The Toymakers

by Robert Dinsdale

  She tried to picture how it might have been: her father, pacing the day away as she and her mother travelled up to Dovercourt and back, prowling along the estuary sands with one hand clasping the other; the way his head had been buried as she came home that evening – might that have been fear, not fury? In her mind’s eye she saw his fingers trembling to clasp his inkpen. London, he might have thought. Yes, you could disappear in a place like that. People go missing in London all of the time.

  Ordinary magic. All of the Emporium’s wonders around her, all of the things Papa Jack’s creations could do, but how much more powerful was this?

  ‘Papa Jack,’ she said, ‘thank you.’

  Outside, Kaspar was waiting.

  ‘Kaspar,’ she said, ‘there’s something I have to do. Will you help me?’

  ‘Anything, Cathy. I’m your servant.’

  Emil was still staring as they disappeared out to the gallery together, Sirius following obediently behind. Then, alone, he returned to his soldiers, began to lay each of them down in its red velvet case. Last of all came his Imperial Kapitan, the original and most precious of the thousands he had made. Emil held him close, a much smaller boy trapped in a young man’s body, until finally he felt foolish and tidied him away.

  In the end, it was weeks before she was strong enough to venture out.

  Kaspar stayed with her in the nights that came, his toyboxes sitting half-finished on his workshop floor. When Martha woke in the night, so did Kaspar; when Cathy needed somebody there, to bring her tea or toast – or only to tell her that it was good to be tired, that being tired meant she was doing everything that she must – there was Kaspar, beating back his own exhaustion to sit at the foot of her bed. Those nights were long and empty and, when she was not nursing Martha or rocking her basket to try and get her to sleep, she asked Kaspar about his father and those things she had seen. And, ‘Papa’s life is very different to our own,’ he said. ‘Sometimes I wonder if that’s the reason, if that’s why those things he can do seem so natural to him, but so strained to me and Emil. Mightn’t it be, Cathy, that, until you’ve seen the dark, you don’t really know the light?’

  ‘I hope you never see that dark, Kaspar, not for all the magic in the world.’

  They made plans to leave at the start of Martha’s twelfth week. By then, the thought of returning to the world beyond the shopfloor was not tantalising, but disconcerting. ‘I feel as if she’s never really left the womb,’ Cathy said as, with Kaspar and Sirius, she crossed the shopfloor and carried Martha out on to Iron Duke Mews.

  Summer was giving way to autumn, the sun growing too weak to properly dispel the London chill. At the bottom of Iron Duke Mews, the motorcar Kaspar had hired was a boxy thing, gleaming black and with wheels half as high as Cathy herself. Sirius was first aboard, sniffing at the leather seats with his cross-stich nose. Only when he was satisfied did he scurry back to allow Cathy aboard. She lifted Martha in carefully, settled her basket on the seat and steeled herself. To run away by train and return in her personal carriage; what they would think of her when she appeared!

  Kaspar fancied himself a driver of estimable talent, but driving the carts he and Emil had created up and down the empty Emporium aisles each summer had taught him only recklessness and haste. Cathy had to bark at him more than once, or grapple out with her arm to wrest him from the wheel, as he joined the flow of traffic heading east, along the river and out of the city.

  Beyond London the roads lay empty and still. It was a revelation to see greenery again, that trees might sprout leaves in summer that were not curls of paper and corrugated card. Yet nothing was more revelatory than the smell that hit her as they came close to the sea. That smell, only salt, seaweed, perhaps even the barest hint of sewage, was intoxicating. She lifted Martha to breathe it in. Smells, she decided, were like the pine-bark ballerina hidden safely in her pocket. They could make you feel five, six, seven years old again.

  Leigh had not changed in the months she had been away. The streets were the same, the shopfronts, the boats basking across the mudflats like beached wrecks. She directed Kaspar quietly, until at last they arrived at the street she had once lived. She had been gone mere months, had travelled only thirty miles, and yet a whole world existed between then and now.

