The Toymakers

by Robert Dinsdale

  ‘A stranger. Papa knew him long ago. Long before he knew either me or Emil …’

  Halfway along the trail, when the carriages were already in sight, a thought hit Cathy and she dug her heels into the frozen earth, straining on Kaspar’s arm until he too came to a halt.

  ‘That man,’ Cathy said, ‘did he say what his name was?’

  ‘Chichikov,’ Kaspar answered. Then he drew his collar up, against the cold and wind. ‘The man said his name was Chichikov.’

  Seven days is an aeon in the lives of toy soldiers. For simple wooden minds, a day might be a lifetime; a week, time beyond measure. And though they were there on the night Papa Jack passed away, their best and bravest seeking communion with him as he slipped from this world, up and down the skirting board he has already passed into legend. All they know, now, is that the Old One is gone, that a season has passed with not a heart beating anywhere in the Emporium halls; and that, now, the two younger gods and their families have returned. The toy soldiers lurk in the skirting boards now, silent but for the ticking of their motors, spying through thin cracks in the wood. And what they see is this: on one side of the room, the daemon lord is playing with his children. On the other, the Kaspar god is seated with his wife and their daughter, the one who tells the soldiers Truths out of Books. Between them sits a table, heaped high with the foods of Banquet – and not a roast potato, not a glazed carrot, not a vareniki or bowl of hot broth is being touched. Instead, the gods remain famished on the borders of the room, casting each other glances whenever the other one is unaware.

  And the toy soldiers think: to whom does the world belong, now that the Old One is gone? Which one is it? The Lord of Light, or the Lord of Death? Are we to live in peace, or be sent back to wage the Long War, from this day on and for evermore?

  Cathy was late to bed that night, for in the kitchens Mrs Hornung quaked over the wasted food, the mountains of crockery, the pots and pans that needed to be scoured and stacked away. For hours they worked in companionable silence, and only once did either one speak. Her arms deep in soap suds, Mrs Hornung uttered, ‘He was a good man,’ and after that returned to her work with newfound fire.

  Some time later, when the Emporium clocks were tolling and Cathy was ready to leave, she spoke again. ‘Those two boys have been squabbling since they were young. But there was love in it back then. Tell me, Cathy, is there love in it now? Because all I see is hate …’

  ‘There’s love,’ said Cathy. ‘No understanding, but there’s still love.’

  ‘Well, that’s boys for you. All the love in the world doesn’t match a little scrap of understanding.’

  Cathy dwelt on it as she went back above. By now Emil and Nina had retired to their separate beds, Martha reading Perrault to the toy soldiers in the walls. For a moment, Cathy stopped in the doorway to listen. The story was Bluebeard, and the terrible chamber to which his young wife was forbidden to go. She wondered if the soldiers understood, yet, the horror they were hearing. Then she drifted on.

  Kaspar would be asleep by now, his back turned against her as it always was. She opened the door …

  … and there he sat, in a whirlwind of paper dolls. They danced like sprites as he scissored them from the rolls at his side, taking off and floating like some heavenly host.

  He looked at her through the angelic storm. ‘For you,’ he said. They hung in the air: paper centaurs, paper nymphs.

  ‘Kaspar, you’re awake.’

  ‘I was waiting for you.’

  ‘Waiting for me?’

  ‘I didn’t want to sleep, Mrs Godman. Not without you near.’

  Words were such slippery things. She wanted to hear what she thought she was hearing, but there was so much distance between the two of them; languages grew and changed, and perhaps the words had a different meaning when they left Kaspar’s mouth to the moment they touched her ear. She snuffed out the light, slid under the covers. As always, the no-man’s-land stretched between them. ‘Tomorrow’s a new day,’ she ventured. ‘Remember that. We’ll always have new days.’

  Something had changed in his breathing. Then – she had to check herself, for this too had the quality of dream – she felt movement at her side. Kaspar’s hand had stretched out into the no-man’s-land. It was reaching for hers and she allowed it to be taken.

  ‘Cathy, there’s something I have to do. You might think it frightfully absurd.’

