The Dynamite Room Read Free Page A

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