The Toymakers
Page 22
Cathy sent the dispatch expecting a reply as soon as Kaspar opened the journal, but by fall of night none had come. She lost herself, that morning, in joining Martha for her lessons; then, in the afternoon, they threw themselves into the brave task of accounting for the winter’s takings before the man from Lloyd’s arrived for his annual account. When no reply had come by fall of next night, the fear she had been holding at bay finally broke through. Now she stood on the threshold of Papa Jack’s workshop, wondering whether she dared venture in, if what she was about to say might tear apart his world.
At last she found her courage, marched into the workshop – and there Papa Jack slept, his phoenix on his shoulder, Sirius curled up at his feet. He looked so like Kaspar when he slept and something in the image soothed her. She slunk back to her quarters alone, looked in on Martha as she too slept, and lay back in the marital bed.
In the morning, letters reeled across the journal page:
Cathy, please forgive my silence. I am delighted for my brother and wish to fill these pages only with good tidings and salutations for Emil’s future wife. I know I will find my home much changed when I return to you. But I can keep the truth from you no longer. I am writing to you from the base hospital at Arras, behind the line. But Cathy – I am alive.
It was the way Kaspar’s hand had trembled upon writing that final line, causing the letters to tumble uncontrolled across the page, that stopped Cathy’s heart. She sat upright, raced to read on.
By the time the snowdrops had flowered on the Emporium terrace, Private Kaspar Godman had become Lance Corporal, with the Emporium shop hands and a group of other men under his command. Spring had brought with it the thaw that closed the Emporium doors, and it was this same thaw that returned Flanders to open war.
Cathy, they came for us. We had long thought it was coming and waited, each night, for the horns to sound. But when it finally happened, they did not send men. They sent great reefs of gas, ghosts to do their bidding. When men set their minds to it, they accomplish the most terrible things.
Kaspar had not been on the line on the day the gas first came, but he had watched from behind as the French soldiers staggered through. Some had run, cascading out of the little hamlets they had taken oaths to defend. Others, too trusting or too defiant to understand, had stood their ground. But battle could not be fought against an enemy invisible to the eye, and hundreds had perished there, amid the budding leaves of spring, before any had understood what was happening. Kaspar had watched the ambulance wagons flowing, like a line of ants, into the west.
And I wondered, Cathy, how many men made it to their beds, or how many were left in the dirt along the way.
Across the next days there were gaps in the line, which men raced to defend, but always that same dirty yellow on the horizon, or the reef breaking through a line of blasted trees. Sometimes, you could see them coming through the smoke, the shapes of those German boys in black. They were stripping what they could from our fallen boys. And I tried to hold on to what my papa said. My men and I were sent to hold a copse of willow at the Salient’s deepest point and I was telling myself: they played with toys too. Yet, when the gas came and I saw their shadows loom, it mattered not at all that they had rode on rocking horses or thrilled at tumbling skittles, not when I saw what their gas had done to Andrew Dunmore’s lungs. I fired and fired and fired.
I was at the clearing station before I started coughing up blood. And now here I am. Arras is not so far from the line, and yet the streets still stand. Ypres is a ruin, but the ruin is ours. And yet, can it be that my body itself has been conquered? The physician tells me I have my heart, I still have my stronghold, but the salient around me is withered. It is a strange feeling to be weak. But I am alive, Cathy. Isn’t that a thing?
Cathy lifted her pen to reply, but her fingers had no grip, and her blood was beating so fiercely that she thought she would better run to France and hold him in her arms than write a single word. She was composing herself when she heard Martha’s voice at the door and the girl scrambled in, meaning to lose herself in the hugs and kisses with which every morning began. Cathy embraced her, slipped the journal beneath the bedsheets, and thought: he’s alive, he’s alive, he’s alive … but for how long?
Across the next months, the missives flew back and forth between the sleeping Emporium and the base hospital at Arras. Kaspar’s recovery was slow. Cathy charted it in how often he wrote, the steadiness of his hand. Summer had already come, and plans for Emil’s wedding were in full swing, by the time she saw a change in him. His letters grew long, he was writing in the thick of night, and the passion with which he wrote was evident in the way his pen pressed against the page. Kaspar was energised as she had seen him only once before, that summer when he was first learning to make caverns inside his toyboxes – for, stranded in Arras, co-opted by nurses and orderlies to help ferry around patients more critically wounded than himself, Cathy’s husband had returned to his old vocation.
