“How is your young man?”
“Tied up safe and sound in Portsmouth harbour,” Marija sighed. “He’s put in a second transfer request to be assigned to the Mediterranean Fleet and this time his Captain has allowed it to go forward.”
Margo Seiffert patted the younger woman’s left hand.
“You mustn’t go getting your hopes up.”
“No, I won’t.”
“Things will work out okay. Sometimes, you just have to have a little faith.”
Marija strangled a giggle. The story of how Margo — then a Surgeon Commander in the United States Navy — had arranged her transfer to Naples, the base of the American 5th Fleet, Europe to escape her loveless marriage and later unsuspectingly met the love of her life read like a latter day fairy tale. On a liaison visit, a ‘god-awful courtesy call’ as Margo complained, she’d found herself saluting and shaking hands with a ‘short, balding man with big ears and the kindest, most intelligent green eyes’ and her life had changed. ‘You’re never too old for love at first sight’ she’d told Marija when they’d gone together to the chapel in Kalkara within a stone’s throw of the Bighi Royal Naval Hospital, to bid their private last farewells to the man who’d — in different ways — saved both their lives. Surgeon Captain Reginald Stanley Stephens (Retired) had had a heart attack a week before and he’d never recovered consciousness. The two women had kept a vigil at his bedside, knowing that the end was near. He’d died peacefully in his sleep with Margo holding his hand. The terrible sadness of his loss had hung over the women for days and then weeks. But then something strange had happened. They still regularly placed flowers on the grave, they still got tearful, the dreadful aching emptiness remained; but the hurt became bearable and their friendship, always close, sisterly, became almost like that of a mother and daughter. For Marija the death of her real life saviour was like a delayed rite of passage into true adulthood; for Margo was like a licence to pick up the torch that had fallen from her dead lover’s hands and to renew the battle. Together, they’d moved on.
Staff Sergeant Jim Siddall straightened and smiled a tight-lipped smile as Marija slowly negotiated the last few steps and emerged into the waiting room of the St Catherine’s Hospital for Women. His uniform was freshly pressed, creases razor-edged and his cap with its distinctive badge and red band was under his arm. He was unarmed.
Together the man and the woman walked out onto the cobbles of the plaza in front of the Cathedral, which loomed darkly in the east in the falling murk of the late evening. The twin city of Mdina-Rabat was unnaturally quiet behind its ancient ramparts, subdued as if the spirit of its people had been temporarily crushed.
“I received the first uncensored letter from England,” Marija said dully in the night as they walked away from the Hospital. “Should I thank you, Sergeant Siddall?”
“No. I never had anything to do with that side of things.”
“But you are here now?”
“Yes, I am,” the man chuckled ruefully. “As my old Mum used to say, it’s a funny old world, isn’t it?”
Marija drew her shawl close around her shoulders.
“Two babies were born today. Both were pink and plump and…perfect.”
“That’s good news.”
“Why did you come here?”
“There’s talk we may be pulling out of the Med.”
“The British? Leaving?”
“Yes,” the big man muttered hoarsely. “Back home people are likely to starve this winter and they say we can’t afford to hang on to what’s left of the Empire. If it comes to it we’ll pull out quickly. Not quite overnight, but it won’t be pretty. I’ve been assigned to a special unit to organise the rescue of families and individuals particularly associated or linked to the Military Administration. People who’d be liable to be labelled collaborators, or worse. Your father is the Deputy Manager of the docks at Senglea so he’s an obvious candidate for reprisals after we’ve gone…”
“I will stay whatever happens,” Marija snapped, feeling her face flush with anger.
“All Hell will break loose after we’ve gone. The Communists and Nationalists will be at each other’s throats,” the man protested with resignation. “You have no idea, Marija!”
“Enlighten me?”
“There is a fascist regime in Italy. In Sicily, sixty miles away there is a civil war going on. Along the North African coast south of Malta there’s another war, more tribal than civil by all accounts, going on for the control of the oil fields they discovered a few years back. In Tunisia and Algeria there appears to be some kind of Holy war, a jihad, whatever that is in progress. There’s bloodletting and chaos all around the Mediterranean. The Mediterranean used to be a British and American lake with the French and the Italians in the background. Now that the Americans have withdrawn their 5th Fleet to home waters the Spanish, Italians, Greeks, Turks, Egyptians and Israelis are all flexing their muscles. The latest news is that Turkey and Greece will be shooting at each other soon. God knows what the crowd in power in Rome are up to. As for the Spanish!” Jim Siddall realised her was beginning to rant. “If the Mediterranean Fleet pulls out of Malta somebody else will move in. The one thing you can be absolutely sure of is that whoever moves in — and somebody will — will be ten times worse than us.”
The Times of Malta occasionally carried foreign news implying discontent and lawlessness in the outside world; rarely dealing in specifics. People in the street gossiped about pirates at large in the eastern seas and it was known the British patrolled the narrow seas between Cicily and Cap Bon. In the summer several of the long empty gun emplacements guarding Kalkara, Valetta and Sliema had been refitted with long-barrelled 3.7 inch guns. However, since there had been no attack on either Malta or on Gozo, and there had been no reports of piracy or any other incidents in the waters immediately around the archipelago most people had treated the reports of the spreading anarchy elsewhere with a pinch of salt. Life on the islands was difficult enough. The rationing and the myriad of stupid little restrictions imposed under martial law tended to distract most people from any lengthy consideration of the woes of others in lands beyond the horizon.
“We will defend ourselves if we have to,” Marija declared with more confidence than she actually felt.
“With what? If we go we’ll leave nothing. In fact we’ll blow up, burn or scuttle anything we can’t take with us.”
Marija’s angry eyes burned in the gloom.
“Anybody who remains on Malta with any kind of link with us will be branded a collaborator,” Jim Siddall continued remorselessly.
“I think you are exaggerating…”
“Marija,” the man groaned, “why do you think we, the British, have been acting like such complete bastards the last year? For our own amusement? One in three of my countrymen and women are dead and the rest are living on the edge of survival. Out here in ‘the colonies’ we’re clinging on by our finger tips. The Yanks only pulled out of the Mediterranean was because they didn’t want to leave one of their hands in the meat-grinder a moment longer than they absolutely had to.”
The woman folded her arms across her breasts as if she was cold.
The big military policeman wasn’t afraid for himself, he was on afraid for her.
Chapter 17