The Toymakers

by Robert Dinsdale

  As they left, Cathy put an arm around Emil and he shrunk into her.

  ‘They’ll be back, won’t they, Cathy? Once the Emporium lives again. Once the Emporium thrives. Then I’ll be able to instruct lawyers. I’ll bring all the wealth of the Emporium to bear. And then, then, then they’ll be here, playing in these aisles, just like it’s meant to be …’

  1929. 1930. 1931.

  Pursuant to the Births and Deaths Registration Act 1874

  Death in the sub-district of Westminster, London, United Kingdom of England and Wales

  ~

  Kaspar Godman, b. May 24th 1888, foreign national

  d. January 12th 1931, in absentia

  Male, 43 years, by his own hand

  ~

  Certified to be a True Copy of an entry in the certified copy of a Register of Deaths in the District Mentioned Above

  Cathy was rigid as she folded the paper and pressed it back into the envelope. She thought she might let it flutter down over the Emporium in a tiny thousand pieces, just like that confetti snow they used to be able to afford.

  Lurking unshaven behind her, Emil bided his time before he spoke.

  ‘We had to observe it, Cathy. You understand, don’t you? If they make the Emporium mine by the deeds, Lloyd’s will start lending again. Mr Moilliet’s made me a promise. They couldn’t possibly lend to a man who’s been missing so long – but, now that they can, well, we can get things back to the way they used to be. You and me, Cathy. Together we can do it.’

  Cathy handed him the paper.

  ‘I won’t believe it, what they’ve written there.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Emil, ‘you won’t have to! As a matter of fact, I –’ he floundered, some memory of his brother no doubt flurrying up ‘– won’t believe it either. But it’s only paper. It doesn’t have to be true. You and me, we can believe what we want to believe, just so long as there are customers at Christmas and the cloud castle’s floating on air, just so long as there are festivities on Opening Night …’

  Papa Jack’s Emporium

  Iron Duke Mews

  16th October 1934

  Dear Frances (wrote Cathy; and then, on a separate leaf: Dear Sally-Anne),

  It has come to that time of year again when we look to first frost. Some nights I feel it in the air and I know you will be waking every morning too, looking for that telltale crust of white that has for so long told us our winter has begun.

  But I have news, and believe me when I tell you that this is a letter I had hoped never to write. Papa Jack’s Emporium will indeed open at first frost, but we will not be inviting our shop hands to return. This winter Emil will labour in his workshop while Martha and I alone work the shopfloor. It is the slow creep of the ages, which you have seen with your own eyes. We have sold the very last paper tree from the storerooms. All of the patchwork animals are gone, and what dogs and cats and sheep and bears Emil makes now are no more magical than the ones they engineer in any other toyshop in London town; and twice as expensive to boot. We have boxes of bric-a-brac and Emil is not short of new designs, but the wherewithal to produce them en masse evades us, and we rely so heavily on credit from Lloyd’s that shop hands this winter are a luxury we cannot afford.

  Do not think lowly of me, for I have fought the cause and lost. Try not to think unkindly of Emil either, for it is the ledgers that have beaten us, not the man. Should the stars shine on us this winter, should Emil stumble upon some flight of Imagination so striking that it might draw back the crowds we once had, I will write that same moment. I will tie missives to pipe-cleaner birds and cast them from the terrace into the London skies.

  How I will miss you this winter, and for all the winters to come (she crossed out this latter; then, for Sally-Anne alone, she added: You told me once that I should beware of the Godman boy. I think, now that I stare my middle-age square in the face, that it would not hurt my pride so much to admit you were right! I love you Sally-Anne and hope I will see you again.)

  Yours for ever

  Cathy

  Cathy set down her inkpen and added the letters to the pile. There was only one more left to write. This she composed with the greatest sinking feeling of all. ‘To Whom It May Concern. Please consider this letter as recommendation of Mrs Evelyn Hornung’s abilities as nanny, housekeeper, bookkeeper and all else besides.’ She thought to add ‘friend’ and ‘confidante’, ‘Keeper of Hope in Darkest Times’ and even ‘mother, when I had no mother of my own’, but wanted to spare Mrs Hornung the blushes. She would give it to her at the last moment, when she stepped off through the Emporium doors, and would hope that the guilt lasted no longer than it must.