I am making toys, Cathy. Toys for the ones who go to sleep at night and will not wake in the morning. Toys for those men I hear crying for their mamas. And might I confess? Cathy, they are the most beautiful toys I have ever built.
Daily the wounded men came through, and daily they were sent away – back to the line in boots or far from it in boxes.
The man beside me died last night. I was holding his hand as he faded – and I think I know, now, what I did not know before. A secret has been revealed, and finally I understand the true meaning of toys, something my papa learnt long before me. When you are young, what you want out of toys is to feel grown-up. You play with toys and cast yourself an adult, and imagine life the way it’s going to be. Yet, when you are grown, that changes; now, what you want out of toys is to feel young again. You want to be back there, in a place that did not harm nor hurt you, in a pocket of time built out of memory and love. You want things in miniature, where they can better be understood: battles, and houses, picnic baskets and sailing boats too. Boyhood and adulthood – any toymaker worth his craft has to find a place to sit, somewhere between the two. It’s only in those borderlands that the very best toys are made. So let me tell you, Cathy, about a new toy I have made …
There is a moment, before the end, when a man knows he cannot be saved. I have watched some go to it in a state of quiet awe, but that is not the story of most. Most men feel the encroaching dark and rage against it – but a man can no more fight that battle than light can battle shade. In these hospital beds they hold themselves until they can hold themselves no longer; after that, they are men no more. They are like boys with a fever, wanting only to curl up beside Mama, with old blankets on their laps, and be sung to and told stories. What better way for a man to go out than the way he came in? With the milk of mother’s love.
It was my papa who taught me how a toy must speak to a grown man, how it must fill him with the simplicity, again, of being a child. Children come to the Emporium for adventure, but adults to be reminded that adventure was once possible, that once the world was as filled with magic as the imagination will allow. Emporium toys have always taken us back in time. And, as I have lain here in Arras, watching my fellows die around me, I have wondered: could a toy comfort a man in his final hours? What if he was not here, rotting in a bed in which another man will rot tomorrow – but twenty years ago instead, curled happily in the crook of his mama’s arm, knowing that all is good and right in the world? What kind of a toy could be so perfect as to take him back there, the magic so adept that, for brief snatches of time, he might even forget the reality of his life? What if, in his final moments, those memories were manifest around him? Wouldn’t that be the Perfect Toy?
She was not sure why the letter made her uneasy, perhaps only for the idea that Kaspar and Death made such common bedfellows – and were it not for the fact that his next missive was so joyous (for first frost had come early to Arras, and Kaspar’s senses were enlivened by the thought of an Emporium in full swing), she might
have known it sooner. As Christmas grew close, Kaspar’s letters showed him, if not his old self – gleeful and fizzling and bursting with ideas – then at least renewed. After he returned to the line, and found Douglas Flood, John Horwood and the rest, his humours returned; he wrote no more about his Perfect Toy, turning instead to questions of Cathy and Martha and professions of how he missed the shopfloor. It was, it seemed, a restorative to be among Emporium friends once again. But Cathy noticed, in the way his letters still quivered across the page, in the way the words disintegrated as each sentence moved on, until sometimes they were illegible even after many hours of trying, that all was not right with her husband. The lies had started again: the lies of omission, the lies of keep your head up and soldier on, forgivable only because, this time, Kaspar was lying to himself as much as he was his wife.
Kaspar’s body had survived the gas, but something else, some other part of him, lay bedraggled and maimed, gasping for air.
And still Cathy kept writing, for it was the only thing she could do.
Emil Godman and Nina Dean were married on the morning after the snowdrops flowered, bringing the next Emporium winter to its end. Such a sight it was, to see Emil in his morning suit and Nina in her bridal gown. They spoke their words and made it formal before a city registrar, but Papa Jack raised a chapel on the shopfloor, and into it streamed every shop hand who still survived (along with the ghosts of those who had perished on the way). Emil spoke his vows with a tremble in his voice, Nina with the sharp authority that was her everyday tone. Martha scattered paper flowers in their wake while satin butterflies, released from the insectarium, cavorted overhead.
