“My goodness!” David Penberthy chuckled hoarsely. “You’re a sight for sore eyes, Peter!”
The younger man shook his bony hand.
“You look…”
“Pretty bloody dreadful, I should imagine,” the man in the bed grinned. “I’m on the mend.” He guffawed feebly: “Although I rather doubt I shall be back at sea any time soon.”
It was Peter’s turn to smile.
“I suspect that whenever you are fit to resume sea duty, sir,” he assured the man who had been like a father to him and the rest of Talavera’s crew in the grim times after the October War, “there will be no shortage of employment for chaps like us.” After the war the ship was moored like a floating prison hulk in Fareham Creek along with most of the Channel Fleet for endless months, inactive while the ships of his father’s British Pacific Fleet shepherded the Operation Manna convoys half-way around the World to the old country. “I don’t think the Fleet will be spending much time in port for the foreseeable future!”
There was a hard chair next to the bed and Peter Christopher pulled it up, settled.
“I rather doubt it,” the older man agreed.
“I apologise for not coming to visit sooner, sir,” the younger man offered, grimacing.
“I wouldn’t have known you were here until a couple of days ago,” he was comforted.
David Penberthy had lost so much blood by the time Talavera’s surgeon — before the war a third-year medical student who had been press-ganged into the Royal Navy under the provisions of the War Emergency Act — had staunched the bleeding, that he had very nearly died on the destroyer’s bridge that night while Peter had fought the ship standing and stepping over his prostrate, unconscious body. At Bighi he had fallen prey to fever, balanced precariously between life and death for over a week.
“I gather you saved the day at Lampedusa with the Nelson gambit?” The older man inquired wryly, the amusement that was flickering in his rheumy eyes hardly touching his drawn, ashen features.
“Er, I don’t know about that, sir.”
“Steaming inshore of the gun line? Drawing the enemy’s fire while you got a hawser onboard the Puma? It sounds pretty bloody Nelsonian to me, Peter?”
The younger man blushed with embarrassment.
“It was the only thing to do,” he shrugged. “Puma was taking a beating and she was dead in the water.” He shrugged again. “I only did what I thought you’d have done in the same circumstances, sir.”
David Penberthy wasn’t having any of that. He waved around the ward. Beds were crowded into practically every available space and uniformed visitors cluttered the aisles and clustered around the cots as voices babbled softly in the warm, sunlit hall.
“As if your exploits off Lampedusa weren’t enough, from what my new friends from the lost colonies tell me, you and Nick Davey saved the Enterprise’s bacon a week ago. Apparently, the chaps on the carrier couldn’t believe their eyes when Scorpion and Talavera disappeared under the Enterprise’s flight deck overhang and started pumping water into her stern. Is it true what they say about a Phantom falling across Talavera’s bridge wing?”
“Er, that was nothing,” Peter said evasively. “It was just the wing tip that clipped us. I think one of its external fuel tanks lit off about the time the fuselage went overboard so a few of the chaps got singed eyebrows. Everybody on deck was kitted out in anti-flash kit and fire-fighting suits, so not much harm was done. Scorpion got knocked about a lot worse than Talavera.”
David Penberthy thought about this while he collected his strength.
“Whatever,” he muttered weakly. “These fellows,” another attempted sweep of the arm to take in their surroundings, “think you and Nick should get medals…”
Peter waited patiently for his friend to recover.
“How goes it with your young lady?” The older man asked eventually.
“We’re engaged to be married, sir.”
“Good…” Exhausted, Peter Christopher’s former commanding officer sank back onto his pillows. “That’s good…” He shut his eyes and slept.
Peter patted the back of the older man’s hand, remaining in his chair. He had an appointment with the newly-appointed Superintendent of the Admiralty Naval Dockyard at his office in Senglea later that afternoon but he was in no hurry to leave. Once he left Bighi his day was going to be a succession of meetings and journeys between them. There would be no opportunity to see Marija again for another day or two now.
Yesterday evening had been dreamlike; sitting with Marija in the cool inner courtyard of the St Catherine’s Hospital for Women in the Citadel at Mdina, quietly, intimately alone with her for the first time. The first time he had ever been truly alone with her and he ached to be alone — just the two of them — with her again. They had said very little, held each other and when the time had come for him to go they had kissed, slowly, innocently.
On the coming Sunday evening he had been invited to the Calleja family home in Sliema where he would meet Marija’s ‘Mama’, and — probably — any number of her aunts, uncles, nephews and nieces. ‘Joe’ she had promised, ‘will be on his best behaviour’. They had smiled at each other at that point; he had bent his head, they had nuzzled foreheads…
That was yesterday and this was today.
He found Petty Officer Jack Griffin in the hospital canteen laughing and joking with a comely girl in the pale blue uniform of one of Margo Seiffert’s ‘nursing auxiliaries’. He had seen several women so dressed in his brief visit to Bighi. The red-bearded Petty Officer straightened and sobered the moment he saw Peter.
“This is Miss Anna Boffa, sir,” he reported. “She trained in Mdina with Miss Calleja, sir.”
Peter Christopher shook the young woman’s hand and to his horror, she very nearly swooned with delight.
“It is good to see that you are making friends with the natives, Jack,” he observed dryly as the two men marched out of the hospital towards their car.
“All you have to do is tell a girl that you’re off the old Talavera, sir,” the other man explained, cheerfully, “and suddenly it’s like being a movie star. Right now they’d make you King of Malta if you asked, sir!”
Peter did not care for that thought, or have the least inclination to encourage the sort of transient hero-worship that Jack Griffin and presumably other of his men were likely to exploit to gratuitously take advantage of impressionable young women who really ought to know better.
“Grand Masters,” he grunted. “They don’t have Kings, they have Grand Masters of the Knights Hospitaller of the Order of St John of Jerusalem,” he equivocated, not confident he had remembered the name of the Order correctly, “I think.”
Peter was surprised to be confronted by an old friend when he entered the outer office of the new Superintendent of the Admiralty Naval Dockyards.