It was over a fortnight — three or four letters — before he dared confess his ‘problem’ to Marija, and another week before she replied, by airmail. Customarily their letters went by overland mail or by the normal shipping routes and sometimes took weeks to arrive. Strangely, when he’d been based at Simonstown near the southern tip of Africa his letters had invariably reached Malta within the week, whereas, from England there was no telling when she’d receive his latest missive, or he’d receive her latest news. Sometimes, letters mysteriously arrived out of sequence so they’d got into the habit of appending a footnote to each letter specifying to which communication they were replying.
Marija hadn’t been upset, or jealous, or angry in any way with his foolishness. She’d known from his previous correspondence on the subject that he hadn’t, by any stretch of the imagination, fallen in love with Phoebe Sellars and didn’t think their ‘relations’ would survive his next sea going posting.
“Have you told her about me?” Marija had asked rhetorically.
He had once, innocently in passing and Phoebe had been rather stuffy about it so he hadn’t mentioned it again.
“You and I tell each other everything,” Marija’s letter had reminded him. “If I was your wife I would not put up with it. I would insist that you stopped writing to that brazen Mediterranean temptress! Three is company, as you English say!”
He’d known Marija was being tongue-in-cheek but nevertheless he’d been struck by the fact she wasn’t mincing her words. It was as if she understood how torn he was to be considering breaking — because he was and had been ever since the reality of the ‘engagement’ had sunk in — with Phoebe. He was not, and had never been, a choirboy, notwithstanding he’d always, rather clumsily and guiltily, glossed over his easy come easy go affairs with girlfriends and other women. He hadn’t know what Marija had read between the lines over the years, or even if she had strong views on the subject. Not until that letter.
‘If I was your wife I would not put up with it…’
Marija had never mentioned a boyfriend of her own. Marija was lively, articulate, funny, beautiful and the Maltese valued marriage and family above practically all things so he’d always assumed that one day she’d write to him to inform him of her own forthcoming nuptials. That letter had turned everything he’d taken for granted about his pen friend’s feelings for him on their head.
“There are only three things you can do,” Marija had counselled. “Firstly, you must marry her. She sounds like a very nice and very well brought up young woman who plans to support you in your career and will almost certainly fill up your home with bambinos. Secondly, you can tell her that you don’t love her and that your engagement is over. This would be cruel and she would spend the rest of her life wondering why you could not find it in your heart to love her, and how she could have misjudged a rascal like you so badly.”
Peter Christopher had smiled as he read these words, reassured before he read, and re-read, a dozen or twenty times, the following lines.
“Thirdly,” Marija had advised him, “you must never write to me again.”
Fortuitously, Phoebe had broken off the engagement a few days later.
If he stopped writing to Marija a part of him, possibly, the best part of him would have withered and died. He’d literally, have rather cut off his right arm than lose Marija for if he had a soul mate in this world it was Marija Elizabeth Calleja.
The breach with Phoebe had been this time last year and he’d become a monastic figure in the months since. Then, just before they’d sailed from Chatham the news had come through that in March next year Talavera was to relieve her sister ship, HMS Agincourt, and commence a two year attachment with the 7th Destroyer Squadron in Malta.
Peter hadn’t had time to dash off a letter to Marija with the good news before they’d sailed. March was still a long way off and there would be plenty of time to compose a proper, serious and suitably restrained epistle communicating the future movements of Her Majesty’s Ship Talavera. Three days ago there had seemed to be all the time in the world. All the time in the world to contemplate the depth and the true nature of his feelings for the woman whom he’d never met but to whom he felt inextricably linked.
And then the world had gone mad.
Malta was Headquarters of the Mediterranean Fleet, a prime target for Soviet medium range ballistic missiles in Bulgaria and the Balkans, and nuclear bombers based in the Ukraine and the Crimea. Even now Malta might be a scorched radioactive desert, uninhabitable for generations.
No, no, no…
However, it seems to me that no matter how bad things are we cannot afford to give in. If we despair then we are lost. While we survive, while Talavera and my crewmates survive we owe it to ourselves to be worthy of surviving.
Everything has changed but some things remain the same. You have always been and will always remain my best friend in the world and the one person I trust above all others. As I write I am looking at your picture. While I look at your face I can still believe that there is hope.
If we both live please wait for me because I am on my way to you.
Author’s Endnote
Thank you again for reading Timeline 10/27/62 — Book 1: Operation Anadyr. I hope you enjoyed it — or if you didn’t, sorry — but either way, thank you for reading and helping to keep the printed word alive. Remember, civilisation depends on people like you.
Love is Strange, the sequel to Operation Anadyr is also available on Kindle. Book 3 in the series, The Pillars of Hercules and Book 4, Red Dawn be published in 2015.
For details of my other books and forthcoming publications please check out
www.jamesphilip.co.uk.