‘You’re not as foolish as that, Emil. Doing it for me? The Emporium in tatters and your names signed on a mortgage deed? No, you’re doing it for you. Doing it for us would have been to take that offer from Hamley’s. Go and make toys for them and be paid well enough. Staying here? That’s for …’ She shook her head. ‘You, a toymaker, the best toymaker left in London, and you won’t even play with your own boys.’
‘Best,’ Emil uttered, ‘but evidently not good enough.’
She stood. She dusted down her house dress. She said, ‘I’m leaving you, Emil.’
There was silence in the study. Emil rose to his feet, with his papa’s designs sloughing off him like a skin being shed. ‘Nina—’
‘No,’ she said, and refused to catch his eye as she marched out into the hall, ‘we’ve had this conversation too many times. You’re not a father. You’re not a husband. You’re a little boy, still looking for magic. Well, what about the ordinary magic, Emil? The ordinary magic of simply being a good father. Those boys deserve better. We’re to stay with my aunts.’
‘That coven? For my boys—’
‘We’ll find our own home, in good course. I have a cousin who has promised his help. It won’t be easy, but at least it can be a start. All of this –’ and she opened her arms, as if to take in Emil, the study, the whole Emporium itself, ‘– it’s a long, slow end.’
He did not argue with her. He slammed the door and, once his tears were spilled, he marched into his boys’ bedroom and spun them the most fantastic tale, of a dumpy little boy who didn’t know he was a prince, and a magic sword lying at the bottom of a toybox, and a castle that the prince conquered, a heritage that was rightfully his.
Two weeks later, the boys lined up in the half-moon hall while their mama arranged for their trunks to be ferried to the taxicab waiting outside. They looked smart in their short trousers and blazers, each with a little Gladstone bag at their side. Emil approached each in turn and stiffly shook their hands. To Cathy it looked as if each boy might suddenly bleat out, but whatever they were feeling, they were adept at keeping it in; something, no doubt, they had inherited from their father.
Nina was back in the doorway, summoning them out.
‘Be good for your mama,’ Emil uttered as they filed out into Iron Duke Mews.
As they left, Cathy put an arm around Emil and he shrunk into her.
‘They’ll be back, won’t they, Cathy? Once the Emporium lives again. Once the Emporium thrives. Then I’ll be able to instruct lawyers. I’ll bring all the wealth of the Emporium to bear. And then, then, then they’ll be here, playing in these aisles, just like it’s meant to be …’
1929. 1930. 1931.
Pursuant to the Births and Deaths Registration Act 1874
Death in the sub-district of Westminster, London, United Kingdom of England and Wales
~
Kaspar Godman, b. May 24th 1888, foreign national
d. January 12th 1931, in absentia
Male, 43 years, by his own hand
~
Certified to be a True Copy of an entry in the certified copy of a Register of Deaths in the District Mentioned Above
Cathy was rigid as she folded the paper and pressed it back into the envelope. She thought she might let it flutter down over the Emporium in a tiny thousand pieces, just like that confetti snow they used to be able to afford.
Lurking unshaven behind her, Emil bided his time before he spoke.
‘We had to observe it, Cathy. You understand, don’t you? If they make the Emporium mine by the deeds, Lloyd’s will start lending again. Mr Moilliet’s made me a promise. They couldn’t possibly lend to a man who’s been missing so long – but, now that they can, well, we can get things back to the way they used to be. You and me, Cathy. Together we can do it.’
Cathy handed him the paper.
‘I won’t believe it, what they’ve written there.’
‘Oh,’ said Emil, ‘you won’t have to! As a matter of fact, I –’ he floundered, some memory of his brother no doubt flurrying up ‘– won’t believe it either. But it’s only paper. It doesn’t have to be true. You and me, we can believe what we want to believe, just so long as there are customers at Christmas and the cloud castle’s floating on air, just so long as there are festivities on Opening Night …’
Papa Jack’s Emporium
Iron Duke Mews
16th October 1934
Dear Frances (wrote Cathy; and then, on a separate leaf: Dear Sally-Anne),
It has come to that time of year again when we look to first frost. Some nights I feel it in the air and I know you will be waking every morning too, looking for that telltale crust of white that has for so long told us our winter has begun.
But I have news, and believe me when I tell you that this is a letter I had hoped never to write. Papa Jack’s Emporium will indeed open at first frost, but we will not be inviting our shop hands to return. This winter Emil will labour in his workshop while Martha and I alone work the shopfloor. It is the slow creep of the ages, which you have seen with your own eyes. We have sold the very last paper tree from the storerooms. All of the patchwork animals are gone, and what dogs and cats and sheep and bears Emil makes now are no more magical than the ones they engineer in any other toyshop in London town; and twice as expensive to boot. We have boxes of bric-a-brac and Emil is not short of new designs, but the wherewithal to produce them en masse evades us, and we rely so heavily on credit from Lloyd’s that shop hands this winter are a luxury we cannot afford.
Do not think lowly of me, for I have fought the cause and lost. Try not to think unkindly of Emil either, for it is the ledgers that have beaten us, not the man. Should the stars shine on us this winter, should Emil stumble upon some flight of Imagination so striking that it might draw back the crowds we once had, I will write that same moment. I will tie missives to pipe-cleaner birds and cast them from the terrace into the London skies.
How I will miss you this winter, and for all the winters to come (she crossed out this latter; then, for Sally-Anne alone, she added: You told me once that I should beware of the Godman boy. I think, now that I stare my middle-age square in the face, that it would not hurt my pride so much to admit you were right! I love you Sally-Anne and hope I will see you again.)
Yours for ever
Cathy
Cathy set down her inkpen and added the letters to the pile. There was only one more left to write. This she composed with the greatest sinking feeling of all. ‘To Whom It May Concern. Please consider this letter as recommendation of Mrs Evelyn Hornung’s abilities as nanny, housekeeper, bookkeeper and all else besides.’ She thought to add ‘friend’ and ‘confidante’, ‘Keeper of Hope in Darkest Times’ and even ‘mother, when I had no mother of my own’, but wanted to spare Mrs Hornung the blushes. She would give it to her at the last moment, when she stepped off through the Emporium doors, and would hope that the guilt lasted no longer than it must.
She was on her way to post the others when she passed by Martha’s open door and saw her studying at her desk. Cathy had quite lost track of what this correspondence course might have been, no doubt one of the Latinate languages with which Martha spent the long summers – and, not for the first time, Cathy felt her pride in her daughter like a barb in her side. There wasn’t a language on the continent that Martha didn’t know (Mr Atlee, God rest his soul, would have been proud), but in these vast, cavernous halls, this latter-day Emporium, there was not a person she might speak to.
Cathy hovered in the doorway, watching her write. Then she stepped nervously within. She had not planned for this, but as she approached she knew that this was right.
‘Hard at work, little one?’
Martha had been hunched over her typewriter, an old toy repurposed from the stores. In capital letters across the head of the page were the words THE TRUE HISTORY OF TOYS and, below that: Martha Godman.