Her eyes were on Emil. He seemed close now, closer than the walls of the toybox compelled him to be. He lifted his hand, dropped it again – and when he found the courage to lift it again, she almost took it in her own. His eyes were cast down but all she would have to do, all it would take, was a word and they would rise up again. She might have reached out to him, touched her fingertips to his, and both of their worlds would have changed.
Instead she curled her fingers into her palm. How long had it been since she felt human arms wrapped around her? Seventeen years since Kaspar, seventeen years since that night he had fallen into her as if for the very first time. And yet, the memory of it remained – just like the memory of how the stars had glittered that night on the seafront, or how the paper trees had risen as he rushed her into the Wendy House walls, or how deranged he had looked as he goaded her through it, pushing Martha out into the world. All of these, a thousand other memories, all of them entwined: the big and the small. The ordinary magic (why was it always those words?) of a husband who loved his wife and was loved in return.
‘Sometimes I can still hear him.’ She was only really aware she had spoken when Emil looked up; her voice was soft, subsumed in the sirens. ‘It’s when I’m sleeping, or when I’m lying there, dreaming of sleep. I hear him in the walls, like we used to hear the soldiers – only it isn’t him, not really, it’s just the memory of him, the ghost of a ghost, refusing to leave. Or I’ll wake, even now, and wonder if all my life has been a dream – because what else could it be, me and Kaspar, you and this old Emporium? There are nights I’ll hear the things he said to me, or the things I said to him, as if the Emporium captured them, like that old music box of his, ripping me out of the bed where I’m sleeping and casting me back there, where I might be waltzing with him in the paper forest or chasing Martha in those longboats around the cloud castle moat.’ One night she had felt his arms close around her but when she opened her eyes she was alone, with only Sirius to keep her warm. In the morning, she thought: I should run now, run away like I ran once before. But his ghost was in the toyshop, and though a heart still beat in her breast, so was hers; both of them haunting the aisles where they first met. ‘I can feel him now. Can’t you? Crouching here, in his toybox, in space he chipped out of the world himself. That’s how I know …’
Emil mouthed the word, ‘Know?’, his question turned into a mime by the echoes in the earth.
‘Know that he’s gone. That Kaspar’s dead.’
The shriek of some falling incendiary, the din it made as it made fountains out of some nearby alley, drove them back against the walls.
‘Cathy, don’t …’
‘It took me an age to see it. Years and years to admit it to myself. But if Kaspar didn’t die, if he isn’t at the bottom of the Thames or swept out to sea, well, how can he haunt this place like he does? No, Emil. If he didn’t die that night, he died the day after. I know that now …’
Whatever Cathy said next was lost to the sound of brick shearing from brick, of a street opened up to the sewer beneath. The toybox shifted, Emil plunged against Cathy – and then they were toppling, each entangled in the other as the toybox and all the world it contained crashed down, down, down …
Somehow, even in spite of the ringing in their ears, the sirens sang louder now. Somewhere, there was the smell of smoke.
In the morning, standing upon the ruptured cobbles of Iron Duke Mews, Cathy and Emil looked up at the Emporium edifice, its uppermost storeys open to the world just like the doll’s houses that once lined the aisles. Through the shifting reefs of black she could spy the charred timbers where the flames had ebbed away, the terrace where the snowdrops would never flower again. It was a wonder such a place as Papa Jack’s Emporium had ever existed; it seemed so tiny from without, so ordinary: just bricks and mortar, like any of the buildings around; and, like any of the buildings around, it was not built to last.
The fire engines were still at the end of the mews. Some of the ARP and fire wardens had shopped at the Emporium once. They had come here as boys to play the Long War or imprint themselves upon patchwork beasts. Now they gazed at it with a kind of despair. This was not just the ruin of a building, Cathy thought, but the ruin of memory itself.
Emil took Sirius into his arms, shivering as he stood.
‘How are we going to come back from this, Cathy?’
Cathy said nothing. She too was staring into the open Emporium, at the place where Kaspar’s toybox still teetered over the precipice and the wind kept snatching charred pages from the books he had filled with his designs, his ideas, his imagination: the very essence of Kaspar himself. Up they went, up and ever upwards, turning into a thousand blackened fragments as the wind bore them over the rooftops until, at last, they were gone.
1940. ’41. ’42.
MANY MORE YEARS LATER …
THIS ORDINARY WORLD
LONDON, AUGUST–NOVEMBER 1953
Consider Catherine Godman: older than you remember her, though you remember her well; greyer, more lined than she was when she first saw the Emporium lights, but still the same girl you followed up from her estuary home, into an upside-down life of mystery, memory and magic. Tonight, if you had crept through the empty Emporium aisles (as so few do these days), you would have found her at the desk in her daughter’s old room, and on the scratched surface in front of her two torn letters, salvaged from the bins where her old friend Emil had thrown them away. Three hours of painstaking recreation, of glue, ink and masking tape, was all it took to piece those letters back together. And if you had lurked there on her shoulder, you too might have seen what Cathy herself saw: one letter the notification of Mr Moilliet’s retirement from his position at Lloyd’s bank, and the appointment of a Mr Greene as his successor; the next, from Mr Greene himself, declaring a full audit of the Emporium records, surprise at the lenience with which his predecessor conducted affairs, an immediate suspension of all credit extended to Papa Jack’s Emporium and a demand for all extant payments to be made good, under threat of foreclosure.
If you had been particularly canny (as we know that you are), perhaps you would have seen what Cathy saw last of all, the thing that brought the first tear to her eye – for in the corner of the letters, the date read April and, on the calendar on the wall, the date read August. There had always been secrets aplenty in Papa Jack’s Emporium, but perhaps none as devastating as this. Emil had known what was coming all summer long.
Because this is how the world ends: not in the falling incendiaries of an aerial attack, not in a storm of toy soldiers laying waste to the gods who brought them into being, but in the banal letters of a bank. Where once was magic: now only economics.
Yes: consider Catherine Godman. We have followed her all this way. We must follow her a little further yet.
Papa Jack’s Emporium closed its doors for the final time on an overcast day in the August of 1953. There was bitterness to the wind that day and, as Cathy left the store by one of its manifold tradesman’s exits, she stopped to fasten her overcoat and thought: well, that was a life. Then she toddled off to catch a bus.
It had been some time since she was last alone on London streets. The city was bigger than she remembered. It was more colourful too – and, as she fought for a seat on one of the crowded buses, she got to thinking that here was one of the reasons the Emporium had finally closed its doors; for if there was such extravagance to be found on an everyday London street, what place in the world could there be for a shop grown so drab and ordinary after the glory days of its youth?
The bus took her past the green splendour of Regent’s Park, through the elegant porticos of St John’s Wood and north, before depositing her upon the Finchley Road – where, finally, she stood outside a simple redbrick terrace, distinguished from its neighbours only by the monkey puzzle standing in the garden. Here she checked the address against the notebook poking out of the top of her day bag. Satisfied, she knocked at the door.
‘Mama,’ came a voice as the door drew back.