The blue double doors of the St Catherine’s Hospital for Women had been blown in, and off its hinges.
Forgetting her pains Marija shrugged off Michael Stephen’s supporting hand and staggered into the gaping hole where the doors had been and lurched into the wrecked interior of what had once been the reception lobby of the hospital.
There she stood, her eyes slowly growing accustomed to the gloom.
“Marija!”
One, then two, and then a third woman emerged from the shadows.
“Marija!”
The women were suddenly hugging and sniffing back tears.
Others were emerging from the darkened hallway leading to the inner courtyard of the hospital; patients and more nurses in their pale blue smocks.
Marija began to search for Margo’s face.
“We knew you’d come!” One woman said and it set up a chorus.
“Where is Margo?” Marija asked eventually.
And the silence told her everything she needed to know.
Everything she needed to know and everything that she had known and sensed but stubbornly refused to believe many hours ago…
Chapter 34
‘I am discharging myself,’ Alan Hannay had half-informed, half-asked Lieutenant-Commander Miles Weiss, Talavera’s former Executive Officer. Of the two men the destroyer’s Supply Officer looked much the worse for wear but his injuries were largely superficial, whereas Miles Weiss kept blacking out — probably, doctors had concluded, the delayed results of a concussion sustained when an eleven-inch shell from the battle cruiser Yavuz had torn off the top of his gun director tower, and cut down Talavera’s great lattice foremast as if it was made of papier-mâché — so of the two men, he was the one with the stronger claim to be categorised as ‘walking wounded’.
Miles Weiss had been lying on a palliasse in the corridor of the old Zymotic Wing of the hospital solicitously attended by an uninjured Talavera, a leading seaman from Spider McCann’s deck division.
‘Consider yourself discharged, old man,’ Talavera’s second-in-command had concurred, drunkenly forcing an ashen-faced grin.
Alan Hannay had explained that the reason he was ‘discharging himself’ from RNH Bighi, ‘which had plenty of much more deserving cases to take care of’ was specifically, to ‘escort’ Rosa Calleja back to her house in Kalkara.
‘Basically, to see if it is still there and so forth…’
Talavera’s Canadian Navigator Lieutenant Dermot O’Reilly, after Miles Weiss the senior surviving officer, and Chief Petty Officer Spider McCann the Master at Arms had organised most of Talavera’s unwounded survivors into work parties, while several of the destroyer’s lightly wounded had been put at the disposal of RNH Bighi for hospital portering, maintenance and general duties; with the ‘fit’ men being sent into Kalkara to assist the civilian authorities.
It was symptomatic of the chaos on Malta that nobody from Headquarters Mediterranean Fleet had greeted Talavera’s survivors on the jetty in Kalkara Creek, and that they had been left, broadly speaking, to their own devices in the intervening hours.
‘In the absence of any orders to the contrary, I’ve asked Mr McCann to muster all able bodied men outside the hospital at zero-nine-hundred tomorrow, Alan,’ Miles Weiss informed his friend before he turned on his side and began to retch uncontrollably. ‘Tell the Master what you are up to in case he needs to find you before roll call tomorrow morning,’ Talavera’s Executive Officer had added, gasping breathlessly after the dry-retching fit had passed.
Alan Hannay had patted his shoulder and departed.
‘I feel guilty taking you away from your people,’ Rosa had confessed as the limping, careworn couple stumbled haltingly out of the hospital gates.
Alan Hannay had had to stop several times, his gait becoming ever more shambling. Twice the couple encountered small work parties of Talaveras, clearing roads, sweeping away shattered glass, and once, kicking a football around with a group of local boys. It soon became apparent that Kalkara had escaped the bombardment relatively undamaged with only a handful of smaller calibre shells falling in the village.
The threat of morning rain had blown out to sea and the spring sunshine was already shimmering off the sandstone walls of the close-packed houses above Kalkara Creek. The man and the woman paused in their laboured progress to gaze down at the USS Berkeley, moored fore and aft seemingly half-filling the inner Creek. The big ships normally moored much farther out but the captain of the guided missile destroyer had conned her so close inshore that it was a miracle her bow had not touched the bottom in his determination to facilitate the speedy transfer ashore of Talavera’s wounded. The Berkeley’s surgeon and every qualified sick bay attendant onboard had disembarked with Talavera’s wounded and been placed unconditionally at the disposal of RNH Bighi.
In the strangely bright sunshine the waters of the Grand Harbour, fouled and despoiled with bunker oil and the foul flotsam of war, here and there turned azure, sparkling blue. Across the anchorage fires still burned in Valletta. Big shells had bitten several large chunks out of the previously clean lines of the King George V Breakwater, the long northern sea wall guarding the Grand Harbour. Numerous small boats plied through the oily water, while out to sea the long grey menacing silhouette of the giant battleship USS Iowa slowly prowled the approaches to the Grand Harbour and Marsamxett Anchorage. High over the island the contrails of otherwise invisible jet fighters flying off the USS Independence criss-crossed the heavens, the thunder of their engines falling to earth as a mere whisper.
The small two-storey former Admiralty Dockyards of Malta house in which Rosa had lived her unhappy married life with her missing, latterly presumed dead husband seemed untouched at a distance. Rosa had been forced to relinquish the house after the Royal Navy took over the estate of the Admiralty Dockyards of Malta; because whether or not her husband, Marija’s elder brother Samuel was dead or alive, he had undeniably and self-evidently ‘ceased to work’ in the docks and therefore his, and his family’s right to a ‘company house’ was terminated. She would have been treated better if she had had any children but not much, because her estranged father had fatally undermined her ‘rights of tenure’ by informing the Navy that his daughter was ‘welcome under his roof in Mosta’. Peter and Marija had saved her from that awful prospect by inviting her to ‘camp’ in the ground floor living room of the house. Knowing the house was falling vacant Marija had used her charm and status as the daughter-in-law of the C-in-C to ‘jump the queue’ and to claim the house. Rosa had been speechless when her sister had invited her to move in.
‘Peter is a captain of a fleet destroyer, sister,’ Marija had explained patiently, winningly as only she could, ‘he will often be away and you will keep me company. If you don’t come to stay with us I will be miserable.’
Rosa had not believed that for a single minute.
Marija was the most self-reliant, strongest person she had ever met and in hindsight it was exactly those qualities which had kept the two young women at arm’s length during her marriage to Samuel. That and the distance which had already existed between the two elder Calleja siblings long before she came on the scene. Samuel had resented Marija. Marija was the ‘chosen one’, whereas he had always been in some non-specific way a ‘disappointment’ to his family. Marija was his father’s ‘little princess’, and his younger brother Joe, his mother’s ‘baby, who could do no wrong’ while he had been just ‘Sam’, the boring one who just got on with his job and who was never quite good enough…