The Dynamite Room (2 page)

He leaned farther across the passenger seat and pushed the door so that it swung open on its hinges, but she took a step back.

He watched her for what seemed like ages and then, maybe realizing that she wasn't going to get in, said, “Suit yourself,” pulling the door shut again with a slam.

“You're being rather stupid, you know,” he said through the window. “You'll get yourself shot.”

He put the car into gear with a grinding wrench, and she watched as the car's bumpers hit each verge again as he struggled to swing it back around; then he drove off, the exhaust still clattering. She waited on the verge until the car was safely out of sight and just a distant mumbling; then she stepped down into the lane and, pushing the gas mask back into its box, carried on walking.

A little while later, she saw the fork in the road and the red postbox at the end of the drive up ahead. The box wobbled on its stand as the heat shimmered off the camber and everything rippled, the view down the lane turning to liquid in the sun. When she reached the old crossbar gate, she stopped and looked down the drive. She'd expected all the windows and doors to be wide open, the breeze blowing through the large house, but everything was shuttered up. The gate squeaked when she opened it and she crunched across the gravel up the drive, then dropped her case on the doorstep, pulled up her sagging socks, and tried to open the door—but it was locked. She stepped back and looked up at the house. The bottom half was neat red brick, the top half painted a crisp white between the dark beams. Ivy crept up one wall, edging its way around the windows. There were patches of moss on the roof tiles and grass sprouted between the two chimney pots. She walked around the outside but everything was closed. The shuttered windows on the ground floor even had planks of wood nailed across them. She tried the back door but she couldn't get the handle to turn no matter which way she twisted it; instead, she stood on tiptoes to look through a glass pane, but something was covering the window inside and she couldn't see in.

She went back to the front and tried the door again.

“Hello!” she called as she peered up at the windows. “Hello!”

She tried to force the handle one more time, shaking it, then looked around. The house and its garden were surrounded on three sides by woods, the trees standing silent in the heat, and beyond them it was a good mile back to the village, or half a mile in the opposite direction to the shore if you knew your way across the salt marsh and mudflats. She slung her gas mask box down by her suitcase and walked across the scorched lawn. The splintered door of the chicken run was hooked open, the chickens gone. She crouched down beside the rabbit run but that was empty as well. She scanned the undergrowth of the trees for the white bob of Jeremiah's tail, and she called out to him, but there was no sign of the rabbit. The flower beds had been turned over to vegetables but most of them were dead now, the soil sucked dry and the leaves crisp and withered. In the middle of a circular flower bed, now surrounded by rings of shrunken cauliflower heads, stood a stone cherub on a granite slab, his skin freckled with lichen. It took all of her strength to wiggle him far enough to one side so that she could pull the spare key, wrapped in paper, out from under him. She ran with it across the grass to the door, but the key wouldn't turn at first and she had to rattle it around in the lock for a while, until finally, reluctantly, it clicked. She pushed the door open and the sunlight glanced in ahead of her.

The house smelled unfamiliar. Her feet creaked over the floorboards and the oak paneling was cool to her touch. All the doors from the hallway were closed; she opened them one by one, finding the rooms dark and musty, the fixtures and furnishings indistinct. All the windows were filled with blackout frames.

She stood at the foot of the stairs and called out again.

“Hello?”

Holding on to the banisters as she went, she followed her voice up the staircase. At the top she looked both ways before nervously making her way down the corridor. The bathroom light didn't work; even the tiny window in there had its blackout frame in place. There were no towels hanging over the rail. No toothbrushes or toothpaste in the blue spotted mug.

She stepped back into the corridor and stopped outside the next door, her sweaty hand on the cool, brass knob.

“Hello?” she said quietly. She turned the knob and nudged the door open. The room was dark and hot. At first everything seemed to be in its place. The neatly made four-poster. The old oak dressing table. The slightly tarnished mirror. The little side table and tasseled lamp. But no bedside book. No half-drunk glass of water. She took a step back and found herself staring at the bulky oak wardrobe. Her breath quickened as she reached out for both handles, and then, after a silent count of
one, two, three,
she flung open the double doors. It was empty. Her mother's clothes were gone.

She sat there on the four-poster bed, her feet dangling, until her eyes slowly adjusted to the dark and shapes began to emerge from the wall: pictures hanging from the picture rail, her mother's treadle sewing machine, the corn dolly hanging on its hook. She began to feel cool again as the sun fingered its way around the side of the house, no longer pressing at the shutters. She tried to think, forcing her eyes shut in the hope that when she opened them again, the room would be full of light and everything as it should be. Twice she got up and shut the heavy wardrobe doors, hearing the careful click setting everything back into place, but when she opened them again the wardrobe remained empty.

Eventually she wandered downstairs. The front door was still open, the sun still streaming through now that it was lower in the sky, but the kitchen remained dark.

She sat up on the work surface—something her mother would never have allowed—and leaned over to fill a glass from the tap. The water drooled out, cloudy at first and then finally clear, and she drank it and then filled the glass again, drinking it more slowly this time.

Her mother had gone to the cinema at Felixstowe with Bea, or Joyce, or somebody else. There wouldn't be a bus back till late, and that was why she'd already prepared the house for the blackout. Her mother was like that—organized. That was why they'd wanted her in the Women's Voluntary Service, and on the parish council and the school's board of governors and heaven knows what else. And she'd moved out of their bedroom and into the spare one. That was it. It might have got damp in her parents' room, because, after all, her mother had always said that the house was damp, she said she could smell it, while her father contested it as he contested almost everything, arguing that it was her imagination.
It's barely thirty years old, Annie. How on earth can it be damp?

