The Toymakers

by Robert Dinsdale

  His morning’s work would have to end here, with the final soldier in his hand. With a flurry of paint and varnish he crafted a face, dipped him in lacquer to create jackboots of sparkling green, adorned him with tiny brass medals and a sash of crimson red. It was only when he set the soldier down among the others that he realised what he had created – for this figurine was quite the most venerable of all. This soldier bore the many campaigns he had waged with a quiet dignity; this soldier had a single scar above his left eye, a line in the wood caused by some enemy soldier’s sabre; this soldier had known triumph and disaster and treated those impostors exactly the same. He was, Emil decided, quite extraordinary; any boy would be proud to have him among his collection.

  A tingle he had not felt in many months was lighting up every nerve of his body. He would have to set the shop hands to replicating it soon. Their copies would be imperfect, but they would still be toys to shout about, toys to draw the customers back. Thinking of the stories his papa once told, he decided to give it a name like no other. This, he decided, would be the first: the Imperial Kapitan.

  The great bell in the Emporium dome was tolling, bringing the rest of the shop hands out from their roosts. Emil hurried out of his workshop and on to the shop floor. While he had been sleeping, the night hands had transformed the displays. Theirs was a job coveted by all the rest: to come out after dark and work wonders along the atriums and aisles. This morning an Oriental dragon snaked from one end of the store to another. The atrium at the Emporium’s heart had become the wilderness lair of two enormous black bears.

  The doors would not open for another two hours but the first-shift shop hands were already at work. Emil trod among them, eager to show the Imperial Kapitan to everyone he passed, but most were too engrossed in their tasks to stop. Kesey and Dunmore, who had first come to the Emporium as astonished customers and signed up as shop hands the winter they came of age, were corralling a herd of runnerless rocking horses, painted up as if they had cantered down from the Siberian steppes. Sally-Anne was repopulating the princess aisle, decimated in last night’s deluge, while John Horwood, the Emporium caretaker, was patching holes in the floorboards caused by some boys’ pitched battle. Even the new girl, the one who had arrived on opening night and barely spoken a word ever since, was emerging from the storerooms, heaving a sled spilling over with fresh stock.

  Emil fingered the Imperial Kapitan in his pocket. It occurred to him that there was only one person he really wanted to show, and that was the one person who hadn’t even deigned to get out of bed.

  Kaspar.

  Emil took the short cut to the Godmans’ quarters, high in the Emporium eaves. Mrs Hornung was serving Papa Jack his salt fish for breakfast, but Emil’s brother Kaspar was nowhere to be found. His bed had the air of one that had not been slept in for days, its covers heaped high in a kind of vagabond’s nest (Mrs Hornung had long since forsaken cleaning the Godman boys’ rooms on account of the clockwork spiders she had once caught nesting there). Kaspar’s notebook was open at the side of his bed but Emil was proud enough to resist peeking inside; whatever designs had been scribbled here were Kaspar’s alone and he had no desire to betray him. When the Emporium one day belonged to Emil, he wanted the victory to be clean.

  There was another place his brother would be – and sure enough, there he was, bent over the worktable in the attic workshop above their father’s own. Bigger than Emil’s only because they had once shared it (Emil had left three winters ago and built a workshop of his own, a private place where their secrets need not be shared), it was cluttered with more debris than Emil thought possible. A disorderly workshop, Emil knew, meant a disorderly mind. He allowed himself the slightest of all smiles.

  Kaspar was at the hearth in the hourglass’s end, though no fire had been kindled in the grate. One year Emil’s senior, he had shed the puppy fat both boys had once had and which Emil’s body stubbornly refused to lose, and crouched over his work table with the same intensity with which Emil had worked on his soldiers. His hair was swept back in an ostentatious peak, revealing eyes more shrill and blue than Emil’s, and a nose that might have befitted a Roman legionnaire. Emil saw, with a sinking feeling, that the Imperial Kapitan had features almost wholly the same, and the thought brought him great displeasure.

  Nevertheless, ‘Kaspar,’ he called out, ‘I’ve something to … Wait until you …’

  ‘One moment, little brother. I’ve something to show you.’