Emil had no best man (Cathy wrote), for it would have been you, Kaspar, to stand at his side and settle his stomach in those few hours before the service, when he knew not how to button a shirt, nor how to fasten a tie, nor even how to put one foot in front of another. You would have laughed to have seen him, but you would have put an arm around him too. Instead it was me who dusted his morning suit down (he had spent the morning in his workshop, dressed in all his finery, whittling more soldiers for the sweet release it brings him), me who told him not to put cuff links into sleeves that were not French cut. Me who told him you would have been proud.
She told him it all, about how Nina’s family had gaped to see the patchwork pegasi soaring in the Emporium dome; about how the toast Papa Jack made harked back to his own wedding day and the wife who was lost while he slaved in the frozen East; how Nina (cold, hard Nina) had shed a tear as Emil told the congregation how he had never envisaged a future as perfect as the future he envisaged now. She did not tell him about the fleeting glance Emil gave her when his speech reached its zenith, for it spoke of indecision, of an instant’s hesitation, of an actor at odds with his part; it spoke, she thought, of a stowaway summer long ago, and things that were better left unsaid. She filled pages instead with details of the many-tiered cake Mrs Hornung had prepared, the trinkets Martha had already made in anticipation of the cousins to come. She told him all of these things, and sat up through the night waiting for the letter she was certain would come in response – but that was the first time in all of their writing that Kaspar never wrote back at all.
CHILDHOOD’S END
DOLLIS HILL TO PAPA JACK’S EMPORIUM, SEPTEMBER 1917
After all this time, Cathy could not get used to riding in a hansom carriage. In her heart, she supposed, she would always be a tram girl – but life, like almost everything else, rolled constantly on. This morning, when she stepped out of the carriage, she felt so ostentatious she could not keep her cheeks from turning crimson. It was not right to come to a place like this dressed in finery, nor to have arrived in so cavalier a fashion.
Dollis Hill House had been built to a grand specification and had lost little of that glamour in the century since. A resplendent farmhouse with whitewashed walls, it looked out across the manicured wild of Gladstone Park. This far out of London the approach was flanked by willows in russet leaf. Some of the convalescents were tending to the estate’s empty flower beds and, as Cathy began the long approach, they turned to watch her. Makeshift wooden huts, like the barracks she imagined Kaspar had once called home, had been erected in a horseshoe along the farmhouse’s eastern flank.
The sister was there to meet her. Her name was Philomena and she was the daughter of a local teacher, one of those who had been instrumental in initiating the hospital fund back when the war began. That had been three years ago, though the hospital only opened its doors in 1916. ‘We only had twenty-three beds at the start,’ Philomena explained as she took Cathy into a dimly lit reception area, once the farmhouse porch. ‘Now we have seventy-three, and every one of them taken.’
And every one of them needed, thought Cathy. ‘My sister is a nurse. She’s in Dieppe. It’s only through her that we knew. It’s hard to put in words but, after a little time, my husband stopped writing at all …’
It had been a slow process. It happened in stages. One week between missives, then two, then three and four. Once his letters had been long and florid; then they were short, perfunctory things. It got so that he said almost nothing of his days – and that was when Cathy knew for certain that he was in some kind of hell, trapped there, alone, all of the Emporium hands gone from this world and Kaspar left as officer of a group of young boys, some so young they must still have thrilled at trips to the Emporium each Christmas. She had told him, once, that he must never lie to her again, so instead he drew within himself, wrote letters with silly, nonsensical verses for Martha, or wrote not at all. Three summer months had passed without a word when the letter arrived on the Emporium doorstep. It was Martha who had brought it to her, sobbing even before the envelope opened; Cathy had wanted to sob too, for a letter from Arras certainly meant her husband’s death. Instead she had found a hand she had almost forgotten: the delicately practised hand of her sister:
Cathy, forgive the brusqueness of this note, but I write on a matter most unexpected and no less urgent. As you know I have been stationed in Dieppe these past months. Two months ago I made an exchange with a nurse close to the line, whose nerves demanded she be relieved from the front. In this capacity I have been nursing in the base hospital in Arras. The work is relentless, the hours long, and perhaps if it was not this way I would have known sooner. But there is a face here you would know well. He awoke from his injuries one week past. I believe he even recognises who I am.
