Marija watched over her husband.
She felt a little guilty abandoning her friends in Mdina. Also, for so meekly surrendering St Catherine’s Hospital to the tender mercies of the Military Administration; Margo would never have run away or surrendered anything but she was not Margo; any more than she was just a younger replica of her own Mama, whom she loved dearly and fondly respected despite her old-fashioned, quirky and stiflingly limited perspective on the outside World. Margo had had big dreams; her mother no ambitions beyond her immediate family, her husband and her children. Although first and foremost Marija planned to be a good wife and mother; she wanted to live her own life and when she had lived that life for however long it lasted in this changed new post-cataclysm World, she hoped to have as few regrets and as few unanswered questions as possible. Wherever Peter went, she would follow.
Marija distractedly stroked her husband’s head, slowly losing herself in her tiredness and her thoughts.
“Excuse me, Mrs Calleja-Christopher.”
Marija realised she must have dropped off to sleep.
She looked up into the youthful face of a man who seemed very familiar. It irked her not to be able to immediately put a name to his face. He had spoken in Maltese, quietly, respectfully and a little sheepishly.
“Forgive me. We met once or twice when you were leading the Women of Malta protests outside the gates to Manoel Island last year,” the man who was about her own age explained. “You probably don’t remember me…”
“Mr Boffa,” Marija recollected, without confidence. “Paul, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” the man agreed with relief. He squatted down so that his eyes were on a level with Marija’s. “I was honoured to be permitted inside the Cathedral at your wedding. Sir Julian arranged for me to have a pass on account of my being the editor of The Times of Malta. Well, the temporary editor, the board hasn’t actually met to confirm my post or anything very much at all really this year. After the bombing raid in December some colleagues and I decided to try to keep the paper in print, and your good friend the late Lieutenant Siddall pulled strings to get us back into production soon after Sir Julian arrived in Malta. You wrote a fortnightly diary about the Women of Malta for my predecessor as editor until the bombing in December but I was only a stringer in those days…”
The visitor realised he was talking too much and shut up.
Marija waved him to sit near her on the floor. She also put her finger to her lips and glanced down at her fitfully sleeping husband.
“A stringer?” She asked in a whisper.
“I was paid per column inch of script that appeared in the paper. I wasn’t even a full-time journalist in those days…”
“Oh,” Marija murmured. She looked down at her sleeping husband’s face. “I don’t think my brave husband has slept for at least two days,” she explained, proudly, tenderly stroking his face.
“This is awkward,” the other man confessed. “I feel like I am intruding…”
Marija studied Paul Boffa. The stubble on his young chin was more down than beard. Like her he was a Maltese native who had seen far too much grief and suffering in his as yet half-lived life. They were both of the generation who might yet hold the future of their home islands in their hands.
“I did not know that my father-in-law,” she involuntarily crossed herself at mention of her husband’s slain father, “was involved in helping your paper. But,” she smiled sadly, “I should not be surprised. I read the story you printed about my brother Samuel being an innocent pawn in that dreadful business with the sinking of HMS Torquay. I wondered at the time if Sir Julian was behind that.”
“All the rumours about your brother must have been horrible for you, Mrs…”
“Please. We are hiding in a bomb shelter and our islands are in ruins around us. I am Marija. May I call you Paul?”
“Yes, yes, of course. I would be…” Paul Boffa was about to say that he would be ‘honoured’ to call her Marija. He thought better of it at the last moment, perhaps realising that she would tease him for his cupidity. This he knew because her kind smile told him she saw right through him. “Air Vice-Marshal French’s information officer said it would be all right if I talked to you and Commander Christopher,” the flustered journalist went on. “But this obviously isn’t a good time…”
Marija took pity on her compatriot.
“You may talk to me. If he wakes up my husband will talk to you. For him it would be rude not to talk to you. For me, well, I chose to talk to you because I want my husband’s story to be told first in Malta.”
This utterly perplexed the youthful editor of The Times of Malta.
“I was fortunate to get to know my husband’s father a little. The first time we met I was a little afraid he would think of me as less than his son deserved. A grasping little Maltese hussy. I even suspected that he might put obstacles between us. Instead, he ‘approved’ of me so much that I think I became his ‘daughter-in-law in waiting’ even before I met Peter.”
Paul Boffa was struggling with his shorthand pad.
“I didn’t sharpen my pencil,” he apologised.
Marija giggled, her husband blinked awake and she stroked his brow. He slept again.
“Today Peter and I belong to Malta but tomorrow,” she hunched her shoulders resignedly, “that will be over, for a while at least. So we will talk now while we can.”
“Is it really true that you and Commander Christopher never met until HMS Talavera came to Malta?”
“Yes. We were pen friends from when we were thirteen.”
“When you were thirteen you were still…”
“In hospital. At Bighi, mostly held together with metal,” she recollected ruefully. She stroked her husband’s sleeping cheek. “I think I loved him from the start, but it was different for him. I think he loved me for a long time but never knew it until the night of the war…”
“Love you…” The unconscious man murmured complacently.
Marija and the journalist were silent for some seconds.
Around them quiet voices echoed down the corridors, distantly a typewriter clattered, and the far away rumble of the diesel generators provided a continual, low-level background hum.
“The funny thing is,” Marija went on, “whenever I heard Peter had been involved in this or that battle I was never surprised. When his ship was bombed in the Atlantic off Cape Finisterre I thought I might have lost him. I fainted when I heard he was all right. Then there was that fight off Lampedusa when poor Captain Penberthy lost his foot and Peter had to take command of the whole squadron, and later the dreadful fight to save the USS Enterprise. I sort of expected him to be, I don’t know, heroic. Because he just is. Heroic, I mean. My sister, Rosa and I, we were high on the hill above Kalkara on Friday when HMS Talavera raced out of the Grand Harbour like a greyhound. The big shells were landing all around her and she was running up all the flags her people could find in her flag lockers; and she looked so brave and so small as she disappeared from sight behind Fort Ricasoli…”
Marija’s voice tailed away, she was a little embarrassed by how dreamy her words must have sounded.
“A little later I felt death. I think that was when my friend Margo Seiffert was murdered but at the time I was afraid it was my husband.” She wiped away a tear, sniffed. “God is sometimes merciful.”
“You felt death?”
“How could one not feel it at such a time?”
Paul Boffa was too shell shocked to pursue this further.
“I am intruding,” Paul Boffa mused aloud. “I will leave you in peace. But first, may I ask a last question, Marija?”