and so on, and I’d been looking back to the past. I didn’t want you to find this. I wanted you to find something sophisticated, that no one in the family could have thought up.’
‘Hra,’ he said, seeming to accept it.‘How many people outside your family knew about these clocks?’
‘Several did, I suppose, but it was such a long time ago. No one would remember, would they?’
‘They might.’ Yale turned to Smith.‘This toy, is this really what set off the bomb?’
Smith nodded.‘It sounds just right. Wire in a detonator where the Pembroke children had a torch bulb …’ He spread his hands.‘It wouldn’t need more current than that.’
Not surprisingly, they decided to take a look in the playroom. They picked their way cautiously across the ankle-twisting rubble and headed for the passage which was comparatively clear by this time. The playroom, when we reached it, was shadowy inside, with the windows boarded up. Light of sorts seeped in through the door, but it took a few minutes for eyes to acclimatise, during which Yale bumped into the bicycles, knocking them over. I helped him pick them up. He wanted to know whose they were, and I told him about Peter and Robin.
He made no especial comment but watched while I went over to the shelves and began peering into boxes. I hadn’t been in the room at all since the twins had gone, and their own playthings had overlaid those outgrown and abandoned by their elder brothers and sisters so that most of what I was looking at was unfamiliar and seemed to belong to strangers. It took several minutes to locate the box I thought I wanted, and to pick it off the shelves and put it on the table.
Someone, Coochie I dared say, had packed the trains away for good after Gervase and Ferdinand had left and I’d been busy with school and horses. At one time, the tracks had run permanently round half the room, but Peter and Robin had been television-watchers more than the rest of us, and hadn’t dragged them out again. I opened the box and found the old treasures undisturbed, looking more battered than I’d thought, with rust on the much-used wheels.
I lifted out a couple of engines and some coaches, then followed them with a tunnel, a signal box with green and red bulbs and a brown plastic railway station adorned with empty bulb-holders among the advertisement stickers. I suppose to any adult, his childhood’s rediscovered toys look smaller, deader, less appealing than he remembers. The trains were dusty and sad, relics ready for the skip outside, melancholic. The little lights had long gone out.
I took everything out of the box, but there were no clocks.
‘Sorry,’ I said.‘They could be in anything, really. If they’re here.’
Smith began looking into any box whose contents weren’t easily identifiable by the picture on top. Yale, with a no-hope expression, followed suit. I packed the trains back into oblivion with regret.
‘Well, just look here,’ Smith said suddenly.‘Gold mine.’
He had produced from a jumble of Lego constructions a bright new-looking clock with a Mickey Mouse face in unfaded techni-colour. Mickey’s hands in fat white gloves were the hands of the clock. To the minute hand was fixed a coil of white plastic-covered wire. A second white coil was stuck to the scarlet clock casing, its bared end jutting out over noon. When Smith held it all up, the white coils stretched out and down like curling streamers.
I looked at it blankly.
‘I’ve never seen that one before,’ I said.‘We didn’t make them decorative. Ours were …’ I sought for the word ‘… utilitarian.’
Smith picked away among the Lego.‘Can’t find a battery,’ he reported.‘Nor a torch bulb, for that matter.’ A pause.‘Wait a minute …’ He rattled around and, finally, triumphantly produced a red and white Lego tower with a bulb-holder lodged inside near the top.
‘A lighthouse, wouldn’t you say?’ he asked, standing it upright.‘Neat.’
‘Someone made this for your twin brothers,’ Yale said.‘Are you sure you never saw it?’
I shook my head.‘I didn’t live here then, only visited. The twinshad a short attention span, anyway. They tired of new toys pretty quickly. Always wanted to get on with the next thing.’
‘I’ll find out who made it,’ Yale said.‘Can you sort out a box to put it in? I’ll give you a receipt, of course.’
Smith found him an empty Lego box and into it they packed the bright co-star of an act that had brought half the house down. There