This time, he looked at her. He opened his hands and said, ‘There is nothing.’
‘You did it for me. You held me here, on this same bed, and told me I could do it, told me I was strong. So tell me, why can’t I do it for you?’
‘My Cathy, you can’t—’
Her body was at odds with itself, just like his. Part of her wanted to throw herself down and lie beside him, but other parts could not bear to be there, her body repelling his just as his repelled her. Her disgust disgusted her, but that way lay madness; that way lay hate. Finally, she screamed, ‘Then you have to do it! I don’t care what it is. I don’t care how. But if you won’t let me, then there’s only you left. Do you understand? You didn’t die out there, Kaspar. You came back to us. Was it for a reason? Was it just plain luck? I don’t know. But if you didn’t die, you have to live … because there isn’t anything else.’
Kaspar’s breathing slowed. His eyes, which had darted into so many corners as she spoke, settled on hers.
‘She missed you, Kaspar. I …’ Her voice cracked. She was as bad as him. Since when had she lost the ability to say what she meant? ‘We waited for you all this time and you came back and …’
‘Then tell me. Tell me. How am I to—’
‘I don’t know,’ Cathy said, ‘but you do. I’ve watched you build boxes with caverns inside them. I took shelter in here with you, while paper trees rained down from the sky. You transform things out here, Kaspar. So why can’t you transform things … in there?’ After that, they stared at each other for the longest time. Soon, Cathy heard footsteps beyond the Wendy House walls. ‘She’s coming back. Kaspar, promise me. You’re alive, aren’t you? You are alive.’
That night, Emil took his time to disrobe. First, he picked every splinter of wood from his arms, where they had matted in the bristles of hair that grew thicker each year. Then he hung his work clothes carefully in the wardrobe, ready for another day’s labour. Only after dousing himself liberally in the little tin sink did he step behind the screen and don the nightclothes Mrs Hornung had left out for him. In the bedroom, Nina was already upright in bed, reading one of her novelettes.
Emil had taken his notebook to bed, as had been his practice ever since he was a boy, but the marks he made tonight were scrappy and inconsequential. He drew the face of a soldier, supposed to be as regal as the Imperial Kapitan, but instead the image looked bedraggled, worn, like a body whose soul had been spent. Like Kaspar, Emil caught himself thinking – and promptly scoured the image clean away. He had not yet told their father about the scene Kaspar had made in the glades of the Long War this evening; he wondered if he ever should.
‘Emil?’ Nina had been watching him all along. ‘Do you want to tell me what’s wrong?’
Emil lay with his hands folded beneath his face, the imitation of a sleeping angel. He rolled to face Nina. ‘I don’t know what to do with him, Nina. I see Cathy trying to cradle him, and he won’t be cradled. I want to go to him myself but …’
‘But what?’
‘But how can I? I’ll say the wrong thing. I’ll make out like I understand. But I don’t. How could I?’
Nina ran a finger along the thick thatch of his eyebrows. ‘This is your home, Emil. You shouldn’t have to creep around it like you don’t belong. Don’t you belong here? Don’t I? What your brother sacrificed, that shouldn’t have to …’
‘You don’t understand. He’s Kaspar. He’s the one who made the paper forests. He’s the one who built the toyboxes, with all those caverns inside. We’ve been waiting for him to—’
‘Do you know what I see when I see your brother, Emil? I see a man. That’s all. A lonely man. A broken man. But still just a man. Look at what you did these winters, Emil. Look at the ledgerbooks. A paper tree, that lives and dies. But a game like the Long War? That goes on and on and on … children devote themselves to it. You don’t think that’s a marvel, just as good as all of the rest?’
Everything she was saying was true, and yet, ‘I miss my brother,’ he whispered. ‘It isn’t right to say it, and who knows if he missed me, but … I miss him, Nina. I want him home.’
‘He is home.’
Emil shook his head, as fierce as a toddler just discovering the motion.
For a while Nina said nothing. She lay with her own hands folded beneath her face. Then she reached out, took Emil’s, and guided it down. Emil tried to resist (this was not the moment, how could she feel romantic when …), but gave in when he found his hand had been cupped around her belly.
