The Toymakers(123)

Martha peered under the bed, and found nothing. She looked behind the broken door, and found nothing still. Dancing in the light of her own torch, she scurried to the little tin sink and squinted down the plughole – but nothing, nothing, nothing, everywhere she looked.

Then she reared up, with an empty can of bully beef in her hands. ‘Mama,’ she said. ‘He was here.’

The torch arced over the room, illuminating first her mama, nursing what little hope she had left, then Sirius, still snuggled on her lap. Finally, light spilled upon the toybox at the foot of the bed – that plain, unremarkable thing that Kaspar had brought to her almost fifty years before.

Martha rushed to open it up.

‘Mama,’ she breathed.

From the lip of the box, into its unseen depths, a stair spiralled down. Where once there had been cans of bully beef and sardines, jars of new potatoes in brine, now there were polished oak steps, a banister rail of glistening bone. Unlit candles were fixed in brackets to a wall that disappeared in the darkness. Balanced in the first was a book of matches.

‘Mama?’

‘That old fool …’ Cathy said. ‘Oh Kaspar, what have you done?’

‘What has he done?’

In the half-light it seemed that Cathy was smiling. She had to try twice before she could speak, for something was clogging her throat – and to Martha it sounded like joy. ‘He … got better,’ she laughed.

It was dull in the Wendy House. The toy soldiers provided some modicum of company, and across the weeks and months Kaspar had grown used to the silence, but no amount of tutoring them, or watching them discover new things, could keep boredom at bay. Sometimes, he let it smother him and lay in bed for days and nights (though he could not tell where one ended and another began, and never would again), and were it not for the memory of the summer Cathy, his Cathy, had spent here, perhaps he would never have got out of bed again. Cathy had thought this place a prison too … at first. But she was carrying Martha inside her, a whole new world, and when Kaspar remembered that, that was when he knew what he had to do. If the world outside was to be denied him, he would have to make the world within.

The toy soldiers stopped their drilling as they watched their demi-god shed his bedclothes and get to his feet. With his canes he shuffled to the toybox and began to empty it of the tins of seasoned ham, the bags of flour and jars of honey that Emil had crammed inside. Beneath were bags of earth and seedling potatoes, onions with shoots and packets of seed. Emil had provisioned him well, and that was both proof of the love his brother still bore him and evidence of how eagerly he had prepared Kaspar’s cell.

With the toybox emptied, Kaspar lowered himself inside. The place was more cavernous than he remembered, though scarcely the size of a four-poster bed. He basked in the darkness and remembered: that summer, that first summer with Cathy, I barely made six of these. We painted them in bright colours and put the price tag high, but I never went back to them. It was too slow an endeavour – and back then there were other distractions, the ordinary magic more important than the rest.

But now, he thought, what is time? What else is there? And: I did it once. I could do it again. All it takes is to hold the vision in mind. A little push here, a careful tweak there, and things start changing. You have to remember the textures. You have to cast yourself back, back to when you were eight years old and rooms were bigger, your home was bigger, the world itself bigger than it would ever be again. Perspectives, he had told Cathy. It was all about perspectives.

He sat up, at one and the same time at the bottom of the box and peering over its lip. The Wendy House walls were stacked high with other boxes, materials Emil and the shop hands had carted in here that winter they turned it into their secure shopfloor. In there were rolls of felt and bales of wire, reams of crêpe paper and card, pipe cleaners and springs and bags of iron balls: everything a toymaker might need for the greatest creation of his life.

In a crescent around him, the toy soldiers bobbed up and down, as if to ask what he meant to do.

‘My wife once told me that, when nobody else can help you, you have to help yourself. And the world, it can be anything we want it to, if only we can hold it in our heads. So, my little friends, what do we want it to be?’

Papa Jack once taught him that a toymaker needed only two commodities: his imagination and his time. Well, now he had both. I’m going to have to get a lot better, he thought, but there was no time like the present – so, with the wind-up soldiers still watching, he got to work.

Cathy took the book of matches, lighting each candle as she came.

There were seventeen steps before she stopped counting. There might have been seventeen more before she felt the crinkling of cardboard creepers underfoot and, looking down, saw crêpe paper flowers in blue and green, a carpet of blossom and berries as in the depths of some summer forest. Behind her, Sirius stopped to sniff at the crinkling foliage.

At the bottom of the steps the paper was thick and entangled, gone to seed for so many years that the way ahead was a wilderness of briars and thorn. Through it, the narrow stairs became a passage and, beyond that, opened out into a room, a cavern, she could not see. That cavern was forested in cardboard larch, evergreens of tinsel, mighty oaks whose paper trunks had hardened and knotted with the passing generations.

‘Martha?’

She was at her side now, the axe in her hand. ‘I’ll give it everything I have,’ she said, and together they blazed a path forward.