Chapter 23
Marija Calleja almost fainted when she walked into Margo Seiffert’s ground floor office and was confronted by the tall, uniformed figure of Staff Sergeant Jim Siddall of the Royal Military Police and the smaller, slighter presence of her irresponsible, reckless little brother. Joe Calleja grinned conspiratorially at his sister.
“Joe!” She said like an idiot. “Joe, I don’t…”
Brother and sister fell into an embrace which ended with the man exuberantly spinning Marija in a circle, her feet never touching the ground. However, sanity soon reasserted itself.
Disentangling herself from her brother Marija threw a confused, horribly conflicted look first at her friend Margo, than at the big Redcap.
The Director of the St Catherine’s Hospital for Women had remained seated behind her cluttered desk when the two men had jumped to their feet to greet Marija’s entrance.
“I’ve been ordered to release this little ‘troublemaker’ into your custody,” the man said flatly.
“My custody?”
The man nodded.
“I don’t understand, Jim?” It was odd using the man’s Christian name, somehow intimate when something inside her shrieked against even the suggestion of an intimacy that could never be. The last time they’d met she’d bidden him goodnight, sent him on his way as she would a friend. He’d always be ‘Jim Siddall’ to her now, never again the enemy. Yet she was aware how easily this tiny familiarity might be misinterpreted by others and it gnawed insidiously at her soul. She could feel her brother’s eyes narrowing, a seed of suspicion suddenly planted in his mind. Undaunted, she asked the one question she knew would inflame his doubt. “Is this something to do with what we spoke of the other night?”
“I don’t know,” the Redcap confessed as he reached into his breast pocket and retrieved a sheet of paper. “When I reported to HMS Phoenicia this morning the boys were sorting through a big stack of orders like this one.” He sighed, began to read: “Joseph Mario Calleja is hereby released into the custody of Miss Marija Elizabeth Calleja, currently registered as resident at St Catherine’s Hospital for Women in the Military District of Rabat. She is to be informed that the man in her custody is forbidden to enter the Military District of Valetta and, or the Three Cities. He is further barred without exception from entering the Military Districts of Gzira and Sliema until further notice...” He handed the single page of closely typed script to her.
It seemed that she was her brother’s keeper. His infractions would henceforth be considered as being her infractions and she would be jointly liable in the event he was found guilty of any offence — civil or criminal — or if he breached his ‘movement order’. The icing on the cake was that her brother was subject to a dusk to dawn curfew.
“Joe’s release is also conditional on his finding gainful employment within seven days,” the tall Redcap.
“That’s not a problem,” Margo Seiffert declared. “What was your trade in the dockyard, Joe?” She inquired, fixing Marija’s brother sternly in her sights.
“Er, electrician, ma’am,” he replied, wilting a little under Margo’s scrutiny. The older woman had always rather intimidated him. “And general ship fitting, low pressure plumbing, that sort of thing.”
“Marija says you are good at taking things apart and fixing them?”
“Yes, and that too, ma’am.”
“In that case St Catherine’s Hospital for Women has a new porter and odd job man. You will also run errands. Be aware that as a mere man in what is essential a matriarchal environment you will be right at the bottom of the pecking order. In my absence you will obey the direction of any female member of staff. Is that absolutely crystal clear, Joseph Calleja?”
Jim Siddall stifled a chuckle.
Marija’s brother nodded acknowledgment with the aplomb of a man who has just been struck over the head with a cricket bat.
“Whilst on the premises,” Margo concluded with maternal severity, “you will not flirt or in any way fraternize or distract any of my girls.”
“No, of course not, ma’am.”
“Good,” the Director of the St Catherine’s Hospital for Women said. She held the young man in her vice-like star a moment longer. Smiling a quirky, sympathetic smile she relented. “My girls call me Margo or Doctor Seiffert, Joe. I don’t mind which as long as they remember I’m the boss.”
“Yes, I see… Thank you, Doctor Seiffert.”
Jim Siddall slapped the younger man on the back.
“I have to go. I have other deliveries to make today,” he explained dryly. Marija walked with him out onto the cobbled plaza in front of the Cathedral.
“Thank you for being the one who delivered my brother to me.”
The man looked to his feet.
Marija stepped close to him and on tip toes brushed the side of his square jaw with a fleeting, pecking kiss.
She watched him drive away, her thoughts tumbling one over another.
Back in Margo’s office the Director of the St Catherine’s Hospital for Women was restating her brother’s duties and emphasising — as if he’d ever had any doubts on the matter — that she was the last person in the world he ever wanted to displease. In comparison to her the ‘British Imperialist Pigs’ were ‘Teddy Bears’. There were two rooms in the roof of the building, both partially filled with linen, bric-a-brac and odds and ends of furniture donated to the Hospital for which nobody had found a use. He was to clear one of the rooms and claim it as his ‘cell’.
“I’m sure Marija will show you around and introduce you to everybody.”
Marija noticed for the first time the brown paper bundle tied with string beside Margo’s cluttered desk and realised that it must contain her brother’s earthly possessions from his time in detention. She looked anew at Joe. He’d always been sinewy, slight of build like their father, whereas Samuel, their older brother had inherited their mother’s softer, hardier constitution and a tendency to accumulate girth. She was pleasantly surprised and somewhat relieved to discover that whatever else the British had done to Joe they obviously hadn’t been starving him. Her little brother seemed almost well fed, lacking the hungry gauntness of many of the young men she saw in the streets. He looked pale, otherwise fit although his hair was over his ears and tousled, very Elvis Presley. It was a mystery to her how a would be Marxist-Leninist dockyard agitator like her brother could be so addicted to the persona and the music of somebody that was the living embodiment of the creeping global Americanisation that he’d professed to have so despised since he was a teenager. Joe had been the despair of their mother, every inch the black sheep of the family. Samuel, their elder sibling, had followed their father into the docks, become an under-manager just before the war and moved into a company house in Kalkara. Marija had inadvertently become the saintly daughter of the family. Poor Joe, how was he ever going to compete with his siblings? No matter that he was their mother’s favourite. Sam had always resented that, Marija suspected although she never talked to him about such things. Sam had always been a very private person and she’d respected that although she still regretted how they’d drifted apart after he’d married a plump girl — Rosa — from Valetta. Rosa was the only daughter of an old Valetta family who’d made it plain — in a dozen little ways that only Marija and her mother truly understood, as women from time immemorial had understood and no man could ever understand — only tolerated the upstart Callejas because she adored Sam. Marija had tried to be friendly; to no avail and then the war had come and she and Sam had broken with each other over her prominent role in the Women’s Protest Movement… After that being friends with her sister-in-law hadn’t seemed that important any more.