‘Papa Jack, listen. There’s something I have to ask. It is going to sound foolish. I hope you don’t take me for a fool.’
‘Sit, Cathy. We’ve talked about so much, you and I.’
Cathy sat at his side.
‘Now that I come to it, it seems a question Martha ought to be asking, not a grown woman like me. But, Papa Jack, is it possible … I mean to say, might it be possible … that a toy might …’ Now she knew it truly was foolish; she had never been as foolish as this, not even as a child. ‘… come to life? Oh, we read about it in books. There are always puppets growing into real live boys.. And of course they come alive in the imagination and that, that’s where a toy truly lives. But I don’t mean that. I mean life. I look at Sirius and I wonder …’
Papa Jack had taken Cathy by the hand. She flushed to look at him, so foolish did she feel. ‘I’ve wondered too, my girl. Of all the patchwork dogs and cats and wolves and bears we’ve sent out into the world, what sets Sirius apart? He was made the same way, made with these same hands.’ And he lifted them up, like a magician might do to show: no tricks. ‘Sometimes you see understanding in those black button eyes, and no cogs and gears could ever account for that.’
‘So what, then? What might it be?’
‘My boys, and now you, have kept Sirius wound since the moment I made him. Wind down has never come to that poor patchwork dog. He just keeps going and going. They show him new tricks, and soon his gears strain to mimic them. They take him new places, and his paws record the way. They poured their teaching into him without even knowing that was what they were doing. And with every new trick he learned, every new habit, well, knowledge grows. The braille cards in his motors that tell him when to walk or when to run, when to sit up or when to wag his tail, they get imprinted with more and more knowledge. And then … why, then, mightn’t that knowledge rub up against itself? Mightn’t one piece of knowledge touch or complement or clash with another? Suddenly it isn’t just a list of tricks. It’s a way of comparing one trick to all the rest. And maybe, just maybe, things begin to mesh. Maybe that meshing is a kind of … intellect. These things are more mysterious than a mere toymaker could hope to account for. But sometimes, when I look into those black button eyes …’ Papa Jack paused. ‘It would feel like murder to let him wind down, would it not?’
Cathy nodded.
‘You cannot murder what never lived, so isn’t that life?’
As if knowing he was being spoken of, Sirius sidled into the room, snouted at Cathy’s hand, and curled up, right there, on her lap.
‘The shop hands have been complaining, complaining about … scuttling in the walls. They think we’ve got mice, or rats – and of course we do, because this is London and …’ Cathy lost her train of thought. ‘What you say about Sirius, is it possible it might happen to other toys? More quickly than you’ve said …’ She took a deep breath. To give voice to it was to make it manifest. ‘Emil’s soldiers. Kaspar changed them so that they can wind themselves. He did it out of spite, because Emil wouldn’t listen any more, not when Kaspar tried to tell him what it was like, to be a soldier and have no control over what you do, where you go, who you are … But since then, they’re … changed, and changed again. Martha showed me them drilling. They took an ordinary soldier and turned it into one of their own.’ And now, she thought: the glades of the Long War brought to ruin, all of the hundreds Emil crafted all summer long, all of the thousands … Toy soldiers, proliferating up and down the Emporium aisles. Emil had ordered the shop hands to lay barricades across the seventh aisle, to shut the snowflake stair. And she couldn’t escape that feeling: the scuttling in the walls, it was nothing to do with mice …
Papa Jack was staring. She thought he would speak of the soldiers but instead he said, ‘How is my son?’
‘I want to talk to him about it. We used to talk. The physicians say he has to, but he won’t. This thing with the soldiers, at first I thought it might help. But now …’ She steadied herself, tracing the blue veins on Papa Jack’s palm. ‘I’m going to speak out of turn, Papa Jack, but you’re the one who showed it to me, so perhaps you won’t mind. All that time ago, when they dragged you into the East, when they chained you up with men like Chichikov and Ursa Major and all of the rest. It did something to you. It could have killed you, here, inside’ – she lifted her hand from his to touch him on the breastbone – ‘but you came home from it. You survived.’
