She realised she had tears in her eyes. That wasn’t Cathy’s way, but there was another creature inside her; possibly these were its tears, and Cathy merely the conduit.
‘Has he taken responsibility?’
‘His father wouldn’t allow for it, not with a girl like me.’
‘A girl like you?’
‘You mustn’t marry down, Mrs Albemarle.’
‘Yes,’ said Mrs Albemarle. ‘They won’t marry down but, when it comes to the rest, they wouldn’t care if you were scullery maid or debutante. What about the boy himself? This … friend of yours. Put up a protest, has he? Cast off his considerable inheritance to look after his bastard born?’
‘Oh,’ Cathy said, and for the first time allowed herself the merest bitterness, ‘Daniel’s a good boy. He’ll do what his father says. They’re to send him to Derby. Their cousins own a mill.’
For a moment Mrs Albemarle was silent. Then, reaching across the table as if to take Cathy’s hand, she said, ‘Catherine, understand that, what we do here, we do for the very best. Your baby will rise from the shame of its beginnings and find a new, better life.’
The way Mrs Albemarle was smiling returned the nausea to Cathy’s stomach. She was too late to excuse herself; in Mrs Albemarle’s office, the smell would linger for days.
Her mother barely said a word as they waited for the omnibus home. Shame had compounded yet more shame (the stains on Cathy’s dress didn’t help), and perhaps she would have taken a different seat altogether if only the vehicle hadn’t been so crowded.
Back in Leigh, where the smell of seaweed cast up on the estuary sands stirred such vivid recollections, Cathy followed her mother through the door. Caught in a whirlwind of memory and scent, she took off her shoes and ventured further in. How many times had she come through that same door, laden down with shopping and heaving on her mother’s hand? How many times had she scurried in unbridled excitement along this hall, having spied her father tramping home from work? And now, there he was, eating his dinner of pork and beans, steadfastly refusing to look up as Cathy hovered at the dining-room door.
‘Upstairs,’ said Cathy’s mother. She had already closed the door, and the last thing Cathy saw was her father studying the marbling of marrow from a bone on his plate. He still hadn’t looked up.
An onlooker might have thought pregnancy was catching, that if she stayed around a second longer, Cathy’s sister – now locked in that room with their father – might suddenly issue forth some progeny of her own. Wordlessly, Cathy followed her mother upstairs. In the bedroom that she shared with Lizzy, the shelves had been denuded of her books. The toy chest and doll’s house were both gone, and the rabbit figurines that ordinarily lined up so prettily on the window ledge had been spirited away.
‘Don’t start with me, Catherine. It was your father’s decision, but I’ll brook no nonsense from you. If you’re old enough to be a mother, you’re not a little girl any more.’
‘I’m sorry, Mama.’
She felt sick after she said it, but at least that complemented the nausea already bubbling in her gut. It was a pointless gesture anyway; the words did not penetrate her mother’s resolve. Instead, she began to reel off a list of instructions: Catherine was no longer to go beyond the front door – a letter would be sent to her schoolmistress instructing that she had taken work – and into the back garden only with the express permission of her mother; Catherine was to dress only in clothes that might hide her swelling stomach. ‘It’s only for three months,’ her mother concluded. ‘Then you can go where you need to go and come back to us afresh, our own little girl.’
After she had gone, Cathy took in the room. How big it looked, emptied of all the tokens of her childhood. She tried to make herself comfortable on the bed, but conversely it seemed too small; too small for two, at any rate. She was still lying there, curled up like a question mark, when the door opened again. Expecting her mother, Cathy turned against the wall, but in the corner of her eye she saw Lizzy sidling through.
Lizzy was the taller of the two. Her hair was blond where Cathy’s was dark, but they had the same grey eyes, the same high cheekbones. Common knowledge (the knowledge of the neighbours) held that Lizzy was the prettier, and she held herself that way too. Only once had she ever climbed a tree, and even then Cathy had to scramble up to help her down.
