by Chris Cleave
He spat in disgust. ‘Two hours and not a single bite. Fish are Nazis.”
“Maybe you’re using the wrong lure.”
Simonson shook his head. “The fish are mocking me. They know I’m famished and they’re swimming six inches behind the spinner, in their silvery lederhosen.”
“They are goose-swimming,” said Alistair, using a hand to approximate the motion.
“Well of course,” said Simonson. “They are the master plaice.”
While they both looked back at their wake, a floating mine bobbed in it. Only the topmost part, black and lethal with protruberances, broke surface in the troughs of the waves. They could only have missed it only by inches.
“Ah,” said Alistair, “the upwind mark. I must ask the Commodore to paint them a little brighter.”
They tacked the boat and had another look as they went back past.
“Would it have gone off if we’d hit it, do you suppose? With our wooden hull? Or do they only trigger by magnetism?”
“How curious are you to find out?”
“Absolutely not at all.”
“Let’s try to miss it all over again then, shall we?” said Alistair. “I suppose we ought to be getting home, in any case.”
“Oh god, is it wartime already?”
“Look on the bright side: it’ll be dinner when we get back.”
Simonson groaned. Dinner that night would be with the regiment in Valletta, in Fort St. Elmo at the mouth of Grand Harbour. Having shaved and dressed, they would go down into the bowels of the fortress that had survived Malta’s great siege in the sixteenth century. In the officers’ mess room they would sit at folding aluminium tables to eat the pitiful rations of the present blockade: a small lump of bully beef let down with flour and potato, and on every third day the tinned Maconochie’s stew that was so foul it was almost a blessing to have it in ever smaller quantities as the convoys became harder to fight through to the island.
Alistair grinned at his friend’s displeasure. He pulled in the beer net while Simonson let out the trawling line.
“Do me a favor?” said Simonson.
“Ask away,” said Alistair, prising the tops off the beers.
“If we don’t catch a fish, butcher me and tell the cook I’m pork.”
“Don’t flatter yourself that it hadn’t already occurred to me. I’m a sentimental fool for letting you have a beer first.”
They headed for the land, pointing in to St. Paul’s Bay where the apostle had been shipwrecked. Alistair had checked every particular of the account in Acts against the relevant Admiralty chart and found nothing wanting. He had been on Malta three months now and he liked the way the island lived in the full embrace of time. In London, bedded in its clay, one viewed history as a reworkable legend, a great entertainment of doubtful veracity and liable in any case to revision whenever the next mudlark waded into the Thames at low tide and pulled out some iconoclastic sherd.
London was a crowd-pleaser, a protestant, a voluntary amnesiac, living to disinter stories only to arrange their bones in a sly new order. But Malta was permanent rock, with barely an inch of topsoil. Time, having nowhere to hide, had colonized the surface instead and lay there with its full duration exposed. In niches in the limestone studded with fossil shells, Alistair had seen eight-thousand-year-old statuary hung with paper garlands on the feast days of the saints. In a tiny, dark, incense-smelling chapel into which he had strayed to have a moment away from the war, Alistair had found what he thought might be a Caravaggio. The priest had neither known nor minded—he had simply said that the painting was by a local artist.
Alistair finished his beer while it was still cold, and flipped the empty brown bottle over his shoulder into the depths. Their white wake hissed through the sea.
“What are you smiling about?” said Simonson.
“I had a love letter in this morning’s post.”
Simonson yawned. “I get three a week.”
“But my family is not disgustingly wealthy, so I can actually take it as proof of my looks.”
“Go to hell,” said Simonson, “and tell them I sent you.”
“I suppose you own the place.”
“Fifty-one percent, old boy. One maintains a controlling interest.”
“I’ll be sure to keep it warm for you. She is called Hilda, by the way.”
“I didn’t ask.”
“No, but you were curious.”
“My curiosity about you, Heath, is the curiosity Freud had for hysterics, or Mendel for peas. You help to confirm my theories.”
“She is called Hilda and she has fabulous eyes, like . . . well, I don’t know. Like themselves. They’re unique.”
Simonson looked thoughtful. “O Hilda, your eyes like a simile, you wrote to a commoner in the military.”
Alistair ignored him. “She declares her love in the first paragraph.”
“How impossibly vulgar. Oh, what now? What are you smirking about, vile man?”
“I’m flattered to have elicited such an unscientific response from you.”
“It is only that one cannot condone willfulness, in women or in horses.”
“I’ll be sure to let Hilda know. If you’ll loan me a sugar lump, I shall pop it in the envelope.”
“Surely you don’t plan to dignify her with a response?”
‘I can’t say I’ve given it much thought.”
Simonson ruffled Alistair’s hair. “That’s more like it.”
Alistair had, though. How honest and uncomplicated Hilda had been, snuggled up beside him at the Lyceum. It would have been convenient if he could have fallen in love with her, and not Mary. They could have gone on weekends away, the four of them, and laughed with pristine teeth like those chummy couples in the ads for Blackpool Beach.
He turned the nose of the dinghy farther into the bay.
“Damn it,” said Simonson. “Must we really go back?”