  She was on her way to post the others when she passed by Martha’s open door and saw her studying at her desk. Cathy had quite lost track of what this correspondence course might have been, no doubt one of the Latinate languages with which Martha spent the long summers – and, not for the first time, Cathy felt her pride in her daughter like a barb in her side. There wasn’t a language on the continent that Martha didn’t know (Mr Atlee, God rest his soul, would have been proud), but in these vast, cavernous halls, this latter-day Emporium, there was not a person she might speak to.

  Cathy hovered in the doorway, watching her write. Then she stepped nervously within. She had not planned for this, but as she approached she knew that this was right.

  ‘Hard at work, little one?’

  Martha had been hunched over her typewriter, an old toy repurposed from the stores. In capital letters across the head of the page were the words THE TRUE HISTORY OF TOYS and, below that: Martha Godman.

  ‘I thought – somebody ought to tell it. Even if there’s nobody left who wants to listen, it should be written down somewhere, so it’s never forgotten. Not just Papa and Papa Jack, though I’ve written them too. But … the soldiers, Mama. We shouldn’t forget the soldiers.’

  If Martha could have recreated them, taken any two toy soldiers and set them to wind each other up, triggered thought and idea and imagination all over again, she would have done it in a second. Sometimes, Cathy thought, that was why she learnt her languages so diligently – for Martha had never been able to do that thing she had dreamed of, and start conversing with the toy soldiers themselves. She had kept the copy of Gulliver like it was a totem. It stood, dog-eared, up on the shelf.

  ‘I’ve written the letters,’ Cathy said, sinking to the end of the bed. ‘They’re not coming back. All of those shop girls, even Mrs Hornung, they’ll have to find their own places now. And Martha …’ She hesitated, steeling herself. ‘… so should you.’

  Martha was silent.

  ‘You’re twenty-seven years old. Always my little girl, but twenty-seven years old. It’s young enough to start again. You, with all your languages, all of that thought. It mustn’t go to waste, waiting here with your mama. You mustn’t go to waste. You might be at the Foreign Office. You might be translating works of great literature. You might be writing your own. You might be … prime minister, with a mind like yours.’

  ‘A shop girl like me.’

  ‘A shop girl like you.’

  For a time, Martha returned to THE TRUE HISTORY OF TOYS. ‘I won’t say I haven’t thought of it. But to leave you here, in this … museum. This … mausoleum …’

  Cathy took her hand. ‘Running away isn’t like it is in the stories, little one. Most of the time you aren’t running away from monsters or villains, not even from memories like the ones we have here. Those things are hardly worth running from, because they’ll always catch you up. No, most of the time you’re running from that little voice, the one in there, telling you to stay where you are …’

  ‘I’d wanted to wait with you, Mama, to wait for him to come home.’

  Cathy whispered in her ear: ‘Your father wasted his last years not living. Don’t waste yours. Live, little one, for us both. It’s what Kaspar would have wanted.’

  Cathy went out on to the shopfloor and from there out into London town. Regent Str
eet was a bustle. Carriages became ensnared at the Oxford Circus while the sky, so cerulean blue, turned overhead. It would be lonely without Martha. But there would still be Emil. There would always be Emil. And loneliness needed company, even though that was still loneliness of a sort. So when, some time later, Emil came to her with the idea of turning off the power in half of the quarters and, in that way, saving a little money to make the Emporium last a little longer, it did not seem so very strange that they should drag the single beds out of the storerooms and move into Mrs Hornung’s old chambers together. It did not seem so very strange that, without Mrs Hornung and with no Martha to care for, Cathy should take to cooking meals for them each night. And if a customer come shopping tipped his hat to ‘Mr Godman, Mrs Godman,’ as he passed back through the Emporium doors, there was no need to tell him that they were not husband and wife. You did not correct your customers, not if you hoped (not if you needed) them to come back.

  One year.

