The Toymakers(76)

‘Where is he, Mama?’

‘Go to the shopfloor,’ Cathy whispered, forcing a smile. ‘They’re going to need all the help they can get.’

Cathy took off, through the cluttered workshop and up the servants’ stair to the quarters above. She had hoped to find Kaspar in the bedroom – but he was nowhere to be found. She checked every cranny before she returned to the workshop below. She was hurrying through when she recalled the forest green toybox from the summer Martha was born. There it sat, crammed between two crates of cast-offs and a bale of satin lace. The lid was askew, hinting at the darkness within.

Cathy heaved it aside. Being one of the earliest Kaspar had made, it had always been the smallest of the toyboxes. From the lip, she could see Kaspar lying six feet below, seeming to cringe from the light.

‘Kaspar. My love. It was only the bugle. It’s to be opening night.’

Kaspar rolled; for a moment Cathy thought that he was fitting, but it was laughter that rattled his body. ‘Mrs Godman, you must think me awfully strange.’

Cathy remembered a conversation of so long ago. ‘Awfully sentimental, perhaps.’

‘Aha!’ sighed Kaspar. ‘Well, there you have it. For, if a toymaker cannot be sentimental, who on this blasted earth can?’

Tonight, the heavens inside the Emporium were laid bare for all to see. As the doors opened and the first families flocked in, constellations exploded above them. Stars were born, died and re-formed. Angels of light galloped through the blackness, a heavenly host was picked out in cascades of paper, and, as the swirling mass settled, the outlines of toys could be seen, gazing back down. Here was the constellation of the Patchwork Dog; here, the Imperial Kapitan and his loyal wind-up soldiers. It was snowing across the Emporium and cheering erupted in every alcove and aisle.

In one of those alcoves, grasping Martha by one hand and Cathy by the other (and with Sirius, loyal as ever, sitting at his side), stood Kaspar. His eyes pointed upward but his body was quaking. As the snowfall broke, his trembling slowed down.

‘Is it good, Papa?’

A night of falling stars, of explosions in the heavens. More magical than any other opening night – and yet, these things, they were not so out of the ordinary for Kaspar.

He was still trembling as he said, ‘They put on a good show. I couldn’t have done it better myself.’ But then he broke free of both their hands and stepped into the aisle, where the first customers were hurrying through. It had been all women last year; women and their children. Now there were others: a cripple on his crutches, a gentleman who wheezed with every breath. No wonder they were drawn back, thought Cathy. After everything that had happened, who wouldn’t long for the time before?

‘I should like to see some toys,’ said Kaspar. ‘There’s so much I’ve missed.’ And Cathy, thinking that a good thing, let him drift on.

Cathy had much to attend to, for most of the shop hands, three seasons old, still needed her to cluck around them like a mother hen. Martha, meanwhile, was determined to keep watch. She followed him at a distance, pretending to peruse shelves whose contents she knew by heart.

Kaspar headed first for the carousel, and next for the corrals where the children were riding rocking horses with wild abandon. Kaspar recognised some of these horses, but many others had been crafted since he left. Martha watched him clamber on to the one she called Black Star, the king of all rocking horses the Emporium had ever made. He rode for some time, eyes screwed against an imaginary wind, before he clambered out of the saddle and wandered on.

Sometimes he got lost. Aisles had been torn down, reassembled and torn down again – and he took to asking Sirius for directions, following wherever its nose led. And that was how, some time later, Kaspar strode into the glade where boys were playing at war.

A dozen skirmishes were being played out across the carpets. Gangs of boys crouched around what toy soldiers they had scavenged from the open boxes, wound them up and let them go. Tiny bugles sounded, wooden bullets flew, and all at once images raked across Kaspar’s eyes: the first time he went up and over the top, the time he battled Emil in the bedroom while the new shop girl, mysterious Cathy Wray, watched on. How energised he had been then! How in awe! Now, he was compelled to look the other way. The battle cries were too insistent, too loud. He cringed and found himself looking, instead, at a tower of cardboard boxes, decorated by an expert hand. The stencils across the sides were surrounded with a weave of Emporium soldiers in interlocking design. The words read: THE LONG WAR.

He had made an industry of it, then. While Kaspar discovered real war, Emil brought their game to the world.

ADVENTURE! the box declared. GLORY!

YOUR COUNTRY NEEDS YOU!

Kaspar turned away. There was a cabinet of other toys behind the tower and, hoping to distract himself, he picked one up. It was another of Emil’s creations; he could feel it in the weight and heft of the piece. Touching its crank handle, he felt the axle meshing with the mechanism inside.

Against a diorama of crosshatch hills and skeleton trees, tin soldiers were presented on spikes, as if peeping out of their foxholes. When he turned the handle, the soldiers rose, swivelling as if to bring their rifles to bear. Then, because a toy could only ever capture a moment in time, the soldiers retreated again, back into the safety of their dugouts, bound to repeat the same manoeuvre over and over: never seeing real battle, but never going back home. As Kaspar turned the handle for the third time, he heard, as if in the distance, the horns of war begin to sound, a single trumpeter turning into a chorus. A fourth time, and the edges of the aisles filled with sporadic bursts of tiny artillery fire, the miniature thunder of cavalry stampeding past, the alarm call of whistles and officers bellowing at their rank and file. Kaspar did not look up from the toy but, as he turned the handle again and again, the borders of the shopfloor fell away, the shelves dissolved into a blasted battlescape of trenches and barbed wire. It was then that the terror hit him. The rational part of him knew that he was safe, that it was only a game, the toy working on his imagination as toys are meant to do, but it was not the rational part of him in charge of his fingers. They kept turning the crank, solidifying all that he could see. And then he was back there. Back where his fingers were grimed in scarlet and black. Back in his uniform, with pieces of his second lieutenant’s brain smeared across his face. His ears were full of the sounds, his nose was full of the smells. He screamed and screamed and screamed.