The Dynamite Room (7 page)

She let out a held breath.

On the windowsill was her mother's mint plant in a cracked terra-cotta pot. She poked her finger into the soil. She wondered how long her mother had been gone. Long enough for the soil to become as dry as dust, but the plant was still alive, the leaves limp but not yet dead. She lifted it and held it under the tap, letting the water drizzle slowly into the earth. Then she returned it to the sill, turning it so that when the light was finally allowed back into the house again, a new set of leaves would feel the sun upon them.

He was intent on making a first aid kit, supplementing the field dressing, needles and thread, and iodine he had already with what he could find in the bathroom cabinet and a small drawer in the kitchen. He found plasters, more dressing, arnica, and a tin of pink cream called Germolene, which he took to be some kind of antiseptic.

He was aware of the girl creeping down the stairs after he had gone up to the bathroom and then of her going back up once he had come back down. It was as if they had the same magnetic charge, keeping to opposing corners and pushing each other around the edges of the house. All the while, he sensed her listening to him as he listened to her. Feet padding over floorboards, groaning giveaways, and telltale squeaks, her eyes watching him from behind a door or a chair.

“Why don't you come out,” he said, “and stop creeping about like a little mouse?”

But she stayed silent; he could hear her holding her breath.

In her bedroom he picked up the discarded clothes from the floor and folded them—a pretty little blue dress that was soft to his touch; a white cotton vest with a fraying hemline; a pair of white cotton panties with three mauve flowers stitched onto one side. He put them neatly back in the drawer. Dried leaves shed from a dead plant on one of the shelves crinkled under his feet, and further down the shelves, parked between books of fairy tales and poetry, was a wooden Noah's Ark, a menagerie of carved animals boxed up inside. When he pulled down the blackout frame at the window, he uncovered a dusty line of seashells set out in order of size along the windowsill. He held the largest to his ear for a moment and listened to it whisper.

What was it she had run from? It intrigued him that she seemed to have no idea where her mother was, where anybody was. An adult would have been so much simpler to deal with, he knew from experience. There would have been no delay, no hesitation, no mistakes. But then the house—this house—was supposed to be empty.

Greyfriars,
he thought. The word had been an abstraction, as, of course, had Lydia herself, but now he was here and everything was real. It felt odd, but satisfying, to have honed in across Europe to this one place, this house, this moment; the surprise of actually finding the girl exactly where he had imagined her to be.

Back downstairs in the porch he found plant pots and wooden trays, sacks of compost, gardening gloves, propagators, and canes tied in bundles with fraying string. His grandfather had taught him gardening, among other things, but there had been no space for it in Berlin. He thumbed through the seed packets, all opened but folded down and held together with a single wooden clothespin. He carefully read the names, feeling the shape of each one in his mouth: delphinium, lupins, fuchsia, geraniums. He tipped a few seeds into the palm of his hand and moved them around with his fingertip. Each seed in itself was a little packet of hope, a tiny new beginning.

When he shone his torch around the kitchen larder he was relieved to see that they were set for a siege. Ceramic containers and earthenware jars and columns of tins and packets were piled precariously, and it took some time to divide the tins and packets into two tottering heaps. The smaller of these he would not touch: it was just about as much as he could carry when the time came. The rest they could eat as and when, for as long as they were here. Skipper sardines. “Woppa” processed peas. Baxters chicken and mushroom soup. One or two tins he had trouble deciphering, even from the pictures on the labels. Those words, once he'd understood them, he repeated to himself as he went about the house.

“Tap-ee-o-ca,” he said as he sat on the bottom step of the stairs picking gravel stones out of the tread of his boots. “Tap-i-o-ca. Tapioca. I will have tapioca pudding, please. And cauliflower cheese.”

He put his boot back down and turned, looking up the stairs. The girl had materialized at the top, coming out of nowhere as she had been doing all morning. She looked down at him, embarrassed perhaps and indecisive, then slowly she made her way down the steps, her sweaty hand squeaking against the handrail as she inched her way towards him. He didn't move as she reached the bottom, and she squeezed past him into the hall without catching his eye, walking swiftly into the kitchen. He heard a cupboard door being opened, a packet being torn, more rummaging. The girl must be hungry. He had no idea what time it was.

