The Toymakers(116)

But we are going to need some help.

That night, Cathy put the children to bed with another tale from THE TRUE HISTORY OF TOYS and, on turning out the lights, met Martha on the stair.

‘Mama,’ she said, ‘I was worried about you.’

Mindful that the children might hear, Cathy ushered Martha down the stairs. ‘Don’t be worried. Don’t be afraid. I’m a sturdy old thing, remember?’

‘For a moment I thought – what if they were real? Real in the way we’d understand it, Mama. But of course, they were only toy soldiers …’ She smiled. ‘The Emporium never leaves you, does it? I’ve been halfway around the world and back, but it doesn’t go. Sooner or later, bits of it start appearing.’

‘You might as well try and escape your own heart.’

For a time there was silence on the stairs.

‘It made me think of him,’ said Martha. ‘Oh, never a day goes by, of course, when he isn’t there – but sometimes he’s more there than others. Seeing his soldiers …’

‘Those weren’t your father’s soldiers, Martha, my love. They were Emil’s. Just plain, ordinary Emil’s, of the kind we used to rely on, once upon a time. A simpler time.’

Cathy drew close to plant a kiss on her daughter’s cheek. ‘Sleep tight, my little Martha.’

Martha said nothing until Cathy was halfway back up the stairs. Then, into the silence, she called out: ‘I miss him, Mama.’

Cathy stopped.

‘Do you ever wish you had one of his music boxes? Remember those dainty old things? You could turn its crank handle and be back there, and there he’d be.’

It was a question to which Cathy had devoted the better part of her life. She tightened her robe against a sudden draught. It was funny how talking about it could play tricks upon your senses. She almost felt as if she could hear the same scuttling in the walls that had disappeared along with her husband.

‘Never,’ she whispered. ‘I loved your father as much as anything else on this earth – but if I had one of his music boxes on my bedside, why, I’d take a hammer to it this very night. If Kaspar was here and in our lives, I’d want him as he is now, every last scar of it, all the things you can see and all the ones you can’t. Because the thing your father knew better than any of us, Martha dear, is still true: the past is the past; you can’t ever go back.’

The bedroom had a draught too. Cathy checked that the window was closed and watched for a time as the clouds parted, revealing the inky blackness and arcing stars above. A clear night: the kind of November night that might, once upon a time, have heralded first frost.

She was happy for Sirius that he had the children to play with, because there would come a time, soon, when she was gone the same as Kaspar. But toys? Toys lived on.

She woke in the blackness, propelled out of a dream. It was the thought of the soldiers, the visit from Harold Elderkin, those stolen moments with her daughter on the stairs. In her dreams they had been marching again, and she wasn’t sure where toy soldier ended and soldier of flesh and blood began.

It was a Kaspar dream, and for decades those dreams had been the worst.

She rolled over, wishing Sirius was here more than ever. She closed her eyes, willing sleep to return, but soon she realised that the dream hadn’t ended. She could still hear that terrible scuttling in the wall.

Cathy screwed her eyes tighter. She screwed her eyes tighter still. She drew the covers up and over her head, a little girl afraid of monsters, and still she could hear the scuttling.

All it had taken was one little sight of them. All the walls she had been building, all the ways of keeping the devastation at bay, they were all falling clean away.

Kaspar had once told her that she was brave but she did not feel brave tonight. She felt like the lost little girl she had never been – and, oh, how she hated it …

Kicking off the bedsheets, Cathy got to her feet. The scuttling was louder now, louder than ever, but hot milk would chase it away. Hot milk and hot tea and, yes, she would tempt Sirius to come back through, if only for one night. The children would understand. A patchwork dog’s loyalty was an inconstant thing …

She was at the door when the scuttling reached its zenith.

Then: silence.

It was the silence that stilled her. She had grown used to the nightmare but, now that it was gone, a different kind of dread seeped in. Her body was telling her to turn, but she did not want to turn.

She turned.

For the first time, she realised that the noises had been coming from only one section of the skirting, the gap between the bedside cabinet and the fireplace where her wedding portraits still hung. Down there, the skirting was in shadow. The scuttling had stopped – but now there was movement, movement down there in the gloom.

She crouched, peering downwards. This time she was certain. The skirting board was shifting. It trembled at the edges, a thin seam appeared where two boards had been whitewashed together, and out popped the little tin tacks holding it in place. Then, with the rattling ferocious in the cavity beyond, the skirting board tumbled outwards, landing in the deep pile of the rug.

A myriad of black shapes rushed out of the cavity. Cathy staggered backwards, the candle she had been holding tumbling to her feet.

Out of the skirting, a battalion of wooden soldiers streamed on to the carpet. They came three abreast, until there were twenty, thirty, forty of them all milling on the floor, the keys in their backs slowly winding down. Before Cathy had caught her breath, long before she had formulated a rational thought, they were swarming towards her.