“You’re going off to the Verdala Palace with the other Talaveras,” he was informed in a weary, matter of fact way.
With the other Talaveras.
“Oh.” Most of the times men had come to cart him off somewhere new in the last eighteen months it had been to arrest him so the prospect of visiting the seat of British Imperial power on the archipelago in the company of men with whom he had just fought a huge battle was, well, different and gave him considerable pause for thought. So much so that he said not another word until Petty Officer Jack Griffin, decked out in what looked like a brand new blue Dress № 4 uniform still stinking of mothballs swam into his field of vision.
“Look what we’ve got here, lads!” The red-headed, piratically bearded and scarred Navy man guffawed loudly.
Joe winced as men surrounded his wheelchair, each and every one of them intent on patting and slapping his back and shoulders and ruffling his hair.
“Good on you, mate!”
“You had us worried…”
“You don’t look half as bad as they said?”
“The drinks are on you the next time we end up in Sammy’s Bar!”
Sammy’s Bar was a notorious Navy watering hole off Pieta Creek at the eastern end of Marsamxett Anchorage. It was a Navy bar — its real name was ‘The Old Bar’ but the Royal Navy had renamed it years ago — renowned for purveying various beverages of dubious provenances and sweet white that had very little in common with the output of any other vintage produced in pre-war Europe. Sammy’s Bar was the sort of place a Maltese civilian like Joe Calleja would normally give as wide a berth as possible…
“Sammy’s Bar!” The men around him chorused. “Sammy’s Bar!”
The circle of faces parted and the painful back slapping ceased.
“Give the civilian room to breathe, lads!” Chief Petty Officer Spider McCann ordered. He bent low and squinted thoughtfully at the battered dockyard electrician. Presently, he was joined by Lieutenant Alan Hannay in his earnest scrutiny of the injured man.
“Mrs Calleja will accompany us, Mr McCann,” the young officer declared. “But Joe will need somebody to keep an eye on him.”
Joe Calleja was fascinated by the fleeting suggestion of an unspoken question in Spider McCann’s eyes and his momentary delay in acknowledging the suggestion.
“Aye, sir.”
“Hello, Joe,” Rosa Calleja said uncomfortably.
The man in the wheelchair blinked at his sister-in-law. She seemed somehow changed, as if a cloud had lifted off her shoulders. Her short hair was brushed back off her face and held in check with a blue band, she had applied some kind of subtle rouge to her cheeks and she seemed alive.
“We are all to go to the Verdala Palace in a bus they are sending,” she explained. “It will be a bumpy ride,” she apologised. “I will try to get hold of some more aspirins and the boys are looking for pillows and cushions to make you comfortable.”
She patted his undamaged left arm gently and departed.
Jack Griffin leaned over Joe.
“They were going to leave you behind!” He complained, clearly horrified by the idea. “But then Mr Hannay called up HQ and everything was sorted!”
“Oh, I see.” Or rather he did not.
“Fuck it!” Jack Griffin growled. “You were the one who actually sank those two big fuckers. Not those fucking come lately fucking Yanks!”
Chapter 59
Queen Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God, of Great Britain, Ireland and the British Dominions beyond the Seas Queen, and Defender of the Faith had been flanked by her two children, fifteen year old Prince Charles, and thirteen year old Princess Anne in the reception hall as Margaret Thatcher and her own small entourage had been graciously escorted into Blenheim Palace.
It was some minutes later after much bowing and scraping and the mutual introductions of their respective offspring that Monarch and Prime Minister removed themselves to the library where, across a low ornate table bearing a tea service the two women had settled in Queen Anne chairs.
“I shall be mother,” the Queen announced.
It had become the custom in recent months for the Prime Minister to be accompanied at audiences with her sovereign by a representative of her Labour Party coalition partners in government. The arrangement was one which recognised that within the current constitutional and parliamentary accommodation put in place after the October War, that there was an inherent ‘democratic deficit’ and it was vital not to place the Queen, the one inviolable and inalienable surviving symbol of national unity in a position where she seemed to be in any way partisan. Today, this was not an issue because the Queen had specifically summoned as was Her right, Her Prime Minister for a private audience.
Presently the two women, both younger than any of their senior ministers, both bereaved and torn with fears for their children and loved ones, viewed each other over the rims of their tea cups.
“I know that you and Admiral Sir Julian Christopher were very close,” the Queen said sadly. “These must be awful times for you?”
Margaret Thatcher did not trust herself to speak.
She nodded mutely.
The Queen’s three year old son Prince Andrew had been killed in the regicidal attack on Balmoral four months ago and her husband and consort Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh had suffered injuries so severe that he was still as yet insufficiently recovered to make the journey south to join his family at Blenheim.
The two women had established a rapport in the aftermath of the attack on Balmoral, jointly setting up and managing an emergency casualty clearing station in the ruins of the castle. Since then they had unflinchingly faced one crisis after another in the sure and certain knowledge that this was their lot, the burden that they must both carry, together.
The Queen was the younger of the two by six months, not yet thirty-eight for another three weeks or so; and she never allowed herself to forget the crushing weight of responsibility that pressed down upon her Prime Minister’s eminently capable, but nonetheless fragile shoulders.
“Sir Julian and I were to be married,” Margaret Thatcher said, relieved to be able to say it without fear of anybody overhearing or interpreting her grief for weakness. “I confess that I have not been myself since I heard of his death, Ma’am.”
“That is entirely understandable.”
There would be no crocodile tears in this room today. It was enough that the two women understood and empathised one with the other. Neither paused to contemplate the strangeness of how it had come to be that a grocer’s daughter from Grantham had become the primus inter pares — first among equals — in Queen Elizabeth II’s realm.
“I am quite recovered now, Ma’am.”
The Queen did not believe this and her silence communicated it.
“Recovered,” Margaret Thatcher qualified, “but not reconciled. I had hoped, all of us in government had hoped, that we could see some kind of end in sight. With American help I saw a day when not only Cyprus would be back in our hands, perhaps Crete also, and that we might effectively have penned the evil of Red Dawn behind defensible barriers for the foreseeable future. But recent events, if they have shown us anything at all have shown how little we know about our enemies.”
“How goes the campaign in Cyprus?”