The Toymakers

by Robert Dinsdale

  ‘You’re making fun of me.’

  ‘Cathy,’ he said, more earnestly now, ‘you can be safe here. You don’t really want to have your baby alone in some Lambeth lodging, do you?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Well, you don’t have to. All you need is here. Let the Wendy House be a sanctuary for you. Let these walls hide you away. Why, all you’d have to do is lock that door and nobody would ever find you. My papa never made a toy that would stoop so low as to break in all of his life. These walls are a fortress. The Emporium might cave in and you’d still be snug and safe in here.’ His next words were not so full of bravado. ‘Let me do this,’ he whispered, and then, full of bravado again, ‘Why would you ever want anywhere else?’

  Why indeed? After Kaspar was gone, Cathy walked the circumference of the Wendy House walls. Here was an entire life in miniature. She would have been lying if she had said she was not afraid, it would not have been true to say she did not wonder why – but above everything else was the relief she felt as she rushed to grill bread over the hot plate and slathered it with elderflower preserve. Kaspar’s footsteps were fading on the other side of the paper trees, and Cathy Wray broke into the most mystified smile.

  He came back to her that night, when the eerie hooting of stuffed owls on the shopfloor was keeping her awake. He had brought blackouts for the windows (‘So you can light your lantern at night’) and extra blankets for the bed; the snowdrops might have flowered, but winter was still bitter and deep. He had brought tea leaves as well, and soup from Mrs Hornung’s pot. And, ‘You’re going to be bored,’ he said, ‘so you might tutor yourselves with these.’ Onto the bedside he upended a hessian bag filled with pamphlets and old lithographs. ‘Every catalogue and advertisement the Emporium’s ever had. It’s my own collection. One year we’re going to have an exhibit devoted to it. “Kaspar Godman’s Archive of the Emporium!” Here,’ he went on, rifling through to find the oldest one. ‘What do you make of that?’

  The card depicted stuffed bears of dubious design. Above it were the words: COME TO PAPA’S EMPORIUM.

  ‘That’s my handiwork you’re holding there. I’ll wager you didn’t know you were in the presence of an artiste par excellence.’ When she did not challenge him, he added, ‘I was eight years old. It was the same month that my papa made this …’

  Kaspar whistled, and into the Wendy House lolloped Sirius, the patchwork dog. On seeing Kaspar it butted affectionately against his leg, as energetic as a concoction made up of fabric and thread could be. Then Kaspar crouched and, in teasing its ear, directed its gaze at Cathy.

  ‘Do you understand?’

  In response, the dog lay down at Cathy’s feet.

  ‘He’s to keep you company, for when I can’t be here. Oh, I’ll come as often as I can, but there’s Emil to think of, and Papa too. They’ll expect me to be up in the workshop, working out designs for next winter. If they don’t see me slaving at it, they’ll suspect.’

  Cathy crouched so that the dog could nuzzle her hand. She still had no sense how such a thing might work, but the more time she spent with it, the less it seemed to matter. Such was the magic of an Emporium toy.

  ‘Papa made him for us, to remind us of the dog we left behind. It was the winter we first came. We were living, all three of us to a single room, in one of those Whitechapel tenements a good girl like you won’t know anything about. Papa didn’t speak back then. He didn’t really have the words. But he was making us those soldiers out of wood, and we were playing our Long War, and then, one night, Emil was crying, and I was there, holding him, asking what was wrong. That was what it was like back then. Emil would crawl over in the night and I’d have to hold him, tell him we were on the greatest adventure of our lives. And when he said he’d been thinking of our old dog, well, that got me sobbing too. I’d imagine you find that hard to believe. Me, Kaspar Godman, crying like that? Well, there was something about that night. Back then we barely knew a word in English. What we wouldn’t have given to play with the boys on the floor below! But not one of them could understand a word we said. Papa was taking what work he could, tinkering around, and one night he came back with a pile of old trousers and capes. He must have spent three weeks hunkered down in the corner with those things – but then, one morning, there this dog was, all wound up and waiting to play. We named him Sirius, after the mutt we left behind …’ Kaspar clicked his forefinger and thumb, and Sirius rose on his haunches to beg. ‘He was simpler back then. He couldn’t do nearly as many tricks …’

  ‘I love him,’ said Cathy, and meant it too.

