The Information Officer

by Mark Mills

  “I mean it. Life here … it’s like another incarnation. I can’t remember who I was.”

  “So tell me.”

  “What?”

  “Tell me. It might help you remember.”

  He spoke mostly about architecture, the curious and inexplicable passion that had nibbled at the fringes of his consciousness during childhood, and that he had finally acknowledged, just in time, a week shy of taking up the post he’d been offered by the Foreign Office while still a student at Oxford.

  His university friends, taking the first teetering steps in their respective careers, were baffled by his decision to start over from scratch, dismissing it as the whimsy of someone who was an eternal student at heart, which probably wasn’t so far from the truth. His father, on the other hand, had embraced the idea. He’d even embraced Max—something he hadn’t done in years—congratulating him on his courage and offering to cover the cost of a small apartment in London for the duration of his studies.

  His time at the Architectural Association had been a revelation, both thrilling and humbling after the dilettante posturing of Oxford, the endless round of dining clubs and debating societies. No one cared if he thought Ezra Pound or T. S. Eliot was the daddy of contemporary poetry. He felt stripped bare, naked, exhilarated. The work came first, their work, not someone else’s. He even learned to find beauty in the tedium of a technical drawing class, the utter silence of people doing rather than discussing. Yes, they talked about architecture—as he did now to Lilian—about its power to make the human spirit soar, and about the green shoots of the exciting new aesthetic pushing through the establishment soil. If he bored her, she didn’t show it.

  That one conversation had marked a notable shift in their relationship. She might have been the instigator, but they both played their part in it. Almost imperceptibly, their weekly get-together became a twice-weekly get-together, and he found himself manufacturing further excuses to drop by the offices in Saint Paul’s Street whenever he was in town. The first time he invited her for a drink at the Union Club, it was on some doubtful professional pretext.

  Perched on a chair in the ladies’ bar—amusingly nicknamed the snake pit, which didn’t amuse her—she told him the story of her father, a captain in the Yorkshire Light Infantry who had spent a year of his life on Malta, recuperating from injuries sustained in the Salonika campaign. Malta had catered to well over one hundred thousand sick and wounded during the Great War, and had come to be known as “the nurse of the Mediterranean.” Lilian’s mother, like so many other Maltese girls at the time, had been a volunteer nurse, and she’d lost her heart to the lanky Yorkshireman in her care, marrying him a few months before he was sent back to the front. George Flint wasn’t killed by a Bulgar bullet or bomb; he died from malaria in September 1918, a few days before the war in Salonika ended.

  Her mother had never remarried, unable to square the concept with her faith, although it hadn’t stopped her from disappearing off to Italy a couple of years before the outbreak of war, on the arm of a visiting professor of archaeology from the University of Padua. This was the reason Lilian now lived with her aunt’s family in Mdina. The invitation to dinner there had followed a few weeks later.

  With its walls and ramparts and sweeping views, Mdina reminded him of a number of hilltop towns he had visited in France with his father before the war, and while it lacked a cathedral to match those of Laon or Vézelay, it more than made up for this in other ways. As the seat of the Maltese nobility, its streets and squares were lined with stately palaces, mostly built in a restrained baroque style. The same graceful architecture was evident in the churches, convents, and seminaries that accounted for almost all the other buildings in the compact citadel. The effect was ordered, aristocratic, ecclesiastical; and an ancient peace seemed to hang over the place, a silence broken every so often by the slap and scuff of leather sandals on stone as friars and nuns shuffled about their business.

  Lilian’s aunt, her mother’s younger sister, had married into one of the more ancient families, acquiring a convoluted title in the process, although she insisted on being addressed simply as Teresa. Her husband, the twentieth baron of something or other unpronounceable, was an officer in the Royal Malta Artillery. He commanded an antiaircraft battery near the fuel reservoirs at Birzebbuga in the south of the island, and he was rarely around, which left his wife, his niece, and his two young daughters free run of the palace on Bastion Square.

