The Toymakers

by Robert Dinsdale

  Cathy said, ‘If you think it will help,’ and noticed the man could not even look her in the eye.

  ‘When did you and your husband last have … there is no savoury way of saying this … relations?’

  ‘Is that a proper question, sergeant?’

  ‘Not improper, Mrs Godman. It may shed some light.’

  Propriety says I ought to be ashamed, thought Cathy, ashamed to stand here, in front of this man, and even entertain his question. But, even in that place her mother tried to take her, Cathy had refused to feel ashamed.

  ‘I’ll answer, Mr Lewis, this one and nothing more. My husband and I were together on the night that he left.’

  The sergeant nodded. ‘He was saying goodbye. You can be certain of that. It’s a thing with some men. One for the road, as they say. I’m sorry, Mrs Godman. Look, we’ll take a picture, if we may. We’ll open a file – all in the way of a favour, you understand.’

  The sergeant called out for his constables, and idled there while he waited. ‘Before I go, I wonder – and this being unprofessional, I know – if I might take a little something? I have a nephew on the coast. His parents have promised him a journey to your Emporium many Christmases now, and yet …’ The sergeant shrugged, and in that shrug was all the indifference in the world. ‘Just a little trinket. Perhaps … a little toy soldier?’

  ‘I’m afraid we have none.’

  The sergeant glowered. ‘Papa Jack’s Emporium, and not a single toy soldier.’

  ‘It seems my husband took them, each and every one.’

  The sergeant nodded, so slowly it seemed he was testing her. ‘I suppose you believe they just picked themselves up and marched after him.’

  And Cathy, to whom the silence was still so strange, thought: if only you knew.

  She watched them go from the doorway, knowing in her heart they would not return. As they reached the end of Iron Duke Mews, no doubt already debating the dogs down at Dagenham, Cathy pictured how it might have been seven nights ago, as Kaspar loped the same way. In her mind she saw him turning the corner and Sirius, torn between his loyalty to his master and the Emporium itself, left howling in his wake. Running away, she remembered now, was not like it was in the stories. People did not try and stop you. They did not give chase. The thing people didn’t understand was that you had to decide what you were running away from. Most of the time it wasn’t husbands or wives or monsters or villains; most of the time you were running away from that little voice inside your head, the one telling you to stay where you are, that everything will be all right.

  But it would have been, she thought as she slammed the door. She would have gone to the end with him, even if he’d never let her touch him again, even if all he’d wanted to do was to stay in his workshop and make his toys. She had wanted to be the one who was with him on the day that he died, when the century had grown older and the two of them grown older too. But now that hope was gone and, gazing up, the Emporium lay empty before her.

  Two weeks since he’d gone and she felt like one of London’s vagrants, sitting on a street corner grateful for any crust. There was still snow left in Hyde Park. She came out of St George’s on the corner, decorating every lamp post and tree from the Serpentine to the Apsley Gate with the posters she and Martha had laboured over. Come Home Kaspar hung from every bough. In the heart of Mayfair, where she had planted one of his paper trees, people gathered for the spectacle and came away with a letter in their hands. If you see this man, deliver this promise: I still love you, no matter what.

  She went down to the veterans’ homes where they said he had taken his music boxes. She dug out the addresses of old soldiers, anyone whose path might have crossed his; she wrote to shop hands past and present, thinking of all the places he might go. She took the train to the estuary, for mightn’t Kaspar – deranged, in his way – have thought to find a new life in her old one, just as she had found one in his? But the letters came back – Dear Cathy, I have seen neither hide nor hair – and the trips were in vain.

  Nineteen hours and fifteen days.

  Three hours three weeks.

  Spring and summer and autumn and winter again.

  Somewhere along the way she stopped going out to hand out pamphlets. The tree in Berkeley Square grew heavy with rain and crumpled to a thick, sticky mulch. Emil said they could hardly afford another full page in The Times, not until they began the hard work of repairing the Emporium’s reputation. Cathy left the tradesman’s door unlocked each night, just in case he returned – until, one day, Mrs Hornung noticed the wet footprints in the windward aisles and deduced, to Emil’s horror, that crooks had crept in and stolen a whole crate of magic carpets. After that Cathy just waited, and waiting was the most lonesome thing.

