“I should warn you, I’m very wet.”
He shed his desert boots and his socks and lay down beside her, naked.
“I’ve been wet for hours, thinking about you.”
She liked to talk, and she liked to take her time, he knew that, just as he knew that her lovemaking with Lionel had always been a rushed and entirely silent affair.
“Are you sure you didn’t start without me?”
“I might have, just a bit,” she admitted coquettishly. Reaching for his wrist, she drew his hand down her body, guiding his fingers between her legs. She could have raised the hem of the negligee, but chose not to, preferring that he first feel her through the material.
“You see? I wasn’t lying.”
He slowly worked a finger inside of her, as far as the restraining tension of the moist satin would permit. Her mouth reached for his, her tongue edging between his lips, mimicking the movement of his finger.
Apart from the first time, when he had gone to her room at the Riviera Hotel and found her naked beneath the sheet on the mattress on the floor, underwear of some kind or another had always played a role in their lovemaking. Underwear lent an illicit frisson to their trysts, a whiff of the forbidden, its flimsy barrier a token gesture to Victorian prudishness.
Max didn’t mind; it cost him nothing to play along. It was also an excuse to draw out their few precious moments alone.
On this occasion, though, Mitzi’s characteristic restraint seemed to desert her suddenly. Straddling him in one swift movement, she guided him into her.
“I’m sorry, I need to feel you inside me. Just for a moment. Just for a moment …”
The moment was heralded by the eldritch scream of the air-raid siren, its sickening cadence somehow all the more ominous for the fact that it had gone unheard for so long.
“Oh God …,” Max breathed.
It wasn’t the siren. For all he cared, two hundred German bombers could have been closing in on Malta with instructions to obliterate Number 18 Windmill Street. They were nothing when set alongside the sensation of Mitzi lowering herself onto him.
“I’ll stop if you want,” she teased. “We probably should.”
He placed his hands on her hips and drew her down the rest of the way. She winced, adjusting her position to accommodate him.
“My God, you’re a good fit. Any more would be too much.”
His hands climbed to her small firm breasts, the nipples hard beneath the satin. She placed her hands over his, holding them there.
“We’ve still got time to make the shelter,” she said, almost drunkenly.
“Oh, I think I’ve already found safe harbor.”
It was a terrible joke, a childish jeu de mots, but she laughed, recognizing it for what it was—a cheap swipe at Lionel and his submariner chums. He already knew from her how they liked to talk in such terms when it came to women. Expressions such as “raising the periscope” and “arming the torpedo” figured large in their schoolboy innuendo.
“Well, as long as you don’t blow the tanks too early.”
That was one he hadn’t heard before, and they giggled like two naughty schoolchildren.
“I can feel it when you laugh,” said Max.
“And when I do this …?”
She started to move, a slow, rhythmic roll of the hips, a reminder that they weren’t in fact welded together, one being.
The distant bark of a heavy battery suggested that the searchlights had picked out the first of the raiders.
“There’s no hurry,” she whispered.
“Tell that to our German friends.”
“Let them do their worst. We’re untouchable.”
“I mean it.”
“So do I. If I’m going to die, I want it to be like this, with you inside me.”
And that’s where he stayed. Long after it had become clear that Valetta was the target, long after the whistle and crump of the first bombs had drowned out the dirge of the siren, he was still there, inside her. And as the heavens outside pitched and rolled in one vast, undying thunderclap of sound, they twisted and turned together on the bed, at one with the holocaust, somehow a part of it, immune to it. Terrific concussions tossed the building, but the tremors seemed only to resonate with the febrile tension of their bodies. And as the raid built in ferocity, so did their own exertions, rising to a crescendo, almost in defiance now, looking to drive back the deadly storm, to outlast it.
This they did, their wild cries of release rending the air as the last of the bombers headed for home, chased back to Sicily by a few hopeful shell bursts.
They lay damp and spent in each other’s arms for a long while, lacquered together in the eerie silence, the acrid smell of cordite leaking into the room through the shutters.
“That was … well, like nothing else I’ve ever known,” said Max.
“Did the earth move for you too?”
They laughed weakly and kissed and held each other tighter.
“I told you they couldn’t touch us.”
“They came pretty damned close.”
An enormous explosion had shaken the building to its foundations during the height of the raid—Brr-ummmph!—probably a parachute mine, picked off by one of the Bofors crews before it could land.
Outside, the “Raiders Passed” siren sounded its single note.
“They’ll be back,” said Max.
They all knew the pattern by now. Kesselring would keep the planes coming, varying his targets throughout the night. It was unlikely that Valetta would suffer another assault, but you couldn’t bank on it.
“Maybe you should go now,” said Mitzi.
“Maybe I don’t want to. Maybe I want to know why you summoned me here.”
“You know the reason. I know you know, because Lionel told me this afternoon. Apparently he bumped into you at the submarine base the other day.”
“That’s right.”
“And was a jolly time had by all?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“How long have you known? Three days? Four? A week? Longer?”
“Hugh told me at the party.”
“And you didn’t think to share it with me?”
“He only mentioned it later, after you and I had talked.”
Mitzi lay silent for a moment. “I’m sorry. It just seems like I’m the last person to hear that I’m leaving the island.”
“You should be glad. Things aren’t going to get any better here for a long while.”
“Alexandria sounds ghastly.”
“Well, it isn’t.”
He had rather enjoyed his time in Alexandria, although his appreciation of the place might well have had something to do with the fact that he’d arrived there directly from Atbara, a desolate, flyblown corner of the Sudan, where he’d spent a miserable couple of months on an intelligence course.
“The bar at the Windsor Palace is worth a visit,” said Max. “Their cocktails are second to none.”
“My God, a bright future beckons with Baedeker’s.”
“I’m just saying there are worse places to be. At least you won’t be pounded to pieces on a daily basis.”
“Lionel’s convinced Alexandria will fall.”
“Then he should have a word with Elliott.”
“Elliott? What does Elliott know about anything?”
“Considerably more than he likes to let on.”
She kissed him tenderly on the lips. “You’re so sweet and trusting.”
A part of him bristled at her condescending tone, and normally he would have reacted. He didn’t because he wanted to steer the conversation back to the question of her imminent departure, and for reasons that showed him to be neither sweet nor trusting.
“Did Lionel say exactly when he’s leaving?”
“Monday. They’re still making repairs to the Upstanding. She’ll be the last sub to leave.”