‘Manuela has a good idea, no?’ a voice shouted in my ear. It was the Commander of the Naval Base. ‘Why does nobody think to use this place before? It is magnificent, eh?’
The music stopped abruptly, the dancers coming to a halt. Floodlights either side of the cavern entrance were switched on, spotlighting white-capped cooks and the charcoal fires with their steaming pans of soup and steaks sizzling and flaming on the coals. Lloyd Jones had stopped quite near us and I hailed him over. ‘I’d like you to meet Fernando Perez,’ I said. ‘He’s Jefe of the Navy here.’ I introduced him as Lieutenant Lloyd Jones of the Royal Navy, adding, ‘That’s right, isn’t it?’
I sensed a moment’s hesitancy. ‘In fact, I’m now a Lieutenant Commander.’ He laughed, a little embarrassed. ‘I’ve just been promoted.’
We offered him our congratulations and Perez asked him what he was doing in Menorca. ‘You are on leave per’aps?’ He had a good command of English, particularly sea terminology, having had a short exchange posting to an RN carrier, though quite why they sent him to an aircraft carrier when he was a gunnery officer I don’t know.
‘Yes, on leave,’ Lloyd Jones said.
‘You have a ship, or are you posting ashore, like me?’ And Fernando Perez gave a deprecatory little smile.
‘No, I’m very lucky,’ Lloyd Jones replied. ‘With the promotion I’ve been offered a ship.’
‘And where is that?’
‘I’ll be joining at Gibraltar as soon as my leave is up.’
Fernando turned down the corners of his mouth. ‘You are indeed fortunate. Except for the Americans, who have so many ships, like the Russians, all our navies are in the same boat, eh?’ He smiled, looking pleased at having achieved a touch of humour in a foreign language. ‘Myself, I do not have a ship since five, no six years now. Already I have been ‘ere three, stuck on a little island where nothing ever happen.’
‘But at least you have the biggest guns in the Mediterranean,’ I said.
‘That is true. But what use are they, those big guns? They belong to another age and we have so few ammunition … Well, you know yourself. We fire them once a year and everybody complain because windows are shaken all over Mahon, some broken.’
‘Are these the guns out on the northern arm of the Mahon entrance?’ Lloyd Jones asked.
‘On La Mola, yes. If you wish I take you to look at them. It is a Zona Militar, a prohibited area, but there is nothing secret about those guns, they ‘ave been there too long. Everybody know about them.’
They started talking then about the problems of island defence and after a while I left them to see that the girls were being looked after, Soo in particular. I didn’t want her standing in the queue and maybe getting jostled. In any case, she was becoming a little self-conscious about her figure, I think because all our friends knew very well she had lost the first. But she was no longer at our table. She was at Manuela’s. Petra, too, and they had already finished their soup and were tucking into steak and mashed potato, Gonzalez Renato sitting between them and everybody at the table flushed with wine and talking animatedly.
I went to get myself some food then and Miguel joined me in the line-up for the barbecue. He had his cousin with him, both of them in dark suits, their hair oiled and their faces so scrubbed and clean I hardly recognised them. They hadn’t booked a table so I took them to mine. They had their wives with them, Miguel’s a large, very vivacious woman with beautiful skin and eyes, Antoni’s a small, youngish girl with plump breasts and enormous dark eyes that seemed to watch me all the time. I think she was nervous. I danced with her once. She moved most beautifully, very light on her feet, but she never said a word.
It was as I took her back to the table that I saw Soo dancing with Lloyd Jones. She shouldn’t really have been dancing at all, but by then I’d had a lot to drink and I didn’t care. Petra joined me and we danced together for the rest of the evening, and whenever I saw Soo she was with the Navy, looking flushed and happy, and talking hard.
At midnight the band stopped playing and Manuela lit the train that set the fireworks crackling. It was a short display and afterwards everybody began to drift off home. That was when Petra announced that I was going to drive her over to Cales Coves.
I should have refused, but the moon was high, the night so beautiful, and I was curious. I did make some effort to discourage her. ‘It’s almost midnight,’ I said. Too late to go messing around in those caves in the dark. And you’re not dressed for it.’
