‘There’s the banquet,’ Kaspar said. ‘The Emporium Feast, for all of the shopkeeps who can’t go home, all of the sweepers and joiners and tinkers. And … all of us Godmans.’
Cathy faltered in what she meant to say, so instead she asked, ‘Where?’
‘On the shopfloor.’
Before she left, Cathy gave Kaspar a look that might have been either promise or regret. Five days would pass between this Midwinter’s Eve and the Christmas Day when he would find out for certain. He would spend every one of them chasing down the meaning in her eyes, and every night he would lose another battle to Emil. And, in that way, the Long War would continue, while a new war was being waged in Kaspar Godman’s mind.
On Christmas morning, Cathy woke ravenous with the dawn. Sally-Anne, she had discovered, had been secretly meeting with John Horwood, the Emporium caretaker, and he had taken her to a hotel for the evening; Ted Jacobs and Kesey and little Douglas Flood had ventured out into London as well, to go a-wassailing, see their families, or else lose themselves in some uproarious drinking den. The Emporium halls would be quiet without them. She rolled over with her hands to her belly, trying to assure herself that she was not truly alone. And yet – Christmas morning only intensified the feeling: without Sally-Anne to fill her head with gossip from the shopfloor, she felt the absence of her mother more keenly than ever. There were things she wanted to ask. Was it normal to wake up in the night and rush to the toilet bowl, barely to squeeze out a drop? Was it normal for her breasts to feel hard and tender, all at the same time? For the skin around her nipples to darken with tiny raised bumps? She asked the baby all of these things, but when even the answers she invented stopped coming, she knew there was only one option: sooner or later, she was going to have to leave the room.
Some time later she picked her way down the shifting Emporium stairs. And there, on the shopfloor, lay everything Kaspar had spoken of. In the night, the shelves had been rearranged, opening a huge plateau between the exhibits. Through the paper trees, now shimmering in streamers, a huge table was being laid. Mrs Hornung was directing the remaining shop hands like a general with his men. Somebody was bringing out steaming platters of potatoes and parsnips. Somebody else was carving a goose. Even up high, the smells reached out and wrapped around her, tempting her down.
When she came along the aisle and entered the plateau, one of the shop girls called out her name, and soon Cathy found herself laying out miniature wreaths of holly upon each plate. As soon as she had finished, a gong rang out. There must have been thirty shop hands left in the Emporium this Christmas Day, and now they all scrabbled for their seats. Only then did Cathy see that the Godmans were already among them. Papa Jack had a pre-ordained seat at the head of the table (somebody had hewn off its arms, so that he could sit overhanging each side), but Kaspar had found a seat a little further along, pressed up between one of the archivists, a girl with bottle-green eyes, and one of the boys who wrangled the puppets. Both seemed to be vying for his attention; when he looked up, he seemed to stare straight through her, preferring their flirtation instead. Later, Cathy would put it down to the steam billowing up from the food, but she felt herself flushing crimson as the blood rushed to her cheeks. Sirius the patchwork dog appeared, as if to beg for scraps from the table, and then wandered on; even he seemed to be drawn to Kaspar’s company, curling up at his feet.
She was still staring at him when she realised that the figure levering into the chair beside her was Emil. Food materialised upon her plate, but in comparison to the mountain on Emil’s, hers was only a foothill. Even so, the baby inside her began to cavort. She could barely restrain her hands as Papa Jack rose at the head of the table to wish good cheer on all of his guests.
‘We haven’t seen you,’ Emil whispered as his father raised a glass to another Emporium Christmas, another dark winter shot through with Emporium lights. ‘I thought, perhaps, my brother had …’
‘No,’ said Cathy, ‘nothing like that.’
‘So you’re …’
‘I’m well, Emil. I promise.’
