The Toymakers(110)
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
LONDON, AUGUST–NOVEMBER 1953
Consider Catherine Godman: older than you remember her, though you remember her well; greyer, more lined than she was when she first saw the Emporium lights, but still the same girl you followed up from her estuary home, into an upside-down life of mystery, memory and magic. Tonight, if you had crept through the empty Emporium aisles (as so few do these days), you would have found her at the desk in her daughter’s old room, and on the scratched surface in front of her two torn letters, salvaged from the bins where her old friend Emil had thrown them away. Three hours of painstaking recreation, of glue, ink and masking tape, was all it took to piece those letters back together. And if you had lurked there on her shoulder, you too might have seen what Cathy herself saw: one letter the notification of Mr Moilliet’s retirement from his position at Lloyd’s bank, and the appointment of a Mr Greene as his successor; the next, from Mr Greene himself, declaring a full audit of the Emporium records, surprise at the lenience with which his predecessor conducted affairs, an immediate suspension of all credit extended to Papa Jack’s Emporium and a demand for all extant payments to be made good, under threat of foreclosure.
If you had been particularly canny (as we know that you are), perhaps you would have seen what Cathy saw last of all, the thing that brought the first tear to her eye – for in the corner of the letters, the date read April and, on the calendar on the wall, the date read August. There had always been secrets aplenty in Papa Jack’s Emporium, but perhaps none as devastating as this. Emil had known what was coming all summer long.
Because this is how the world ends: not in the falling incendiaries of an aerial attack, not in a storm of toy soldiers laying waste to the gods who brought them into being, but in the banal letters of a bank. Where once was magic: now only economics.
Yes: consider Catherine Godman. We have followed her all this way. We must follow her a little further yet.
Papa Jack’s Emporium closed its doors for the final time on an overcast day in the August of 1953. There was bitterness to the wind that day and, as Cathy left the store by one of its manifold tradesman’s exits, she stopped to fasten her overcoat and thought: well, that was a life. Then she toddled off to catch a bus.
It had been some time since she was last alone on London streets. The city was bigger than she remembered. It was more colourful too – and, as she fought for a seat on one of the crowded buses, she got to thinking that here was one of the reasons the Emporium had finally closed its doors; for if there was such extravagance to be found on an everyday London street, what place in the world could there be for a shop grown so drab and ordinary after the glory days of its youth?
The bus took her past the green splendour of Regent’s Park, through the elegant porticos of St John’s Wood and north, before depositing her upon the Finchley Road – where, finally, she stood outside a simple redbrick terrace, distinguished from its neighbours only by the monkey puzzle standing in the garden. Here she checked the address against the notebook poking out of the top of her day bag. Satisfied, she knocked at the door.
‘Mama,’ came a voice as the door drew back.
‘My little girl.’
‘I’m so glad you found us. Lemuel’s been berating me all morning for not sending a taxicab – but then, he doesn’t know you like I do. I told him: she’s my mother, and she doesn’t need a fuss. She’d find her way through the Arctic.’
Figures had appeared in the hall behind Martha: three little ones, all lined up, and behind them the beanpole that was Martha’s husband. Cathy had seen him so rarely, the rocketeer who had met Martha at the Washington embassy where she worked and allowed himself to be swept off his feet. He had the same figure as Kaspar once had, his hair swept back in the same lovingly bedraggled manner.
‘Mrs Godman, it’s my pleasure to see you again.’ His accent had hardly softened since the last time they met; he still spoke as if he was up on the silver screen. In time, she would learn it was an affectation, meant solely to delight his children; now, it took her by surprise. ‘Why, Mrs Godman – is that all you’ve brought?’
Cathy lifted the day bag on her wrist and nodded. ‘I have need for so little, Lemuel.’
‘And yet – only this, for an entire life?’
Cathy stepped inside. The house – her new home, she reminded herself – smelled faintly of gingerbread and peppermints. A little bowl on a sideboard was filled with bonbons. ‘I should enjoy a pot of tea, Martha dear. It already feels like the longest day.’