  Two years.

  Three years.

  Four.

  ‘We have to find some way to bring back children,’ Emil said, locking up the shopfloor on a cold winter night. ‘Have you noticed it isn’t families who come any more? Now it’s just grown men who used to come when they were boys. Mothers bringing their children, when it used to be children bringing their mothers …’

  The path of nostalgia, thought Cathy, narrowing into regret.

  1937. ’38. ’39. ’40.

  The blast woke her. That one had been close. She reached for the nightlamp at her side, thought better of it, and ran with her head bowed low along the hall, up the stair to the place where Kaspar’s workshop used to sit. Emil, who had been somewhere on the shopfloor, was not far behind. They crashed into the toybox together and slammed shut the lid.

  It was dark in here, the comforting dark, the dark that made the world seem such a faraway, dreamlike place. Cathy waited for the next reverberation.

  A voice spoke to her in the darkness. ‘Cathy, are you hurt?’

  ‘It was close. Not Iron Duke Mews. Oxford Street? The Circus?’

  A succession of smaller conflagrations, somewhere on the other side of the city. The sounds reached out to them through walls of wood, the imaginary air.

  ‘It’s an all-night one, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Cathy, ‘I’d imagine it is.’

  When the bombardments first came they hadn’t known where to hide. Emil spoke of erecting an Anderson shelter in the heart of the shopfloor, but the Emporium had cubbyholes aplenty, cupboards beneath its manifold stairs, hollows in the walls where the toy soldiers had once built their doll’s house worlds. Beyond the Emporium doors, London’s terrified were flooding into the Underground, but the thought of rushing there, beneath a sky marked with the comet trails of sparring aircraft, was reason enough to stay behind. It was hunkered together in Martha’s old closet, the carnival etchings of the Long War all around them, that Cathy first remembered the toybox. Ten years ago they had sold the few Kaspar once made to a collector, and in that way bought themselves a few more months without the fear of Mr Moilliet’s letters, but this one had always remained: unpainted, half-finished, propped on its end in the corner of his workshop.

  Emil had brought a night light. He fumbled to strike a match and, a moment later, the walls were alive with an incandescent display. Then, as if recognising the solemnity of the occasion, the shadow figures stopped dancing, wrapped their arms around one another and waited out the bombardment.

  For a long time they alternated between silences and concern about the other. Emil asked Cathy if she was frightened; Cathy asked the same question of Emil. Emil said he was grateful that Martha was gone, off to the Americas with her husband, because at least she did not have to live through this. Cathy said she was grateful Emil’s boys were training as doctors, because at least that meant they might be excused the fighting; at least that meant they might not come back as Kaspar had, all that time ago.

  The Emporium shook. The world turned on its axis. Somewhere, somebody’s life was opened up; somebody else’s, taken away.

  Emil said: ‘I’m so glad you’re here, Cathy.’

  And gently she said, ‘There’s nowhere else I’d be.’

  Emil stuttered as he next spoke, forcing his words into the snatches of silence between the falling bombs. ‘Perhaps I’m a foolish old man, Cathy, but … you’re the person I’ve known the longest, in all of my life. After Papa went, after Kaspar – it’s always been you, Cathy, you for more than half of my life. Ever since that summer, when we were young, and everything was good … Do you know, we’ve been longer like this than we ever were with Kaspar? You and me and our little Emporium.’ He stopped. She was staring at him, voiceless, in the dark. ‘Aren’t we married, Cathy? Oh, I know it’s not that and I know it’s not …’ His words came apart. ‘But marriage, of a sort. Well, aren’t we?’

  Another explosion echoed in the Emporium. What the toy soldiers might have made of this, thought Cathy. They would have charged out of the skirting, believing their Long War had returned.

  Her eyes were on Emil. He seemed close now, closer than the walls of the toybox compelled him to be. He lifted his hand, dropped it again – and when he found the courage to lift it again, she almost took it in her own. His eyes were cast down but all she would have to do, all it would take, was a word and they would rise up again. She might have reached out to him, touched her fingertips to his, and both of their worlds would have changed.