She looked up, to see him nodding feverishly. ‘I knew you were. My brother, sometimes he gets … carried away. He thinks everyone ought to worship him. This time, it’s those trees. I’d be sore as all hell if only they weren’t so good. And they are good, Cathy. That’s the problem. When I saw what he’d done with those trees, why, I …’ Cathy did not need him to finish the sentence. She had seen the look on Emil’s face as his axe burst through the tree: there had been envy, that much was true, but eclipsing it was sheer delight. ‘I’ve been trying seasons to work something quite as magical. And Papa, Papa must have noticed. If it wasn’t for my soldiers, why, the game would already be up. Papa might as well have signed the Emporium to Kaspar and be …’ At the head of the table, Papa Jack was finishing his first toast. As the cheer went up, Emil lost track of his thoughts and, by the time the cheering died away, was rambling incoherent. ‘You didn’t want to go home?’ he finally asked, by way of stemming the tide.
‘No.’
‘And your family, won’t they miss you?’
She wondered what the house was like today, whether there had been presents and celebrations, or …
‘No,’ she whispered, half trying to convince herself.
Somewhere in the conversation, as the first food touched her lips, she felt the baby twirling in unconstrained delight, and, by instinct, her hand dropped to the curve of her belly, to feel for it there. She was aware how tight her stomach felt, was marvelling at the way she filled even Sally-Anne’s clothes, when suddenly something pushed back against her hand. She froze, but the sensation came again – and, when she lifted her hand, she could see it there, pushed up through fabric and flesh, a hand or a foot, the touch of her child.
She felt for it with the tip of her finger. Startled, the baby withdrew. Then, its courage returned. It kicked out again.
In the corner of her eye, she saw Emil tense. In an instant reality returned, the cheering from Papa Jack’s toast reached a crescendo, and when she looked up, Emil was staring at the place where her fingers had been, his face livid as a bruise.
‘Emil?’
‘Why Cathy, surely you can’t be—’
‘Emil,’ she said, and was surprised to hear how easily her own voice frayed, ‘please …’
But now his face was buried in his food; now he could not bear to look. And, inside her, oblivious to its discovery, the baby continued to turn.
STOWAWAY
PAPA JACK’S EMPORIUM, 1907
Consider Emil Godman: the youngest son of a youngest son, born to a toymaker who did not yet know that he was a toymaker, to a man who would one day find ways to invent whole worlds. On Christmas night, if you were the kind of creature to spy on him through a crack in the skirting boards, you would have found Emil in his workshop, tinkering with the toy held fast in the vice. He had been coming back to this toy for many long months, each time unable to make the adjustments that might have seen it taking pride of place on the shop floor. Something to transform the season, something to strike all mention of those Instant Trees from the Emporium record – something, anything, to stand alongside the magics with which his father, and now his brother, were imbuing their toys.
It was a mahogany case, lined in velvet, and when he opened it up it was to reveal a family of mice dressed as ballerinas. He wound them up, daring to believe when the mice unhitched themselves from the contraption and lined up in formation – but, when the music tinkled and the dancing began, everything was wrong. When the lead mouse turned a pirouette, she tumbled into the dancers behind her. When the second held an arabesque, she promptly fell over. When it came time for the climactic move, the whole troop turning their tours en l’air, the result was a chaos of arms and legs and tails, little grey legs windmilling madly in a heap on the tabletop.
Emil whipped them all up and set them back in the vice. He was about to take another turn, but something stopped him. At first, he though
t it was his hands, treacherous as they were. He looked at them with fire – for why couldn’t they be the ones plucking magic from thin air, taking the runners off a rocking horse and letting that horse go cantering around the store? Then he realised it wasn’t his hands at all. It was his head. His head was too busy, too clouded with other things. How could he be expected to achieve real magic when his heart wasn’t in toymaking at all? It was the girl. After what he had seen at the Christmas table, he couldn’t stop thinking about the girl …
Christmas night came, and Emil breathed not a word. Boxing Day died, and still Papa Jack had not come knocking at Cathy’s door, demanding to know why she had not told them she was conjuring a baby beneath their roof. Next morning, as the shop hands prepared the Emporium to open once more, there were no whispers in the Palace, no sordid looks from Sally-Anne and the rest. Doubting herself, Cathy ventured to the foot of the Godmans’ stair, thinking she might catch him coming down, but Emil was already out, and soon the patchwork dog appeared to warn her away with its stuffed-pillow barks.
