Since his Captain was a bag of nerves facing the prospect of finally meeting the love of his life — in something akin to privacy for the first time — he had been only too glad to bring Alan Hannay along for the ride.
“You must have met Marija dozens of times in the last couple of months,” he remarked as the old Humber bumped and jolted, rolling like a bathtub on a Channel crossing.
“I was quite friendly with Jim Siddall,” Alan Hannay explained.
“The poor chap who got blown up in Kalkara with Marija’s sister-in-law?”
“Rosa. Yes, it was a very bad business. That and Marija’s brother going missing. We were all very worried about her.”
Both men ignored the flapping ears of their red-bearded driver.
Back in the days when thirty year old Petty Officer Jack Griffin had been a humble, repeatedly demoted electrical artificer in HMS Talavera’s radar room he had appointed himself Peter Christopher’s personal guardian angel. The reasons for this were arcane and mostly incomprehensible to anybody ignorant of the two men’s history. Peter had inherited Jack Griffin when he joined Talavera at Chatham; that was several months before a one megaton ground burst on the night of the October War transformed the historic base into a flooded crater, diverted the River Medway and killed everybody who had lived within three miles of ground zero. The two men had struck up an unlikely rapport from the outset and somewhere along the line perennial black sheep Jack Griffin had turned over a new leaf. He had stopped drinking — to excess, leastways — curbed his tripwire temper, decided for the first time in his life that he wanted to ‘belong’ to ‘something, somewhere’, and had become a respected key member of Peter Christopher’s tight knit Radar and Electrical Warfare Division on the Talavera, then fitting out at Chatham ahead of her much delayed operational trials. The two men were the last survivors of Talavera’s radar room crew from the night of the October War. Most of the others had died in the Battle of Cape Finisterre, shredded when the Skyhawks strafed the crippled destroyer. Peter would probably have been dead too if Jack Griffin had not wrestled him out of high chair onto the debris-strewn deck that seconds later was awash with the blood of the dead and dying. When HMS Talavera’s previous Captain, David Penberthy, had sent Peter ashore at Oporto after the battle to recover from his minor injuries he had detailed Jack Griffin as his personal ‘steward’ and bodyguard. Subsequently, they had been posted together to the Operations Staff of HMS Hermes, thence back to Talavera at Gibraltar and since then shared the destroyer’s latest adventures off Lampedusa and the day-long terrifying fire-fighting episode beneath the raging inferno on the USS Enterprise’s flight deck.
All of which was known to Alan Hannay; which meant that he knew that in front of this particular Petty Officer, he could speak his mind without fear or favour knowing that his words would go no further than the car.
“There were those awful rumours about Marija’s brother Samuel being involved in some way with Red Dawn,” Alan Hannay explained. “It is ludicrous, but there were actually people who accused him of personally sabotaging HMS Torquay!”
Peter Christopher had been very careful to steer Talavera well clear of the buoys marking the resting places of the two sections of the sunken frigate in the Grand Harbour. It was a pure fluke that the bow section had gone down in over seventy feet of water, settling on its starboard side; and that the stern had grounded just beneath the surface under the ruins of Fort St Angelo, again in such a position as to not present a serious hazard to navigation at the neck of Dockyard Creek.
“Your father quashed all that nonsense,” Alan Hannay continued. “Fortunately, the security people rounded up the real culprits. Or rather cornered the blighters and settled their hash once and for all!” There was undisguised heat and bitterness in Alan Hannay’s words of a kind Peter Christopher had not thought his urbane, mild-mannered Supply Officer capable.
He glanced at the other man.
“I should imagine some of the chaps at HQ took the whole dreadful business to heart?”
“I should say so, sir!”
“I never realised how,” Peter hesitated, “special Marija is to people on the island. Yesterday on the dockside it was as if everybody had come to see her not Scorpion or Talavera.”
“The Labour Party and the Nationalists are both courting her for all they are worth,” Alan Hannay said, not knowing if he ought to be telling his commanding officer this. Any of it. “On account of her becoming so famous leading the Women of Malta movement, I suppose, but I think it is more than that. It is the whole thing about how she recovered from the injuries she suffered during the siege in 1942, and how she trained as a nurse. I never met her before the bombing in December but after the work she did on the Sliema waterfront just after the attack, well, ever since that night she seems to have become even more of a symbol of…”
“A symbol of what, Alan?”
“I don’t know really. Of hope, I suppose. The World has changed so much from before the war that none of the old ideas really hold water these days, don’t you feel, sir?”
“Because the old ways died with the old World?”
“Something like that.”
Petty Officer Jack Griffin sighed: “Miss Calleja is a perfect little Princess. That’s what everybody says, sir.”
At Headquarters Peter Christopher attempted to pay a courtesy call on his father but discovered that the great man was ‘in conference’. Relieved, he walked the short distance to St Paul’s Square and the St Catherine’s Hospital for Women. Before they had broken from their — in hindsight, embarrassingly spontaneous and intimate clinch on Parlatorio Wharf — Marija has whispered that she was ‘on shift’ at the hospital for the next four days and or nights, he could not remember which. Holding Marija in his arms had been distracting in ways he had never experienced with another woman, and when she kissed him his mind had gone completely blank…
“Commander Christopher!” An excited young woman with wide eyes and a mop of short, unruly brown hair attempting to escape from her pale blue starched nursing bonnet exclaimed excitedly before she disappeared into the back of the building.
Margo Seiffert was less excitable.
“Have you recovered from yesterday’s homecoming, Peter?” She asked, smiling ruefully and shaking his proffered hand.
“No, not yet,” he confessed. “I believe Lieutenant Hannay may have preceded me…”
The Director of St Catherine’s Hospital for Women refreshed her smile and nodded.
“Just walk straight through to the courtyard at the back. Alan’s in the garden with Marija and Rosa.”
“Rosa?”
“Samuel Calleja’s widow.”
“Ah,” the man murmured, “of course.” He followed the direction indicated by the older woman’s pointing arm and stumbled towards his fate. He heard women’s voices and laughing before he emerged into the cool sheltered cloister hidden in the heart of the hospital.
He glanced up at the branches of the tree which grew in one corner of the courtyard, its upper boughs brushing against gables and gutters.
His eyes grew accustomed to the shadows.
Marija, dressed in her pale blue nursing smock was sitting at one end of a wooden bench next to a young woman in a wheel chair; and Alan Hannay was standing beside a woman whose profile was instantly familiar but not immediately recognisable to the newcomer.
“Peter!” Marija exclaimed, rising and moving to meet him as he emerged into the peaceful church-quiet yard. Her eyes twinkled with pleasure as she walked into his open arms as if she had been doing it all her life. He had hugged her close and planted kisses in her hair before he remembered the watching eyes. In a moment she took his hand and turned proudly to the others. The man was in a complete daze, hardly registering anything but the scent of Marija’s hair.