‘Cathy, it’s me. I—’
Cathy crumpled. She opened her arms and Lizzy dropped beside her on the bed, and then they were clinging to each other as they had done when they were small, waking together in the night to hear the sea making war against the coast.
For a time, neither said a thing; for Cathy, it was enough that she was here. There was a look on Lizzy’s face that might even have been excitement. Her eyes kept flitting to Cathy’s stomach, as if she might see a little face there, pressed up against the cotton of her blouse.
‘What does it … feel like? Does it feel special, Cathy?’
As a matter of fact, it did. It felt hot and righteous, like none of the scorn nor shame mattered, like nobody else on the planet had ever done it before. That was how special it felt. And yet all Cathy said was, ‘You shouldn’t be in here. Mother will explode if she knows.’
Chastened, Lizzy whispered, ‘I wanted to bring you this.’
She had produced a newspaper, a day-old copy of the local gazette their father trawled through each night. It would be something to while away the sleepless hours, Cathy supposed, that or something else to throw up into when the feeling next came. Yet, as she took it, she felt something hidden inside. She laid it on the bed and opened it up, and inside was the same dog-eared copy of Gulliver’s Travels that had sat, for so long, on the cabinet between their beds.
‘Do you remember it?’
Cathy clasped Lizzy’s hands.
‘Hide it. Take it with you when you go. Oh, we loved it so, Cathy! Maybe you’ll have a chance to read it to the little thing, before they …’
Lizzy could not bring herself to finish the sentence. Instead, she kissed Cathy full on the lips and vanished through the bedroom door.
After she was gone, Cathy picked up the book, smelled its pages; that scent was the scent of being five, six, seven years old. Funny how quickly it could transport her back there. For some time, she savoured old sentences, until finally the sweetness turned to bitterness and she buried it beneath her pillow.
She was drying her tears, the room coming back into focus, when she saw the newspaper lying on the bed. It had fallen open at the situations vacant. There she saw the calls for tinkers and joiners, for shipwrights and salesmen, all the usual fare that her father entertained and dismissed as a daily rite. She was still staring at those adverts when her eyes were drawn to a smudge of black on the opposite page. Between a notice for a removals firm and an advertisement for the bonfire celebrations to be held on the Point, another notice had been circled in ink.
~
Help Wanted
Are you lost? Are you afraid? Are you a child at heart?
So are we.
The Emporium opens with the first frost of winter.
Sales and stocktaking, no experience required. Bed and board
included.
Apply in person at London’s premier merchant of toys and
childhood paraphernalia
Papa Jack’s Emporium
Iron Duke Mews, London W1K
~
There was a different quality to the letters, something that made them appear to float an infinitesimally small level above the page. How her eyes had glanced over it before, she did not know.
Cathy ran her hand across her belly, pretending she could sense the tiny kicks that would one day come. Though she felt nothing, she could still imagine it – the he, the she, the unformed promise of days and years to come – tumbling in unrestrained delight within her. How could something so beautiful be the worst thing in all of the world?
Something drew her eyes back to the advert, refusing to let the
m go. Because an idea was blossoming inside her. An advert like that had to be circled for a reason. Certainly it had not been for her father. A message, then, from Lizzy to her sister, compelling her to run?
Yes, she thought, run.
She was still staring at the newspaper as the soft autumn darkness descended. In the house around her, time was slowing down. She heard the familiar rattle of doors being bolted and the fire being stifled in the grate. Once upon a time, there would have come a tapping at the door and her mother would have peeped in to whisper her goodnights. Tonight, there was only the long silence. The lamp on the landing fizzled into blackness, and Cathy was left, still staring at the advert by the silvery light of the stars.
Sales and stocktaking – that sounded simple enough. No experience required – that seemed an invitation too good to be true. And, if she wondered why there was an advert for a store in London so far outside the city itself, her bewilderment did not last long. London, she thought. Yes, she could disappear in a place like that. People went missing in London all of the time.
