Together, they stood over it. ‘There’s only room for one, Mama.’ Martha looked down. The toy soldiers were already marching aboard. ‘And some tiny passengers, perhaps.’
Martha remained only to help her into the boat, Sirius diving into the paper waves alongside, and released her from the mooring. Then, determined to rescue the toybox from ruin, Martha returned to the flowers on fire, the cottage and forests in the world up above.
It was a slow journey over the lake; the paper waves moved sluggishly, and tendrils of satin seaweed seemed to anchor her down, but there was a current to the water and, by accident or design, it was drawing her to the island. Cathy could do nothing more than lie back and whisper in Sirius’s ragged ears, while the Imperial Kapitan stood on the coracle’s rounded prow and raised his rifle at every leaping fish.
Soon, she felt the quaking of the earth and stepped out of the coracle, on to a new shore of shale and confetti sand. The steps leading to the tower were weatherworn and she took to them carefully, allowing Sirius to venture ahead.
There were no nerves as she reached the tower. The door was nondescript, nothing more than a tradesman’s entrance, and up close the white walls seemed scored in lines, as if the paper had been folded, smoothed out and folded again. She stepped into the interior, but all was serene. A stair of ivory white beckoned her on.
She stopped only once as she ventured up. Sirius was eager to continue the climb, but through a door Cathy saw a room much bigger than it had any right to be, and in it a model village of magnificent design. Farmhouses and fields, no bigger than the doll’s houses of the Emporium shelves, surrounded a bustling market town of churches and steeples, butchers and grocers and libraries and schools. A model railway ran a circuit through the houses – and, on every street corner, wind-up men and women, no longer painted as the soldiers they used to be, strolled (not marched) up and down.
As she was watching, painted eyes looked up and found her. Soon the whole town was flocking her way. In the fields of paper wheat on the fringes of the farmland, the windup host gathered. At Cathy’s side, the Imperial Kapitan appeared with his fellows, took one look at the miracle that lay before them, and surged out to meet friends not seen since an age long forgotten. Soon, they were mingling with their brethren. There would, Cathy supposed, be much learning to do; the new arrivals would have to be demobbed. But, for now, they were allowing themselves to be led. A town crier was flinging his arms in circles and the town was falling into formation.
Beneath her, Cathy read out the words.
HE IS WAITING!
Sirius yapped, but Cathy needed no encouragement. Her old bones did not feel young as she returned to the stairs, they still creaked and complained as they had grown used to doing, but there was a new feeling now. Perhaps this was the feeling of being rewound. She took flight. On the next storey, the halls were empty. On the storey above, only old crates and rolls of unused felt. But now she could feel the flickering of the fire she had seen from afar; its heat touched her, luring her on.
She stopped before a wooden door, the only thing of any colour set into the ivory walls. She did not knock, because she did not need to. She pushed it open.
The workshop was small, with a fire and a worktop and a single chair. He was lying back in that wooden throne, a mess of hair and tight white beard, with his head lolling forward. His hands, which had once been so smooth, were mottled in blue, with nails like yellow horns, and they twitched in his sleep, drumming out the pattern of some old dream.
Cathy stuttered forward. She did not know where to stand. Having no such compunctions, Sirius lolloped forward and tasted his fingers with its darned-sock tongue, then lay down to curl at his feet, the thrumming of his motor like a contented purr.
Cathy stood above him. For the longest time, she watched his chest as it rose and fell. She was aware, dimly, that the tower had shifted, the sky through the window seeming askew, and wondered (without really caring) whether Martha was moving the toybox, even now.
He opened his eyes. God, but they were glacial blue. How the years had changed him, and how they had kept him the same. He looked like her Kaspar, inhabiting the body of his father.
His lips came apart. Perhaps it had been decades since he had last spoken, for his voice, when it came, was as coarse as freshly felled wood.
‘Miss Wray?’ he croaked, scarcely able to believe.
‘Kaspar,’ she breathed, ‘I thought I told you to stop calling me that.’
She fell into his arms.
They demolished Papa Jack’s Emporium, Purveyors of Childhood Delights, on a winter’s day in the December of 1953. If, like me, you had been there to see it done, you would have stood in the falling snow surrounded by so many others, seen the walls come down and the dust rise up, and thought it the very end of enchantment.
But you would have been wrong.
Come north with me now, past the green splendours of Regent’s Park, through the elegant porticos of St John’s Wood and north, to a little house off the Finchley Road. Take your shoes off at the door, creep past the kitchen where Martha Godman’s children are putting the finishing touches to toys of their very own designs while their patchwork dog watches curiously on, and come up the crooked stairs. Here, in a chamber at the very top, sits an ill-hewn toybox, rescued from the Emporium on that last November night. Inside it are worlds too many to be imagined, and two old lovers making new ones every day.