The Dynamite Room Read online

  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?

  Because they were Jews, he had told her.

  Yes, yes, I know that. Of course I know that. But they play so beautifully. It doesn’t make sense.

  He closed his eyes for a moment, shutting her away, and then flicked through the pile of documents in front of him again, knowing already that they would offer him nothing more. He carefully returned them into the paper wallet, into the box within a box.

  The new day was cold and still, the air thick with mist. Everything was bleached white and muffled silent so that all they heard was the crush of their own feet through the snow, the creak of the sledges behind them, and their panting breath. He had blisters within blisters that rubbed against the backs of his boots. He tried to focus on walking but ridiculous memories kept slipping into his head: a holiday in the Alps with his parents, having his photograph taken on a jetty with a bathing ring around his waist, playing Ping-Pong with his father, the back and forth and back and forth of the ball. He could play the memory eternal, just like the rhythm. Back and forth, back and forth. Step, step, step. He kept forgetting where he was going. Perhaps they were walking home.

  The mist grew patchy and in parts they could see the mountainsides rising up over them, and occasionally rocks and rubble skittering down into the chasms, dislodged by the snow. In the distance a rusty bridge crossed the gorge. The Ofoten Railway line. They were to secure it east of Narvik, clearing out the Norwegians that were holding the railway between Norddal Bridge and the Swedish border. Often they would stop to scan the trees for sharpshooters. Ohlendorf said that the Norwegians would be almost impossible to see or hear, all dressed in white and moving silently through the trees on their skis.

  Keep your wits about you, Ohlendorf had said.

  They’ll pick us off one by one, he remembered thinking.

  Their path took them downhill again. The snow got deeper in the sunken ridges until it was almost waist high and it took every ounce of strength to haul their way through, following one behind the other through deeply channeled pathways and pulling each other out. Trying to drag the sledges through became impossible, and they stopped while Ohlendorf and his officers huddled in a circle with a compass and squares around their maps and decided what to do. The men waited, some lying flat out on their backs in the snow. Others leaned against trees, smoking. He opened his canteen but the water inside was frozen.

  In the end they sabotaged the gear they’d dragged there on the sledges and abandoned it in pieces in the clearing. They set off again, slowly, traveling along the base of a gorge for some miles before heading uphill again. The mist would not lift, and as afternoon came it seemed to thicken around them.

  As they walked through the trees a bough above them cracked and snow thumped heavily to the ground. Someone’s gun went off.

  Jesus Christ!

  No firing!

  The men stopped and held still, nervously scanning the trees.

  He watched as up ahead Ohlendorf tried to radio the scouts. Then, after several minutes, he signaled them to move on slowly, and they did, straining to see through the mist, their fingers jittery at their triggers as the trees lumbered towards them out of the fog. You hunt or you are hunted. The mist swallowed everything until all but the men on either side of him had entirely vanished, just as his grandfather had done.

  She held the glass of water to her cheek, her forehead, to her neck and to her arms, letting the cold condensation cool her before she finally drank it. She then upturned the empty glass on the windowsill over a fly, trapping it, and watched it bumping around inside for a while. She had never much liked flies. Filthy little things, her mother said, and Lydia was inclined to agree.

  She tiptoed along the landing past all the portraits of her mother’s family, the ones that she had never known. She wanted to go into the sitting room and search through her mother’s Good Housekeeping magazines for survival tips, but he was in there and she didn’t want to see him; she would pretend he didn’t exist. She felt quite certain that today someone would come. She was getting agitated just waiting. She wondered if they’d be young like him, whether they would speak English too, whether she’d understand them. Every time she passed an upstairs window she looked out in case there were Germans in the garden or coming up the lane, maybe whole lines of men tramping through the fields towards the house. If only Alfie himself would walk out of the woods. If only he would come back.

  They didn’t know what had happened to him. The story had no final chapter.

  Damn this bloody war, Aunt Em had said, and then she broke down, even though she had promised not to.

