The Toymakers(68)

There is secret history to this. Nina’s brother, Emil tells us, perished at the defence of Muscat. Their grandfather has interests in Arabia and had been tutoring his grandson there when hostilities were declared. He served bravely as an officer, at only twenty-one years of age, and lost his life in that service. The tragedy has hardened Nina to what she wants from life. This, she knows now, is our brother Emil. She has spent the last weeks in cleverly disguised misery that the end of the season might be the end of their relations. Now she will stay with us all summer long and be welcomed to our Emporium famille.



Cathy sent the dispatch expecting a reply as soon as Kaspar opened the journal, but by fall of night none had come. She lost herself, that morning, in joining Martha for her lessons; then, in the afternoon, they threw themselves into the brave task of accounting for the winter’s takings before the man from Lloyd’s arrived for his annual account. When no reply had come by fall of next night, the fear she had been holding at bay finally broke through. Now she stood on the threshold of Papa Jack’s workshop, wondering whether she dared venture in, if what she was about to say might tear apart his world.

At last she found her courage, marched into the workshop – and there Papa Jack slept, his phoenix on his shoulder, Sirius curled up at his feet. He looked so like Kaspar when he slept and something in the image soothed her. She slunk back to her quarters alone, looked in on Martha as she too slept, and lay back in the marital bed.

In the morning, letters reeled across the journal page:

Cathy, please forgive my silence. I am delighted for my brother and wish to fill these pages only with good tidings and salutations for Emil’s future wife. I know I will find my home much changed when I return to you. But I can keep the truth from you no longer. I am writing to you from the base hospital at Arras, behind the line. But Cathy – I am alive.



It was the way Kaspar’s hand had trembled upon writing that final line, causing the letters to tumble uncontrolled across the page, that stopped Cathy’s heart. She sat upright, raced to read on.

By the time the snowdrops had flowered on the Emporium terrace, Private Kaspar Godman had become Lance Corporal, with the Emporium shop hands and a group of other men under his command. Spring had brought with it the thaw that closed the Emporium doors, and it was this same thaw that returned Flanders to open war.

Cathy, they came for us. We had long thought it was coming and waited, each night, for the horns to sound. But when it finally happened, they did not send men. They sent great reefs of gas, ghosts to do their bidding. When men set their minds to it, they accomplish the most terrible things.



Kaspar had not been on the line on the day the gas first came, but he had watched from behind as the French soldiers staggered through. Some had run, cascading out of the little hamlets they had taken oaths to defend. Others, too trusting or too defiant to understand, had stood their ground. But battle could not be fought against an enemy invisible to the eye, and hundreds had perished there, amid the budding leaves of spring, before any had understood what was happening. Kaspar had watched the ambulance wagons flowing, like a line of ants, into the west.

And I wondered, Cathy, how many men made it to their beds, or how many were left in the dirt along the way.

Across the next days there were gaps in the line, which men raced to defend, but always that same dirty yellow on the horizon, or the reef breaking through a line of blasted trees. Sometimes, you could see them coming through the smoke, the shapes of those German boys in black. They were stripping what they could from our fallen boys. And I tried to hold on to what my papa said. My men and I were sent to hold a copse of willow at the Salient’s deepest point and I was telling myself: they played with toys too. Yet, when the gas came and I saw their shadows loom, it mattered not at all that they had rode on rocking horses or thrilled at tumbling skittles, not when I saw what their gas had done to Andrew Dunmore’s lungs. I fired and fired and fired.

I was at the clearing station before I started coughing up blood. And now here I am. Arras is not so far from the line, and yet the streets still stand. Ypres is a ruin, but the ruin is ours. And yet, can it be that my body itself has been conquered? The physician tells me I have my heart, I still have my stronghold, but the salient around me is withered. It is a strange feeling to be weak. But I am alive, Cathy. Isn’t that a thing?



Cathy lifted her pen to reply, but her fingers had no grip, and her blood was beating so fiercely that she thought she would better run to France and hold him in her arms than write a single word. She was composing herself when she heard Martha’s voice at the door and the girl scrambled in, meaning to lose herself in the hugs and kisses with which every morning began. Cathy embraced her, slipped the journal beneath the bedsheets, and thought: he’s alive, he’s alive, he’s alive … but for how long?

Across the next months, the missives flew back and forth between the sleeping Emporium and the base hospital at Arras. Kaspar’s recovery was slow. Cathy charted it in how often he wrote, the steadiness of his hand. Summer had already come, and plans for Emil’s wedding were in full swing, by the time she saw a change in him. His letters grew long, he was writing in the thick of night, and the passion with which he wrote was evident in the way his pen pressed against the page. Kaspar was energised as she had seen him only once before, that summer when he was first learning to make caverns inside his toyboxes – for, stranded in Arras, co-opted by nurses and orderlies to help ferry around patients more critically wounded than himself, Cathy’s husband had returned to his old vocation.