by Sheila Burns
‘You do not seem to realize that Cam wants me.’
He clapped his hands violently for a boy, and when the waiter came, spoke in Maltese. It was the first time that Mandy had heard an Englishman speaking Maltese and was amazed.
‘Isn’t Maltese very difficult?’
‘Not to a man who is good at peculiar languages. I fluffed French and German at school, was a blockhead at Latin, but odd languages come easily to me.’
‘Where were you at school?’
‘I was at Harrow.’ It was exactly the school that she had expected him to mention. ‘Eastern languages are child’s play to me, and the Maltese amuse me. It cuts a lot of ice if you visit their island and speak their language; it is something they never get over,’ he said.
She had let the critical moment pass, and he had literally talked her out of it, and beyond it. She could see this. He had finished his drink, ignoring the fact that she had left hers, and the food that he had ordered came to them. There was nothing that Mandy could say to stop it; it was in fact probably much quicker to go through with it than to argue about it. Here was iced grapefruit, elegantly arranged, and refreshing. It was followed by the eternal chicken served with fresh pineapple, and again refreshing. Mandy had to admit that she enjoyed it.
He began talking. ‘Cam is recovering?’
‘Very slowly, and he must not be disturbed in any way.’
‘I know that, and he has a very good guardian angel with him.’
‘I must not let visitors get past me.’
‘Your stepfather’s work is worrying. One lives on the edge of a precipice, and it takes a lot of ingenuity and care to avoid a crash.’
‘I know.’ She dropped a barb. ‘My mother will be out here possibly tomorrow.’
‘Your mother?’ She knew that he did not like the idea.
‘She is flying out.’
For a single moment she saw doubt in his eyes, but he did not refer to it again, only went on talking about Cam. ‘I want to help your stepfather now so ill, for we have known each other from schooldays.’
She said, ‘Cam did not go to Harrow,’ and saw him colour slightly, aware of having made a bad mistake.
‘Of course not. His people had not got the money for it, but we were at the same prep. You don’t believe me, do you?’
‘I know so little about you.’
‘You know Contessa Lucinda,’ he said.
‘I know of her, no more.’
‘She happens to be my aunt.’
She knew by the way that he said it he hoped this would hit hard. She only said. ‘Oh, yes.’
He brought things to the point. ‘Look here. I know your stepfather’s job, and it’s highly secret.’
‘You know more than I do.’
‘You’re difficult! I don’t believe you want to help him. I know that Giuseppe is turning traitor, and Cam ought to be told, and forewarned. Also, you should be careful with Luis Vella.’
‘What exactly do you mean?’
He leant closer, his face a little flushed, his eyes shrewd. ‘You realize that he is connected with the secret police in this island?’
‘To the innocent, the police are harmless,’ she said with the cold manner she had learnt from Tutor-Sister. It was invaluable.
A singer had begun to sing at the far end of the restaurant, and she wished that the girl had chosen any other moment for her strident song. He looked at her.
‘You know nothing about Malta, and it can be sinister. Realize that I am a friend, acting as a friend and wanting only to help you.’
‘I’ll ask Cam about you.’
‘He will endorse everything that I have said.’
‘I’m glad.’ She felt an emotional hurricane swirling within herself. The day had been so hot; perhaps when one first came here one felt it more, and she behaved foolishly. She put a small lace handkerchief to her head, which was aching. He saw it.
‘You find our heat difficult?’
‘It certainly slows me down.’
‘You get used to it later.’ She wished that she did not feel instinctively that he was untrustworthy, for he was trying to be kind. ‘What made you take up nursing?’ he asked.
‘It was something that I always wanted, I suppose. I would have liked to be a doctor, but that is such a long training, and I’d have to earn before the whole six years were through, so I turned to nursing.’
‘You will probably marry a doctor. Most nurses do, and then they help him enormously with his work. Surely there was some medical student you liked?’
It was stupid to recall Richard’s amiable smile as Max spoke of marrying a doctor. The lightness of his hair in a world of black heads, his friendly smile when he came into the wards, and the feeling that he was their Dr Kildare. Maybe Max Jefferies was a thought reader, for he said, ‘So there was somebody?’
‘Not really! Probably every nurse who finishes training has to leave one affair behind her. Mine was not even an affair. We just happened to be serving in the same hospital and were interested in the same type of cases.’
‘Yes, of course.’
The waiter brought iced coffee served in small golden glasses, exquisitely made. She reminded Max that she must not be late. Because the coolness of the evening was delicious, they walked the short way back. The moon swung in a big golden ball above them and there was that infinite pattern of giant stars across the heavy purple darkness. A light wind moved the palm trees, and they turned into the side street. Still men and women sat in doorways, chattering together, for the Maltese were good gossips and adored talking to one another. A black car was waiting outside the big house at the corner. Max noticed it.
‘You know what that car is?’
‘No, is it anything in particular?’
‘It is a police car.’
‘Going the rounds?’ She was not interested. In London one was always seeing police cars coming and going. They were not worrying.
