The Toymakers

by Robert Dinsdale

  At night the skies are open and Douglas Flood makes merry with his violin. In our billets we eat snail and French sausage and talk of the Emporium this Christmas. I am well my Cathy, my Martha. The French air is bracing and as we march (we march for the sea) I imagine an Emporium in Paris, or one in Liège (one in New York, when I forget where I am, one in St Petersburg, all the grand places of the world) and what we might do together, one day. For the world is more vast than you can tell, and I am living in it now. (PS Here is a design for a Constant Burrow, that boys and girls might have underworld dens in their gardens. We are digging in ourselves now and it is exhilarating work. Perhaps Emil might construct one?)

  Sometimes there were notes, hidden in the letters. The capitals might spell out Remember Our Wendy House, or in minute script (illegible except to a magnifying glass, sentences looped inside tiny o’s or crammed up inside a question mark) You would love Paris, Cathy, and I will bring you here when the war is finished. Summer in Paris is divine. Winter would be perfect. Mr Atlee had Martha compiling a scrapbook, all the places her father had seen, all the foods he had eaten and the people he met. Cathy kept a scrapbook of her own and, in it, she counted the days.

  August became September. October arrived more swiftly than it ought. Paris was saved from what had seemed a certain fate. An armada of taxicabs came together to deliver soldiers to the city’s defence. Odessa was ravaged by shells from the sea, the Turks drew lots and entered battle in the East; but inside the Emporium, the world did not change. The aisles were replenished in anticipation of first frost: toy soldiers and princesses, patchwork dogs and all the toil of Papa Jack’s summer. The cloud castle anchored in the Emporium dome grew a drawbridge and walls. In the workshops, patchwork reindeer were taught how to walk, then, finally, how to fly. The movements of autumn, heralding the movements of Christmas, were the same as in every other year – and yet sometimes Cathy woke in the night to find her bed empty (or, worse still, that Martha, haunted by some phantom image of her father, was occupying the place where Kaspar once lay), and this was her constant reminder: this year was not like every other, not at all.

  Then came the night when Cathy walked through the paper trees, telling Martha the story of how her life had started here, in the little Wendy House beneath the boughs, and looked up to see the glass at the height of the Emporium dome was incandescent with tiny droplets of ice.

  ‘Look, Martha.’ Her daughter’s eyes were agog as Cathy lifted her up, the better to see the way the crystals caught and trapped the moonlight above. ‘The first frost of winter …’

  A magical moment, one for which every devotee of the Emporium hungered, and yet this year it was tinged with sadness, for Kaspar hadn’t made it home after all.

  Daylight had not yet fallen upon the grand arcades of Regent Street when the shop hands lined up at the Emporium door. Those who had chanced to see the first frost forming had rapidly packed their bags and made their pilgrimage to Iron Duke Mews. Among them were the flatterers, confidence men and tricksters who thought to try their luck and sneak within – but Emil stood diligently by the door, turning away any ne’er-do-wells who gathered in the alley. When he was done, he hurried back across the shopfloor – and there he met Cathy, standing in the aisle. He looked white as the frost itself.

  ‘It’s down to you now, dear Cathy. I can’t recall an opening night with so many new hands, not since our very first!’

  There were familiar faces this season, but in the half-moon hall the new shop hands gathered, nervously awaiting their introduction to the aisles. Cathy, who had sifted through the letters of entreaty that piled up on Papa Jack’s mat, knew already that most would be girls, but in her mind she had imagined them as images of herself, the runaway coming to the Emporium with little more than the clothes she stood up in. Instead, she found mothers and grandmothers, elder sisters and aunts – the rags of families left behind this Christmas, eager for change.

  At least Sally-Anne was here. That calmed Cathy. ‘Just us this year, girl. We’re to sail this ship, are we?’

  ‘We still have Emil,’ Cathy replied.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, rolling her eyes, ‘we’ll always have Emil …’

  It seemed a spiteful thing to say – but then, Sally-Anne had not seen the way he grew purple with shame that day he tried to sign up. In the weeks approaching first frost, Cathy had seen how feverishly he worked. It meant the world to Emil that this season should not suffer, because Kaspar was not here to sprinkle his magic up and down the aisles.

