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The Information Officer

Page 21

by Mark Mills


  “My God, you’re a good fit. Any more would be too much.”

  His hands climbed to her small firm breasts, the nipples hard beneath the satin. She placed her hands over his, holding them there.

  “We’ve still got time to make the shelter,” she said, almost drunkenly.

  “Oh, I think I’ve already found safe harbor.”

  It was a terrible joke, a childish jeu de mots, but she laughed, recognizing it for what it was—a cheap swipe at Lionel and his submariner chums. He already knew from her how they liked to talk in such terms when it came to women. Expressions such as “raising the periscope” and “arming the torpedo” figured large in their schoolboy innuendo.

  “Well, as long as you don’t blow the tanks too early.”

  That was one he hadn’t heard before, and they giggled like two naughty schoolchildren.

  “I can feel it when you laugh,” said Max.

  “And when I do this …?”

  She started to move, a slow, rhythmic roll of the hips, a reminder that they weren’t in fact welded together, one being.

  The distant bark of a heavy battery suggested that the searchlights had picked out the first of the raiders.

  “There’s no hurry,” she whispered.

  “Tell that to our German friends.”

  “Let them do their worst. We’re untouchable.”

  “I mean it.”

  “So do I. If I’m going to die, I want it to be like this, with you inside me.”

  And that’s where he stayed. Long after it had become clear that Valetta was the target, long after the whistle and crump of the first bombs had drowned out the dirge of the siren, he was still there, inside her. And as the heavens outside pitched and rolled in one vast, undying thunderclap of sound, they twisted and turned together on the bed, at one with the holocaust, somehow a part of it, immune to it. Terrific concussions tossed the building, but the tremors seemed only to resonate with the febrile tension of their bodies. And as the raid built in ferocity, so did their own exertions, rising to a crescendo, almost in defiance now, looking to drive back the deadly storm, to outlast it.

  This they did, their wild cries of release rending the air as the last of the bombers headed for home, chased back to Sicily by a few hopeful shell bursts.

  They lay damp and spent in each other’s arms for a long while, lacquered together in the eerie silence, the acrid smell of cordite leaking into the room through the shutters.

  “That was … well, like nothing else I’ve ever known,” said Max.

  “Did the earth move for you too?”

  They laughed weakly and kissed and held each other tighter.

  “I told you they couldn’t touch us.”

  “They came pretty damned close.”

  An enormous explosion had shaken the building to its foundations during the height of the raid—Brr-ummmph!—probably a parachute mine, picked off by one of the Bofors crews before it could land.

  Outside, the “Raiders Passed” siren sounded its single note.

  “They’ll be back,” said Max.

  They all knew the pattern by now. Kesselring would keep the planes coming, varying his targets throughout the night. It was unlikely that Valetta would suffer another assault, but you couldn’t bank on it.

  “Maybe you should go now,” said Mitzi.

  “Maybe I don’t want to. Maybe I want to know why you summoned me here.”

  “You know the reason. I know you know, because Lionel told me this afternoon. Apparently he bumped into you at the submarine base the other day.”

  “That’s right.”

  “And was a jolly time had by all?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “How long have you known? Three days? Four? A week? Longer?”

  “Hugh told me at the party.”

  “And you didn’t think to share it with me?”

  “He only mentioned it later, after you and I had talked.”

  Mitzi lay silent for a moment. “I’m sorry. It just seems like I’m the last person to hear that I’m leaving the island.”

  “You should be glad. Things aren’t going to get any better here for a long while.”

  “Alexandria sounds ghastly.”

  “Well, it isn’t.”

  He had rather enjoyed his time in Alexandria, although his appreciation of the place might well have had something to do with the fact that he’d arrived there directly from Atbara, a desolate, flyblown corner of the Sudan, where he’d spent a miserable couple of months on an intelligence course.

  “The bar at the Windsor Palace is worth a visit,” said Max. “Their cocktails are second to none.”

  “My God, a bright future beckons with Baedeker’s.”

