The Toymakers

by Robert Dinsdale

  It took only seconds for the soldiers to meet. Yet, as they came together, it was not battle that Emil saw. No infantryman sent another cartwheeling over the edge, or snarled itself in its enemy’s arms. As one, the soldiers stopped. Each lifted a hand and grasped the hand of the soldier it had, only moments ago, been sworn to kill.

  ‘Well?’ the rotund man was demanding. ‘What is the meaning of it?’

  Emil was already grappling the tow rope of the dirigible that had been floating above. Holding it firmly, he took a step off the shelving and heaved down, to land clumsily at the bottom of the aisle. By the time he had picked himself up, the man at the counter was demanding the return of his money (and a payment in recompense for the distress his sons had shown on Christmas morning). Emil lumbered in that direction, his chest heaving.

  The first rule of storekeeping was not ‘the customer is king’. The real first rule was ‘don’t assault the clientele’. It was a rule Emil ignored as he forced his way through the crowd. By the time he reached the counter, Cathy was patiently counting coins back into the customer’s outstretched hand.

  ‘Has something happened?’ Emil asked, still straining for breath.

  ‘You’re the toymaker, are you?’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘Then it’s you to blame, is it, for toys that won’t play? Shame on you, sir. They were only boys. They wanted nothing more than a game. And all this, while our boys are still fighting out there …’

  The man would brook no further questions. The crowd parted to allow him through, unwittingly closing ranks as Emil sought to follow. By the time they fanned out back into the aisles, the customer was gone. Emil stared after him, searching for footprints in the confetti snow.

  He turned to see Cathy packing the soldiers away. ‘Let me see them.’

  Cathy stood in silence as he wound the soldiers up, deployed them, and watched them broker their peace.

  ‘It’s him,’ said Emil, unable to speak his brother’s name.

  Cathy touched him on the arm. ‘You don’t know that.’

  ‘Oh, but I do. He waltzed in and made his declaration and now he’s done this … He’s done it to spite me. And all because I …’ Emil hesitated before saying the words, but Cathy heard them all the same: because I wasn’t there. ‘It’s sabotage. That’s what it is. Well, we’ve had saboteurs before. We’ll see about—’

  He was on the verge of striding through the counter and into the warren of stores and antechambers above, when Cathy said, ‘Emil, let me go to him.’

  Emil was about to say no when a trio of boys tumbled out of the aisles, with boxes of the Long War in their arms.

  ‘Sir,’ announced the first. ‘It’s these ones too.’

  ‘We were playing in the glade, but these wouldn’t work. We’d thought they were broken, until that man …’

  Emil fell to one knee and took the new soldiers in his hands. ‘What use is a soldier if he won’t do battle?’

  He opened the mechanism of the first soldier, as if he might find the answer inside – and, while he was ferreting within, Cathy slipped into the shadows behind the counter. Moments later, past the register and up the spiralling stair, she was standing in front of Kaspar, the patchwork rabbits having proliferated around his feet. Martha crouched among them, feeding scraps of fabric to one of the tiny kits.

  ‘Martha, might I speak to your father?’

  ‘Oh yes, Mama.’

  ‘Alone.’

  Martha scooped a selection of rabbits into her arms and, with a vengeful glare, tramped out of the room.

  ‘Kaspar, tell me it truthfully. Have you … tinkered’ – she could find no better word for it – ‘with the soldiers on the shopfloor?’

  Kaspar’s lips parted in a smile.

  ‘Kaspar?’

  ‘It’s you who told me, Cathy. That I had to do it, that it had to come from me. Well, my love, this is how. You understand, don’t you? Why it has to be this way? Because … they weren’t going to listen. They all look at me like I’m an intruder. Well, this is my home. And Cathy, all I want is to come back …’

  ‘Kaspar, here you are. Here.’

  ‘Emil was never going to listen. He’s wanted to win the Long War ever since we were boys. Well, now there’ll be no winner. Now it can end – and this Emporium, this place we have, it can live again …’

  At that moment, the workshop door flew open. Patchwork rabbits scattered for the shelter of shelves and upturned crates.

  Emil stood in the doorway, his cheeks bunched and red. ‘What did you do?’ he breathed. ‘Tell me what you did!’