  Cathy stepped forward, facing the crowd. ‘I remember the first day I stood in this hall,’ she began – and she vividly did: the cold at her back, the emptiness gnawing in her belly, the exhilaration of escape. ‘Savour it, because, though this could be the first of many Emporium seasons, you will never have a first time again. Tonight the spectacular will happen. Christmas begins. And I know how much you all need Christmas …’ She paused, thinking of Kaspar behind the lines in some derelict barracks. ‘But there is work to do before those doors open, and so few hours to do it. I hope you’re ready …’ At this point a mechanical reindeer, all of its patchwork sloughing off, came cantering down the aisle, Sirius chasing wildly behind. Cathy closed her eyes. This was going to be more arduous than she thought. ‘You’ll need to show some of them how to wrangle them,’ she whispered to Sally-Anne. ‘Papa Jack has so much in store.’

  ‘Let’s take them on a tour. Show them what they’re letting themselves in for.’

  Cathy nodded. ‘But don’t go losing one of the grandmothers in the storerooms. We haven’t time to organise search parties.’

  Sally-Anne grinned, ‘Not this year …’

  Sally-Anne relished playing mother hen and led them into the aisles. A diminutive grandmother with tight white curls, a middle-aged couple who clasped each other’s hands as they filed past, a young man dragging behind him a lame leg and somebody’s spinster aunt; the Emporium would have a motley crew this Christmas, but motley did not have to mean miserable.

  Cathy was about to follow the procession when a girl caught her eye. She might have been no more than fifteen, sixteen years old, with hair as red as anger, and somehow this struck Cathy as familiar. Her eyes were grey and marked by freckles, her teeth just crooked enough to be noticed. She had been fixing Cathy with a look, trying to pluck up the courage to talk.

  Being a mother made you think impossible things. There must have been only six or seven years between them, and yet by instinct Cathy put a comforting arm around her shoulder. ‘You mustn’t be nervous. This winter you’ll see such magical things.’

  ‘You’re Cathy Godman, aren’t you?’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘My name’s Frances,’ she ventured. ‘Frances Kesey. My brother, Robert …’

  Cathy beamed, ‘You’re Robert’s sister.’

  She nodded, finding her nerve. ‘He spoke so much about this place. That’s why I’m here, you see. To see all the things my brother talked about …’ She spoke in the same broad Cornish that Robert Kesey had spoken, even more his sister in voice than she was in the flesh. ‘Oh, we didn’t believe it, Mrs Godman, that first Christmas he came here. We thought he had a girl, or was just trying to be contrary, because that was his way. That maybe he’d been gone from home so long just to spite our parents. Robert liked to tell a tale, and when he talked about patchwork dogs and trees bursting out of tiny wooden shells and … why, Wendy Houses bigger on the inside! Well, we could be forgiven for thinking he was having us on. It wasn’t until the next year, when I woke at New Year and there were paper trees all over our garden, a whole forest of them sprouted overnight, that I knew it was real. After that, he’d bring gifts every year. I have a ballerina, a mouse, who turns pirouettes up the walls, across the ceiling. I have a dress that shows me how to dance.’ She stopped. Cathy thought: how strange for the girl to be overcome with such emotion … ‘He was going to bring me here one day. We would ride on runnerless rocking horses together, or we’d sneak into
the storerooms and see the patchwork giants Papa Jack makes in secret. Woolly mammoths and cave bears and – are there truly spiders, the size of a horse, sleeping in the cellars? So you see, I had to come and see it for myself. I want to feel the things he felt. Eat dinners in the Palace each night, and make merry with the other shop hands and maybe, just maybe, open up my own patchwork dog and be the first thing its black button eyes see when I wind it up …’

  The girl’s words exploded. Now they were formless, ugly things as she tried to contain her tears.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mrs Godman,’ she said, straightening herself up. ‘You must think me frightful. And I have been, ever since that telegram arrived. My mother and father, they don’t know I’m here, you see. But I had to come. To honour Robert. To remember.’

  By now Sally-Anne and the rest had reached the heart of the shopfloor. Over the aisles, Cathy could hear her dividing them into parties, assigning roles, assigning tasks. But Frances Kesey’s words had given Cathy a chill for which she was not prepared.