“Anyone would think you didn’t enjoy the war.”
“It’s this island I can’t stand.”
“You don’t find it exotic?”
“Heath, I detest Malta. Anywhere grain will not grow is no place for a man. My greatest hope is that one of the bombs will hole this island below the waterline and it will sink, and then we can all go home with the Navy.”
“But you like the people, at least?”
“I loathe the people. They are feckless and swarthy and nauseatingly loyal. They are hardly better than niggers.”
“They’ve been hospitable to us.”
“They’ve been hospitable to the Phoenicians, the Carthaginians, the Romans, the Vandals, the Byzantines, the Arabs, the Christians and the French. If Mussolini had got here five minutes before us, the locals would be whistling Puccini.”
“Wouldn’t we be innkeepers too, if we happened to live on the crossroads?”
Simonson drew himself up. “If England has twenty-eight-ton breech-loading Mark Ten coastal artillery pieces, it is so we do not need to be innkeepers.”
Alistair laughed. “Haven’t you caught a fish yet?”
Simonson tugged on the line disconsolately. “It’s the Kriegsmarine, isn’t it? They radio our position to all the fish within a nautical mile.”
When they were still three hundred yards from shore, nearing the head of the bay, a fighter burst over the coastal bluff and dropped down almost to the sea. It headed straight at them. Alistair saw the pilot through the front panel of the aircraft’s canopy, goggles up on his forehead, staring back with perfect surprise over the block of his radial engine. Alistair had time to think: Oh, it is one of theirs. Then the plane was overhead, howling, barely missing the mast. The prop wash slammed into the sails, taking them aback and capsizing the dinghy.
Alistair gasped in the cold waves. The boat lay on its side with the sails flat on the wat
er.
“Now we shall have to dry out our tobacco.”
“You told me you could sail these things,” said Simonson.
“It’s just that the wind’s a bit fluky at this end of the bay.”
They clung to the transom while Alistair released the sails and made ready to right the dinghy.
“We’ll swim the boat around so it’s across the wind, then we’ll bear down on the center plate until we come upright again. All right?”
Simonson glared at the receding fighter. “He’s an Italian, isn’t he?”
“I think so. I’ll bet he’s calling us in as a probable kill.”
Simonson spat salt water. “He’s off home to have a sailboat stenciled on the side of his fuselage. His ground crew will administer fellatio.”
As they began to swim the dinghy around, they heard the note of the fighter’s engine change. The pitch and the volume increased. Alistair saw the topside of the wings with their fasces roundels and realized that the airplane was banking around and coming back on them. It happened faster than the mind could usefully process, so that a part of him braced for emergency while another part enjoyed the tight curve the fighter was making, the dipped wing almost clipping the waves and a firm white contrail arcing over the glittering sea. The nose of the fighter lined up on them again. There was nothing at all to be done. Simonson, in a quiet voice, called the pilot a stone-cold bastard. Then the fighter roared overhead and no shots had been fired.
“The devil is he doing?”
“He’s getting lined up,” said Alistair. “New to the job, I should think.”
The fighter banked around again and came back at them. Alistair turned his legs toward the onrushing plane and lay back in the water, angling his body to present the soles of his feet as the smallest possible target. As he let himself sink back, he saw the Italian slide open the cover of his canopy. An ungloved hand emerged and let go something white, and as the plane roared overhead for the third time the scrap of white floated down to the sea. The fighter receded. The note of the engine faded into the chatter of the waves.
When it seemed that the plane was not coming back, Simonson swam for the thing the pilot had dropped. It was paper, balled up to float. Simonson smoothed it against the upturned hull. It was torn from the corner of an aviation map. In green navigation pencil the pilot had scribbled: Mi dispiace.
“He’s sorry,” said Simonson. “For capsizing us, I suppose.”
Clinging to the dinghy, they stared at the point on the horizon where the Italian had become indistinguishable from the sky.
“You never mentioned you knew Italian,” said Alistair.
“Mother has a place on Lake Como.”
Alistair laughed.
“What?” said Simonson.
“How gloomy for you, that one can no longer travel there.”
“Oh, I don’t know. Italy always seemed an awfully long way to go for fascism and olives.”
“I rather like olives.”
“Mother rather liked fascism. We had to burn all the photographs when war was declared.”
They worked the boat upright, and shivered while they bailed with their shoes. When all was seaworthy they went back for the trawling line. The wooden spool floated on the water. Simonson retrieved it and began reeling in, but the spinner had sunk to the seabed and snagged something. The line took an age to come. While Simonson worked, Alistair lay back and let the sun warm him. The water lapped the hull and the idle sails flapped. Storm petrels crackled and purred as they quartered the waves for prey.
Simonson could say what he liked, but Alistair liked Malta. This blameless blue sea softened the memories of the retreat through France. Even the enemy’s blockade had done him good. After a few sleepless nights with the terrors, the scarcity of alcohol had probably saved him. Now a rare beer made him cheerful—he no longer had to follow it into oblivion. He saw things clearly again: Hilda’s smile, the endearing effort she had made to keep her makeup fresh. He decided he would write to her. She might enjoy hearing about the warmth, the cheerful press of locals, the little island lost in the blue.