Through the crack in the door she watched him draw the blade down his neck, gathering up the grubby soapsuds and the dark flecks of hair along its shine. He sloshed it around in the sink and slowly dragged the blade down the other side of his cheek.

Beside him the bath continued to fill, the pressure in the pipes so low that the water was a trickle. He was slender but more muscular than her father or Alfie, and he was covered in cuts, bruises, and grazes, some of which still looked red raw. Worst was the hole in his shoulder, as if a bullet had gone right in and was still embedded there. It was inflamed and caked in clods of black, dried blood, and the skin around it looked pink and tender. Every time he raised his arm a twinge shot across his face, pulling at his cheek and his eye.

He bent over and washed the soap from him, droplets running down his face and along his arms. His hair was dark and damp in the steam, trails of it drooping down over his eyes that, in the mirror's reflection and sharp sunlight, were the deepest blue she'd ever seen.

He reached over the bath to turn the taps off, but the water still churned up the pipes, and deep in the belly of the house there came a juddering groan. The floor beneath her trembled. The beast in the pipes.

He unbuttoned his trousers and slipped them off, then tugged off his socks, hopping about as he did. Everything was neatly draped over the chair. He tested the water and flicked the droplets from his hand, before drying it on the towel. Then he slipped his grubby white underpants down and stepped out of them. She watched him drop them on the chair and step cautiously into the bath. She covered her face with her hand but couldn't stop her fingers from opening or her eyes from looking between them at his neat, pale bottom and the sore-looking cuts on the back of his thighs. He lifted the other foot into the bath and made a quiet gasp, followed by a short sharp hiss; he murmured something as he slipped into the water, and, for the slightest moment, she thought she heard him sobbing.

He had laid his uniform blouse and collarless shirt out on her parents' bed. His black leather boots were under the dressing table, laces neatly tucked inside; his pack on the floor. She recognized the uniform; it had the same shoulder flash the Essex boys had worn before they'd been sent up to Northumbria and replaced. When was that? April or May. Definitely before the summer and before she'd been sent away. She let her fingers touch the khaki woolen fabric, the fly-flap to conceal the buttons down the middle, the small belt tab, the patch pockets on each breast. The wool was rougher than she had imagined, and tacky, as if something had been spilled on it.

By January all the local regiments were serving abroad. They were replaced by the Territorials or recent recruits that in time would include Alfie. Several army infantry divisions that were not fully equipped or hadn't been trained enough to be dispatched to France had been sent this way to protect the East Anglia coast. The Essex Regiment had been in the area since the previous November. She'd seen them patrolling Shingle Street before they'd started cutting off the beaches, putting up all the barbed wire and blockades. By the time Lydia was evacuated, there were soldiers and defenses up and down the beaches, and now she wondered what good they had been and what had happened to them all.

She opened up the shirt, laying it out flat. A name was written on the label inside. Red capitals, the ink of each letter seeping into the fabric like jagged little teeth.

She stared at the name for a while and folded the collar in on itself so she wouldn't have to think about how a German soldier might have acquired an Englishman's uniform. She wondered why he hadn't killed her, why he was keeping her in the house. Perhaps he was playing a game.

She lifted the arm of the uniform and smelled it. It had a familiar odor, like the louse dust Mrs. Duggan had brushed into Button's jacket that had made him sneeze.

Poor Button. The first thing her mother had done with him when he had arrived at Greyfriars was take him out into the garden and wash his hair over a bowl with kerosene mixed with sassafras oil, and then rinse it in vinegar. Lydia had laughed at him. But then the first morning in Wales Mrs. Duggan had done the same to them both. Out came the washing bowl and the Jeyes Fluid, and they were ordered into the yard.

This is a clean, ship-shape house,
she said as she tugged Lydia's dress off over her head and then pushed her head down over the bowl.
I don't work at it all day long only to have scallywags like you coming in full of creepy-crawlies. Filthy little vackies.

