Belatedly, Peter Christopher saw where she was going and instinctively, wanted to forestall her.
“Skin and bone like me?” He queried softly.
“Ugly,” Marija said hoarsely.
“I have a few unsightly nicks and stitches under my finery,” he offered.
“I am trying to be serious, Peter.”
The man admitted defeat; knowing he was never going to be capable of refusing her anything once she had made up her mind. Every time he looked at her he felt her inner strength, her inner belief in the rightness of things. Yet even the Heroine of Vittoriosa-Birgu had her Achilles heel.
“Sorry,” he murmured, putting on his most crestfallen look, complete with a dramatically trembling lower lip.
Marija giggled, reminded herself she was trying to be serious.
But that was so hard with this man!
“Under my skirts,” she reiterated, backing away and passing her hands over her lower abdomen and her left thigh, “I am ugly. Everything was broken and it was put back together as best as possible but,” she shrugged helplessly, apologetically, “I am not as other women you,” he could tell she was blushing deeply with embarrassment in the gloom, “may have known. Margo says I am being stupid but I am frightened, Peter. She says I can bear children but, I don’t know and I…”
Peter stepped towards her and wrapped her in his arms.
He planted kisses in her hair.
“Our wedding day will be the happiest day of my life,” he informed her, somewhat more formally and stiffly than he had meant. “When we are married there won’t be anything, anything that we can’t sort out between us. I love you exactly the way you are. Exactly the way you are.”
“You do?”
He held the love of his life at arm’s length so that he could lose himself in the soft, liquid pools of her eyes, he was shaking with a strange tension that began to evaporate only when he realised there was no fear in Marija’s return gaze.
“Yes. Do we understand each other, Miss Calleja?”
Marija nodded, pursing her lips to stop herself giggling.
“Yes, Lieutenant-Commander Christopher.”
In a moment he had swept her off her feet, she screeched a laugh of delight as he swung her in a slow circle and their lips melded together, careless of the watching eyes and in that moment utterly oblivious to the uncaring threat-filled World in which they lived.
Chapter 19
In the weeks since James William Fulbright, the fifty-eight year old Missouri-born Chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations had been appointed as the late Dean Rusk’s replacement as Secretary of State on Christmas Eve 1963, he felt like he had been living his life in one or other of the Presidential fleet of jetliners. When the President had asked him to return to the United States and ‘weekend’ at Camp David he had initially bridled, protested that there was work to be done shuttling between ‘the parties in Europe and the Middle East’. However, Jack Kennedy had remained quietly insistent that he return and he had given in with good grace. He was dog tired and badly needed a break from the constant travelling. It was only when he had landed at Andrews Air Force Base on Saturday morning that he first learned that the House of Representatives, sitting in joint session, after a litany of blustering threats had finally tabled a Bill of Impeachment against the President.
Fresh snow had fallen overnight and the temperature was several degrees below zero as Fulbright and his Marine Corps minders, two men from the squad who had been with him throughout his recent travels, toting automatic rifles walked with him from his bungalow to the President’s ‘villa’ that morning. The Secretary of State who was still technically — ‘technically’ because he had not sat in the House since joining the Administration — the Chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, was scheduled to leave for Philadelphia that afternoon. Arms needed twisting that only he could twist. The Vice-President had stayed in Pennsylvania freely dispensing the famous ‘LBJ treatment’ to wavering representatives and disaffected former supporters of the President. Other members of the Administration would descend on the city tomorrow morning. Meanwhile, the President would remain aloof, above the fray.
Fulbright, who had been elected to Congress as long ago as 1942 was not without sympathy, albeit at on a purely philosophical, sentimental level with the grievances of many of his fellow House members and was old enough to be experiencing a vague feeling of déjà vu. Franklin Delano Roosevelt had ridden roughshod over the rights and prerogatives of the House in the 1940s and memories were long. FDR had got away with it because America had won the Second World War and emerged as the richest and most powerful nation on the planet. Jack Kennedy could not promise the American people a repeat of FDR’s triumph. Besides, FDR had died in the days before the final victory, a great, gallant knight in defence of democracy and freedom who had perished in the fight. Of such things are legends made. FDR had had a ‘good war’ to fight; Jack Kennedy had not been as lucky and whereas FDR’s America had remained inviolate in his war; in the October War the sacred soil of the United States had been savagely defiled by her enemies and then beset with widespread internal political, criminal and sectarian strife, and ultimately, murderous insurrection.
While it was likely that a majority in both Congress and the Senate might genuinely believe that the President had usurped their powers and prerogatives and therefore, behaved unconstitutionally, Fulbright regarded the actions of many of his former colleagues as unconscionable and in many ways, despicable. A lesser man than John Fitzgerald Kennedy would have been circling the wagons by now.
Fulbright trudged up the path to the entrance to the President’s villa where more Marines crunched to attention.
McGeorge Bundy, Jack Kennedy’s newly re-appointed United States National Security Advisor, was already in the room when the Secretary of State was ushered into the President’s presence.
Bundy had been with Jack Kennedy in the Oval Office the night of the October War. Last spring he had been struck down by the influenza pandemic that had randomly carried away so many of the old, the frail and the very young across the northern states. Immunologists, virologists and the best medical minds were still puzzling over what had caused the short-lived epidemic; the mystery remained unsolved although all manner of conspiracy theories and wild conjectures about germ warfare had been the rage last summer. In any event, McGeorge Bundy had been struck down and disappeared from the scene until his unheralded re-admission to the Presidential circle in recent days.
The Secretary of State and Bundy were different kinds of men but Fulbright recognised the inherent wisdom of re-introducing ‘Mac’ Bundy back into the fold. Astutely, the President had brought him back without fanfare and as far away as possible from the public gaze because there were a lot of people on the Hill who secretly suspected — wrongly in Fulbright’s opinion — that ‘Mac’ was as culpable as any man for the catastrophe of the October War. In the circumstances, Naval Support Facility Thurmond, more popularly known to the man in the street as ‘Camp David’, was the ideal place to quietly begin the rehabilitation the Administration’s prodigal son.
Camp David had been the country retreat of Presidents of the United States of America since 1942. Sixty miles from Washington DC in the Catoctin Mountains, Franklin Delano Roosevelt had called it the USS Shangri-La — allegedly because the base was run by the Navy and it reminded him of the mythical Himalayan paradise described by British author James Hilton in his 1933 novel ‘Lost Horizon’ — but Dwight Eisenhower, the least sentimental of all recent American Presidents had, uncharacteristically mandated the name ‘Camp David’ in commemoration of his father and his grandson, both named ‘David’ in the 1950s. Protected with missionary zeal by the Marine Corps, Camp David was the one place in America where the Administration could conduct its business in absolute privacy.