Lydia sat for a moment, letting the heel of her sandal bang rhythmically against the cupboard. But that didn't explain the empty station, or the empty village either, or the empty road and fields. Other than the man in the black Hillman Minx, the only sign of life she had seen had been on the train: soldiers with their kit bags, air force officers eating sandwiches or playing cards or sleeping with their heads gently knocking against the window as the train rattled on its way. Two or three women had been sitting in other carriages. She'd seen them on the platform getting on when she'd changed at Reading—a plump lady with a suitcase and a couple of WVSs in their funny green uniforms and hats. She had hoped that one of them would sit by her, but they hadn't. Something about them had made her think of her mother.

Have you a ticket?

Her mother had it, she had told the ticket collector.
She's just powdering her nose.

Right,
he said, although he didn't seem sure.
Most lassies your age are going the other way, you know.

She nodded.

Everyone but the army is going the other way.

He asked her how old she was, nibbling at his mustache as he did and leaning against the compartment door as if he was getting himself ready for a long wait.

She told him, almost twelve.

He frowned as if even that were questionable, scratching his head under his cap, and then stood there watching her, waiting. Finally he asked her if she was all right in there—
your ma?

She stumbled for a moment, wondering what to say, and then blurted that her mother was feeling sick, that was all—sick.
She doesn't like trains.

No? Well, nor do I much on a ruddy 'ot day like this,
he said.
I'll be back later for the ticket, mind. I've another four carriages to do before Ipswich, so you make sure she has it ready.

She nodded and forced a smile, but the man never did come back and the train clattered on.

She hauled her things up the stairs, along the landing, and into her darkened room. She dropped her gas mask on the floor at her feet, heaved her suitcase up onto the bed, and lit the oil lamp. The flame's light flickered across the walls, teasing shadows up to the ceiling and smearing them across the floor. She pulled the evacuee tag off the case's handle and, screwing it into a ball, netted it into the wicker waste bin beneath her dressing table, then clicked open the catches and lifted the lid. She took Mr. Tabernacle out and sat him plumply on the bed. At eleven years old she had thought herself too old for bears, but her mother had suggested that she might want a friendly face with her, even if it was just one-eyed Mr. Tabernacle wearing her father's school tie.

She emptied the rest of the suitcase on the bed and then felt too hungry and tired to put any of it away. What was the point? If her mother had been planning to leave the house, she was sure that she would have written to her. But then her mother still thought she was in Wales, safe and sound.

She slumped on the bed with the bear on her knee and reached over to pull out the six letters from the gas mask box along with a storybook she'd made, the pages threaded together with string. Now it was all crumpled, her writing half-washed away where one of the Welsh boys had thrown it into the brook. She tried one more time to smooth out the creases where it had dried all out of shape, but the story was ruined. She put it back into the box, then laid out the letters, folded tight, in a semicircle on the bed between her and Mr. Tabernacle.

“You choose,” she told the bear. Then, taking his arm, she made him pick one.

She unfolded the letter.

She knew them off by heart, her mother lamenting at how quiet the house was now that she and Alfie and Lydia's father were all away. The petrol pump in the village was out of bounds, she wrote—needed by the infantry apparently—so she was feeling desperately cut off and she never had been good on a bicycle, as Lydia well knew. The Germans had given them a bit of a bashing the day before, one of the Jerries emptying a load on the harbor at Lowestoft and another hitting the airfield at Martlesham. Joyce had apparently felt the rumbles in the pub, and her mother wrote that half the tins in the kitchen larder had fallen out. It had put the frighteners up them all.

There was no news of Alfie or of Lydia's father. She wrote instead of WVS meetings and her disastrous fruitcakes, as if nothing else mattered, and of Mr. Morton.

And so Lydia had written one of the special postcards they'd given all the children. Everyone is being lovely, she said. What did another lie matter?

She slowly folded the letter again and put it back in the box with the rest. Then she picked up Mr. Tabernacle, gathered the blanket from the bed, and took up the oil lamp. She stepped out onto the landing and walked along to the junction outside the spare room. The door at the far end of the corridor was closed, the rim of darkness around its frame sealing everything in. At some stage, if no one came back, she thought, she would have to go in.

She stood for a moment, looking at it, then turned back as far as the narrow flight of stairs that led up to the attic. The steps were steep, and near the top she had to set Mr. Tabernacle and the oil lamp down, her blanket wrapped around her shoulders, so that she could heave the hatch open. After a struggle it tipped back on its hinge and clattered down, throwing up dust. She hauled herself and everything with her up through the hole and then dropped the hatch shut and pulled the bolt across, pushing it into its socket good and tight.

The attic had been many things: a submarine, or an airship flying out across the Channel, or a courtroom, or the offices of a spying agency, or a dragon's lair, or just the very best and most secret of hiding places. It was rather poky, being in the only part of the roof that was high enough to stand in, but it had a single square window that she could see out of if she stood on one of the crates. She looked out now. The sun was finally sinking beneath the horizon. Clouds rolled in from the coast, their underbellies orange and pink.

She stepped down off the crate. There wasn't much room. An old ottoman stood in the corner, containing some of her mother's coats from when she'd been courting and there must have been more money. A few cardboard boxes were stacked full of disused china plates, cracked saucers, and chipped teacups. And everything—even the things supposedly sealed up safe—was furred with dust.