The Toymakers

by Robert Dinsdale

  ‘He can’t sleep again,’ said Emil. ‘That means either he had an idea or …’

  Papa Jack lifted himself to move again. Cathy was certain she was not mistaken; the old man was either crying or singing. Whichever it was, it had the quality of winter wind in the trees.

  ‘… or what?’

  ‘Or he’s remembering.’

  High above, Papa Jack disappeared through another door. The light seemed to move sluggishly after him, as if he wore it as a bridal train.

  Emil must have realised he was standing too close to Cathy for he swiftly stepped aside.

  ‘I’ll come back soon, Cathy. I’ll make soldiers so magnificent those toyboxes will sit around gathering dust. This winter, they won’t even remember those paper trees.’

  Cathy watched him race off into the darkness of the shopfloor. It was strange how easily Emil and Kaspar thought of the first frost, of October and November and Christmas beyond. Cathy laid a hand on her belly, where the baby was suddenly too big to cartwheel around. Before winter, there was autumn – and before autumn, summer. No wonder she could not envisage beyond, for what was life going to look like then?

  The weeks flickered by.

  Keeping Kaspar from Emil and Emil from Kaspar became a parlour game in which all three of them were embroiled (though only Cathy had any knowledge of the rules). When Kaspar was inside the Wendy House walls, the baby tumbled in panic – for what would happen were Emil to come sauntering through the paper trees right then? When Emil came by, to show her the Cossack cavalry he was devising, the miniature cannonade and musketeers fit for the Crimea, the baby tumbled again – for what if there were to come a knock at the door and Cathy were to open it, only to discover a perfectly composed toybox out of which Kaspar Godman unfolded himself?

  There were tricks she learnt to employ. The gifts Emil brought could be hidden at the bottom of Kaspar’s toybox. The signs of Kaspar’s visits were easier to disguise, for he brought only his ideas – and the only sign he was there were the teacups he left behind, the impressions his body made on the bed when he lay back and told her how one day he would make her a Wendy House ten times the size, a paper garden for her baby, a whole world they need never leave.

  And perhaps it was the way her eyes furrowed at this that prompted Kaspar’s return at dawn the next morning. Evidently he had slept, for he looked less ragged than Cathy had seen him in weeks. He wore a woollen town coat and, over his shoulder, a satchel of waxed leather.

  ‘You’ll have to come quickly, if this is going to work.’

  Still in her nightdress, Cathy felt suddenly naked. ‘If what’s going to work?’

  ‘You’ve been a prisoner too long, Miss Wray. This Emporium of ours has its wonders, but sometimes you need a moment of normality to remember the magic. What do you say?’

  ‘I’d say something, if only I knew what …’

  ‘Outside, Miss Wray. London. But is has to be now – because once Emil starts pottering around the shopfloor, the moment is lost. Seize the day, Miss Wray!’

  It was not the idea of seizing the day that propelled her to rush behind the screen and scramble into her day clothes. It was the thought of Emil wending his way down here, to share the fruits of his evening’s endeavour, and catching her with Kaspar. For Emil, that would be a calamity too terrible to bear; she was, after all, his secret.

  Hastily dressed, she stepped out from behind the screen and slipped her arm through Kaspar’s. ‘Do you know,’ she said, ‘it’s somehow hard to think of there being an outside at all.’

  ‘It can get you like that,’ said Kaspar, and with a wolfish grin, he led her through the shadowed halls.

  The coach was waiting at the end of Iron Duke Mews, with a horse already reined up. At first Cathy took it for patchwork, but it was only the enforced months of the Emporium tricking her eyes; this horse was very real. Kaspar helped Cathy on to the stage, where she sat among great felt sacks bulging with presents. She recognised sets of Emil’s soldiery spilling out, boxes of paper trees, a floating cloud castle, weighted down so that it did not disappear, up above the London streets.

  ‘What is all this?’

  ‘There’s a city to explore,’ Kaspar began, ‘but we have to earn it first. Come on, I’ll show you.’

