How much had changed! Yet over the long gap of four centuries, the forts, ramparts and ravelins of the Knights still stood massive in the sunshine — Senglea and St Michael, Birgu and St Angelo, and Fort St Elmo away to my left on the Valetta side of Grand Harbour. I had been reading up on the Great Siege when I first met Soo and it was she who had taken me to all sorts of places I would otherwise have missed. It was, in fact, the Great Siege that had brought us together, the beginning of our love, and seeing it again all bright on that cloudless morning brought a lump to my throat.
A sudden flurry of activity on the deck of the frigate brought my mind back from the past. The gangway staff had been alerted by the approach of a launch speeding across from Valetta, I watched as it came alongside the accommodation ladder, sailors with boathooks fore and aft and a naval officer stepping out and climbing quickly to the deck above. There was a twitter of bo's'n's pipes and I wondered if it was the Captain returning from a courtesy visit. Was it Lloyd Jones? Would he know about the Great Siege? Would that spark I had seen explode between them compensate for all the things Soo and I had shared? And then, more practically, I was looking at the frigate's superstructure, the tangle of radio and radar equipment. There, if the worst came to the worst, was the means of communicating with the outside world, if he would play.
That thought stayed in my mind all day. I needed to know what was happening back in Mahon, what my position was. I had been so convinced I would be in the clear by the time we reached Malta, and Evans?… surely they would have searched the villa by now? Lying in the broad double bunk in the port hull my mind went over and over the stupidity of it all. To fall into such a heavily baited trap — me, with all the experience I had of sailing close to the wind Christ! It was unbelievable.
And then, when I finally got off to sleep, there was the jar of a launch alongside, Maltese voices and the thump of feet on deck. It was the customs back again, this time with orders to search the boat, which they did from end to end, peering into all the bilges, prodding cushions and bedding and searching every locker, the engine compartments, too. Periodically I asked them what they were looking for, but each time the senior officer replied, 'A routine search. Nothing more. Just routine.'
They were on board the better part of two hours. When they left I was advised once again not to go ashore. 'And don't send any bags, laundry, anything like that ashore. You wait here until you are cleared, okay?'
Nothing is more demoralising than being confined on board a sailing boat in port and at anchor, nothing to do hut wait, and so many things I could have been doing ashore. Carp retired philosophically to his bunk, but though I followed his example, I couldn't sleep. After lunch I got the inflatable into the water and the outboard fixed to its bracket in readiness. If I had been on my own I think I would have risked it, but I had Carp to consider and so I sat there in the helmsman's chair watching the world go by, the sun hot on my bare shoulders, a drink in my hand and the sounds of Malta at work all about me.
Nobody else came out to us and time passed slowly. The flamboyantly painted dghajsasand ferries full of tourists scurried to and fro across the water between Valetta and Kalkara or Vittoriosa, and there were launches and service craft constantly moving among the vessels at anchor. lust before five the launch lying alongside the frigate's gangway was manned again and an officer appeared on the deck above. I got the glasses, but I couldn't be sure it was Lloyd Jones, the peak of his cap casting a shadow across his face. He was taken across the harbour to land by the Customs House where a car was waiting for him. Inside of an hour he was back on board. By then the sun was sinking over the Marsa township and the honey-coloured limestone of the older buildings ashore began to glow with a warmth that turned rapidly from gold to a fiery red.
By then the shipyard noises had been briefly swamped by the engines and horns of the rush-hour traffic. Lights appeared in the streets and on the wharfs, the windows of buildings blazed like a myriad fireflies, and suddenly the frigate was lit from end to end, a circlet of electric light bulbs. I think it was this that finally made up my mind for me. I went below, changed into a decent pair of trousers, put on a shirt and tie, then asked Carp to run me over to the frigate.
He looked at me hard for a moment, then he nodded. 'Okay, if that's what you want. You can always say it doesn't count — as going ashore, I mean.'
It took us less than five minutes to cross the flat calm strip of water that separated us from the frigate. The launch had been hoisted into its davits so that, once I had checked that Lloyd Jones was the frigate's captain and the Quartermaster had satisfied himself I really did know him, we were able to go straight alongside the accommodation ladder. 'Want me to wait for you?' Carp asked as I seized one of the stanchions and swung myself up on to the grating.
'No.' I didn't want it made that easy for them to get rid of me. 'Either they'll bring me back or I'll have them flash you up on their signal lamp.'
By the time I reached the frigate's deck Carp was already on his way back to the boat and a very young-looking officer was waiting for me. He confirmed that Lloyd Jones was the Captain and when I told him I was a friend, he asked me to wait while he phoned. He came back almost immediately with Gareth Lloyd Jones. He looked very smart in an open-necked shirt, immaculately white, black trousers and cummerbund, and the gold of his new rank bright on his shoulder boards, a smile on that pleasant open face of his. 'Mike. It's good to see you.' He held out his hand, seeming genuinely pleased. 'John, take Mr Steele up to my cabin,' he told the young officer, 'and have Petty Officer Jarvis get him a drink.' Then to me he said, 'You'll excuse me for a moment. There's a party going ashore for supper at the invitation of a Maltese wine company and I want to have a word with them before they leave.'
He left me then, climbing the ladder to the helicopter flight deck ahead of me and disappearing round the hangar on the port side. John Kent, a dark-haired, dark-browed young man, who proved to be one of the seamen officers, led the way for me, up to the flight deck, for'ard past the illuminated funnel and in through a watertight door to a passageway that led across to the curtained entrance to the Commanding Officer's day cabin. 'Make yourself at home, sir, while I find the Captain's steward.'
The cabin was a roomy one with a desk, two armchairs and a couch with a coffee table in front of it, and there was a small dining table by one of the two portholes with utilitarian upright chairs. The portholes, which had grips for steel shuttering, gave me a view of the concrete wall at the back of the quay and the lit buildings behind it rising to the back of the Senglea peninsula. There was nobody on the wharf or at the end of the shore-side gangway, which I could just see a short distance aft of where I was standing. The only sounds that penetrated the cabin were shipboard sounds of whining machinery and air-conditioning.
On the wall by the desk there was a telephone communications system, also a microphone and loudspeaker, and on the desk itself there was a naval manual of some sort, a Folio Society edition of Fitzroy's Voyage of HMS Beagle,a paperback copy of one of Patrick O'Brian's sea stories, also a framed photograph of Soo sunbathing on a rock. It looked like a picture I had taken myself, at Gala d'Alcaufar when we had first come to Menorca. It was a shock to have this visual evidence of how much my wife now meant to this man living a monastic existence on one of Her Majesty's ships.
'What would you care to drink, sir?'
I turned with a start to find a round-faced young man in dark blue, almost black, Navy trousers, and white shirt gazing at me curiously from the doorway. I ordered a gin and tonic and moved back to the porthole. There was movement now, a steady stream of sailors, all in civvies, looking clean and smart with their hair well brushed, moving down the gangway on to the wharf. I counted twenty-seven of them as they walked briskly across the wharf, separating into little groups as they disappeared from view round the corner of a storage shed. A moment later Gareth Lloyd Jones came in. 'Nobody offered you a drink?'