The Toymakers(95)

‘See, boys?’ Emil whispered, drawing them near. ‘He’s here now, and he’s here at our mercy. Without us, he’ll wind down. Without us, he’ll cease to exist. And if those other soldiers know what’s good for them …’ He took a broom handle and beat out a rhythm on the skirting, up and down the walls. ‘They’ll do as I tell them.’ He opened his mouth to roar out. ‘Go back to your walls! Live your doll’s-house lives! But stay away from the shopfloor or …’ He rounded on the birdcage again, and the Imperial Kapitan who had once been his friend. ‘Wind Down. Wind Down for you all!’

How to explain what was happening in the walls? Days passed. Weeks and months. Sometimes the soldiers were quelled, but sometimes they grew confident, determined to win back their Kapitan – and that was when the workshop walls came alive with the tramping of a thousand wooden feet. Emil ran sorties when he discovered a build-up behind his workshop door. He built patchwork ferrets and sent them into the skirting to hunt; when they came back at all, it was with their backs pierced by wooden lances, their stuffing ripped out. So long did he spend conniving ways to stop the soldiers proliferating, blocking up holes in the skirting and cementing up the burrows his boys kept discovering, that for long months he made no new toys for the winter to come. All the while, Papa Jack worked long into the nights, so that the aisles might be full again by the time first frost came. And because he was locked away, with only his toys to confide in, nobody noticed the new cough that was wracking his chest, nor the way his fingers were finally – after decades of intricate work – beginning to seize up. They did not notice the first time his memory failed him, because he recovered of his own accord and continued to make stitches in the hides of his seaside serpents. They only went about their business, and he about his, and the only ones who truly knew were the soldiers standing dumbly in the walls.

In Martha’s quarters that summer, when Mr Atlee came to give her lessons, the wind-up host gathered to listen. She took to opening the skirting board so that they could hear her teacher drone on about arithmetic and parables, kings and countries and the Proverbs of the Bible. Sometimes, she came back to her bedroom at night to find that they had scaled to the top of her reading desk and were marching up and down her thesaurus, as if trying to understand the mysteries written within. At night, she read to them from Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire – but of armies and soldiers, no matter what the sort, they didn’t want to hear. Instead, she read them Perrault and the Brothers Grimm, stories from the Arabian Nights. She read them Jules Verne and HG Wells. And when Cathy came to wish her goodnight, she was shocked (but not surprised) to see the soldiers perched on every shelf around the bedstead, the sounds of their constant motors turning all around.

Stories, Martha thought. It was stories that could help them think …

The first frost came late in that year of 1923 – so that, by the time the Emporium opened its doors, the ledgerbooks looked barer than ever, and when Mr Moilliet, the man from Lloyd’s, came to consider the annual accounts, he departed with a sombre look and promises in his ear that surely could not be kept. There was no grand spectacle that night. When the first families flocked through the doors, they were not met with flying reindeer or cartwheeling stars, but only by a shopfloor half the size of the year before, its outer reaches boarded up to avoid the sense of empty shelves. There would have been more magic, the customers whispered, in a night at the Palladium, and this was a thing that had never been said before.

If you had returned to the Emporium that Christmas (as so many men did, seeking reminders of earlier, more innocent times), you would not have recognised it as the Emporium of your youth. You would have turned into dead-end aisles, would have seen hollows where toys had been bought and never replenished; the Wendy House you used to marvel at would have seemed a grotty woodland hovel, its windows still boarded up; and, above all else, you would have floundered over the looping railway lines that had erupted all over the Emporium floor – for there had been an industrial revolution in the walls that winter, the toy soldiers seeking better ways to cross the vast distances between them and unearth stores of more inert soldiers they could fit with self-winding designs. Emil and what shop hands he could afford had spent days prising up the new railway lines, but as fast as they worked, the wind-up army worked faster. By the time the first frost came, Emil had already ceded the mezzanine, the carousel, half of the windward aisles to the soldiers, in the hope they might be satisfied – yet, at night, the hooting of train whistles filled the shopfloor, and each morning, the aisles were a little more ragged, another paper tree felled or another tow-rope severed, upending the cloud castle above. And if you had been like any of the other shoppers come to the Emporium that winter, you would have taken one look at the ruin and thought: is this it? Is this the place I used to dream about coming every year? Have I changed, or is the Emporium really gone?

It had been a quarter of a century since Papa Jack last saw an opening night, but tonight he emerged from his workshop tomb and gazed out across the shopfloor. He watched his patchwork pegasi, threadbare after so many years, cartwheeling through the towers of the listing cloud castle and, closing his eyes, shuffled on his way.

The Godmans’ quarters stood silent, Cathy, Martha, Emil and the rest attending to the shopfloor below, but here lay Kaspar, curled up in bed where Papa Jack had known he would be. When he slept there was still a way of believing he was thirty years younger – only now the demons that danced in his dreams were built out of memory, not childish fancy or imagination. Papa Jack lowered himself to the seat at his bedside.