The Dynamite Room (19 page)

All along the beach now were coils of wire, pillboxes, dragon's teeth, and concrete blocks; all the clobber, Mr. Morton said, of England under siege. Before the beaches had become out of bounds, her memories were of brightly painted fishing boats lined up along the shore, while out to sea ships were on their way to Felixstowe. Yes, a war was going on then too, but it was being fought out on the horizon by people she didn't know. The weather that day—in her memory—had been mixed. A dark cloud smudged with rain seeping across the sky. She sat in the shingle, hiding among the tall tufts of grass that formed their own waves as the wind washed through them. And when she walked along the beach with Alfie he had pointed out the various plants, giving them names that she had now forgotten. Plants with little purple flowers nestled among the shingle. Plants that looked like cauliflowers with thick rubbery leaves and green buds like berries. Crinkly bits of seaweed that crackled as you stood on them. They'd seen a dried bit of bush blowing across the beach, down the slope to the shore, doing cartwheels all the way. Often boys prowled there, throwing handfuls of shingle over each other's heads, or hiding on the other side of the slope, lying in wait. Alfie stood on the top of the slope sometimes, in his shorts, long socks, and cloth cap, with his arms folded to the wind and his expression imperious.

There was a white-painted bungalow half-buried on the beach. Alfie and Eddie always wanted to break into it, as the house had been abandoned for years, but they never had the guts. One day the whole place would be consumed, Alfie said. Every room in the house filled to the ceiling with shingle, and, maybe in many, many years, when someone managed to open the door and all the shingle flooded out, they'd find the remains of a family, their mouths open and full, their bodies stuffed with stones.

Instead they looked for bullets, rusted tin mugs, tangled netting, or bits of amber or carnelian that were the color of toffee. And hiding among the grasses, she would run her hands through them, drawing them up the stems and hearing the wind, the soft whispers of the shore, or an occasional gunshot in the distance that set her heart a-jitter. Then off she'd go, scrunching through the shingle. You couldn't run. The shingle wouldn't let you. Uphill it pulled at the backs of her calves and, as she slid down the other side of the slopes, her heels would sink in, avalanches cascading down ahead of her and giving her a strange lurching feeling. She remembered Alfie waving and waiting, the silhouette of him against the sky.

He rapped on the shutters with the end of a garden cane: “Will you help?”

She lifted herself out of the depths of her father's chair. “I don't want to.”

“Well, I need you,” he said. “Come into the garden, please.”

She wanted to say that she was busy but he'd already seen that she wasn't. It was probably his attempt at saying sorry for slapping her and breaking their wireless. He disappeared, and she sat there for a little while longer before she went out into the garden anyway.

The soil had become so dry that some of the cane wigwams had pulled free of the earth and fallen over, scattering the peas and beans. “If we're going to stay here much longer we need to do something with this,” he said. “We have got to save as many of these plants as we can. When the other men come, they will all need feeding. We don't know how long we are going to be here.”

She stood for a moment on the edge of the lawn, curling her toes around the warm, dry grass and holding her hand up to shield her eyes from the sun. It was such a relief to be outside, even if it was still hot. He bent down and pulled two canes out from the jumble of pea plants and glanced over his shoulder at her.

“Come on then. You need to get some shoes on. What are you waiting for?”

Together they managed to get the wooden canes back into the soil and pushed them in deep. The plants were already parched and withering, so dried out that some of the pods had cracked open and the peas inside were as hard as marbles.

“I don't think we'll get much from them,” he told her.

He walked along the line of plants, checking that the other canes were pushed in deep. Then he looked out across the rest of the garden. “Now,” he said, “what next?”

“You mustn't change anything,” she said, suddenly worried that he might ruin it all. Her father had spent ages planning the garden. He had sketched it all out on boards and roughly colored the flowers with her old crayons.

“I am not going to change anything,” he said. “I am just trying to save what is here. Or would you rather we starved?”

She frowned. She could feel the sun burning her skin, and sweat was forming in her hair and in the palms of her hands. He began hoeing around the drooping onions and bolting broccoli, and she walked behind with her mother's cane flower basket, picking out from the dirt the weeds that he pulled up. Clouds of earthy dust rose up around them and stuck to her damp skin and got into her eyes. The garden seemed to be choking. Even the soldier coughed.

“You have to be resourceful if you're going to survive,” he told her. “It is important to get a good education, but learning about knights and kings and castles won't feed you or keep you warm.” He pulled up a disheveled carrot plant and flung it onto the lawn. “Unless you become a teacher, of course,” he added. “Do you want to be a teacher?”

She hadn't decided so she shook her head.

“Then we'd better teach you something useful,” he said. He started to list things as he hoed up and down the row. His shoulder still seemed to be giving him trouble. “Firstly, you should never go anywhere without matches, and always keep them dry. If you're trying to catch fish with your bare hands don't make sudden movements; the vibrations will scare them. And put your hand just in front of them because water bends light, so objects and things like fish always appear further away than they are. Another thing is, you can eat dandelion leaves or sour grass, but never eat real grass—that will make you sick. And if you're lighting a fire make sure you only put dry stones around it.”

“Why?” said Lydia.

“Why? Because wet stones can explode.”

“How do you know all this?”

“My training,” he said, stopping for a moment and resting on the hoe.

She had never heard of stones exploding.

“And from my grandfather. He taught me how to hunt when I used to visit him in Bavaria. We need to be prepared.”

“Prepared?”

“This is a war. What if I wasn't here?” he said. “What would you do? What would you eat when there was nothing left in the kitchen? How would you survive?”

She looked back at the house. She hadn't thought about it before. What if he had never come? She couldn't imagine being here on her own now. How quickly she had got used to him.

