The Toymakers(7)

The boy’s mountain eyes narrowed to ravines, and when he took hold of the gazette that Cathy was holding, they narrowed yet further. ‘Where did you get this?’

Cathy was fumbling a reply when the boy lost himself in a clamour of pages. The newspaper positively exploded around him as he searched for its front page. ‘Leigh-on-Sea? I’m sure we get seashells from … Look,’ he said, stopping dead, ‘you’ve caught us on the hop. It was first frost this morning, which you probably know. Opening night! That means – chaos and plunder, catastrophe and clamour! If you’d wanted a position, if you’d truly wanted a position, you’d have been here …’ The boy seemed to be fighting a battle against himself. Which side won, Cathy could not tell. Stepping back, he fiddled with a latch and the counter groaned open, panels in the wood revolving out of one another at the command of pulleys and gears. As the unit came apart, and only for the briefest of moments, it froze in the air, depicting the perfect image of a snowflake. Then the snowflake fractured to reveal a way through. ‘You’ll have to stay near. If you go wandering, there’s a chance I won’t find you.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Well, you want a position, do you? Then you’ll have to be interviewed. He’s in his workshop, where he always is. You’ll have to come this way.’

Cathy watched him disappear into a doorway barnacled in yet more perfect crystals of snow and pressed her hand to her belly. ‘I’m sorry, little thing. Not much further now.’ And then, with the cries of some pretend battle exploding behind her, she wandered on.

Behind the counter a set of stairs spiralled up to the galleries above. The boy was already puffing his way around the first bend by the time Cathy reached its bottom. Swiftly, she followed after.

The way was narrow. At the first landing he took her out on to a gallery, from which they could look down across the bustling shopfloor. From here: another door, and another stair, a passageway lined with storerooms in between. Each gallery grew into the next, one door opened into an antechamber from which several other halls sprouted – and, though she could have sworn they had not climbed as far, soon Cathy emerged on to a balcony at the very height of the Emporium’s dome. The shop must have grown into the others around it, one of those tricks of London geography that marked it out as a city much older than most, or perhaps it was a trick of perspective – for, from up here, Cathy believed it almost as big as the cathedral at St Paul’s.

The boy was waiting for her at a single heavy door, oak with rivets of grey-black steel. He had already knocked when Cathy arrived, breathless from her travels. Here the walls were banked in hooks and, from those hooks, there dangled the detritus of a hundred unfinished toys. A jack, uprooted from its box, stared at them with delirium in its eyes.

From beyond the door a voice beckoned the boy to enter and, with an almost apologetic look, he tumbled through. From the hall, Cathy peered in. The workshop was illuminated in the oranges and reds of a great hearthfire, its walls banked in aquariums and shelves where the toys of past Christmases peered out.

Nervously she waited, the silence punctured only by the tolling of the boy’s feet. Finally, the footsteps came to an end. She heard something landing, the newspaper being thrown down, and the boy piped up, ‘I didn’t know we still had this thing out.’

And a gravelly voice, as of a bear still sluggish from hibernation, said, ‘It’s always there when we need it there, Emil. You know that. Why, do you not think we need more help?’

‘We always need more help.’

‘Then show her in. Let’s see if she’s Emporium, through and through.’

Soon after, the boy named Emil reappeared. The look on his face was either panic or exasperation. ‘You’ll have to forgive me. They’ll need me on the shopfloor. It’s not as if Kaspar would rush to the helm when the deluge comes. No, he just preens up in his tower, lording it over the rest – and on opening night as well!’ He ran a hand through his hair, as tangled as briars. ‘I’m Emil, by the way.’

He lingered longer, so that Cathy had no option but to say, ‘I’m … Cathy.’

At this he clapped a heavy paw on her shoulder. ‘Good luck, Cathy. And remember, he isn’t as awful as he sounds. He’s … only my father.’

As Cathy stepped through, her eyes took in the bellows and tools, the bundles of dried fabric that hung from the rafters like the herbs of an apothecary. It was only now, her feet crunching through wood shavings and shreds of felt, startled at a family of wind-up mice who scattered as she accidentally upended their nest, that she wondered if she had done the right thing. Running was easy, she decided; but every runaway had to arrive, and arriving seemed the most difficult thing of all.

The workshop was long and narrow, swollen like an hourglass at either end. At its apex, Emil’s father sat in a chair whose arms had been hewn off, so that he could overhang each side. He was a mountain of man – his square head framed by curls of white and grey, his face an atlas of fissures and cracks – but by his eyes he was undeniably Emil’s father. They had paled with age, but across the workshop’s length Cathy could see they had once been as vivid and blue. Now that she saw him, he seemed more like grandfather than he did father. He was old enough, at any rate – or else seemed it. The only thing about him that had any youth were his hands. They were delicately threading ruby feathers into what at first seemed the carcass of a bird. Only as she got closer did she take it for a toy, its hessian hide already thick with crimson down.