  ‘Are you certain of this, Cathy?’

  She lifted Martha, wrapped her up in a shawl. She had not cried once, in spite of Kaspar’s driving, but as Cathy stepped from the car she strained against her shoulder, putting up a protest.

  Before Cathy could approach the first house, Kaspar called out: ‘Miss Wray, wait …’

  Before he went after her, he reached into the back of the carriage and produced a lady’s leather purse, with ornamental clasps depicting butterflies in flight. In the middle of the road, beneath the brilliant reds of twilight, he presented it to Cathy.

  ‘It’s for you. I’ve seen mothers staggering up and down our Emporium aisles with such bulging bags, but not you, not with this …’

  It was difficult to tear herself away from his eyes, but when she unclasped the purse and looked inside all she saw was blackness, rich and deep. She reached in but her fingers could not find the bottom.

  There were all sorts of things that she wanted to say. She wanted to tell him thank you – for this purse, for bringing her so far away from his Emporium, for the way he had knelt at her side and told her she was strong, that she could do it all, as Martha came into the world – but, instead, she turned to face the old house and said, ‘You’ve never asked me who my baby’s father is.’

  The statement seemed to catch Kaspar off guard. ‘It isn’t that I haven’t wanted to ask. But … you came to our Emporium with your secrets. They’re yours alone.’

  ‘No,’ she whispered. The façade of the house seemed to glare down at her. ‘Not any more.’ She found the courage to face him again. ‘Kaspar, I owe you the truth. I’ve been a coward. But the truth is, I haven’t thought of Martha’s father in so long, it already seems another life. He was a friend to me, for a little while. Nothing more.’

  Kaspar’s eyes twitched. ‘A little more, Miss Wray.’

  ‘I thought you’d stopped calling me that.’

  ‘Where is he now?’

  Cathy barely knew. ‘Gone, off to some other family, some other future. He didn’t come looking, Kaspar. But I’ve already told you – it wasn’t as if it was … love.’

  ‘Not love,’ said Kaspar, ‘but there are … responsibilities.’

  Cathy turned the word over. In the end, she supposed, Daniel’s responsibilities to his father had outweighed any responsibilities he had to a child who was barely an idea. But then there was Kaspar: a boy to whom ideas were everything.

  She turned and walked some distance, crossing the street to reach her house in three loping strides. When she looked back, Kaspar was still staring after her.

  ‘Kaspar, about that day we were in London, when you took me to the park. I … wanted to. I want you to know that. And I might have, if only …’ How to say it without – not hurting his feelings, because sometimes Kaspar Godman behaved as if he had no feelings to be hurt. Perhaps it was only – without seeming foolish. In her heart, she had wanted to. But it was her body; her body had wanted different things. Things like rest, like food and water; like being able to sleep on a night without waking every second hour. People talked about the heart and the head being at war – but, when you were pregnant, the body was separate, and the body ruled all.

  She lifted Martha to her shoulder, tightening the shawl around her. I’m not pregnant now, she thought – so what is it, what’s stopping me? Propriety? Could that really have been it? Because she had never once cared about being proper. She had spent the year, hadn’t she, in Papa Jack’s Emporium, instead of there, as her parents had planned …

  She strode back toward him. It was captivating how silent he was. He did not flinch, even as she lifted a hand to stroke the hair out of his eyes, even as she rose on to her tiptoes (the
baby sandwiched between them) and planted a kiss on the thin stubble that lined his cheek.

  ‘I knew you’d understand, Kaspar. If anyone could, it would be you.’

  Then, cooing at Martha, she walked into her house.

