Mr Kasperl looked at him silently, twiddling the pencil in his heavy hands. The men grinned and mumbled, shuffling their feet.
In the end they all got hired, even the one with the bald spot. One morning I arrived and found them gathered in front of the house, with shovels over their shoulders, smoking cigarettes and muttering among themselves. A lorry with its engine going stood on the drive, a clumsy, upright model with a sort of chimney sticking up, and no mudguards. It shuddered like a sick horse, belching up black spurts of exhaust smoke. The tailgate was crusted with traces of dung, the mark of a previous life. Felix got down from behind the wheel and herded the workers aboard. He winked at me, and mimed exhaustion, drooping his shoulders and letting his jaw hang sideways. Mr Kasperl, in dustcoat and overshoes, paused in front of the house and looked about him at the bright morning with a grim, disparaging eye, then descended the steps with his mincing tread and hauled himself, grunting, into the cab. Felix ground the gears and swung the wheel, and the lorry moved off falteringly in a cloud of dust and diesel fumes. One of the workmen standing in the back gave a halfhearted whoop, and then grinned sheepishly and stared hard ahead. The noise of the engine died away in the direction of Coolmine, and the heedless song of a thrush, that had been there all the time, welled up in the stillness.
There was a sense of airy emptiness in the house. I climbed the stairs as if ascending a rope into the blue. Sophie was above me on the landing, looking down at me, hands braced on the rail, her face suspended in a vault of air, like a trapeze artist poised to leap. We wandered through the attic. The floors were tense as trampolines under our feet. I thought of all those rooms below us with no one in them, the sky going about its enormous, stealthy business in the windows, the sun inching its complex geometry across the dusty floors.
In Sophie’s room we sat down on the bed. I had tried to teach her something about numbers here, showed her match games, and tricks with algebra, laying out my gift before her on the quilt. I had entertained high hopes. How could she resist these things, their simplicity and elegance, the way move by move the patterns grew, like crystals assembling in clear, cold air? But it was no good, she looked at the numbers and at me, her eyes empty, her face a smiling mask. Her silence was a kind of absence. And so I gave up. Now she raised herself on one knee, stretching to peer out the round window above us. She had brought up the box of marionettes and was repairing them, they were strewn on the floor among paintpots and brushes and jars of glue. She tapped me on the shoulder, wanting me to look at something down on the drive. When I made to rise she lost her balance for a moment, and fell against me in a flurry of hands and breath and tumbling hair. Her skin was cool, I could feel the heat of my own suddenly flushed face reflected back at me from her smooth brow and shadowed cheeks. She drew away from me with a little, gurgling laugh. She had kissed me, or I had kissed her, I don’t know, so lightly, so fleetingly, I thought at first I had imagined it. My heart wobbled, like something swaying on an edge and about to fall. She had raised herself to the window again and was looking out. She turned and smiled, not at me this time, but in the direction of the doorway. Felix was there, regarding us with a glint of amusement.
— Please, don’t get up, he said slyly. It’s only me.
He ambled into the room, casting a sideways glance at the marionettes on the floor. I had not heard the lorry returning. His boots had black mud on them, and there were faint black streaks, like traces of war-paint, on his forehead and his jaw. He said:
— Hell down pit, lad.
Sophie was motioning him excitedly to the window. He came and stood behind her, craning to see where she was pointing. Below, on the gravel in front of the house, Jack Kay was standing, hatted, in Sunday suit, leaning on his malacca stick. He was looking up, I wondered if he could see us, our three heads crowded in the staring window high above him. Felix turned his face to me, a grinning indian.
— Who’s that, now, I wonder? he said. Looks familiar, I think.
Jack Kay was climbing the steps, then we heard his distant knock at the front door. Felix put a finger to his lips. He sat down on the bed, and Sophie knelt behind him, leaning eagerly over his shoulder. He reached into a pocket of his jacket, then turned up his hand to her and opened it slowly. A tiny brown mouse crouched in his palm, its whiskers and the pink tip of its nose aquiver. It turned this way and that, sniffing the air with little jerks of its head. Sophie, delighted, tried to take the creature in her hand, but Felix held it teasingly out of her reach, until she made a lunge and captured it. She lifted it level with her face, and mouse and girl studied each other. Then she leaned forward quickly and touched her pursed lips lightly to the quivering snout. Felix laughed.
— Oho! he cried, look, beauty and the beast!
Jack Kay was hammering at the front door down there. Felix heaved a sigh.
— All right, all right! he muttered.
He went out, and presently I heard him below on the steps with Jack Kay. The old man’s voice was raised. Sophie sat on her heels on the bed, with the mouse in her lap, stroking it rhythmically with her fingertip, from head to tail, pressing a groove into the fine fur. At each gently dragging stroke the pink cleft at the tip of the creature’s sharp little snout opened a fraction and closed again wetly. Sophie bowed her head, her dark hair falling about her face. Her fingernail, gliding amid the parted fur, gleamed like an oiled bead. The room was still. Jack Kay was shouting. The front door slammed. Sophie looked up at me with an intent, attenuated smile, as if she were vaguely in distress. The mouse lay meekly in her lap, minutely throbbing. I took a step forward, it seemed a kind of lurching fall, and reached out a hand to touch the tiny creature. Immediately it sprang from her lap and scurried down the side of the bed. Felix, coming into the room again, said lightly:
— Ah, you haven’t the knack. We’ll have to teach you, won’t we?
He bent down by the bed and coaxed the mouse back on to his palm. He wandered with it to the window and peered out.
— There he goes, he said. Fierce old boy, I must say. He was looking for you, you know, cob. Told him we’d never heard of you. No Swan here, my man, I said, our swans are all geese. Did I do right?
He looked from me to Sophie and back again. There was silence. I could hear faintly the sound of Jack Kay’s boots crunching away over the gravel. Sophie rose from the bed, brushing at her skirt. She glanced at me vaguely, as if she could not quite remember who I was. Felix offered her the mouse, but she walked past him like a sleepwalker, out of the room. He watched her go, then turned his sly glance on me.
— All these my creatures, he whispered gaily, making his eyeballs roll.
He opened his hand and showed me the mouse, lying motionless on its side, its front paws folded, a bubble of ruby blood in its snout.
At home I found Jack Kay sitting sideways at the kitchen table, ashen with rage, one fist planted among the tea-things and the other clamped on the crook of his stick. For the second time in his life he had been put out of Ashburn Park. Who did they think they were, that fat foreigner and that other, red-headed bastard? What right did they have? He glared about him, knuckles whitening, daring anyone to answer. Felix had laughed at him — laughed, at him, Jack Kay!
— God blast him for a whore’s melt, he muttered thickly, and dealt the floor a crack with his cane.
He fixed me with a blood-filled eye and grunted, scowling. My mother was silent. It was she, of course, who had sent him out to Ashburn. Now she wore a chastened, thoughtful air. She brought my tea to the table and stood over me, incensed, and yet unnerved. She had felt today the touch of something cold and cruel, a kind of malignancy, as if an illness had taken hold in her. She too had twice lost Ashburn, once as a girl when she left home, and then a second time with the advent of Mr Kasperl and his familiar. Now they were trying to take me from her too. But she would not let them — no, she would not let them! Her hand shook, the cup and saucer rattled, she set them down hurriedly, with a little crash.