The Toymakers

by Robert Dinsdale

  ‘I’ll be with you in one moment,’ he said as he finally snapped the box shut. Then he reared up. He was a good-looking young man, with eyes of mountain blue and black hair growing frenzied around his shoulders. He had been attempting a first beard, but the shadow on his chin was pitiful compared to the black thatches that were his eyebrows, and there was chubbiness to his face that gave him the air of a boy much younger.

  ‘Forgive me,’ said Cathy, ‘but I’m here about the job.’

  The boy’s mountain eyes narrowed to ravines, and when he took hold of the gazette that Cathy was holding, they narrowed yet further. ‘Where did you get this?’

  Cathy was fumbling a reply when the boy lost himself in a clamour of pages. The newspaper positively exploded around him as he searched for its front page. ‘Leigh-on-Sea? I’m sure we get seashells from … Look,’ he said, stopping dead, ‘you’ve caught us on the hop. It was first frost this morning, which you probably know. Opening night! That means – chaos and plunder, catastrophe and clamour! If you’d wanted a position, if you’d truly wanted a position, you’d have been here …’ The boy seemed to be fighting a battle against himself. Which side won, Cathy could not tell. Stepping back, he fiddled with a latch and the counter groaned open, panels in the wood revolving out of one another at the command of pulleys and gears. As the unit came apart, and only for the briefest of moments, it froze in the air, depicting the perfect image of a snowflake. Then the snowflake fractured to reveal a way through. ‘You’ll have to stay near. If you go wandering, there’s a chance I won’t find you.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘Well, you want a position, do you? Then you’ll have to be interviewed. He’s in his workshop, where he always is. You’ll have to come this way.’

  Cathy watched him disappear into a doorway barnacled in yet more perfect crystals of snow and pressed her hand to her belly. ‘I’m sorry, little thing. Not much further now.’ And then, with the cries of some pretend battle exploding behind her, she wandered on.

  Behind the counter a set of stairs spiralled up to the galleries above. The boy was already puffing his way around the first bend by the time Cathy reached its bottom. Swiftly, she followed after.

  The way was narrow. At the first landing he took her out on to a gallery, from which they could look down across the bustling shopfloor. From here: another door, and another stair, a passageway lined with storerooms in between. Each gallery grew into the next, one door opened into an antechamber from which several other halls sprouted – and, though she could have sworn they had not climbed as far, soon Cathy emerged on to a balcony at the very height of the Emporium’s dome. The shop must have grown into the others around it, one of those tricks of London geography that marked it out as a city much older than most, or perhaps it was a trick of perspective – for, from up here, Cathy believed it almost as big as the cathedral at St Paul’s.

  The boy was waiting for her at a single heavy door, oak with rivets of grey-black steel. He had already knocked when Cathy arrived, breathless from her travels. Here the walls were banked in hooks and, from those hooks, there dangled the detritus of a hundred unfinished toys. A jack, uprooted from its box, stared at them with delirium in its eyes.

  From beyond the door a voice beckoned the boy to enter and, with an almost apologetic look, he tumbled through. From the hall, Cathy peered in. The workshop was illuminated in the oranges and reds of a great hearthfire, its walls banked in aquariums and shelves where the toys of past Christmases peered out.

  Nervously she waited, the silence punctured only by the tolling of the boy’s feet. Finally, the footsteps came to an end. She heard something landing, the newspaper being thrown down, and the boy piped up, ‘I didn’t know we still had this thing out.’

  And a gravelly voice, as of a bear still sluggish from hibernation, said, ‘It’s always there when we need it there, Emil. You know that. Why, do you not think we need more help?’

  ‘We always need more help.’

  ‘Then show her in. Let’s see if she’s Emporium, through and through.’

  Soon after, the boy named Emil reappeared. The look on his face was either panic or exasperation. ‘You’ll have to forgive me. They’ll need me on the shopfloor. It’s not as if Kaspar would rush to the helm when the deluge comes. No, he just preens up in his tower, lording it over the rest – and on opening night as well!’ He ran a hand through his hair, as tangled as briars. ‘I’m Emil, by the way.’

