The Dynamite Room (12 page)

And now, after all of that, here she was without him. She'd undone all her efforts. No one, she thought, would come and save a girl who only thought of herself.

Somewhere outside there was a boom, so loud and near that she felt it reverberate through the house. Windows rattled and downstairs something fell from a shelf and smashed. She scrambled off the bed and ran into the hallway. It had sounded like a shell blast.

“Hello?” she called. “Hello?”

She looked up and down the corridor. Bits of dust were falling in trails from the cracks in the ceiling.

“Are you there? Mister! Hello?”

Eventually his head appeared at the bottom of the staircase—“Are you all right?” he said—and she sighed with relief.

You hunt or you are hunted,
his grandfather had said.
You need to be invisible and silent and full of tricks if you don't want to be caught and eaten or turned over to the Devil.

And so he had taken the boy out hunting in the night, far into the dark Bavarian forests that surrounded the farmhouse.

You have to train your eyes to see through your blindness and train your ears
to hear sounds in the silence. The forest is full of living things,
he would say,
and if you are to be the hunter, you have to know that they are there.

They would go deeper and deeper, and the boy would learn how to listen with new ears and see with new eyes, his grandfather teaching him how to walk so light footed that barely a leaf beneath him would crinkle and barely a twig would crack.

You see things that others think are invisible, and you hear things that others think are silent, but you yourself
need to be silent and invisible,
he said.
That is all that differentiates the eater from the eaten.

Through the darkness of the forest his grandfather would cock his gun and fire into the pitch black, and although the boy saw nothing, somewhere he would catch the sound of a wood pigeon dropping through the trees. His grandfather would send him off to fetch it.

That will do for tomorrow's dinner.

But I didn't see where it fell,
the boy would say.

His grandfather would shake his head with solemn despair.
You need to look with your ears as well as your eyes,
he would tell the boy.
If someone magicked you into a bat, what a mess you would be in.

Then his grandfather would send him off rummaging in the darkness to find it. But one night, when he eventually found the pigeon in a soggy pile of forest debris, he turned around and the old man was gone.

He stood there for a moment and then called out.
Grandfather? Grandfather,
he called.
Grandfather, where are you?

He stood there, quite still, holding the dead pigeon and feeling the darkness of the forest thickening around him, the trees growing taller out of the ground, the lofty tops closing in and thatching themselves over him, until the darkness was immense and complete.

Where are you?
he said again, or whispered, or perhaps just thought. A panic surged through him.
Where are you?
He let the pigeon drop to the ground and for a moment he stood, listening hard, and trying even harder to see; and then, rather timidly, he stepped forward and began to fumble his way.

How long it had taken him to feel his way out of the forest, he did not know. Long enough for his hearing to grow acute and his sight to sharpen, so that, after a while, the darkness began to retreat and shapes started to emerge. His toes were stubbed and his fingers were pricked and grazed as he slowly made his way, half-blind, slithering over fallen tree trunks, his clothes occasionally catching on briars, his feet slipping in the sodden, uneven ground. When he finally broke out of the forest into the clearing, it was with a rush of relief. He found his grandfather sitting on the front steps of the farmhouse, casually lighting his pipe. A thread of smoke lifted from it. An oil lamp burned from inside one of the windows.

Where were you?
the boy said—almost demanded—as he tried to hold back his tears.

There,
his grandfather said.

No you weren't!

I was. I was right beside you, all the way. You just chose not to see me.

She slopped along the landing with the buckles of her sandals undone, now that her mother wasn't there to say,
For goodness' sake, Lydia—take them off or do them up!
The house was a furnace, every surface hot to touch. She paused at the top of the stairs and looked down the dark corridor to the closed door at the end and the room she had tried to stop him from going in. If no one came, she had told herself, she would have to go in as well; and now it was her third day here and nobody had come.

She walked nervously towards it—a door no different from any of the others and yet the wood seemed darker somehow. She reached out. The brass handle was warm in her hand, and the metal squeaked its resistance as she slowly turned it.

The room was just as they had left it, just as she remembered. FROG model planes lined up and waiting in their squadrons along the shelves, books on ships and tanks and wars, thickly packed between stone bookends carved as crouching monkeys. A man with a big mustache pointed his finger at her from a poster above the desk.
YOUR COUNTRY NEEDS YOU,
and Alfie had given himself to it, blagging himself into a war that, at his age, he had no right to take part in, her father had said.

She stepped inside and leaned against the door until it quietly clicked shut. There was the photo of Alfie and their father taken on a beach somewhere in Norfolk—Alfie in his swimming belt aged no more than fourteen, his dimples opening up in his cheeks as he grinned. On his bed sat his golliwog. A folded pair of pajamas was sticking out from under his pillow. Several cricket bats and tennis racquets were propped in the corner, with a pair of white sports shoes. One shoe had a balding tennis ball pushed inside, the other a cricket ball—the same ball perhaps that had once been wedged in the tree. Looking about her, she had the odd sensation that everything in the room had somehow been hollowed out, leaving just the skin of things.

On a shelf stood a wooden soldier carved by their father—a rectangular hunk of wood turned into a roughly shaped man: a little taken away from either side of the top to form a head, a slight rounding of the shoulders, the wood sliced away beneath the hands, and thick cuts to differentiate the arms from the body and the stocky soldier's legs from the base. It had been painted and varnished once, but the varnish was now cracked by many summers of heat and sun. She picked the soldier up and held it in both hands. It looked as if it had been broken into a thousand pieces, then delicately stuck back together, piece by tiny piece.