  She woke in the night, an idea dragging her from dreams. The journal Papa Jack had given her was still in the trunk beneath the bed. She heaved it out, daring not to open it in case this dream was to be shattered. It was almost dawn by the time she opened the journal and, finding no note from Kaspar there, took a pen and scribbled herself. ‘Kaspar, my dearest Kaspar. Are you there? Wherever you are, why ever you went, it can be undone.’ But when, three months later (the pages scoured each night), there was no reply, she placed the journal back in the chest beneath the bed and never did open it again.

  It was not the silence of her papa that Martha missed in those months, for heaven knows he had been silent long enough. It was the silence in the walls that kept her up at night. Silence, she was starting to realise, could be as oppressive as snow.

  Martha put away her Gulliver’s Travels, her Charles Perrault and Arabian Nights on the day the soldiers disappeared. Reading alone was not enough, not when there were once a hundred wooden faces hanging on every word. The books on the shelf spoke of happier times: of Martha on Kaspar’s knee, as he told great fables which she later realised he had entirely made up; of the soldiers waiting for every twist and turn, the stories seeping into their sandalwood minds, teaching them, ordering them, programming them with this business of life.

  At night the silence weighed on her. The peace frightened her. Seventeen years old, she slept in her mama’s bed, in the place where her papa used to lie.

  ‘They can’t all have gone, can they?’ she said one night, to the impenetrable dark. ‘All those hundreds of them, all those thousands, however many lived up and down the walls … He can’t have taken them all, can he?’

  All he would have needed, Cathy thought, was one of his bags, like the one he made for me when Martha was born. Open it up and let them all march into its depths, and off they would go, out into the world. But at least that would mean he was alive. At least that might mean he was not rotting at the bottom of the Thames like all the rest of the missing, all the dispossessed.

  That first year the shop hands came long before first frost. Emil sent notices out and now, here they were, with new storemen and down-and-out stevedores, all dragged in to set the Emporium to rights.

  On the shopfloor the workers were wrenching up the aisles. Nina and the boys were marshalling the patchwork reindeer to heave the shipping containers out of the storerooms so that Emil might make an inventory of all they had left. There were enough toys here of Papa Jack and Kaspar’s design to keep the shelves full for the next winter, more still if they rationed them well, and Emil worked hard to supplement them with toys of his own.

  In places they tore down the barricades. Mrs Hornung levered up every stretch of railroad track the toy soldiers had lain. The shop hands reconstructed the aisles in such a way that the shopfloor would seem smaller, and yet more packed with excitement than these last winters, when the soldiers had run amok. Foresters were brought in to fell the paper trees, now yellow and sagging with age, while the Wendy House, still boarded up, was loaded up and hauled away. ‘We’ll refit it next winter,’ said Emil, when he saw how Cathy was staring. ‘It’s not gone for ever, Cathy, I promise.’

  But perhaps it ought to be, she thought. Those four walls, so
loaded with memory; perhaps what she needed was not to see it sitting there every day, speaking of happier times.

  She returned to an aisle where she worked alone, dusting down old dancing bears. At its end, the shelf stacks had been torn up, revealing a great maw in the wall where the masonry had crumbled away. There Martha called out for her mama.

  Cathy went down, into the shadows, and crouched at Martha’s side. Behind the crumbled wall lay one of the cavities where the soldiers used to march. The light from Martha’s lantern spilled over the open face of a doll’s house. Tiny paper trees had sprouted in its garden, stunted by the dark.

  ‘Look, Mama …’

  Martha had prised up one of the floorboards. Along the piping underneath the toy soldiers had laid out a field, and in that field tiny stones had been arranged.