‘That’s soon remedied,’ she said. ‘Oh, come on. You promised.’
‘I did no such thing,’ I told her, but she had already turned to Soo, who was standing there with Lloyd Jones close beside her. ‘Why don’t you come, too – both of you?’ And she added, it’ll be fun, going there now. The moon’s almost full. It’ll be quite light. Anyway, it won’t matter in the cave itself. If it were broad daylight we’d still need torches.’
I thought Soo would be furious, but instead, she seemed to accept it. Maybe the two of them had already talked about it when they had gone off together to the girls’ latrine at the end of the meal. At any rate, she didn’t say anything. She had hold of Lloyd Jones’s arm and seemed in a much happier frame of mind, humming to herself as we walked down the grass-grown track to the road where I’d left the car.
There was no wind, the sky clear and the moon a white eye high in the sky as I turned the car off the Villa Carlos road on to the steep descent to Cala Figuera. ‘Have you ever seen anything so beautiful!’ Petra exclaimed. ‘I love it when it’s still, like this, nothing stirring on the water, and Mahon a white sprawl above it. Sometimes I wake up in the night and pull back the tent flap. It looks like an Arab town then, so white, and everything reflected in the water. It’s so beautiful.’
‘Malta is better,’ Soo cut in. ‘What do you think, Gareth? You’ve just come from there.’ She was sitting in the back with him. ‘The buildings are so much more impressive, so solid. You haven’t seen Malta, have you, Petra? Compared with Valetta and Grand Harbour – well, you can’t compare them, can you, Gareth? Mahon is just a little provincial port.’
‘But still beautiful.’ Petra’s tone, though insistent, was quite relaxed. ‘And from Bloody Island I can see the whole sweep of it.’
‘I don’t think beautiful is the right word for a port,’ Lloyd Jones said. ‘Not for Malta anyway.’ Out of the corner of my eye I saw him turn to Soo. ‘Impressive now. I think impressive is the word. Those old strongholds, the great castles of the Knights that withstood the Turks and the German bombs.’ And he added, ‘But Gozo – Gozo is different somehow. I took a boat out to Gozo. That really is beautiful.’
I looked at them in the mirror. They were sitting very close together and she nodded, smiling happily. I think it was her smile that prompted him to say, ‘I’ve been thinking, you know, about this visit to Cales Coves.’ He leant forward suddenly, speaking to Petra and myself. ‘I saw the inlets this afternoon, but I was only there a short while. It would be nice to see them by moonlight. And it’s not far off my way back to Fornells, so I’ll join you if I may.’
We had reached the end of the road and I turned the car on to the raw gravel of our new car park. We were facing the water then, close beside his little Fiat, and there was a yacht coming in under motor, her mains’l a white triangle in the moonlight as she moved steadily across the crouched outline of the hospital ruins.
‘If Gareth is going,’ Soo said suddenly, ‘then I’m going too.’
‘It’s your bedtime,’ I told her. ‘Remember what the doctor said. You shouldn’t have been dancing really.’
‘Well, I’m not going to be left behind on my own, that’s definite.’ And then, as Lloyd Jones helped her out, she was asking Petra whether she could lend her anything. But she had come ashore with all the clothes she needed. ‘You never know,’ she said as she retrieved her holdall from under the trestle table in the chandlery. ‘It can blow up pretty fast here and you only get caught out at a pa
rty once with a full gale blowing and nothing to change into. I’ve never forgotten it. I got soaked to the skin and so cold …’ She went with Soo up the stairs and into the bedroom.
Lloyd Jones followed them with his eyes, and when the door was shut he seemed suddenly ill-at-ease, as though unhappy at being left alone with me. ‘I’ll get you something more suitable to wear,’ I said and went into the back premises, where I found him a spare sweater of mine and an old pair of working pants.
We made a quick change right there in the chandlery. ‘You knew I was a Naval officer.’ He was staring at me. ‘The moment I arrived here, you knew. Do you have a rank? you asked.’ I didn’t say anything, an awkward silence growing between us. Then he went on, ‘When I arrived here this morning – yesterday morning now – there was a man here, a short man in overalls and sweater. He was coming out of the door there.’
