Alan Hannay laughed and shook his head.
Marija was positively glowing.
Rosa walked with him to the car; giving the newlyweds a chance to complete their lengthy and very tactile ‘farewell’ routine.
“Will you be gone for many days?” She asked shyly.
“A day or two. Maybe three. Trials, that sort of thing. We’ll shoot off a few rounds; let the new chaps blaze away at an oil drum with the new anti-aircraft guns the yard welded onto our stern house. Oh, and exercise with the new torpedo tubes, I suppose. That should be fun, lots of high speed runs and fast turns. The thing is to see if anything breaks,” he continued assuredly as if he was an old hand with twenty years experience under his belt. “That’s what Miles says, anyway.”
Rosa liked Miles Weiss, the destroyer’s youthful Executive Officer. He and Peter Christopher had been catapulted into their present, elevated positions by the death and wounding of friends and senior officers, and subsequently earned their confirmation in those roles by virtue of the decisive and courageous way in which they had responded to their new responsibilities.
Out of the corner of his eye Alan Hannay saw his commanding officer reluctantly disentangling himself from his wife’s embrace.
“Perhaps, you’d allow me to take you out when we get back?” He suggested to Rosa, his voice quavering with the tiniest hint of nerves. “You know, to celebrate being separated from the cast on your leg?”
“Yes,” Rosa whispered, almost inaudibly.
Marija joined her and together they watched the battered old Austin that Alan Hannay, as HMS Talavera’s Supply officer, had requisitioned — nobody knew from whence, as ‘ship’s officers transportation’ soon after the destroyer was surrendered into dockyard hands — disappear up the hill.
The high overnight clouds were scudding into the northern sky, and overhead there was a carpet of perfect azure blue. It was going to be a warm day, a clear day; a good day for watching ships coming and going through the Grand Harbour breakwaters.
The two women set off a snail’s pace after an early breakfast of bread and a little cheese, a few olives and English milky tea. Rosa struggled a little with her crutches until she found a rhythm and Marija was in no hurry. The hospital was less than a mile from the house in Kalkara and it was a bright, optimistic morning.
“You are looking more like yourself, sister,” Marija observed after the women had been walking ten minutes.
Rosa thought about arguing. She was a little hot and bothered from the unusual exertions of the day thus far but she took comfort from knowing that Lieutenant Hannay had not seen her like this. Otherwise she could not deny that she was feeling much better in herself than she had for a long time. It was only now, comparing the friendless misery of the last year of her marriage with her current situation — seemingly surrounded by real friends — that she realised how desperately unhappy she had been with Samuel.
When she had first overhead the malicious gossip that Sam was a Soviet agent provocateur, possibly a member of Red Dawn, she had not been as surprised as she ought to have been; it was as if she had always known something was wrong, that something had been awry in Sam’s life long before he had married her. Suddenly, she had an explanation for his moodiness and, well, coldness towards her. If he was a terrorist — the word made her inwardly shudder — things began to add up. Of course, it was all the perfect clarity of hindsight. Before HMS Torquay was sabotaged, before Sam had disappeared and the security police working for Colonel Rykov had rounded up the ‘real’ terrorists, she had never have believed a word of it. Not a single word of it.
“I look a mess,” Rosa said.
“Your hair has grown back to hide the bumps and most of the pink bits,” Marija retorted. Scars were just ‘pink bits’ to Marija and nobody was about to get into a fight with her, of all people, about it. “And as soon as that plaster cast is off you’ll be back to normal in no time.”
“I’m all skin and bones and I feel like I’m squinting at people with my bad eye!”
“Margo says even that will get better eventually, sister.” Marija stopped, having got a couple of paces ahead of her sister-in-law. She was unaccustomed to inadvertently walking faster than a companion; people usually had to moderate their pace to not leave her behind. “Besides, nobody can tell you are squinting.”
“Are you sure?”
“Lieutenant Hannay seems quite taken with you exactly the way you are, sister.”
Rosa coloured in an agony of embarrassment.
Marija remembered, belatedly, that her sister-in-law had wanted to keep her infatuation with the young naval officer private. Mortified by her insensitivity — her own happiness was blinding her to the preoccupations of others, which was inexcusable — she put on her contrite face and put an arm around the other woman.
“I’m sorry. Ever since Peter came to the Hospital that day after I fell over I’ve been walking on air. It is all I can do to remind myself I can’t actually run. I keep catching myself about to break into a run. It is so silly, I know, but there it is. But things have been awful for you and all I do is flaunt my happiness in front of you. I am truly sorry, sister. Can you forgive me?”
Rosa felt salty moisture trickling down her face from her stinging eyes.
The women hugged.
“Lieutenant Hannay really does like me?” Rosa queried presently, as she, and Marija, both dried their tears.
“He seems to, sister.”
“I shouldn’t be so excited about it, I know. I’m still married. Nobody knows what really happened to Sam…”
The preparations for the re-taking of Cyprus had prevented salvage operations getting under way to comprehensively survey and eventually, raise the two sunken sections of HMS Torquay. The sunken frigate had had her magazines emptied before she was refloated and was therefore, deemed, as shipwrecks go, ‘safe’. Thereafter, salvage operations had never had a high priority once it was clear that the wreck posed no major hazard to navigation within the Grand Harbour. Moreover, Rosa had been warned by Margo Seiffert that even if human remains were eventually recovered from the wreck the likelihood of being able to categorically identify them as being the mortal remains of Samuel Calleja were remote. In time Rosa might be able to persuade a court to certify her husband as deceased, but until then she was in limbo.
The women trudged slowly towards the gates to the Royal Naval Hospital.
In asserting her new found authority as Medical Director of the Malta Defence Force, Margo Seiffert had succeeded in re-opening each and every one of the old fissures in her relations with the medical establishment of the archipelago. Those wounds had been papered over and a large fund of goodwill built up by the contribution Margo, and her cadre of auxiliary nurses, had made in dealing with the avalanche of casualties after the bombing in December. In a situation in which all of the existing hospitals had been damaged to some degree, and dozens of doctors, nurses and administrative staff killed and injured, Margo’s organisational prowess and her direct line to the Commander-in-Chief had enabled her to circumvent many of the normal bottlenecks, and her fifty plus additional trained ‘auxiliary’ nurses had helped to make a bad situation both tolerable and eventually, manageable. However, now that the immediate emergency was over, true to form, Margo and the medical establishment of the archipelago were at loggerheads again.
It was for this reason that Marija had offered to organise the twice weekly orthopaedic clinics at Bighi. She had put it to Margo that things would run a lot more smoothly if she let her do all the talking to Surgeon Captain Hughes — to whom she was a little princess and Margo was a ‘Meddling Yank’ — the Chief Administrative Officer of RNH Bighi. Consequently, Marija had liaised with Captain Hughes and explained to Margo that all she had to do was turn up on time, do her ‘doctoring’ and depart, hopefully, without ever having to meet any of the people she had upset, or anybody who had by their ‘smug, complacent, lethargic, lack of urgency’ so upset her in the past.