  “I’m just saying there are worse places to be. At least you won’t be pounded to pieces on a daily basis.”

  “Lionel’s convinced Alexandria will fall.”

  “Then he should have a word with Elliott.”

  “Elliott? What does Elliott know about anything?”

  “Considerably more than he likes to let on.”

  She kissed him tenderly on the lips. “You’re so sweet and trusting.”

  A part of him bristled at her condescending tone, and normally he would have reacted. He didn’t because he wanted to steer the conversation back to the question of her imminent departure, and for reasons that showed him to be neither sweet nor trusting.

  “Did Lionel say exactly when he’s leaving?”

  “Monday. They’re still making repairs to the Upstanding. She’ll be the last sub to leave.”

  Four days was nothing. He was going to have to move fast, push things along.

  “He said you’ll be staying on for a bit, maybe moving in with the Reynolds in Saint Julian’s.”

  “Not anymore. The sea transport officer has booked me on a seaplane from Kalafrana the next day.”

  “So what’s this, then? Goodbye?”

  “I suppose. And I couldn’t leave without telling you.”

  “Sounds intriguing.”

  “Oh, it’s more than that.”

  She lapsed into an unnerving silence.

  “Mitzi …?”

  She took his hand and placed it gently on her belly. The negligee had long since been discarded, and his palm was rough against the soft skin around her navel.

  He was about to speak when it dawned on him.

  “I’m thinking something.” He twisted onto his side to face her. “Am I wrong?”

  “No. It’s yours.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “It can’t be his.”

  “He was away on patrol?”

  “Even if he’d been here.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “It’s very simple.”

  They had tried and tried to have a child, Mitzi explained, but it hadn’t worked. Leaping to the assumption that she must be to blame for their fruitless efforts, Lionel had dispatched her to a doctor in London just before the war, unaware that she’d already visited two Harley Street specialists, both of whom had given her a clean bill of health. The third was of exactly the same opinion: that everything was in fine working order, and that the fault most likely lay with her husband. She still wasn’t sure why she had lied to Lionel, presumably to protect his over-heightened sense of masculinity, but that’s what she had done, casting herself as the barren wife to spare him the shame.

  Conveniently, the war had come along soon after, allowing them to ignore the issue. Neither of them wished to bring a child into a turbulent world. But that, it seemed, was exactly what was about to happen.

  “It’s early days still, but it’s the real thing. I know it is.”

  Max struggled to find the words. “What do you want to do?”

  “I want to have a child, Max.”

  “My child? Or any child?”

  “It’s probably my only chance.”

  “Not if you take another lover.”

  “That’s not fai
r. I didn’t set out to get pregnant by you.”

  “An unfortunate slip, then?”

  “Rationing.”

  “Rationing?” he scoffed.

  “Malnutrition. It messes with our menstrual cycles. If you don’t believe me, ask Lilian.”

  He had never heard Mitzi mention Lilian’s name before. In fact, he’d had no idea she was even aware of Lilian’s existence.

  “From what I hear, you know her well enough to ask,” Mitzi added archly.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means please don’t play the saint with me. For all I know, you were seeing her at the same time as me.”

  “Well, I wasn’t. And I’m not ‘seeing her.’”

  “Call it what you will, I don’t blame you, not after the way I treated you. I hurt you, I know that, but I was confused.”

  “And now?” he asked.

  “Now? Now I’m wishing I hadn’t told you.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because you didn’t need to know.”

  He lay beside her in silence, absorbing the meaning of her words.

  “I’m not ready to throw my family, my friends, and my reputation to the wind.”

  “You might find you have no choice.”

  “That depends on you.”

  “Mitzi, it’s going to look like me.”

  “Not if it’s lucky.”

  “I’m being serious. I’m dark. Lionel’s fair, and so are you. Two blonds can only produce a blond child—remember your biology lessons?”

  “Yes, I remember my biology lessons.”

  “So what happens when it pops out with a mop of black hair?”

  “Your father’s fair-haired.”

