The Toymakers(92)

‘Thank you? Thank you, Cathy? Do you know, you were better in his absence as well. There isn’t a thing your wife can’t do, Kaspar, and you haven’t deserved her, not for one second since you’ve been back.’

Emil disappeared down the hall, into the room he and Nina shared. The reverberations of their argument moved in the walls, just as surely as the tramping of toy soldiers, but Cathy tried to put it from her mind as they returned to their own side of the quarters.

As soon as the outer door was closed, she heard the crying. She had thought to plead with Kaspar, for there must have been something he could do, but instead she was drawn to Martha’s bedroom door. At the foot of her bed, Martha sat in a ball, her knees tucked into her chin, Sirius trying to inveigle himself inside to give her what comfort he could. Cathy rushed to her side, falling to the floor so that she could wrap her in her arms.

‘It’s all my fault,’ Martha said, between breathy gulps.

‘What is?’

‘The boys. I saw them through the door. I didn’t mean to, Mama, but …’

Kaspar was hovering in the doorway and, with one arm wrapped around Martha, Cathy gestured for him to come in. When he remained outside, her face set hard and her gesture became a demand. She hated to concede it, but Emil had been right about one thing: those years when Kaspar had been away, those endless summers and testing winters, somehow they had been easier than this.

‘Martha, my treasure, how could any of it have been down to you?’

Martha got to her feet and brought Cathy the book that had been half-hidden beneath her pillow. Cathy remembered the book well, though now it was falling apart. The stitches in its seams had long come undone. Martha dropped it into her hands and it fell open at the colour plates in its middle.

Gulliver’s Travels. In the illustration, the giant Gulliver lay on his back among hills of rolling green, and crawling all over him were the tiny Lilliputians, men no bigger than the little finger of Gulliver’s clenched fist. In his sleep Gulliver had been lashed down with ropes. Scaffolds of wood and wire had been built across both of his shins, his midriff buried beneath the beginnings of a rudimentary fort.

‘I hear them, every night, in the wardrobe and the walls … and I thought that maybe they wanted to listen. Maybe, if I read to them, they might come out and line up and … they did, Mama. They did.’ The tears were threatening to come again, but Martha had learnt stubbornness from her father (perhaps Cathy had something to do with it too) and fought to contain them with a single, sticky snort. ‘I wasn’t sure if they understood. Not at first. But something must have got through, because the second night more came, and the third night even more. After that they just kept pouring out of the wardrobe. It was like they were telling each other, in the walls: come and listen, come and listen to the story …’

The first nights they sat in perfect stillness, the only sound the steady rattle of their motors winding down, and listened. It was weeks before they started reacting. Martha would tell them how Gulliver was enslaved by the Lilliputians and the soldiers would be on their feet, twirling around in what she could only define as sheer, unadulterated joy. When she reached the moment in the story when Gulliver, found guilty of treason, was sentenced to be blinded in both eyes, the righteousness among the soldiers turned into a riot. ‘The Imperial Kapitan had to order them to stand down. He was marching through them and putting them in place and … I think he still cares for Emil, Mama. Maybe he remembers everything that happened before he … woke up. How they were friends, back then.’

In the doorway, Kaspar still lingered. ‘I don’t believe so. Back then the Kapitan was only sandalwood and teak, a little varnish, a little paint.’

Cathy had heard quite enough. Besides, what story Martha was telling was quickly lost in the resurgent scuttling in the walls. On her feet, she stepped through the closet door, parted the hanging dresses and coats, and gazed at the mural carved into the wood. A new etching had appeared among the rest, one with all the florid detail of the best Renaissance painters. Surrounded by soldiers bearing guns, two little boys were lashed to their beds. The giant that was Emil stood horrified behind them. There was something in the way his face had been rendered that gave the impression of despair, of terror, of submission. The way they depicted it, the soldiers had cowed the monster.

Cathy lifted her hand to her mouth.

Back outside the closet, Kaspar had come into the room to sit beside Martha. ‘What if they could learn more, Papa. They might …’

‘They planned it,’ Cathy cut in. ‘They’ll have other plans as well. Surely you could talk to them? They know you, Kaspar. They trust you. They think … they think you’re gods. You the light and Emil the dark, and all because of that stupid Long War of yours.’ What she was saying ought to have seemed a fantasy, but she had been too long in Papa Jack’s Emporium to believe anything else. It meant the soldiers had minds, it meant those minds were growing – but she knew that already, from the way their etchings grew more sophisticated, the way they grew more organised and bold. Her eyes dropped to the copy of Gulliver’s Travels, and she thought of how Papa Jack had described Sirius: his mind a collection of tricks, things performed by rote, until suddenly came ideas and knowledge, intellect and invention. Personality. What else had the soldiers drawn from the story? Stories were like entire lives lived in a few dozen pages. How more swiftly might a mind grow if it could read, if it devoured one story after another?