For the first two weeks either she or Button had cried in the night, until Mrs. Duggan came in and said,
If you don't pipe down, I'll put you out in the baily and give you both a clout.

She looked out of the bedroom now, across the landing to the shut bathroom door, her heart suddenly bumping harder. Wisps of steam drifted out from under it. No sound though, not even the slop of bathwater; she wondered if he had drowned.

She fumbled in his shirt pockets. The two outside ones were empty, but there were two more inside. The first had lots of shiny tacks in it, and when she pulled out a handful a golden St. Christopher medallion was caught up among the pins as well. She untangled it and lifted it up so that the cross twirled around on itself, catching the dim light. She let the chain trail through her fingers, then she put it and the tacks back and carefully felt inside the second pocket. She found small, flat bits of metal, and when she pulled them out she saw that they were half-moon-shaped tags made of steel or tin. Six of them, and all broken, it seemed, in half. She spread them out across her hand.

“What are you doing?”

He grabbed her arm and snatched the tags away, scattering them to the floor, then pushed her hard against the dressing table, causing her to gasp. He scrambled around gathering the tags up, wearing nothing but one of their towels tied tight around his waist.

“Do not touch or look at anything. Do you understand?”

“What are they?” she said.

“They are nothing.”

She pressed herself back against the dressing table and watched him feed the tags back into the pocket and fasten the button. He took the shirt from the bed and shook it out and draped it over the chair. He still had water dripping from his hair, dripping onto his shoulders and down his stomach. It trickled down the side of his chest and seeped into the towel about his waist. She thought she ought to look away, but she didn't.

“I didn't mean it,” she said. “I'm sorry. I didn't mean to be nosy.”

“I have given you many chances,” he said. “So many. That was your last. Do you understand?”

She nodded.

His chest lifted as he breathed. How was it that she hadn't seen him, hadn't even heard him enter the room? The bathroom door was wide open now. All the steam was gone.

“Now,” he said. “I am wet. I want to get dressed.”

She stepped away from the dressing table. She wouldn't let him see that she was scared. “You can't keep wearing the same clothes,” she said.

“What is it to you?”

“They smell.”

He glanced at her but said nothing, so she walked slowly to the door, then stopped again. He lifted his shirt off the back of the chair. “I know how to make egg omelets,” she added, “if you're hungry.”

He nodded but that was all.

She felt stronger now. She stood in the doorway, waiting.

He turned his head to look at her. “I want to get dressed,” he said again, and then he flitted her away with the flick of his shirt and she quickly left the room.

They ate in silence, the small lamp casting a vague light across the blackout cloth at the dining-room window. Their shadows played across the walls. They did not speak. She kept her head down but strained her eyes to watch him without looking up. He had opened one of her father's bottles of wine, but he barely had more than a few sips. He sat in her father's seat in his collarless shirt, his jacket hung over the back. Perhaps it wasn't
his
shirt, but that of Jack Henry Bayliss or some other English hero. His dark, damp hair kept falling into his eyes, and occasionally he would push it away with his finger; and then she would see the blue of his eyes again. When he laid his hand flat on the table she wanted to reach across and touch it, just with the very tips of her fingers, to see if he was warm.

When he was finished eating he folded his napkin. He watched her as she pushed the dried-egg omelet around her plate. She had been famished but now she couldn't eat—not with him watching her—and anyway, the omelet had tasted powdery, the egg so tough she could have soled her sandals with it. If her mother hadn't let the chickens go they could have had real omelets, real chicken. The man probably wouldn't have thought twice about killing one with his bare hands.

She gave up and put her fork down. He was tapping the table with the nails of two fingers, tapping out a rhythm, a marching drumbeat, the wineglass tilted in his other hand.
Tup-tup-tuppity-tup.
He looked right through her, as if a film or a dream was playing out against the wall behind her.
Tup-tup-tuppity-tup.
His lips were red with wine. His skin almost dark in the candlelight.