‘I see.’
‘To make him better.’
Emil remained silent, working out a particularly knotty joint.
‘What do you think is wrong with my papa, Uncle Emil?’
Emil whispered, ‘I don’t think I could ever understand.’
‘I thought a toy would help. It’s what Papa Jack says. A toy can’t save a life, but it can save a soul. Well, my papa’s alive, but …’
‘There,’ Emil said, thankful to be bringing the conversation to an end. He set the toy down and now, when Martha looked, it seemed sleeker and more crisply defined than ever. The key in its back would set it running. Martha turned it and watched it fly. Soon, it was hurtling toward the naked wall, its whistle (Martha had not thought of a whistle; it must have been Emil’s addition) trilling all the way. She rose to the tips of her toes in anticipation. The train bore down on the wall, there came an almighty crash – and the next thing she knew, the canes had concertinaed, parts fanning out and twisting around. An instant later, the threads binding it all together grew taut, contained the explosion, and the flying parts collapsed back into place. Now, just as she had hoped, the locomotive had reassembled itself, facing in the other direction. It came screaming towards her. She threw her arms around Emil and gushed out her thanks.
As Emil watched her leave, he felt that strange longing again, the one that had been plaguing him ever since Cathy brought Kaspar home. How he hungered to go up there and hold his brother’s hand! How he hungered to show him the Long War, to settle down with Kaspar and make mindless battle across carpets, floors and aisles. And yet – something always stopped him, something always held him back. Whatever it was, it would not permit him to sit at Kaspar’s side, so he sank back to his workbench, picked up his lathe, and continued his work. Sometimes, it was the only thing that could bring him peace of mind.
With the locomotive cradled in her arms, Martha burst through the bedroom door.
Inside, it smelt of the bedpan and sour milk. Her papa was upright in bed, buttressed by pillows on every side. In his lap, a papery hand, ridged with veins, was turning the handle of the music box; occasionally, as the mice danced, his lips twitched with a smile. Sirius was lying across his feet, guarding his shrunken legs. He eyed her warily, judging if he ought to let her near.
She had decided that she would be strident. And so, ignoring the smell, ignoring the growling of the dog, she strode to the edge of the bed and held up the train. ‘Papa, it’s for you!’
Kaspar remained as he was, mindlessly turning the crank, but Martha would not be deterred. She set the train down and watched with mounting glee as it exploded against one wall, reassembled itself, and then exploded against another. She watched the volleys three times, cheering with every collision, before she turned back to her father. And still Kaspar remained, lost in the melody and whatever cherished landscapes the box was creating.
He wasn’t even in the room, Martha realised. Wherever he was, it was not here.
She leapt on to the bed. Before she knew it, she was straddling him, her two hands grasping the music box and trying to tear it from his lap. She did not realise, until much later, that Sirius had closed his muslin jaws around her leg. He was wrestling with her just the same as she was wrestling with her papa. Despite the way he slumped, there was strength in her father’s fingers. Those brittle things would not release the music box, no matter how hard she tried. Even as she fought, he was continuing to wind it. The music billowed up around her.
‘Papa!’ she screamed and, realising at last that Sirius was mauling her, she kicked out and sent him flying from the bed. ‘It’s … for … you!’
Something cracked inside the music box. At last, she ripped it from his hands. His fingers were left clasping the crank handle, but the box was hers; she flung the wretched thing aside, down past Sirius, down into the path of the unstoppable locomotive. Had she tried, she would still have been too slow to stop it. The steam train whistled in fury and barrelled straight into the stranded box. Canes exploded, strings drew taut, and though the locomotive reassembled to hurtle raggedly in the other direction, the box was no more. Parts of it arced in every direction.
The music was dead, but the silence was oppressive. Martha rocked back, Kaspar still unmoving underneath her.
‘Papa,’ she repeated, ‘it’s for you …’
Still he said nothing. He looked straight through her, and that was when Martha gave up. She clambered off her father, not caring for his cadaverous body underneath the sheets, and tramped back across the room.
