The Information Officer

by Mark Mills

  “I’m meeting Elliott this evening.”

  “I’m sure you can rearrange it,” she said.

  Under other circumstances, maybe.

  “It’s not a moveable feast, I’m afraid.”

  “My, it must be important.”

  She was annoyed now, unaccustomed as she was to him calling the tune. He could picture the obstinate tightening of her jaw at the other end of the line.

  “Just one of those things, I’m afraid.”

  “Well, this is more than just one of those things,” she replied flatly. “So if you could find a moment in your busy schedule …”

  He knew what she was like; she wasn’t going to give up.

  “How late tonight?”

  “I’m not going anywhere, and I believe you still have a key.”

  If the girls at the exchange were listening in, there’d be a flurry of speculation. It was Mitzi’s way of saying she didn’t care.

  “Okay.”

  “I’m honored,” said Mitzi tersely before hanging up.

  The key was where he had always kept it—in the drawer of his bedside table, along with the letters from home. There had been no mail in months, and the bundle of envelopes with their out-of-date news seemed only to deepen his sense of isolation. For all he knew, his father had finally seen sense and separated from his stepmother; Elizabeth was bearing the child of the stockman’s son; and Roland, well, there were any number of things he could wish upon Roland, syphilis springing readily to mind, but the irritating truth was that Roland would probably be kicking his heels with his regiment somewhere in southern England and sneaking as much leave as was humanly possible.

  He spread the letters on the bed, searching for the one from his good friend Lucinda. There was no address, no stamp, only his Christian name, because she had handed it to him in person just a week before he’d gone abroad. He had taken the train to Lewes, where, in her own words, she was now living in sin with a painter old enough to be her father. If that was sin, then the devil really did have all the best tunes.

  The painter was named Roger and the house was a large brick-and-flint-built affair on the edge of a hamlet at the foot of the South Downs. The garden was wild and unkempt, not unlike Roger’s hair.

  They ate lunch outside on the terrace beneath a cotton awning slung between wooden posts. Roger’s son was away at boarding school, but his daughter, Clare, was there, with her sulky pout and downcast gaze, as befitted a thirteen-year-old. She attended the school in Lewes where Lucinda taught French.

  “I was also Max’s teacher,” Lucinda explained. “Many, many moons ago.”

  “La femme de Monsieur Dupont a les yeux bleus.”

  “Excellent, Chadwick—give yourself a gold star.”

  “We used to ascribe a whole load of other attributes to Madame Dupont when you weren’t listening. There’s nothing I don’t know about Madame Dupont.”

  Roger had erupted in laughter, and even Clare had smiled.

  Whenever Max was feeling down and desolate, he would think of the house and its garden bursting with blossom and lime-green loveliness on that warm day in early May. He could see it now as he pulled the four pages of paper from the envelope.

  He hadn’t read Lucinda’s letter in a while, probably because he knew he had failed to live up to her kind and flattering words.

  It started with a simple statement, barely legible. Her handwriting had always been atrocious, like a doctor’s scrawl.Our friendship began with a letter, and this letter is all you shall have to sustain it over the coming months or, God forbid, years.

  Well, God hadn’t been listening; it had been almost two years since she had handed him the letter on the platform at Lewes station as he’d been boarding the train back to London. He had waited till Haywards Heath before opening it, and he had still been pondering its contents when the train drew into Victoria station a good while later.

  In the letter, she went on to say that she would not be writing to him again while he was away at war. Anything she had to report would only appear trite and commonplace when set alongside his own experiences. Also, there was a strong likelihood that her letters would not reach him, and as strong a likelihood that any reply of his would not reach her. These silences would only fuel her fear that he had been killed.

  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.”

  Ralph gave a sudden loud laugh. “Damn your detractors. Now I know why you got the job.”

  “What detractors?”

  “Come on, you’re at least ten years too young for the post.”

  “I forgot to mention … at the pub, you’re in a wheelchair. You lost both legs when you got shot down over Malta in May 1942.”

  Ralph laughed some more as he pulled open the front door. After the cool of the palace and its shaded garden the heat in Bastion Square hit them like a hammer.

  “She’s a great girl, Max, war or no war. She’s the real thing.”

  “She’s just a friend.”

  “Then you’re a bloody fool.”

  “If you say so.”

  “Hugh says so too.”

  “Hugh?”

  “And Freddie.”

  He knew Freddie was a fan of Lilian’s. The three of them had spent a raucous evening together at Captain Caruana’s bar in Valetta a few weeks back. He struggled to recall when Hugh had ever set eyes on her.