  ‘You’d better run along, before they get ahead of us.’

  Composing herself, Frances Kesey took off up the aisle.

  ‘We’ll look after you here,’ Cathy called. Frances Kesey looked back and allowed herself a wan, half smile. Perhaps Cathy’s words had brought her comfort (perhaps this winter was everything the girl needed, for all she would have to do was touch one of Papa Jack’s toys and be spirited back to the childhood games she and Robert once shared), but her own words had opened up a chasm in Cathy. Robert Kesey dead. Dozens of letters from Kaspar and he hadn’t said a thing.

  Martha had hardly slept the night before, dreaming of the magics of opening night. In their quarters, where Mr Atlee diligently tried to instruct her in the basic structures of Latin, or the secret meanings hidden inside her mother’s old edition of Gulliver’s Travels, her excitement could barely be contained, manifesting itself (as it often did) in lack of interest, contrary questions and downright insolence. Mr Atlee – who would, if you had badgered him, have admitted to a tingle of excitement himself – was ready to accept defeat and would have done so right then, if only he hadn’t heard Martha’s mother marching past the study door.

  Bracing herself, Cathy strode into the bedroom. Kaspar’s letters were kept in a bundle in the bedside dresser. She lifted them out and spread them on the eiderdown.

  My own Cathy, read the first letter. My only Cathy, read the second. She read about his basic training and his journey across the water. She read about the barracks in which the Artisans Rifles spent their nights, the scent of wildflowers in a Flanders meadow. She read about the card games they played after dark and the wagers they made. It was only when she went looking for it that she noticed: a month ago, all remarks about Robert Kesey had evaporated from Kaspar’s letters. He still spoke fondly of Andrew Dunmore, of John Horwood and Douglas Flood, but Robert Kesey was dead and it hadn’t merited a mention.

  A lie of omission was still a lie. She sat for long hours, reading the letters over and over and only now did she see: these letters were about nothing at all. They were bedtime stories, things he had contrived from the banal moments of his days, letters designed to protect her and nothing else. To protect her from knowing. To protect her from the truth.

  She was trembling (this was fury like she had never felt) when there came a tentative tapping at the door. By the time she turned around, Emil was already nosing his way in. Cathy thought: Get out! Get out now! But Emil was wearing that same anxious look he had on the eve of every opening night, and something in it made the anger bleed out of her.

  ‘Cathy, it’s time.’

  Her eyes shot to the window. The afternoon darkness was hardening to night. Her entire afternoon, wasted in these letters, while a fresh band of shop hands were tasked with preparing the Emporium for its biggest night of the year. She felt the shame of it, hot and urgent.

  Martha appeared beside Emil, Mr Atlee hovering behind.

  ‘Mama,’ she grinned, ‘come on! We mustn’t miss it!’

  Cathy gathered the letters together, not caring when they crumpled in her hands. As she crossed the room, she caught sight of herself in the mirror, still in her day dress with the dust of forgotten aisles up and down her arms. Her hair was a mess, her fury had deepened the creases in her cheeks, but this would have to do. A gong was sounding on the shopfloor. The seconds were counting down.

  As they reached the shopfloor, Cathy’s shame turned to relief. What magics they had worked while her head was buried in those letters! Around her, every aisle was garlanded with lights. High above, the Emporium dome was swirling with pinpoints of white, like a constantly falling snow. The arches that opened each aisle were wreathed in holly leaves of crêpe paper and card; plump red berries of papier mâché hung from every leaf. Pipe-cleaner owls stood in the boughs of the paper trees, the carousel turned and sang, and the vaults above the aisles were a circus show of dragon longships, patchwork pegasi, and a white lace wyvern whose body was wrapped around the turrets of Emil’s cloud castle.

  The shop hands were all flocking in the same direction. The aisles had separated and moved while Cathy had been up above, and now they all led into a single great boulevard, charting the length of the Emporium floor. Where there had once been polished floorboards, now there were the cobbles of an open-air market, and it was here that the confetti fountain constantly burst forth, painting the air with images of horses mid-canter, great dragons and knights. She and Martha joined the procession and stopped where the crowd was gathered in the half-moon hall. Here, through frosted glass, she could see Iron Duke Mews thronged with mothers and their excited broods.