  On the worktop in front of Kaspar sat a simple glass jar, etched in sygils and lines. Kaspar took a small candle from the mantel on top of the hearth, struck a match against the wick and dropped it into the jar. Moments later he screwed the lid shut – and reclined as the dark workshop walls turned into a theatre of shadows and lights.

  The walls were a kaleidoscope, animals and men picked out in different gradations of shadow and all of them spinning a synchronised arabesque. A princess appeared, blew a kiss at Emil, and vanished in a whirlwind of dancing girls. An armada of galleons manifested, and beneath them there arose a great whale, which devoured each ship in turn. Stick men sailors tossed themselves overboard, lost to the shadowy sea.

  ‘A night light!’ Kaspar exclaimed. ‘For boys and girls too excitable to go to sleep. Can you imagine it, Emil? Your nursemaid comes, reads you some dull-as-ditch water story – probably with a nice moral at its end – and expects you to roll over and sleep. But – bang! – they close the door, you light your light, and …’

  Emil barely heard the rest. On the walls, a swarm of fairies were dancing in pirouette as a vast, fire-breathing serpent struggled to fight them off. A knight on a fierce destrier dropped his lance and cantered in, skewering the dreaded beast in the same moment that his horse revealed itself a pegasus, spread its wings and took flight.

  In the jar the candle guttered and died. The shadow spell vanished, leaving behind only naked walls – naked walls and a familiar, obliterated feeling in Emil’s stomach. He had been fingering the Imperial Kapitan all the while, but now he slipped it back into his pocket.

  ‘Well? What was it you wanted to show me, little brother?’

  Kaspar had kicked back, a satisfied grin on his face.

  ‘I’ll show you a fist full of my knuckles if you aren’t on the shopfloor when those doors open. You’ve had all summer for trying new things, Kaspar. It isn’t fair to shirk all the hard work …’

  Kaspar skipped through the detritus of the workshop floor and put an arm around his brother. ‘You’re being a scoundrel. Don’t you think it took hard work, my night light?’

  Emil was about to reply when the workshop door blew open, as if under the fist of a blizzard, and there hunched their father. The great bear had to stoop to come into the workshop, for it had been built to the design of a twelve-year-old boy.

  ‘Papa,’ Kaspar exclaimed, always swift to the attack, ‘might I …’

  In a second he had lit a new candle in the jar. This time, the shadow dance was different. Emil tried to resist his delight as a damsel-in-distress fled from the wolf pack of a spidery forest, as a castle made out of clouds descended from on high, as mermaids danced and swam in formation.

  All the while, Papa Jack’s glacial eyes flitted between the shadow dance and Emil. Then, when the performance was in full flight, he tramped across the workshop, took Kaspar’s place at the worktop and snuffed the candlelight. A moment later he was pressing a minuscule blade to the jar. A magnifying glass was in his eye and he was scratching particles away, opening up infinitesimal chasms, prompting a billion tiny fractures in the glass.

  When he was done, he set the jar back down, relit the candle and fastened the lid.

  Fireworks exploded across the walls. What started as shadows turned into blooms of glittering colour. The fairies that fought with the dragon fluttered wings of silver, cyan and gold. The dragon’s scales were emerald green, and the pegasus was white as the world’s most dazzling pearl. Unicorns cantered across rolling dells, castles sat sta
rk while briars rose up around them, burst open with ruby-red roses, and withered away again. A rainbow burst out of the masonry and cascaded from one wall to the next, erupting in gold in every place that it landed.

  Papa Jack picked himself up. ‘I don’t want you two fighting today. There’s an example needs setting. It’s well understood.’ Then he pressed a piece of parchment into Emil’s hands and disappeared.

  Emil made as if to follow, but Kaspar remained still.

  ‘Yours was magical, Kaspar. It was.’

  More magical than my soldiers, thought Emil, though he said not a word.

  ‘How does he do it?’