  “My father?”

  “You showed me a photo of him once. If he’s fair-haired, then the child can be too.”

  It was a moment before he responded. “My God, you’ve really thought this through, haven’t you?”

  “Of course I’ve thought it through. It’s not the sort of thing to be taken lightly.”

  She was getting angry now, and so was he.

  “What happened to dying with me inside you?” he asked.

  “You know how I talk when I’m aroused.”

  “Don’t I have any say in this whatsoever?”

  “You do now, but only because I told you when I didn’t have to. And if you have any respect for me, you’ll go along with my wishes. When you’ve thought on it, you may find they’re your wishes too.”

  “Don’t count on it,” he said, swinging his legs off the bed.

  His shorts were still in the hallway, but he remembered his shirt on the floor only after feeling the soft crunch of eggs underfoot.

  “Bloody hell!” he snapped.

  Mitzi misinterpreted the expletive. “Okay. I’ll ask Lionel for a divorce and marry you. Is that what you want to hear? Because I don’t think it is.”

  He groped around for his socks and desert boots.

  “Tell me I’m wrong,” she insisted.

  He couldn’t, so he didn’t. He just left the bedroom with his clothes bundled beneath his arm.

  Sleep was out of the question. All he could manage was a kind of limbo, a restless tug-of-war between exhaustion and wide-eyed wakefulness, a contest punctuated every half hour or so by another cigarette. He thought back to his student days and the cramped ground-floor flat in Waterloo, when anything less than nine hours of full and proper slumber would have had him snoozing happily on his drawing board come three o’clock in the afternoon.

  How simple life had been back then. A morning lecture on Piranesi; half a day given over to tweaking a floor plan or an elevation; the Northern Line home from Tottenham Court Road station; three pints and a slice of pie in the King’s Arms on Roupell Street, followed by a short stagger to his front door. What had his concerns been at the time? They must have existed, but he struggled now to recall them. They certainly couldn’t hold a candle to his current predicament, he ruminated wearily.

  The news that he had fathered a child—the very fact that he was capable of doing so—had touched him at some deep, primordial level that defied words. It was as if the lens through which he viewed the world had been shattered and then hastily repaired. He could make out the rough shape of things, but it was a fragmented picture, one of refractions and reflections and unexpected associations—an alien landscape where past, present, and future somehow coexisted.

  He saw himself screaming at the top of his newborn lungs in the arms of his dying mother, and for the first time he saw the logic of her sacrifice. He watched it playing out before his eyes, with Mitzi standing in for his mother and the ending rewritten. Try as he might, though, he couldn’t write himself into the scene.

  He wasn’t wanted at the bedside, where his father had once stood. Mitzi had made her feelings clear on that score, and he couldn’t see her changing her mind. It was easy to resent her, and more than a little unfair. There was no denying the sudden clutch of fear he’d experienced when she had tested him, confident of his reaction, proposing that she seek a divorce from Lionel and marry him. It just didn’t fit with the future he’d envisaged for himself: the architect, the man about town, looking to leave his mark on the world. He couldn’t find a place for the young child and the disgraced ex–navy wife in his dream. And he thought less of himself for it.

  He tried to console himself with the alternatives. He would be the mysterious gentleman watching the Colts’ football match against the rival school, stifling his cheers as his son broke free in the dying seconds of the game to score the winning goal. That didn’t work. Lionel barged his way into the fantasy, sidling toward him along the touchline.

  “Hello, old boy. What brings you here?”

  “Oh, nothing much. That fine figure of a young man you have always assumed to be your son is in fact the product of a brief but passionate affair I conducted with your dear lady wife during our time on Malta.”

  “Well, I say. I didn’t see that one coming.”

  “Doubtless, dear fellow, but who can blame you? We were very discreet.”

  Somehow all the scenarios he came up with collapsed into absurdity, leaving him lost and floundering in a future world of his own creation.

