The Toymakers(70)

CHILDHOOD’S END



DOLLIS HILL TO PAPA JACK’S EMPORIUM, SEPTEMBER 1917


After all this time, Cathy could not get used to riding in a hansom carriage. In her heart, she supposed, she would always be a tram girl – but life, like almost everything else, rolled constantly on. This morning, when she stepped out of the carriage, she felt so ostentatious she could not keep her cheeks from turning crimson. It was not right to come to a place like this dressed in finery, nor to have arrived in so cavalier a fashion.

Dollis Hill House had been built to a grand specification and had lost little of that glamour in the century since. A resplendent farmhouse with whitewashed walls, it looked out across the manicured wild of Gladstone Park. This far out of London the approach was flanked by willows in russet leaf. Some of the convalescents were tending to the estate’s empty flower beds and, as Cathy began the long approach, they turned to watch her. Makeshift wooden huts, like the barracks she imagined Kaspar had once called home, had been erected in a horseshoe along the farmhouse’s eastern flank.

The sister was there to meet her. Her name was Philomena and she was the daughter of a local teacher, one of those who had been instrumental in initiating the hospital fund back when the war began. That had been three years ago, though the hospital only opened its doors in 1916. ‘We only had twenty-three beds at the start,’ Philomena explained as she took Cathy into a dimly lit reception area, once the farmhouse porch. ‘Now we have seventy-three, and every one of them taken.’

And every one of them needed, thought Cathy. ‘My sister is a nurse. She’s in Dieppe. It’s only through her that we knew. It’s hard to put in words but, after a little time, my husband stopped writing at all …’

It had been a slow process. It happened in stages. One week between missives, then two, then three and four. Once his letters had been long and florid; then they were short, perfunctory things. It got so that he said almost nothing of his days – and that was when Cathy knew for certain that he was in some kind of hell, trapped there, alone, all of the Emporium hands gone from this world and Kaspar left as officer of a group of young boys, some so young they must still have thrilled at trips to the Emporium each Christmas. She had told him, once, that he must never lie to her again, so instead he drew within himself, wrote letters with silly, nonsensical verses for Martha, or wrote not at all. Three summer months had passed without a word when the letter arrived on the Emporium doorstep. It was Martha who had brought it to her, sobbing even before the envelope opened; Cathy had wanted to sob too, for a letter from Arras certainly meant her husband’s death. Instead she had found a hand she had almost forgotten: the delicately practised hand of her sister:

Cathy, forgive the brusqueness of this note, but I write on a matter most unexpected and no less urgent. As you know I have been stationed in Dieppe these past months. Two months ago I made an exchange with a nurse close to the line, whose nerves demanded she be relieved from the front. In this capacity I have been nursing in the base hospital in Arras. The work is relentless, the hours long, and perhaps if it was not this way I would have known sooner. But there is a face here you would know well. He awoke from his injuries one week past. I believe he even recognises who I am.

Cathy, you must prepare yourself. He has suffered. But …



Sister Philomena was disappearing into the twilight of the hospital interior. Coming out of herself, Cathy hurried after.

‘Tell me, have you come far?’

‘London.’

The Sister paused, as if the information did not tally with what she had been told.

‘Please forgive me,’ Cathy explained. ‘We only discovered my husband was here three days ago. My sister wrote that he would be repatriated to England, but that was all. One of the other convalescents penned us a letter when he arrived here, but it took some time to find us.’ The envelope had said EMPORIUM and nothing more, the manic scrawl of a soldier come back from Reims, where – or so he professed – his body had been made an offering to the fire.

‘I see,’ Sister Philomena said, and Cathy was grateful when they drew to a halt outside the door of what had once been the farmhouse study. ‘The doctor will see you now.’

Through the doors sat a physician who Philomena introduced as Norrell. He was a small man, and when Cathy stepped into the study he was buried in reams of papers. After studiously finishing the final leaf, he looked up and said, ‘Take a seat, Mrs Godman.’

‘I should like to see my husband, if it pleases.’

‘And I shall take you to him soon. Lieutenant Godman isn’t going far, but first there are things we ought to discuss. Please, Mrs Godman. If the lieutenant is to return home with you this day, and he’s professed no resistance to the idea, it’s important that you understand.’

What was there to understand? Kaspar was coming back to the place he belonged. Papa Jack’s Emporium had been waiting for him for three long years.

The look on Norrell’s face compelled her to sit.

‘When did you last see Lieutenant Godman, Mrs Godman?’

How she wished they would stop calling him that. Lieutenant Godman, as if he was anything other than the wild-haired boy who had secreted her in the Wendy House all summer long. Anything other than the man who had spent Midwinter’s Eve of five years past painfully recreating a lost bear in spider silk and fur, so that Martha would not miss it on her pillow when she awoke.