  ‘Cathy.’ A note of seriousness had crept into Kaspar’s voice. ‘If you’re going to keep him, there’s something you have to promise me.’

  ‘I know you, Kaspar,’ she said, not knowing if that was true. ‘You’d better tell me what it is first, or I’m liable to find myself in some sort of contract …’

  Kaspar took a deep breath before he proceeded. ‘You have to keep him wound.’ He saw the way she was looking at him, as if searching for a jest. Sometimes, Kaspar Godman found it hard to be taken seriously. It could be the most vexing thing. ‘Ever since the day Papa gave him to us, he’s never wound down. At first it was because Emil and I always wanted to play with him. But then …’ He hesitated. ‘I don’t know if I can explain it. You’ll think it strange. Sirius has changed so much since then. Patches have been torn off and taken away. He’s had new buttons for eyes. Half of his tail burnt off once – I’ll admit I was to blame for that – and we stitched him a new one. But he’s never wound down. We wouldn’t let it. And … his contraption is old. I don’t know what would happen if it stopped. What if he couldn’t be wound up again? What if, once he ground to a halt, he was over, he was spent? Well,’ he concluded, ‘do you promise?’

  Cathy said, ‘I do,’ and at that Kaspar turned, as if to hide his eyes. Soon he was hovering in the Wendy House door, ready to disappear into the forest.

  ‘Kaspar, if he did wind down, if that contraption did break, couldn’t you just make him a new one?’

  ‘I don’t think it’s like that. It would be like somebody opening up your chest and giving you a new heart. How could anything – how could anybody – be the same after that?’ He turned back to her, summoning up a smile at last. Things, he decided, had become far too maudlin; life was for levity, not despair. ‘Do you think I’m awfully strange, Miss Wray?’

  ‘Awfully sentimental, perhaps.’

  ‘Aha!’ declared Kaspar. ‘Well, there you have it. For, if a toymaker cannot be sentimental, who on this fine earth can?’

  Kaspar was correct; she quickly grew restless. The Wendy House was bigger than it had any right to be, but by the end of the second day it was already a prison cell. She spent long hours reading the old catalogues, charting the creations of Papa Jack and his sons across the years, but this could not sustain her for ever. By the fall of the third night she knew all about their first winter, when the Emporium was nothing more than the room where the Godman family lived and the boys from down the hall, who told the boys from down the road, who told the boys from further afield, that here was a family trading toys for winter fuel. She knew about the savings Jekabs Godman built up across that next summer and how, on the day of the winter’s first frost, he made a deal with a fellow migrant, a man named Abram Hassan, to lease the derelict shopfront at the end of Iron Duke Mews. It was Hassan who convinced Jekabs that a stranger could rise up in London, that even a foreigner might prosper. Until then he had been working hard to lose his language, reasoning that English boys wanted English toys, but Hassan convinced him that, if this ‘Emporium’ of his was to succeed, a little exoticism went a long way. People could believe in magic from the frozen East, he said, so long as that East was further afield than Whitechapel or Bethnal Green. So that winter the rocking horses were painted with the red and green tassels of the Russian Steppes, and the bears were Arctic white with jet black eyes. Cathy held up the postcards with which Kaspar and Emil ha
d capered around the West End, drumming up business while their papa slaved in his shop. It must have worked, because the next year’s catalogue proudly declared the Emporium the toast of London town. Papa Jack’s toys had garnered such a reputation that the freehold of the building was now his, and the first photographs of the shopfloor showed the aisles thronged with enchanted children, and equally enchanted mothers and fathers. That, Cathy supposed, was how the true fortune of the Emporium had been built: by making even grown-ups hanker after toys they might once have had.

  Leafing through old photographs was distraction enough for the first few days. Yet the stretches between Kaspar’s visits were achingly long, and when she spoke to Sirius her voice echoed in the cavernous Wendy House hall.

  ‘I’ll bring you more books,’ said Kaspar one night. ‘And games. Papa has chess boards that you can play against themselves, backgammon too. If you treat it right, the wood can remember. Beat those boards once and you won’t beat them in the same way again.’