“You need to be resourceful when you're on a mission,” he said. “Know how to survive in the wilds, what you can eat from the land and what you can't, how to keep yourself alive, how to protect yourself.”

He tossed the hoe onto the grass then bent down to study the giant fan leaves of a courgette plant. It was half-eaten and covered in a white dust. He broke off the leaf and then circled the plant, breaking off the other leaves that were plagued or turning yellow.

“What else?”

“I don't know…how to scale cliffs, how to make charges, defuse them, dismantle them, how to lay mines and traps. How to disguise ourselves.”

Lydia giggled.

“Why do you laugh?” he said. “The training I had was brutal. There is nothing fun about learning how to kill someone, how to do it with your bare hands, silently, by surprise so they never have a chance. I could have killed you a hundred different ways before now if I wanted.” He picked up the ball of twine that had fallen from his pocket. “I could kill you five different ways with this cord alone, maybe six. I could hang you from a tree with it, by the neck; stuff it into your mouth until you choke; tie it around your nose and mouth until you suffocate…I won't,” he said, “but I could.” He stuffed it back into his pocket and carried on tending to the plant. “War is not kind,” he said. “Everything we were taught with the Brandenburgers goes against the Geneva Convention, but tell me, has your Churchill got British soldiers being trained to do the same thing? Of course he has.”

Lydia didn't believe that. Perhaps none of it was true.

He stood up and ran his hands through his damp hair, then pulled his shirt out from under his armpits. “Let's sit in the shade. I'm hot,” he said, glancing over to the back door, ornamented by a selection of pots in which her mother grew herbs.

They sat on the back step in the shadow of the house, and she watched him trim the herbs with her mother's pruning shears. She could imagine her mother pottering about around the side of the house, rummaging around in the flower beds and slopping across the lawn in her wellies, her hair tied up scruffily in a scarf. “You need to trim them back and cut off the old leaves to encourage fresh ones to grow,” he explained. “You need to take care of them.”

He picked a leaf from one plant and rubbed it between his finger and thumb. He held it to her nose. “Tell me, what do you call this?” he said. The leaf was soft, grayish, and quite large. It smelled slightly peppery.

“That's sage,” she told him.

He said the word quietly to himself. “We call it
Salbei,
” he said. “And this?”

He picked a sprig from another plant and handed it to her. “That's easy,” she said, smelling it. “That's thyme.”

She gave it back to him.

“Thyme.” He held it up. “It's almost the same. We say
Thymian. Der Thymian.
”

He picked another easy one.

“Chives,” she said.

“
Schnittlauch,
” he told her, but he had to say it several times before she could say it herself.

And so it went: parsley, coriander, basil, all three nearly dead, as well as rosemary and a plant that neither of them knew but which might have been oregano. Lydia wasn't sure.

He got up and stood with his back to her, scanning the perimeters of the garden.

“We need rain,” he said. “We can't do anything here unless we get some rain.”

“Perhaps we should do a rain dance,” she suggested.

“A rain dance?” He laughed.

Then, before she knew what she was doing, she was standing up and dancing about, waving her arms up at the sky and then swinging them down towards the ground, chanting and hollering as if she were summoning the gods.

“Come on,” she shouted. “You have to do it too!”

And to her surprise he did. They kicked at the dust and gravel and whooped like Indians, and for all too brief a moment she forgot herself entirely but just danced and laughed in the sun.

When she went back into the house though, there really was no water. What did dribble out of the bathroom and kitchen taps too quickly drooled away to nothing but an airless wheeze, and then not even that. She stood behind him, watching as he tried himself, turning the taps this way and that, and then furiously slammed his hand against the sink. He pushed past her and back into the garden. For half an hour she watched him, suddenly feeling worried, as he worked at the dead pump again.

“It's all right,” he said. “We will fix it.”

But she knew somehow that he wouldn't.

During the day, his memories of her came like trap doors through which he suddenly fell. He saw her now as he leaned over the sink, clinging to the dead taps, his knuckles pushing through his skin. A picnic in the Tiergarten. She always liked the parks. She would lie flat on the ground sometimes, as she now was in his memory, face down, her cheek to the ground. She liked to feel the closeness of the grass. She used to say that she could feel the earth's heartbeat. It looked as if no matter how the world turned, she would still cling on, while, if gravity suddenly ceased to exist, all around her the rest of them would fall away and fly off into space.

Play for me, he would say, in the dark nights of the garret room, and she would take out her violin. The sound of it would fill the room, every corner, cupboard, crack, and cranny, every chamber of his heart, every space in his head, so that he could hold it tight within his memory, so that even when the music was gone a sense of it remained.

He looked out the window. Once they had sat in the garret window, facing each other, their legs intertwined, Eva finding faces in the clouds or counting chimney pots.
Suppose we said every chimney pot is a note,
she said.
That first one, over there, being a “C,” then the piece would sound something like this,
and she hummed it, thirteen notes in all, forming a funny little tune. She called it their “Chimney Pot Concerto.” And when she was done she mapped out the notes on a piece of paper held to the glass.
So that we don't forget it,
she said.
It's quirky, don't you think.

I'm not sure that the ministry would approve. It's a bit atonal,
Heiden said.

And the two of them had laughed.

They walked through the wood away from Greyfriars, her holding one of the buckets, him the other two. She felt oddly relieved to be away from the house.

“Stay close,” he told her. “Don't try to run.”

But she had no intention of running. She felt safer with him near her. And anyway, where would she go?

The bucket was heavy. Shafts of light came through gaps in the branches and it was dry and dusty underfoot. He had made her wear a tin hat that he'd found on top of a wardrobe. It kept slipping down over her eyes.

“No baths. This is for drinking and cooking, that is all,” he said, as they stumbled on. “When the rest of the men come we will send them out to get more.”

“There are streams across the marsh,” she told him. “On the other side of the wood.”