Papa Jack whispered, ‘But not the same. Never the same. It all does something to you. The little things as well as the big. You might go to sleep one person and wake so slightly different, and all because of a dream you had. You can’t hope to go back. Men lose themselves trying it.’
And Cathy thought: those music boxes, the ones Kaspar tinkers with, even now. Even Cathy had felt the pull of the past, wanting to drag her down, wanting to immerse her.
‘Might you speak with him, Papa Jack? You’re his father. Perhaps he’d listen.’
Papa Jack said, ‘I’ll try.’
When Cathy got to her feet, Sirius followed. By the time she was halfway across the workshop, Papa Jack had closed his eyes. The worry was sloughing off her with every step. That was what Kaspar needed, she thought: only to talk.
As she stepped into the hall, Papa Jack stirred. ‘Cathy,’ he called out. She turned around to face him. ‘I haven’t forgotten how you stood here in front of me that day you first arrived. Even then you understood our Emporium, though you didn’t know it. But can a toy come to life? My dear,’ he breathed, ‘it isn’t foolish at all. All of the magic, all of the love we pour into them. I should think the only foolish thing is to wonder why it doesn’t happen all of the time.’
Sleep came more easily when Cathy returned to her bed. Even so, she awoke in the pitch black, to the sound of scurrying in the walls and her heart beating wild. Instinctively she reached out for Kaspar – but he slept on and, in his sleep, cringed from her hand. She trembled as she lit the candle at her bedside, illuminating every corner in dancing orange light. The only thing that moved in the room was Sirius, the bellows of his lungs lifting his fabric hide up and down. And still that infernal scuttling in the walls.
Perhaps it was her imagination, but the scuttling seemed to move up and down the walls, as if the mice in the cavities were constantly surging one way and then the next. She followed it out on to the landing and pressed her ear against the wall. Sometimes it was strong and sometimes it was soft, but always it was there. Not mice. There was no point in keeping up the pretence. She took a deep breath and prepared to retreat to her bed – and it was then that she noticed the candlelight flickering under the opposite door. Martha’s room. Evidently the girl had fallen asleep with her head in a book, and her candles still guttered on the ledge. Inwardly, Cathy sighed. This was how the Emporium would end: in a dancing inferno, patchwork beasts darting hither and thither, paper trees turned to columns of raging ash, and all because of a little girl who loved to read too much.
Quietly, she pushed through the door. Martha ought to have been there, wrapped up in sheets with the old copy of Gulliver’s Travels splayed open on her lap, but instead the bed was empty, the covers drawn back and left in a heap at the end.
Cathy rushed to the window. The girl had left it open and the chill air clawing in made the candle stubs dance a wild fandango on the ledge. For a moment, there was terror – for the window opened on to a steepled roof, and all that separated the roof from the drop into Iron Duke Mews below was a length of iron gutter shot through with rust. She thought to call out, but the November air robbed her of all breath and, when she turned against it, she saw, for the first time, that the closet door was hanging ajar, and more candlelight coming from within.
Cathy stole forward and opened the door.
Here were Martha’s dresses and here were Martha’s coats; here were the costumes Kaspar himself had stitched, that might whisk Martha away to the court of some Imperial Tsar or the pleasure gardens of a Parisian palace. The candlel
ight, weak as it was, came from somewhere beyond.
She parted the coats and crept through – and there, in the back of the closet, sat Martha, gaping upwards with the candle at her side.
‘Martha Godman, what on earth …’
Martha lifted a finger to her lips. Then, ‘Look!’ she whispered.
So Cathy looked.
The wall above Martha was a woodcut panorama from head to toe. The candlelight picked out grooves that had been scored into the wood, shapes and swirls of some primeval design. There were spirals and boxes, amorphous shapes that gradually took on the details of faces. Cathy followed them as they grew: the first, just a blob; the second, an orb with barely defined eyes, a mouth open wide as if in a scream. There, at the end of the row, the face of a toy soldier was recognisable at last.
She knelt down, bringing her candle close to the wood. The artist, whoever it was, had grown confident in the telling. At her foot an etching showed ranks of toy soldiers lined up against one another. The next showed two soldiers, crude stick men with tall charred hats, reaching out to shake each other’s hands. In the next frame, what she could only take for a God (for he was vaster than any toy soldier) towered above the regiment. A second God was drawn leaner, more handsome, where the second was corpulent with eyes of deep engraved black.
