The Toymakers(109)
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.