  It was cold out on the estuary. Kaspar took the motorcar down to the sand and watched the tide glittering as the stars revealed themselves, one by one. For a time, he walked along the shale, listening to the waves. A pair of old lovers sat out on the rocks, holding each other as they gazed into the gas lamps on the other side of the water. Kaspar sat higher yet, the darkness solidifying all around. Without knowing he was doing it, he twisted a length of sun-baked seaweed into the skeleton of a sailing boat and, giving that sailing boat wings, let it fly out into the blackness over the water. Those two old lovers, perhaps they had come here every night since they were children. Perhaps they would come here every night until, finally, one of them did not. And, as he watched, he got to thinking: what if they had been born two streets distant? What if they had not been sent to the same schools, or if their parents had not met in the same beer hall, or walked the same routes through the same parks? What if … she had not run away to his father’s Emporium, and he had not found her there? What if those boys had not crashed into his paper trees and she had not taken shelter, with him, in the Wendy House at the bottom of the aisle? What, then, of life?

  An image, perfectly simple, seared on to the back of Kaspar Godman’s eyes: he and Cathy, as old as these two wrapped up together on the estuary’s edge, wandering the aisles of their Emporium, a threadbare Sirius still lolloping behind.

  What if she had never fallen pregnant by some other man and been driven into his world? The baby he had helped birth might never be his, but he could love her all the same – for that, and everything else.

  Kaspar took the motorcar back to the streets and stood outside Cathy’s house. The silhouette show against the curtains was like one of his father’s puppet theatres. He watched Cathy twirl. Figures stood and then sat down. He thought he heard laughter, and that was a beautiful thing – until he remembered that only happiness might make her stay, here where she surely did not belong. After that, fear was like a seed sprouting shoots in his belly. He went to the door, but checked himself; went to the door again and started at the voices within. A man his age hurried down the street, and the thought of him knocking at the door – for was this Cathy’s estuary boy, come back to be a father? – made all the jealousy he had not known that he had flower.

  The door opened and, framed by the light, there stood Cathy.

  Behind her hung figures Kaspar thought he would never see: her mother, her father, a sister taller than Cathy with striking blond hair. It was the sister who was holding Martha. Kaspar froze, allowing himself to breathe again only when Cathy took her daughter back into her arms. One by one, she embraced the family around her. They had not come to claim her back, he saw; they had come to see her off. Her mother was stiff as Cathy held her, but her father gave in. His fingers teased the fluff of Martha’s hair.

  Cathy joined him at the motorcar and, in silence, allowed Kaspar to help her inside.

  Some way along the estuary, with the lights of Leigh fading behind, he dared break the silence.

  ‘Are we going to be all right, Cathy?’

  When he said we he might have meant Cathy and Martha, or he might have meant all three of them. She nodded but said not a word, for there were tears in her eyes and she did not know what they were for: what she had lost, or what she had gained.

  ‘You look like your daughter when you cry.’

  ‘Kaspar!’ she snorted, and dried her eyes on the hem of her skirt.

  ‘Well, it’s true.’

  ‘My father said that too. He said seeing her was like seeing me.’

  ‘You might have stayed.’

  Cathy nodded, trying to make sense of it all. ‘After all of this, they would even have had me. A few lies here, a compromise there, we might have made it work …’

  Into the silence that followed, Kaspar said, ‘There was a piece of me, a tiny corner, that thought you would. That your life might be here … where it started. And, while you were in there, that thought, it just kept on growing. I couldn’t stop it. I think that must be what … doubt feels like. Cathy, I hadn’t thought it until now, but the thought of you not there, in the Emporium, it …’

  ‘Hush, Kaspar,’ she said. ‘Take me home.’

  The car drove on, back through the late summer night.

  The Emporium was silent when they returned. Emil and Mrs Hornung had been busy replenishing some of the aisles, anticipating the first frost yet to come. Emil’s soldiers looked resplendent on the shelves.

  In the Wendy House, Kaspar slid Martha into her crib, the only sound the suckling of her own thumb. Together, they watched her squirm against her blankets, undisturbed by the world.

  ‘Will you go back?’ Kaspar asked. He had crossed the room to hover in the Wendy House door, as if uncertain whether he should be in or out. It was such a nonsense to see him uncertain; it did not suit Kaspar Godman well, and the idea infuriated her.

