Marija had not had the heart to tell the good Arch Bishop that his church did not hold a patch on the Cathedral of St Paul’s in the Citadel at Mdina, where she and her Peter had been married only seventy-one days ago. That would have been rude and un-Christian and besides, Lord Franks had been quite explicit about how he expected the two young couples to ‘play the game’.
Lord Franks and his wife, a kindly and very distinguished lady, had entertained the newcomers to an English tea the day after their arrival in Philadelphia. Significantly, the men from the Ministry of Information had been summarily excluded from the tea.
‘Things may be a little bit sticky at present,’ the Ambassador had admitted. ‘Back home there is no doubt a lot of loose talk about how the Americans have let us down, and so forth. That is not how most decent, hard-working, family-loving, God-fearing Americans view the situation. By the way, most Americans are transparently decent, hard-working, family-loving, God-fearing and instinctively welcoming in my experience and this is my second stint over here as Ambassador.’
The Christophers and the Hannays had listened respectfully.
‘The Kennedy Administration has not betrayed us. The United States is a democracy and the President cannot lead his people where they will not go. This is election year and if President Kennedy sends American GIs to the Middle East he will be swept away in a landslide in November. You will find that the rhetoric and distemper of the American TV, radio and printed press is directed not at Britain, or at British people but at the British Government, and at what many Americans still perceive to be British Imperial pretensions. You will — generally speaking — be welcomed with open arms wherever you go providing,’ Lord Franks had counselled, ‘that you do not allow yourself to get drawn into politics. Under no circumstances are you to offer any opinion, positive or otherwise on the American body politic, its Byzantine machinations or upon the character or sayings of any of its players. Other than when you are in this building you should say nothing whatsoever about politics to anybody.’
Marija’s husband had whispered to her afterwards that if they were not in the Embassy they ought, actually, to assume that their conversation was being ‘bugged’. She thought he was being a little bit paranoid and had indicated as much.
‘We are a long way from home here, my love,” he had sighed.
In the back of the Embassy car the two young women were tempted to pinch themselves. Life was suddenly even more marvellous. Marija had accepted that sooner or later she would have to leave Malta; she had never dreamed it would be in these circumstances or that she would be accompanied by her best friend.
“I wish we were going down to Norfolk with ‘the boys’,” Rosa decided, catching her breath and watching the streets rush past the window.
“We’d only get in the way,” Marija giggled.
Rosa giggled, also.
Their husbands had spent most of yesterday clambering over big grey warships in the Philadelphia Naval Yard; tomorrow there was talk of a helicopter ride out to a re-commissioned guided missile destroyer conducting trials just off the coast.
The men from the Ministry of Information had scheduled meetings with Congressmen and various other luminaries at City Hall, the American version of Parliament, tomorrow for the two women. Rosa thought it sounded dreadfully boring; secretly Marija was actually quite excited about the prospect.
But then everything was exciting about America!
Marija understood that she and Peter had been sent across the Atlantic to be ‘ambassadors’; she understood why she was being treated like minor royalty and that everybody she met was on their best behaviour. But even so she was beginning to form a real feeling for the country around her, the sprawling mass of its cities, of a population descended from a hundred different races, tribes, places and religions all thrown together into a single bewildering, fascinating melting pot.
She had been born into and raised in a society which was, albeit on a vastly smaller scale, just such a melting pot. Her father was half-English, half Maltese distantly descended probably from Jews expelled from Spain around the time of Christopher Columbus, her mother was Sicilian, her maternal grandparents were possibly from southern Italy, she almost certainly had the blood of Phoenicians, Greeks and Carthaginians in her veins and yet she was Maltese. She was Maltese in the same way that all the people around her, regardless of their ancestry and family traditions were American. Of course, nothing was that simple. She might be Maltese but she had married an Englishman; her children would be Maltese-English or English-Maltese, it mattered not which, like her own father. If the wheel turned once, it soon turned again for that was the way of the World. Another complication: if they were to be in American two years not only would her first child be born in America, but possibly her daughter’s younger brother or sister too before she and Peter returned home. Wherever home was to be?
“You haven’t been listening to a word I’ve said!” Rosa complained with laughing eyes.
Marija shrugged apologetically and brushed the palm of her right hand across her abdomen. Rosa had that dark, Norman look about her sometimes. Of the two women she was the more naturally curvaceous, flashing-eyed. Rosa had always had boys in tow in her teens. Hers was an old Maltese family with a lineage mapped back ten generations; such short genealogies were superficial in the history of ancient Malta. In the last thousand years Norman knights, Christian crusaders, Ottoman Turks, Barbary pirates and the human flotsam of a score of wars had swept around, through, and sometimes washed up on Malta’s unforgiving rocky shores. Marija was nutmeg-haired and almond-eyed, Rosa was dark haired and her complexion fairer, both were equally the children of their tiny archipelago situated at the crossroads of the Mediterranean, fought over, broken and rebuilt countless times through history; once pagan then Christian, Moorish and Christian again. Although they came from a place that would probably fit inside the geographical footprint of greater Philadelphia the two women were oddly at home in America…
CLANG!
The women looked to each other.
The driver gunned the Embassy car’s engine hard; Marija and Rosa were forced back into their seats.
Suddenly they grasped each other’s hand.
CLANG!
Splinters of glass sprayed into the car.
Behind their heads the rear window blew out.
Chapter 30
Lieutenant-Commander Walter Brenckmann junior had been standing duty as Officer of the Deck shortly after dawn forty-eight hours ago when the Australian destroyer had approached Carrier Division Seven at flank speed with her bridge signal lamps blinking angrily.