  He lingered longer, so that Cathy had no option but to say, ‘I’m … Cathy.’

  At this he clapped a heavy paw on her shoulder. ‘Good luck, Cathy. And remember, he isn’t as awful as he sounds. He’s … only my father.’

  As Cathy stepped through, her eyes took in the bellows and tools, the bundles of dried fabric that hung from the rafters like the herbs of an apothecary. It was only now, her feet crunching through wood shavings and shreds of felt, startled at a family of wind-up mice who scattered as she accidentally upended their nest, that she wondered if she had done the right thing. Running was easy, she decided; but every runaway had to arrive, and arriving seemed the most difficult thing of all.

  The workshop was long and narrow, swollen like an hourglass at either end. At its apex, Emil’s father sat in a chair whose arms had been hewn off, so that he could overhang each side. He was a mountain of man – his square head framed by curls of white and grey, his face an atlas of fissures and cracks – but by his eyes he was undeniably Emil’s father. They had paled with age, but across the workshop’s length Cathy could see they had once been as vivid and blue. Now that she saw him, he seemed more like grandfather than he did father. He was old enough, at any rate – or else seemed it. The only thing about him that had any youth were his hands. They were delicately threading ruby feathers into what at first seemed the carcass of a bird. Only as she got closer did she take it for a toy, its hessian hide already thick with crimson down.

  Her nerves grew the closer she got. At once the workshop seemed impossibly long; the toymaker at its end shrank further and further away, while behind her the way she had walked stretched out, as in a fairground hall of mirrors. She had reached the second hearth when something picked itself up from the bails of wool that covered the floor. A framework of branches and wires rose jaggedly up, enclosing cam shafts and wooden pistons within. Half of the frame had been covered in muslin, threaded with hair; there was enough for Cathy to take it for a model of a deer, but so incomplete it could not rise to its feet. It turned its sightless face to her, a blind foal reaching for its mother.

  Finally, she stood before the toymaker.

  ‘Please, sir, I’ve caught you on your opening night. I’m sorry it’s so late. I didn’t mean to—’

  The man shook his head, because evidently this was a preposterous notion. ‘It’s never too late.’ His voice was like snowfall, ghostly and soft, and the way his eyes tightened suggested some double meaning. ‘Did my Emil take you through the questions?’

  ‘What questions?’

  Bewildered, the man lifted a single finger and gestured to the gazette that had fallen at his feet. ‘They were right here, in the vacancy.’ He intoned them slowly, rolling his whiskers around each one. ‘Are you lost? Are you afraid?’ He fixed her with his eyes, as if descrying one in her silence. ‘Are you a child at heart?’

  ‘Yes,’ Cathy found herself saying, resisting the temptation to turn it into a question of her own.

  ‘That’s good enough for me. I have an ear for a liar. Do you remember being small, how you could tell if your mama or papa were trying to outfox you? Something in the back of their voice always gave them away. Well, I never lost the knack.’ The man rose from the chair, giving the impression of a fallen tree being hauled back on to its roots. With one hand in the small of his back, he levered around to extend the other for Cathy. ‘My name is Jekabs. But you might call me … Papa Jack’ – and, when she shook his hand, his fingers were not gnarled like she had expected, but smooth and soft:
a painter’s hands, the hands of a child.

  It was important to be brave. She had been brave when she stepped out of the back door, brave when she took the train and knew there was no going back, but bravery, she supposed, could not end there. Now that there was somebody else lurking inside her, she would have to be brave every day. Brave in the little things, as well as the big.

  ‘You’ll need showing to your room. Allow me.’

  There was a small bell by the workshop lathe. He lifted it in an outsized hand and its chimes echoed all around. In the rafters above, the chimes were answered by pipe-cleaner birds.

  ‘My room?’

  ‘Bed and board, remember?’

  ‘You mean I’m hired?’

  ‘It was the first frost of winter this morning. We don’t turn folk away, not on first frost.’

  With those words, Papa Jack sank back into his chair. In moments, the phoenix was in his lap. His fingers danced along its seams, and in their wake sprang up more feathers, crimson and vermilion and burgundy red.

  ‘You can come this way, dear.’