‘I know you miss him, Emil. I think it might be the sweetest thing about you, how much you love your brother. But your family’s bigger now … and it’s growing bigger still.’ She paused, waiting for the gears in Emil’s mind to start turning. ‘I saw my aunt’s physician. It’s certain. He believes … there may even be twins.’
Emil’s eyes widened with every utterance.
‘Imagine it, Emil. Twin boys, gambolling up and down the Emporium halls. Your boys, our boys, making their futures here. I’m sorry for your brother, I’m sorry the Emporium isn’t going back to how it was. But – and this is important, so listen to me, my love – these last years, that’s what the Emporium is to me. That’s all the Emporium I’ve ever known. I don’t want it to go back. I want it to go forward. I want you to be fit and fighting strong, and for the Long War to make your fortune … because your children –’ she smiled, the simplest and most meaningful smile, and saw it mirrored in Emil’s opening face, ‘– are going to need it.’
On the first day of December, with ragged snow streaming through the Marble Arch, Cathy wrapped herself against the winter and took the trolleybus west. Hyde Park was not blanketed in snow, but its pastures were dusted in a whiteness at the same time dirtier and more pure than the confetti snow with which she usually spent her winters. The banks of the Serpentine, where she had dozed with Kaspar in that summer so long ago, were alternately crisp with frost or deluged in dirt – but it had not stopped the families turning out to see the new memorial, nor the patients from St George’s venturing out to fill their lungs with the crisp, frigid air.
St George’s loomed on the corner, half-hidden behind colonnades. As Cathy approached, a horse-drawn ambulance had stopped and orderlies were striding out to help its occupant through the doors. Cathy followed after, to the whirlwind smells of iodine and carbolic soap. At a counter a nurse was filling in papers.
‘I’m looking for a Lizzy Wray,’ she began. ‘My sister. She’s …’ And here she brandished the letter she had received, its postmark already two months old: Lizzy, back from the base hospital and using her service leave to volunteer. It all seemed so unlikely.
‘I don’t know a Lizzy,’ the sister replied. ‘But there’s a Beth Wray working on second ward. Might that be …’
Second Ward was not difficult to find. A convalescent floor, its patients reclined in the sax blue suits and scarlet ties that marked them out as soldiers at rest. Some of them were cajoling each other from the spaces between their beds, but more still were asleep, or gathered on a terrace looking out at the snow. Only one nurse drifted between them, fixing sheets and piling bedpans on a trolley.
When she finally looked up, Cathy realised how long it had been since she had seen her sister. Lizzy was older now, her eyes greyer, but above all else (in spite of the uniform, the places she had been, the grime beneath her fingernails so alien to the girl she used to know), she was still the same beautiful Lizzy Wray.
‘Cathy!’
‘Beth?’ Cathy ventured, with just a hint of admonition.
Her sister rolled her eyes. ‘It was time for a change,’ she said. ‘Oh Cathy, I wasn’t sure if you’d got my letters. Now I see that you have, I … I would have come to the Emporium. You know that, don’t you? Only …’
Cathy understood; what could first frost matter when set against everything happening inside these hospital walls?
‘The truth is, I’m only here another week. After that I’m putting
in a favour for a girl at Endell Street. It’s women only there, did you know? Women nurses and women doctors, the whole thing. But by Christmas I’ll be gone. Cathy,’ she whispered, ‘I’ve met somebody. He’s back in Dieppe. Convalescent to start with, but back home he was a medical doctor, so now he’s working the rounds.’
For a little while they talked of other things. Their mother was well, their father resigned from the cockle sheds to keep books for the munitions works on the other side of the estuary. If nothing else, and unless he did anything foolish, it would keep him from France. After that, there were only the small utterances and stilted conversations of people with too much time in between them. But Cathy had not come here to be reminded of what she had left behind. In the silences she kept circling herself, searching for the courage to say what was on her mind.
‘Kaspar’s home,’ she finally said. It felt better to get it out and, after she had said it, the words came more freely. ‘You saw him, Lizzy. What it did to him. Well, his body’s healed, and yet …’
Lizzy rushed forward, smothering her in her arms.