  This last he said with a grin, and Cathy felt certain it was not her imagination. She felt more certain still when his other hand found her, lying on her belly before gliding north. It was such a strange sensation, so unexpected, that she could not drive the tension out of her body. She flinched, recoiled, then laughed, as if she had never been touched before.

  ‘Kaspar, are you …’

  ‘You ask me if I’m well by the hour, every hour. You won’t need to ask me again.’

  He had rolled toward her, drawing her into the no-man’s-land – but then this, she supposed, was where everyone ought to meet.

  ‘Do you think we might … try?’

  It was no good holding herself so rigidly. She was a part of this too. She had to force her hand up to touch Kaspar’s face but, once she had forced it, her fingers remembered the line of his cheeks, the knots in his skin, the peculiar savageness above his left eye. The body had a memory, just like the mind. To hell with those music boxes he used to make; this, right now, was like stepping backwards in time.

  In the night she woke knowing he was near and, when she rolled toward him, his arms folded around her and she felt the beating of his heart. Later, when she woke, they had come apart, each dreaming their separate dreams – but that was good, that was as it should be, and when she stretched her body he stretched his, as if reflecting her in a mirror. For a time, the images that played across the backs of her eyes were not true dreams, but recollections, fragments of lives yet to be lived. She and Kaspar had a tiny emporium in Paris, where they sold patchwork frogs and the toy soldiers lived in peace. She heard the deep bass of his snoring, then she heard silence – and until she woke up, with dawn’s first light, to feel the emptiness beside her, the cold air playing at her back, she had no idea that he was not there with her and had not been for hours.

  Kaspar was gone. His slippers, his robe, the canes with which he walked; all of those things, gone as well.

  It was not so unusual for Cathy to wake up alone – and if, after last night, she had imagined them lying together until the day was old, that was only because, on the edges of sleep, it was possible to believe she was still the sixteen-year-old runaway who had first fallen into his arms, to forget the fact that she was a mother, a wife, part of the gears that kept Papa Jack’s Emporium alive. Perhaps it was not such a shameful thing to admit that, if only for tiny pockets in time, it was a joy to be nothing other than herself.

  The idea struck her that he would be in his workshop, for after last night anything seemed possible. She went there now, expecting to find him lost in some miraculous new design, but the workshop was empty – and, it occurred to her now, she could hear no scuttling in the walls, none of the regimented march of toy soldiers that had coloured their days for so long. Sometimes it was more reverential in Kaspar’s workshop, but as she returned to the quarters she crouched at the skirting, pressed her ear to the wall. In the cavities there was only silence, dull and absolute.

  ‘What are you doing down there, Mama?’

  She turned. Martha had been reclining on one of the armchairs all along, one of her novels in hand.

  ‘You slept there all night, little one?’

  Martha shrugged. ‘Not on purpose … Is something wrong, Mama?’

  What could she say? Silence, Martha. Peace.

  Cathy lifted her robe and hurried back through the quarters, up the stair to the place where her bed lay bare. She could see the indentation Kaspar’s body made in the sheets, but his absence was like a vortex in the room. It pulled her down.

  The window was ajar, the fr
ost of morning whispering through, but though she peered out, she did not see him hanging from a ledge, nor reclined up on the roof tiles, taking in the morning air.

  Through the walls she heard the chatter of Emil’s children. Nina was already barracking them for some imagined mischief.

  As she stepped back from the window, her eyes fell on Kaspar’s bedside table. There, beneath the lantern strewn up with dancing paper dolls, lay a letter.

  Cathy, the envelope read – and the word was loaded with all the dread of the journal he used to write, the feeling of his hands on her last night, the strange new silence in the walls.

  My own Cathy

  By the time you find this letter, I will be gone. I dare not think of your face as you are reading these words. I dare not imagine the moment you tell Martha, my Martha (for she has always been mine, no matter what the particulars of her blood), that she will not see me again. You will not hate me for it, because your heart has always been bigger than hate. But do not think ill of yourself, should you perhaps feel a little relief. Because the truth is, I have been gone for many years already. I left you on the day I left the Emporium for those foxholes in the French earth. That I came back at all was down to you. You picked me up and put me back together – and if you could not put me back together whole, that was never your burden, and never your fault.

