And I wondered, Cathy, how many men made it to their beds, or how many were left in the dirt along the way.
Across the next days there were gaps in the line, which men raced to defend, but always that same dirty yellow on the horizon, or the reef breaking through a line of blasted trees. Sometimes, you could see them coming through the smoke, the shapes of those German boys in black. They were stripping what they could from our fallen boys. And I tried to hold on to what my papa said. My men and I were sent to hold a copse of willow at the Salient’s deepest point and I was telling myself: they played with toys too. Yet, when the gas came and I saw their shadows loom, it mattered not at all that they had rode on rocking horses or thrilled at tumbling skittles, not when I saw what their gas had done to Andrew Dunmore’s lungs. I fired and fired and fired.
I was at the clearing station before I started coughing up blood. And now here I am. Arras is not so far from the line, and yet the streets still stand. Ypres is a ruin, but the ruin is ours. And yet, can it be that my body itself has been conquered? The physician tells me I have my heart, I still have my stronghold, but the salient around me is withered. It is a strange feeling to be weak. But I am alive, Cathy. Isn’t that a thing?
Cathy lifted her pen to reply, but her fingers had no grip, and her blood was beating so fiercely that she thought she would better run to France and hold him in her arms than write a single word. She was composing herself when she heard Martha’s voice at the door and the girl scrambled in, meaning to lose herself in the hugs and kisses with which every morning began. Cathy embraced her, slipped the journal beneath the bedsheets, and thought: he’s alive, he’s alive, he’s alive … but for how long?
Across the next months, the missives flew back and forth between the sleeping Emporium and the base hospital at Arras. Kaspar’s recovery was slow. Cathy charted it in how often he wrote, the steadiness of his hand. Summer had already come, and plans for Emil’s wedding were in full swing, by the time she saw a change in him. His letters grew long, he was writing in the thick of night, and the passion with which he wrote was evident in the way his pen pressed against the page. Kaspar was energised as she had seen him only once before, that summer when he was first learning to make caverns inside his toyboxes – for, stranded in Arras, co-opted by nurses and orderlies to help ferry around patients more critically wounded than himself, Cathy’s husband had returned to his old vocation.
I am making toys, Cathy. Toys for the ones who go to sleep at night and will not wake in the morning. Toys for those men I hear crying for their mamas. And might I confess? Cathy, they are the most beautiful toys I have ever built.
Daily the wounded men came through, and daily they were sent away – back to the line in boots or far from it in boxes.
The man beside me died last night. I was holding his hand as he faded – and I think I know, now, what I did not know before. A secret has been revealed, and finally I understand the true meaning of toys, something my papa learnt long before me. When you are young, what you want out of toys is to feel grown-up. You play with toys and cast yourself an adult, and imagine life the way it’s going to be. Yet, when you are grown, that changes; now, what you want out of toys is to feel young again. You want to be back there, in a place that did not harm nor hurt you, in a pocket of time built out of memory and love. You want things in miniature, where they can better be understood: battles, and houses, picnic baskets and sailing boats too. Boyhood and adulthood – any toymaker worth his craft has to find a place to sit, somewhere between the two. It’s only in those borderlands that the very best toys are made. So let me tell you, Cathy, about a new toy I have made …
There is a moment, before the end, when a man knows he cannot be saved. I have watched some go to it in a state of quiet awe, but that is not the story of most. Most men feel the encroaching dark and rage against it – but a man can no more fight that battle than light can battle shade. In these hospital beds they hold themselves until they can hold themselves no longer; after that, they are men no more. They are like boys with a fever, wanting only to curl up beside Mama, with old blankets on their laps, and be sung to and told stories. What better way for a man to go out than the way he came in? With the milk of mother’s love.
It was my papa who taught me how a toy must speak to a grown man, how it must fill him with the simplicity, again, of being a child. Children come to the Emporium for adventure, but adults to be reminded that adventure was once possible, that once the world was as filled with magic as the imagination will allow. Emporium toys have always taken us back in time. And, as I have lain here in Arras, watching my fellows die around me, I have wondered: could a toy comfort a man in his final hours? What if he was not here, rotting in a bed in which another man will rot tomorrow – but twenty years ago instead, curled happily in the crook of his mama’s arm, knowing that all is good and right in the world? What kind of a toy could be so perfect as to take him back there, the magic so adept that, for brief snatches of time, he might even forget the reality of his life? What if, in his final moments, those memories were manifest around him? Wouldn’t that be the Perfect Toy?
She was not sure why the letter made her uneasy, perhaps only for the idea that Kaspar and Death made such common bedfellows – and were it not for the fact that his next missive was so joyous (for first frost had come early to Arras, and Kaspar’s senses were enlivened by the thought of an Emporium in full swing), she might have known it sooner. As Christmas grew close, Kaspar’s letters showed him, if not his old self – gleeful and fizzling and bursting with ideas – then at least renewed. After he returned to the line, and found Douglas Flood, John Horwood and the rest, his humours returned; he wrote no more about his Perfect Toy, turning instead to questions of Cathy and Martha and professions of how he missed the shopfloor. It was, it seemed, a restorative to be among Emporium friends once again. But Cathy noticed, in the way his letters still quivered across the page, in the way the words disintegrated as each sentence moved on, until sometimes they were illegible even after many hours of trying, that all was not right with her husband. The lies had started again: the lies of omission, the lies of keep your head up and soldier on, forgivable only because, this time, Kaspar was lying to himself as much as he was his wife.
Kaspar’s body had survived the gas, but something else, some other part of him, lay bedraggled and maimed, gasping for air.
And still Cathy kept writing, for it was the only thing she could do.