Cathy, you must prepare yourself. He has suffered. But …
Sister Philomena was disappearing into the twilight of the hospital interior. Coming out of herself, Cathy hurried after.
‘Tell me, have you come far?’
‘London.’
The Sister paused, as if the information did not tally with what she had been told.
‘Please forgive me,’ Cathy explained. ‘We only discovered my husband was here three days ago. My sister wrote that he would be repatriated to England, but that was all. One of the other convalescents penned us a letter when he arrived here, but it took some time to find us.’ The envelope had said EMPORIUM and nothing more, the manic scrawl of a soldier come back from Reims, where – or so he professed – his body had been made an offering to the fire.
‘I see,’ Sister Philomena said, and Cathy was grateful when they drew to a halt outside the door of what had once been the farmhouse study. ‘The doctor will see you now.’
Through the doors sat a physician who Philomena introduced as Norrell. He was a small man, and when Cathy stepped into the study he was buried in reams of papers. After studiously finishing the final leaf, he looked up and said, ‘Take a seat, Mrs Godman.’
‘I should like to see my husband, if it pleases.’
‘And I shall take you to him soon. Lieutenant Godman isn’t going far, but first there are things we ought to discuss. Please, Mrs Godman. If the lieutenant is to return home with you this day, and he’s professed no resistance to the idea, it’s important that you understand.’
The look on Norrell’s face compelled her to sit.
‘When did you last see Lieutenant Godman, Mrs Godman?’
How she wished they would stop calling him that. Lieutenant Godman, as if he was anything other than the wild-haired boy who had secreted her in the Wendy House all summer long. Anything other than the man who had spent Midwinter’s Eve of five years past painfully recreating a lost bear in spider silk and fur, so that Martha would not miss it on her pillow when she awoke.
‘I know about his injuries,’ she said, suddenly strident. ‘But I’m his wife. You’ll think it ought to matter, but you don’t know me, and you don’t know my husband.’
Doctor Norrell gave a simpering look that seemed to say: they all think that, in the beginning. But then he said, ‘Lieutenant Godman’s injuries were not insignificant, yet his body has borne them well. He’ll walk again, I’m certain of that. No, Mrs Godman, what I want to talk about are the injuries we do not see.’ For a moment he was silent. ‘This is a convalescent hospital, Mrs Godman. It is not a hospice. It is my duty to repair our men and return them to the front, where they are needed most. I’m taught to watch for malingerers, for confidence men, for men of ill honour. But not every wound is one you can stitch together or cut away, and not every man who isn’t fit to return is a malingerer. I’m speaking, as you must know, about maladies of the heart. And of the head.’
‘My husband isn’t mad, Doctor Norrell.’
‘Madness is relative. Do you know, in Ypres, they called your husband the God Man? The God Man – on account of the things he did that put him in harm’s way. His record demonstrates him a ruthlessly efficient leader. He’s been promoted and decorated. The boys in his platoon look up to him enormously, and the same cannot be said for many of the NCOs whose paths have crossed mine. And yet … Mrs Godman, your husband has not breathed a word since the day he arrived. There has been no crack through which I can shine a light, to better understand what goes on behind his eyes. Mrs Godman, you may not want to hear what I have to say next, but it’s important that you do. Your husband was dragged from the mire by two of his men. By the time they reached the field station, it had been eighteen hours since the explosion that felled him. He had spent every one of those hours with his head buried in the cavity of his second lieutenant’s chest. When the field ambulance reached him, they believed him to be dead. The God Man, they said, dead and gone. And yet he awoke, in the hospital behind the front line. By some miracle, his wounds were not infected. He is still there behind his eyes, Mrs Godman, but there has been no way in. Most of my colleagues would tell you that silence settles the mind, that the lieutenant is doing everything he can to return to himself. But there is another school of thought – and it is my sincere belief – that, for maladies like your husband’s, the only cure is in the talking.’ Again, he stopped. ‘Do you understand my meaning, Mrs Godman? Your husband cannot be cured if he remains hidden inside his own head.’