My own Cathy, read the first letter. My only Cathy, read the second. She read about his basic training and his journey across the water. She read about the barracks in which the Artisans Rifles spent their nights, the scent of wildflowers in a Flanders meadow. She read about the card games they played after dark and the wagers they made. It was only when she went looking for it that she noticed: a month ago, all remarks about Robert Kesey had evaporated from Kaspar’s letters. He still spoke fondly of Andrew Dunmore, of John Horwood and Douglas Flood, but Robert Kesey was dead and it hadn’t merited a mention.
A lie of omission was still a lie. She sat for long hours, reading the letters over and over and only now did she see: these letters were about nothing at all. They were bedtime stories, things he had contrived from the banal moments of his days, letters designed to protect her and nothing else. To protect her from knowing. To protect her from the truth.
She was trembling (this was fury like she had never felt) when there came a tentative tapping at the door. By the time she turned around, Emil was already nosing his way in. Cathy thought: Get out! Get out now! But Emil was wearing that same anxious look he had on the eve of every opening night, and something in it made the anger bleed out of her.
‘Cathy, it’s time.’
Her eyes shot to the window. The afternoon darkness was hardening to night. Her entire afternoon, wasted in these letters, while a fresh band of shop hands were tasked with preparing the Emporium for its biggest night of the year. She felt the shame of it, hot and urgent.
Martha appeared beside Emil, Mr Atlee hovering behind.
‘Mama,’ she grinned, ‘come on! We mustn’t miss it!’
Cathy gathered the letters together, not caring when they crumpled in her hands. As she crossed the room, she caught sight of herself in the mirror, still in her day dress with the dust of forgotten aisles up and down her arms. Her hair was a mess, her fury had deepened the creases in her cheeks, but this would have to do. A gong was sounding on the shopfloor. The seconds were counting down.
As they reached the shopfloor, Cathy’s shame turned to relief. What magics they had worked while her head was buried in those letters! Around her, every aisle was garlanded with lights. High above, the Emporium dome was swirling with pinpoints of white, like a constantly falling snow. The arches that opened each aisle were wreathed in holly leaves of crêpe paper and card; plump red berries of papier maché hung from every leaf. Pipe-cleaner owls stood in the boughs of the paper trees, the carousel turned and sang, and the vaults above the aisles were a circus show of dragon longships, patchwork pegasi, and a white lace wyvern whose body was wrapped around the turrets of Emil’s cloud castle.
The shop hands were all flocking in the same direction. The aisles had separated and moved while Cathy had been up above, and now they all led into a single great boulevard, charting the length of the Emporium floor. Where there had once been polished floorboards, now there were the cobbles of an open-air market, and it was here that the confetti fountain constantly burst forth, painting the air with images of horses mid-canter, great dragons and knights. She and Martha joined the procession and stopped where the crowd was gathered in the half-moon hall. Here, through frosted glass, she could see Iron Duke Mews thronged with mothers and their excited broods.
The bells stopped pealing. All was silent on the Emporium floor. From the forested alcoves to the cloud castle halls, not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse. Then, without being touched, the doors opened. Winter rushed in with its perfect icy breath, and on it came a tide of shoppers.
In the half-moon hall, the first customers froze. Before they could fan out, their eyes were drawn upward. Cathy looked the same way. Above them, the cloud castle drawbridge was lowering, and out of the vault inside a red carpet rolled. Instead of dropping from the precipice, it slowly unfurled, charting a crimson pathway over the tops of the aisles – until it landed here, at the feet of the first family. From up above, the sound of sleigh bells could be heard. The swirling lights of the castle interior revolved, and through curtains of rippling white the heads of two cloth creatures emerged. Black button eyes and embroidered noses were followed by antlers of crocheted bone. Soon, two patchwork reindeer stood regally at the top of the crimson road; then, each with a nod to the other, they began to canter down.
Behind them they trailed a simple wooden sled, its rear piled high with presents wrapped with silver paper and bows. No passengers descended with the sled, no driver flicked the reins to drive the reindeer on. They cantered, without hoof beats, to the half-moon hall, and there they came to a stop in front of the first family to have breached the doors. The first reindeer nuzzled the hands of the mother, the second reindeer nuzzled the hands of the children, and in that way they directed the family aboard. Then the sled drew around, parted the gathered shop hands, and took off along the cobbled aisle.
Somewhere, gramophones began to play. The carousel burst back into life. The shop hands came together in one last burst of applause – and then it was done. Opening night had begun.
‘Danger! Adventure! Glory! Have you got what it takes? Step up, be courageous! Fight the brave fight, beat the unbeatable foe, win the unwinnable war!’
Emil stood atop one of the monstrous bears, which had been armoured and saddled like some monster plucked out of Nordic myth. The glade between the aisles was one of several waiting to be discovered on the shopfloor. In front of him, two dozen expectant faces looked up. More were being drawn from the neighbouring aisles, boys straining on their mothers’ hands.
Beneath him – Emil, the god of the battlefield – lay a medieval village in miniature, a rustic landscape where a hand-crafted windmill turned the waters of a stream, where paper trees the size of a boot made forests against the banks, and the hilltops rose in gradients of felt, cloth and papier maché. The houses were tumbledown creations crouched around a market square, where wind-up pigs and cows troughed in the fountain.
Soldiers were descending from all sides, the village the scene of the battle.
‘Take cover!’ Emil cried, and one of the boys shuffled his soldiers into a barn. ‘Enter the fray!’ he exclaimed, waving at another boy about to deposit his soldiers to the battle. ‘Keep tabs on your sergeants, on your captains and mercenaries! You there—’ he waved at a nervous boy, who was opening a package his mother had purchased and finding a rag-tag set of soldiery within ‘—those soldiers were peasant farmers just two days gone, but they’ll need to see battle. Then—’ Emil whipped out another package, which he gave to the boy. Inside were tiny pantaloons, leather jerkins, private’s tunics and redcoats. ‘—dress them as you see fit, as they rise up through your ranks! This is the Long War, boys, and it is only just beginning!’