The Toymakers(32)
‘You won’t tell Papa Jack, will you?’
Emil puffed out his chest. ‘I’ve never lied to my papa before, but I’ll lie this time.’
‘And … Kaspar?’
On this, he seemed to ruminate for the longest time. ‘Kaspar would know what to do. He always does. After our mama passed on, before our papa came back … well, it was Kaspar who used to catch rabbits for our pot. Kaspar who taught me how to dig for mushrooms. It was Kaspar who told me we had a papa, and that one day he was coming home. Oh, he didn’t believe it himself, but he still told me it, every night. And now …’ Emil came to sit beside her on the bed. Folding his hand over hers, he said, ‘Mrs Hornung has some books. I’ve seen them on a shelf. And Papa has his taxonomies, the anatomies he uses for building his dolls. There must be something in there. And … perhaps it’s best, after all, if Kaspar doesn’t know? Two can keep a secret, Cathy. But three …’
It was on the tip of her tongue to say: you already told him I was pregnant. But then he would know, know that Kaspar had told her, know that it was Kaspar who brought her back here. That did not seem fair. All Emil wanted, all Emil had ever wanted, was something of his own, something he could stand alongside and say: look, this was mine, and I did as good a job as any. So, instead, Cathy squeezed his hand, rested her head on his shoulder and whispered her thanks – while, inwardly, she cursed her lack of courage. Why had her bravery abandoned her tonight? Even the baby, that half-formed thing inside her, was wiser than this.
Before he left that night, Emil gave her a pipe-cleaner bird – the closest he’d ever got, he confessed, to the magics of his father. It fluttered around the Wendy House rafters until all its energy was gone; then it dropped to the floor, where Sirius gnawed on it with relish. Afterwards, she picked up what was left and hid it underneath the mattress. Secrets and lies, she thought. She had thought she was skilled in both, but in truth she was a dilettante; she was going to have to do a lot better.
THE BROTHERS GODMAN
PAPA JACK’S EMPORIUM, 1907
Consider Kaspar Godman. Tonight, if you were the kind of Emporium obsessive who collects a catalogue each year, whose home is infested with silver satin mice, who has saved and saved your pennies in the hope of one day taking a runnerless rocking horse of your own back home, you would have found him in his workshop, unwashed and unkempt as only a man in the throes of passion can be. Only, you would not have found Kaspar Godman locked up with an admirer; you would have found him in a storm of balsam and metal rivets, of paints and lacquers and varnish. Around him would be a half-dozen incomplete boxes, one upended inside another. One would be overfilled with patchwork animals, wound down and piled high. Another would have half a bedstead poking out. Yet another would be splayed open around Kaspar Godman’s waist, as if trying to devour him whole.
The peripheries of the room were couched in the patchwork animals he had tried to make. A mermaid, meant for a good girl’s bathtub, lay half-beached on a shore of wound-down patchwork bears. Kaspar had thought he would devote his summer to making patchwork so lifelike there was not a difference between his and his father’s own, but there was a higher calling and he slaved for it now. He pressed his hands against the innards of the box in which he was standing, thinking he might shift its edges back just one more inch – but the wood began to buckle, the slats came apart, and instead of standing inside his own cavernous vault he stood in a disaster of splinters and jagged shards. Still, he did not abandon his calling, nor lament the world that was doing him wrong. He sat for a while, in the middle of the destruction, and gaped. Even in failure, what a life this was! He picked up one of his joists, slotted the broken shards back together and laughed. What a blissful way to spend your hours, your days and nights, making things up because nothing else mattered!
He was about to take another turn, but something stopped him. At first, he thought it was his hands. They were too tired. His whole body was spent. Then he realised it wasn’t his hands at all. It was his head. What inspiration he had to achieve this, the thing that had first driven him to cobble the slats together and start teasing out the space inside … it was the girl. Down there in the Wendy House, waiting for him to come back; the smile she had given when he stepped into his toybox, the way her face had crinkled, trying to resist her astonishment – and yet, and yet …
What he wanted, most of all, above even beating Emil in the next round of the Long War, was to take a completed toybox down to Cathy and say, ‘Look! Look at this thing I have done! You think it’s only my papa who achieves the most vivid of Emporium magics – well, not any more …’
It was the girl. He realised, now, that he was doing it because of the girl.
By the time he careened across the shopfloor, he was more convinced than ever. Cathy had never made a toy in her life, but she had opened something inside him, some untrammelled desire. Kaspar had never lacked inspiration (no toymaker could have made his paper trees without it) but this was different. He had never lacked shop girls to tell outrageous stories to, nor even to get lost with in one of the Emporium’s many nooks, but this was different too. Being the best had always been important – but only to be the best. Being the best for somebody else, well, that was special …
He stopped as he hit the paper forest. His papa’s Magic Mirror was hanging here, showing some corner of the Emporium storerooms where its sister mirror hung. He stood in front of it, his reflection imposed upon that shuttered room full of boxes, crates, the ranks of twitching skeletons waiting to be draped in patchwork, wound up and released into the Emporium playrooms. He was not, he had to admit, the most handsome sight. He made some attempt to style his hair with the tips of his fingers, straightened his shirtsleeves and the velveteen waistcoat he always wore (it did not do to wear common plaid, not when his work was so important) and proceeded, pausing to pick paper wallflowers on the way.