THE GIRL IN THE TOYSHOP
LEIGH-ON-SEA TO LONDON, NOVEMBER 1906
Running away was not like it was in the stories. People did not try and stop you. They did not give chase. The thing people didn’t understand was that you had to decide what you were running away from. Most of the time it wasn’t mothers or fathers or monsters or villains; most of the time you were running away from that little voice inside your head, the one telling you to stay where you are, that everything will turn out all right.
That voice kept Cathy up almost all of the night. In the darkest hour she sat in the window, one hand cupped around her belly, the other holding the advert up to the starlight that cascaded through. ‘And what do you think we should do?’ she whispered. ‘It isn’t just me, little thing. It would be you running too.’
The answer came in a rush of feeling, of love and nausea and imaginary kicks.
Her mind made up, she was awake before dawn. She could hear the house coming to life, the fire being stoked in the grate. She watched from the window as her father set out into the dark. She watched, some time later, as Lizzy disappeared for school: just another ordinary day. Later still, her mother brought her toast, depositing it without a word. Even then there was that little voice in the back of her mind. Stay where you are, it was telling her. Everything will be all right.
But everything wouldn’t be all right. She knew it, with the same sinking inevitability that she knew she would not keep the toast down this morning. Even her stomach was mutinying against her.
There was so little to take with her: three clean dresses meant for school, socks from the drawer, the copy of Gulliver Lizzy had meant for her to have. The few pennies she had saved were meant for Christmas gifts, but she pocketed them all the same.
Goodbyes would be in short order today. She did not want to make one to her room – it would only lead to tears, and tears would only keep her here – so without looking back she went out on to the landing and hovered at the top of the stair. Down there, her mother was lost in a clattering of buckets and mops, pots and pans.
Cathy paused once at the bottom of the stairs. But it was not a second thought holding her here. It was only the realisation that this place where she had been raised, where she had squabbled and sobbed and sought comfort in her mother’s arms, wasn’t hers. It was already changed – so, without a moment of regret, she stepped out into the bracing November air.
After that, all she had to do was walk.
The station sat on the seafront, only a short walk along the estuary sands. If anyone looked at her on the way, they saw only simple, smiling Cathy Wray. They did not see the baby she brought with her. If they noticed the way she kept glancing over her shoulder, fearful of being followed by some fisherman friend of her father’s, they did not try to stop her. And when she finally stood on the platform, ticket in hand, she understood why: the world cared nothing for a single runaway daughter. It had seen the story so many times.
Alone, she boarded the train and watched the seafront sailing past. Cathy had ridden the train before, but never with this same sense of freedom. Was there a word for having done something wrong and yet so terribly right at the same time? If not, she would have to make one, a word for only her and her child. She pressed her face up against the window as the towns and rags of country flickered by. London was stealing up on her by degrees, the railway sidings and towns becoming a city only in those moments when she looked the other way. One moment she was passing through the shadows of Upminster, the next the platforms at Stepney East. By the time she stepped off the train, all the other passengers fanning out into the streets, she had quite forgotten the exhilaration of escape. It was a revelation to know that, after all the pious staring of the last six weeks, she was a nobody again.
She had been to London once before, but that had been in the Distant Past, and all she remembered of that trip was a café with chequered table cloths, sausages and chips and ice cream. A holy dinner, if ever there was one. Now, she found herself coming down the steps into a city she could not understand. A horse-drawn bus was sitting in front of the station, while the pavement heaved with office clerks. It was best to keep her head down, to barrel on, even though she had only the faintest idea in which direction to head. By instinct, she picked her way to the tramline and watched as one, two, three trams rolled past. When the fourth came she found courage enough to ask the driver if he knew where Iron Duke Mews might be. Somewhere up west, he said, and invited her aboard.
