The Toymakers(99)

Behind them, Emil and Nina were emerging from the hearse, their boys dressed in miniature black suits. Emil, whose own suit seemed suddenly too small, waited while the pall-bearers lifted the coffin out of the carriage.

‘Are you certain you can do it?’ Cathy asked.

Kaspar’s eyes had not left the coffin for a second. ‘Do you want honesty?’

‘Always, Kaspar.’

‘Then I’m far from certain. But I’m certain that, if I don’t, I would never forgive myself. So I’ll stand at Emil’s side, if only for today.’

Cathy led Martha along the frost-hardened trail, as an honour guard grew up along the wild, untended banks. At its end, the earth was open and the gravediggers standing by. Cathy stood at its head, staring into the ground that would soon swallow Jekabs Godman whole. She had been telling herself: it’s only his husk, only what he left behind, and he left behind so much more, back in our Emporium. But seeing the earth made thoughts like those seem so facile. Jekabs Godman was gone.

‘Mama, there’s something changed in Papa today. Did you see? He held my hand in the carriage.’

There were so few excuses she could make. The years had been a long litany of explaining her husband away, and Martha was not a girl any longer; she could not be persuaded to believe what her heart held as untrue.

‘Today is a strange day.’

They were coming along the trail now: lean, angular Kaspar, still walking with a limp; ragged, rotund Emil, who looked as if he hadn’t slept in nights. Behind them two hired hands bore the second half of the coffin.

‘I remember being scared of him, up in that workshop. Can you believe that? Warm fuzzy Uncle Emil and Papa, just being Papa … and then there was Papa Jack, big as both of them, and with those eyes, and those hands, and that … would you call it hair, Mama?’

‘Tangled and matted, like he hadn’t had a wife in a century or more. But, yes, Martha, I’d call it hair.’

Martha grinned.

‘I was scared of him too. The day I turned up, they took me up to his workshop, and he fixed me with those eyes and asked me those questions and … somewhere along the way, it clean melted away. He stitched you a bear out of spider silk. You lay in his hands, that day you were born, and, do you know, by then I wasn’t afraid at all. I would have let him carry you away.’ Cathy paused. ‘Here they come …’

The funeral procession had arrived. In a succession of stutters and false starts, Kaspar and Emil guided the coffin to the ground at the graveside. Moments later, the cowled undertakers stepped in and began to attach cords.

The graveside was growing crowded at last. There were faces here that Cathy knew, but so many more to which she could put no name. She reached out for Kaspar, guided him to the grave beside her.

‘Are you …’

Kaspar gave her a knowing look. ‘My papa was the heaviest of men.’

The crowd had gathered. The undertakers were in place. The coffin hung, suspended, over the grave – and then, inch by inch, Papa Jack vanished into the ground.

At the head of the grave Emil waited nervously for his moment. The silence around him was absolute – and, with his boys at his side, he began.

‘My papa was a simple man. My papa was a great man. My papa was my world. The Emporium he created occupies such a place in all of our hearts that we would not be the people we are without it – and that is why we have joined here today, to commit my papa to the earth, to give our thanks that he was a part of this world at all.

‘Papa Jack is gone, but the Emporium lives on in all of us, in our hearts, and in the memories that exist out there – of everyone who ever shopped in the Emporium halls, the boys and girls and the games that they played.’ Cathy saw his eyes roaming the crowd until they found his brother, whose head was still bowed over the grave. ‘Our papa’s work lives on as long as the Emporium does. As long as we’re making toys. As long as we’re …’ His voice threatened to break, but he conquered it again. ‘… keeping magic in the world, never forgetting we used to be small – making the world better, one toy at a time.’

From the clouds above, thin snowflakes started to fall. They sifted through the cemetery trees, dusting the graves – but they were not paper, so it was not right. Emil helped his boys throw handfuls of dirt on to the coffin; the gravediggers were waiting to do their task, but soon all of those gathered were tossing in more handfuls. In that way, Papa Jack’s coffin disappeared from view.

At Cathy’s side, Martha threw a handful of earth. Cathy did the same, removing her glove to feel the frozen dirt on her fingers. She turned to deposit some into Kaspar’s hand – but there was another figure between them now, somebody sidled up from behind to make his offering.

He was old as Papa Jack had been, with the look of a weasel and the only hair he had left hanging in a curtain of grey around the back of a scalp mottled with age. The suit he was wearing was freshly bought, and the raw red of his skin gave Cathy the impression that he had spent long days scouring away the filth in which he ordinarily lived. He smelt of cheap talc and peppermint lotion and, when he looked up, she saw that one of his eyes was made entirely of glass.

‘Are you the son?’

His voice had the same inflection as Papa Jack’s, of a language learned long into life and peppered with old, harsher sounds never forgotten. It took Kaspar a moment to realise it was him to whom the stranger had spoken. ‘My name is Kaspar,’ he said. ‘Tell me, did you know my father?’