“Why don’t you take a turn?” said Simonson. “I’ve had it.”
He flopped down in the bottom of the boat and closed his eyes while Alistair took over the job of reeling in the trawl line. It was sluggish and painful work, a foot at a time, with the cord digging in to his hands as he heaved it in. The white line angled straight down into the blue, with golden coils of sunlight chasing it into the darkness. After a few minutes Alistair saw a gray-green looming, thirty or forty feet below.
“Lump of seaweed,’ he said.
Simonson yawned. “I’ve been called worse, and by better-looking men.”
As Alistair worked, the shape came closer to the surface and resolved itself into a thing that ought to be recognized, but for the reluctance of the mind. When it was only twenty feet down, Alistair could see it distinctly. The dead man looked back at him with an expression as quiet and clear as the water, and Alistair shivered and took out his pocketknife and cut the line. He put away the knife and watched as the uniformed body rolled onto its front and began the long journey down, trailing blond hair and the long white filament of fishing line that Alistair watched until it blent with the coiling sunlight and was lost to sight.
“Damn it,” he said.
“Hmm?’ said Simonson, half opening an eye.
“Line snapped,” said Alistair. “I must have pulled too hard.”
“I paid three shillings for that gear.”
“I’ll buy you another set.”
“Oh, that’s quite all right,” said Simonson. “You are miserably poor, and there’s nothing down there in any case.”
They sailed the dinghy back to the beach and dragged it up through the narrow channel of sand that had been left between the barbed-wire entanglements. They lowered the sails, stowed the rudder and left the boat in its spot for the next officers who got the half-day leave.
Their driver had waited for them. As the boat came in he had harnessed his bony horse between the shafts and now they climbed into the open calash for the bumpy ride back to Fort St. Elmo.
The sun was sinking over the spine of the island. Alistair shivered as the heat went out of the day. The shadows spread across the yellow rock outcrops and the yellow rock walls. On either side of the road, women in black scratched at the thin earth of fields no bigger than tennis courts. The blades of their hoes rang as they struck the rock beneath the soil. Alistair watched Simonson, his fine black hair still wet, looking out over the scene. He was twenty-two but looked younger. He was muscled from swimming and sports, and he moved with an athlete’s competence. When he walked, he seemed to need the ground only for balance. Now, at rest, his eyes glowed amber in the last of the light. His face was wonderfully kind in a way that Alistair was certain would infuriate Simonson if he knew. The face had the habit of subverting, with bashful smiles, the harshest of his talk.
Simonson wrapped himself in the horse’s blanket and scowled at the bucolic scene.
Alistair grinned. “Do you also disapprove of agriculture?”
“I think of the parties we’re missing. Every letter I get stinks of champagne and orchestras.”
“From what I hear, London is catching hell.”
“It is a matter of perspective. With proper planning one can watch while hell is caught, from the safety of Claridge’s roof. My dear elder brother hasn’t been sober since this war started.”
“Doesn’t it bother him, to stay behind?”
“Good god, why would it? Randolph has nothing to prove beyond being the firstborn son, to the actuality of which attests a certificate that he keeps in a safe.”
“Now I know you’re not serious,’ said Alistair.
“Jealous, is what I am. Randy will just be waking up now, in silk sheets, with a nice pink l
over on either side. While we cling to this bilious rock.”
“Your brother will be called up eventually, I suppose.’
Simonson shook his head in simple pity. “You really don’t know how it works, do you?”
“I know how it has worked until now. But this war will change things.”
Simonson raised a horrified eyebrow. “Not unless we lose. And even then, I daresay Mother will have squirreled away a few choice photographs. Any family worth its arms has learned to hedge a few bets.”
Alistair’s clothes were still sharp with brine—he sucked his shirt cuffs and shivered at the wonder of it. They had foundered in the bay where St. Paul had almost drowned. They were taking the same coast road that Paul must have taken to Valletta. The horse’s shoes rang out, and to left and right the people in their black clothes merged with the deepening shadows. Below the road, all around the points and crenulations of the bay, the waves bled black ink into the twilight.
He would reply to Hilda’s letter, and he supposed it would be the start of things between them. Perhaps this was what love was like after all—not the lurch of going over a humpback bridge, and not the incandescence of fireworks, just the quiet understanding that one should take a kind hand when it was offered, before all light was gone from the sky.
First, though, he would write to Tom. If he had been a prig to Hilda then he had been an inexcusable ass to his oldest friend. As soon as they got back to the fort he would write. He would apologize for the way he had been, and he wouldn’t blame the war. He would ask Tom to forgive him, and when Tom did then he could reply to Hilda with an untroubled mind.
He felt better now, as the calash bounced along the rocky track and they wound through the stone walls older than Christ. He felt himself made new by the war, while the cool salt breeze blew in off the sea and the first star rose in the east.
December, 1940
MARY SAT AT THE piano and smiled at Tom in the front row. All the children had managed to field at least one parent, which was good work at three in the afternoon on a working day reduced to six hours by the bombing. They all deserved “A” for effort.