  “Now go in there and look after her. She needs it.”

  Lilian didn’t appear particularly needy. She sat there silent and grim-faced while he made the right noises, and the moment Teresa withdrew, leaving them alone together, she suggested that they head for Boschetto Gardens. Actually, it was more of a command than a suggestion, and there was something wild and reckless in her eyes when she issued it.

  “On the motorcycle?”

  Until now, she had always refused to be seen with him on the motorcycle.

  “Well, I’m not walking there in this heat.”

  It was a short trip, a few miles at most along the ridge toward the coast. He took it slowly, savoring the experience.

  Lilian rode sidesaddle because of her skirt, and as Rabat fell away behind them, she shifted closer on the seat, holding him around the waist just that little bit tighter.

  She was a good pillion passenger, not fighting the curves in the road, leaning with him.

  “You’ve done this before,” he called over his shoulder.

  “I’ve never done what I’m about to do.”

  “And what’s that?” he asked, turning to look her in the eye.

  “I think it’s a goat,” she replied calmly.

  They missed the emaciated creature by a matter of inches.

  It would have been a pity to kill it, a survivor like that. Most had gone the way of the pot long before now.

  Boschetto Gardens offered the only genuine patch of woodland on Malta—a rare glimpse of what the island must have looked like long ago, before it was stripped of trees by early shipbuilders. Max had walked its weaving pathways a handful of times, often with Ralph, who loved to go there to paint. It was a tranquil, sun-dappled world where dark pines towered over groves of lemon, orange, and olive trees. There was an ancient atmosphere about the place, a whiff of dusty fables by classical authors you’d heard of but never read.

  “I half expect a unicorn to come trotting round the corner any moment.”

  They were making their way along a shaded path lined with ivy-threaded walls.

  “Or Pan,” replied Lilian.

  “I’ve never liked Pan.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’m sorry, he’s too creepy.”

  “But he’s the god of music and nature and love.”

  “Exactly, so why’s he got goat legs?”

  He told her about The Wind in the Willows, and the bizarre chapter in the book where Pan helps Rat and Mole locate Otter’s lost son.

  She liked the sound of the book, especially Toad, and he promised to send her a copy of it when he got home.

  Maybe it was the mention of home, but she grew silent before asking, “It is going to end, isn’t it?”

  “Of course it is. And one day Germans will come here in peace and walk this path and admire this view.” He spread his hands before him.

  “I hate them.”

/>   It was said in a calm, low voice, and was all the more menacing for it.

  “They’re only doing their job. It doesn’t mean they enjoy it, or even that they agree with it.”

  “How can you be so reasonable? You’ve lost friends too.”

  She sounded almost angry with him, and maybe she was, but he also sensed she was searching for answers she hoped he might hold. He didn’t have any to offer her, though. What could he say? Ivor, Wilf, Delia, Dicky … they had all died defending a cause in which they believed, for which they’d been ready to fight. That was his consolation. Caterina, on the other hand, had been obliterated while watching from the sidelines—an innocent bystander caught in the cross fire.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I really don’t.” He stopped on the pathway, staring down at his dusty desert boots before looking up into her lambent brown eyes. “But I know that being unreasonable doesn’t help. It doesn’t do justice to those who have died. It doesn’t honor them. They’re the ones who matter, not the man—the boy, most likely—who pulled the lever or pressed the button or did whatever he was ordered to do. I doubt he’s so very different from the rest of us, just happy to be alive and eager for it all to end.”

  She weighed his words awhile.

  “So who do I blame? I have to blame someone.”

  “Try the politicians—the idiots who dragged us into this mess in the first place. I find that works best.”

  Not long after, she led him off the path, through the trees, until they found themselves in a small glade. When she sat herself down at the base of a gnarled old olive tree, he followed suit, remembering what she had said on the motorcycle about doing something she’d never done before.

  “Can I have a cigarette?” she asked.

  “You don’t smoke.”

  “But I want to try.”

  He lit two cigarettes and handed her one, amused by his presumption.

  She didn’t cough and she didn’t complain about the taste; she just smoked the cigarette, then stubbed it out in the sandy soil.

  “Verdict?”

  “Not so special. I feel a bit dizzy.”

  She sat back against the trunk and closed her eyes. There was nothing awkward about the silence that now enveloped them. It gave him the opportunity to think about how he was going to broach the subject. It was hardly the time to do it, not while she was still reeling from the death of her friend, but time was a luxury he couldn’t afford right then.