  Time moved erratically in the Wendy House walls. Sometimes the tedium drove her back to bed in the middle of the afternoon. Often she only knew what hour it was by the fingers rapping on the glass that announced Kaspar’s coming. Once, he arrived as she slept and she woke to find him urgently winding up Sirius, whose innards had started to slow down as she dreamt. ‘Every night,’ he was saying as the dog got back to its paws. ‘Every night, with your prayers …’ Cathy swore, then and there, that she would never forget again.

  By the third week, she was spending too much time standing in the Wendy House door, gazing up into the paper branches. What a thrill it would have been to take just one step, and then one more! But Cathy was true to her word. She made a calendar to keep track of the days, and on it plotted the twists and turns of the baby in her belly. The kicks came with such frequency now. She could catch a heel or a hand and make it squirm inside her.

  Somewhere along the way, she realised she had not thought of her mother or her father, nor even of Lizzy, in several weeks. Daniel himself was an outline in her mind; he might never have existed, were it not for the child turning inside her. Perhaps this was how lives changed: with new families always supplanting the last.

  One night, when Kaspar arrived, she had rearranged the Wendy House floor. The bed she had shifted around, the curtains she had rehung; the nursery had been dismantled and rebuilt in a different corner.

  ‘I know what this is,’ announced Kaspar, depositing the evening’s supplies on the bed. ‘I’ve read about it in the Annals. This is what happens to polar explorers when they get trapped in their tents. It’s a kind of hysteria. The white madness!’

  ‘It is not hysteria. Or madness of any kind. It’s …’

  ‘Next time I come, I’m likely to find you’ve built a little temple to one of your new gods.’

  ‘It isn’t that bad.’

  ‘It isn’t?’ said Kaspar. ‘Then, I’d hazard, you won’t mind if I don’t linger tonight. I’m in the thick of it in my workshop …’

  At first, eager that he not know how knotted she was feeling inside, Cathy shrugged – and, with a smile that was altogether too smug, Kaspar sauntered out of the door. He had only just breached the line of paper trees when he felt a ball of paper striking him on the back of the head. He paused, pretending it was merely a scrunched-up leaf, but when he strode on, Sirius hurtled to catch him. Only at the dog’s insistence did he look back. Cathy was standing in the doorway, pointedly not taking the next step. What spirit she had to indulge in his game of brinkmanship was clearly fading away.

  ‘Linger,’ she said – so, with his air of victory barely concealed, Kaspar strode back through the Wendy House door.

  ‘It’s something. It’s a start,’ said Kaspar. ‘And, truth be told, it was thinking of you that got me this far …’

  ‘Me?’ Cathy asked, uncertain whether to be flattered or unnerved.

  ‘Let me show you.’

  On the ground between them was a small brown suitcase of perfectly utilitarian design. It was so unspectacular it didn’t even have a handle. Kaspar knelt and opened it up, but it remained as humdrum as ever; all Cathy could see was the black felt of its lining. It was only as Kaspar stood, dangled one foot over the open case and plunged it inside that she realised the blackness had unaccounted depths – for Kaspar’s foot seemed to have dropped below the bottom of the case, below even the lining of the floor. Then, after pausing to make sure of his balance, Kaspar lifted his second foot and planted it alongside the first.

  Cathy studied him from every angle, while Sirius set up a pillowy hullabaloo. The case had swallowed Kaspar to the knots of his knees, but by rights it should not have reached his ankles.

  ‘Am I going to get a smile?’ asked Kaspar, ignoring the fact that he was wearing the biggest, most inane one himself.

  ‘Explain,’ declared Cathy, determined not to give him the satisfaction even as she battled to contain her surprise.

  ‘Well, you already know how Papa can do the most extraordinary things with space. I’ve been trying to unpick it ever since I was small – but it wasn’t until I started thinking about you in your hiding hole here that I started to see. And I was thinking: when you’re here, inside the House, how could you ever hope to prove how big the House was outside these walls? When you’re inside, why, it’s as big as it feels – and that’s all that matters. The perspective has shifted, don’t you see? From the inside out, this is what’s normal. And it’s the same for that little …’ He flicked a finger airily at Cathy’s stomach. ‘… creature in there. To that baby, your body’s the whole world. The universe entire. So, with that in mind, I started tinkering …’

  Cathy waved her hand to order Kaspar out of the suitcase and took it upon herself to stand in his place. There was no unnatural feeling, no sensation that rippled in her ankles as she dropped in and found the bottom, some way below; it was the most ordinary thing in the world, and yet still she said, ‘I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about.’