  Instead she curled her fingers into her palm. How long had it been since she felt human arms wrapped around her? Seventeen years since Kaspar, seventeen years since that night he had fallen into her as if for the very first time. And yet, the memory of it remained – just like the memory of how the stars had glittered that night on the seafront, or how the paper trees had risen as he rushed her into the Wendy House walls, or how deranged he had looked as he goaded her through it, pushing Martha out into the world. All of these, a thousand other memories, all of them entwined: the big and the small. The ordinary magic (why was it always those words?) of a husband who loved his wife and was loved in return.

  ‘Sometimes I can still hear him.’ She was only really aware she had spoken when Emil looked up; her voice was soft, subsumed in the sirens. ‘It’s when I’m sleeping, or when I’m lying there, dreaming of sleep. I hear him in the walls, like we used to hear the soldiers – only it isn’t him, not really, it’s just the memory of him, the ghost of a ghost, refusing to leave. Or I’ll wake, even now, and wonder if all my life has been a dream – because what else could it be, me and Kaspar, you and this old Emporium? There are nights I’ll hear the things he said to me, or the things I said to him, as if the Emporium captured them, like that old music box of his, ripping me out of the bed where I’m sleeping and casting me back there, where I might be waltzing with him in the paper forest or chasing Martha in those longboats around the cloud castle moat.’ One night she had felt his arms close around her but when she opened her eyes she was alone, with only Sirius to keep her warm. In the morning, she thought: I should run now, run away like I ran once before. But his ghost was in the toyshop, and though a heart still beat in her breast, so was hers; both of them haunting the aisles where they first met. ‘I can feel him now. Can’t you? Crouching here, in his toybox, in space he chipped out of the world himself. That’s how I know …’

  Emil mouthed the word, ‘Know?’, his question turned into a mime by the echoes in the earth.

  ‘Know that he’s gone. That Kaspar’s dead.’

  The shriek of some falling incendiary, the din it made as it made fountains out of some nearby alley, drove them back against the walls.

  ‘Cathy, don’t …’

  ‘It took me an age to see it. Years and years to admit it to myself. But if Kaspar didn’t die, if he isn’t at the bottom of the Thames or swept out to sea, well, how can he haunt this place like he does? No, Emil. If he didn’t die that night, he died the day after. I know
that now …’

  Whatever Cathy said next was lost to the sound of brick shearing from brick, of a street opened up to the sewer beneath. The toybox shifted, Emil plunged against Cathy – and then they were toppling, each entangled in the other as the toybox and all the world it contained crashed down, down, down …

  Somehow, even in spite of the ringing in their ears, the sirens sang louder now. Somewhere, there was the smell of smoke.

  In the morning, standing upon the ruptured cobbles of Iron Duke Mews, Cathy and Emil looked up at the Emporium edifice, its uppermost storeys open to the world just like the doll’s houses that once lined the aisles. Through the shifting reefs of black she could spy the charred timbers where the flames had ebbed away, the terrace where the snowdrops would never flower again. It was a wonder such a place as Papa Jack’s Emporium had ever existed; it seemed so tiny from without, so ordinary: just bricks and mortar, like any of the buildings around; and, like any of the buildings around, it was not built to last.

  The fire engines were still at the end of the mews. Some of the ARP and fire wardens had shopped at the Emporium once. They had come here as boys to play the Long War or imprint themselves upon patchwork beasts. Now they gazed at it with a kind of despair. This was not just the ruin of a building, Cathy thought, but the ruin of memory itself.

  Emil took Sirius into his arms, shivering as he stood.

  ‘How are we going to come back from this, Cathy?’

  Cathy said nothing. She too was staring into the open Emporium, at the place where Kaspar’s toybox still teetered over the precipice and the wind kept snatching charred pages from the books he had filled with his designs, his ideas, his imagination: the very essence of Kaspar himself. Up they went, up and ever upwards, turning into a thousand blackened fragments as the wind bore them over the rooftops until, at last, they were gone.

  1940. ’41. ’42.

  MANY MORE YEARS LATER …

  THIS ORDINARY WORLD