  Kaspar lifted a consolatory hand. ‘Let me show you, little brother.’

  A toy soldier was lying inert on the floor by Kaspar’s feet. The cavity in its back was still open, so Kaspar tinkered within. What adjustments he was making, Emil did not know. Yet, when he set the soldier down, suddenly it wouldn’t march. Emil wound it up, but instead of sallying forth, it folded its legs and took a seat. Then, with sinking inevitability, the key stopped turning.

  ‘It’s supposed to march. They form a unit, so boys can play battles against each other.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ sighed Kaspar, ‘and win a few square feet of carpet for every ten soldiers lost.’ His eyes darkened. ‘I told you, little brother. The Emporium isn’t to sell toy soldiers any more. We are, none of us, butchers. So why must we raise our children that way?’

  Emil snatched the recalcitrant soldier in his fist. Three years his brother had been gone. And if, in those years, Kaspar had seen and done things of which Emil might never know, well, that did not make Emil’s own years worthless. He had Nina. The Long War was a triumph. He was to be a father, a real father … And the Emporium did not belong to Kaspar. It belonged to them all, to their families, and, ‘Damn it, Kaspar! What do you want from me?’

  To Kaspar the answer was so banal there was no point in asking the question.

  ‘I want you to grow up.’

  ‘I deserve more than that, Kaspar. Well, Cathy, don’t I? You fought your war, but I … I kept our Emporium afloat, didn’t I? I did it in the only way I knew how. And my soldiers, they’re … everything.’ He had started out softly, but now his voice reached new heights. ‘The Long War is our best-selling toy. That’s what boys want. Soldiers to put on their shelves and think of their fathers. Little tin tanks that can roll up and down on their tracks. Cavalry and artillery wagons. Boys come here for them. Girls too. They take them home and collect them and make battles and come back for more. The Emporium might have sunk without you, Kaspar. Papa slowing down and you gone for so long and … give me one reason, just one, why you’ve any right to waltz back here and end it all!’

  Kaspar levered himself to his feet, refusing the offer of Cathy’s hand. When he spoke, white spittle flew from his lips. ‘Haven’t you ever thought how it might feel? Two battalions of these things, all wound up and marching at each other – and then they fall down, and get picked back up, and have to do the whole thing all over again, dancing to somebody else’s tune. These soldiers don’t get a choice. It doesn’t end for them, Emil. They don’t even get the sanctity of death.’

  ‘Kaspar,’ Emil said, more softly now, trying to cross the expanse between his brother and him in awkward, stuttering steps, ‘you’re home now. They’re only toys. They can’t feel.’

  The look on Kaspar’s face was incredulous. Emil might as well have told him there were no stars in the night sky, that their mama still lived and walked among them. ‘Didn’t Papa teach you anything?’ he asked – and there they stood, each one staring into the other, while on the shopfloor beneath a hundred disappointed voices began to make themselves heard.

  IMAGINARIUM

  PAPA JACK’S EMPORIUM, 1918

  Dawn, and the aisles of Papa Jack’s Emporium lay in wild disarray. Had you been there that night, had you crouched on one of the galleries and peered through the rails as Martha Godman did, you might have thought that the crooked servants of London’s ordin
ary toyshops had come to lay the Emporium to waste. But had you looked more closely, you would have seen two familiar figures toiling in the gloom: Emil and his wife Nina, whirling together in the Long War glade as they tore open every box, shredded every soldier’s wrapping and set them to march. Now, in every corner of the glade, toy soldiers shook hands and agreed an armistice, rather than raise their rifles or even march on. As the dawn’s first light spilled over the cloud castle turrets, waking the patchwork pegasi from their roosts, Emil sank to his haunches and laughed, laughed in wild despair.

  ‘Pack them all up. Wake Frances Kesey and all of the rest. If one of these soldiers leaves the Emporium today, the shop hand who sells it is finished.’

  Nina went to console him, and for a moment Emil let himself be smothered in her arms. Then he took off, into the darkness of the untended aisles.