  The bells stopped pealing. All was silent on the Emporium floor. From the forested alcoves to the cloud castle halls, not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse. Then, without being touched, the doors opened. Winter rushed in with its perfect icy breath, and on it came a tide of shoppers.

  In the half-moon hall, the first customers froze. Before they could fan out, their eyes were drawn upward. Cathy looked the same way. Above them, the cloud castle drawbridge was lowering, and out of the vault inside a red carpet rolled. Instead of dropping from the precipice, it slowly unfurled, charting a crimson pathway over the tops of the aisles – until it landed here, at the feet of the first family. From up above, the sound of sleigh bells could be heard. The swirling lights of the castle interior revolved, and through curtains of rippling white the heads of two cloth creatures emerged. Black button eyes and embroidered noses were followed by antlers of crocheted bone. Soon, two patchwork reindeer stood regally at the top of the crimson road; then, each with a nod to the other, they began to canter down.

  Behind them they trailed a simple wooden sled, its rear piled high with presents wrapped with silver paper and bows. No passengers descended with the sled, no driver flicked the reins to drive the reindeer on. They cantered, without hoof beats, to the half-moon hall, and there they came to a stop in front of the first family to have breached the doors. The first reindeer nuzzled the hands of the mother, the second reindeer nuzzled the hands of the children, and in that way they directed the family aboard. Then the sled drew around, parted the gathered shop hands, and took off along the cobbled aisle.

  Somewhere, gramophones began to play. The carousel burst back into life. The shop hands came together in one last burst of applause – and then it was done. Opening night had begun.

  ‘Danger! Adventure! Glory! Have you got what it takes? Step up, be courageous! Fight the brave fight, beat the unbeatable foe, win the unwinnable war!’

  Emil stood atop one of the monstrous bears, which had been armoured and saddled like some monster plucked out of Nordic myth. The glade between the aisles was one of several waiting to be discovered on the shopfloor. In front of him, two dozen expectant faces looked up. More were being drawn from the neighbouring aisles, boys straining on their mothers’ hands.

  Beneath him – Emil, the god of the battlefield – lay a medieval village
in miniature, a rustic landscape where a hand-crafted windmill turned the waters of a stream, where paper trees the size of a boot made forests against the banks, and the hilltops rose in gradients of felt, cloth and papier mâché. The houses were tumbledown creations crouched around a market square, where wind-up pigs and cows troughed in the fountain.

  Soldiers were descending from all sides, the village the scene of the battle.

  ‘Take cover!’ Emil cried, and one of the boys shuffled his soldiers into a barn. ‘Enter the fray!’ he exclaimed, waving at another boy about to deposit his soldiers to the battle. ‘Keep tabs on your sergeants, on your captains and mercenaries! You there—’ he waved at a nervous boy, who was opening a package his mother had purchased and finding a rag-tag set of soldiery within ‘—those soldiers were peasant farmers just two days gone, but they’ll need to see battle. Then—’ Emil whipped out another package, which he gave to the boy. Inside were tiny pantaloons, leather jerkins, private’s tunics and redcoats. ‘—dress them as you see fit, as they rise up through your ranks! This is the Long War, boys, and it is only just beginning!’

  Emil threw his arms out. Battle was being joined all around him. Boys had dragged their mothers to the counters, rushed back with their new toys and set them loose at once. Above him, the great banners of THE LONG WAR! were held aloft by patchwork robins. The walls of the glade were built from boxes that boys might buy. They said Kaspar had enough imagination for an entire Emporium, but they had never seen this. In one box a troop of medieval knights were waiting to be wound up, ready to joust. In another were horse dragoons and musketeers; in another, Roman legionnaires. The boxes of the new Long War game came with a set of soldiers ready for battle, but boys could get together with their friends and make armies as big as the imagination allowed. This was how, Emil knew as he let himself be borne up by the excitement around him. There might not have been true magic in the glades, the children here might not have been witnessing the impossible – but this was magic, all the same. Not the showmanship of Kaspar and his ostentatious toys, but the simple showmanship of business. The ordinary magic. This was how he might be remembered.