  Sitting on a crumbling wall in Wales among the ruins of Cledwyn’s Tower, Lydia felt sorry for her aunt, who had, perhaps against her better nature, driven halfway across the country for her with the news that Alfie was dead. Lydia hardly knew her. She was just a woman who lived miles away in London with a man called Ronald and an arthritic terrier called Mr. Chips, and whom she could only remember ever meeting twice before, once on a trip to the Tower of London and once at a wedding near St. Albans, or had it been a christening? Either way, Aunt Em had never ventured as far as Greyfriars. She’s allergic to us, missy, her father joked. Poor ol’ girl can’t travel more than a twenty-mile radius of London without coming out in a rash.

  Lydia couldn’t quite think straight. Somewhere around her a fly was buzzing. Even the sound of the word was awful. That last d so abrupt and final. Dead.

  But why didn’t my mother come? she said.

  We’ve had to put her in a special place, a type of hospital, her aunt said. Not for long. Just for a short while, you know. It’s for her own good.

  But is she all right?

  Oh, she’ll be fine. Grief’s a funny old business. Some people don’t take to it very well. You know what I mean.

  But Lydia didn’t.

  She’s had a terrible shock. We all have. So you must be brave, Lydia.

  I will, she said, but she didn’t want to be. She wanted to wrap her arms around her aunt and sob, but she didn’t feel that she could.

  Flaming timbers crashed down through the broken rib cages of buildings. Behind the men the hulks of ships, blasted and blazing in the harbor, lit up the darkness. Huge columns of black smoke poured up out of the wreckage. They moved up the street in short bounds, going from corner to corner and doorway to doorway through the blizzard, rifles at the ready. An explosion across the road blew the windows from a hotel, and they buried their heads as glass and chips of wood and masonry rained down over them, shrapnel rattling on car roofs or hissing in the snow.

  It was quieter on Narvik’s back streets as they headed away from the harbor where there had been no air, only smoke and flames and soot, the booms and blasts of warships slugging it out against one another. There was another blast and he woke with a lurch. He was hunched in the chair. His throat was parched dry and he rubbed at his eyes. It took him a while before he realized that he was in the sitting room at Greyfriars, before the chairs and cabinets, the gramophone and piano became familiar again.

  He had stood on the pier watching as survivors from a coastal defense ship were brought ashore. Through the thick snow clouds the early morning sun sketched the tips of the mountaintops. Nearer, smoke still hung above t
he chaos of the harbor, wispy tails of it drifting around the debris. He remembered taking off his suede gloves; he had wanted to feel the cold biting his skin but everything was numb. Flakes of snow and flakes of ash fell from the sky, some melting when they landed in his hand, others lingering until he touched them and they turned to dust. Behind him he could hear the roar of motor vehicles moving through the streets. Below him bodies—young Norwegian sailors mainly—floated in shoals, caught against the stanchions of the jetty.

  He suddenly had a weary sense of the distance he had traveled. What the hell had he been doing there, in France, in Poland, in Norway?

  He had heard that the harbor of Narvik was the only Arctic port that did not freeze over and provided year-long access to anywhere in the west. The Ofoten Railway linked the port with the mining community of Kiruna one hundred miles eastwards over the border in Sweden. Thousands of tons of iron ore were mined there every year, and whoever controlled the Ofoten Railway line and Narvik controlled access to the iron ore. Ohlendorf had told them this during one of their brief stops on the mountainside, high up from the fjords. The platoon was supposed to trek eastwards towards the railway border station at Bjørnefjell, and from there they would secure the railway and the old navy trail that ran parallel to it—places that had seemed as distant and unreachable then as they seemed now.

  He closed his eyes. He should try to forget. All that had happened there no longer mattered.

  She found him in the sitting room, on the floor in front of the wireless. He leaned in close, his hand on one of the dials, turning it with precision. Among the crackles and buzz of the static she could just about hear a voice. He bent his head so his ear was almost against the speaker and raised his other hand to her—a Hold still and Shush, a Don’t make a sound.