  Follow …

  Up, up and up; Emil Godman might have run ungainly, but he could run when he needed to. Into the shadows of mammoths, through the log piles where paper trees had been felled; patchwork dogs and cats watched him from their enclosures; the runnerless rocking horses stopped grazing in their corrals and wondered at his flight. After a long night’s labour, Emil was too tired for the endless stairs, so he clambered into a dirigible balloon, heaved its tethers out of the earth, and soared up, up, up into the dome above the shop floor. From the gallery rail, Martha watched him hurtle past, then lost him in the reef of mist on which the cloud castle sat.

  By the time he reached the Emporium terrace, he was quite out of breath. Great billows of white curled through his nostrils as he burst on to the rooftop where his papa’s garden spilled out of chimneypots and terracotta, rising up through dislodged tiles. From here you could see the world. A single snowflake pirouetted down to land in the hair of Emil’s naked arm.

  Snowflakes, snowflakes all around – but, of snowdrops, there was no sign.

  Chest burning, he crouched down, pressed his fingers to the earth. He was searching for colour, for a speck of green, anything that might convince. The bulbs were down there, down where they hid all summer long. And if there truly was magic in the Emporium, if this thing they called magic existed at all, then surely it would call itself forth now. Surely a snowdrop would rise from the earth and open itself to reveal a perfect bell of white.

  But no magic came for Emil. No magic had ever come for him at all.

  He pressed his fingers through the frost-hardened earth, delved down until the dirt grew thick in his fingernails, riming the creases of his hands. It was, he realised with a sense of revelation, delicious to be doing something so … untoward. He risked a look over his shoulder, but in the Godmans’ quarters all was still. Then, back to his task, his fingers found what they were looking for. He pulled his hand back, trailing a snowdrop bulb and all of its roots. It had already started to shoot, struggling for the surface.

  Now that the crime was done and all his adrenaline spent, Emil hurried to hide the misdeed. He flattened the earth beneath his boot, scraped the soil from his hand and hurried inside. Perhaps Mrs Hornung would notice the boot prints he left behind him, but she would not say.

  The Imperial Kapitan was watching him from its place on the mantle, where he had left it after dinner the previous night. On seeing it, Emil felt a rush of such shame. How many seasons had he gone to the terrace, willing the snowdrops to stay beneath the earth? Now he dragged them up with his hands, desperate for winter to end.

  The necessary tools were in his workshop. With a scalpel blade he opened the flower’s head, spread back its unripe layers. A little paper, a little felt; his fingers had painted such delicate things on the faces of his soldiers that surely they were up to this task. He worked quickly, he worked with purpose, he locked the magnifier to his eye and hunched over – and then, then when he heard footsteps behind him, then when he was holding himself so tight he felt ready to burst, then he was finished. He turned around to find Nina waiting. Her belly was rounded, his two sons grown firm.

  ‘They’re ready for you.’

  Emil strode across the workshop, squeezing her hand as he brushed past. Out on the shopfloor, the shop hands were nervously milling. Cathy lingered, unseen in the darkness, watching him keenly.

  Emil shook as he lifted his fist, opening it to reveal the snowball bulb with its flower standing tall and firm. ‘It’s over,’ he said. ‘Finished. We’ll see you all next year.’

  A month had passed by the time real snowdrops filled the Emporium terrace. Cathy wove them into Martha’s hair, Papa Jack retired for his long summer sleep, Kaspar continued his tinkering – and down below, locked in his workshop day and night, Emil opened up the soldiers that had once been his, removed their mechanisms and took them apart piece by piece. Scalpels he had at his side, screwdrivers and tweezers and wrenches small enough to shift the most tiny of cogs. He lifted out springs and stretched them, looking for faults in the coiling. He put his magnifying glass to the teeth of the wheels that drove the pistons that drove the soldiers’ arms and legs. He dismantled and rebuilt and dismantled again, and still he couldn’t discern by which simple trick of engineering Kaspar had corrupted his Long War.

  ‘What am I missing?’ he said, to the Imperial Kapitan sitting static up on the shelf. ‘What did he do?’

  Spring was here, the days already growing longer. They would, Emil decided with a sinking finality, all have to be destroyed. All of those hours spent at his workshop lathe, all of those unsuspecting toy soldiers put to the torch, so that he could begin again.