‘More than that. There has been a tremendous search throughout the island, a drive which could be dangerous.’
‘Hardly to me,’ and she smiled.
‘You never know! Dangerous drugs have been coming into this island. They have been brought in consistently, and there is a big campaign to stop it.’
‘What sort of dangerous drugs?’ she asked, but only interested from the medical point of view.
‘All sorts of them, but in particular heroin.’
‘That is a very dangerous drug indeed.’
‘It fetches the highest prices with addicts.’ That rather greasy smile had come to his face, and when he looked that way it made her positively dislike him. He was a big man, running to fat. One had the feeling that his smile was false, that under the amiable outer appearance there lurked a man who was of quite a different order.
As they drew level with the car, the door of the house opened. A uniformed man came out, followed by another who was bringing with him a young Maltese. The Maltese had no shoes on, and his light material trousers fluttered as he walked. He wore no coat, only a singlet with wide scoops coming low on the breast and back. Mandy did not know why these details seemed to strike her so fully. The man was a stranger, someone she had never seen before and would never see again. He was protesting most vehemently, and the man escorting him took no notice.
They bundled him into the car, and it drove away on the instant. The men and women sitting talking on the doorsteps took no notice of the scene; it was matterless to them, for they had their own troubles. That was when she heard a woman weeping. The sound of her crying came nearer, and looking through the open door of the house out of which they had brought the man, she saw a Maltese woman coming. She would have been middle-aged, she supposed, with her black hair growing thinner, and her face lined. She wore the black cotton frock most of the women wore, a little multicoloured apron perched on her large stomach, and she came out into the street weeping bitterly. She was crying so much that she almost ran into Mandy, who stopped.
�
�Something is the matter?’ she said, gently.
The tears were pouring down the woman’s face as she turned to her. ‘They have taken Alonzo! He did nuz’ing, nuz’ing. But they take him just the same.’
‘They will bring him back.’
The woman shook her head, and she made no attempt to stay the tears. ‘No. Not in this island. They take him to prison; they will not let him be free.’ Then she saw Max Jefferies for the first time. It seemed that she galvanized her whole body. ‘You,’ she gasped. ‘You know of this! You know.’
His face did not flicker. For a moment Mandy wondered if the poor woman was hysterical, and had mistaken him for somebody else, so calm was he, so utterly untouched by her.
‘She is mad,’ was what he said.
The woman swung round. ‘Look,’ and she spoke to Mandy, ‘he was in it! He was the master, and I know him. You do not believe what I say, but it is true, and one day you will find that it is true.’ She put out her hands and caught at Mandy’s arm. It was Max who pushed her away.
‘Don’t hurt her,’ she begged.
‘You must come away. Don’t you see that she is deranged and does not know what she is saying? You must come away,’ and his hand firmly guided her arm.
The woman stood there weeping noisily. Mandy dared not look back to her, and afterwards knew that she should have done, for something was very much the matter with her. It was silly to be so shocked, but the scene had come by surprise. The police car and the men in uniform; the way they had bundled the young man into their car and had driven away, and the pitiful sobbing of the woman as if her world had ceased to be.
Max was speaking kindly. ‘I expect the young man had been up to some petty thieving. It goes on all the time in this island, and the police tolerate it for a while, then suddenly they take action. He won’t get a severe sentence, there is no hardship here, but of course it is worrying for the woman. She’ll get over it, don’t worry.’
‘No, no, of course not.’
She had the feeling that she wanted to be alone as they came to the door of the house where the flats were. A gramophone was playing something from ‘Porgy and Bess’, and somehow, at this particular moment, it was the very thing she wanted.
He said, ‘May I come in for a few minutes?’
‘No. I have to go straight to my patient.’
‘You stick to your job, don’t you?’
‘I came out here to nurse my stepfather, and he is not out of the wood yet. He needs all my care.’
‘You should save yourself.’
She turned on the step to him. ‘I did not become a nurse with the idea of saving myself,’ was what she said. ‘Thank you for the evening, it did me good, but now I must say goodnight.’
He took her hand, coming a shade nearer to her, his eyes half-admiring. ‘No kisses to say thank you?’ he said.
‘No kisses to say thank you.’ Mandy went through the door and shut it behind her.
Chapter Seven
That was a dreadful night, for she could not sleep. Her stepfather was better, and sleeping far more naturally, in fact there was no need to stay up with him, and she ought to be thankful for that. She went to her own room, which seemed to be insufferably hot in spite of fans, and windows open to the ground. On the centre table was a huge bowl of flowers, the lemon-scented lilies, and the pale irises which grew so plentifully in the island, and the big pale peonies. There was a little note for her, and she opened it. Somehow she had hoped for some message, some word which she could remember, for tonight half of her was lonely, but there was no message, only the two words, ‘From Luis’.
The card on which he had written bore the crest of the Knights of Malta, something that she recognized from the tombs in St John’s Cathedral. The card was beautifully embossed, and she turned it over in her hands.