  Cathy turned. A figure was standing in the workshop door, no doubt summoned by Papa Jack’s bell. She set off that way, careful not to crunch the wind-up mice still milling at her feet. Only halfway along the workshop hall did she dare to turn back. ‘Sir,’ she ventured, ‘don’t you even want to know my name?’

  Papa Jack looked up, airily. She had not noticed, until now, the way his white locks fell about his head, like an avalanche. His eyes had the faraway look of the fishermen she had known, those who had fought in foreign wars and come home wanting only to fish. In reply he breathed no words, only opened his hands, and the phoenix, whose feathers he had been darning, took flight.

  The lady waiting in the door was not as old as Cathy supposed. She might have been no older than Cathy’s own mother, and wore a look similarly severe. ‘You’ll let me carry your bag?’ she said as Cathy joined her. Her house dress was a simple starched cotton, and on top of this she wore a holland apron.

  ‘If it’s all the same, I’ll carry my own.’

  The lady led her along the hall, back to the galleries that overlooked the shopfloor.

  ‘The master might not want your name, but I’ll have it soon enough.’

  ‘It’s … Cathy,’ she replied, her eyes drawn by the confetti snowfall coalescing into clouds above the aisles.

  ‘And you came off one of them adverts, did you?’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘That’s how I found myself here as well, but that was twelve years gone, when his boys was just bairns. You’ll call me Hornung. Mrs Hornung, though the first name’s Eva.’

  Together they wound their way along a crooked servants’ passage to the foot of a crooked servants’ stair. Along the way, Mrs Hornung trilled and whispered under her breath but Cathy could not make out a word.

  The way was steep, each step uneven, but there was light at the top of the stairs. The landing was cramped, barely big enough for them both to stand there together, with a door hanging open on either side. Through one lay a simple washroom with toilet bowl and tub. Cathy was about to step through the other when Mrs Hornung touched her hand and whispered, ‘Are you sure about this, girl?’

  The question caught her off guard.

  ‘It wouldn’t be too late for you to go back … wherever it is you came from. You could make up a story. Whoever it is, they’d understand.’

  She stiffened. ‘I’m sure I don’t know what you mean. All of these others are here, aren’t they? I can work like the best of them.’

  Mrs Hornung considered her oddly. Then, something shifted in her appearance. She seemed to have acquiesced to some unvoiced demand. ‘You’ll find Sally-Anne on the shopfloor come sun up. She’s been with the Emporium too many Christmases to mention. She’ll show you the ropes. Get your rest, Cathy. There’s much you’ll have to learn.’

  It wasn’t until Mrs Hornung had disappeared that Cathy’s heart was stilled. She wondered if the other heart was beating as rapidly. Perhaps it could sense her trepidation, and beat in unison with her own. Quickly, she slammed the door shut and scrabbled to find a bolt. Only once she was sealed within did she look around. There was a bed in the corner, where the pitched roof met the wall. A steepled window looked out across black rooftops and streetlights, half a moon hanging between towers rising up on the other side of the city. Apart from that, there was nothing.

  ‘Are you still there?’ she whispered, with her hand on her belly. She prowled around the room, until she reached the window. She had not known she was so high, but there was a clarity to the air, the taste of winter’s first frost. It was strange not to smell the sea. London had odours of its own. ‘It can’t be so bad. We might have turned up at a den of thieves. They could have killed us already. No reason why they’d wait until the dead of night, creep up here and smother us with a pillow …’ Her eyes revolved, until they landed on the door. ‘No reason at all.’

  The thought propelled her to heave her bed against the door, but that revealed black holes in the floorboards that had been gnawed away to reveal the pitted darkness underneath. In the end, she heaved the bed back into place. It was better to be afraid of what she knew than what she didn’t. She lay down and closed her eyes; her body was ready for sleep, but her mind was not. It kept erupting with images of Lizzy a victim of their father’s inquisition, with the idea of their mother storming to Daniel’s house and demanding to search every cupboard and crawlspace.

  ‘How long before they call the police?’ she whispered, but the baby fluttered inside her and, to Cathy, its inference was clear: they won’t call the police; they couldn’t stand the shame. ‘So it’s only me and you. And hang them,’ she uttered. ‘They would rather you never existed.’