  The past and present offered more of a refuge. He found himself drawing a strange kind of strength from the prospect of fatherhood. Just as his own father was the touchstone by which he tested himself, so it now fell to him to set an example, to light the path for the next generation—a mawkish sentiment, he knew, but at least it gave some small degree of comfort.

  It had just passed five o’clock when he heard the knock. His first thought was of Mitzi, but she didn’t have a key to the downstairs door. His second thought was of his neighbor, the young sculptor on the floor below, the one who used to teach at the art school on Old Bakery Street and who now made a living running off devotional plaster models of the Virgin (much in demand), the neighbor who was always cadging a scrap of bread or a smear of jam. Then he remembered that the sculptor was long gone, off to stay with relatives near Zejtun, where the bombs didn’t rain down with such deadly persistence.

  He dragged on his shorts and shuffled to the front door.

  “Who is it?” he called.

  “Busuttil.”

  The name meant nothing to him until the low grumble of a voice added, “From Lilian.”

  He slipped the latch and opened the door. In the darkness it was hard to make out much of Mr. Busuttil other than that he was short, was rounded in the shoulder, and appeared to have something odd on his head.

  It was a straw hat, but only just. Stained and crumpled, it looked like it had been pulled from the rubble of a bombed building. This became clear once they were in the kitchen and Max had lit a candle.

  Busuttil glanced around the bare room. It was hard to guess his age, hard to say whether the hat concealed a bald pate or a thick head of hair. His face had a lean hangdog look to it, as if someone had let the air out of it. H
is eyes, in contrast, were bright, alert, and restless.

  “She said no phone, so I come instead.”

  “You’re a friend of Lilian’s?” Somehow Max couldn’t see it.

  “I know the brother of the cousin of her uncle.”

  “And you’re a policeman?”

  Max had been very clear about that with Lilian: it had to be someone who knew the ropes, someone with authority. The man in front of him didn’t appear to score highly in either department. He could hardly be held to blame for the large carbuncle on his neck, but there was something essentially disheveled about the fellow that didn’t scream “dependable upholder of the law.”

  Busuttil pulled back his dusty jacket and flashed the pistol at his waist. “CID. Inspector for five years.”

  Max tried to look suitably impressed.

  “Do you have tea?”

  “It’s the only thing I do have.”

  This wasn’t entirely true. He also had a three-penny bar of chocolate he’d been holding back for a special occasion. He wasn’t sure that this qualified but produced it nonetheless. Busuttil eagerly devoured it all before the water had even come to a boil.

  Max had his own contacts within the police department, men with whom he communicated every day over casualty figures, and he was beginning to wish he’d taken the risk and gone with one of them. He started to feel more comfortable only when the tea had brewed and they were sitting at the table.

  “I see your eyes,” said Busuttil. “I see you are not happy. So before I ask questions, I tell you about Busuttil.” He paused to take a sip of tea. “I was born 1901 in a small house near Siggiewi. My father, he was a farmer of corn. There were also goats, six goats …”

  Oh Christ, thought Max, he’s going to tell me their names.

  Without warning, Busuttil erupted in laughter, gripping Max’s forearm as he did so. The laughter accounted for the long furrows flanking his mouth.

  “Your face!” Busuttil gasped. Once he’d recovered enough to risk another sip of tea, he added, “It is good for my work that people see me like you see me.”

  His work, it turned out, was pretty eye-popping stuff. It was hardly surprising that in a garrison of twenty-six thousand British servicemen there were a few bad apples, but Max was taken aback by the true extent of the rot. Busuttil wasn’t talking about men banged up in the guardroom for “conduct prejudicial to good order and discipline”; he was talking about the genuine article: racketeers, extortionists, rapists, and murderers. He claimed to have cracked a ring of NAAFI men responsible for the theft of five hundred cases of whisky from a convoy back in September. He had also arrested a corporal in the West Kents who’d slit the throat of another soldier in a quarrel over a girl. He reeled off a grim catalogue of other crimes perpetrated by British servicemen that he’d investigated, though not always with success.

 

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