The Toymakers(105)
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.