  ‘Is that …’

  ‘Letters,’ Martha realised, for the stones at her feet might, if she squinted just right, spell out the single word:

  HELLO

  ‘I was trying to show them,’ she said as the men behind her took joy in dragging out six feet of underground railway. ‘I’d remembered how Uncle Emil proposed. I thought – why not? If they could understand, they could learn to talk back … If only there was more time, perhaps there could have been a parley, perhaps they might have understood, Uncle Emil isn’t a monster, he isn’t the tyrant they thought he was. Perhaps we could have understood each other, if only we could have talked …’

  Cathy had been crouching. In the garden of one of the crudely built houses she found a minuscule figure, no bigger then the nail of her little finger. She lay it in her palm and brought it to the light: splinters, trussed up and twisted into the shape of a ballerina.

  ‘They were making their own toys …’

  ‘Toys for toys,’ laughed Martha. ‘Maybe one day they’d have learned to wind themselves too. Maybe they’d have woken up, then made toys of their own, even tinier ones, tiny toys out of motes of dust …’

  ‘Maybe they’d have woken up too.’

  ‘And maybe, just maybe, all we are, every last one of us, is a toy brought to life.’

  ‘You’re starting to sound religious.’

  ‘Papa would have liked the idea, wouldn’t he, Mama? Well, wouldn’t he?’

  Cathy lay the tiny ballerina back in the dark, where it surely belonged.

  ‘What are we going to do, Mama?’

  Cathy fingered the ruin, the world where the soldiers used to live. ‘We’re going to wait,’ she said, ‘and we’re going to believe.’

  Papa Jack’s Emporium

  Iron Duke Mews

  18th February 1925

  Dear Mr Moilliet,

  Please find enc. the balance sheets drawn up for the winter season 1924–25. As you will see, the Emporium did not run at profit and will require further hard work to rejuvenate, but rest assured that the work is being undertaken. Next winter will be a triumph!

  Yours sincerely

  Emil Godman Esq.

  Papa Jack’s Emporium

  Iron Duke Mews

  20th January 1926

  Dear Mr Moilliet,

  Please find enc. the balance sheets drawn up for the winter season 1925–26. Might I impose upon you to extend our credit arrangement in anticipation of next season, when we stalwart Emporium few will return our Emporium to the giddy heights of yore.

  Yours sincerely

  Emil Godman Esq.

  Papa Jack’s Emporium

  Iron Duke Mews

  6th June 1927

  Mr Moilliet,

  I am sick and tired of the doggerel I receive through my letterbox and the unannounced visits from your associates at the bank. We are late in our annual accounting. Do you not think I have better things to be doing than totting up numbers that don’t mean a thing? I was here this winter. I know how the Emporium fares. Please find enc. the balance sheets: BLANK because I have TOYS to make and (lest this be forgotten) my business is in making TOYS and not paying LIP SERVICE to a moneylender.

  EG

  Papa Jack’s Emporium

  Iron Duke Mews

  18th June 1927

  Dear Mr Moilliet,

  I received your letter and apologise for mine written in haste. We look forward to your visit and what new arrangements we are able to work out. I remain optimistic that, with a little help, our Emporium will once again be a fixture in London life.

  Yours in gratitude,

  Emil Godman Esq.

  The snowdrops blossomed early in the year of 1928 – and thank heavens for small mercies, for Emil could not stand another day, another night, another customer who looked him bare in the face and said: there used to be such magic. Now he sat on the floor in his papa’s old study, all of the shelves denuded of their books, pages of designs he could barely understand splayed out all around. The chest with a thousand legs had been snapping at him from under the armchair all night, the phoenix (who had refused to leave the room ever since the old man died) was wound down, but watched him nevertheless from its roost in the rafters – but Emil was lost in a world that did not belong to him, searching for a design, an idea, a something that might make it all worthwhile.

  January became February became March and April. All the ideas of Papa Jack’s life came down like an avalanche around Emil. He spent his days braced for the next deluge, holding his breath.

  Sometimes he fell asleep there and sometimes he woke there too. He marvelled at the designs for the first patchwork bears, but when he tried to recreate them they were dull, dumb things with barely a character among them. He unearthed plans for the Foldaway Fortress of 1901, the Door Through the Wall of 1898, the Infinity of Russian Dolls of 1911; he lost a month in hewing a new line of runnerless rocking horse, but the brutes were intractable, refused to take a rider, and had – in the end – to be added to a pyre or dismantled for scrap.

