‘Well, that’s boys for you. All the love in the world doesn’t match a little scrap of understanding.’
Cathy dwelt on it as she went back above. By now Emil and Nina had retired to their separate beds, Martha reading Perrault to the toy soldiers in the walls. For a moment, Cathy stopped in the doorway to listen. The story was Bluebeard, and the terrible chamber to which his young wife was forbidden to go. She wondered if the soldiers understood, yet, the horror they were hearing. Then she drifted on.
Kaspar would be asleep by now, his back turned against her as it always was. She opened the door …
… and there he sat, in a whirlwind of paper dolls. They danced like sprites as he scissored them from the rolls at his side, taking off and floating like some heavenly host.
He looked at her through the angelic storm. ‘For you,’ he said. They hung in the air: paper centaurs, paper nymphs.
‘Kaspar, you’re awake.’
‘I was waiting for you.’
‘Waiting for me?’
‘I didn’t want to sleep, Mrs Godman. Not without you near.’
Words were such slippery things. She wanted to hear what she thought she was hearing, but there was so much distance between the two of them; languages grew and changed, and perhaps the words had a different meaning when they left Kaspar’s mouth to the moment they touched her ear. She snuffed out the light, slid under the covers. As always, the no-man’s-land stretched between them. ‘Tomorrow’s a new day,’ she ventured. ‘Remember that. We’ll always have new days.’
Something had changed in his breathing. Then – she had to check herself, for this too had the quality of dream – she felt movement at her side. Kaspar’s hand had stretched out into the no-man’s-land. It was reaching for hers and she allowed it to be taken.
‘Cathy, there’s something I have to do. You might think it frightfully absurd.’
This last he said with a grin, and Cathy felt certain it was not her imagination. She felt more certain still when his other hand found her, lying on her belly before gliding north. It was such a strange sensation, so unexpected, that she could not drive the tension out of her body. She flinched, recoiled, then laughed, as if she had never been touched before.
‘Kaspar, are you …’
‘You ask me if I’m well by the hour, every hour. You won’t need to ask me again.’
He had rolled toward her, drawing her into the no-man’s-land – but then this, she supposed, was where everyone ought to meet.
‘Do you think we might … try?’
It was no good holding herself so rigidly. She was a part of this too. She had to force her hand up to touch Kaspar’s face but, once she had forced it, her fingers remembered the line of his cheeks, the knots in his skin, the peculiar savageness above his left eye. The body had a memory, just like the mind. To hell with those music boxes he used to make; this, right now, was like stepping backwards in time.
In the night she woke knowing he was near and, when she rolled toward him, his arms folded around her and she felt the beating of his heart. Later, when she woke, they had come apart, each dreaming their separate dreams – but that was good, that was as it should be, and when she stretched her body he stretched his, as if reflecting her in a mirror. For a time, the images that played across the backs of her eyes were not true dreams, but recollections, fragments of lives yet to be lived. She and Kaspar had a tiny emporium in Paris, where they sold patchwork frogs and the toy soldiers lived in peace. She heard the deep bass of his snoring, then she heard silence – and until she woke up, with dawn’s first light, to feel the emptiness beside her, the cold air playing at her back, she had no idea that he was not there with her and had not been for hours.
Kaspar was gone. His slippers, his robe, the canes with which he walked; all of those things, gone as well.
It was not so unusual for Cathy to wake up alone – and if, after last night, she had imagined them lying together until the day was old, that was only because, on the edges of sleep, it was possible to believe she was still the sixteen-year-old runaway who had first fallen into his arms, to forget the fact that she was a mother, a wife, part of the gears that kept Papa Jack’s Emporium alive. Perhaps it was not such a shameful thing to admit that, if only for tiny pockets in time, it was a joy to be nothing other than herself.
The idea struck her that he would be in his workshop, for after last night anything seemed possible. She went there now, expecting to find him lost in some miraculous new design, but the workshop was empty – and, it occurred to her now, she could hear no scuttling in the walls, none of the regimented march of toy soldiers that had coloured their days for so long. Sometimes it was more reverential in Kaspar’s workshop, but as she returned to the quarters she crouched at the skirting, pressed her ear to the wall. In the cavities there was only silence, dull and absolute.
‘What are you doing down there, Mama?’
She turned. Martha had been reclining on one of the armchairs all along, one of her novels in hand.
‘You slept there all night, little one?’
Martha shrugged. ‘Not on purpose … Is something wrong, Mama?’
What could she say? Silence, Martha. Peace.
Cathy lifted her robe and hurried back through the quarters, up the stair to the place where her bed lay bare. She could see the indentation Kaspar’s body made in the sheets, but his absence was like a vortex in the room. It pulled her down.
The window was ajar, the frost of morning whispering through, but though she peered out, she did not see him hanging from a ledge, nor reclined up on the roof tiles, taking in the morning air.
Through the walls she heard the chatter of Emil’s children. Nina was already barracking them for some imagined mischief.
As she stepped back from the window, her eyes fell on Kaspar’s bedside table. There, beneath the lantern strewn up with dancing paper dolls, lay a letter.
Cathy, the envelope read – and the word was loaded with all the dread of the journal he used to write, the feeling of his hands on her last night, the strange new silence in the walls.
My own Cathy
By the time you find this letter, I will be gone. I dare not think of your face as you are reading these words. I dare not imagine the moment you tell Martha, my Martha (for she has always been mine, no matter what the particulars of her blood), that she will not see me again. You will not hate me for it, because your heart has always been bigger than hate. But do not think ill of yourself, should you perhaps feel a little relief. Because the truth is, I have been gone for many years already. I left you on the day I left the Emporium for those foxholes in the French earth. That I came back at all was down to you. You picked me up and put me back together – and if you could not put me back together whole, that was never your burden, and never your fault.
I have known for too long that I am withering away, but I know now what I must do and, though I do it, I do it with the deepest regret – for I love you as I have only ever loved one thing, and that is the Emporium itself. In my heart and mind, you are bound up with one another and never to be prised apart. But the Emporium is in ruins, and it is me keeping it that way. And, my darling, you are in ruins – and it is me keeping you that way. It is in this letter that I set you free.
Live a long, rich life. Think of me often, but never with regrets. But Papa Jack’s Emporium must endure where I cannot, and so must you, my darling. There is a different place for me now. I am going to find it.
Yours for the last time,
Kaspar Godman Esq.
PS. Take care of Emil. He is going to need you now.