But now, he thought, what is time? What else is there? And: I did it once. I could do it again. All it takes is to hold the vision in mind. A little push here, a careful tweak there, and things start changing. You have to remember the textures. You have to cast yourself back, back to when you were eight years old and rooms were bigger, your home was bigger, the world itself bigger than it would ever be again. Perspectives, he had told Cathy. It was all about perspectives.
He sat up, at one and the same time at the bottom of the box and peering over its lip. The Wendy House walls were stacked high with other boxes, materials Emil and the shop hands had carted in here that winter they turned it into their secure shopfloor. In there were rolls of felt and bales of wire, reams of crêpe paper and card, pipe cleaners and springs and bags of iron balls: everything a toymaker might need for the greatest creation of his life.
In a crescent around him, the toy soldiers bobbed up and down, as if to ask what he meant to do.
‘My wife once told me that, when nobody else can help you, you have to help yourself. And the world, it can be anything we want it to, if only we can hold it in our heads. So, my little friends, what do we want it to be?’
Papa Jack once taught him that a toymaker needed only two commodities: his imagination and his time. Well, now he had both. I’m going to have to get a lot better, he thought, but there was no time like the present – so, with the wind-up soldiers still watching, he got to work.
Cathy took the book of matches, lighting each candle as she came.
There were seventeen steps before she stopped counting. There might have been seventeen more before she felt the crinkling of cardboard creepers underfoot and, looking down, saw crêpe paper flowers in blue and green, a carpet of blossom and berries as in the depths of some summer forest. Behind her, Sirius stopped to sniff at the crinkling foliage.
At the bottom of the steps the paper was thick and entangled, gone to seed for so many years that the way ahead was a wilderness of briars and thorn. Through it, the narrow stairs became a passage and, beyond that, opened out into a room, a cavern, she could not see. That cavern was forested in cardboard larch, evergreens of tinsel, mighty oaks whose paper trunks had hardened and knotted with the passing generations.
‘Martha?’
She was at her side now, the axe in her hand. ‘I’ll give it everything I have,’ she said, and together they blazed a path forward.
Under the trees the briars grew less wild. Here there were trails and places where the trees had been coppiced, and in the roots the spoor of some animal. Something startled above them: the goldfinches of pipe cleaners and golden brocade that were roosting above.
A patchwork rabbit darted across Cathy’s path. She followed it with her eyes – and there, in the shadows between two cardboard elm, it looked back. Perhaps it was only her imagination, but its eyes seemed to pinch in imitation of a human’s surprise, before it turned tail and zigzagged back into the forest.
After that, more rabbits came. One, chewing at the petals of some felt flower, birthed a tiny kit, which took one look at the interlopers and hurtled for cover.
‘Mama,’ Martha whispered, ‘look …’
Together, their eyes turned upward. Through the lattice of branches, the sky seemed closer than ever. Unable to resist, Martha lifted herself into the nearest elm. There, she reached through a canopy of crinkling green – and felt the touch of the sky, a blue wall against her hand.
By the time she returned to the forest floor, Cathy had already gone on ahead. Somewhere, Sirius yelped in fright – and Cathy barrelled forward, until she chanced upon a clearing. Here was the place the forest met the sky, and surely the outer limit of the toybox. Nestled against the wall stood a cottage of imitation stone, cotton wool smoke billowing out of its chimney.
Cathy was standing outside its picket fence. Patchwork hens clucked around a coop, and in the trees a great wolfhound opened one lazy eye to consider them, then closed it to snooze once again.
‘Mama,’ Martha ventured, ‘mightn’t he …’
Cathy said nothing. She squeezed her daughter’s hand, and walked into the cottage.
Inside, there were only boxes – two dozen and more, lined up around the cottage walls, with paper grasses growing up in between. Martha and Cathy opened each one, gazing within. Inside lay new worlds, and nestled in them more worlds still. A great galleon lay beached upon the sand, with patchwork parrots nesting in its sails and troops of patchwork monkeys screeching from the jungles inland. Across icebound taiga, herds of embroidered reindeer outpaced the mountain tigers that stalked them, and beavers made dams out of paper spruce and fir. A miniature railway crossed a lunar landscape, populated by little green men.
‘Oh Papa,’ said Martha, ‘he lived a life …’
So many lives, thought Cathy, but where to begin?
It had taken them some time to catch up, but finally the Imperial Kapitan led the toy soldiers into the cottage. Cathy helped them on to the lips of the toyboxes, so that they might peer into the new worlds within. She was watching them sally in and out, seemingly inspecting each frontier, when she realised that Sirius was whimpering. He had been following a scent in the dirt and now he had risen on his hind paws, scrabbling at the lip of a toybox crammed in behind the others. Cathy moved toward it. The box was of a simple design – and there, on its lid, a single scarlet arrow, in florid design.
‘This way,’ she smiled.
The way in was a mountain ravine, with the bones of prehistoric patchwork bears littering the way – but soon they emerged into the box’s interior, where a rainbow arced across what Cathy took for the sky. On a cliff face above them, words were carved into imitation stone. Cathy read them to herself, each word a prayer. ROBERT KESEY, read the first. ANDREW DUNMORE. DOUGLAS FLOOD. JEKABS GODMAN, PAPA JACK. The names of every other Emporium shop hand lost along the way.
Onwards they went, beneath the memorial stone as high as the sky. Fields of incandescent flowers, like the sparklers of a bonfire night, dropped down toward the shores of a vast lake: streamers of crêpe paper in blue and green, with cross-stitch fish leaping from the waves and gulls, borne up by tiny balloons, hovering above. Cathy stood on the sand and looked across. In the heart of the lake rose an island, and on that island a tower of stone. There was only one window in that tower. Halfway up, firelight crackled, ringing the window in orange and red.
