They walked on, completing one, then another circuit of the garden, neither speaking until the silence ceased to be a comfort and became by degrees, a little oppressive.
“We ought to go back indoors,” Margaret Thatcher declared.
“For what it is worth,” Julian Christopher said, his tone mildly self-deprecating, “I think we’d be a good team.”
“A good team?”
“Yes. You asked me what sort of marriage we’d have?”
“Yes, I did, I suppose. Yes, I think we’d be a good team, too.”
“Is that a ‘yes’ then?”
They had come to the steps at the foot of the veranda. The lights from inside the Verdala Palace seeped across their faces for a moment.
“Yes, Admiral,” the woman said. “That would be an unequivocal ‘yes’.”
Chapter 31
Marija had prayed in the Cathedral for as long as she had been travelling to and living and working in the ancient Citadel perched on the highest ground on Malta. Doctor Margo Seiffert had first talked to her about a career as a nurse when she was still an infirm fourteen-year old. At first she had run errands, cleaned floors, gossiped with the other nurses and the women and children who passed through the happy, welcoming, comforting doors of the St Catherine’s Hospital for Women; when she was sixteen Margo had suggested she was ready to begin her training to be a nurse and it had seemed to be the most natural thing in the World. As she had lain in her cages of steel for weeks and months each year of her infanthood and early adolescence, she had always hoped for a life in which she might repay the kindness shown to her by friends and stranger’s alike in the Royal Naval Hospital at Bighi and elsewhere.
She had found her vocation accidentally; not so her future husband. Whatever Peter now claimed she had always known that no other future had awaited him than the Royal Navy. Recent events had amply confirmed that he had been born to stand on the deck of a big grey warship, predestined almost, whereas, she had needed to be gently introduced to the vocation that she knew would forever be her joy and salvation. However, in all the years she had been coming to St Paul’s Cathedral in the heart of the old city she had never seen it with the eyes of a woman on her wedding day.
The day had been a blur and yet, oddly, she remembered everything with crystal clear pin point clarity. Father Dominic from the Church of St John’s in Sliema, a wise, sanguine, gentle man in his sixties who had been seriously injured several times working with the rescue teams during the bombing of Malta in the Second War, had told her that ‘this is your day’ and that ‘on this day the World is at your feet’, but she had not understood what he meant until that moment. Her senses were so heightened that nothing eluded her notice.
She had had to calm her Papa, normally the most measured and composed of men — other than when her Mama was taking him to task, obviously — because he had been a bag of nerves and trembling with anxiety as they walked up the steps from the piazza to the doors of the Cathedral.
Marija had repeatedly squeezed his hand in reassurance.
The Archbishop had ‘interviewed’ Marija and Peter Christopher two days ago. He had ascertained, perfunctorily, that Peter intended for any children of the union to be brought up as ‘good Catholics’, and Peter had replied ‘oh, absolutely, sir’ and thereafter there had been no more talk of doctrinal matters. Instead, the Archbishop had proudly extolled the history and the tradition of the great church in which they were to be married.
On the spot where she and Peter stood — or close to it, nobody actually knew for certain — the Roman Governor, Publius had greeted St Paul after he had been shipwrecked off the north east coast of Malta. Publius, later beatified as St Publius, the first Bishop of Malta was martyred during the reign of Hadrian, the Emperor who built the ‘Scottish wall’, in Athens. A small church was built on the site around then and later a more substantial one which fell into disrepair and ruin during the Muslim period, before its reconstruction and re-dedicated by the Normans in the 12th century. When that building collapsed during the great earthquake of 1693 — few ‘Maltese people realise that very, very occasionally the archipelago suffers very, very big earthquakes’, the Bishop had smiled — a number of priceless and irreplaceable works of art had been saved: a Mattia Preti painting depicting the conversion of St Paul the Apostle, a Tuscan painting of the Madonna and Child, and frescos of St Paul’s shipwreck. The great Irish Oak doors of that earlier church had been incorporated into the current Cathedral, a masterpiece in stone of 17th century baroque architecture. Designed by Lorenzo Gafa, who was like Marija, Birgu born, St Paul’s Cathedral was the crowning glory of his long and illustrious career. Built between 1697 and 1702 at the eastern end of the rectangular piazza of St Paul’s Square, its facade was delineated by three Corinthian pilasters with bell towers at each end. Internally, the plan was of a classical Latin cross beneath a vaulted nave, with aisles and two small side chapels. The building was topped by an octagonal red dome, and underfoot the floor was richly tessellated, everywhere there were sculptures made of Irish wood, and paintings and sublime iconography adorned the walls of the interior.
“Do you, Marija Elizabeth Calleja,” asked the Archbishop solemnly, “take this man Peter Julian Christopher to be your lawful wedded husband?”
The words sounded odd, spoken in uneasy English rather than the Archbishop’s familiar mother tongue, or the Latin of the Church, in which he had already asked the liturgically correct form of words, not the corrupted version he had voiced in the only language understood by so many of those present in the great church.
Marija’s mother — constantly dabbing tears of pride, angst, relief and probably disbelief at her surroundings — and father sat in the left hand pews of the nave, Marija’s brother Joe in his best Sunday suite held his Mama’s hand, beyond him Rosa Calleja, her dead brother Samuel’s widow smiled and bit her lip, her estranged parents to either side of the daughter they had disowned only weeks ago when she had most needed their loving support. Marija did not know how if the rapprochement between the daughter and parents would last. She had never liked the elder Borg-Canteras because they cultivated too many airs and graces, and had been far too grand to welcome their daughter marrying into a ‘Dockyard Family’. Behind Marija’s own family was her army of friends, Margo and the women from the hospital, her sisters in the Women of Malta movement, and the top men from both the Maltese Labour Party and the Nationalists, both with large entourages. The politicians sat apart from each other, Dom Mintoff the prickly supremo of the Labour Party surrounded with his gang of toughs and bruisers; the Nationalist, Giorgio Borg Olivier, a quieter, gentler more scholarly presence who tended to gather about himself men of similar tastes and dispositions. Then there was the Marija’s bewilderingly complicated — almost entirely on her Mama’s, Sicilian side — family; the countless aunts, uncles, nephews and nieces, many of whom had spilled across onto the benches and chairs of the groom’s party.
The Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland sat beside the proud father, the Commander-in-Chief, resplendent in his immaculate dress uniform. Other senior officers flanked the Prime Minister’s companion, Lady Patricia Harding-Grayson and the ten year old twins, who both looked a little bored. Captain Nicholas Davey, Captain ‘D’ of the still mainly inactive — and under repair — ships of the 7th Destroyer Squadron had led what seemed like the entire company of HMS Talavera into the Cathedral.