“Commander Christopher,” the elegantly dressed blond said, smiling. She’d poured herself into the chair opposite him at the table in the waterfront taverna. He’d found this place a week ago and come here the last few evenings to collect his thoughts and make his peace with the changed reality of his life. He missed his old ship, HMS Talavera. He missed the gadgets and gizmos that as the old destroyer’s Electronic Warfare Officer (EWO) had been his to experiment with and to play with to his heart’s content. He badly missed his friends from Talavera’s wardroom; those both dead and alive. Worst of all he felt disconnected from things. Ever since Rear Admiral Grenville had brought his staff ashore from his flagship, the Hermes, he’d been a spare part, a square peg in a world of round holes. Hermes sailed for Malta in the morning for a three month refit; and here he was ashore twiddling his thumbs. If God had a sense of humour it was a bloody perverse one! Peter Christopher gave the woman an impatient frown.
“Don’t look so worried,” the newcomer laughed. “I’m not about to proposition you, or anything.”
The woman’s voice was plumy, straight out of the Home Counties.
“We’ve not met,” she went on. “I’m Clara Pullman.” She waved to the bar. “Might I have a coffee, please?” She asked in Portuguese. “I came here a lot before the war,” she explained, smiling again.
Peter Christopher guessed his companion to be in her mid-thirties. She wore a lightweight fawn coat over a plain cotton dress that was obviously tailored to her contours. She had no rings on her fingers; and had placed a small, grey leather handbag on the table.
Several of the tables around them were occupied by men in Royal Navy or Royal Air Force blue. Lisbon had become an outpost of the British military machine shortly before the ceasefire was declared and now it was swiftly turning into a regular staging post and watering hole, much to the delight of the local hotel, taverna and restaurant owners.
“Forgive my manners,” the man muttered. “If it is all the same with you I am not feeling terribly sociable this afternoon.”
“No offence taken,” the woman assured him. She gave the waiter a tight-lipped smile when her coffee was placed before her, was silent until the man retreated, wiping his hands on a stained apron. “You’ve had a rough old time of it lately. Still, you’ll be on your way to Malta soon.”
The man gave her a baleful look.
“You just need to have a little faith, that’s all,” Clara Pullman said, glancing out of the window as she raised her cup to her lips. She wore very little makeup, much in the style of the local better off, respectable women of the city; that was how the man had known she wasn’t a tart drawn to the waterfront by the influx of foreign sailors, airmen and soldiers. She nodded towards the darkening silhouette of HMS Hermes. “When were you last in England?” She asked suddenly.
Peter Christopher snorted softly.
“Late November.” It seemed like a lifetime ago; all those months that HMS Talavera was swinging around her anchors in Fareham Creek, the occasional runs ashore into Portsmouth or Gosport, the greyness of the skies and the radiation lockdown exercises. Yes, that was another lifetime.
“What’s it like at home?” The woman probed, trying not to seem overly anxious. “I left London just before the war, you see. I had a lovely little flat in Hampstead. Courtesy of a rich admirer who’d fallen in love with this city during the war — Hitler’s War, that is — when he was something dangerous and exciting in the Special Operations Executive. Lisbon was the playground of the spies of all the warring parties in those days.” She laughed a sad little laugh. “The more things change the more they remain the same, I suppose.”
“Home is not like it once was,” the man said gently. “There is no London any more. Or much of Kent, or large tracts of the East Coast. There were some hits up in the north-east, I think. Nobody talked much about it and not a lot of people really know what really happened in some places. There was a big airburst over Morecombe Bay, for example. I’ve no idea if Blackpool is still there. We heard bad things about the rationing, shortages of everything, there were rumours of plague; I don’t know. That’s what it is like at home. Pretty grim for most people, I should imagine.”
The woman viewed him thoughtfully.
“They say radiation levels aren’t as bad as everybody said they’d be if we ever blew up the World?”
Peter Christopher shrugged.
“Radiation levels dropped quickly after the first few weeks. The best policy is probably not to think about it. We won’t know how bad things are going to be for a while. Several years, perhaps, decades.” He found himself thinking about Marija celebrating each defect-free birth at the St Catherine’s Hospital for Women at Mdina; wondered if that was the new future for all of Mankind. Counting its blessings for the tiny things; the things that only a truly merciful God could reliably bestow upon his children. “Humanity is fourteen months into a millennium long experiment when it comes to living with raised background radiation levels. You and I, we just won’t live so long as we would before the war. It is our children who will pay the real price.”
Clara Pullman grimaced.
“Children have never been on my agenda. I’m not really the maternal type.”
“No, what type are you Miss Pullman?”
“I was once a nurse. From time to time in the last year I have been again. In the meantime I was,” she smiled, fluttered her eyelids and tried very hard not to giggle, “a kept lady. But that career was slowly winding down. The sort of men who keep women of my ilk like their trophies young and lissom and as you see, I have been neither for some time now.”
Peter Christopher raised an eyebrow.
Clara Pullman raised a hand.
“No, don’t start trying to be gallant, Commander,” when she laughed her eyes came alight. “In the last year I have embarked on a new career. Although I didn’t know it until about a month ago I’ve been, shall we say, on Government Service ever since the day of the war. Which brings me to why I’m sitting at a table in a waterfront taverna with a handsome young naval officer trying very hard not to flirt.”
Peter Christopher’s ill humour at being jogged out of his brooding had morphed into curiosity by then. If a beautiful woman — and whatever Miss Pullman thought of her own looks, she was a beautiful woman — wanted to spend the time of day cheering him up who was he to affect misogyny?
“We’re not flirting, Miss Pullman,” he observed. “I am…” His voice trailed off because he had been about to say ‘engaged’, which strictly speaking, wasn’t true. He and Marija Calleja were, well, affianced but not in a way that he could easily explain to himself, let alone a complete stranger. They had only ever spoken through their letters, one to the other, and they’d never discussed, or mentioned what their ‘status’ actually was. Instead, he simply felt ‘committed’ to her and he tacitly assumed she felt the same way towards him. In either event he didn’t consider himself free to ‘flirt’ with an attractive older woman he met in a waterfront taverna.