‘Carp,’ I said. ‘His name’s Carpenter.’
‘An employee of yours? English, isn’t he?’
‘Yes.’
‘Where from?’
‘A little place on the East Coast. Felixstowe Ferry.’
He nodded. ‘Thought I recognised him.’ He was standing quite still, staring at me. ‘So you know the whole stupid story?’
‘About your being found clinging to a buoy off the Deben entrance? Yes.’ And I asked him why he had ducked his head inside his car to avoid speaking to Carp. ‘He was one of the men who rescued you, wasn’t he? In fact, he says it was he who cut you down.’
‘Yes.’ There was a long pause, and then he said, ‘it sounds silly, you know, but it’s not something I’m very proud of – Navy officer found half frozen to death and roped to a buoy off a North Sea estuary. The media had a lot of fun at my expense, and seeing the man coming out of your door – it was a hell of a shock. I just didn’t want to be reminded of the episode.’
Soo’s voice called to ask if we were ready. ‘Well, take Benjie out for a pee, will you, and Petra says to remind you about torches.’
I slipped a sweater over my head, ‘I see your point,’ I told him, ‘but it’s no excuse for not even saying hullo. He was very hurt.’
He shrugged, ‘I’m sorry.’
The little dog had been shut in the store where he had a box to sleep in when we were out, and after I had taken him down the road to do his stuff, I went into the store with him and searched out the spare torches I kept with our boat gear. By the time I had found them, and some spare batteries, Soo and the other two were waiting for me out on the road. ‘You take Petra,’ she said as I locked the door. ‘I’ll show Gareth the way. We’ll meet you on the track down into the cove. Okay?’ And she took hold of Lloyd Jones’s arm, steering him across to his Fiat, as though afraid I might object.
‘Well, she seems quite happy about it, now we’re all going,’ Petra said as we got into the car. ‘But you’d better tell Gareth to stay with her while we’re in the cave. It’s one of those entrances that are halfway up the side of the ravine and the last part is a bit of a climb.’
It was just past twelve-thirty by the dashboard clock as I took the old Jag through San Clemente and out on the four-kilometre straight to the Binicalaf turn-off, the moon so bright we could see the talayot to the left of the road very clearly, a huge cairn of interlocking stone blocks. Shortly after that I turned left, past the Biniadris development and another talayot, Petra talking all the time about the cave drawings she had seen when studying in France. The one we were going to see now reminded her of Font-de-Gaume in the Dordogne, the entrance to it similarly placed, halfway up a cliff.
‘When they’d opened up Font-de-Gaume they found a series of chambers with pictures of animals on the walls, chiefly reindeer and mammoth. And there was another cave, Rouffignac, much longer, and older I think. The drawings there were of rhinoceros and bison as well as mammoths, and the floor was pock-marked with the pits of hibernating bears, like small craters.’ She laughed at the recollection, and then, suddenly urgent again: ‘Most of those drawings were from way back in time, Mike, at least 17,000 years ago, and if the little bit of a drawing Fm going to show you is really that of a woolly rhinoceros, then it’ll be at least as old as those Dordogne paintings.’
I remember the way she said that, the intensity, the excitement in her voice. She really did believe she had found something important. And then we were at the start of the track that wound down the cliff-edged ravine to the first cove.
‘You turn left in about a hundred yards,’ Petra said. ‘After that we walk.’
I stopped at the turn-off, waiting for the others, and after that we were on sand and gravel – not a road, nor even a track, just a piece of cliff-top country, a sort of maquis. Judging by the litter and the worn patches of thyme people came here to picnic, fornicate, or simply park their cars and sleep in the sun. It was tired, worn-looking country, but as I pushed on, driving carefully round the worst of the potholes, I realised that we had moved on to some sort of a track. A sharp turning to the right, a cave entrance marked by a sprinkling of tattered rags, then we were dropping down very steeply. ‘You’ll be able to park at the bottom,’ Petra assured me. ‘There’s just room to turn there. Do you know this place?’