In the final frame the soldiers lined up in procession. Cathy doubted herself at first but now she was certain: the soldiers were winding each other up while, from above, the good God looked benevolently down.
‘It’s Papa, isn’t it?’ Martha began. ‘And the other …’ She pointed to the corpulent god, the one whose mouth was a wide black vortex, ‘that’s uncle Emil.’
She dropped the candle.
‘Did you do this, Martha?’
Martha barely had time to shake her head when Cathy, with a rising panic she did not fully understand, snapped, ‘Martha, this isn’t a joke. If this was—’
‘It wasn’t!’ Martha protested. ‘Come and see.’
Outside the closet, Martha got to her knees and prised back a piece of skirting board from the wall. ‘They scuttle through here, Mama. I hear them every night. So one night I got a chisel from Papa’s workshop – I’m sorry, Mama, I’ll put it back, I swear – and opened it up. I thought I might catch them, whatever they’re up to in there. That’s when I found this …’
The etchings inside the skirting board were not nearly as nuanced as the ones across the closet walls. If the closet wall was a Bayeux tapestry of details and delights, the skirting board was the first foray of some Neanderthal cave dweller, scratching out bison and mammoth on his cavern wall.
Cathy took Martha’s candle and pushed it into the gap. The sounds within were unmistakable. The toy soldiers might have been no more than inches from her hand. She imagined them gathered together, watching her in the dark.
‘They’re everywhere, Mama. Up and down every Emporium wall. It’s an … infestation.’
Cathy revolved to look at Martha. The words she wanted to say seemed absurd, but the evidence was there in etchings across the skirting board, up and down the closet walls.
‘It’s more than infestation. Is it possible …’ She paused, hesitating even now. ‘Martha, have they learned how to think?’
THE FOREVER WAR
PAPA JACK’S EMPORIUM, 1919–1924
Emil opened the Emporium door, oblivious to the smells of the London spring. The snowdrops had flowered late along the Emporium terrace this winter, and a month later the circles that darkened around his eyes had still not disappeared. Sleep had been coming to him only in snatches; the memories of the season kept turning in his mind: the obliterated Long War, the barricaded aisle, the disappointed faces of the children who had flocked to their door, only to leave it empty-handed.
The man standing in the doorway had the look (like they all did) of somebody only just demobbed. Emil invited him inside and, taking care not to stare at the bright red birthmark that discoloured his right cheek, tramped with him into the aisles.
‘I can hear them already,’ said the man. He had a broom handle in one hand and a leather satchel into which had been stitched the words ANDERSENS’ EXTERMINATORS. ‘There must be a nest. It’s the time of year for a nest. O’ course, every time of year’s the year for a nest these days. It’s on account of the End Times. Plagues and wars and infestations. Well, we’ve already had two, so the third’s on its way. You’ll see.’
Emil did not intend to talk theology with a ratcatcher’s apprentice and had already marched on when he looked back to discover the exterminator on his hands and knees, listening to the floor. ‘Good Lord, there’s a fair few. Have you got a sewer running under this shop?’
‘I’m sure there’s nothing of the sort.’ Impatience came too easily these days. Emil pressed his face into the palm of his hand, hoping to cram whatever insult had been forming back into his throat.
‘Well, there’s something. I can hear hollows. There they are again!’ And the exterminator, still squatting, scuttled to one of the walls. ‘Do you mind?’ he asked – and, before Emil could answer, he was back on his knees, a crowbar in hand. Soon, he had popped a length of skirting out, revealing a long black cavity beyond. ‘It’s the most vexing thing. Ordinarily, you’d jimmy up something like this and see spoor. Spoor here and spoor there. You see?’
Emil bristled.
‘But – nothing!’ Now he had a torch in his hand and was extending it into the hollow. ‘You get to know the signs of rats in this profession. London has some big ones, o’ course, but none as big as them we had in France. Nasty black fellows, big as cats. You remember things like that, don’t you? It’s silly the things you don’t forget. I forget the sounds, but I don’t forget the rats …’
‘I wasn’t in France,’ Emil uttered.
