by James Philip
‘He’s in the piazza talking to that nice Mister Hannay!’
Marija had guided Rosa to the treatment couch and made absolutely certain that her sister was not about to fall off it before she had turned and swallowing hard, cautiously pulled back a corner of the curtain and sneaked a look down into St Paul’s Square.
Her heart had almost stopped, and then palpitated insanely.
She had stepped back as if a serpent had reared up in front of her.
Three times she had gone down to the Sliema waterfront and gazed across the Creek at the sleek destroyer. Her Peter had been on that ship. She had hoped to catch a glimpse of him again, but he had been invisible although men walked and clambered over the decks and superstructure constantly. Last night she had seen the welding arcs burning like stars in the near distance, sparks flying in the night. Other destroyers had eased back into the anchorage in the last day. HMS Scorpion flying the Leader’s Pennant, and HMS Aisne, immaculate and complete in every way that HMS Talavera, her war-torn sister ship, was not. Marija had felt so guilty slipping away, staring across the waters when she ought to be on duty at the hospital Mdina or comforting her Mama at home in Sliema. It was one thing for her father to tell her that her Mama had her aunts to watch over her, and that her brother Joe was keeping their spirits up, but her place was...
Where exactly was her place now?
She had thought her place was to wait for Peter; to explore that indefinable thing which had grown between them over the years, hoping it developed into something so unlikely as to be beyond her girlish dreams. She had never expected him to come to Malta and sweep her off her feet, to bowl her over with talk of love. But she had hoped he would be her friend and her companion, a solace in every way he wanted to be, and she to him in whatever ways she was able. Marriage and children had never really figured, but in Peter Christopher she had invested her faith in the future and now all that seemed spoiled, broken and beyond repair. Her elder brother had destroyed the life she had thought she was living; smashed a hole in it as big as the one in the side of HMS Torquay that bomb had torn two months ago. Like that helpless ship, her hopes and dreams had foundered. If she could have found it in herself she would have hated Samuel; the trouble was that she felt only pity. Pity for him and a bottomless well of shame for what he had done.
And now Peter was standing not twenty feet from her talking to Admiral Christopher’s flag lieutenant, Alan Hannay!
‘Well, what are you waiting for, sister?’ Rosa had demanded. It was the first time her beaten and demoralised sister-in-law had found her old self, a hint of the proud young woman who had been to the best schools, and never wanted for anything in her privileged upbringing by her wealthy landowning, Old Maltese family.
Marija had stared at her in confusion.
Since Jim Siddall’s death Rosa had opened her soul to her, and she had reciprocated. Rosa had recounted nights when Samuel would toss and turn in bed, cry out in the night, talk insensibly as if he was having a conversation with a mad man. In retrospect she was convinced that some small part of her dead husband had recoiled against the monstrous things he had done, and the murder of so many people. Marija had spoken to Rosa about her childhood injuries, the long journey to becoming the person she had become and how, through even the worst times, Peter Christopher had been her strength.
‘You love that boy!’ Rosa had hissed. ‘What are you thinking of? He’s outside in the piazza! Do something, sister!’
Still Marija had hesitated.
What of her pride?
What of the dishonour she would carry with her like a shroud forever?
How could she face the man she had spurned thus far?
What must he think of her?
After all these years and after what he had been through in the last couple of months; whatever must he think of her for spurning him so cruelly?
Her feet were rooted to the floor.
‘Go sister!”
Suddenly, she had been stumbling and rushing, unsteadily down the stone steps to the ground floor. She had burst out into the watery sunshine of the winter morning.
But Peter had gone!
She had panicked, desperately looked around.
Peter was walking with Alan Hannay, they seemed deep in conversation.
Marija opened her mouth to call; no sound came forth. She waved at the retreating backs of the two men. People in the piazza gave her odd looks: What was the young woman in the pale blue nursing uniform doing?