She did not take the toy train with her. It had been for her father and, whether he wanted it or not, that was where it would stay. That was what presents were for. Disconsolate, she dropped back to the Emporium floor. She had almost reached the sanctuary of the Wendy House when her mother caught her. Her mother had a sixth sense that told her when she had been crying. She clawed angrily at her eyes, as if that might mask the tears.
‘Darling, has something happened?’
Martha could not hold it in, no matter how hard she tried. ‘It’s my papa. He won’t …’
Her sentence faltered, for another sound was filling her ears. It was the clanking of bamboo pistons, the shrill call of a whistle – and, from along the aisle, the miniature locomotive burst into sight. It passed between Martha and her mother, disappeared into the paper trees and returned, slightly worse for its explosion against the Wendy House wall. Martha tracked it with her eyes – back along the aisle, back through the open boxes where Emil’s Long War boxes were waiting to be displayed, and between the knock-kneed legs that had loomed into view.
She gazed up. There stood her papa, a wraith in a dressing robe, black hair entangled with black beard. His whiskers were crusted in the white run-off of his drool.
‘Kaspar?’ her mother breathed – but she was the second to reach him. Martha was already there, with her arms wrapped around his legs.
THE RISING
PAPA JACK’S EMPORIUM, WINTER 1917–1918
October turned into November, but still there was no frost. News came that John Horwood, the Emporium caretaker who had been presumed dead on the Somme, was alive and well (though none would recognise him if he ever returned, for his jaw had been left in the Flanders earth and now he wore a new one made of ivory and India rubber). Every day the Emporium shelves grew deeper, new displays appearing in the alcoves and other expanses. It was the time of year that Cathy liked best: those evenings of anticipation, wondering if tonight was when the first crystals of white might appear. And this year, more than any other, she had reason to cheer – for there was her Kaspar, back in his workshop, working on his toys.
Here he was now. Cathy peeped through the gap in the workshop door, and watched as he turned the concoction of felt and fabric in his hands, adjusting its insides with the miniature tools from his bench. He held his body (that body he would never let her hold) differently now, but in his eyes something of the old Kaspar remained. Around him, the workshop counters were littered with fragments of the music boxes that, in his weaker moments, he had been trying to recreate; that he had given up on each new version was the thing that made Cathy know he was still as proud and stubborn as the day they had met.
Her heart gave a flutter when she saw him set down his new creation and smile. Never had one of those smiles – once so irrepressible, so infectious – meant more to her than it did now.
The patchwork rabbit was a dainty thing. It had a key in its side that was slowly winding down and it hopped along, as rabbits do, until it found a few scraps of fabric left on the workshop floor. At these it bent down and started to eat. Kaspar sprinkled more felt and the rabbit hopped after its forage and gobbled it up. Next, Kaspar scattered bits of bent iron, a few screws, a length of copper wire. The rabbit devoured it all. Then, at the last, it stopped hopping altogether. It hunched against the cold furnace wall, furrowed its embroidered eyes – and, out of a knot in the fabric of its posterior, there popped another ra
bbit, this one even daintier than the last. As the adult rabbit’s motor wound down, the baby’s came alive. Eagerly, it hopped back toward Kaspar, searching out any scraps of food its mother had missed.
Sensing movement behind her, Cathy turned to see Martha approaching along the shadowed hall. Putting a finger to her lips, she whispered, ‘Come and see …’ and, with a footfall soft as Emporium snow, Martha scurried to her mama’s side. She was about to peep through the door, where another patchwork rabbit was birthing a kit, when a sound echoed up the hall. Three short blasts – the sound of a bugle, the sound of the bugle that announced first frost. Martha looked up at her mother, her face opening in delight. ‘Oh, Mama!’
Cathy pushed open the door. The room was silent. Where Kaspar once sat, there was only an empty chair. Around its legs the patchwork rabbits gave their last little hops as their motors wound down. With no felt left to feast on, or transform in whatever intricate motors Kaspar had devised, they huddled together as they grew still.
‘Where is he, Mama?’
‘Go to the shopfloor,’ Cathy whispered, forcing a smile. ‘They’re going to need all the help they can get.’
