Free The Dynamite Room by Jason Hewitt Page B

becoming afraid of the silence between them.
    He looked at her but didn’t answer and she fidgeted awkwardly in the doorway. She held on to Mr. Tabernacle so tight that she thought he might burst in her arms.
    They’d had blackouts in England since just before the war had started, so that now the only nighttime lights seen with any regularity were the beams of searchlights crisscrossing the skies on the coast. Hardly anyone left the house after dusk for fear of falling over something or not being able to find the way back home again. Even before Lydia had left, there had been several incidents in the village with people stumbling off pavements or into the ditches along the sides of the road. No one dared drive anywhere on a cloudy night, and with no street lighting in the village even her father had given up risking the walk to The Cricketers; he’d have his own brew at home.
    Lydia’s mother had wanted everyone safely indoors by the time it got dark, but Alfie had proven to be a law unto himself.
    What time do you call this? her father would say when Alfie finally tramped in. And where in God’s name have you been?
    Don’t worry. No Jerries are coming tonight, said Alfie.
    Oh, is that right? And how do you know?
    With the blackout fabric in place, the soldier set candles in jam jars out on the floor and then opened up his pack and pulled out a canvas case, each narrow pocket snugly holding a pencil. He unbuckled the main flap and took from it a large map, torn and crumpled and stained in places. He opened it up and laid it out on the floor, then repositioned the lights around it. He looked up at her standing in the doorway, her eyes suddenly welling.
    “What is it?”
    She stared at the map, brought of course by him, then shook her head and said, “Nothing.” Her endeavors to hide anything useful from him had, it seemed, been pointless.
    He turned back, bending over the telltale lines of roads and rivers and the target dots of towns. The map was of England, but it was only the southeast coast that he seemed interested in, and, taking a pencil from one of the bag pockets, he placed a small X where she supposed Greyfriars must be. She nervously walked across the room to one of her father’s leatherback chairs and sat with her feet up on it and her knees huddled up. He followed the roads inland with his finger, occasionally writing something down on a scrap of paper and mumbling to himself, then took a coil of thread from his pocket and measured out one of the roads.
    “Are you a spy?” she said. He probably was. “I know that’s not your uniform. Where did you get it?”
    “It doesn’t matter.”
    “Did you kill him?”
    “No.”
    “Then how did you get it?”
    He said nothing but turned back to the map, following the different roads with his finger and occasionally looking up, not at her but just to think, his lips moving ever so slightly as if the thoughts were words that he was trying to shape but he didn’t quite know how. He scribbled things down, finding another road, maybe measuring it with his thread.
    After a while she lowered herself out of the chair and onto the floor beside him, taking Mr. Tabernacle with her, and he edged a candle away to make room for them. She leaned in close so she could read some of the towns: Ipswich, Colchester, Felixstowe…
    He had drawn little circular symbols at Yarmouth, Lowestoft, Brightlingsea, and Harwich, and she wondered if they were naval bases. When she asked him he didn’t answer.
    “Did you fight in France?” she said.
    He raised his eyes to look at her.
    “Yes.”
    “Where else? Did you fight in Poland?”
    He made no response and turned his attention back to what he was doing, and then he changed his mind. He ushered her to move out of the way as he lifted the map, getting up onto his knees to do so. He turned it over and laid it back down. The flip side covered the whole of Europe and was scribbled all over in washed-out pen and pencil so that almost