  At dinner, Max had been a little put out to find himself seated next to Teresa at one end of the long table, while a handsome and amusing young captain with the 2nd Battalion Cheshire Regiment monopolized Lilian at the other end. He drew some consolation from the fact that Teresa appeared to know a fair amount about him already, although this didn’t stop her from quizzing him further. She was an attractive woman with a ready laugh and large eyes made for drawing confidences from strangers, especially ones who had consumed too much fine red wine.

  He told her about his life back home in England, about the big house in Oxfordshire where he had grown up, the farm that came with it, and the fields and woods and lakes that had served as his playground when he was a boy. She wanted more, though. What was his father like? A modest, soft-spoken man. Kindhearted, if slightly remote. And his mother? She was dead. How? In childbirth. Giving birth to him.

  Silence. The same awkward silence that always followed this revelation, as if people were weighing in their minds the exact extent of his culpability. But Teresa was different.

  “How terrible that you did not know your mother.”

  “I couldn’t say. I’ve nothing to compare it with.”

  “Are her family still in your life?”

  “They’re French. She was French.”

  “And her name?”

  It didn’t come readily to his lips. In fact, he couldn’t remember the last time he’d uttered it.

  “Camille.”

  He was too far in by now to extract himself, so he told her the story, in so much as it had been handed down to him. His father, the youngest of three sons, had always harbored dreams of being a painter, dreams that had carried him to Paris against the wishes of his parents. The advent of war, along with a creeping recognition of his own creative limitations, conspired to foul his plans, and in 1914 he returned to England with his French bride—the daughter of a notary who had lived in the same apartment building in Paris. Both of his brothers were dead within a year. Miraculously, he survived the Western Front to find himself first in line, the sole heir, to a small estate north of Oxford.

  It was the kind of life Max’s father had never wanted or imagined for himself, but Camille’s death in childbirth a short while later sealed his fate. A number of local ladies pounced on him, and he was too disorientated and weak—yes, weak—to repel the pushiest candidate.

  “Your stepmother?”

  “Sylvia.”

  “How old were you?”

  “Too young to remember.”

  This was a lie. Strange and mildly unsettling memories still came to him from time to time, static images, snapshots, cold and stark and remote: the high shine of his father’s shoes on the day of the wedding … a faceless woman dressed all in white and framed in a doorway … his nanny holding him at the nursery window, watching the wedding party return from the church. Whether or not they were reliable memories, he couldn’t say. It was quite possible that his brain had assembled them from photographs and hearsay. He knew for a fact, however, that Sylvia had insisted he shouldn’t attend the ceremony.

  “Did they have children?”

  “I have a half brother and sister, not much younger than me. Roland and Elizabeth. Elizabeth’s a fine woman.”

  “And Roland?”

  Max hesitated, reaching for his wineglass. Idle. Overweight. Overbearing. Cruel.

  “Roland’s all right.”

  Any pretense of a relationship had disappeared long ago, when Roland—not for the first time—had referred to Max’s mother as �
��that French whore.” Dr. Tomkins, the local GP, had done a good job of resetting Roland’s nose, although it still veered a little to the left when viewed in certain lights.

  Even as he had landed that punch, Max had known that Roland hadn’t been wholly to blame, that he had only been parroting the words of his mother. Sylvia had worked tirelessly over the years to drive a wedge between Max and her own son. Everyone knew the reason why. Everyone knew what was at stake.

  Max had toyed with the idea of forgoing his birthright, of stepping aside and allowing the estate to pass to Roland—and maybe he still would—but prolonging their distress offered some small satisfaction for their hostile treatment of him over the years, the injustice of which still filled him with impotent and uncomprehending anger in his darker moments.