The footing within the Citadel – old uneven cobbles - was particularly treacherous for her; not a problem normally because she would walk at her own pace. Attempting to hurry within the Citadel she always ended up her throwing out her arms to maintain her balance as if she was a tight-rope walker in a high wind, or stepping so close to the high walls that she could at any moment extend an arm to stop herself taking a tumble.
However, the two men were striding out, in a moment they would have turned the corner out of St Paul’s Square into Villegaignon Street.
‘Peter!’ She called, hardly a sound escaping her dry throat.
She was panicking now.
Losing sight of the two men she began to run.
Marija Calleja had not run since that day that German bomb had entombed her and her little brother, Joe, in the cellar in Birgu on that terrible afternoon in 1942. In her dreams she often imagined running across a road, a field, down a beach into the sea; but she had never actually run since that day when she had dragged her infant brother into the illusory shelter of that dreadful place of death. They had been literally snatched off the street by neighbours, taken inside as the first deafening explosions tore through the surrounding buildings...
That was the last time Marija had tried to run.
Until today, over twenty years later...
She had been running before she knew what she was doing.
Her feet seemed to be flying.
And then she was flying...
‘Marija, sweetheart!’ Margo Seiffert had repeated, worriedly. That was odd because nothing ever really worried Margo.
Why am I lying on the ground?
Marija had blinked at her mentor and friend, the woman whom her own Mama called ‘your second Mama’ with sincere sisterly fondness and adoration. She realised her face was wet, sticky and she felt a little nauseas. For a moment she thought she was going to be sick. She must have blacked out for a few seconds because strong arms were carrying her inside the hospital the next time she slipped into and out of consciousness. Shortly afterwards, she had been very, very sick. Mostly on herself.
That was yesterday.
Even though she had not been sick since last night, this morning Margo and women whom she had previously regarded as friends, had steadfastly refused to allow her to get out of bed, other than to pay closely supervised but necessary calls of nature.
“I am perfectly all right, Margo,” Marija protested tetchily.
“No,” the older woman told her, “you are not, Nurse Calleja.”
Margo only resorted to Nurse Calleja when Marija was being really stubborn. Or being stupid, or acting like a child, or being argumentative. Marija did not think she was being, or doing any of those things. She simply wanted to get out of bed!
“Mirror,” Margo sighed, resignedly.
Marija looked at herself.
Or rather, she catalogued the damage. It was not as if she was unaccustomed to viewing her own numerous old scars. She had a very respectable collection – some quite grotesque - of those on her slender frame, enough to make any sober man blanch she had realised from earliest puberty. If one could not be honest with one self about these things who could one be honest with?
“Three stitches?” She scowled, viewing the leaking gash in her eyebrow above her right eye. Her hand carefully explored her puffy cheek and explored the lower orbit of the eye which was half-shut and mottling black and blue. She looked like she had been in a boxing match. Her nose was sore, she examin
ed it tentatively.
“I don’t think you broke your nose when you fell over,” Margo assured her, turning sternly matriarchal. “In fact, I don’t think you broke anything but how I honestly don’t know!”
“Peter was in the piazza,” Marija started, stopped. Tears were trickling down her bruised and swollen cheeks.
“Yes, I know,” her friend said, a little impatiently.
“I tried to catch up with him.”
“Rosa tells me you were running.”
“Yes, I don’t know how...”
“Well, you were. You were running right up until you fell flat on your face, Nurse Calleja!”
Sometime in the last few minutes Marija had stopped feeling humiliated. She was still feeling sorry for herself, and from the evidence in the mirror she had a perfect right to feel sorry for herself. Long experience had taught her that self-knowledge often comes at a painful personal cost. She had wanted to be with Peter Christopher so much that she had run – albeit only half-a-dozen steps – for the first time in over twenty years to be with him. If she had done that once she could do it again. If and when her friends ever allowed her out of this bed!
“I want to get up!” She declared.
“So you can run after Peter again?”