  The sun was not fully risen as Kaspar drove the coach into the winding streets of Soho, but by the time they reached the Cambridge Circus it was lighting them in radiant array. Cathy had quite forgotten the temptations of sunshine. She felt brighter already. Outside the Palace Theatre, where a gaggle of stage hands called out to Kaspar as he passed – ‘I used to come down here sometimes. The men in these theatres, they think they know magic. Don’t tell Papa, but I leased them Sirius one season. They taught him stage tricks. They’re the reason he can perform a tightrope walk’ – they stopped to buy oranges, and with their fingers sticky with juice they wended their way south, down the Charing Cross Road and to the banks of the river.

  There were places he wanted to take her. Somewhere, there was a poky little toyshop that specialised in miniatures – they were not without merits, Kaspar said, as long as you could overlook the fact that all they did was sit there, looking small – but better were the places he used to visit, secret places of his own. ‘The Emporium might be the world, but summers there are long, Miss Wray. Sometimes you want … something else. I tried to bring Emil once. I had to put a halter on him just to get him out of the door. I forfeited two rounds in our Long War just to make sure he wouldn’t tell Papa. But … Emil never did like escaping the Emporium. I don’t think he’s set foot outside in three whole years.’

  Escaping from the Emporium seemed such a strange thing to hear Kaspar speaking about. She wondered how often he slipped through the tradesman’s exits, what life he found out here, what people he knew.

  It was on her mind to ask when the river hove into view and, hanging above it, the Houses of Parliament, the Abbey standing proudly behind. She had seen them in miniature on the Emporium shelves, but there they were, blotting out the skyline. How vast the world really was, when you started looking up! Kaspar drove the coach out over the river and for a time they lingered there, the boats turning underneath. She breathed in the ripe tang of the Thames and wondered that she was even alive.

  Sir Josiah’s sat beyond the railway arches and the Lambeth bridge. A tumbledown of brick buildings arrayed around a yard with wooden outhouses in between, it sat in shadow at the end of a row of buildings that looked bleaker still. The yard that sat in front was pitted with potholes where thistles and nettles burst up in inglorious rapture.

  Kaspar brought the trap to a halt and, leaping down, extended a hand to guide down Cathy.

  ‘What is this place?’

  In reply, the doors opened and, across the narrow yard, out tumbled a horde of children. The elder ones stampeded the younger in their clamour to get past. Two of the grubbiest fought each other for the privilege of unlocking the iron gates but, once they had, nothing (not even the barking of the mistress who had appeared in the doorway behind them) could hold back the tide. Children of all shapes and sizes, not one of them wearing clothes that fit, lapped around the wagon. Kaspar slid blinkers over his horse’s eyes, if only to stop his restless shifting.

  ‘Think of it as the Summer Emporium,’ Kaspar began – and, upon lifting the first of the felt sacks from the coach floor, submitted himself to a whirlwind of grasping hands as the children closed in.

  After it was done, and the coach floor empty, Cathy watched the children tumble in orgies of delight around the yard, running wind-up armies against each other, squabbling for the affection of the litter of patchwork kittens they had awoken from their slumber, or clinging tight to the floating cloud castles for fear they might evaporate away. For some time, Kaspar was locked in conversation with Sir Josiah’s schoolmistress (why this should have bothered Cathy, she had no idea, save for the fact that this particular mistress had a prim beauty about her); only when he had finished did he saunt
er back through the gates and join her at the wagon. Inside the yard, the battles went on. One of the patchwork kittens was already stuck, mewing for help from the top of a paper tree.

  ‘Do you do this every year?’

  ‘Once a summer. It stops one feeling … stifled.’ He paused, reappraising himself. ‘Don’t look at me like that, Miss Wray! I’ll admit – I enjoy the adoration.’

  ‘I know you do.’

  ‘Does it make me awfully selfish?’

  Cathy was puzzled. ‘To hand out toys at an abandoned children’s home?’

  ‘To bask in the glow of it.’

  A thought cascaded over Cathy, one from which she could not escape. For mightn’t her own child, the one squirming in her belly, have started its life in a place like this? Might it not be its face pressed against the window, waiting for a visit – from the Emporium, from a grieving family, from an old spinster desperate for a baby of her own?

  ‘I think selfishness of that kind might be forgiven. Kaspar …’ And here she hesitated, thinking she might take his hand. ‘Can we …’

  ‘Back to the Emporium?’