  ‘Or they’ll come here. My sister Lizzy, she may even apply for one of your situations vacant …’

  ‘She would be in good company. But …’

  Cathy rolled her eyes. She marched to meet him. ‘Kaspar, you fool. You keep asking yourself why I didn’t leave. What you might be asking is why I stayed. Who I stayed for.’

  Kaspar was still. Then he raised his hands to hold her.

  ‘You’re saying …’

  ‘I’m saying I’m an Emporium girl, through and through.’

  Then he was kissing her, and his hands were in her hair, and hers were in his – while, in the paper branches, a pipe-cleaner owl fluttered its wings and the thin rustle of confetti snow began to fall down.

  MANY YEARS LATER …

  THE HOME FIRES BURNING

  PAPA JACK’S EMPORIUM, AUGUST–NOVEMBER 1914

  The sun had never touched the aisles of Papa Jack’s Emporium, but this summer it was bleaching the London streets. The yard at Sir Josiah’s was white as chalk, the sky a vista of cerulean blue. Even the grief-stricken waters of the river Thames seemed to sparkle, reflecting back the purity of that sky; and if ever there was a reason to think this summer a dream, there it was – for Cathy had never known the river anything but turgid and grey.

  The children had flocked out to watch the Emporium wagons on their way. Ruddy faces watched from the rails, holding to last Christmas’s treasures: backwards bears, Martian rockets, more wind-up soldiery than a boy could ever find uses for. In the street beyond, a motorcar drew around. Kaspar Godman, black hair rippling behind, rose to the tips of his toes, threw the boys a flurry of salutes, and drove on.

  Trips out of the Emporium were few and far between, but Cathy relished each one. Winters had always passed in the same controlled chaos she had known since she arrived at the Emporium, but summers could be stultifying. Too much time in the shadowed aisles was not good for the soul, no matter what Emil said; a turn through the summer sun was the restorative Cathy needed, and a trip to Sir Josiah’s always renewed her faith in what the Emporium was for.

  Kaspar was about to steer into the controlled pandemonium of Regent Street when Cathy clasped his arm, directing his gaze at the girl sitting beside her. Eight years old and the mirror image of her mother, small and dark with darting green eyes, Martha was peering over the side of the motorcar, gawking at the great billboards of the Piccadilly Circus as if it was these things, not the wonders of Papa Jack’s Emporium, that defied all reason. She wore the same look every time they emerged from the Emporium, constantly finding adventure in the ordinary.

  ‘Do we have to go back quite yet?’

  ‘What was I thinking?’ Kaspar gasped, in mock surprise. Martha beamed up at him. ‘A change of heart never hurt a soul,’ he declared and, bellowing at a horse and trap about to cross their way, he arced the motorcar around and sped off alon
g the broad way.

  The afternoon was growing old, Hyde Park in full blossom. He drove them up and down the Rotten Row, turned dramatic circles around the Apsley Gate, and finally – when it was growing dark – plunged headlong into the grand parades of Belgravia, where men in tall frock coats (didn’t these people know it was summer, and a twentieth-century summer at that?) looked aghast at these deplorables come to ruin the afternoon. One man barked at them to show some respect, and this was a thing that delighted Kaspar and Cathy both. They turned to blow kisses – and would have followed through with dainty little waves if only the air had not been suddenly filled with invective, the hollering of a brawl and, next moment, the sound of shattering glass.

  Belgrave Square, an explosion of green among the grand terraces, was drawing people to it like ants to spilled sugar. As it met the crowd, the motorcar had to slow to a crawl. Two tradesmen crossed their path with impunity, barely flinching when Kaspar ordered them out of his way. One of the men clasped a rock in his fist. Brazenly, he tossed it from one hand to another, then brought his arm back and let it fly. Over heads and the crowns of treetops it flew. It fell short of the house behind the black railings, but the second and third were better thrown. Glass shattered. Somebody sounded an alarm.