  I have known for too long that I am withering away, but I know now what I must do and, though I do it, I do it with the deepest regret – for I love you as I have only ever loved one thing, and that is the Emporium itself. In my heart and mind, you are bound up with one another and never to be prised apart. But the Emporium is in ruins, and it is me keeping it that way. And, my darling, you are in ruins – and it is me keeping you that way. It is in this letter that I set you free.

  Live a long, rich life. Think of me often, but never with regrets. But Papa Jack’s Emporium must endure where I cannot, and so must you, my darling. There is a different place for me now. I am going to find it.

  Yours for the last time,

  Kaspar Godman Esq.

  PS. Take care of Emil. He is going to need you now.

  Cathy read it once. She read it twice. She forced herself to read it again, each time more agonisingly slowly than the last – but, if she had expected the words to evaporate and change, she was sorely mistaken. There they stayed, imprinted on the page just as they were imprinting themselves on her heart.

  An hour passed, maybe more. But the clock had stopped ticking. The motors had wound down. She thought, perhaps, that she herself was winding down – until, with an enormous effort, she got to her feet. She marched to the mirror – and, god, but she looked old. Dry your eyes, Catherine Wray, she told herself, and choked when she realised the old name had already come back to her tongue. No, she reminded herself. Whether you’re a Godman or a Wray, you’re still you. And Cathy, you don’t cry.

  Folding the letter neatly to place it in a pocket, she marched out on to the gallery.

  He was not in his workshop, but she had known that already. She crossed the silent shopfloor, where no miniature locomotives hurtled along the aisles, no tramping could be heard between floorboards and shelf stack, and into the half-moon hall. She fumbled for a key and opened up the door, staggering out into the whiteness that had encrusted Iron Duke Mews.

  The snow had fallen thickly last night. Drifts grew up the walls of the mews, burying the doors of the neighbouring shops. It had fallen too deeply to leave any footprints, but she hastened up the mews all the same: Cathy Godman, still in her nightgown, plunging knee deep with every step.

  She had gone halfway when she stumbled. There was a mound in the snow, no doubt belying the cobbles underneath, and she pitched forward as she hit it. The snow cushioned her fall and for a time she lay there, breathing it in: the morning air, the stillness, the very last day of what she’d thought was her life. She watched as a pair of newspapermen crossed the end of the mews, but they did not look in so they did not see her lying there.

  Nor did they see the frosted velvet and felt that had been unearthed when she stumbled.

  Cathy saw it in the corner of her eye: indigo and tartan; a lolling tongue of darned sock. In an instant the numbness (surely so much more than the snow) to which she was giving herself had been swept away. In its place was fire that thawed every corner of her body. She plunged her forearms into the snow, scrabbled for purchase, shovelled handfuls away where she could not take hold. Then she heaved, until the tartan and felt was lying on top of the snow and she was staring down, down into the lifeless face of Sirius, the patchwork dog.

  She brushed crystals of ice away from his cross-stitched nose. She pressed her face to his belly, listened for the whirring of his heart – but the mechanisms that drove him, that had driven him ever since Kaspar was a boy, had stopped. Her fingers fumbled for his belly, but nothing turned within. The key by which Sirius was wound was unnaturally still.

  Cathy bore the dog up (how light it was, only cotton wadding and felt!) and carried it back along the mews, through the doors to the half-moon hall. There she spread its legs to see the tiny key protruding from the fabric on its underside. ‘Please,’ she whispered, and blew on her hands to warm up her fingers. Delicately, she started to turn.

