Kaspar’s breathing slowed. His eyes, which had darted into so many corners as she spoke, settled on hers.
‘She missed you, Kaspar. I …’ Her voice cracked. She was as bad as him. Since when had she lost the ability to say what she meant? ‘We waited for you all this time and you came back and …’
‘Then tell me. Tell me. How am I to—’
‘I don’t know,’ Cathy said, ‘but you do. I’ve watched you build boxes with caverns inside them. I took shelter in here with you, while paper trees rained down from the sky. You transform things out here, Kaspar. So why can’t you transform things … in there?’ After that, they stared at each other for the longest time. Soon, Cathy heard footsteps beyond the Wendy House walls. ‘She’s coming back. Kaspar, promise me. You’re alive, aren’t you? You are alive.’
That night, Emil took his time to disrobe. First, he picked every splinter of wood from his arms, where they had matted in the bristles of hair that grew thicker each year. Then he hung his work clothes carefully in the wardrobe, ready for another day’s labour. Only after dousing himself liberally in the little tin sink did he step behind the screen and don the nightclothes Mrs Hornung had left out for him. In the bedroom, Nina was already upright in bed, reading one of her novelettes.
Emil had taken his notebook to bed, as had been his practice ever since he was a boy, but the marks he made tonight were scrappy and inconsequential. He drew the face of a soldier, supposed to be as regal as the Imperial Kapitan, but instead the image looked bedraggled, worn, like a body whose soul had been spent. Like Kaspar, Emil caught himself thinking – and promptly scoured the image clean away. He had not yet told their father about the scene Kaspar had made in the glades of the Long War this evening; he wondered if he ever should.
‘Emil?’ Nina had been watching him all along. ‘Do you want to tell me what’s wrong?’
Emil lay with his hands folded beneath his face, the imitation of a sleeping angel. He rolled to face Nina. ‘I don’t know what to do with him, Nina. I see Cathy trying to cradle him, and he won’t be cradled. I want to go to him myself but …’
‘But what?’
‘But how can I? I’ll say the wrong thing. I’ll make out like I understand. But I don’t. How could I?’
Nina ran a finger along the thick thatch of his eyebrows. ‘This is your home, Emil. You shouldn’t have to creep around it like you don’t belong. Don’t you belong here? Don’t I? What your brother sacrificed, that shouldn’t have to …’
‘You don’t understand. He’s Kaspar. He’s the one who made the paper forests. He’s the one who built the toyboxes, with all those caverns inside. We’ve been waiting for him to—’
‘Do you know what I see when I see your brother, Emil? I see a man. That’s all. A lonely man. A broken man. But still just a man. Look at what you did these winters, Emil. Look at the ledgerbooks. A paper tree, that lives and dies. But a game like the Long War? That goes on and on and on … children devote themselves to it. You don’t think that’s a marvel, just as good as all of the rest?’
Everything she was saying was true, and yet, ‘I miss my brother,’ he whispered. ‘It isn’t right to say it, and who knows if he missed me, but … I miss him, Nina. I want him home.’
‘He is home.’
Emil shook his head, as fierce as a toddler just discovering the motion.
For a while Nina said nothing. She lay with her own hands folded beneath her face. Then she reached out, took Emil’s, and guided it down. Emil tried to resist (this was not the moment, how could she feel romantic when …), but gave in when he found his hand had been cupped around her belly.
‘I know you miss him, Emil. I think it might be the sweetest thing about you, how much you love your brother. But your family’s bigger now … and it’s growing bigger still.’ She paused, waiting for the gears in Emil’s mind to start turning. ‘I saw my aunt’s physician. It’s certain. He believes … there may even be twins.’
Emil’s eyes widened with every utterance.
‘Imagine it, Emil. Twin boys, gambolling up and down the Emporium halls. Your boys, our boys, making their futures here. I’m sorry for your brother, I’m sorry the Emporium isn’t going back to how it was. But – and this is important, so listen to me, my love – these last years, that’s what the Emporium is to me. That’s all the Emporium I’ve ever known. I don’t want it to go back. I want it to go forward. I want you to be fit and fighting strong, and for the Long War to make your fortune … because your children –’ she smiled, the simplest and most meaningful smile, and saw it mirrored in Emil’s opening face, ‘– are going to need it.’
On the first day of December, with ragged snow streaming through the Marble Arch, Cathy wrapped herself against the winter and took the trolleybus west. Hyde Park was not blanketed in snow, but its pastures were dusted in a whiteness at the same time dirtier and more pure than the confetti snow with which she usually spent her winters. The banks of the Serpentine, where she had dozed with Kaspar in that summer so long ago, were alternately crisp with frost or deluged in dirt – but it had not stopped the families turning out to see the new memorial, nor the patients from St George’s venturing out to fill their lungs with the crisp, frigid air.
St George’s loomed on the corner, half-hidden behind colonnades. As Cathy approached, a horse-drawn ambulance had stopped and orderlies were striding out to help its occupant through the doors. Cathy followed after, to the whirlwind smells of iodine and carbolic soap. At a counter a nurse was filling in papers.
‘I’m looking for a Lizzy Wray,’ she began. ‘My sister. She’s …’ And here she brandished the letter she had received, its postmark already two months old: Lizzy, back from the base hospital and using her service leave to volunteer. It all seemed so unlikely.
‘I don’t know a Lizzy,’ the sister replied. ‘But there’s a Beth Wray working on second ward. Might that be …’
Second Ward was not difficult to find. A convalescent floor, its patients reclined in the sax blue suits and scarlet ties that marked them out as soldiers at rest. Some of them were cajoling each other from the spaces between their beds, but more still were asleep, or gathered on a terrace looking out at the snow. Only one nurse drifted between them, fixing sheets and piling bedpans on a trolley.
When she finally looked up, Cathy realised how long it had been since she had seen her sister. Lizzy was older now, her eyes greyer, but above all else (in spite of the uniform, the places she had been, the grime beneath her fingernails so alien to the girl she used to know), she was still the same beautiful Lizzy Wray.
‘Cathy!’
‘Beth?’ Cathy ventured, with just a hint of admonition.
Her sister rolled her eyes. ‘It was time for a change,’ she said. ‘Oh Cathy, I wasn’t sure if you’d got my letters. Now I see that you have, I … I would have come to the Emporium. You know that, don’t you? Only …’
Cathy understood; what could first frost matter when set against everything happening inside these hospital walls?
‘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.’