‘Flanders, was it?’
‘I wasn’t there.’
‘Ah, well,’ the ratcatcher said with a modicum of impatience, ‘you won’t know rats then …’
At last, Emil could take no more. He exploded: ‘Whoever said they were rats?’
‘You did call for a ratcatcher, sir. Now, I’m not one for riddles, but what do you call a ratcatcher for if you don’t want to catch rats?’
‘They’re toy soldiers, you fool!’
Emil marched over and, kicking the neighbouring stretch of skirting aside, revealed a trio of soldiers standing stock still in the blackness. Poor fools, but their keys had wound down – and here they waited until some of their brethren happened across them on their patrols.
The ratcatcher laid down his torch and looked up. ‘This some sort of trick, sir? Trying to catch me out, are you?’
‘I just want them gone,’ Emil breathed, but the ratcatcher was already on his feet.
‘It might not seem much to you, sir, not with your flying galleons and castles in the air, but ratcatching’s a noble profession. I’ve caught rats in palaces and sewers. Ain’t no difference between them both.’
The exterminator marched back towards the doors.
‘Please!’ Emil cried after him. ‘They’re up and down the walls. They scurry all night. I haven’t slept properly since Christmas.’ His words were having no effect. ‘I have two sons. Surely you can do something. Lay down traps. Put down poison. Don’t you have ferrets you send in for this sort of thing?’
At the door, the exterminator turned on his heel. ‘I could’ve been smothering fleas in Buckingham Palace,’ he declared – and, on that dubious note, he was gone.
Screams sundered the Emporium night.
Cathy and Kaspar were in the Godmans’ quarters, around the table with Mrs Hornung and Papa Jack, when the screaming began. The doors to the terrace were open, but there was no mistaking this for a scream coming from some Regent Street reveller, or drunkard on his way home. Cathy was on her feet in a second, pulling Martha near. The plates in front of them, piled high with vareniki and chipped potatoes (since she was a babe, Martha would not sanction a meal without chipped potatoes), sent
up curls of steam.
‘That’s the boys,’ said Cathy. ‘Where’s Nina?’
‘Dinner in his lordship’s workshop,’ Mrs Hornung muttered darkly – for it had been months, years even, since Emil would sit around a dining table with his brother, and Mrs Hornung was compelled each night to deliver service to the shopfloor.
‘Go for them, Martha. I’ll be in the nursery …’
Cathy hoisted her skirts and was already off, through the door.
The nursery was on Emil’s side of the Godmans’ quarters. As a bachelor, Emil had needed so little, sleeping wherever he fell, but when Nina arrived at the Emporium the old living rooms and larder had been partitioned and new bedrooms built where old storerooms used to lie. Cathy had often wondered if the rooms they all lived in were of a kin with the Wendy House sitting shuttered up on the shopfloor; she seemed to walk down halls too narrow, into rooms that threatened to be the size of a wardrobe but opened up into grand, palatial suites.
The nursery door was closed and the screams still coming from the other side. Cathy lunged for the handle and the door toppled inwards.
The boys were in their beds, old cots shorn of their sides, but they were not alone. The window was wide open, net curtains rippling in the breeze, but no crook nor kidnapper had shimmied up the drainpipe to carry away the Godman boys.
All around, toy soldiers swarmed.
They had come out of the skirting. Cathy could see, in the corners of her eyes, places where little portals had been chipped away, doors opened into the wall beyond. Now they stood along the rails at the foot of the boys’ beds, marching where they could across the undulating battlefields of the bedspreads themselves. Little siege towers and scaling ladders, cobbled together out of salvaged wood (and, Cathy saw to her surprise, pieces of shelving harvested from the shopfloor), had been pushed into place against the beds, and up these the soldiers were scrambling. A scouting party had reached the giddy heights of the window ledge using crampons and cotton rope, while others worked with miniature axe heads (Cathy took them for skittled pennies) to carve notches in the bed legs, like foresters hard at work.
The Toymakers Page 28