  ‘It feels like I’ve done something real here, something just like my father, punched my way through whatever’s been holding me back. Watch and learn, Miss Wray. Watch and learn. By the time this summer ends, I’ll have more space inside my packages than you could hope to believe. The real question is – how to sell them? I’ve been picturing “Emporium Hiding Holes”, for the perfect game of hide and seek. Or—’

  ‘Toyboxes!’ Cathy announced, at which Kaspar gave a wolfish grin. ‘Toyboxes bigger on the inside, so a whole bedroom could be tidied away. Just open it up and cram everything in. Think about that, Kaspar. What mother wouldn’t want a toybox like that?’

  ‘You’ve a wicked mind, Miss Wray. It is mothers, of course, who hold the purses …’

  Cathy could virtually see the sales piling up in Kaspar’s mind’s eye. At once, he helped her clamber out of the box, snapped it shut, and darted away. ‘I’ve much thinking to do. Too much thinking …’

  He stopped once before the doorway, to look back and make his goodbyes. As he did, a new look crossed his face; it seemed he was seeing her for the very first time. ‘It’s soon, isn’t it?’ he asked, considering her belly.

  ‘Soon enough,’ whispered Cathy, and only after he was gone did she realise quite how soon that was.

  She had been given the gift of too much time. Too much time to think about it, too much time to wallow in ideas of what birth might be like. Time, she already knew, played tricks in the Emporium, but never as markedly as it did now: the days going by so slowly, but her body changing so fast. Kaspar came back across the next evenings, always bringing her some new version of his toy. Four nights had passed by the time he brought her a prototype toybox, plain pine inscribed with the tin soldier emblem of Papa Jack’s Emporium. It was on the tip of her tongue to ask him to stay that night, but something held her back. Perhaps it was only pride, for Cathy had asked for so little in her life. She faced the emptiness of that night as she had all others – in thinking about the
Emporium and its past, and trying desperately not to imagine the future.

  The next night was the first that Kaspar did not appear. She gave up thinking of him (it was easier said than done; she realised, now, how eagerly she awaited his visits) and slept early, only to wake an hour, a half hour, a scant few minutes later – and, disoriented, stand in the Wendy House door. She spent the next day in solitude, but when Kaspar did not appear that night, nor the night after that, the feeling of imprisonment became too intense. There were only so many times she could prowl around the Wendy House walls, only so many times she could go back through the photographs of the old Emporium and search for some detail she had not yet noticed. She did not want to, but when she found herself back at the Wendy House door, it was the most natural thing in the world to set foot outside. And, when the world did not end, it was the most natural thing to keep going, over the white picket fence, under the first of the paper trees, up out of the alcove and into the first aisle.

  Almost immediately the restlessness bled out of her. The knots inside her chest unwound. It was dark in the Emporium but she wandered along aisles lit by moonlight pouring in from the skylights above, and for the first time in many weeks she felt free.

  It was intoxicating to be out. She spent an hour in the alcove where the pop-up books had been covered up, ferreting under the dust sheets and going through each book in turn. In the atrium the Russian rocking horses had been corralled behind a wooden fence, but she stole through and (mindful of her bump) climbed on to the closest she saw. Almost instantly, she could feel the wind in her hair, hear the pounding of hoof beats across some verdant plain. The sensations were so acute she quite forgot she was in the dusty old Emporium at all; the shop walls simply faded away, until what she could see in the edges of her vision was a wild, rugged vista of green, across which other rocking horses cantered in wild abandon.

  After that she was tired, but it would not do to go back to the Wendy House, not when the night was still vast. Determined, she set off, ducking along an aisle where lace butterflies had once cavorted on invisible threads. In the insectarium at its end, the shelves were packed with boxes of grubs and larvae. On a whim, Cathy picked up the first, warmed the cocoon inside her palms and watched as a woollen house fly emerged. Only Kaspar, she thought, could have spent long hours concocting something so mundane as a toy fly. Papa Jack’s were the golden dragonflies and grasshoppers, Emil’s the bright furry bumblebees.