  If I knew that, thought Emil, I’d be doing it too. And then – then the Emporium would come to me …

  Kaspar raised his hand, as if to swat the jar on to the floor – but something, perhaps his sense of wonder, perhaps his ambition, stayed his hand. ‘Come on, little brother,’ he said, ‘haven’t we got work to do?’

  And that was how another day at Papa Jack’s Emporium began.

  The paper Papa Jack had passed to them was a list of chores only the Godman brothers were entrusted to undertake. The reindeer which had starred in the opening night extravaganza had wandered into one of the storerooms and set to grazing on the bales of felt warehoused there; their motors needed neutering for they were literally eating the winter’s profits. By the time that was done the shop was open, the first customers swarming the aisles. Emil tramped (and Kaspar sashayed) to the atrium at the centre of the aisles and set to work on the diorama waiting there.

  An hour later they were still hard at work, grappling after a nuance that always seemed out of reach. While Emil worked on the landscape of papier mâché and clay, Kaspar crouched between the jaws of the two enormous bears, positioning their teeth to provide just the right amount of horror (fear had to be leavened by joy, or a toy had no appeal at all). It was an operation that was taking the brothers much longer than it ought, because Kaspar kept rising on to his haunches to peer through the stacks at the new girl working in the alcove of paper trees. There was something about her that kept drawing his eye, though Emil would have pointed out that every new girl drew Kaspar’s eye. It was one of the many things that exasperated him about his brother.

  ‘She’s called Cathy. Cathy Wray.’

  ‘There’s something about her.’ Kaspar slid the final tooth into place. Perhaps the effect caught even him off guard, for suddenly he could feel the moist breath of the bear across his cheek – and all the terror that came with it. That was when he knew he had the diorama just right; that was the kind of thrill little boys would want. ‘How long has it been since she came?’

  ‘Two weeks,’ said Emil. ‘Three?’

  ‘And you’re only just telling me now?’

  ‘Kaspar, I’m really not telling you a thing …’

  Emil stared. This girl, this Cathy Wray, was filling shelves with more EMPORIUM INSTANT TREES. They were a new toy for this winter, and it pained him to remember that they were one of Kaspar’s inventions. Their papa hadn’t even seen any need to tweak them himself, and this pained him most of all. The toy over which Emil had spent all summer labouring – the pipe-cleaner birds who, released from their nests, would explode forth and find roosts on top of cupboards and bedposts and picture rails – were selling in pitiful numbers compared to the trees. When customers bought them at all, it was only so that they had something to roost in one of Kaspar’s Scots pines.

  ‘Do we know where she came from?’

  ‘She answered one of Papa’s adverts.’

  ‘So do they all,’ sighed Kaspar, and, picking himself up, he vaulted the first black bear and took off through the aisles.

  Emil watched him go. There was a time when he used to think: when I’m Kaspar’s age, I’ll be just like him; I’ll be making the toys they all clamour for, and I’ll be vaulting bears; I’ll be talking to the shop girls whenever Papa’s looking the other way. But the thing he’d been thinking recently was: I’m already Kaspar’s age. I’m the age he was last year, and last year I was the age he was the year before that. That was the fate of being a younger brother. Sometimes he wished there was some way he might catch up, overtake him somehow – if, only for a moment, Kaspar might have been the one looking up to him, cooing over the toys he had made, sloping off to his workshop at night and thinking (no, dreaming) that one day he’d be as close to achieving the feats their papa could in his most marvellous toys. But that was a terrible thing to think about his own flesh and blood. He and Kaspar had played in these halls for so many years, built labyrinthine dens together, spent whole weeks running wild with the rocking horses. There was not a memory in Emil’s head in which Kaspar did not sit at his left-hand side – so why was it that, in recent seasons, things had started to feel so strained?

