‘Next time I come, I’m likely to find you’ve built a little temple to one of your new gods.’
‘It isn’t that bad.’
‘It isn’t?’ said Kaspar. ‘Then, I’d hazard, you won’t mind if I don’t linger tonight. I’m in the thick of it in my workshop …’
At first, eager that he not know how knotted she was feeling inside, Cathy shrugged – and, with a smile that was altogether too smug, Kaspar sauntered out of the door. He had only just breached the line of paper trees when he felt a ball of paper striking him on the back of the head. He paused, pretending it was merely a scrunched-up leaf, but when he strode on, Sirius hurtled to catch him. Only at the dog’s insistence did he look back. Cathy was standing in the doorway, pointedly not taking the next step. What spirit she had to indulge in his game of brinkmanship was clearly fading away.
‘Linger,’ she said – so, with his air of victory barely concealed, Kaspar strode back through the Wendy House door.
‘It’s something. It’s a start,’ said Kaspar. ‘And, truth be told, it was thinking of you that got me this far …’
‘Me?’ Cathy asked, uncertain whether to be flattered or unnerved.
‘Let me show you.’
On the ground between them was a small brown suitcase of perfectly utilitarian design. It was so unspectacular it didn’t even have a handle. Kaspar knelt and opened it up, but it remained as humdrum as ever; all Cathy could see was the black felt of its lining. It was only as Kaspar stood, dangled one foot over the open case and plunged it inside that she realised the blackness had unaccounted depths – for Kaspar’s foot seemed to have dropped below the bottom of the case, below even the lining of the floor. Then, after pausing to make sure of his balance, Kaspar lifted his second foot and planted it alongside the first.
Cathy studied him from every angle, while Sirius set up a pillowy hullabaloo. The case had swallowed Kaspar to the knots of his knees, but by rights it should not have reached his ankles.
‘Am I going to get a smile?’ asked Kaspar, ignoring the fact that he was wearing the biggest, most inane one himself.
‘Explain,’ declared Cathy, determined not to give him the satisfaction even as she battled to contain her surprise.
‘Well, you already know how Papa can do the most extraordinary things with space. I’ve been trying to unpick it ever since I was small – but it wasn’t until I started thinking about you in your hiding hole here that I started to see. And I was thinking: when you’re here, inside the House, how could you ever hope to prove how big the House was outside these walls? When you’re inside, why, it’s as big as it feels – and that’s all that matters. The perspective has shifted, don’t you see? From the inside out, this is what’s normal. And it’s the same for that little …’ He flicked a finger airily at Cathy’s stomach. ‘… creature in there. To that baby, your body’s the whole world. The universe entire. So, with that in mind, I started tinkering …’
Cathy waved her hand to order Kaspar out of the suitcase and took it upon herself to stand in his place. There was no unnatural feeling, no sensation that rippled in her ankles as she dropped in and found the bottom, some way below; it was the most ordinary thing in the world, and yet still she said, ‘I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about.’
‘It feels like I’ve done something real here, something just like my father, punched my way through whatever’s been holding me back. Watch and learn, Miss Wray. Watch and learn. By the time this summer ends, I’ll have more space inside my packages than you could hope to believe. The real question is – how to sell them? I’ve been picturing “Emporium Hiding Holes”, for the perfect game of hide and seek. Or—’
‘Toyboxes!’ Cathy announced, at which Kaspar gave a wolfish grin. ‘Toyboxes bigger on the inside, so a whole bedroom could be tidied away. Just open it up and cram everything in. Think about that, Kaspar. What mother wouldn’t want a toybox like that?’
‘You’ve a wicked mind, Miss Wray. It is mothers, of course, who hold the purses …’
Cathy could virtually see the sales piling up in Kaspar’s mind’s eye. At once, he helped her clamber out of the box, snapped it shut, and darted away. ‘I’ve much thinking to do. Too much thinking …’
He stopped once before the doorway, to look back and make his goodbyes. As he did, a new look crossed his face; it seemed he was seeing her for the very first time. ‘It’s soon, isn’t it?’ he asked, considering her belly.
‘Soon enough,’ whispered Cathy, and only after he was gone did she realise quite how soon that was.
She had been given the gift of too much time. Too much time to think about it, too much time to wallow in ideas of what birth might be like. Time, she already knew, played tricks in the Emporium, but never as markedly as it did now: the days going by so slowly, but her body changing so fast. Kaspar came back across the next evenings, always bringing her some new version of his toy. Four nights had passed by the time he brought her a prototype toybox, plain pine inscribed with the tin soldier emblem of Papa Jack’s Emporium. It was on the tip of her tongue to ask him to stay that night, but something held her back. Perhaps it was only pride, for Cathy had asked for so little in her life. She faced the emptiness of that night as she had all others – in thinking about the Emporium and its past, and trying desperately not to imagine the future.
The next night was the first that Kaspar did not appear. She gave up thinking of him (it was easier said than done; she realised, now, how eagerly she awaited his visits) and slept early, only to wake an hour, a half hour, a scant few minutes later – and, disoriented, stand in the Wendy House door. She spent the next day in solitude, but when Kaspar did not appear that night, nor the night after that, the feeling of imprisonment became too intense. There were only so many times she could prowl around the Wendy House walls, only so many times she could go back through the photographs of the old Emporium and search for some detail she had not yet noticed. She did not want to, but when she found herself back at the Wendy House door, it was the most natural thing in the world to set foot outside. And, when the world did not end, it was the most natural thing to keep going, over the white picket fence, under the first of the paper trees, up out of the alcove and into the first aisle.
Almost immediately the restlessness bled out of her. The knots inside her chest unwound. It was dark in the Emporium but she wandered along aisles lit by moonlight pouring in from the skylights above, and for the first time in many weeks she felt free.
It was intoxicating to be out. She spent an hour in the alcove where the pop-up books had been covered up, ferreting under the dust sheets and going through each book in turn. In the atrium the Russian rocking horses had been corralled behind a wooden fence, but she stole through and (mindful of her bump) climbed on to the closest she saw. Almost instantly, she could feel the wind in her hair, hear the pounding of hoof beats across some verdant plain. The sensations were so acute she quite forgot she was in the dusty old Emporium at all; the shop walls simply faded away, until what she could see in the edges of her vision was a wild, rugged vista of green, across which other rocking horses cantered in wild abandon.