“Do you remember the night of the war when everybody came down to the Creek to watch the British destroyers trying to escape out to sea?” Joe asked.
“Yes,” his sister replied in a whisper. “That was the night we met Jim for the first time.”
“It seems like years ago.”
“Perhaps, it was. I think we are all much older now.”
“Mama said you planned to go back to Mdina tonight?”
“Lieutenant Hannay promised to send a car later.”
“Oh.” Joe hated to see his sister brought so low. He thought he’d seen all her moods but this was different, there was a dull resignation in her. He’d never seen that before, not even when as a five or six year old he’d visited her in Bighi; in those days when she’d been trapped — seemingly forever — in a hospital bed, often in a cage of steel that was literally holding her together, her eyes had sparkled and she’d prattled about what she would do when she was well again. Always, there had been hope, a future filled with possibilities, bright and exciting. “I saw Papa had the Times of Malta,” did you read the story about HMS Talavera?”
“Yes.” Marija sniffed back a tear and forced herself not to raise her hands to her eyes to wipe away the moisture welling, welling, unstoppably like the rising lump in her throat. The British had gone insanely close inshore off Lampedusa to help the assault company of Royal Marines who had gone ashore unopposed only to be pinned down by a hail of machine gun and shoulder launched rocket fire. The ‘enemy’, or ‘pirates’ or ‘monsters’ depending on who one spoke to had opened fire on the destroyers and frigates of the 23rd Escort Flotilla, led by HMS Talavera with anti-tank and anti-aircraft guns. HMS Puma had lost all power, been forced to drop anchor to stop running aground. A hit on HMS Talavera’s bridge had badly wounded several men including the ship’s captain. Peter had assumed command not only of his own ship, but in the confusion, of the whole flotilla. Ordering the two least damaged vessels, HMS Leopard and the big old-fashioned fleet destroyer HMS Defender to lay down covering fire he had steered the Talavera between the shore and the crippled HMS Puma, secured a tow line and while Talavera’s main battery bombarded and ultimately silenced the ‘enemy’ guns at point blank range firing over open sights, had hauled her wounded consort to safety into deeper water.
Peter was a hero.
And she was even less worthy of him.
She’d sat down to write him a letter that morning; stared at the blank sheet for minutes and then an hour, her hand paralysed. Each time she gripped the pen to start to write, no words came. She could say anything to Peter Christopher except that she didn’t love him; unless she denied that love what was the point of writing the letter. In her room at the St Catherine’s Hospital for Women in Mdina she’d try again to write, to explain, to end this unbearable turmoil…
In the gathering dusk lights were blinking on along the length of the old Battle class destroyer. Two whalers were butting up against the ferry jetty, waiting a little further along the sea wall. Talavera’s crew were swinging down a boarding ladder, forming up on the amidships deck.
Marija thought the destroyer looked a little bit odd with the yawning gap behind her funnel where she would normally have expected to see the high, blocky deckhouse which somebody had once told her housed most of the technical marvels of the converted Fast Air Detection Battles.
Several cars drew up opposite the ferry jetty.
Marija forced herself to look away.
In the Times of Malta they said the British ships had gone so close inshore off Lampedusa that the enemy guns, firing shells designed to penetrate the inclined, super-hardened thick armoured glacis plates of tanks had ripped straight through the thin hulls of the British destroyers ‘like hot knives through butter’, except where they hit something solid, then they’d ricocheted around the insides of the ships like huge unstoppable bullets. She counted half-a-dozen football-sized jagged holes in the bridge superstructure and the hull beneath it. HMS Talavera’s stern looked like a cheese grater, riddled with fist-sized dark holes and blackened, here and there by small fires. The paper said only three men had died and only eight had been seriously wounded. Staring at the visible damage she didn’t know how that was possible, surely more men must have died?
Marija was so preoccupied she didn’t notice, or feel, Joe’s sudden movement by her side.
“Miss Calleja?” Alan Hannay asked anxiously. “Marija, are you all right?”
She swung around, wild-eyed.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you.”
“No, no. You didn’t, Alan.”
“Oh. Good. Look, the Admiral is going aboard HMS Talavera. He’d be honoured if you…”
“No!” Marija cried.
The young officer misunderstood.
“I’m sure they’ve quite tidied up the battle damage,” he said lamely.
“No,” she hissed. “I cannot, I have no right. Everything is spoiled now. Don’t you see?”
“Er, no,” the C-in-C’s flag lieutenant stammered, troubled by the tears flooding down the woman’s face. “Lieutenant-Commander Christopher will be coming ashore with the Admiral. There are lots of photographers and journalists down by the ferry…”
Marija shook her head and broke past him.
Her brother exchanged worried looks with the British officer and ran after his sister. He soon caught up with her. The sea front was crowded and Marija wasn’t as spritely once she met the rising slope of Tower Street.
“The British don’t blame you, sister!” He declared breathlessly. “They don’t blame any of us. They know we didn’t have anything to do with what Sam was involved in!”
Marija kept marching purposefully up hill.
Joe made a grab for her elbow.
She shook off his hand.
“Please!” He pleaded plaintively.
Marija halted and suddenly he was two paces beyond her before he realised she had stopped. He turned.
“Don’t you see?” His sister implored him. “Peter is a hero and I am the sister of a monster?”
Joe threw his arms wide; unable to express his utter incomprehension.
“I was stupid to think he would ever love me!” She went on, spiralling into self-immolation in her despair. “Me! What was I thinking, Joe? What kind of a wife could I ever be to a man who is such a hero?”
Joe didn’t know what to say or even if there was anything to be said.
He pulled his sister towards him and wrapped his arms around her, in a moment she was clinging to his neck, sobbing unrequitedly, inconsolably in the failing light of the day.
Down on the waterfront a brass band struck up.
“How does HMS Talavera look, son?” Joe’s father asked, standing aside as his daughter stumbled into her mother’s waiting arms and the two women crabbed, hugging and crying into the kitchen. The son followed the stooped, defeated figure of his father into the living room.
“Like she was in a real fight, Papa,” Peter Calleja’s surviving son told him. “I don’t know how they could have let her get into any kind of fight. She’s missing her CIC deckhouse, she’s got no gun directors, the mainmast is just a radio aerial, and she’s got no surface-to-air missile launcher or AS mortar. She must have had to fire her main battery in local control the other day. That’s almost like something from a World War One sea battle!”
His father forced a haggard smile.
“Like father like son,” he said with a soft, dreadful bitterness.
“We met Lieutenant Hannay on the sea wall. He invited Marija to go aboard, or to meet Peter Christopher when he came ashore.”