  He labored under no illusions—he’d had a privileged upbringing, and to complain about it seemed somehow perverse—but he had always felt himself very much alone in the world, and he held Sylvia and Roland largely to blame for this. His father was exonerated on the grounds that he had never given Max cause to doubt their special bond. They shared many of the same interests. Whether it was facing each other across a chessboard or fiddling with the guts of some motorcycle or casting flies for trout on the river, they both knew that those private moments were more about reinforcing their silent alliance than about the activity itself. They discussed literature and art and films, and all the other things that Sylvia deemed too trivial to be aired at the dinner table, such as the book his father had been working on for the past ten years or more.

  It was a biography of the young Frenchman Jean-François Champollion, who, in spite of his lowly origins, had won the race to decipher the Egyptian hieroglyphs, beating the most eminent orientalists in Europe to the coveted prize. It was a story well worth telling, but why his father should have devoted so many years of his life to the subject was anyone’s guess. Max suspected it was something to do with the idea of a young man setting his sights on a goal and persevering in the face of insuperable odds—something his father had failed to do. He also suspected that the book would never be completed, because if it ever were, his father would no longer have an excuse to potter off to the London Library or the British Museum on the train.

  Max had had no intention of sharing any of this with Teresa, but the words had just tumbled from his lips, almost as if he were under the spell of some sorceress, which he began to think he might be.

  “Maybe he has a lover in London,” Teresa remarked.

  “That’s … well, an unexpected observation.”

  “Why?”

  “From a Catholic.”

  “Say what you like about us Catholics, but we understand human weakness.” She gave a knowing smile. “And I see from your face that the idea is not such a bad one for you.”

  No, it wasn’t: his father stealing a few moments of happiness in the arms of a lady friend. He just felt a little foolish that it hadn’t occurred to him before.

  Meanwhile, down at the other end of the table, the captain from the Cheshires was evidently doing a good job of entertaining Lilian, judging from her laughter. A few weeks before, it wouldn’t have mattered to him. Now it did. So much so that when the evening finally broke up, he was quite ready to leave, to be gone. That impulse vanished the moment Lilian asked him to stay on a while longer. There was a work matter she needed to discuss with him.

  It was a chilly, clear night, and she held her woolen cardigan tight around her shoulders as they strolled in the palace garden, their feet crunching softly on the gravel pathway.

  “You looked like you were enjoying yourself with the blond Adonis from the Cheshires.”

  “Tristran.”

  “Of course. How could I forget?”

  “He’s very brave.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, he told me.”

  In the darkness he could just make out the gleam of her teeth.

  “You know what? He probably is. The Cheshires have had the dirty end of the stick for quite a while.”

  “You’re defending him?” she asked.

  “Yes. No. I hate him.”

  They both knew there was another message buried in the words—an admission on his part—and he quickly filled the awkward silence with a question.

  “So, what did you want to talk about?”

  She had a couple of questions about some material sent by the Ministry of Information to the Times of Malta that had found its way through to her at Il-Berqa.

  “Ignore it,” was Max’s advice. “Most of what we get from them is complete rubbish or out of date—usually both.”

  “That’s no way to talk about your superiors.”

  “I can only imagine it’s done on purpose.”

  “On purpose?”

  “To confuse the Germans, should they ever intercept a dispatch.”

  Lilian laughed before drawing to a halt on the pathway.

  “Over here,” she said quietly, setting off across the grass.

  “Why?”

  “My cousins.”

  “What about them?” he asked, falling into step with her.

  Felicia and Ena were two leggy creatures in their early teens.

  “I know what they’re like. They’ll be watching from their bedroom.”

  She led him beneath the boughs of a large orange tree. It was so dark that he sensed rather than saw her take a step toward him.

  They kissed briefly, almost cursorily, their lips barely touching.

  There was nothing cursory about their second kiss. She pressed her body against his, and the warm tip of her tongue forced its way between his lips.

  “Don’t stop,” she said, when they broke off briefly.

  And when they finally separated, he bent to recover her cardigan from the ground and replaced it around her shoulders.

  “Oh dear,” she said. “Now I’ll have to lie to them at breakfast.”

