Men were so stupid sometimes!
Peter and Alan had been the guests of the US Navy that morning; shown around a big cruiser that was being, or had been — Marija could not remember which — converted to carry an array of space age guided missile systems. She and Rosa had toured a local school. Actually, although she had enjoyed the school visit and the attention of the children — aged between five and ten — Marija would much rather have gone to the navy yard with ‘the boys’, then she could have written home to her Papa and her brother Joe, who had flown back to Malta from England a fortnight ago, about all sorts of ‘Navy things’ that they would have been really interested to hear. Never mind. Peter would tell her the ‘interesting’ stuff sooner or later. He still had not wholly got used to the fact that she was interested, very interested, in every aspect of his professional world. She had after all grown up in a dockyard family and considered herself to be a font of knowledge on the subject of post-1945 British naval architecture, radar and electronic suites, engineering and weaponry. Peter, bless him, ought to have worked that out by now after all these years. Still, men were men!
Marija blinked, and tried very hard to concentrate on the here and the now.
However, this was much easier said than done when one was standing in front of the most powerful man in the World.
“I am delighted to meet you at last Lady Marija!”
The President of the United States of America’s face was deeply lined and his eyes were faded green tired and faded. Not so his smile and the warmth behind his words of welcome.
“I am honoured, Mister President.”
Marija looked into the man’s eyes and was briefly transfixed; she blinked again, told herself that she was shaking the hand of a mere mortal, a man with the weight of history crushing down upon his shoulders and felt…sad for him.
It was the oddest moment of her life.
John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s smile stalled, rekindled in an instant fired by the flicker of sympathy in the young Maltese woman’s gaze. There was no awe in Marija’s stare, just an absence of condemnation. She was not judging him; she was looking to him as if he was just another human being and that was so strange as to be…comforting.
Her hand was small in his.
And then he was greeting Rosa Hannay.
Rosa was so excited and embarrassed and out of her depth that Jack Kennedy was a little afraid she was going to swoon. That sort of thing had happened a lot before he blew up the World but lately, hardly at all.
The President’s men had told him that Alan Hannay had been Admiral Sir Julian Christopher’s flag lieutenant on Malta before he joined HMS Talavera. They had also informed him that he had won his Distinguished Service Order engaging ‘a battleship with an anti-aircraft cannon’ at ‘point blank range’ after everybody around him on the destroyer’s aft deckhouse gun deck had been killed. Hannay just looked like an ordinary guy to Jack Kennedy; most real heroes did in his experience. There was respect and measured deference in the younger man’s face but none of the awe which had rendered his wife incapable of speech moments ago.
The President and the First Lady formed up for the photo call with the Christopher’s to the President’s right and the Hannays to the First Lady’s left. From behind a tautly held Marine Corps rope line the pressmen’s cameras clicked and flashed. And then the party was walking into the woods, the British Naval officers flanking the President, their wives the First Lady.
Presently, alone at last in their allotted chalet Marija thankfully sat down on the corner of one of the two single beds, unashamedly sighing to be able to relax for a few minutes. Her husband carefully arranged his jacket over the back of chair and came to join her on the bed.
She leaned against him.
Shortly before leaving the British Embassy they had been informed that the Prime Minister’s planned visit to Philadelphia had been delayed ‘for several days’. There was also a suggestion that Philadelphia would not be the venue for the scheduled ‘summit’; although no alternative location had yet been promulgated. Their brief ‘house call’ at Camp David, where President Kennedy was recuperating after a ‘minor operation’, had therefore been extended some days, apparently at the suggestion of the First Lady. The message was that the President was taking a short break from the campaign trail to aid his recovery and he wanted ‘to hear everything there was to hear’ about the Battle of Malta’ and ‘Sir Peter’s other adventures’.
“I think,” Marija observed philosophically, “that if things carry on like this for a few more months we will both go mad, husband.”
Peter opened his mouth to speak.
“No,” his wife assured him immediately, “I am not unhappy. I am not complaining. This is, well, strange and very exciting and everybody else in the World would love to be living this life,” she insisted, “it is just that I don’t know what people expect of us. At home on Malta I was just Marija, here you and I, we are something that we are not.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No, this is not a thing to be sorry about,” Marija shot back, brooking no dissent. “This is what our life together is. We are together. If you had your own ship we would be apart but I know you miss your Talaveras dreadfully. But this,” she made a wiping away gesture with her right arm, “is not a thing we expected.” She sighed, a little frustrated that she was not saying what she felt in a way that made sense of those feelings. “Oh, I don’t know what I mean. Ignore what I say!”
The man kissed the top of her head, extended an arm about her shoulders.
“You know I’d never do anything that silly, wife.”
Marija giggled.
“Men always ignore what their wives tell them to do!”
“How do you know they do?”
When she raised her face he kissed her and after that nature swiftly took its inevitable course. Hot and bothered, half-dressed they lay together beneath the sheets until sometime later there was a knock at the door, which they ignored. The phone’s insistent overloud clanging on the bedside table less than a minute later was impossible to wish away.
“Peter Christopher…”
He listened half-asleep.
“Very good,” he muttered and put the handset back in its cradle.
Marija snuggled closer to her husband.
“We dine in the President’s Reception Chalet at eight o’clock apparently.”
“Eight o’clock, when’s that?”
“Oh, er… In about an hour’s time…”
“And hour!” Marija managed to half-shriek this in the middle of embarking upon a complacent yawn. “My hair must be a mess! I don’t know what to wear!”
The dress she had been wearing that afternoon was creased and discarded on the floor and she almost tangled her feet in it as she struggled to her feet. This brought her back towards sanity in a hurry. The last time she had forgotten that she could not actually run she had fallen flat on her face; an hour before she ‘dined’ with the President of the United States of America it would be a very bad time to fall flat on her face again.