  Sometimes the only time he spoke to another living soul was when Mrs Hornung arrived with his supper, and sometimes not even then.

  He thought it was Mrs Hornung tonight, loitering in the study door with a bowl of pea soup and a hunk of hard bread. That was why, at first, he did not turn around. He was sailing in a sea of books and the blueprint unrolled before him was for a Minotaur, Lost In Its Labyrinth. This one he might even be able to attempt. He was picturing how it might be done when a cough alerted him to the fact that his wife was waiting. She hadn’t even brought supper.

  ‘Emil, we have to talk.’

  ‘I can’t, not yet, not now. It’s in here somewhere, Nina. One of these toys. Something he dreamt up but didn’t see through. Well, we’ll see it through. Who cares if it isn’t mine? Who’ll know? We’ll find a way to make it, every bit as magical as they would have done, and fill the shopfloor.’ He looked up, dewy-eyed. ‘There are still six months until Christmas.’

  ‘Four, Emil.’

  Emil tore at the blueprint, scything it apart with his hands. Four. How had he not known it was four?

  Nina swept the papers off his papa’s armchair and sat down. ‘Do you realise,’ she said, ‘how long it’s been since you read to your boys? How many hours you’ve been down here? Do you realise,’ she went on, punctuating each word with the point of her finger, ‘how long it’s been since you played with your own sons?’

  Emil looked as if he might answer, but Nina quickly cut him off. ‘Three weeks. And before that, five. There they are, upstairs, and … here you are, oblivious.’

  ‘Oblivious? Good God, Nina, what do you think I’m here for? Do you think I want to be here every night, poring through this? Every page a reminder of how useless, how ordinary I am? How witless would you have to be to think I’d want that. I’m doing it for them, Nina. I’m doing it for you …’

  ‘You’re not as foolish as that, Emil. Doing it for me? The Emporium in tatters and your names signed on a mortgage deed? No, you’re doing it for you. Doing it for us would have been to take that offer from Hamley’s. Go and make toys for them and be paid well enough. Staying
here? That’s for …’ She shook her head. ‘You, a toymaker, the best toymaker left in London, and you won’t even play with your own boys.’

  ‘Best,’ Emil uttered, ‘but evidently not good enough.’

  She stood. She dusted down her house dress. She said, ‘I’m leaving you, Emil.’

  There was silence in the study. Emil rose to his feet, with his papa’s designs sloughing off him like a skin being shed. ‘Nina—’

  ‘No,’ she said, and refused to catch his eye as she marched out into the hall, ‘we’ve had this conversation too many times. You’re not a father. You’re not a husband. You’re a little boy, still looking for magic. Well, what about the ordinary magic, Emil? The ordinary magic of simply being a good father. Those boys deserve better. We’re to stay with my aunts.’

  ‘That coven? For my boys—’

  ‘We’ll find our own home, in good course. I have a cousin who has promised his help. It won’t be easy, but at least it can be a start. All of this –’ and she opened her arms, as if to take in Emil, the study, the whole Emporium itself, ‘– it’s a long, slow end.’

  He did not argue with her. He slammed the door and, once his tears were spilled, he marched into his boys’ bedroom and spun them the most fantastic tale, of a dumpy little boy who didn’t know he was a prince, and a magic sword lying at the bottom of a toybox, and a castle that the prince conquered, a heritage that was rightfully his.

  Two weeks later, the boys lined up in the half-moon hall while their mama arranged for their trunks to be ferried to the taxicab waiting outside. They looked smart in their short trousers and blazers, each with a little Gladstone bag at their side. Emil approached each in turn and stiffly shook their hands. To Cathy it looked as if each boy might suddenly bleat out, but whatever they were feeling, they were adept at keeping it in; something, no doubt, they had inherited from their father.

  Nina was back in the doorway, summoning them out.

  ‘Be good for your mama,’ Emil uttered as they filed out into Iron Duke Mews.