The Toymakers(56)

‘I’m the one who tried, aren’t I? I’m the one who went out and tried to do my part, while you all sat here just talking about it. And now you dare to stare at me like this, like I’m some … some coward? Is that it? Well, I’m sick and tired of being the odd one out in this Emporium! I’m sick and tired of being overlooked. I tried and—’

His anger had carried him so far but now his words were failing him. Another tortuous silence threatened, until Cathy – who had never liked seeing Emil squirm – ventured, ‘Oh, Emil. You tried to sign up.’

So that was why he had come storming back into the Emporium this morning, unable to look her in the eye.

‘I did,’ Emil breathed – and, now that his valiant feat was acknowledged, he sank back into his seat. ‘But what would you know? They wouldn’t have me. Asthma, they told me. A weak heart. They’ve said I should find a physician. Well, I’ve more heart than any of you. I tried, didn’t I?’

Sadly, he spooned in the last of his pudding.

‘This morning, pig’s blood sprayed all up the shopfront. You might have thought they’d brought that pig, kicking and squealing, and cut its throat there and then.’ Rage was infectious; now Mrs Hornung seemed to be purpling herself. Cathy touched her forearm, as if to soak up some of the anger, but instead she started to feel it too. ‘It’s a shame you didn’t make it, young Emil. Somebody ought to give those bastards – there, I said it! – filled with their fear and hate something to think about. Show them all foreign born aren’t to be reviled. Why, they’ll come here and play with your toys one winter, then come to vandalise the next. Well, we ought to be showing them, we’ll stand up to be counted – and not because we’re English, because we’ve no need to be. Because we’re people.’

Emil had finished his suet pudding but continued to scratch at the bowl.

‘Mealtimes are not for fighting,’ Papa Jack began. ‘There is enough warring outside these walls to make war among ourselves. Emil, you are my son and I love you. Today you surrendered a part of yourself. That they sent you back here does not diminish the trying.’ He paused, clasping Emil with one of his mammoth hands. ‘But you are right, dear Mrs Hornung. I have longed to make the Emporium apart from the world – but we are, and will always be, a part of the world. This morning proves we are not forgotten. And they will come again.’

‘We need to do our part,’ said Mrs Hornung, repeating it like a petition.

‘We must,’ said Papa Jack.

There was silence. For a time, nobody could look at Emil. They kept their faces buried in their bowls. Then, when it was not enough to ignore his anguish any longer, their eyes seemed repelled, moving as one along the length of the table, past Papa Jack, past Cathy, past Mrs Hornung, to its other end. There sat Kaspar, engaged in a suppertime skirmish with Martha (his salt cellar was advancing on her fortress of interlocked knives and spoons). Until now he had pointedly been ignoring his brother’s disgrace, for a look from Kaspar could have turned Emil’s rage incandescent. Now he looked up, to see his family staring back at him. His face opened wide, in dumb realisation.

Cathy curled up, Kaspar around her. Small as she was, she fit perfectly inside the arc of his body.

‘How are we going to tell her?’

‘We’ll tell her her father is a brave, brave man.’

‘She’ll miss you.’ Cathy paused. ‘I’ll miss you.’

‘Don’t think I haven’t thought the same. I’ve spent almost every day with you since I shuttered you up in my Wendy House, Cathy. It isn’t the Emporium that’s my universe. It’s you. Of course, they may not take me yet. They may find a weak heart …’

‘Oh,’ Cathy sighed, ‘please.’ Then, more seriously now, ‘You don’t have to do this.’

But I do, thought Kaspar – and, as soon as he thought it, the idea solidified around him. Kesey and Dunmore, Douglas Flood and John Horwood, they were already part of a battalion, the Artisans Rifles, and they were in training, or they were over the water, out in the world. Those last words, out in the world, transformed the way he was thinking. ‘Do you know,’ he whispered into Cathy’s ear, touching it with his lips, ‘I always wanted an adventure. It used to be that sneaking out of the Emporium in summer was enough. But I think back on that journey we made with our papa, over the oceans with a man we barely knew, and – for all the wonders in the Emporium aisles, was anything as adventurous as this? I’ll be gone mere months. I wouldn’t even miss first frost. I could be out there, with those Emporium boys, and back by opening night. Perhaps – perhaps this is the adventure for now?’

Cathy turned in his arms, to face his naked chest. ‘You’ll write.’

‘I’ll write. The most florid, extravagant letters a wife ever received.’

She held his hand, searched for the simple wedding band there.

‘And keep it on you always, no matter where you are or whatever you do.’

‘Until I die,’ he whispered.

Sirius was at the foot of the bed. He let out a disenchanted moan.

Daybreak found Emil in his workshop. If he had cared to look in the mirror this morning (he did not, for fear of the man who would be glowering back), he would have seen his eyes bloodshot and red. If Papa Jack, Cathy or any of the rest had pressed him on it, he would have told them it was exhaustion, and the evidence of that would have been piled up around him – for last night toy soldiers had sprung out of his lathe like a plague, and the red on his fingertips was the residue of the paint he had used to dress them in their finery. But he would have been lying. For last night, Emil had ventured into the Emporium attics, those great antechambers where whole childhoods are stored away, and unearthed the first games he and Kaspar used to play. Crude toy soldiers and their three-legged mules; maps they had painted across which they fought the first battles of the Long War; a spinning top that Kaspar had given to Emil that first Christmas they were English boys, its edges grooved so perfectly it hummed a lullaby as it spun. It was spinning now, up on the shelf above his worktop, spinning beside the Imperial Kapitan. It had been spinning all night and, though there was no magic in it, not like the toys Kaspar now made, still Emil kept seeing memories manifesting themselves in the edges of his vision: he and Kaspar gambolling through the empty Emporium, the first morning their papa took the lease on the place; he and Kaspar, kindling a fire together, that night they got lost in the shifting aisles and couldn’t find their way back.