The Toymakers(17)

Cathy might have let her nerves get the better of her and fled there and then, if only Sally-Anne – tall, with flaming red hair and fiery eyes to match – hadn’t appeared out of the haze and thrown her arms around her shoulder. ‘Rapunzel is out of her tower!’ she announced. ‘Make room!’

Sally-Anne’s laughter was infectious. Soon Cathy was being swept across the room and deposited in a seat, where Joe Horner (who worked the production line, replicating Emil’s toy soldiers) and Ted Jacobs (who once trained hounds for the shooting at Sandringham, but now put patchwork dogs through their paces before they could be sold) provided her with food and wine and meringues of the most intricate design. Too used to a diet of toast and stewed apple, the baby inside her started to turn cartwheels of delight. Cathy had to take her first bite just to barter its silence, for she was certain the shop hands would notice the way her body squirmed in response.

‘I’m sorry I’ve been so … locked up. You’ll know how it is. First season nerves.’

‘No apology needed,’ Sally-Anne declared, ‘but you have catching up to do. This,’ she declared, urging an older man, comprised almost entirely of beard, to the table, ‘is Pat Field. He’s one of Papa Jack’s first woodworkers. He prunes and prepares all of the logs from the Forestry Commission. And this is Vera Larkin. She’s a seamstress, touching up the ragdolls. And this – well, this is Ted. He’s with the patchwork dogs.’

‘Blithering things they are as well,’ Ted said as, around him, the rest made their hellos. ‘It’s as well you weren’t here last Christmas. Papa Jack, he can make almost anything with his hands, but you just can’t get loyalty in a patchwork dog.’

‘There were complaints,’ Sally-Anne butted in, as if laying a taunt at Ted.

‘Little boys upset their new toy would only play with their sister. A patchwork Dalmatian, of all things, who took a shining to some old fella’s next-door neighbour and wouldn’t stop howling at the walls. Why, three Christmases ago, I was up and roaming Battersea on Christmas Eve itself – one of his hounds had gone feral, started running with a pack of street dogs down there.’

‘Ted,’ Sally-Anne interjected once more, ‘isn’t good enough at his job, you see.’

Ted looked as if he might summon up a spirited reply, but instead he slumped into a seat, pulled the stopper from a decanter of what Cathy took for brandy, and poured himself a generous measure. Moments later, as he stared into the fire, a bundle of velvet and rags unfolded itself from a basket and scrabbled to get into his lap. ‘And these cats aren’t up to much either!’

‘How are you finding our little Emporium, Cathy?’

‘Little?’ she exclaimed. Her eyes had already taken in the extent of the Palace; perhaps she was mistaken, but it seemed another trick of perspective, or whatever it was that opened up the Wendy House down in the paper trees. ‘Why, I don’t think I’ve seen a fraction of it …’

‘And you won’t,’ Ted chipped in, ‘not this season at any rate. Midwinter’s barely a week away and how long will we have after that?’

‘How long?’

‘Until the thaw,’ Sally-Anne explained.

‘Then it’s drawbridge up and us shop hands out on our ears.’

Cathy froze; even the baby had stopped tumbling inside her. ‘You don’t mean to say …’

‘What is it Papa Jack always says? A toy shop’s trade is in the dark winter months … Yes,’ Sally-Anne went on, ‘it’ll be back to the boring life soon. Reckon I’ll find myself cleaning dishes in Bethnal Green. Douglas Flood can go back to – what is it, Douglas? Understudying at the Old Vic?’

Up on the dais, the boy named Douglas set down his fiddle (though it played on without him) and said, ‘Vaudeville. I’ve a mind I’ll chance my arm in the music halls.’

‘Well you’d best be taking that fiddle with you. I’ve heard you try and play a—’ Sally-Anne stopped, for a shocking paleness had spread across Cathy’s face. ‘Cathy, are you … Is it the food?’

‘No,’ she said, ‘not the food,’ though the way her stomach was revolting made her certain she was going to be side. ‘If I may … Might I be excused?’

‘Excused?’ somebody baulked. ‘Lor’, girl, you’re not at mama’s table any more!’

Just as well, thought Cathy, and reeled as she got to her feet.

‘Oh Cathy, come on, you’ve hardly eaten …’

She was unsteady. She caught herself as she made for the wardrobe door. Sally-Anne was at her side, but Cathy pulled herself through alone. Halfway through the storerooms she stopped to catch her breath, looking back to see Sally-Anne standing, a question given form, in the wardrobe door.

Lives turn on an instant, just as they are made. There was no going back. There never had been, not since the moment she set foot out of the back door. But if there was no staying – if there was no long summer in the Emporium, no place for a mother and child, well, what then?

The approach of Christmas only intensified Cathy’s terror of what might happen when the Emporium closed, but the invitation that came on Midwinter’s Eve pushed those thoughts to the back of her mind. It had been lying in an envelope slipped beneath the attic door when she returned at the end of the day, and Sally-Anne – who had followed her up from the Palace, soliloquising on the Herculean good looks of Jon Mosby, brought in this winter to wrangle the runnerless rocking horses – was already perched on the end of the bed, pontificating over its contents. There was so little privacy to the room that Cathy could not stop her from seeing. The envelope was sealed with scarlet wax, imprinted with the emblem of Papa Jack’s Emporium – a single tin soldier of unquantifiable rank – and inside was a piece of golden card: