The Toymakers(82)
To Kaspar the answer was so banal there was no point in asking the question.
‘I want you to grow up.’
‘I deserve more than that, Kaspar. Well, Cathy, don’t I? You fought your war, but I … I kept our Emporium afloat, didn’t I? I did it in the only way I knew how. And my soldiers, they’re … everything.’ He had started out softly, but now his voice reached new heights. ‘The Long War is our best-selling toy. That’s what boys want. Soldiers to put on their shelves and think of their fathers. Little tin tanks that can roll up and down on their tracks. Cavalry and artillery wagons. Boys come here for them. Girls too. They take them home and collect them and make battles and come back for more. The Emporium might have sunk without you, Kaspar. Papa slowing down and you gone for so long and … give me one reason, just one, why you’ve any right to waltz back here and end it all!’
Kaspar levered himself to his feet, refusing the offer of Cathy’s hand. When he spoke, white spittle flew from his lips. ‘Haven’t you ever thought how it might feel? Two battalions of these things, all wound up and marching at each other – and then they fall down, and get picked back up, and have to do the whole thing all over again, dancing to somebody else’s tune. These soldiers don’t get a choice. It doesn’t end for them, Emil. They don’t even get the sanctity of death.’
‘Kaspar,’ Emil said, more softly now, trying to cross the expanse between his brother and him in awkward, stuttering steps, ‘you’re home now. They’re only toys. They can’t feel.’
The look on Kaspar’s face was incredulous. Emil might as well have told him there were no stars in the night sky, that their mama still lived and walked among them. ‘Didn’t Papa teach you anything?’ he asked – and there they stood, each one staring into the other, while on the shopfloor beneath a hundred disappointed voices began to make themselves heard.
IMAGINARIUM
PAPA JACK’S EMPORIUM, 1918
Dawn, and the aisles of Papa Jack’s Emporium lay in wild disarray. Had you been there that night, had you crouched on one of the galleries and peered through the rails as Martha Godman did, you might have thought that the crooked servants of London’s ordinary toyshops had come to lay the Emporium to waste. But had you looked more closely, you would have seen two familiar figures toiling in the gloom: Emil and his wife Nina, whirling together in the Long War glade as they tore open every box, shredded every soldier’s wrapping and set them to march. Now, in every corner of the glade, toy soldiers shook hands and agreed an armistice, rather than raise their rifles or even march on. As the dawn’s first light spilled over the cloud castle turrets, waking the patchwork pegasi from their roosts, Emil sank to his haunches and laughed, laughed in wild despair.
‘Pack them all up. Wake Frances Kesey and all of the rest. If one of these soldiers leaves the Emporium today, the shop hand who sells it is finished.’
Nina went to console him, and for a moment Emil let himself be smothered in her arms. Then he took off, into the darkness of the untended aisles.
Follow …
Up, up and up; Emil Godman might have run ungainly, but he could run when he needed to. Into the shadows of mammoths, through the log piles where paper trees had been felled; patchwork dogs and cats watched him from their enclosures; the runnerless rocking horses stopped grazing in their corrals and wondered at his flight. After a long night’s labour, Emil was too tired for the endless stairs, so he clambered into a dirigible balloon, heaved its tethers out of the earth, and soared up, up, up into the dome above the shop floor. From the gallery rail, Martha watched him hurtle past, then lost him in the reef of mist on which the cloud castle sat.
By the time he reached the Emporium terrace, he was quite out of breath. Great billows of white curled through his nostrils as he burst on to the rooftop where his papa’s garden spilled out of chimneypots and terracotta, rising up through dislodged tiles. From here you could see the world. A single snowflake pirouetted down to land in the hair of Emil’s naked arm.
Snowflakes, snowflakes all around – but, of snowdrops, there was no sign.
Chest burning, he crouched down, pressed his fingers to the earth. He was searching for colour, for a speck of green, anything that might convince. The bulbs were down there, down where they hid all summer long. And if there truly was magic in the Emporium, if this thing they called magic existed at all, then surely it would call itself forth now. Surely a snowdrop would rise from the earth and open itself to reveal a perfect bell of white.
But no magic came for Emil. No magic had ever come for him at all.
He pressed his fingers through the frost-hardened earth, delved down until the dirt grew thick in his fingernails, riming the creases of his hands. It was, he realised with a sense of revelation, delicious to be doing something so … untoward. He risked a look over his shoulder, but in the Godmans’ quarters all was still. Then, back to his task, his fingers found what they were looking for. He pulled his hand back, trailing a snowdrop bulb and all of its roots. It had already started to shoot, struggling for the surface.
Now that the crime was done and all his adrenaline spent, Emil hurried to hide the misdeed. He flattened the earth beneath his boot, scraped the soil from his hand and hurried inside. Perhaps Mrs Hornung would notice the boot prints he left behind him, but she would not say.