Mark Mills - The Information Officer

Rather, she preferred to trust entirely to Providence that he would return safely—as she knew he would—and she looked forward to that moment. Meanwhile, these words would have to suffice. He could carry them with him wherever he went, dip into them at will. They were not limited by time or place. They were eternal and infinite.

He knew that there had always been a special bond between them—even when he was a ten-year-old schoolboy and she his twenty-one-year-old French teacher—but it was strange to see it spelled out in her hieroglyphic scrawl. Hunched on a bed in a crumbling room in a bombed and besieged city, her words, paradoxically, now made more sense to him than they ever had.

In many ways, the letter was a declaration of love—not a physical love (although she confessed that not long after he had graduated from Oxford there had been a moment when she had wanted to carry him off to bed with her, and had even come within a hairs-breadth of putting the proposition to him).

The love she spoke of was something else. It was to do with a man having many fathers in his life, and sometimes more than one mother. She wasn’t looking to set herself up as a replacement, but she couldn’t deny that she had sometimes felt and acted as such. She listed the qualities in him that had stirred those feelings in her.

Rounding off the letter, she wrote: I don’t know what you made of what you saw today, but if the house under the Downs is still my home when you return, then it is also your home. And if I have moved on, then I will have packed your bags and carried them with me. This is as much as I have ever promised anyone, but it is far less than you deserve .

“Deserve” was a big word. It suggested that he had earned the right to her feelings, and he could find little in his behavior of late to justify this exchange. The brass door key in his hand was evidence enough of that.

He felt the tears brimming in his eyes and he willed them to disappear. When that failed, he wiped them away on the back of his arm.

He didn’t know what he was weeping for.

For Lucinda? Her kind words? England on a May day? The person he used to be? The person he had become? The lack of sleep? The pinch of hunger? The remorseless hail of bombs? The death of his friends? The faceless German pilot in the burns ward? Carmela Cassar?

Maybe he wept for all of these things.

Or maybe just one: his mother, Camille.

The morning limped by, hot and humid. Max spent much of it editing copy for the Weekly Bulletin and waiting impatiently for Lilian to call him back. By noon, everyone was remarking on the fact that an air raid had not yet materialized.

Neither had Lilian.

There was still no sign of her at the office, and no one was answering the phone at her aunt’s palace in Mdina. There was nothing in the reports to worry about; two bombs had fallen on Rabat at about three A.M., but that was it.

An hour later, Maria put the call through to his office.

“Good of you to show up at work,” he joked.

“I’m not at work; I’m at home.”

She sounded tired, drained, downcast. And with good cause, it turned out. A childhood friend of hers, Caterina Gasan, had been killed by one of the two bombs that had fallen on Rabat, her family home receiving a direct hit that had made a mockery of the concrete shelter in the basement. Caterina’s mother and her younger brother had also perished in the ruins. Her father and her elder brother, the two men who had laid the concrete with such confidence, had both survived almost entirely unscathed.

Max had met Caterina only once, back in March, but he could see her clearly: short, voluptuous, full-lipped, and feisty. He could see her rapt expression, lit by the screen, while Dennis O’Keefe and Helen Parrish warbled their way through I’m Nobody’s Sweetheart Now at the Rabat Plaza. They hadn’t agreed on the merits of the film, but he had enjoyed her efforts to persuade him of the error of his ways.

“God …,” he said, pathetically.

“What God?” Lilian replied.

“You don’t mean that.”

“Don’t I? It doesn’t make sense, not Caterina.”

“It’s not meant to make sense.”

There was a short silence before she spoke. “I want to see you.”

“That’s lucky. I want to see you too.”

“Can you come to Mdina?”

“I’ll be there in twenty minutes—Luftwaffe permitting.”

Ena, the younger of Lilian’s two cousins, answered the door to Max. He could see from her eyes that she’d been crying.

“They’re in the garden,” she said simply, taking him by the hand and leading him there in silence.

They were seated at a tin table in the shade of an orange tree: Lilian, her aunt Teresa, and Ralph. It was a surprise to see Ralph there, and Max experienced a momentary twinge of jealousy.

“I saw Squadron Leader Tindle in the street and told him about Caterina,” Teresa explained. Like Lilian, she was dressed in black.

“I was just leaving,” said Ralph, stubbing out his cigarette and getting to his feet. “My sincere condolences again.” He graced both women with something between a nod and a bow.

“Lilian …,” Teresa prompted.

“No, stay,” said Ralph. “I’m sure Max will see me out.”

The tall glazed doors at the back of the palace were crisscrossed with tape, and as two men entered the building, Ralph said, “Bad blow for them. Caterina was a great girl.”

“You knew her?”

“Only to ogle. She used to come to the Point de Vue every now and then.”

The Point de Vue Hotel stood on the south side of the Saqqajja, the leafy square separating Mdina and Rabat. Like the Xara Palace, the hotel had been requisitioned by the RAF as a billet for pilots stationed at Ta’ Qali. The hotel barman was known for his John Collinses, the bar itself for the local girls who were drawn there come nightfall, like moths to a candle flame. For some reason the pilots called these flirtatious encounters “poodle-faking.” Well, that had all stopped the month before, when the Point de Vue had taken a direct hit during an afternoon raid, killing six.

“That place is cursed. When I think of the times we had there, and those who are gone …”

It wasn’t like Ralph to come over all maudlin—breeziness was his stock-in-trade—and Max wasn’t sure how to respond.

“Thanks for last night” was the best he could come up with.

“Might be a while before we get to do it again. Had a summons from the CO this morning, and the fly-in’s definitely set for the ninth.”

“Three days …”

“Believe me, I’m counting. He passed me fit to fly Spits again.”

“Congratulations.”

“It’s going to be one hell of a scrap. That bastard Kesselring’s going to throw everything he’s got at us.”

“But this time you’re ready. I saw the new blast pens when I passed by Ta’ Qali.”

“What counts is up there,” said Ralph, nodding heavenward. “If the new Spits really do have four cannons and are faster in the climb, we stand a chance. Who knows, we might even bloody their noses. We’d better, or it’s all over.”

“You think?”

“I know. This is it—the last roll of the dice.”

Max paused in the hallway at the front door.

“When we’re old and sitting in a pub somewhere, I’m going to remind you of this conversation.”

Ralph smiled weakly. “Tell me more about the pub.”

“It’s at the end of a long track, and there’s a river, with trout, and a garden running down to the water. It’s summer and the sun is shining, and there’s a weeping willow near the jetty where our grandchildren are playing. They’re naked, jumping off the jetty, flapping around in the river, splashing the people drifting past in punts.”