‘I thought – somebody ought to tell it. Even if there’s nobody left who wants to listen, it should be written down somewhere, so it’s never forgotten. Not just Papa and Papa Jack, though I’ve written them too. But … the soldiers, Mama. We shouldn’t forget the soldiers.’
If Martha could have recreated them, taken any two toy soldiers and set them to wind each other up, triggered thought and idea and imagination all over again, she would have done it in a second. Sometimes, Cathy thought, that was why she learnt her languages so diligently – for Martha had never been able to do that thing she had dreamed of, and start conversing with the toy soldiers themselves. She had kept the copy of Gulliver like it was a totem. It stood, dog-eared, up on the shelf.
‘I’ve written the letters,’ Cathy said, sinking to the end of the bed. ‘They’re not coming back. All of those shop girls, even Mrs Hornung, they’ll have to find their own places now. And Martha …’ She hesitated, steeling herself. ‘… so should you.’
Martha was silent.
‘You’re twenty-seven years old. Always my little girl, but twenty-seven years old. It’s young enough to start again. You, with all your languages, all of that thought. It mustn’t go to waste, waiting here with your mama. You mustn’t go to waste. You might be at the Foreign Office. You might be translating works of great literature. You might be writing your own. You might be … prime minister, with a mind like yours.’
‘A shop girl like me.’
‘A shop girl like you.’
For a time, Martha returned to THE TRUE HISTORY OF TOYS. ‘I won’t say I haven’t thought of it. But to leave you here, in this … museum. This … mausoleum …’
Cathy took her hand. ‘Running away isn’t like it is in the stories, little one. Most of the time you aren’t running away from monsters or villains, not even from memories like the ones we have here. Those things are hardly worth running from, because they’ll always catch you up. No, most of the time you’re running from that little voice, the one in there, telling you to stay where you are …’
‘I’d wanted to wait with you, Mama, to wait for him to come home.’
Cathy whispered in her ear: ‘Your father wasted his last years not living. Don’t waste yours. Live, little one, for us both. It’s what Kaspar would have wanted.’
Cathy went out on to the shopfloor and from there out into London town. Regent Street was a bustle. Carriages became ensnared at the Oxford Circus while the sky, so cerulean blue, turned overhead. It would be lonely without Martha. But there would still be Emil. There would always be Emil. And loneliness needed company, even though that was still loneliness of a sort. So when, some time later, Emil came to her with the idea of turning off the power in half of the quarters and, in that way, saving a little money to make the Emporium last a little longer, it did not seem so very strange that they should drag the single beds out of the storerooms and move into Mrs Hornung’s old chambers together. It did not seem so very strange that, without Mrs Hornung and with no Martha to care for, Cathy should take to cooking meals for them each night. And if a customer come shopping tipped his hat to ‘Mr Godman, Mrs Godman,’ as he passed back through the Emporium doors, there was no need to tell him that they were not husband and wife. You did not correct your customers, not if you hoped (not if you needed) them to come back.
One year.
Two years.
Three years.
Four.
‘We have to find some way to bring back children,’ Emil said, locking up the shopfloor on a cold winter night. ‘Have you noticed it isn’t families who come any more? Now it’s just grown men who used to come when they were boys. Mothers bringing their children, when it used to be children bringing their mothers …’
The path of nostalgia, thought Cathy, narrowing into regret.
1937. ’38. ’39. ’40.
The blast woke her. That one had been close. She reached for the nightlamp at her side, thought better of it, and ran with her head bowed low along the hall, up the stair to the place where Kaspar’s workshop used to sit. Emil, who had been somewhere on the shopfloor, was not far behind. They crashed into the toybox together and slammed shut the lid.
It was dark in here, the comforting dark, the dark that made the world seem such a faraway, dreamlike place. Cathy waited for the next reverberation.
A voice spoke to her in the darkness. ‘Cathy, are you hurt?’
‘It was close. Not Iron Duke Mews. Oxford Street? The Circus?’
A succession of smaller conflagrations, somewhere on the other side of the city. The sounds reached out to them through walls of wood, the imaginary air.
‘It’s an all-night one, isn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ said Cathy, ‘I’d imagine it is.’
When the bombardments first came they hadn’t known where to hide. Emil spoke of erecting an Anderson shelter in the heart of the shopfloor, but the Emporium had cubbyholes aplenty, cupboards beneath its manifold stairs, hollows in the walls where the toy soldiers had once built their doll’s house worlds. Beyond the Emporium doors, London’s terrified were flooding into the Underground, but the thought of rushing there, beneath a sky marked with the comet trails of sparring aircraft, was reason enough to stay behind. It was hunkered together in Martha’s old closet, the carnival etchings of the Long War all around them, that Cathy first remembered the toybox. Ten years ago they had sold the few Kaspar once made to a collector, and in that way bought themselves a few more months without the fear of Mr Moilliet’s letters, but this one had always remained: unpainted, half-finished, propped on its end in the corner of his workshop.
Emil had brought a night light. He fumbled to strike a match and, a moment later, the walls were alive with an incandescent display. Then, as if recognising the solemnity of the occasion, the shadow figures stopped dancing, wrapped their arms around one another and waited out the bombardment.
For a long time they alternated between silences and concern about the other. Emil asked Cathy if she was frightened; Cathy asked the same question of Emil. Emil said he was grateful that Martha was gone, off to the Americas with her husband, because at least she did not have to live through this. Cathy said she was grateful Emil’s boys were training as doctors, because at least that meant they might be excused the fighting; at least that meant they might not come back as Kaspar had, all that time ago.
The Emporium shook. The world turned on its axis. Somewhere, somebody’s life was opened up; somebody else’s, taken away.
Emil said: ‘I’m so glad you’re here, Cathy.’
And gently she said, ‘There’s nowhere else I’d be.’
Emil stuttered as he next spoke, forcing his words into the snatches of silence between the falling bombs. ‘Perhaps I’m a foolish old man, Cathy, but … you’re the person I’ve known the longest, in all of my life. After Papa went, after Kaspar – it’s always been you, Cathy, you for more than half of my life. Ever since that summer, when we were young, and everything was good … Do you know, we’ve been longer like this than we ever were with Kaspar? You and me and our little Emporium.’ He stopped. She was staring at him, voiceless, in the dark. ‘Aren’t we married, Cathy? Oh, I know it’s not that and I know it’s not …’ His words came apart. ‘But marriage, of a sort. Well, aren’t we?’
Another explosion echoed in the Emporium. What the toy soldiers might have made of this, thought Cathy. They would have charged out of the skirting, believing their Long War had returned.