“I can’t say any of that to Jack Kennedy, Tom,” Margaret Thatcher objected. “Not right now, anyway. Perhaps, tomorrow when I have had a little rest?”
What terrified Tom Harding-Grayson was that she did not sound as if she cared one way or the other. It was as if she had divorced herself from things, lost interest.
“Yes, you should rest, Margaret,” Willie Whitelaw agreed, rising to his feet and gesturing for the Foreign Secretary to leave ahead of him.
The Prime Minister made no sign of noticing their departure.
Chapter 47
Marija and Peter had turned the downstairs living, or as it was more usually called in Malta, the ‘family’ room of the small house into a bedroom when Rosa had been discharged from hospital in Mdina. There was a second small bed room upstairs but the stairs would have been a problem for her at that time because she was still in plaster. A single wood-framed cot had been acquired and squeezed into the space beneath the window and in the weeks since she had moved back to Kalkara, Rosa had begun to make the room her own. By some miracle the window had not blown in, or out, and the room had survived the bombardment completely untouched.
Rosa had pulled up a chair and watched Alan Hannay sleeping on her bed. She had cleaned up his head wounds — two superficial but nasty gashes to his scalp, applied a little liniment to his bruised mottled right cheek and persuaded him to take off his shirt, so that she could liberally apply more of the same calming balm to his bruised, literally black and blue, ribs — and afterwards he had needed no encouragement to stretch out on her cot.
“This is awfully good of you,” he had muttered, embarrassed and promptly fallen asleep.
Rosa had lost track of time as she watched over him. He murmured incomprehensibly in his unconsciousness, perhaps reliving the horrors he had witnessed on HMS Talavera’s burning deck. She had wasted no time worrying about the fact that she hardly knew the young naval officer; that they had never actually walked out together, only ever really met in passing and never had the opportunity to privately talk to each other about anything in particular. He had looked at her in that special way from the start. The first time they met she had been a bandaged mess, in plaster and yet he had still looked at her in that very special way. He had always looked at her as if she was special and nobody had ever done that before. She had been slow to reciprocate but by the time she was recovering and able to move — albeit with great clumsiness, difficulty and no little pain — around St Catherine’s Hospital for Women, Alan who regularly looked in to say ‘hello’ to Marija, had begun to seek her out. Again, just to say ‘hello’. Now and then they would pass a few minutes together, usually in the company of other women, nurses and patients, in the courtyard before he had to rush off on his latest errand. He had of course, been Admiral Christopher’s flag lieutenant in those days, with practically no time for himself, let alone anybody else. Less than a week ago — although it seemed longer, a scene from another age — in the moments before he drove Peter Christopher to the docks and HMS Talavera left harbour for three days of sea trials he had shyly suggested they might ‘go out for dinner’ on his return. Rosa’s heart had very nearly failed her; by then she had been hopelessly smitten, hanging on his every word, longing for his next passing visit and his every spoken syllable turned her previously cold, lonely world upside down.
Now at last she had Alan Hannay to herself.
The day had turned to evening, and then night had fallen.
It was a clear night and Rosa’s eyes had adjusted to the gloom.
The man stirred and blinked at Rosa.
She had offered him a glass of water and he had drunk deep.
She had taken his hand stroked and squeezed it comfortingly.
“Sorry,” he murmured. “Don’t know what came over me,” he yawned, his thoughts still scrambled. “How long have I…”
“Several hours. You were exhausted,” Rosa cooed.
“I suppose I must have been,” he conceded, attempting to prop himself on an unsteady elbow. He slumped back. “I thought I was dreaming but I wasn’t.”
Rosa was proud that she had never been anything other than proper in her relations before and during her unhappy marriage. She had not used her husband’s obvious physical indifference to her as an excuse to consider, or even contemplate unfaithfulness. She had never so much as flirted with another man. She knew she was attractive to men; the boys had always circled her at school. Yet her husband whom she had convinced herself she loved had, after coldly, mechanically consummating their marriage abjured all physical contact with her for long periods. Until the war he had occasionally come to her bed but after each of those cold-hearted couplings she had felt used, unhappier and less sated than ever; but now her husband was gone and she was a free woman again, if not in the sight of the law then certainly, in her own head.
“I almost lost you,” she said timidly, in a tone so tremulous that had she not formed the words in her own mouth she would not have recognised the stranger’s voice.
“Sorry,” he grinned lopsidedly. “I’ll try to be more careful next time.”
Rosa was in a daze, her thoughts churning.
She stood up and in an ever deepening trance collected the hem of her dress in her hands, lifted it over her hips and over her head in a single dreamy movement. She paused, feeling her face flush with heat. Her mouth was dry and she did not trust herself to speak. She did not dare to meet the man’s gaze as she unhooked her bra and slipped off her knickers.
“Rosa, I…”
She reached for his hand, pressed it to her belly.
“I want this,” she blurted in breathless whisper.
The man had levered himself off the bed, self-consciously discarded his borrowed trousers without daring to look again at the woman and together they had, awkwardly, mindful of each other’s minor fresh in his case, and in her case healing old injuries, eventually and in a shroud of almost suffocating embarrassment arranged themselves uncomfortably, face to face in the narrow cot, he on his left side, she on her right and although touching each other involuntarily somehow, remained impossibly a little apart like the innocents abroad that they both for all the madness of their lives, remained.
“Gosh,” Alan Hannay confessed, “look, I don’t know how to say this, but… You should know I’ve never done this before.”
They had contrived to lie together in the darkness for some minutes barely touching.
“Never?”
“I was a bishop’s son, you see,” he explained lowly. “And until lately most girls of my acquaintance thought I was rather a swot. Putting on the Queen’s uniform rather improved things but then the war came along, and well, what with one thing and another I really didn’t have much time or reason to socialise, or to meet girls. And I well; basically, I never was the sort of chap to take liberties…”
Tentatively, Rosa pressed her face to his, sought out his mouth and kissed him. She was trembling with something akin to terror for moment, shocked that she could be acting so brazenly but all those fears and doubts faded in an instant.
He kissed her back, as uncertainly, their lips pressing, open together.
Her mouth was soft, warm, wet.
Rosa tried to draw him against her but he flinched, could not suppress a groan.
“Sorry,” he moaned, “I don’t remember much about it but the Master at Arms said I fell off the dashed stern house quite early in the battle. I think I probably cracked a rib.”