‘There’s a boat,’ Cathy said, and pointed to a coracle moored against a narrow jetty. ‘Come on …’
Together, they stood over it. ‘There’s only room for one, Mama.’ Martha looked down. The toy soldiers were already marching aboard. ‘And some tiny passengers, perhaps.’
Martha remained only to help her into the boat, Sirius diving into the paper waves alongside, and released her from the mooring. Then, determined to rescue the toybox from ruin, Martha returned to the flowers on fire, the cottage and forests in the world up above.
It was a slow journey over the lake; the paper waves moved sluggishly, and tendrils of satin seaweed seemed to anchor her down, but there was a current to the water and, by accident or design, it was drawing her to the island. Cathy could do nothing more than lie back and whisper in Sirius’s ragged ears, while the Imperial Kapitan stood on the coracle’s rounded prow and raised his rifle at every leaping fish.
Soon, she felt the quaking of the earth and stepped out of the coracle, on to a new shore of shale and confetti sand. The steps leading to the tower were weatherworn and she took to them carefully, allowing Sirius to venture ahead.
There were no nerves as she reached the tower. The door was nondescript, nothing more than a tradesman’s entrance, and up close the white walls seemed scored in lines, as if the paper had been folded, smoothed out and folded again. She stepped into the interior, but all was serene. A stair of ivory white beckoned her on.
She stopped only once as she ventured up. Sirius was eager to continue the climb, but through a door Cathy saw a room much bigger than it had
any right to be, and in it a model village of magnificent design. Farmhouses and fields, no bigger than the doll’s houses of the Emporium shelves, surrounded a bustling market town of churches and steeples, butchers and grocers and libraries and schools. A model railway ran a circuit through the houses – and, on every street corner, wind-up men and women, no longer painted as the soldiers they used to be, strolled (not marched) up and down.
As she was watching, painted eyes looked up and found her. Soon the whole town was flocking her way. In the fields of paper wheat on the fringes of the farmland, the windup host gathered. At Cathy’s side, the Imperial Kapitan appeared with his fellows, took one look at the miracle that lay before them, and surged out to meet friends not seen since an age long forgotten. Soon, they were mingling with their brethren. There would, Cathy supposed, be much learning to do; the new arrivals would have to be demobbed. But, for now, they were allowing themselves to be led. A town crier was flinging his arms in circles and the town was falling into formation.
Beneath her, Cathy read out the words.
HE IS WAITING!
Sirius yapped, but Cathy needed no encouragement. Her old bones did not feel young as she returned to the stairs, they still creaked and complained as they had grown used to doing, but there was a new feeling now. Perhaps this was the feeling of being rewound. She took flight. On the next storey, the halls were empty. On the storey above, only old crates and rolls of unused felt. But now she could feel the flickering of the fire she had seen from afar; its heat touched her, luring her on.
She stopped before a wooden door, the only thing of any colour set into the ivory walls. She did not knock, because she did not need to. She pushed it open.
The workshop was small, with a fire and a worktop and a single chair. He was lying back in that wooden throne, a mess of hair and tight white beard, with his head lolling forward. His hands, which had once been so smooth, were mottled in blue, with nails like yellow horns, and they twitched in his sleep, drumming out the pattern of some old dream.
Cathy stuttered forward. She did not know where to stand. Having no such compunctions, Sirius lolloped forward and tasted his fingers with its darned-sock tongue, then lay down to curl at his feet, the thrumming of his motor like a contented purr.
Cathy stood above him. For the longest time, she watched his chest as it rose and fell. She was aware, dimly, that the tower had shifted, the sky through the window seeming askew, and wondered (without really caring) whether Martha was moving the toybox, even now.
He opened his eyes. God, but they were glacial blue. How the years had changed him, and how they had kept him the same. He looked like her Kaspar, inhabiting the body of his father.
His lips came apart. Perhaps it had been decades since he had last spoken, for his voice, when it came, was as coarse as freshly felled wood.
‘Miss Wray?’ he croaked, scarcely able to believe.
‘Kaspar,’ she breathed, ‘I thought I told you to stop calling me that.’
She fell into his arms.
They demolished Papa Jack’s Emporium, Purveyors of Childhood Delights, on a winter’s day in the December of 1953. If, like me, you had been there to see it done, you would have stood in the falling snow surrounded by so many others, seen the walls come down and the dust rise up, and thought it the very end of enchantment.
But you would have been wrong.
Come north with me now, past the green splendours of Regent’s Park, through the elegant porticos of St John’s Wood and north, to a little house off the Finchley Road. Take your shoes off at the door, creep past the kitchen where Martha Godman’s children are putting the finishing touches to toys of their very own designs while their patchwork dog watches curiously on, and come up the crooked stairs. Here, in a chamber at the very top, sits an ill-hewn toybox, rescued from the Emporium on that last November night. Inside it are worlds too many to be imagined, and two old lovers making new ones every day.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I extend my sincere thanks to all of this novel’s early readers and champions: Maggie Traugott, Celia Hayley, Euan Thorneycroft, Elliott Hall, Geoffrey Dinsdale, Sophie Lambert, and of course Kirstie Imber; thanks too to all of those who provided moral support along the way, especially James Clegg and Susan Armstrong.
Last but not least – no book is written in isolation, and I am indebted to Gillian Green and her team at Del Rey for steering the good ship Toymakers on, and for all the enthusiasm and editorial support along the way.
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
Epub ISBN: 9781473551602
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Del Rey, an imprint of Ebury Publishing
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Copyright © Robert Dinsdale, 2018
Robert Dinsdale has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This novel is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental
First published by Del Rey in 2018
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9781785036347
The Toymakers Page 39