The Toymakers(34)

‘I am?’

‘The way that says, if I wasn’t so charming, you’d have them drag me off to Bedlam.’

She gave him a pointed look and, in return, he roared in unadulterated delight.

Kaspar stayed until midnight, but Cathy had not yet fallen asleep when she heard a different tread approaching through the paper trees. Emil was more reticent than Kaspar; he knocked and waited to be invited within. Cathy rushed to the door and tried to bustle him through – but instead Emil stood, steadfast, on the step between the paper trees.

‘No, Cathy. I’ve come to take you out.’

Cathy looked up. Mottled silver rained through the paper branches from the skylights high above.

‘It’s … midnight.’

‘Indeed!’ Emil declared. ‘A midnight … feast.’ And, on stepping aside, he revealed the picnic hamper he had been hiding. It sat squarely on the roots of a paper oak, opened up to reveal breads and preserves and all manner of other splendid concoctions.

Cathy needed no further temptation. She followed Emil through the trees and on to the shopfloor – but it was not until they came through the atrium at the Emporium’s entrance, past the knights errant and the rocking-horse corral, that she realised they were not really going out at all. Now that she thought of it, the very idea was preposterous. Emil outside these Emporium doors was more of a nonsense than Kaspar. He simply did not belong. Far better that she follow him through the insectarium, along an aisle where a patchwork menagerie waited, gathering dust, for next winter – and on into a depression of land where the aisles pivoted apart.

‘There used to be places like this all over the shopfloor,’ Emil explained, ‘but they get retired or they get moved around, and sometimes, if you don’t keep up, you get to forgetting where they are. They get trapped behind aisles, or somebody builds a bridge over them, or the toys are placed in such a way the eye rather glances over the spaces in between. Me and Kaspar, we used to call them the Sometime Dens, because they’re only ever there half of the time. But they’re perfect, don’t you see, for just not being seen …’

There was a picnic blanket already lain out, in red and white chequered squares. Emil led Cathy down, guiding her as if past imaginary holes in the earth, and invited her to sit.

‘May I?’ Emil began.

Cathy nodded.

Emil opened up the hamper so that the moonlit picnic could begin. After the plates, knives and silver spoons, he produced a pair of chicken legs, roasted to perfection, a loaf of golden bread, a slab of butter that positively gleamed. There were bunches of grapes and quarters of cheese, an apple tart hidden beneath a lattice of shortcrust pastry. The sardines in the glass jar looked the most delectable of all, but it wasn’t until Emil produced the jug of lemonade that Cathy realised none of it was real.

Her eyes caught Emil’s. ‘Please,’ he said. ‘Just play …’

She picked up a bunch of painted grapes. They seemed almost good enough to eat. The adult part of her knew they were only orbs of wood, but another part could smell the crisp sweetness of the vineyard. The longer she held on to it, the more the feelings intensified. Just to test it further, she picked up a tiny teapot and pretended to pour a cup. The aisles that surrounded them fell away, she heard the tinkling of teaspoons, the drone of a dragonfly in the pristine parkland that now seemed to exist on the very edges of her vision. She could smell cake, buttery and rich with vanilla, though the only things beneath her fingers were paper and painted wood.

She put the grapes and teapot down and the parkland evaporated. Suddenly she was back on the dusty shopfloor. ‘It’s … incredible, Emil. Did you make all of this?’

She looked up. While she had been engrossed, Emil had got to his feet. A few scant minutes ago his face had been open with pleasure; now he prowled the edge of the picnic blanket like a scalded dog.

If she had expected Emil to be heartened by her words, she was sorely disappointed. He simply picked up the cake, looked at it with disgust, and tossed it into the empty hamper.

‘I’m sorry, Cathy. I so wanted to give you a good day out. But … play a little longer, you’ll find ants in the sandwiches. Storms in the sky.’

She ventured a grin, hoping it would dispel some of this madness. ‘Then you’ve captured the experience of almost every English picnic there’s ever been …’

If Emil appreciated the joke, he did nothing to show it. He began to pack the hamper away, hands shaking in fury at the uselessness of a pinewood boiled egg. ‘It isn’t real. The feeling isn’t right. Every cut I make, every little polish, it just slips further away. It starts out sunny and ends up with a storm. Why is that always the way?’

‘You’re too cruel to yourself, Emil. I could taste the cake.’

Emil lost himself in the mania of packing his creation away. ‘I’m working so hard, Cathy. But Kaspar …’

‘What of him?’

‘It’s those toyboxes of his. Why couldn’t I …? Why didn’t I …? If he perfects it by winter, Papa will be so proud.’

Cathy sighed, trying hard not to let her exasperation show. ‘Does it matter?’

‘You don’t understand. Papa, he’s … not a young man. Sometimes it seems like he never was. But he won’t make toys for ever. And when he stops … well, the Emporium, it has to belong, doesn’t it? There has to be a Papa Jack. What if …’ Emil lost his words; perhaps this was a fear to which he had never given voice. ‘What if he decided that, because Kaspar’s toys …’