This is how it ends, she remembered, and Kaspar’s face beamed at her from the wedding portrait on the wall.
It was to be another week before Martha’s new job at the Ministry, so for a time Cathy had nothing to do but acquaint herself with her grandchildren. There was enough to learn about them, their likes and dislikes, their habits and routines, that it was easy to forget that every passing day was a day closer to the moment the demolition experts would set their charges along Iron Duke Mews, bringing down the Emporium and all its neighbours in the never-ending quest for Post-War Reconstruction. The bus up to Hampstead Heath, Saturday afternoon at the Kilburn theatre, a Technicolor matinee; outside the empty Emporium, the days could easily be filled.
September was the dawn of the new era. There were two schools for the children to attend, a boys’ school in St John’s Wood for Lucas and a girls’ prep for Bethany off Primrose Hill, and the journeys to and fro somehow seemed to dominate the day. In the between times, Esther demanded feeding and bathing and playing, and though some of this could be delegated to Sirius (who seemed to be remembering the tricks he had learned when Martha herself was a girl), Cathy took delight in the small things. When Lucas’s teachers were dissatisfied with his attitude in class (for he was more interested in telling the boy in front that he was an American adventurer every bit as famous as Huckleberry Finn), it was Cathy who sat with him at the end of the day and showed him his fractions, and in that way engaged him with his work. When Bethany slipped in the schoolyard and had to have stitches in her knee, it was Cathy who held her hand in the hospital ward and, afterwards, took her for an Italian ice cream that cured all ills. At bedtime, she plucked the old copy of Gulliver’s Travels from the shelf and, though they were far too old and grown-up for mere stories, she read to them of Gulliver’s adventures in Lilliput and Brobdingnag. And, when that was done (and Esther, too young to understand, was nevertheless demanding to join in), she reached for the only other tome she could find that contained adventures of similar daring, and that was how Martha’s THE TRUE HISTORY OF TOYS became a bedtime story for the very first time.
‘It can’t really have happened that way,’ said Lucas, who had embraced the logic of fractions and the certainty of his times tables with a relish Cathy had not expected. ‘Toys can’t walk and talk …’
‘Not the ones you play with, young man. And yet …’
By now, Sirius had taken to sleeping with the grandchildren, and Cathy had instructed them in the solemn duty of winding him up at the end of each night. ‘He wound down only once before,’ she told them as they fixed a new patch to his hide, ‘and who knows if his heart could stand it again.’
‘Heart!’ Lucas snorted.
‘A mechanical heart might still be a heart,’ said Cathy, and was delighted to hear them bickering the question through over the days that followed. There was, perhaps, a way the Emporium might live on in hearts and minds, even if its bricks and mortar might soon be obliterated from the London streets.
One afternoon, when half-term holidays came around, Cathy took the children on a bus down to the Oxford Circus and, though both Lucas and Bethany gaped at the garish storefront of Hamley’s, finally she lured them away, into that warren of winding Mayfair mews in which the Emporium still waited.
‘Is that it?’ asked Lucas.
‘You said it was as big as Selfridge’s inside. Ten times the size!’
‘Perhaps it was.’
‘Mama said it had its own railway, and a giant dome like at St Paul’s.’
‘Your mama was right. She should know. She was born through that very door.’
‘I think it’s all stories,’ said Lucas – but that night it was Lucas himself who demanded the honour of winding up Sirius as he lay, basking in the attention, at the foot of the bed. And the next morning, when Cathy woke late, she was not surprised to see that it was Lucas who was chasing Sirius in circles around the garden, throwing him a ball and attaching trowel blades to his paws so that he could dig for bones in the vegetable patch like a real live dog.
Cathy was standing at the window, watching them play, when a neighbour appeared over the back fence and halloed out. Lucas, his face set in a suspicious mask, summoned Sirius to heel and answered with a respectful (if slightly scornful) nod of the head. It was good to be suspicious of strangers and his school had rightly drilled him in this fact, but on this occasion he need not have worried. Cathy had seen the way the eyes of their neighbour thrilled upon seeing the patchwork dog; a century might pass by, but you would always recognise a fellow who held the Emporium close to his heart.
The following afternoon, Cathy was involved in writing a letter to Emil, when a knock came at the door. Writing to Emil demanded great patience and composure, for leaving the Emporium had laid him lower than it had Cathy herself – and, Cathy was given to believe, he had not truly left, for he still flitted back and forth between the home of one of his estranged sons (much to the horror of their mother), and the barren shopfloor itself. The distraction of the door knocking, while the rest of the family gambolled with Sirius in the back garden, was a deep relief.
The man on the doorstep was the very same who had ogled Sirius with such wonder over the garden fence. He was a rotund little man, evidently given to pastries – and indeed there were the shreds of some sugary foodstuff still sparkling in his whiskers of white and grey – but he had dressed incongruously smartly for a neighbourly visit. In his hands was a paper bag that cast Cathy back half a century in time: brown paper and green ink, with the insignia of Papa Jack’s Emporium up and down its sides.
‘Forgive me, madam. I’m of the hope you won’t reject a little distraction on a Sunday morning. My name is Harold Elderkin. You won’t have noticed me, I’m sure, but I couldn’t help observe your arrival on our quiet little street. I’m afraid you’ll think me a spook, an espionage artist par excellence, but what spying I’ve done has been quite accidental! I couldn’t help it, you see, that …’
As if on cue, Sirius darted into the hall and let out a series of pillowy barks at the stranger at the door. ‘Sirius,’ she said, ‘do calm down. This is Mr Elderkin, come from …’
‘Good Lord,’ said Harold, ‘I was right! Until yesterday afternoon, I don’t believe I’d seen one of these in more than fifty years. We coveted these as lads. I would have cut off half my own arm to open one of these on a Christmas morning. I’m right, aren’t I? This is vintage stuff. Vintage Emporium … And you …’
‘I worked there,’ said Cathy, ‘once upon a time.’
‘I should say that you did,’ said Harold, giving weight to Cathy’s first impression that here was a man who would be happy talking to a lamp post, if only he could find a lamp post happy to listen, ‘and I remember you, madam. When I was a boy, I was boarded at a little place in Lambeth, a place called Sir Josiah’s. A squalid little place, and I dare say you haven’t given it a second thought in a generation, but … that was home, to me and my lot. Day in day out, with little to look forward to, until … the visitors from the Emporium.’
Cathy thought back: the summer trips, the carriage over the river, the orphaned boys swarming in the yard.
She stepped back. ‘Please Mr Elderkin, come in. I’m delighted you came.’