Soon, the driver summoned her up and set her back down. Regent Street was dizzying, and no place for a girl whose nausea was growing by the minute; all she could do now was hurry on, putting her trust in whatever lay at the other end.
Fortunately, Iron Duke Mews was not far away, though it took her some hours, weaving in her own wake, to find it. She had circumvented the overwhelming opulence of Claridge’s Hotel three times before she saw a regiment of children bullying their nursemaid along the row. Though the nursemaid looked harassed beyond measure, a smile was playing in the corner of her lips. Soon, Cathy began to see others – a father with his son tugging on his hand; a Kensington couple, carefully controlling the chaos as their three daughters cavorted around them – all heading in the same direction. But it wasn’t until she saw others returning that she knew she was right. A grandmother, dressed as if expecting a night at the opera, was leading her grandson out of the alley, and in his hands was a wooden sled harnessed to tiny woollen dogs. They seemed to scrabble in his palms while the sled floated on air behind.
Iron Duke Mews opened in front of her – and there, in the kaleidoscope of lights at its end, she saw Papa Jack’s Emporium for the very first time.
It was a double-fronted building, dominating the dead-end where the alley turned in on itself and forbade further passage; Papa Jack’s Emporium, it seemed, was a destination, not some place to be discovered by pedestrians idling by. The entrance was a gothic archway, around which heart-shaped leaves of the most fearsome red had been trained. On either side stood windows of frosted glass, obscuring the myriad colours within. The edifice of the building was speckled in lights, like snowflakes rendered in fire. Cathy had never seen electricity used like this, had not imagined it could be so giddy or enchanting. Smells were calling out to her too, gingerbreads and cinnamon that plucked her out of this November night and cast her down in a Christmas ten years ago.
She was still staring as a family emerged, trailing behind them a dirigible balloon. As long as a motorcar, it bobbed along at the height of their heads, while in the gondola below their two toddlers turned and gaped. One of them caught Cathy’s eye as he was borne past.
‘I’m going to have to talk to you, little thing,’ she whispered, with her hand on her belly. ‘If I don’t talk to somebody, I’m bound to go mad, and you’re the only one there is. So … what do you think?’
What the baby thought was: cinnamon! And gingerbread! And – wher
e are we sleeping tonight, Mama? It called out to her through sinew and bone.
The way into Papa Jack’s Emporium was narrow, but soon she stepped into tassels of navy blue – and, through a prickling veil of heat, she entered the shopfloor. It was big in here, bigger than it had seemed from the street – impossibly big, Cathy might have noticed, if she wasn’t so fixed on keeping her nerves at bay. Her eyes were drawn, momentarily, to the serpents of fabric and lace that swooped in the vaulted dome above the aisles. The mannequin of a woodcutter at her side bowed ostentatiously. A pyramid of porcelain ballerinas turned en pointe to display themselves at their best.
The aisles were alive. She took a step, stumbled when her foot caught the locomotive of some steam train chugging past. She was turning to miss it when wooden horses cantered past in their jagged rhythms, their Cossack riders reaching out as if to threaten the train gliding by.
The aisle that she chose was lined with castles at siege. Some of the dioramas were frozen, with siege towers rolled into place, but others clicked into gear at Cathy’s footfall. Knights errant ran sorties with loyal companions across tabletops and shelves. On one shelf, a party of pikemen held the defence against a warband of troglodytes plucked from some Scandinavian saga.
Around the corner, where more dirigible balloons were tethered, a queue was forming at a countertop. Cathy joined it and waited until the shoppers in front had finished having their mammoths wrapped up in paper, or the pieces of their pirate galleons slotted together by expert hands. Then, finally, she reached the head of the queue. At the counter, a boy no older than she was battling to keep the lid of a tiny box stamped EMPORIUM INSTANT TREES from springing open, while simultaneously attending to the spinning tops making a symphony on the shelves behind.
The Toymakers Page 2