Marija gave the older woman a determinedly vexed look.
“If I have to! Yes!”
Margo Seiffert considered this briefly, before she smiled and shook her head.
“I don’t think that will be necessary, sweetheart.”
Now Marija was beyond bewilderment.
“Your young man is outside.”
Marija blinked.
“If Lieutenant Hannay hadn’t been holding him down he would have been climbing up the walls by now.” Margo smiled. “I was going to keep him on tenterhooks a little longer. But I was so sorry for him I promised I’d ask you if you wanted to see him before he has to go back to his ship.”
Chapter 44
Tuesday 4th February 1964
Cabinet Office Briefing Room, Corpus Christi College, Oxford
Her Majesty Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and of Her other Realms and Territories Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith entered the ancient room ahead of her Prime Minister. She smiled to the two dozen men and three other women in the ancient wood-panelled borrowed lecture hall as she carefully, and regally – in the quiet, unfussy way which was her signature – descended the steps to the semi-circular space beneath the great, wide blackboard. Privately, the Monarch had entertained many doubts about the apparently reckless rush with which her Government was attempting to transform Christ Church and the surrounding colleges into the new seat of the Mother of Parliaments. Several of her qualms – but not all – had been assuaged by her whistle stop tour of the work in progress around St Aldate’s. She had expected the military to be overtly visible, and for things to be a little more chaotic; in both preconceptions she had been, to her relief, disappointed. The whole of Oxford was alive, buzzing with the coming re-opening of the House of Commons in the exquisite setting of the Great Hall of Christ Church College.
The Queen turned and faced the newly nominated Privy Counsellors, allowing herself a ghost of a smile. The men and the women settling into the benches in front and above her included many unlikely candidates, as many opponents and critics of the Unity Administration of the United Kingdom as it did outright supporters. She was beginning to understand that this was a trait of her new, and remarkable, Prime Minister. Margaret Thatcher did not waste time manoeuvring around obstacles, she confronted them head on. Moreover, the closer she approached to that obstacle, the faster she went!
Seated at the left hand of the bottom step, the Member of Parliament for Wolverhampton South West, Enoch Powell was hurtfully erect in his Sovereign’s presence, wearing his terrible scars like a badge of honour.
The Queen stepped towards him, motioning him not to rise to his feet. The poor man would have had quite enough difficulty in journeying from his hospital bed to this place without her wishing to cause him further, completely unnecessary discomfort.
“I am glad that you were able to be with us this morning, Mr Powell.”
The gaunt, tortured figure bowed his head.
“It is my honour to be at this place at this hour, Your Majesty.”
The legend of how the terribly injured MP had risen to his feet and gone to Margaret Thatcher’s aid when the gunman had opened fire during the ‘great debate’ at Cheltenham Town Hall, had granted Enoch Powell an odd cult status of exactly the kind he detested. That he had suffered a painful flesh wound in the episode was simply grist to the mill. Having tried to shield the Angry Widow - his most implacable political foe – from the assassin’s bullets, he had collapsed and been rushed to hospital.
In the aftermath even the iron heart of the Member of Parliament for Wolverhampton South West had been softened – a little – by the obviously sincere solicitude of his rival. Margaret Thatcher had visited him, very privately, in hospital the next day and wished him a speedy recovery.
‘Our destiny is to continue our debate in a place fitted to the occasion,’ she had informed him. ‘I look forward to that day.’
The Queen focused on the business of the day, lifting her face to meet every eye in the room.