  He thought, suddenly, of the feat of magic in the workshop above, how Kaspar’s night light had cast those enchantments, even before their papa’s tinkering had magnified it a thousandfold. There was a time only their father was capable of such things. He might have brooded further, but small hands were tugging at his sleeve, and when he looked down there was a girl, bearing up one of his father’s Russian horses and begging him to show her how to make it canter. He settled down, cross-legged, right there in the middle of the aisle. Let Kaspar talk to the shop girls all he wanted. Let him chase real magic, let him devise the most fanciful, flamboyant toys his imagination would allow. Emil (or so he told himself) needed nothing of that. He set the little horse to canter and placed by its side the Imperial Kapitan. Once wound up, the Kapitan marched off to war at the side of his trusty steed. The little girl beamed and clapped her hands at their dainty movements, and out of the aisles poured more boys, more girls, all desperate to see.

  Yes, let Kaspar dream up anything he cared to dream; this was where the true joy of the Emporium existed – in the ordinary magic of children at play.

  Cathy was concentrating so deeply on building her pyramid of boxed-up trees that she did not notice Kaspar’s approach. It was the middle of the afternoon and across the Emporium the shopkeeps were tending to their aisles. Seventeen days had passed since the night she stepped through the Emporium doors. There had been much to learn, and had it not been for the moments when nausea got the better of her and she had to bolt for a secluded corner or washroom, those first Emporium days might have passed in a blur. As it was, fixing her mind and trying to commit all its many corners to memory gave Cathy a focus that helped her ride each crest and wave.

  It was important to do a good job. She made it her litany as she set about her tasks. ‘If we do a good job, they’ll want us to stay, even after Christmas.’ That seemed important. Get to Christmas, get to New Year, and things could begin afresh. By then, they’d like her. By then, she’d be indispensable. She’d done it before. That summer in the raspberry fields, they’d begged her to come back next season, said she did the work of ten other girls (and didn’t even shovel the berries into her face all day as well). ‘We’ll make it so this place can’t go on without us, little thing …’

  She placed another box on the shelf. This one, or so the simple stencilling declared, was a black larch. The one she was placing on top of it was Bosnian pine. Most of the trees in the pyramid were hawthorn and horse chestnut, and a separate stack were simple firs, of the kind draped in tinsel outside the Emporium doors. People had been buying them instead of Christmas trees; there had even been a letter from the Forestry Commission instructing them to desist. Each box had a tiny image etched into it with a burnt match-head, and under that were the words ‘WARNING: DO NOT SHAKE’.

  ‘Watch how you go with those. Open them wrong and they’ll put down roots.’

  She turned. There, propped against a pillar, was the boy they called Kaspar. She had seen him often enough, striding across the shopfloor with his black hair flowing behind him, dressed in a waistcoat more ostentatious than she had ever seen on a boy of his age. Like his brother Emil, he had eyes of the shrillest bl
ue, but Kaspar was lean and angular where his brother was given to fat. The way he held himself, he almost seemed to be reclining, even while he stood upright. Sally-Anne, who lodged in a room in the same attic as Cathy and had been with the Emporium every winter since opening night, said he was the one you had to watch out for; his tongue was loose, but his hands were looser. ‘And him,’ she said, ‘just nineteen years of age …’

  ‘They’re mine, don’t you know?’

  He said it with the same pride Cathy’s sister had when she was but two and three years old. Every last thing – be it a toy, a spoon, a seashell – had been mine mine mine.

  ‘These trees?’

  ‘You wouldn’t think it, but that’s three months of my life you’re putting on those shelves. Papa says it’s as good as any toy he ever made, and he wouldn’t say that lightly.’ At this point, a dog of cotton wadding and patchwork paws crossed the mouth of the alcove, stopped at one of the paper trees to cock a leg, and drifted on. Cathy followed it with her eyes, then looked at Kaspar as if to say: as good as that? But Kaspar was not deterred. ‘It really is a marvel of engineering. Shall I show you?’

  It was on the tip of her tongue to excuse herself, but Kaspar was already lifting a boxed-up black larch from the pyramid and turning it in his hands.

  ‘You see, it’s all about perspective. You can do the most extraordinary things if you keep the perspective of a child. That’s how our papa’s training us – to never lose that perspective. To make a toy, you’ve got to burrow into that little part of you that never stopped being a boy. Because, hidden down there, are all the ideas you would have had, if only you’d never grown up.’