Cathy took off, through the cluttered workshop and up the servants’ stair to the quarters above. She had hoped to find Kaspar in the bedroom – but he was nowhere to be found. She checked every cranny before she returned to the workshop below. She was hurrying through when she recalled the forest green toybox from the summer Martha was born. There it sat, crammed between two crates of cast-offs and a bale of satin lace. The lid was askew, hinting at the darkness within.
Cathy heaved it aside. Being one of the earliest Kaspar had made, it had always been the smallest of the toyboxes. From the lip, she could see Kaspar lying six feet below, seeming to cringe from the light.
‘Kaspar. My love. It was only the bugle. It’s to be opening night.’
Kaspar rolled; for a moment Cathy thought that he was fitting, but it was laughter that rattled his body. ‘Mrs Godman, you must think me awfully strange.’
Cathy remembered a conversation of so long ago. ‘Awfully sentimental, perhaps.’
‘Aha!’ sighed Kaspar. ‘Well, there you have it. For, if a toymaker cannot be sentimental, who on this blasted earth can?’
Tonight, the heavens inside the Emporium were laid bare for all to see. As the doors opened and the first families flocked in, constellations exploded above them. Stars were born, died and re-formed. Angels of light galloped through the blackness, a heavenly host was picked out in cascades of paper, and, as the swirling mass settled, the outlines of toys could be seen, gazing back down. Here was the constellation of the Patchwork Dog; here, the Imperial Kapitan and his loyal wind-up soldiers. It was snowing across the Emporium and cheering erupted in every alcove and aisle.
In one of those alcoves, grasping Martha by one hand and Cathy by the other (and with Sirius, loyal as ever, sitting at his side), stood Kaspar. His eyes pointed upward but his body was quaking. As the snowfall broke, his trembling slowed down.
‘Is it good, Papa?’
A night of falling stars, of explosions in the heavens. More magical than any other opening night – and yet, these things, they were not so out of the ordinary for Kaspar.
He was still trembling as he said, ‘They put on a good show. I couldn’t have done it better myself.’ But then he broke free of both their hands and stepped into the aisle, where the first customers were hurrying through. It had been all women last year; women and their children. Now there were others: a cripple on his crutches, a gentleman who wheezed with every breath. No wonder they were drawn back, thought Cathy. After everything that had happened, who wouldn’t long for the time before?
‘I should like to see some toys,’ said Kaspar. ‘There’s so much I’ve missed.’ And Cathy, thinking that a good thing, let him drift on.
Cathy had much to attend to, for most of the shop hands, three seasons old, still needed her to cluck around them like a mother hen. Martha, meanwhile, was determined to keep watch. She followed him at a distance, pretending to peruse shelves whose contents she knew by heart.
Kaspar headed first for the carousel, and next for the corrals where the children were riding rocking horses with wild abandon. Kaspar recognised some of these horses, but many others had been crafted since he left. Martha watched him clamber on to the one she called Black Star, the king of all rocking horses the Emporium had ever made. He rode for some time, eyes screwed against an imaginary wind, before he clambered out of the saddle and wandered on.
Sometimes he got lost. Aisles had been torn down, reassembled and torn down again – and he took to asking Sirius for directions, following wherever its nose led. And that was how, some time later, Kaspar strode into the glade where boys were playing at war.
A dozen skirmishes were being played out across the carpets. Gangs of boys crouched around what toy soldiers they had scavenged from the open boxes, wound them up and let them go. Tiny bugles sounded, wooden bullets flew, and all at once images raked across Kaspar’s eyes: the first time he went up and over the top, the time he battled Emil in the bedroom while the new shop girl, mysterious Cathy Wray, watched on. How energised he had been then! How in awe! Now, he was compelled to look the other way. The battle cries were too insistent, too loud. He cringed and found himself looking, instead, at a tower of cardboard boxes, decorated by an expert hand. The stencils across the sides were surrounded with a weave of Emporium soldiers in interlocking design. The words read: THE LONG WAR.
