The Toymakers(24)

‘No.’

‘And your family, won’t they miss you?’

She wondered what the house was like today, whether there had been presents and celebrations, or …

‘No,’ she whispered, half trying to convince herself.

Somewhere in the conversation, as the first food touched her lips, she felt the baby twirling in unconstrained delight, and, by instinct, her hand dropped to the curve of her belly, to feel for it there. She was aware how tight her stomach felt, was marvelling at the way she filled even Sally-Anne’s clothes, when suddenly something pushed back against her hand. She froze, but the sensation came again – and, when she lifted her hand, she could see it there, pushed up through fabric and flesh, a hand or a foot, the touch of her child.

She felt for it with the tip of her finger. Startled, the baby withdrew. Then, its courage returned. It kicked out again.

In the corner of her eye, she saw Emil tense. In an instant reality returned, the cheering from Papa Jack’s toast reached a crescendo, and when she looked up, Emil was staring at the place where her fingers had been, his face livid as a bruise.

‘Emil?’

‘Why Cathy, surely you can’t be—’

‘Emil,’ she said, and was surprised to hear how easily her own voice frayed, ‘please …’

But now his face was buried in his food; now he could not bear to look. And, inside her, oblivious to its discovery, the baby continued to turn.





STOWAWAY



PAPA JACK’S EMPORIUM, 1907


Consider Emil Godman: the youngest son of a youngest son, born to a toymaker who did not yet know that he was a toymaker, to a man who would one day find ways to invent whole worlds. On Christmas night, if you were the kind of creature to spy on him through a crack in the skirting boards, you would have found Emil in his workshop, tinkering with the toy held fast in the vice. He had been coming back to this toy for many long months, each time unable to make the adjustments that might have seen it taking pride of place on the shop floor. Something to transform the season, something to strike all mention of those Instant Trees from the Emporium record – something, anything, to stand alongside the magics with which his father, and now his brother, were imbuing their toys.

It was a mahogany case, lined in velvet, and when he opened it up it was to reveal a family of mice dressed as ballerinas. He wound them up, daring to believe when the mice unhitched themselves from the contraption and lined up in formation – but, when the music tinkled and the dancing began, everything was wrong. When the lead mouse turned a pirouette, she tumbled into the dancers behind her. When the second held an arabesque, she promptly fell over. When it came time for the climactic move, the whole troop turning their tours en l’air, the result was a chaos of arms and legs and tails, little grey legs windmilling madly in a heap on the tabletop.

Emil whipped them all up and set them back in the vice. He was about to take another turn, but something stopped him. At first, he thought it was his hands, treacherous as they were. He looked at them with fire – for why couldn’t they be the ones plucking magic from thin air, taking the runners off a rocking horse and letting that horse go cantering around the store? Then he realised it wasn’t his hands at all. It was his head. His head was too busy, too clouded with other things. How could he be expected to achieve real magic when his heart wasn’t in toymaking at all? It was the girl. After what he had seen at the Christmas table, he couldn’t stop thinking about the girl …

Christmas night came, and Emil breathed not a word. Boxing Day died, and still Papa Jack had not come knocking at Cathy’s door, demanding to know why she had not told them she was conjuring a baby beneath their roof. Next morning, as the shop hands prepared the Emporium to open once more, there were no whispers in the Palace, no sordid looks from Sally-Anne and the rest. Doubting herself, Cathy ventured to the foot of the Godmans’ stair, thinking she might catch him coming down, but Emil was already out, and soon the patchwork dog appeared to warn her away with its stuffed-pillow barks.

There was a deluge directly after Christmas Day, but the Emporium halls were never as busy again as they had been in December’s earliest days. Cathy worked the register, or took children on rocking-horse rides up and down the aisles while the Emporium stable hands looked dutifully on, and by New Year she was courageous enough to return to the Palace each evening. By the end of that week she was beginning to feel that she was mistaken, that Emil hadn’t really seen what he’d seen at all. In fact, as the second week in January arrived, and with it fresh flurries of London snow, she was finally starting to feel safe. Safety was a feeling that crept up on you. It was not like anxiety or fear. Safety did not descend in a rush, nor seize you in its hands; but here it was, all the same. A secret shared was a secret halved – and Cathy might even have convinced herself to confide in others, to take one of the more seasoned girls to one side and confess, if only Sally-Anne hadn’t sashayed into the Palace one morning, stopped the breakfast revelries (Douglas Flood insisted on playing his fiddle even at breakfast) and demanded everyone’s attention.

‘Time to pack your cases ladies, gentlemen,’ she declared, with a sad lilting tone.

At once, the shop hands understood. Cathy followed their gazes, to where Sally-Anne was now standing, up on the dais. In her hands was a single white flower, the hanging bell of a snowdrop plucked from the Emporium terrace. The thaw had come. This day at the Emporium would be the season’s last.