  Such thoughts could turn self-righteousness to self-pity, so she concentrated on other things. She whispered, instead, about all the things they would do together in this, their new home. She had not thought about it when she slipped through the back door this afternoon, but now it seemed startlingly clear: this was not about a week, a month, or even a year; this was about a new existence. ‘Perhaps we’ll stay. What better place to grow up than in a toyshop? Why, you’d have everything you’d ever want …’

  After she had lain out what few things she had, she climbed to the window ledge and looked out. Oh, but life was a strange and terrifying thing! She was still there, hours later, when the last shoppers flocked out into the winter dark, bound for the horse-drawn buses lined up against the Regent Street arcades. In their hands were bags in which confetti fireworks were already erupting; ballerinas so impatient to get home they were already turning their tours en l’air. Behind one gaggle of shoppers a reindeer in hessian and felt, no doubt the ancestor to whatever half-finished contraption had been resting in Papa Jack’s workshop, trotted out, only for a group of shop hands to hurry after and corral it back on to the Emporium floor.

  Cathy cupped her hand to her belly. ‘Funny to think how close we are. An hour on a train, nothing more. And yet …’ This was a different world, though it seemed so guileless to say it. She was not a child, she had to remind herself. She could not be, not with a child of her own budding inside her. ‘It’s hardly like home, is it, little thing?’

  No, it didn’t feel like home at all – and yet, as she hummed lullabies to soothe herself to sleep that night, one thought was knocking at the door, determined to be let in: Papa Jack’s Emporium did not feel like home, but home it would have to be.

  PAPER FORESTS

  PAPA JACK’S EMPORIUM, CHRISTMAS 1906

  There are a hundred different clocks in the Emporium. Some keep time with the comings and goings of London seasons. Others tick out of sync, counting down the hours of that faraway coastline the Godman brothers once called home. Still more keep erratic and uncontrollable times: one counts each third second backwards, the better to extend the time between chores; another elongates the evening, all the better to keep bedtime at bay. These are
the times that children keep, and which adults are forbidden from remembering. Only a child could understand how one day might last an eternity, while another pass in the flicker of an eye.

  Yes, Papa Jack’s Emporium is a place out of step with the world outside. Come here day or night and you will find a place marching to the beat of its own drum. Listen and you might hear it, even now …

  Emil Godman was up with the Baltic dawn, for such was the habit of his father’s lifetime, and, above all other things, Emil wanted to impress his father. Consequently, a full three hours before sunlight touched Iron Duke Mews, when it was shedding its pale winter light over the countries of the frozen East, Emil was already out of bed and in his workshop. A miniature of his father’s own, its tables were lined with wooden soldiers in various states of undress. Emil walked among them, trailing his fingers over faces half-etched, oblongs of wood waiting for the workshop lathe. According to the shop ledgers, a full three legions of soldiers had left the Emporium doors in the two weeks since opening night; shelves that had been eighteen thousand strong were now depleted, and the knowledge gave Emil one of the greatest thrills of his life. Most of those soldiers were his summer’s work, or else the work of last winter’s craftsmen, but all of them were Emil’s design. He settled into his chair, rolled up sleeves around his meaty forearms (they had his papa’s girth, though he was some years away from sprouting the same wiry hair), and set to work. Simple infantrymen and cavalry he allowed the shop hands to sculpt and paint, but the Emporium’s most prized pieces were for Emil alone.

  By the flick of a wrist, the deft twirl of a brush and a misting of lacquer, the faces of the soldiers became known. Emil worked by rote but he worked as if in a trance, his fingers crafting expressions that astonished him when he set each soldier down to dry. This first was of noble bearing; this second had waged too many battles before; this third carried the scars of some prior campaign and wore a look that revealed his innermost dream: to return to the sweetheart he had left behind. In this way, an hour passed in Emil’s workshop, then two and then three. Not a window here looked out upon the outside world but he knew when dawn was breaking by the rattling in the pipes, the echo of distant footsteps which told him the shop hands were up, about, and preparing for the chaos of the day.