In places they tore down the barricades. Mrs Hornung levered up every stretch of railroad track the toy soldiers had lain. The shop hands reconstructed the aisles in such a way that the shopfloor would seem smaller, and yet more packed with excitement than these last winters, when the soldiers had run amok. Foresters were brought in to fell the paper trees, now yellow and sagging with age, while the Wendy House, still boarded up, was loaded up and hauled away. ‘We’ll refit it next winter,’ said Emil, when he saw how Cathy was staring. ‘It’s not gone for ever, Cathy, I promise.’
But perhaps it ought to be, she thought. Those four walls, so loaded with memory; perhaps what she needed was not to see it sitting there every day, speaking of happier times.
She returned to an aisle where she worked alone, dusting down old dancing bears. At its end, the shelf stacks had been torn up, revealing a great maw in the wall where the masonry had crumbled away. There Martha called out for her mama.
Cathy went down, into the shadows, and crouched at Martha’s side. Behind the crumbled wall lay one of the cavities where the soldiers used to march. The light from Martha’s lantern spilled over the open face of a doll’s house. Tiny paper trees had sprouted in its garden, stunted by the dark.
‘Look, Mama …’
Martha had prised up one of the floorboards. Along the piping underneath the toy soldiers had laid out a field, and in that field tiny stones had been arranged.
‘Is that …’
‘Letters,’ Martha realised, for the stones at her feet might, if she squinted just right, spell out the single word:
HELLO
‘I was trying to show them,’ she said as the men behind her took joy in dragging out six feet of underground railway. ‘I’d remembered how Uncle Emil proposed. I thought – why not? If they could understand, they could learn to talk back … If only there was more time, perhaps there could have been a parley, perhaps they might have understood, Uncle Emil isn’t a monster, he isn’t the tyrant they thought he was. Perhaps we could have understood each other, if only we could have talked …’
Cathy had been crouching. In the garden of one of the crudely built houses she found a minuscule figure, no bigger then the nail of her little finger. She lay it in her palm and brought it to the light: splinters, trussed up and twisted into the shape of a ballerina.
‘They were making their own toys …’
‘Toys for toys,’ laughed Martha. ‘Maybe one day they’d have learned to wind themselves too. Maybe they’d have woken up, then made toys of their own, even tinier ones, tiny toys out of motes of dust …’
‘Maybe they’d have woken up too.’
‘And maybe, just maybe, all we are, every last one of us, is a toy brought to life.’
‘You’re starting to sound religious.’
‘Papa would have liked the idea, wouldn’t he, Mama? Well, wouldn’t he?’
Cathy lay the tiny ballerina back in the dark, where it surely belonged.
‘What are we going to do, Mama?’
Cathy fingered the ruin, the world where the soldiers used to live. ‘We’re going to wait,’ she said, ‘and we’re going to believe.’
Papa Jack’s Emporium
Iron Duke Mews
18th February 1925
Dear Mr Moilliet,
Please find enc. the balance sheets drawn up for the winter season 1924–25. As you will see, the Emporium did not run at profit and will require further hard work to rejuvenate, but rest assured that the work is being undertaken. Next winter will be a triumph!
Yours sincerely
Emil Godman Esq.
Papa Jack’s Emporium
Iron Duke Mews
20th January 1926
Dear Mr Moilliet,
Please find enc. the balance sheets drawn up for the winter season 1925–26. Might I impose upon you to extend our credit arrangement in anticipation of next season, when we stalwart Emporium few will return our Emporium to the giddy heights of yore.
Yours sincerely
Emil Godman Esq.
Papa Jack’s Emporium
Iron Duke Mews
6th June 1927
Mr Moilliet,
I am sick and tired of the doggerel I receive through my letterbox and the unannounced visits from your associates at the bank. We are late in our annual accounting. Do you not think I have better things to be doing than totting up numbers that don’t mean a thing? I was here this winter. I know how the Emporium fares. Please find enc. the balance sheets: BLANK because I have TOYS to make and (lest this be forgotten) my business is in making TOYS and not paying LIP SERVICE to a moneylender.
EG
Papa Jack’s Emporium
Iron Duke Mews
18th June 1927
Dear Mr Moilliet,
I received your letter and apologise for mine written in haste. We look forward to your visit and what new arrangements we are able to work out. I remain optimistic that, with a little help, our Emporium will once again be a fixture in London life.
Yours in gratitude,
Emil Godman Esq.
The snowdrops blossomed early in the year of 1928 – and thank heavens for small mercies, for Emil could not stand another day, another night, another customer who looked him bare in the face and said: there used to be such magic. Now he sat on the floor in his papa’s old study, all of the shelves denuded of their books, pages of designs he could barely understand splayed out all around. The chest with a thousand legs had been snapping at him from under the armchair all night, the phoenix (who had refused to leave the room ever since the old man died) was wound down, but watched him nevertheless from its roost in the rafters – but Emil was lost in a world that did not belong to him, searching for a design, an idea, a something that might make it all worthwhile.
January became February became March and April. All the ideas of Papa Jack’s life came down like an avalanche around Emil. He spent his days braced for the next deluge, holding his breath.
Sometimes he fell asleep there and sometimes he woke there too. He marvelled at the designs for the first patchwork bears, but when he tried to recreate them they were dull, dumb things with barely a character among them. He unearthed plans for the Foldaway Fortress of 1901, the Door Through the Wall of 1898, the Infinity of Russian Dolls of 1911; he lost a month in hewing a new line of runnerless rocking horse, but the brutes were intractable, refused to take a rider, and had – in the end – to be added to a pyre or dismantled for scrap.
Sometimes the only time he spoke to another living soul was when Mrs Hornung arrived with his supper, and sometimes not even then.
He thought it was Mrs Hornung tonight, loitering in the study door with a bowl of pea soup and a hunk of hard bread. That was why, at first, he did not turn around. He was sailing in a sea of books and the blueprint unrolled before him was for a Minotaur, Lost In Its Labyrinth. This one he might even be able to attempt. He was picturing how it might be done when a cough alerted him to the fact that his wife was waiting. She hadn’t even brought supper.
‘Emil, we have to talk.’
‘I can’t, not yet, not now. It’s in here somewhere, Nina. One of these toys. Something he dreamt up but didn’t see through. Well, we’ll see it through. Who cares if it isn’t mine? Who’ll know? We’ll find a way to make it, every bit as magical as they would have done, and fill the shopfloor.’ He looked up, dewy-eyed. ‘There are still six months until Christmas.’
‘Four, Emil.’
Emil tore at the blueprint, scything it apart with his hands. Four. How had he not known it was four?
Nina swept the papers off his papa’s armchair and sat down. ‘Do you realise,’ she said, ‘how long it’s been since you read to your boys? How many hours you’ve been down here? Do you realise,’ she went on, punctuating each word with the point of her finger, ‘how long it’s been since you played with your own sons?’
Emil looked as if he might answer, but Nina quickly cut him off. ‘Three weeks. And before that, five. There they are, upstairs, and … here you are, oblivious.’
‘Oblivious? Good God, Nina, what do you think I’m here for? Do you think I want to be here every night, poring through this? Every page a reminder of how useless, how ordinary I am? How witless would you have to be to think I’d want that. I’m doing it for them, Nina. I’m doing it for you …’