“You really believe that?”
“I know it.”
“I think you underestimate them. Our cards are marked and there’s nothing we can do about it.”
You’re wrong, thought Max. There is.
He wanted to tell Freddie the what and the how of it, but there was no point. Freddie’s mind was made up and it was an undeniable disappointment. The two of them had always stood apart from the others. Ralph and Hugh were career servicemen trained and primed for combat. Max and Freddie were mere guests at the table of war, competent amateurs shipped in to make up the numbers after a big chunk of Czechoslovakia had failed to appease Hitler. Yes, they’d both learned the ropes in the Officers’ Training Corps at their respective schools, but the experience had fired neither of them with enthusiasm. They knew this because they’d discussed it one night when there were no “real soldiers” within earshot.
Max had been packed off to Wellington College at the age of thirteen at his stepmother’s insistence, on the grounds that the men in her family had always gone there—a perplexing line of reasoning, given the assortment of disagreeable uncles and male cousins Sylvia had brought with her into their lives. Wellington was reputed to be Britain’s most military of schools, and Max had done just enough to get by without insulting that tradition, learning to march and fire a gun and bumble around with a blackened face up on the heathland toward Broadmoor during field day.
His failure to become commander of the Picton platoon had been taken by Sylvia as further evidence of his utter fecklessness. All the men in her family had commanded their house platoons. This was a lie that, after some cursory research in the school records, he’d felt obliged to point out to her over Christmas dinner one year—his first public challenge to her authority, and a declaration of open warfare as far as Sylvia was concerned.
Maybe he was doing her an injustice, but he sometimes suspected that she’d waited years to exact a suitable revenge. The family strings she’d pulled, supposedly on his behalf, had seen him carried first to Egypt and then to Malta, and although she couldn’t possibly have known at the time what horrors lay in store for the little island, he wouldn’t have put it past her.
Perversely, surviving the war had become as much about denying Sylvia the pleasure of his extinction as anything else. And maybe, just as perversely, standing up to the Colonel Giffords of the world, refusing to be cowed by the sort of high-handed military types whom he associated with Sylvia, had its roots in the same ancient animosity.
The reasons didn’t matter. He had picked his path and was set in his resolve. Yes, it would have been good to have a companion on the road, but Freddie wasn’t essential to the plan taking shape in his head. The real issue now was one of time, or rather the lack of it. With the Upstanding set to leave for Alexandria in less than a week, the clock was ticking.
Freddie and Max quietly shunted the topic into the shadows and talked of other things, such as dinner with Ralph at the officers’ mess in Mdina. Freddie wasn’t on duty again until the following morning and asked to tag along.
“If you’ll have me, that is,” he said a little sheepishly.
“After this morning, I think we could both do with a dose of Ralph.”
They also got a dose of Hugh.
Apparently he’d become something of a regular at the Xara Palace in the past few weeks, ever since Royal Artillery HQ had relocated to Saint Agatha’s Convent in Rabat following the bombing of the Castille. Rabat and Mdina stood cheek by jowl on the ridge, almost one and the same, and Hugh had taken to stopping off for a “swift sundowner” with Ralph on his way home to Sliema.
The Xara Palace—a grand fifteenth-century building close by the main gate in Mdina—had been requisitioned by the RAF as an officers’ mess for the Ta’ Qali squadrons, although Ralph treated the place as if it were his private residence. As ever with Ralph, this was done with playful insouciance, his tongue firmly in his cheek.
Ralph was tall, with a shock of sand-colored hair that the sun bleached to a startling white in summer. He wore it longer than regulations permitted, but regulations didn’t figure large in his thinking. He set store by the adage that “rules are made for the guidance of wise men and the obedience of fools”—a line he was quite happy to quote to his superiors.
The brass tolerated his idiosyncratic ways because they knew he had qualities far above the general run. He also served a useful purpose. The Xara Palace was a beautiful building, but ghosts stalked its wide corridors: the ghosts of dead pilots. Beds fell free at an alarming rate, and the young replacements shipped in to fill them knew they stood a fair chance of going the same way as the previous occupants. At twenty-nine, Ralph wasn’t the oldest member of 249 Squadron, but he’d been around the longest, and his presence offered some hope of survival to the new arrivals.
Ralph’s lack of respect for “the machine,” as he called it, was a product of hard experience reaching back to his very first day on the island. Of the reinforcement flight of twelve Hurricanes that took off from the aircraft carrier Argus, Ralph’s was one of only four to make land. The others were lost to the unforgiving waters of the Mediterranean because someone, somewhere, had miscalculated the amount of aviation spirit required to see them safely as far as Malta. Ralph had crossed the Dingli Cliffs on vapors, gliding in to Luqa on a dead propeller. He had lost his best friend that day, and he’d lost many more friends since, thanks to the “sheer bloody incompetence of the machine operators.”
Bovine compliance didn’t come naturally to him; his trust had to be earned. He would have cut his hair if the order had come from someone he respected, but the few people he esteemed tended to rate him highly in return and were happy to let him operate with a certain latitude. His reputation helped. With ten “destroyed” and six “probables” to his name, he was one of the few aces on the island, albeit one who had badly blotted his copybook.
The incident had occurred the summer before while Ralph was convalescing at the pilots’ rest camp on Saint Paul’s Bay following his accident. Jumped by a gaggle of 109s over Qormi, he’d been forced to crash-land in a field—a nearly impossible thing to do on Malta without hitting a stone wall. Unconscious, he only survived the burning wreckage because a couple of Maltese women working nearby heaped earth on the flames (after struggling and failing to haul his inert six-foot-something frame from the crumpled cockpit). Patched up by Freddie, he had spent two months in traction at Mtarfa Hospital, successfully resisting all efforts to have him posted home “non-effective sick.” The air battle for Malta was one fight he intended to see through to its bitter conclusion, and he’d managed to secure for himself a further period of convalescence at the pilots’ rest camp on Saint Paul’s Bay.
“Camp” was something of a misnomer. It was a villa with a sloping lawn and honeysuckle arbors and a winding pathway leading down through a shaded avenue of trees to the water’s edge, where a couple of rowboats and an offshore swimming platform bobbed lazily on the swell. At the mouth of the bay lay the flat little island where Saint Paul had been shipwrecked in a storm some two thousand years before. Struggling ashore, Paul had been welcomed in Mdina by Publius, the chief man of the island, whose father had been gravely ill at the time. When Paul healed him, Publius promptly converted to the new religion, carrying his people with him and building the first ever Christian church in Mdina. With a heritage like that, it was hardly surprising that the Christian faith remained the mainspring of Maltese life.
The proximity of Saint Paul’s Island with its solitary statue of the healer saint lent a certain logic to the location of the rest camp: a peaceful spot where men came to repair themselves, a haven amidst all the suffering and destruction. Max had grown to know the place well during Ralph’s stay, riding out there on his motorcycle whenever he could snatch a moment. It was the day after one such visit when Ralph overstepped the mark.