‘He’s alive,’ she said.
‘I keep telling him the same thing. But he’s changed as well. I thought he would come home and we’d pick up our lives, that we might even have all those children we’d talked about, brothers and sisters for Martha to play with in the Emporium halls. But how? How if he’ll never touch me? How if I don’t want to …’
Lizzy shepherded her to a corner of the ward, where the beds sat empty, awaiting the next convoy. ‘It changes them in different ways. I’ve known men lose whole days. Some stop talking. Some talk about nothing else.’
‘It used to be I could tell what he was thinking just by the creases of his eyes. Don’t they say eyes are the windows to the soul? Well, with Kaspar, they’re like the Emporium’s secret doors: you look into them, but you don’t see what’s behind. I want to talk to him, but he doesn’t want to talk. I want to hold him, but he won’t be held. With other men, it would be the drinking. But with Kaspar …’
That morning she had stood in the doors of his workshop. Felt rabbits had birthed more felt rabbits until there were no more left to birth. A woollen sheep was baaing incessantly, searching for the rest of its flock, oblivious to the fact that Kaspar had yet to craft them and probably never would. The silk suit that hung on the back of the door was grappling out with empty sleeves, wanting only to be hugged – and finding nothing to hold. Such things had been pouring out of him in the last days.
Sometimes she woke in the night and he was not there. Sometimes she woke and he had been lying there all along. And as the weeks went by, it was increasingly difficult to tell one night from the next.
‘I don’t know if I love him.’
It burst out of her, dripping with the shame she had been drowning in for days.
‘Oh, Cathy …’
‘I mean – I don’t know how to love him. Can that be real? Can it wither like that? It’s like a rot.’
Lizzy didn’t say a thing. She reached out and held Cathy’s hand.
On Christmas Day, as every year, the tables were laid out on the shopfloor and the shop hands who remained brought up platters of food from the kitchens underneath. Mrs Hornung, who was already a part of Emporium legend on account of her figgy pudding, had surpassed herself with the goose. It was stuffed with a partridge which was, itself, stuffed with a songbird; the pastries were stuffed with pheasant, brought into the store as payment by a gamekeeper whose wallet was empty, but whose children deserved so much more.
Cathy and Martha busied themselves until, at last, the table was a mountain range with crags of roast gammon, foothills of potatoes roasted and mashed. A wilderness of parsnips reached up one of the escarpments and made a crown at its summit. The shop hands were already filling their plates when Emil and Nina appeared along the aisle, helping Papa Jack between them. As he settled, Cathy saw that he was balancing a pinecone soldier between his thumb and forefinger, constantly twirling it around.
The toasts were short and sweet. ‘To the Emporium,’ said Emil. ‘To our families and our friends, at home and abroad. To moments like these. To my wife, and my sons yet to come, and my papa who started it all. And to my brother’s return …’
At this he lifted his glass. His eyes followed it but did not look down again. Cathy looked the same way – and there was Kaspar, balanced on one of the galleries above.
She started. Martha had started too. Cathy had to rein her back into her seat and, by the time she had dealt with her muttered protestations, Kaspar was gone.
‘I’ll fetch him,’ she whispered in Martha’s ear.
‘We didn’t even invite him …’ she was saying. ‘Why didn’t we invite him to our Christmas?’
Cathy was barely out of her seat when he appeared along one of the aisles. From here he was slow in coming, resting on one of his canes. Twice, he caught her eye and gave a mute nod, as if to promise he was fine.
As he grew near, some of the shop hands didn’t know where to look. ‘Eat!’ insisted Papa Jack. Sally-Anne took the order to heart and continued to pile her plate high. Others moved reticently – but not one of them looked in his direction.
Emil reached Kaspar in the same moment that Cathy came to his side. ‘I can still walk, little brother,’ Kaspar said, barely concealing his frustration. Then he was at the table. No place had been left for him, so suddenly Nina was on her feet. ‘There’s really no need,’ Kaspar said. ‘It’s customary to stand to make a toast.’
