She had been worried the hospital would object to the journalists and photographers that followed her around on Wednesday, her first day. Her over-sized uniform had been stiff and starchy and the cold and wet of the alleged spring day had made her bones feel old. However, once the interlopers had departed she had instantly felt at home and all the other nurses had been very friendly, except for Matron and everybody understood that no Matron was ever supposed to be friendly in any hospital Marija had ever been in.
Her husband, meanwhile, had been ‘the most wanted’ man in Oxford.
Well, Peter, along with Alan Hannay, Joe — still under ‘wraps’ in hospital in Cheltenham — and all the other heroes of HMS Talavera’s final desperate action had been ‘wanted men’. Marija had learned that the BBC was hurriedly making a documentary film about the battle. It seemed that at the very moment she and her sister Rosa had watched HMS Talavera with horrified, baited breath as Peter’s ship raced out of the Grand Harbour amidst a forest of giant shell splashes, that a BBC film crew had captured the whole thing in glorious, dramatic Technicolor. She shivered to think of that moment; knowing then as now what it had portended. Peter’s father had told him to ‘cut your lines and get out to sea’, well knowing that whatever he had said to his son that Peter would surely steam at full speed towards the sound of guns.
To her astonishment the newspaper people and the BBC had wanted to talk to her also.
On Saturday she and Peter had sat down in a room at Merton College and been ‘interviewed’ by a man called Barry Lankester. He was a nice man, very polite and a lot more nervous about the whole thing than either she or her husband. It had been Barry Lankester’s film crew, set up to shoot a few scenic ‘filler’ and ‘background’ shots of the Grand Harbour from the lower Barraka Gardens, opposite Kalkara Creek and Royal Naval Hospital Bighi, from where Rosa and Marija had watched HMS Talavera’s break for the open sea and her destiny, which had caught everything on camera.
After a while Marija had relaxed a little.
She had told her personal story; her long recovery from her childhood injuries suffered in the German bombing in 1942, how much she owed to Surgeon Captain Reginald Stephens and to Margo Seiffert, her friend and mentor who had been murdered by a Red Army parachutist during the assault on the Citadel at Mdina. She almost started sobbing uncontrollably more than once; Peter had squeezed her hand and taken his cue to explain how he and Marija had been pen friends half their lives and but for the October War might never have met, face to face.
‘Yes, I know it all sounds a little like a modern fairy tale. But the war changed everything, of course,’ he had observed, in that marvellously winning self-effacing way of his. ‘If nothing else good came out of it that night when the balloon went up the whole dreadful thing made me realise what a prize clot I had been all those years. After that, well, I just wanted to get to Malta. Even when I was standing on the bridge of the Talavera in a North Atlantic winter storm the morning after we got hit off Cape Finisterre, and the ship was wallowing around like a drunken matelot on his way back to his berth after a run ashore, trying to sink under our feet, all I thought about was how I was going to get from there,’ he had smiled and shaken his head ruefully, ‘to Malta. It’s a funny thing,’ he had added, ‘I never really thought I was a terribly brave fellow. I still don’t think I am, by the way. It’s just that when I’m in a tight spot I think of Marija and everything becomes, well, clear, simple.’
Marija could not wait to return to their lodgings at Corpus Christi College that evening. Her husband was still black and blue, sore and healing under his new uniform so she had been gentle with him. It was the first time they had made love since the morning of the Battle of Malta when her adorable, clever, honourable and unbelievably stupidly courageous husband of less than six weeks had done his absolute level best to get himself killed!
Yesterday morning there had been a message from Iain Macleod’s Private Office asking if she and Peter could attend a short meeting at Oriel College. In welcoming the couple into his lair the normally charming, ebullient Minister had been unusually diffident.
‘A decision has been made,’ he had hesitated, ‘by me, actually, on the advice of the Director General of the Security Services, to permanently embargo any information relating to the arrest and execution of your brother, Lady Marija,’ he had explained.
They had been on ‘Iain’ and ‘Marija’ on the flight back to England.
‘Might I inquire why, Mr Macleod?’ Peter had interjected, betraying no hint of censure.
‘Firstly, full disclosure in this matter will almost certainly give more comfort to our enemies than anybody connected to the dead man.’ At this juncture he had looked to Marija with apologetic eyes. ‘Secondly, you had to know, you both had to know because you will become, if you are not already, public figures who will, inevitably, be confronted with rumours and suchlike in the coming years. Frankly, knowing what really happened will help you avoid, let us say, offering inadvertent hostages to fortune. I should tell you that Samuel’s widow, Rosa, has already been fully apprised of the situation and has undertaken to go along with the ‘official line’. She seems to be a most sensible young woman. She stipulated the proviso that a certificate be issued legally assuming that Samuel had in fact perished when HMS Torquay was sabotaged earlier this year. I believe she considers herself to be affianced to Lieutenant-Commander Hannay and that the possession of this ‘certificate’ will facilitate their marriage at the earliest possible time.’
The Minster of Information had made no attempt to sweeten the pill.
‘The fiction that Samuel was an innocent dupe of Red Dawn zealots murdered onboard HMS Torquay will be the official line herewith. Your brother Joe has not been briefed in this matter, nor have your parents in Malta. They can never know the truth about Samuel.’
Marija had been angry and shocked, belatedly understanding why her brother Joe had been kept in hospital in Cheltenham. While he was in hospital and she was here in Oxford they could not share inconvenient secrets.
‘So,’ she had objected, ‘I must now lie to my family about my brother?’
‘Yes,’ Iain Macleod had confirmed. He had spread his hands wide, imploring the young couple to understand.
‘Look, we live in a world in which all the old courtesies and decencies are buried under a layer of radioactive ash. Most of the people in this country are hungry a lot of time, there’s hardly any electricity; very few private citizens have their own cars, most people work for the ration tickets that feed their families. There is no real economy, all things considered life is pretty miserable, and there isn’t much we, as the government can do about it. And that was before this thing in the Middle East blew up in our faces. If we lose the oil from Abadan we’ll be completely at the mercy of the bloody Americans again. If that happens, goodness only knows what will become of us. But, and it is a huge but,’ the Minister for Information declaimed, raising a hand as if in salutation, ‘in the next few days Barry Lankester’s film about the heroes of the Talavera and her brave Captain’s fairy tale princess wife will be on every movie screen in the land.’
Marija had pulled a disapproving face.
‘You are a princess, my dear,’ the man had told her, rather sternly. ‘And Peter is genuine British hero straight out of the pages of Boys’ Own!’ Iain Macleod had had to pause for breath at this point. ‘And if you think I am going to deny the British people the chance to bask in a little of your reflected glory you are sadly mistaken!’