The Toymakers(79)

‘The truth is, I’m only here another week. After that I’m putting in a favour for a girl at Endell Street. It’s women only there, did you know? Women nurses and women doctors, the whole thing. But by Christmas I’ll be gone. Cathy,’ she whispered, ‘I’ve met somebody. He’s back in Dieppe. Convalescent to start with, but back home he was a medical doctor, so now he’s working the rounds.’

For a little while they talked of other things. Their mother was well, their father resigned from the cockle sheds to keep books for the munitions works on the other side of the estuary. If nothing else, and unless he did anything foolish, it would keep him from France. After that, there were only the small utterances and stilted conversations of people with too much time in between them. But Cathy had not come here to be reminded of what she had left behind. In the silences she kept circling herself, searching for the courage to say what was on her mind.

‘Kaspar’s home,’ she finally said. It felt better to get it out and, after she had said it, the words came more freely. ‘You saw him, Lizzy. What it did to him. Well, his body’s healed, and yet …’

Lizzy rushed forward, smothering her in her arms.

‘He’s alive,’ she said.

‘I keep telling him the same thing. But he’s changed as well. I thought he would come home and we’d pick up our lives, that we might even have all those children we’d talked about, brothers and sisters for Martha to play with in the Emporium halls. But how? How if he’ll never touch me? How if I don’t want to …’

Lizzy shepherded her to a corner of the ward, where the beds sat empty, awaiting the next convoy. ‘It changes them in different ways. I’ve known men lose whole days. Some stop talking. Some talk about nothing else.’

‘It used to be I could tell what he was thinking just by the creases of his eyes. Don’t they say eyes are the windows to the soul? Well, with Kaspar, they’re like the Emporium’s secret doors: you look into them, but you don’t see what’s behind. I want to talk to him, but he doesn’t want to talk. I want to hold him, but he won’t be held. With other men, it would be the drinking. But with Kaspar …’

That morning she had stood in the doors of his workshop. Felt rabbits had birthed more felt rabbits until there were no more left to birth. A woollen sheep was baaing incessantly, searching for the rest of its flock, oblivious to the fact that Kaspar had yet to craft them and probably never would. The silk suit that hung on the back of the door was grappling out with empty sleeves, wanting only to be hugged – and finding nothing to hold. Such things had been pouring out of him in the last days.

Sometimes she woke in the night and he was not there. Sometimes she woke and he had been lying there all along. And as the weeks went by, it was increasingly difficult to tell one night from the next.

‘I don’t know if I love him.’

It burst out of her, dripping with the shame she had been drowning in for days.

‘Oh, Cathy …’

‘I mean – I don’t know how to love him. Can that be real? Can it wither like that? It’s like a rot.’

Lizzy didn’t say a thing. She reached out and held Cathy’s hand.

On Christmas Day, as every year, the tables were laid out on the shopfloor and the shop hands who remained brought up platters of food from the kitchens underneath. Mrs Hornung, who was already a part of Emporium legend on account of her figgy pudding, had surpassed herself with the goose. It was stuffed with a partridge which was, itself, stuffed with a songbird; the pastries were stuffed with pheasant, brought into the store as payment by a gamekeeper whose wallet was empty, but whose children deserved so much more.

Cathy and Martha busied themselves until, at last, the table was a mountain range with crags of roast gammon, foothills of potatoes roasted and mashed. A wilderness of parsnips reached up one of the escarpments and made a crown at its summit. The shop hands were already filling their plates when Emil and Nina appeared along the aisle, helping Papa Jack between them. As he settled, Cathy saw that he was balancing a pinecone soldier between his thumb and forefinger, constantly twirling it around.

The toasts were short and sweet. ‘To the Emporium,’ said Emil. ‘To our families and our friends, at home and abroad. To moments like these. To my wife, and my sons yet to come, and my papa who started it all. And to my brother’s return …’

At this he lifted his glass. His eyes followed it but did not look down again. Cathy looked the same way – and there was Kaspar, balanced on one of the galleries above.

She started. Martha had started too. Cathy had to rein her back into her seat and, by the time she had dealt with her muttered protestations, Kaspar was gone.

‘I’ll fetch him,’ she whispered in Martha’s ear.

‘We didn’t even invite him …’ she was saying. ‘Why didn’t we invite him to our Christmas?’

Cathy was barely out of her seat when he appeared along one of the aisles. From here he was slow in coming, resting on one of his canes. Twice, he caught her eye and gave a mute nod, as if to promise he was fine.

As he grew near, some of the shop hands didn’t know where to look. ‘Eat!’ insisted Papa Jack. Sally-Anne took the order to heart and continued to pile her plate high. Others moved reticently – but not one of them looked in his direction.