“No knack for the game,” Bernard summed up. “Such a sweet youngster.”
ON THE NIGHT BEFORE BARBARA’S ARRIVAL Fergus came for another of Anna’s stews. He brought brandy along with flowers and wine. After the meal Anna said her palate was as discriminating as flannel and she would excuse herself from wasting fine cognac.
Fergus said to Bernard, “I’d like to see your workshop.”
“Let’s take the bottle there.”
From the stockroom downstairs they descended farther, spinning around a staircase to a stone basement. “This was once the wine cellar,” Bernard said. An overbright fluorescent bar in the ceiling made Fergus’s eyes water. Bernard pulled a string, and now the only light came from the church’s flood lamp spilling weakly through a small high window. The two men sat at the worktable, surrounded by shelves of toasters and vacuum cleaners and radios, or their shadowy ghosts; by dolls without heads and marionettes without strings.
“Where did you learn toy making?” Fergus asked.
“Ah, I taught myself. I like to carve, and I am mechanical by nature, and I trained as an engineer. I was employed by a company in Paris.”
“I studied engineering, too, at Georgia Tech. But it wasn’t my bent. Management was more to my liking.”
“A talent for organization, affability, languages. You could have been a diplomat …”
“I’m not canny. And I worry too much.”
Bernard lit a pipe. “That must make you valuable to ToyFolk.”
“Well, it does. I’ve never seen you smoke,” Fergus said.
“Anna coughs.”
What had felled the child in the photographs? A missile to the eye, a marble in the esophagus? A train wreck, the middle cars humping upward, the engine falling onto its side? Drowning? There were microorganisms resistant to medicine that could lodge in the chest and emit poisons; sooner or later the patient lay dead. He had spent his children’s childhoods making mental lists of dire events, to forestall them.
He looked across the worktable at the smoking man, then looked away. His eye fell on a rectangular wooden box at the end of the table. One of its faces was glass. He reached for the thing. A crank protruded from the side. “Is this an old automaton?”
“A new one.”
Fergus turned the crank. A bulb went on inside the box. A castle had been painted on the back wall. Three carved soldiers in breeches and jackets with epaulets pointed their rifles at a blindfolded figure in a peasant’s smock. One soldier had a blond beard, another a jutting brow, the third a frivolous nose. Fergus continued to turn the crank. The soldiers lurched in unison. There was a tiny blasting sound. The blindfolded figure fell forward. The light went out. Fergus kept at the crank. The light went on: the scene as before — executioners poised, villain erect and waiting.
Fergus worked the toy for a while. Then he said: “What will you do with this?”
“Oh … we’re fond of the estate agent’s children, and at Christmas …”
“You have a rare talent.”
“Oh, rare, no … It passes the time.”
Fergus turned the crank again. “Yes,” he said. “What doesn’t pass the time? Managing factories, mastering languages, raising families …” He had said too much. “More brandy?” he asked, and poured without waiting for an answer, as if the bottle were still his.
Bernard drank. “Your action figures … they all have the same face, yes?”
“The same face,” Fergus admitted. “Headgear distinguishes them, and costume … Children, young children, identify clothes, equipment, color.”
“Features are too … subtle?”
“Well, research indicates …”
Bernard said: “After all, this is not for the estate agent’s children.” He paused. “I would like to give it to you.”
“Oh, I—”
“Because you value it.”
“—couldn’t take such a gift.” But he took it.
BARBARA RODE ON A LITTLE TRAIN that chugged through the mountains. From her window she looked up at pines, down at a miniature town. She recognized it as charming: the ideal final posting for her sentimental man.
When the train halted she stepped briskly off, carrying one small suitcase and a sack of paperback novels. She wore new harlequin glasses bought in the hope that they would soften her bony face.
She leaped toward Fergus and he leaped toward her.
Then Fergus shouldered Barbara’s books and picked up her suitcase. “Only a few blocks to the inn,” he said. “Wherever we live we’ll be able to walk everywhere. In two months we’ll know everybody here. Have you eaten?”
“There was a nice little buffet car. I’ll bet you know half of the citizens already. Let me take the books.”
“I’ve met the officials,” he said, not relinquishing the sack. “The lawyer, the estate agent,” he enumerated as they walked downhill past soft old buildings. “A doctor, too; I met him at a party the contractor gave. All rather wooden, except for a crazy news vendor who speaks in tongues, sort of.”
At the inn she met the innkeeper. Then: “What a model room!” she said when Fergus brought her upstairs. “That fat quilt. Stencils on the highboy. And what’s this?” she said, spotting the automaton.
She listened to a description of a husband and wife who were devoted to toys. Then she picked up the box and turned the crank and watched an execution several times. “The chin below the blindfold,” she said at last. “Such defiance. I’d like to meet the man who made this.”
“You will. Are you tired, darling?” her husband asked.
“Not too tired. Darling.”
FIVE DAYS WENT BY before Fergus and Barbara could get together with Bernard and Anna — five days of meetings, of house hunting, of the hiring of a tutor. “Though I’m not sure I have the stomach for another language,” Barbara said. “I’ll mime my way around.”
At last the four met on a Saturday night in the dining room of the inn. Under his vest Bernard wore a button-down instead of a T-shirt. He looked like a woodman. Anna wore a cocktail dress — Fergus remembered that his mother had once owned one like it: blue taffeta, with a wide skirt.
The innkeeper sent over a bottle of wine. They bought a second bottle. Guests of the inn and citizens of the town came into the big room in pairs and groups.
“Saturday night,” Anna remarked. “It’s always like this.”
At ten o’clock the innkeeper brought out his collection of big band records, and there was dancing in a glassed-in terrace that overlooked the square. Fergus danced with Barbara, then with Anna.
“I like your wife,” she said.
“I like your village. I think we’ll be happy here.”
“I suspect you’re happy everywhere.”
“Happy enough,” he said, cautiously. “We have a taste for small things.”
“Here you can make a lot out of a little. Old tragedies like the news vendor’s. His father had a fit and chopped off his fingers when he was twelve …”
“Good Lord.” The music stopped.
“He speaks half a dozen languages, more when he’s sober. Life’s a game to him.”
Music again: the big band records repeated. Couples again took the floor. Fergus smiled at the people he’d already met and wondered which would become intimates, which only friends.
“What other scandals can you tell me?” he asked.
“Bernard and I are a bit of a scandal … not being married, you know.”
“I didn’t know. That’s not much of a scandal these days,” he said lightly.
She gave him an offended stare. Though the floor had become crowded, he maneuvered her sideways, backward, forward, without colliding with anyone. He had always been a skillful dancer.