It was difficult to tear herself away from his eyes, but when she unclasped the purse and looked inside all she saw was blackness, rich and deep. She reached in but her fingers could not find the bottom.
There were all sorts of things that she wanted to say. She wanted to tell him thank you – for this purse, for bringing her so far away from his Emporium, for the way he had knelt at her side and told her she was strong, that she could do it all, as Martha came into the world – but, instead, she turned to face the old house and said, ‘You’ve never asked me who my baby’s father is.’
The statement seemed to catch Kaspar off guard. ‘It isn’t that I haven’t wanted to ask. But … you came to our Emporium with your secrets. They’re yours alone.’
‘No,’ she whispered. The fa?ade of the house seemed to glare down at her. ‘Not any more.’ She found the courage to face him again. ‘Kaspar, I owe you the truth. I’ve been a coward. But the truth is, I haven’t thought of Martha’s father in so long, it already seems another life. He was a friend to me, for a little while. Nothing more.’
Kaspar’s eyes twitched. ‘A little more, Miss Wray.’
‘I thought you’d stopped calling me that.’
‘Where is he now?’
Cathy barely knew. ‘Gone, off to some other family, some other future. He didn’t come looking, Kaspar. But I’ve already told you – it wasn’t as if it was … love.’
‘Not love,’ said Kaspar, ‘but there are … responsibilities.’
Cathy turned the word over. In the end, she supposed, Daniel’s responsibilities to his father had outweighed any responsibilities he had to a child who was barely an idea. But then there was Kaspar: a boy to whom ideas were everything.
She turned and walked some distance, crossing the street to reach her house in three loping strides. When she looked back, Kaspar was still staring after her.
‘Kaspar, about that day we were in London, when you took me to the park. I … wanted to. I want you to know that. And I might have, if only …’ How to say it without – not hurting his feelings, because sometimes Kaspar Godman behaved as if he had no feelings to be hurt. Perhaps it was only – without seeming foolish. In her heart, she had wanted to. But it was her body; her body had wanted different things. Things like rest, like food and water; like being able to sleep on a night without waking every second hour. People talked about the heart and the head being at war – but, when you were pregnant, the body was separate, and the body ruled all.
She lifted Martha to her shoulder, tightening the shawl around her. I’m not pregnant now, she thought – so what is it, what’s stopping me? Propriety? Could that really have been it? Because she had never once cared about being proper. She had spent the year, hadn’t she, in Papa Jack’s Emporium, instead of there, as her parents had planned …
She strode back toward him. It was captivating how silent he was. He did not flinch, even as she lifted a hand to stroke the hair out of his eyes, even as she rose on to her tiptoes (the baby sandwiched between them) and planted a kiss on the thin stubble that lined his cheek.
‘I knew you’d understand, Kaspar. If anyone could, it would be you.’
Then, cooing at Martha, she walked into her house.
It was cold out on the estuary. Kaspar took the motorcar down to the sand and watched the tide glittering as the stars revealed themselves, one by one. For a time, he walked along the shale, listening to the waves. A pair of old lovers sat out on the rocks, holding each other as they gazed into the gas lamps on the other side of the water. Kaspar sat higher yet, the darkness solidifying all around. Without knowing he was doing it, he twisted a length of sun-baked seaweed into the skeleton of a sailing boat and, giving that sailing boat wings, let it fly out into the blackness over the water. Those two old lovers, perhaps they had come here every night since they were children. Perhaps they would come here every night until, finally, one of them did not. And, as he watched, he got to thinking: what if they had been born two streets distant? What if they had not been sent to the same schools, or if their parents had not met in the same beer hall, or walked the same routes through the same parks? What if … she had not run away to his father’s Emporium, and he had not found her there? What if those boys had not crashed into his paper trees and she had not taken shelter, with him, in the Wendy House at the bottom of the aisle? What, then, of life?
An image, perfectly simple, seared on to the back of Kaspar Godman’s eyes: he and Cathy, as old as these two wrapped up together on the estuary’s edge, wandering the aisles of their Emporium, a threadbare Sirius still lolloping behind.
What if she had never fallen pregnant by some other man and been driven into his world? The baby he had helped birth might never be his, but he could love her all the same – for that, and everything else.
Kaspar took the motorcar back to the streets and stood outside Cathy’s house. The silhouette show against the curtains was like one of his father’s puppet theatres. He watched Cathy twirl. Figures stood and then sat down. He thought he heard laughter, and that was a beautiful thing – until he remembered that only happiness might make her stay, here where she surely did not belong. After that, fear was like a seed sprouting shoots in his belly. He went to the door, but checked himself; went to the door again and started at the voices within. A man his age hurried down the street, and the thought of him knocking at the door – for was this Cathy’s estuary boy, come back to be a father? – made all the jealousy he had not known that he had flower.
The door opened and, framed by the light, there stood Cathy.
Behind her hung figures Kaspar thought he would never see: her mother, her father, a sister taller than Cathy with striking blond hair. It was the sister who was holding Martha. Kaspar froze, allowing himself to breathe again only when Cathy took her daughter back into her arms. One by one, she embraced the family around her. They had not come to claim her back, he saw; they had come to see her off. Her mother was stiff as Cathy held her, but her father gave in. His fingers teased the fluff of Martha’s hair.
Cathy joined him at the motorcar and, in silence, allowed Kaspar to help her inside.
Some way along the estuary, with the lights of Leigh fading behind, he dared break the silence.
‘Are we going to be all right, Cathy?’
When he said we he might have meant Cathy and Martha, or he might have meant all three of them. She nodded but said not a word, for there were tears in her eyes and she did not know what they were for: what she had lost, or what she had gained.
‘You look like your daughter when you cry.’
‘Kaspar!’ she snorted, and dried her eyes on the hem of her skirt.
‘Well, it’s true.’
‘My father said that too. He said seeing her was like seeing me.’
‘You might have stayed.’
Cathy nodded, trying to make sense of it all. ‘After all of this, they would even have had me. A few lies here, a compromise there, we might have made it work …’
Into the silence that followed, Kaspar said, ‘There was a piece of me, a tiny corner, that thought you would. That your life might be here … where it started. And, while you were in there, that thought, it just kept on growing. I couldn’t stop it. I think that must be what … doubt feels like. Cathy, I hadn’t thought it until now, but the thought of you not there, in the Emporium, it …’
‘Hush, Kaspar,’ she said. ‘Take me home.’
The car drove on, back through the late summer night.
The Emporium was silent when they returned. Emil and Mrs Hornung had been busy replenishing some of the aisles, anticipating the first frost yet to come. Emil’s soldiers looked resplendent on the shelves.