“Joe and I came down here on the night of the war,” she explained when they stopped at the sea wall. The ships in Sliema Creek; HMS Broadsword, HMS Dunkirk, newly arrived from Gibraltar, and HMS Oudenarde were showing faint, hooded bow and stern lights, but were otherwise darkened despite the bright street lights along The Strand from the Cambridge Barracks to the bridge between Sliema and Lazaretto Creeks that joined the main island to Manoel Island upon which so many men and women had died when the 100th Bomb Group’s bombs had obliterated the Headquarters of the Commander-in-Chief on Malta. “That night was the first time I met Jim Siddall.”
Peter Christopher was silent. Alan Hannay had told him the story of how it had been the big Red Cap — Royal Military Policeman — who had rescued Joe Calleja from the hands of what his father now believed to be an illegal and in any event never officially sanctioned, CIA-sponsored interrogation camp at the Empire Stadium in nearby Gzira. Anybody suspected to be working for the Central Intelligence Agency, and most Americans, had been thrown off the archipelago soon afterwards; being replaced by British ‘Internal Security Department’ thugs who had subsequently been responsible for filling the numerous detention ‘depots’ with suspected ‘troublemakers, left-wing agitators, and apologists for terrorists’. Although his father had emptied the detention camps within days of his arrival on the Maltese Archipelago, habeas corpus had only been reinstated — albeit hedged around with ‘security’ caveats — in early January.
“Jim was a good friend to me,” Marija said, staring dreamily across the darkness of Marsamxett at the curtain walls and ramparts of Valletta. “If anything had happened to you I might have married him even though I don’t think I could have loved him. Not the way I love you, anyway.”
“If you had married him I would have understood,” Peter muttered, squeezing Marija’s hand. She leaned against him, her head resting on his right shoulder.
Suddenly she giggled.
“What?” The man asked, not knowing what to make of it, and gently curious.
“Men,” she sighed fondly.
“I mean it,” he went on. “If anything ever happens to me I’d hate to think you’d wrap yourself in mourning forever.”
“How long should I ‘wrap myself in mourning’?”
Peter chuckled, knowing she was teasing him.
“I like your family,” he told her.
“Good.” She gently tugged his hand and they began to walk, very slowly towards the ferry quay. “I never once tried to run for Jim,” she reassured the man, mischievously seraphic. “Not once.”
They walked on.
“All this is still a bit of dream for me,” he confessed.
He and Marija were living in an armed camp.
That morning he had watched the low black hull of Britain’s only nuclear-powered hunter killer submarine ease into a dry dock deep within French Creek over which secretive awnings had been draped ahead of the deadly vessel’s arrival. Taking a whaler back to the RMS Sylvania to dress for the evening he had counted four long grey US Navy anti-aircraft and anti-submarine destroyers moored in Kalkara Bay and another tied up fore and aft at the emergency buoys in the middle of the Grand Harbour. One of the Big Cats, HMS Lion was moored alongside Parlatorio Wharf with the new frigate, HMS Leander tied outboard of the big cruiser. Just inside the northern Grand Harbour breakwater HMS Sheffield, the crippled veteran of the chase for the Bismarck in May 1941, was anchored as floating gun battery, and nearby was HMS Hermes, resplendent in a new coat of battleship grey paint with a squadron of Sea Vixens parked on her flight deck. Another carrier, HMS Ocean was absent, apparently transporting reinforcements to the garrisons on Pantelleria and Lampedusa, in company with a mixed bag of half-a-dozen escorting destroyers and frigates. HMS Talavera and HMS Scorpion were side by side in dry dock; and the race was on to complete their underwater repairs as fast as possible to free up the dock for the next ‘cab on the rank’, possibly HMS Victorious if she managed to get back to Malta under her own steam. There was new talk of offloading HMS Sheffield’s wrecked ‘C’ turret, welding and riveting her stern back together and restoring her to active service. The Fleet was aching to finish unfinished business on Cyprus.
“I joined the Royal Navy to play with electronic gizmos and to travel to exotic places. It never occurred to me that any of this would happen.”
“Would you have come to Malta but for the war?”
“The war? I don’t know. That night of the war when Talavera was out in the middle of the North Sea everything changed, it was like a switch clicking in my head. I just knew what I had to do. Everything changed.”
“I loved the idea of you from when I was still a girl. I know you did not love me the way I loved you, not a first.”
Peter halted, looked down into Marija’s darkly limpid eyes.
“No, it isn’t that,” he explained. “It was just that I didn’t know how much I loved you until the World went barking mad.”
She smiled, detached her hand from his and reached for him, stretching her arms around his neck. He did not need any further encouragement to bow his head and search for her lips with his own.
Marija broke their intimate clinch, breathlessly resting her forehead on his chest for long seconds, before stepping away half-a-pace.
“Something horrible could happen to us all at any time.”
Peter Christopher considered her point and could not help but agree. Another salvo of ICBMs could be hurtling towards Malta right now. There had been that incident a few days ago in which HMS Amphion was lost, barely a hundred-and-fifty miles from where they stood. They said Bucharest was gone, although that was just a Wardroom rumour. Until a week ago the Royal Navy had been throwing ships into the fire as if it was refighting battles of earlier wars. The enemy — Red Dawn, whatever that was — had attacked Limassol and HMS Victorious’s escorts with tactical nuclear weapons; it was probably only a matter of time before the Americans, or perhaps, the V-Bombers based at RAF Luqa struck back. And then what? Round upon round to atomic tit for tat until nobody was left standing? The idea made him shiver with despair.
“Yes, something awful could happen at any time,” he agreed. “But I can’t live like that. No,” he corrected himself, “I refuse to live like that.”
Marija said nothing, nodding proudly.
“If one day everything ends in a blinding flash,” he added, whispering, “so be it. But until that day I intend to live my life like the free man that I was born. I refuse to live in fear. I plan to live normally.”
There were tears in Marija’s eyes now. Peter Christopher thought she was going to bury her face in his chest anew. She sniffed, collected her strength and gazed into his face, her lips working mutely while she attempted to organise her thoughts and her words.
“Peter, there has been no time to talk about things. There are a lot of things that trouble me deeply, that I don’t even know if you want to hear me speak of, but the way things are…”
His sudden concern creased her face with worry. She shook the long hair from her brow, placed a tentative hand on his torso, her fingers tracing tiny, frightened circles on his jacket breast pocket.
“You know what happened when I forgot that I cannot run,” she continued, forcing a strained half-smile. “I am not as most other women of my age. Beneath my skirts I am…”