No, Margo Seiffert was indestructible!
The young American naval lieutenant was still standing before her.
“And,” Marija murmured with a fond shake of her head, “I will also thank your Captain for saving my idiotic little brother, also.”
This clearly perplexed the young American.
“It is complicated, Lieutenant,” she explained. She had no idea what Joe had been doing onboard the Talavera. No doubt this was another thing she would discover in due course. “Forgive me, I am a tired. I don’t usually babble this way.”
“I must get back to my ship, ma’am.”
“Yes. Thank you.”
Marija viewed the rapidly retreating back of the messenger.
I wonder if my sister Rosa has let go of poor Alan yet?
Her sister-in-law had squealed with uncharacteristically anguished relief and delight when Lieutenant Alan Hannay had limped unsteadily up the steps onto the Kalkara Creek jetty. Still hobbling painfully from the effects of her own recent injuries Rosa had limped to greet Talavera’s battered Supply Officer. The pair of them had been a sight to behold in the unforgiving loom of the arc lights. They had looked at each other as if they had no idea what to do next; and had carried on looking at each other like two hopelessly embarrassed teenagers right up until the moment they had spontaneously melted into each other’s arms. The men on the stretchers queued to take their turn on the bed lift to the top of the cliff had spontaneously raised a ragged cheer.
Marija decided she ought to go back inside.
She allowed herself one last look out to sea beyond the darkly silhouetted Grand Harbour breakwaters where the USS Iowa patrolled like some giant grey sentinel. Even two miles out to sea with her long low deadly lines blurred by the dawn haze the great ship broadcast power and reassurance; a living statement wrought in tempered steel that the United States of America was now, irrevocably, in the fight. Many Maltese had questioned if the Americans had the heart for the new war after the fate which had befallen the USS Enterprise and the USS Long Beach. The massive nuclear-powered super carrier had been set ablaze by the thermonuclear airburst which had wrecked her consort from end to end, and but for the heroic assistance of HMS Scorpion and HMS Talavera, the Enterprise’s fires might have consumed her too. Now, looking at the battleship prowling the approaches to the Grand Harbour there could be no doubt that henceforth the United States Navy and the Royal Navy would fight side by side, come what may.
Marija shivered and involuntarily rested the palm of her right hand over her abdomen. Her long-time mentor and friend, Dr Margo Seiffert had gently chided her when in adolescent she had timidly confessed her occasional ‘presentiments’ and ‘feelings’ about things that were about to happen, or had already happened but that she had yet to learn of. In time Margo had let her ‘intuitions’ go unremarked, in the last year or two, ever since the October War in fact, she had greeted Marija’s ‘premonitions’ and ‘predictions’ with resignation, and a quiet, vaguely maternal pride.
When next she was alone with Margo she would share her news.
Her first child would be a girl…
“They said I’d find you out here!” Called Surgeon Lieutenant Michael Stephens. He came to the cliff top wall and lit up a cigarette. Much to Margo Seiffert’s disgust the young doctor’s illustrious uncle, the pioneering orthopaedic surgeon Captain Reginald Stephens had never quite managed to quit the ‘perfidious weed’, as she contemptuously called tobacco. It seemed that the nephew was, like his uncle, also a martyr to the ‘weed’.
Marija recognised the uncle in the nephew. Michael Stephens was compactly built and already a little fleshy, with a complexion that would easily turn florid. Like his uncle, there was a mischievous twinkle in his eye and his voice carried a threat of sudden, inconsequential mirth. He was a man who enjoyed life and fully intended to carry on enjoying it whatever obstacles were placed in his path.
“You remind me very much of your uncle,” she told him.
“He was quite a character they say?”
Marija frowned. “Did you ever meet him?”
“Only a few times as a kid when he came back to England on leave in the late forties. My father was killed in the war. Out in the Far East. I didn’t find out until some months after his death that Uncle Reggie had been supporting my mother and me all those years. I’d probably never have got into medical school without his pulling strings and stumping up my living costs. You must have got to know him quite well?”
“He was a very happy man. He felt bad about putting me in metal cages after some of my operations. He would sit by my bed in the night when I was afraid. It was easy to forget the demons that hide in the darkness when he was holding my hand…”
Marija’s words trailed away into the cool morning airs.
She had not intended to say what she had said; she barely comprehended how those words had escaped her lips or from whence, deep inside her, they had emerged.
The man leaned forward, looking out to sea as he rested his elbows on the wall.
“Uncle Reggie wrote me a letter every fortnight. Every fortnight the last five or six years before he died. He wanted to know what I was up to, sometimes he took me to task for my numerous failings but not very often. Mostly, he wrote about Malta,” Michael Stephens shrugged, “and you and Dr Seiffert.”
Involuntarily, Marija shivered at his mention of Margo’s name.
She said nothing, not trusting herself to speak.
She thought about her mother and father, her friends in Mdina and drew comfort from picturing their faces, and hearing their voices in her head.
But Margo’s name only invoked a pang of aching guilt, and inconsolable loss…
Chapter 27
William Whitelaw had returned to his rooms at New College — ‘new’ in Oxford terms was a relative thing, the college having been founded in 1379 by William of Wykeham and its full name being The Warden and Scholars of St Mary's College of Winchester in Oxford, the ‘new’ simply differentiating it from a nearby neighbour which was at that time also known as St Mary’ but in later centuries became known as Oriel College — to snatch a couple of hours sleep, and to wash and shave before returning to confer with his staff at the offices of the Ministry of Defence.
Merton College like half-a-dozen others had suspended lectures to accommodate the rushed, and increasingly chaotic move of the administrative centre of government from Cheltenham to Oxford. By the autumn the University would, hopefully, begin to get back to normal but that pre-supposed that the ambitious first phase of works in and around the city was completed on schedule. Presently, the main ministries and the Parliamentary bureaucracy were being hosted by individual colleges, while schemes to erect prefabricated housing and administrative compounds outside the old city had as yet barely broken ground. Within the city buildings were being converted at breakneck speed, bomb shelters sunk into the ground and plans being forged to construct new roads to the north and south, and the west out to RAF Brize Norton. Workers were pouring in from all over the United Kingdom transforming sleepy Oxford into a militarized boom town.
The University community was in a daze.
The vision of a ‘new Oxford’, a ne-dedicated capital city at the very heart of England was of course, Margaret Thatcher’s. What had started as an exercise in democratic renewal — reconvening Parliament in the city — had in the last month assumed a momentum of its own, rather like the proverbial genie released from its long captivity. Less charitable souls in the city spoke of a Pandora’s box having been opened. In retrospect it was self-evident that Cheltenham, the first home of the post-cataclysm emergency government — the United Kingdom Interim Emergency Administration — simply did not fit the bill for a new long-term national capital. Whereas, Oxford with is central position, history and the existing University infrastructure automatically suggested itself as the obvious candidate. In any event the ‘governmental settlement’ of Oxford implicitly recognised the reality that the reconstruction of London would be a generation long project which was unlikely to be completed within the life spans of any of the immediate survivors of the cataclysm.