  The key caught, and she could feel the touch of the mechanism inside. Something clicked every time it revolved, but soon she came to know she was turning the key in thin air; it was not meshing with whatever contraption lay on the other side. She shifted Sirius around, petting him gently, making yet more promises as she worked. ‘It’s all right, boy,’

  she whispered. ‘He hasn’t gone. He can’t have gone. Not now, not after all this. He’s coming back. Don’t give up, not yet …’

  Something inside Sirius’s belly moved; the key had snagged on some tangle of wires. After a moment, the key slipped free once again – but, now that she knew what she was searching for, she knew how to find it again. Soon, the key was driving the motors. She felt them coming to life – and when, at last, the key would turn no tighter, she fell back, collapsed on to the cold shopfloor.

  Beside her, Sirius lay still. His motors turned but he did not flicker, not even as if in a dream.

  Cathy lay back, defeated. She did not want to sob and so she did not, but something sobbed inside her – for the end of Sirius, for Papa Jack lying cold in the ground, for the idea that she had not lost Kaspar today, but lost him in a thousand tiny moments ever since he returned; for the fact that she had not been able to save him, after all this time.

  There was a thunder of footsteps. Somebody else was on the shopfloor. She looked up to see them running to her through a stand of paper trees. Emil crashed through the creeping vines, Mrs Hornung close behind.

  ‘We saw the doors open. The snow coming in. Cathy, is everything all right?’

  Before she could answer, the bundle of fabric at her feet started to shift. Cathy looked down and, from between her legs, there rose a cross-stitch nose, two black button eyes. Sirius turned his head, his darned sock tongue lolling out as if desperate for water. Softly, his tail began to beat. He climbed ungainly to his feet.

  Cathy gathered him up, clung to him as he lapped at her, leaving dust and dangling thread wherever he touched her face. She dug into her pocket and pressed the note into Emil’s waiting hand.

  ‘It’s Kaspar,’ she said. ‘He’s gone. He’s left us all behind.’

  THE GHOST IN THE TOYSHOP

  PAPA JACK’S EMPORIUM, 1924–1940

  The man’s name was Lewis and – or so it seemed to Cathy – he was more interested in the patchwork rabbits proliferating on the shelf than the letter she kept pressing into his hands.

  ‘We’re here as a courtesy, Mrs Godman, and because my chief inspector brought his daughters here, once upon a while.’ Two other constables were somewhere in the aisles, trying to pull crinkled card berries from the paper trees. ‘I’m afraid that what you have there, in your hands, rather disproves your case. Your husband isn�
�t missing, Mrs Godman.’ He turned on his heel from the shelf and wiped his hand, in disgust, on his trouser. One of the patchwork rabbits, with precise derision, had deposited a patchwork pellet into his palm. ‘He just left. It’s there in black and white, and little we can do about it – in a public forum, at least. Listen, you have my sympathies. Before I was a copper I was a soldier, like the lot of us, and … Mr Godman wouldn’t be the first to walk out on his wife. If you had my job, why, you’d know some of the terrible things that can happen when a soldier comes home.’

  Cathy said, ‘You don’t know my husband.’

  ‘We done some digging, Mrs Godman. All as a favour, you understand. He was a flamboyant man, your husband. That’s what his old soldier pals tell us. Up and down, up and down, that sort of fellow – and that can be the worst. And you knew, of course, what he was doing down at the veterans’ home? Down on the Strand with those music boxes of his?’

  Cathy stopped herself before she replied. She had thought those music boxes a thing of the past.

  ‘Oh yes, his trips down there seem to have been quite the stir. Music boxes for all the veterans, things to make ’em feel young again. But you knew about that of course.’

  The sergeant loped back into the half-moon hall, poked his head out of the door and peered up the snowbound mews.

  ‘And the dog, you say you found it out there?’

  ‘He must have followed Kaspar out, then lain down in the snow …’

  ‘What, and just froze to death?’

  ‘I wound him back up. He …’

  ‘I … see. One of your contraptions then, was it? Not quite real? Mrs Godman, you can understand where I’m coming from. You say the dog followed him out, and yet you still say he’s missing. Well, if a man leaves of his own accord …’

  Cathy propped herself against one of the shelves. There was no use in arguing with somebody so blinkered, so instead she just nodded.

  ‘Might I ask you a … personal question, Mrs Godman? I’m told it has relevance, though Lord knows you’ll think I’m a ghoul.’