  ‘Not that.’ She tried to lift herself on to the coach again, but her body resisted; she felt the touch of Kaspar’s hands as he helped her aboard. ‘But not here.’

  ‘I believe that’s a thing we might do, Miss Wray.’

  Some time later, having first explored the flower markets of Covent Garden, Kaspar accompanied Cathy through the Marble Arch and walked her, arm in arm, into the budding green of Hyde Park. It was unseasonably bright and the sunshine had already lured countless clerks out of their offices. Most were picnicking around the Apsley Gate, where handsome columns framed a frieze of charioteers riding out to war. Cathy could not ignore the furrowed looks as they noted the roundness of her belly, but it was not this that made her follow Kaspar on. She was, after all, used to a little scorn. Soon, they reached a stand of trees grown in such contortions that they seemed crowned in roots, growing down into the earth. Here patients from the hospital on the Hyde Park Corner formed a great horseshoe, fresh London air being deemed beneficial to their health, and even one of these (an elderly lady clinging to a velveteen rabbit from the Emporium stores) acknowledged Kaspar as he passed.

  ‘They’re looking at me, aren’t they?’ Cathy asked. Together they found the shade above the Serpentine and looked out across its glittering expanse.

  ‘Let them look.’

  ‘They’ll think I’m the servant girl you’ve taken as your bride …’

  ‘Have they never seen a woman with child before?’

  ‘You said it yourself, Kaspar. I’m sixteen if I’m a day.’

  ‘You’ve never cared before.’

  ‘I don’t care now,’ she answered – though perhaps it was no longer true. The Wendy House had spoiled her. It would have been like this every day, had she stayed at home.

  There came the sound of a motorcar approaching along the Rotten Row, a trail of horse-drawn carriages trotting in its wake. Kaspar turned away from them with a sigh. ‘I’d rather a runnerless rocking horse than a real horse almost any day.’

  At least the stupidity of his sneer plucked her out of her own thoughts. ‘Have you even ridden one?’

  ‘I could make a patchwork horse twice as comfortable. Give it a little thought and I could make one twice as fast.’ As if to prove a point, he darted for the roots behind him, came back with a fist full of twigs and lengths of dead grass, and set about meshing them in his lap. A few moments later, he set down a cavalry horse of sticks and made it canter toward her. Once it was in her lap, she held it aloft. It was only the sketch of a horse, and yet every muscle was demarked in dead grass; its halter was thistle, its mane made out of clover.

  There was silence, punctured only by the riot of ducks on the water (the gentlemen from the motorcar had launched a punt and were helping their shrieking lady friends aboard). Cathy set the horse back down, tweaked its tail, and watched it canter to Kaspar. Moments later, he turned it back toward her. Each time it made the crossing, it frayed apart a little further; each time it lurched over a diminishing length of grass. And, as they passed it back and forth, Cathy’s hands crept closer to Kaspar’s own. At last, when the horse was spent, Kaspar’s fingers touched hers.

  He wants to kiss me now, thought Cathy. And, even as certain as he is (vain and cocksure as ever), I’d let him. But the baby had sensed something; it moved inside her, suddenly the only thing she could feel. The ripples across her insides. The ridge that moved across her belly.

  She had waited too long. Masking his pain, Kaspar whipped his hand away, began tying knots in the grasses at his feet.

  ‘Home?’ he said.

  Something inside her wanted to say more. There was so much with which that silence might have been filled. And yet, ‘Home,’ she finally replied.

  By the time they returned to the Emporium, dusk was already settling. What clerks and daytrippers had swarmed Hyde Park were turning back to their townhouses and lodgings. At the end of Iron Duke Mews, the Emporium was a box of delights forgotten at Christmas and secreted away until the snow next fell. There was something forlorn about the idea that these aisles never saw summer.

  Kaspar said so little as they made their way back to the aisles. He was hurt, that much she could tell. He had every right to be. He had told her so much, of the time before their papa, of the crossing they had made, of that wretched tenement where they had lived. All that he wanted was for her to say a little of her own life. Why, then, did it seem so hard?

  He took her as far as the paper trees but would go no further. As she watched him go, something implored her to follow. And yet she remained, her feet stuck as fast as the roots of the trees that surrounded her.