There was a deluge directly after Christmas Day, but the Emporium halls were never as busy again as they had been in December’s earliest days. Cathy worked the register, or took children on rocking-horse rides up and down the aisles while the Emporium stable hands looked dutifully on, and by New Year she was courageous enough to return to the Palace each evening. By the end of that week she was beginning to feel that she was mistaken, that Emil hadn’t really seen what he’d seen at all. In fact, as the second week in January arrived, and with it fresh flurries of London snow, she was finally starting to feel safe. Safety was a feeling that crept up on you. It was not like anxiety or fear. Safety did not descend in a rush, nor seize you in its hands; but here it was, all the same. A secret shared was a secret halved – and Cathy might even have convinced herself to confide in others, to take one of the more seasoned girls to one side and confess, if only Sally-Anne hadn’t sashayed into the Palace one morning, stopped the breakfast revelries (Douglas Flood insisted on playing his fiddle even at breakfast) and demanded everyone’s attention.
‘Time to pack your cases ladies, gentlemen,’ she declared, with a sad lilting tone.
At once, the shop hands understood. Cathy followed their gazes, to where Sally-Anne was now standing, up on the dais. In her hands was a single white flower, the hanging bell of a snowdrop plucked from the Emporium terrace. The thaw had come. This day at the Emporium would be the season’s last.
The Emporium closed its doors on a frigid January morning, London encrusted in frost.
Mrs Hornung had prepared great cauldrons of stewed apples to see the shop hands on their way, but aside from this there was no ceremony. Papa Jack did not emerge from his workshop. Emil and Kaspar barely ghosted past. By the time Cathy was done packing what few possessions she had, most of the shop hands were already gone. She wound her way slowly to the shopfloor, already denuded of last season’s toys, and stood at the open doors, feeling the bracing chill of the London air.
‘You’ll be back next year, dear?’ said Mrs. Hornung.
‘I will,’ Cathy lied, and went out with both hearts beating wild.
At the end of Iron Duke Mews, Sally-Anne scurried past her, whispered ‘Good luck!’ and climbed into a taxicab her gentleman had sent to spirit her away. Then Cathy was alone, and London seemed suddenly so vast and unknown.
The Emporium had looked after her for a time. Emil had looked after her by saying nothing, ever since the feast on Christmas Day. Now there had to be another way. She supposed that the Emporium was looking after her still, for there was a secret place in her satchel where all of her winter pay had been stashed. If she was careful, it would see her until spring. But spring would bring with it new life in more ways than one, and it was a long time until this new year’s first frost and the Emporium’s reopening. How different life would be by then.
She set off, into the great unknown.
Decisions like this should not be made on an instant. And yet, that was what she was doing: deciding her child’s future at every intersection of roads, mapping out its life story by gravitating toward one tram stop or the next. Without knowing it, she reached Regent Street, where horse-drawn trams and trolleybuses battled for control of the thoroughfare. North or south was the decision she had to make. The wind was coming from the north; so south it was.
It took her some time to find a bus bound for Lambeth and Camberwell beyond. Those places seemed as likely as any. Sally-Anne had spoken of grand houses along the Brixton road, carved up into tinier apartments for city clerks and railway workers. One of those might do, for ushering her baby into the world. The question of what happened next was one she was steadfastly putting to the back of her mind.
The bus was slow in wending its way south. Cathy took a seat on the lower deck, where the windows were fogged by the cold and London was a ghostly miasma through the glass. They had not yet reached the circus at Piccadilly when she felt somebody sitting down beside her. Though she kept her head down, she could sense that the stranger had turned in her direction. He was sitting uncomfortably close, his eyes roaming all over her face, her hair, her belly. Finally, she could bear it no longer. She looked up, determined to dress him down – she would rather be thought hysterical than stomach his scrutiny a moment longer – and there sat Kaspar Godman, looking half-affronted that she had not noticed him sooner.
‘And where do you think you’re going?’
‘Kaspar, what are you—’
‘You didn’t think to say goodbye?’