Kaspar held out a hand. Martha passed him a glass. ‘My friends, my family, my daughter, my wife.’ He was looking at them all so fiercely, but on his lips was that same infectious smile of old. ‘It has been a considerable thing to come home. To find you all here again, where you surely belong. With my hand on my heart, I can say that, through every night I spent out there, I kept the image of you all in my mind. My papa and my brother. My Cathy and my Martha. Kesey and Dunmore and little Douglas Flood.’ His brittle hand had fallen to dance through Martha’s hair. She squealed at his touch, looking up with little thrills of delight – and Cathy had to fight the compulsion to draw her away. It was only Kaspar, she told herself. The only father she’d ever known. ‘The Emporium is my home,’ he went on, and something in his voice began to show the frailty he’d been working so hard to keep at bay. ‘This place is my beating heart. Its storerooms and aisles. The dens where I used to play. And I know, now, that that is the only reason I came back to you, while so many of our friends perished. Because how could a man ever die, when he doesn’t carry his heart with him? When he’s locked it away here, at the bottom of his toybox, with everything else he holds dear? The world outside those doors knows more sorrow than I dare remember – but in here? In here, there is snowfall of paper and rocking horses running wild. There are forest glades and butterflies of satin, trains that loop impossible loops and patchwork dogs that never grow old and die – and there is the memory,’ he whispered, ‘of when we were two little boys, who knew nothing other than our games.’
Emil had started to clap, but perhaps it was premature; not one of the other shop hands joined in.
‘The Emporium has changed since I embarked,’ Kaspar went on. ‘But I’m home now and, I’m sorry, Emil, but the Emporium must change again …’ He stopped to survey the room, taking in every face that was staring at his. ‘From the moment the doors open tomorrow, and for ever after, the Emporium will sell no more toy soldiers.’
There was silence, less stunned than perplexed, around the table.
‘Let us put that in our past, like everything else.’
‘Kaspar,’ Emil ventured, ‘what do you mean, no more—’
‘It is a simple matter, my brother. There are so many magical confections in these halls. Why must we sully ourselves with soldiers any longer?’
‘Now, Kaspar,’ Emil said, sterner now. ‘Listen here, the Long War—’
‘—is still going on,’ said Kaspar. ‘I know it is.’ He
leant down to plant a kiss on Martha’s brow. Then, pitching into his cane, he returned along the aisle from which he had come, ignoring the cries that harried him on his way.
‘Eat!’ Emil exclaimed, and the shop hands, who until now had maintained a reverential hush, began their mutterings as the tinkling of plates and forks dispelled the silence. ‘Well, it’s preposterous!’ Cathy heard Emil go on. ‘To think he can waltz in here and make a judgement like that, a judgement on us all. It’s ugly, that’s what it is. Isn’t it, Papa? Well …’
But Papa Jack said nothing. The old man sat slumped in his chair, his pinecone figurine still clasped between forefinger and thumb.
Trade began slowly next morning, as it always did once the festivities had died down, but by the small of afternoon a steady trickle of customers were filling the aisles, the rich children of Knightsbridge coming out to indulge their Christmas allowances. Emil, who spent the morning prowling the shopfloor (if only to make certain that the boxes of the Long War still took pride of place on the carousels) put on his usual ebullient show whenever a boy asked him the way into his cloud castle, or the secret tune that could make the dancing bears perform a fandango. Yet in his quiet moments his eyes kept searching, lingering on the galleries above in case his brother dared to be seen.
The day was almost done, the shopfloor emptying as customers gave up the dallying in which they had spent their days, when he heard the commotion. Balancing on one of the units, trying to draw down a dirigible, he pirouetted around. By the counters at the front of the store, a rotund man was remonstrating with Cathy, his face (behind whiskers waxed as if to look incensed) turning scarlet with rage. A small crowd of onlookers had already formed.
Through bobbing heads and arms flung skyward, Emil watched as the man set up two small units of soldiers on the counter, wound them up and let them go. It was a battle like any other, just the same as the thousands that had already been played with Emporium toys. In perfect formation, the soldiers marched at one another. These were infantrymen, armed with only bayonets; they would do and they would die, and whichever was left standing would be the victor.
The Toymakers Page 25