  “Oh well. In for a penny, in for a pound.” He slipped an arm around her waist and pulled her toward him. She avoided his lips.

  “And then I’ll have to tell Father Tabone in confession that I lied to them, and he will want to know why.”

  “And when you tell him, he’ll say, ‘Lilian, Lilian, not the soldier under the orange tree story again.’”

  She gave a horrified gasp and playfully pinched his arm. “You think I am like that, do you?”

  “I think I want to kiss you again.”

  She didn’t resist, and this time her hands roamed beneath his shirt and up his back.

  No thoughts of Mitzi had intruded at the time. Only later, during the long ride back to Floriana on the motorcycle, the searchlights roving the heavens high above his head, did he weigh those first tentative embraces against the urgent abandon that had always marked his lovemaking with Mitzi.

  Mitzi had unleashed something in him, presented him with a side of himself that he’d never known existed—a dark and sometimes unsavory side. Maybe it was her guilt, but there were occasions when she had required him to dominate, even demean her. And he had duly obliged, warily at first, like an observer hovering above the bed, then more willingly.

  He had since abandoned his theory of an errant wife’s unconscious desire for castigation, partly because it was insulting to her. Did errant husbands feel obliged to act out their guilt with their lovers? Somehow he doubted it. And besides, who was he to pass judgment? An embarrassingly brief encounter with a girl named Felicity after a May Ball at Oxford and a bit of awkward fumbling with Eleanor had represented the entire scope of his sexual experience. Who was he to say what people got up to in the privacy of their bedrooms?

  Moreover, since terminating their affair, Mitzi had shown no signs of guilt or regret for what had passed between them. He had fully expected her to withdraw from him, to avoid him whenever possible, but their public relationship had suffered no such reverse. If anything, it had flourished under the unsuspecting eyes of their friends and acquaintances. He still found it strange to s
pend time with her in company—knowing every inch of the lean body beneath the cotton frock, as well as its most intimate requirements—but her ability to carry on with life regardless had allowed him to package up and parcel off the memories.

  That had all changed at Hugh and Rosamund’s drinks party.

  My God, I’ve missed you.

  A voice straight from their private past, from the flat overlooking Hastings Gardens.

  Me too, he had wanted to shout. Me too.

  This was the reason he’d been unable to sleep, his brain in open rebellion, deaf to the dictates of his weary body, thoughts of Lilian and Mitzi swirling endlessly, aimlessly, around and around in his head, overlapping, intertwining. And as if that hadn’t been bad enough already, the dead dance hostesses had somehow entered the mix, the pale, lifeless features of Carmela Cassar rising to the surface every so often like some ghoulish phantasm clamoring to be heard. She was unhappy with him, and she had every right to be. What had he done for her? What had he really done for her? No more than the bare minimum, hoping that the affair would somehow resolve itself, or simply go away.

  He knew of a number of individuals, men as well as women, who had cracked up and been carted off—one had even tried to end it all with a tube of Veronal—but until now it had never occurred to him to feel much sympathy toward them.

  Outside, the first bombs were beginning to fall on Grand Harbour, and a couple of the big guns were barking back. The Bofors wouldn’t open up until the Stukas showed, which they would after the 88s had had their sport, if the pattern of the past week was anything to go by.

  Flakes of plaster showered from the ceiling as he wandered through to the living room. Strangely, the prospect of observing a bombing raid on his doorstep almost seemed like light relief after the mental inquests of the past few hours. He pushed open the shutters and stepped out onto the balcony.

  He just had time to register the pall of dust hanging over the dockyards and Senglea before a column of water erupted from French Creek. It stood tall and upright, frozen in motion, before collapsing in on itself. Down below, by the bastion wall, the boys in the Bofors gun pit were scanning the skies. If anyone had a right to crack, it was them, especially since the Germans had started targeting the gun emplacements. They didn’t appear too perturbed, though. A couple of them were even laughing.