‘The Emporium’s closed, Kaspar,’ she said, quickly reordering her thoughts. ‘Everybody left.’
‘So where are you going?’
The bus had stopped while yet more passengers piled aboard. She searched for something to say, but each lie evaporated before she could give it voice. ‘I don’t know,’ she finally admitted.
‘Didn’t you think about that before—’
Before he had finished, she cut in, ‘What are you doing here, Kaspar?’
‘Me?’
‘It doesn’t look right, you being out of the Emporium. It’s like seeing a … swallow in winter!’
Kaspar’s face creased. ‘Miss Wray,’ he said, as his laughter subsided, ‘why didn’t you tell me?’
The words did not flay her as she had thought that they might.
‘Emil.’
‘Don’t blame Emil. The way he’s been moping around, I knew something was wrong. And when I found all those snowdrops hung up to dry in his workshop – well, it takes a lot for Emil to break the rules. He’d been plucking them, you see, every morning for the last week. Seems he didn’t want the season to finish, that he didn’t want someone to go. By God, I thought he’d fallen in love! There he was, mooning after one of the seamstresses or … It was just rotten luck that Sally-Anne got to the terrace before him this morning. No doubt he’d have plucked every snowdrop until spring, tried to keep the Emporium open until the Royal Gardens are in full flower. So he had to tell me, you see? The idea I’d tell our father what he’d been up to …’ The bus was about to take off again, but Kaspar cried out for the horseman to stop, and extended a hand. ‘Cathy Wray, don’t make me be a gentleman in front of so many rabid onlookers. But you can’t possibly think I’d let you – let you both – just wander off like that, can you?’
Back at the Emporium, the shop floor was in silence. The gloom that had settled was almost subterranean, and what wan light broke in from the skylights above could hardly penetrate the aisles. Kaspar brought Cathy in through one of the tradesman’s doors, and now they stood in an alcove where pop-up books thronged the shelves. Each one of them held new delights, each page a cascade that could reach out and envelop its reader in lost worlds of dinosaurs and mammoths, of desert islands infested by cannibal hags, of fog-bound London streets and lonely Fenland locks. Mrs Hornung had already begun laying out the dust sheets, hiding the exhibits for another season. Kaspar made Cathy wait until he had scouted
the aisle ahead, and only then did he usher her on.
Through the labyrinthine aisles they reached the paper forest and the Wendy House at its end. As Cathy passed under the branches, Kaspar lifted more Emporium Instant Trees from the shelving and cast them on to the floor. ‘Just in case,’ he grinned, barely flinching as they erupted out of the ground behind him. Now that the Wendy House was entirely encircled, it could barely be seen from the aisle beyond. He took her over the white picket fence and walked within.
Cathy stopped dead. ‘You’ve been planning this for me …’
Things had changed since the last time she was here. Beside the bed stood a cradle. Beside that, a Russian rocking horse had been draped in blankets and shawls. A miniature kitchen had been arranged, with a gas-fired hot plate, a kettle and a single casserole dish, burnt black around the edges. The rack above was filled with jars of preserves, flour and lard. ‘Everything I could snatch from the kitchen without Mrs Hornung beginning to suspect,’ said Kaspar, turning a two-step across the carpeted expanse.
‘I’m going to live here?’
‘Why not?’ It seemed so obvious to him. ‘It has everything you could need. Not a soul on the shopfloor could see. And the walls, well, Papa made them so that a horde of children could play inside and barely a whisper would be heard without. There are three things a woman needs, Cathy. A roof over her head, food on her plate and … delightful company. One, two, three.’ At the last, he turned his index finger on himself.
‘You haven’t told Emil. Nor Papa Jack.’
‘Strictly speaking, of course, it is against the rules. Emil can be a stickler, and my papa may not understand. Ever since that unfortunate business with that toymaker off the Portobello Road … well, he’s seen ghosts in every corner. I’m not suggesting he’ll think you’re a thief, but he may think you’re in a thief’s employ. What better ruse than a girl with child, come to prey on our sympathies?’
The Toymakers Page 8