It angered her that the German soldier had been in there; nothing was safe now. She wondered if he had taken anything or moved anything. Whether he'd found her father's workshop too at the bottom of the garden, whether anything was left untampered with and still theirs. She didn't want him having it all, making the house his own. Some parts of it were meant to be private; some rooms were not supposed to be touched.

She returned the wooden soldier to his shelf and looked around the room again. She opened the drawers and saw the clothes all neatly laid there by her mother. Her fingers touched the white cotton T-shirts, the woolen winter socks, his navy Argyle jumper. She gently pushed her nose into its tickly warmth to take in the smell of him, but all that was left was the scent of camphor balls.

She sat on the floor beside the bed. Next to her were his piles of magazines,
Flight
and
Aeroplane
. He had collected them for several years, but they had become especially important to him once the war had started and each issue began including full-length articles on the identification of various planes. They would lie on their backs in the garden and imagine what it might be like to watch dogfights over the marshes, two planes chasing and wheeling high above, the lines of vapor coiling out behind them like tangled laces.

At the end of April a Heinkel 111 was shot down over Clacton. It came down in the town, ploughing into a row of houses. It still had a belly full of mines that it had been laying off Harwich, and when it crashed the mines took out fifty houses and blew the windows out of every building for over half a mile. Alfie had read it in the paper and announced it over the dinner table, much to their mother's annoyance, who didn't like any talk of war over the craggy landscape of their toad-in-the-hole.

After months of nothing the skies had suddenly been full of planes. Her mother worried so much that she lost weight and had to keep taking her skirts in, and Lydia had seen it in her face too, the worry graying her skin and giving her bags and lines that shouldn't have been there. She kept a suitcase packed by the front door, next to a bucket of sand.
It's daft, I know,
she said to Bea,
but it makes me feel better.

It's going to be all right, isn't it?
Lydia had asked as they'd listened to the reports of the Germans marching into Denmark and Norway.

Of course, darling,
she said.
Of course.

But before long Lydia was being evacuated, and Button too.

Just a precaution,
her mother had said.

She laid herself down on Alfie's bed and felt the warmth of the covers beneath her. The cotton sheets smelled musty. Just the slightest hint of him.

God will look after him,
she had said the day that Alfie went.

Her mother had been staring blankly out the window at the driveway and the gate through which Alfie had gone, one hand held around her stomach, the other pressed against her cheek where he had kissed her. It would be all right because God would look after him, Lydia had repeated.

Yes, darling,
her mother said.
Yes, of course he will.

On the wall above the bed, rows of insects were pinned to the felt board. Alfie had spent hours out on Sutton Heath with his net in one hand and, in the other, a bag with a packed lunch. It was home to some rare species,
Some real gems,
he told her, including the silver-studded blue butterfly. He'd seen one on three different occasions, which, he said, was three more than most ordinary people ever saw. He killed one of everything he came across and skewered it with a dressing pin to his board, but there was an empty place still in the middle, saved for the studded blue. Three times he'd caught one but he'd never been able to kill it.
Too damn special,
he said.
Had to let the buggers go.

She lifted one of the slats of the shutters and peered through. A small downy-white feather drifted against the glass, caught in the warm air, and she poked the window open wider in case it wanted to come in. As she watched it drifting there still, she saw her father walking past the side of the house towards the garage. She recognized the trousers, the shirt, the braces, the glossed sheen to his hair. He walked with casual purpose, his long strides taking him along the edge of the lawn, his arms loose at his sides. Her breath caught in her throat. He strode across the garden as if he'd just returned from a walk across the fields.

And then she saw that it wasn't him, not at all, but the soldier in her father's clothes. She wondered why she hadn't noticed the clothes earlier. How dare he, she thought.
How dare he?
She jumped off the bed and ran out onto the landing and all the way round to her parents' room and the window at the front. There she caught him as he disappeared into the garage, and she had to wait several minutes until he came back out again with a tool of some sort. He walked back around the house, and she ran from window to window to see where he was going until he paced out across the lawn. There were lines of sweat down the back of his shirt where the braces pressed against his spine and great wet circles under his armpits. He looked so much like her father. She shut her eyes and tried to make it true, but when she opened them again he'd disappeared completely, as if he had never been there at all.

The certificates were in a large paper wallet hidden among a dozen other paper wallets, packed within a box within a box that, on first glance, held nothing but torn-out knitting patterns. He sat in candlelight at the dining-room table and pored over each one in turn, carefully making notes in his pocket notebook. Certificates of the man's naval cadetship with records of efficiency, as well as the conduct reports completed at the end of each year and an ancient order of promotion from Midshipman to Sub-Lieutenant. There was even certification for a provisional swimming test, signed by a Commander and Gunner and dated September 1923, which made him smile. He sat back in the chair, stretching, and wondered how much more he needed. A marriage certificate would be good; a birth certificate, better.

Marriage. That had been their plan after the war.

He remembered the two of them sitting on a bench beside the Neue Wache memorial, and, not for the first time, he had thought about proposing—the words had been right there, shaping themselves in his mouth.

How many steeples can you see?
she had then said, the question suddenly tipping him out of his thoughts.

After a while he had counted five.

I can see six.

Where?

There's one in the sky, as well. Can you see? There, in the clouds.

Was it this childish innocence, he wondered, that had so endeared her to him? The way it conflicted so completely with her political acuteness and philosophical viewpoints, as if—like a child—she was still questioning everything, and sat ever so precariously between two very different worlds?

Perhaps this was why she had struggled to understand so much. Why was it that they had fired the Jewish players from the Berlin Philharmonic, she said, when everyone with half an ear knew they were the best players the orchestra had?