‘When did you and your husband last have … there is no savoury way of saying this … relations?’
‘Is that a proper question, sergeant?’
‘Not improper, Mrs Godman. It may shed some light.’
Propriety says I ought to be ashamed, thought Cathy, ashamed to stand here, in front of this man, and even entertain his question. But, even in that place her mother tried to take her, Cathy had refused to feel ashamed.
‘I’ll answer, Mr Lewis, this one and nothing more. My husband and I were together on the night that he left.’
The sergeant nodded. ‘He was saying goodbye. You can be certain of that. It’s a thing with some men. One for the road, as they say. I’m sorry, Mrs Godman. Look, we’ll take a picture, if we may. We’ll open a file – all in the way of a favour, you understand.’
The sergeant called out for his constables, and idled there while he waited. ‘Before I go, I wonder – and this being unprofessional, I know – if I might take a little something? I have a nephew on the coast. His parents have promised him a journey to your Emporium many Christmases now, and yet …’ The sergeant shrugged, and in that shrug was all the indifference in the world. ‘Just a little trinket. Perhaps … a little toy soldier?’
‘I’m afraid we have none.’
The sergeant glowered. ‘Papa Jack’s Emporium, and not a single toy soldier.’
‘It seems my husband took them, each and every one.’
The sergeant nodded, so slowly it seemed he was testing her. ‘I suppose you believe they just picked themselves up and marched after him.’
And Cathy, to whom the silence was still so strange, thought: if only you knew.
She watched them go from the doorway, knowing in her heart they would not return. As they reached the end of Iron Duke Mews, no doubt already debating the dogs down at Dagenham, Cathy pictured how it might have been seven nights ago, as Kaspar loped the same way. In her mind she saw him turning the corner and Sirius, torn between his loyalty to his master and the Emporium itself, left howling in his wake. Running away, she remembered now, was not like it was in the stories. People did not try and stop you. They did not give chase. The thing people didn’t understand was that you had to decide what you were running away from. Most of the time it wasn’t husbands or wives or monsters or villains; most of the time you were running away from that little voice inside your head, the one telling you to stay where you are, that everything will be all right.
But it would have been, she thought as she slammed the door. She would have gone to the end with him, even if he’d never let her touch him again, even if all he’d wanted to do was to stay in his workshop and make his toys. She had wanted to be the one who was with him on the day that he died, when the century had grown older and the two of them grown older too. But now that hope was gone and, gazing up, the Emporium lay empty before her.
Two weeks since he’d gone and she felt like one of London’s vagrants, sitting on a street corner grateful for any crust. There was still snow left in Hyde Park. She came out of St George’s on the corner, decorating every lamp post and tree from the Serpentine to the Apsley Gate with the posters she and Martha had laboured over. Come Home Kaspar hung from every bough. In the heart of Mayfair, where she had planted one of his paper trees, people gathered for the spectacle and came away with a letter in their hands. If you see this man, deliver this promise: I still love you, no matter what.
She went down to the veterans’ homes where they said he had taken his music boxes. She dug out the addresses of old soldiers, anyone whose path might have crossed his; she wrote to shop hands past and present, thinking of all the places he might go. She took the train to the estuary, for mightn’t Kaspar – deranged, in his way – have thought to find a new life in her old one, just as she had found one in his? But the letters came back – Dear Cathy, I have seen neither hide nor hair – and the trips were in vain.
Nineteen hours and fifteen days.
Three hours three weeks.
Spring and summer and autumn and winter again.
Somewhere along the way she stopped going out to hand out pamphlets. The tree in Berkeley Square grew heavy with rain and crumpled to a thick, sticky mulch. Emil said they could hardly afford another full page in The Times, not until they began the hard work of repairing the Emporium’s reputation. Cathy left the tradesman’s door unlocked each night, just in case he returned – until, one day, Mrs Hornung noticed the wet footprints in the windward aisles and deduced, to Emil’s horror, that crooks had crept in and stolen a whole crate of magic carpets. After that Cathy just waited, and waiting was the most lonesome thing.
She woke in the night, an idea dragging her from dreams. The journal Papa Jack had given her was still in the trunk beneath the bed. She heaved it out, daring not to open it in case this dream was to be shattered. It was almost dawn by the time she opened the journal and, finding no note from Kaspar there, took a pen and scribbled herself. ‘Kaspar, my dearest Kaspar. Are you there? Wherever you are, why ever you went, it can be undone.’ But when, three months later (the pages scoured each night), there was no reply, she placed the journal back in the chest beneath the bed and never did open it again.
It was not the silence of her papa that Martha missed in those months, for heaven knows he had been silent long enough. It was the silence in the walls that kept her up at night. Silence, she was starting to realise, could be as oppressive as snow.
Martha put away her Gulliver’s Travels, her Charles Perrault and Arabian Nights on the day the soldiers disappeared. Reading alone was not enough, not when there were once a hundred wooden faces hanging on every word. The books on the shelf spoke of happier times: of Martha on Kaspar’s knee, as he told great fables which she later realised he had entirely made up; of the soldiers waiting for every twist and turn, the stories seeping into their sandalwood minds, teaching them, ordering them, programming them with this business of life.
At night the silence weighed on her. The peace frightened her. Seventeen years old, she slept in her mama’s bed, in the place where her papa used to lie.
‘They can’t all have gone, can they?’ she said one night, to the impenetrable dark. ‘All those hundreds of them, all those thousands, however many lived up and down the walls … He can’t have taken them all, can he?’
All he would have needed, Cathy thought, was one of his bags, like the one he made for me when Martha was born. Open it up and let them all march into its depths, and off they would go, out into the world. But at least that would mean he was alive. At least that might mean he was not rotting at the bottom of the Thames like all the rest of the missing, all the dispossessed.
That first year the shop hands came long before first frost. Emil sent notices out and now, here they were, with new storemen and down-and-out stevedores, all dragged in to set the Emporium to rights.
On the shopfloor the workers were wrenching up the aisles. Nina and the boys were marshalling the patchwork reindeer to heave the shipping containers out of the storerooms so that Emil might make an inventory of all they had left. There were enough toys here of Papa Jack and Kaspar’s design to keep the shelves full for the next winter, more still if they rationed them well, and Emil worked hard to supplement them with toys of his own.