The Toymakers(106)

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.