‘Once or twice I’ve stopped at the top,’ I said. ‘But only for a bite to eat or to relieve myself before going down to the cove.’
She nodded. ‘If you’d got out and walked around you’d have found quite a few cave entrances. There’s one that looks almost like a house. It’s got a painted front door, a couple of windows, a stove pipe stuck out of the side and a vine trained over an arbour of wooden posts. I’m told the man it belongs to visits it regularly right through the winter.’
We reached the bottom, the narrow gravel track petering out into what looked like a watercourse. There was only just room to turn the two cars and park them with their back ends in the shrubbery. I thought we had reached the bottom of the ravine then, but Petra said no, we still had a hundred yards or so to go, then there was a soft patch, almost a stretch of bog to cross before climbing up to the cave entrance. ‘It will take us about ten minutes.’
By then we were out of the cars, all four of us standing in a patch of moonlight. The bushes were higher here, their shadows very black, and no sign of the cliffs that edged the ravine. ‘How did you find it?’ Soo asked her.
‘I don’t know really – some sixth sense, I think. The first time I came to Cales Coves was about six months ago. I’ve always been fascinated by natural caves. Most of them are in limestone and water-worn like these. And after I had explored several of them, I made enquiries and managed to locate a fisherman who uses a cave down by the water, just by the rock ledge that leads round into the other cove. He keeps his nets and gear there and it was he who told me there were several caves above here on the far side of the ravine. He thought it probable that very few people knew about them. The cave openings are mostly hidden by vegetation. At any rate, he hadn’t heard of anybody visiting them, and though he thought I was mad, he very kindly came with me that first time. There are about half a dozen of them up there at the base of the cliffs. I came here several times after that, and then yesterday I found somebody had been digging in one of them. That’s where the wall drawing is.’ She started to move off. ‘Come on. I’ll lead the way.’
But Soo wasn’t at all happy at being left on her own, and it was only when Lloyd Jones agreed to stay with her that she accepted the situation. I hesitated, suddenly uneasy at leaving her there. But Petra had already bounded off into the bushes. ‘I’ll tell you about it on the way home,’ I said and followed her along what seemed to be the ghost of a path. The ground became damper, the light of my torch showing the imprint of soft-soled shoes.
We came to water, a shallow flow over gravel, the bright green of aquatic plants, and at that point we could see the moon shining on the cliffs above us, a grey, very broken curtain of rock splattered with the black of cave entrances. Almost immediately the ground began to rise and we lost sight of them. We we
re moving across the steep side of the ravine, still following traces of a path. It reached a point where we could see the waters of the cove entrance black in shadow, then it doubled back on itself, steeper now as we moved out on to the detritus caused by weathering of the cliff face above. Once Petra stopped to point the torch I had lent her at skid marks on the surface of the scree. ‘Looks as though a bed or a crate, something heavy, has been hauled up here. Did you notice the imprint of feet down in the bottom?’
She scrambled up the steep bend, following the path across loose stone until it reached the base of the cliff where there were bushes growing, the entrance to the cave above screened by a dense thicket. Again there were indications of recent use, twigs snapped, small branches bent back, and in the black hole of the entrance itself the dry dust of the floor was scuffed by feet. ‘That’s not me,’ she said, flashing her torch. ‘I’ve only been into this cave once.’ Again there were skid marks as though a box had been dragged along the ground. ‘Watch the roof.’ She went on ahead of me, the height of the cave gradually lessening until I had to stoop. The sides of it were very smooth. ‘I’m not sure,’ her voice echoed back at me, ‘whether this has been scooped out by surface water making its way to the sea or by the sea itself.’
There were any number of caves around the coast, most of them well below sea level, some reached only by water-filled sumps or chimneys. Looking back at the moonlit half-circle of the entrance, I realised we were striking into the cliff at an oblique angle. We were also moving downwards. ‘You’ve got to remember,’ I said, ‘that when the ice-caps and the glaciers melted at the end of the last ice age the level of the sea rose very considerably.’
‘I know. The best of the caves are thirty to sixty feet down.’
‘Is that what your diving friend says?’
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