She crept on to the bed and lowered the mosquito net, which made it insufferably hot, but what could she do? I must sleep, she told herself.
She dozed for a short while, and had something of a nightmare. She dreamt that she had found a man in the flat, and had gone to see if the packet was still safe, only to find that it had disappeared. She woke with a little cry, heard herself, and stopped it. I must quieten down, she thought.
But the nightmare had been vivid, far too vivid to be easily withstood, and she found that she could not dismiss it so easily. She got the idea that the packet had gone, and could not escape it. At the end of an hour she got up again and drew on a white kimono. I look like a ghost, she thought, but that did not matter. The white mules that she wore made no sound against the carpetless floor, and she went out of the room. She looked first at Cam, lying there in the best sleep he had had since she had come here. Then she went into the next room to look for the parcel.
She would never sleep until she had convinced herself that it was safely there, and this was absurd because it was double locked. She had put it in a small escritoire on the side, which Cam had suggested. The drawer in which it lay was fitted with an inner drawer, also locked. It was, of course, absolutely safe.
She opened the door of the room softly, aware that the fans were making a great noise. She turned on the light, and as she did so she saw a man slip out through the window on to the verandah beyond. He was a mere ghost of a man, here one minute, gone the next, and remarkably like Giuseppe in appearance. Someone had left the window open; it should surely have been locked on a ground-floor flat, yet in this hot island they could not lock windows too easily.
Could Carmina have done this? Or the rather tatty man calling himself a gardener, who cared for the patio and kept the flowers on the verandah moist and not drooping?
Impulsively she rushed across to the open window, just in time to see the man again as he went out of the far gate, shutting it after him. No, she had not made a mistake. It must be Giuseppe, she thought. Cam did not pay him, she had heard them arguing that time, and he has come back determined to take what he did not get from Cam. Even to take that packet which he had brought here if needs be, and the thought horrified her.
She stood there staring at the garden beyond, at the stars, and she felt to be helplessly alone. What ought she to do? There was something quite intangible going on under all this, something which she did not understand at all, and again she thought of what Max Jefferies had said about heroin. But if the windows were left unguarded with the curtains blowing in the delicious first breeze of a burning twenty-four hours, then anybody could get into the flat. She went and shut them.
Instantly the room turned hot again, but that was better than having men coming and going. She went to the escritoire; it appeared to be just as before, and Cam had said it was impossible to break it open, and she had queried why he should be so concerned for it.
She went back to her own room; and all thought of sleep had left her. Nothing had happened, that was the unbelievable thing. She was making an idiotic fuss about nothing. A man had been in the flat, a man who had disappeared so quickly that surely he could have been the creature of her imagination, she told herself, yet to her he had been real enough.
The uneasiness grew.
At one point in the night she was telling herself. ‘This is a haunted island, an island which means harm to us,’ and she went and searched the flat again. Nothing was wrong. Cam was peacefully asleep, and the closed windows of the very hot room alongside had not been tampered with.
I must calm down, she thought.
Then, as she sat on the bed, still dubious, she saw the first pallid light coming into the sky. A goat bleated in the distance, there came the sound of a late car in the street beyond. Or was it a very early car? It could have been either.
A little later she went and had a bath, and was refreshed again. She dressed, because there was no point in hanging about as she had been doing. She heard the arrival of Carmina, and a little later coffee and croissants appeared for her. She did not want them. For one horrible moment she wondered if she was going to be ill, and knew that would be the wo
rst thing that could happen to her.
She went to Cam.
He woke up much better, ‘Like this,’ he said, ‘we shall be flying back before your mother gets here.’
‘You’re not fit for it yet.’
‘I want to get home as soon as I can. It could be wise for me.’
‘I’d like to get you back before Mother gets out here, anyway,’ she agreed.
‘We’ll do that,’ he said.
She did not tell him about the dreadful night, and the man she was sure had got in, and again was convinced was searching for the parcel. She did not want to distress him, and there was nothing that he could do.
When Dr Mallea came, he said that Cam was very much better. He would soon be himself again, but it was the dangerous time when a patient took risks, and this must not be allowed. He must rest through the day, do nothing, and have no anxiety of any sort. But his diet could be increased, and he could sit up in bed. To Cam this was a tremendous step in the right direction.
When the doctor had gone again, Mandy rang Luis.
‘I want to thank you for the most beautiful flowers. I got them when I came in last night. They were too lovely, and I was enchanted with them.’
‘You went out? I hope not alone?’
‘To tell you the truth, Max Jefferies was with me,’ and she said it in a low voice.
‘I hate giving advice which may not be wanted, but if I were you, I think I should leave him severely alone. Somehow I do not think that he is your sort.’
‘I have hardly attracted him,’ and she spoke quickly. ‘He seems to have been seeking me out. He was in the patio the other night when Cam was so ill; I don’t know what he wanted, and I had some difficulty in getting rid of him.’
‘You could always call the police.’