He had made an industry of it, then. While Kaspar discovered real war, Emil brought their game to the world.
ADVENTURE! the box declared. GLORY!
YOUR COUNTRY NEEDS YOU!
Kaspar turned away. There was a cabinet of other toys behind the tower and, hoping to distract himself, he picked one up. It was another of Emil’s creations; he could feel it in the weight and heft of the piece. Touching its crank handle, he felt the axle meshing with the mechanism inside.
Against a diorama of crosshatch hills and skeleton trees, tin soldiers were presented on spikes, as if peeping out of their foxholes. When he turned the handle, the soldiers rose, swivelling as if to bring their rifles to bear. Then, because a toy could only ever capture a moment in time, the soldiers retreated again, back into the safety of their dugouts, bound to repeat the same manoeuvre over and over: never seeing real battle, but never going back home. As Kaspar turned the handle for the third time, he heard, as if in the distance, the horns of war begin to sound, a single trumpeter turning into a chorus. A fourth time, and the edges of the aisles filled with sporadic bursts of tiny artillery fire, the miniature thunder of cavalry stampeding past, the alarm call of whistles and officers bellowing at their rank and file. Kaspar did not look up from the toy but, as he turned the handle again and again, the borders of the shopfloor fell away, the shelves dissolved into a blasted battlescape of trenches and barbed wire. It was then that the terror hit him. The rational part of him knew that he was safe, that it was only a game, the toy working on his imagination as toys are meant to do, but it was not the rational part of him in charge of his fingers. They kept turning the crank, solidifying all that he could see. And then he was back there. Back where his fingers were grimed in scarlet and black. Back in his uniform, with pieces of his second lieutenant’s brain smeared across his face. His ears were full of the sounds, his nose was full of the smells. He screamed and screamed and screamed.
It was a sound that had never been heard in the Emporium. Cathy was wrestling to wrap up a herd of toy sheep when she heard her husband’s cry. Abandoning her post, she hurried into the aisles.
She found Kaspar where he had fallen, his hands over his face. Sirius was trying to nuzzle him but he didn’t seem to know the dog. Martha was standing over him, asking ‘Papa? Papa, are you there?’ as if she had not been asking the same thing every hour of every day since he returned. ‘What happened?’ Cathy asked. Customers were being drawn into the glade. They craned to take a loo
k over the tops of the aisles.
Martha looked at her, face contorted as if that was answer enough.
‘Help me get him out of here,’ Cathy said, and, avoiding the thrashing of his limbs, tried to get her arms under his. ‘Martha?’
‘I’ll fetch Uncle Emil …’
She was already darting off when Cathy shouted, ‘No, don’t tell Emil!’ She did not know why, but somehow that seemed important. ‘Just … stop them all staring.’
With strength she did not know she had, Cathy lifted Kaspar to his feet and laboured him out of the depression. Though his arms had stopped thrashing, now he was a dead weight, slumped against her shoulder.
By the time she reached the aisle where model tigers prowled the uppermost shelves, Martha had done her job. The cloud castle drawbridge had opened above them and yet more lights were fountaining out, painting extravagant snowflakes in the air. This was distraction enough. Eyes no longer followed her as she dragged him along – and, in that faltering way, she brought him through the paper trees.
In the Wendy House, she laid him down. Sirius had followed. He whimpered miserably in the corner.
‘Kaspar?’
On the bed, he rolled, drawing his knees up to his chin. What a thin, angular body his was. At least he was in the room with her now. His eyes recognised her, but still those guttural noises came from the back of his throat.
Cathy made room at the bedside. No matter what he wanted, she would touch him now. She went to grip him by the shoulders but her fingers resisted. She had to battle herself to do it.
‘Kaspar. My love. What happened?’
He choked with laughter again. ‘It’s supposed to be a toy. How could a toy …’ But then the laughter was silence, and into the silence came his sobbing.
She tried to hold him closer, drawing him on to her knee, but there was strength in him yet. He rolled away, fists bunching up the bedclothes.
‘My love, you have to tell me. Tell me what I can do.’
The Toymakers Page 24