“I apologise to you all for the brevity and the cursory nature of your admission to the ranks of My Privy Council.” The thirty-seven year old recently bereaved mother, whose husband was still in the early stages of a long road to recovery from the injuries he had sustained during the regicidal attack on Balmoral which had claimed the life of infant son, Andrew, was not and never would be entirely comfortable with the modified constitutional role she had assumed in recent weeks. Having been brought up all her life to be apolitical, completely above the fray, she had been obliged by the absolute necessity of the situation to rebuild a sense of national unity to stand, foursquare behind Her Ministers and Her Government. Gone were the days when the Royal Assent was a rubber stamp framed in archaic Norman French; in this brave new World she exercised real power of a kind that would have been intimately familiar to her early Georgian antecedents. “In these difficult times your Queen needs the counsel of patriots of all parties and political persuasions. More than that, it is vital that the true dimensions of the threats we face, and the challenges we must surmount, are understood by as many of our people as possible. My Government will deliver everything it has promised in terms of political reforms and the normalisation and relaxation where possible, of the harsh civil order and austerity regime under which most of our people still live. However, before we can ‘heal ourselves’ we must first confront the deadly perils facing us and our vital interests in the wider World. My Government is convinced that if we fail to do battle with our enemies abroad, those enemies will inevitably seek us out in our own land. What then would become of our efforts to rebuild? What then would become of the great reconstruction that fills all our dreams?”
The quietness was neutrally deferential.
“It is My intention to locate My family close to the seat of Parliament in Oxford. Plans are afoot to this end at Blenheim Palace at Woodstock. Much of that estate is already in use by the Ministry of Defence but one wing of the great house is being readied to receive myself, my children and the Queen Mother. Prince Philip will join us when he is fit enough to withstand the journey.”
The Queen glanced to Margaret Thatcher as if to say ‘one more thing and I will surrender the floor to you’.
“Please take me at my word when I say that I am fully cognisant of the uneasy constitutional role I have been required to fulfil in this crisis. My primary concern in moving from Scotland to be near My Parliament is to be closer to the representatives of My People. The Sovereign cannot and should not be aloof in times such as these.”
This said the diminutive woman took a chair and her Prime Minister stepped forward.
�
�Your Majesty, ladies and gentlemen,” Margaret Thatcher began, sparing a moment to flash a tight-lipped smile at Enoch Powell, “in normal times I would have been required to account for my actions before the House of Commons several times by now at Prime Minister’s Questions. Until that institution is restored I propose regular sessions such as this. While the format and protocol of PMQs is neither appropriate nor workable in the current circumstances I hope this will go some way to discharging my responsibility to communicate with the elected representatives of our People. It will also serve to better inform you, and I, in our future private and or, public dealings. Some matters of State are rightly secret; but most need not be. That will be my guiding principle in our discourse.”
Enoch Powell made as if to speak. He remained silent, waved away his partially formed, unspoken objection with his good hand.
“These are grave times,” Margaret Thatcher declared, setting her face against adversity and becoming the living embodiment of her alto ego, the Angry Widow.
“You may have heard of a sinister and mendacious movement known as Red Dawn.”
Everybody had heard that expression, it was like a curse that no amount of secrecy, D Notices or misinformation could crush.
“It is the unanimous opinion of the Chiefs of Staff Committee that all our Crown Colonies and Possessions in the Mediterranean, and all the territories of our remaining friends and of the neutrals alike in that part of the World, are threatened by hostile forces which survived the October War.”
She let this sink in.
“Admiral,” she went on, the Commander-in-Chief of All British and Commonwealth Forces in the Mediterranean Theatre having been promoted full Admiral, retrospectively effective as of 1st February, “Sir Julian Christopher anticipates that the Island of Cyprus will be invaded shortly. Given that Crete already appears to be in the hands of Red Dawn, as is the entire Aegean Basin, and that Greece, notwithstanding pockets of determined resistance – will surely fall in the next few hours or days, the strategic outlook in the Eastern Mediterranean is bleak. It might be that Red Dawn’s immediate objectives are the subjugation of Greece and the southern Balkans, and the capture of Cyprus. It is more likely, given the way Red Dawn seems to operate and the naval forces – mostly former Soviet – that we have detected exercising in the Sea of Crete and elsewhere, that Yugoslavia and Italy, and inevitably, Malta will be the next targets.”