  He was scratching out figures on a slate, trying to quantify the amount of timber he would need, the number of shop hands he would have to hire to replenish the shelves by the time Christmas came, when fists hammered at the workshop door. Behind him, Cathy hung in the frame, gasping for breath.

  ‘Emil, you must come.’

  ‘I’m nearly there, Cathy. Whatever he’s done, I’m certain—’

  ‘No, Emil. Now. It’s now.’

  Emil was slow to understand. He began to protest – this was his time, all he needed to do was think, the answer was here, if only the world would let him find it – but then Cathy’s silence revealed all. He dropped his pencil to the worktop, watched it roll down to the feet of the Imperial Kapitan. Then he was up on his feet, finding neither his words nor his balance.

  ‘Now? But Cathy, there’s a month, two months to go …’

  ‘It’s twins, Emil. The midwife said, they come sooner if they’re twins …’

  Emil stuttered out on to the shopfloor, stumbling over himself as he twirled to look at the galleries above. Perhaps it was only imagination, but he thought he could hear Nina, even all that distance away.

  Cathy took him by the hand. ‘Now,’ she said, more firmly.

  They reached the Godmans’ quarters by the back stair, the one that couldn’t possibly have climbed so high into the rafters as it did. Martha hung by the terrace door, standing on the tips of her toes. Papa Jack clasped his hand as he came. Mrs Hornung, or so Cathy said, was already by the tradesman’s entrance, awaiting the arrival of the midwife; and Kaspar, well, Kaspar was behind one of those doors, his head in a manual, oblivious to the nephews about to make their entrance to the world.

  Nina waited alone in their bedroom. When Cathy left she had been prowling back and forth; now she sat on the edge of the bed, trying to ride the early contractions.

  In the passage outside, Emil stopped dead.

  ‘Cathy, I don’t know if I can.’

  How his heart must have been pounding. Cathy stood as close to him as a wife ever could and whispered, ‘You’ve been waiting eleven years. You were ready to help me then, and you’re ready to help her now. Don’t you remember? All of the books you collected, all of the questions you asked? Emil, not once, then or now, did I doubt you could do it. Just go in there, hold her hand until the midwife comes. Tell her you love her. She’s going to need it.’

  Emil whispered, ‘Thank you, Cathy,’ and then he was gone throug
h the doors.

  Seven hours later there was cheering in the Emporium halls. Cathy – who had waited so anxiously while Emil paced the quarters, panicking each time the midwife emerged to collect more towels, more water, toast and butter to give his wife strength – heard the squawking of a newborn through the wall and breathed out. Until that moment she had not known she was holding so much tension within.

  At her side, Emil was suddenly on his feet.

  ‘Shall I … Should I go, Cathy?’

  There were two voices crying now; she was certain of it. The midwife would already be swaddling them. Nina would already be …

  Mrs Hornung appeared in the doorway, her sleeves still rolled up as if she herself had been there at the bedside. ‘They’re asking for you, Emil. It’s time.’

  But he was rooted to the spot – and until Cathy put her arms around him, and whispered that his work was about to begin, he did not dare take a step.

  After he was gone, Martha clung on to Cathy’s hand. ‘Can we go, Mama? Can we see them?’

  Cathy made her wait. She remembered the exhaustion that came afterwards, the feeling of plunging back to earth from that otherworld where all that existed was the breathing, the body put to its only real purpose. It was not until darkness had fallen, and the shopfloor lit by the haloes of Papa Jack’s falling stars, that she caught a glimpse of her nephews for the first time. Emil had carried them – tiny as twins often are – out on to the gallery, where they might sneak their first look at the shopfloor. He was whispering to them as Cathy approached: ‘We’ll set it right, the three of us, and there’ll be stars falling every opening night, just like there are now, stars for the two of you … There’s the cloud castle where we’ll camp, and there’s the paper forest where we’ll go hunting patchwork deer – and there, there’s the glade where we’ll play our Long War, all three of us together. They’ll come at Christmas and try to take us on, but nobody will ever win a battle, not against us Godman boys …’ Cathy was almost at Emil’s side, and now he looked around.