  Sirius did not rush out to join her. That would have been some consolation for whatever it was she was feeling – but, as she stepped through the Wendy House door, she realised why. The dog was curled up at the foot of the bed, and pinned to his breast was a simple letter.

  I missed you.

  Where are you?

  Yours always

  Emil

  She clasped the letter to her breast, pitched down on to the bed and lay there as Sirius scrabbled up beside her. She was tired, yet thoughts of Kaspar kept cartwheeling through her mind, and the baby was pressed up against her, shifting in places that made her think the time was near. Where had this heaviness come from? It ought to have been a joyous day: she and Kaspar, out in the world. And yet …

  She sat up. ‘I’ve let him down, haven’t I?’ The paper tore where her fingers were straining at it. ‘Come on, Sirius. You can lead the way.’

  She stopped outside the door to Emil’s workshop. Part of her hoped he wasn’t there. But no, there he was, as besotted with his work as Kaspar before him. He had fallen asleep where he was sitting, slumped over his lathe with a unit of half-formed soldiers lined up in the vice.

  Gone were the half-formed patchworks he had been trying to make; gone, his attempts at recreating Emporium Instant Trees; gone, the chaos of splintered parts that had put Cathy in mind of a child at tantrum. As hard as she looked, she could not even see the picnic hamper over which he had shed so many tears. Now, the workshop was an ordered production line. Units of soldiers occupied every surface and shelf. Some of them needed painting, some needed lacquer; but all stood proud, defiant as any Emporium soldier had ever been.

  She stole in, Sirius sloping after.

  Cathy spent some time looking at the soldiers. Emil’s original Kapitan was perched on his worktop, always at his left-hand side. There was something unbearably sad about that. Either sad or – why not? – the most magical thing ever. A little part of Emil was refusing to grow up. And that was how Cathy knew: no matter if he never learned to do the things Papa Jack could, Emil would always be a toymaker at heart.

  She hated to think of him, waiting in the Wendy House for her today. Her hands danced across the thatch of his hair, until finally he woke.

 
‘Cathy?’ he whispered. ‘I was worried for you. I was …’

  ‘I know you were, dear Emil.’

  ‘But you came.’

  She thought: I almost didn’t.

  ‘I did.’

  She sat on one of the upturned boxes and watched as he kneaded the wakefulness back into his eyes. It was on the tip of his tongue to ask where she had been, and if he had asked it, she would have said; she did not have the strength of secrets in her tonight. All she wanted was to tell, to tell it all.

  ‘Do you want to show me?’ she asked.

  ‘Show you?’

  ‘You came to show me something, didn’t you? And I wasn’t there to see it.’

  Emil came to his senses, leapt to his feet. In a flurry of movement, he had whipped away the dust sheet covering his work bench. On it sparkled a legion of soldiers, armed with their working rifles, flanked by proud dragoons and miniature cannonade.

  Cathy had seen toy soldiers at battle before, but she had not seen them like this. They came at each other, stopped and let loose their fire. The barrels of the toy cannons jerked upwards and, out of their eyes, black orbs erupted to scatter the enemy like skittles. The devastation they wreaked was incredible to behold.

  Gazing out across the ruin his creation had made, Emil trembled with pride. ‘Oh, Cathy,’ he whispered, ‘what do you think?’

  She only stared.

  ‘When Kaspar sees this …’ Emil began to place the soldiers back into their cases, handling his cannons with the delicate fingers a boy reserves for only his most special toys. When, at last, he was done, he gave Cathy a salute so long she felt quite ridiculous. ‘No, I need to stop thinking of Kaspar. I didn’t do this for Kaspar. Cathy, I hope you don’t think it strange, but I must say it. Why, if I don’t say it now, I never will, and then I’ll perish. I … did it for you. I did it so you’d know I could do it, and that making my toys is done out of love. Love of sitting here in my workshop and making things happen. I don’t do it for glory, I don’t do it to win, I don’t do it even because, one day, I want all of London’s children to think of me, Emil Godman, like they think of my papa. I did it because you made me see. Papa and Kaspar have their magics, but I have my own magic, of a sort. You’re my totem now, Cathy. I hope you don’t think it foolish.’