‘Really?’
‘Well, you’ve seen the pasting they’ve been taking down at Lazaretto Creek. And since Wanklyn came a cropper…’
The loss of the Upholder a couple of weeks back had rocked the whole garrison, right down to the man on the street. Subs had been lost before, subs driven by good men known to all, men who had once lit up the bar at the Union Club and whose bones were now resting somewhere on the seabed. ‘Wankers’ Wanklyn was different, though. A tall, softly spoken Scotsman with a biblical beard, he was modest in the way that only the truly great can afford to be. With well over 100,000 tons of enemy shipping under his belt and a Victoria Cross on his chest, he exuded a quiet invincibility which others fed off, drew strength from. Not one of his peers begrudged him his star status because he never once played to it; he just got on with the job. And now he was gone, sent to the bottom, a mere human being after all.
As the Information Officer, Max had been the first to learn of the Upholder’s fate. It was buried away in the transcript of an Italian broadcast—a brief mention of a nameless submarine destroyed in an engagement off Tripoli. He had made some discreet enquiries, enough to narrow the field to the Upholder, and then he had sat on the news for a couple of days.
Yes, he had wanted Wanklyn to prove him wrong, he had wanted to see the Maltese packing the bastions again, cheering the Upholder home, straining to see if there were any new chevrons stitched to the Jolly Roger she was flying. But he had known in his bones that it wasn’t going to happen, he had known that what he needed was a couple of days to figure out how to play it, how to soften the blow for his readers and listeners.
But that was then, and this was now, and while he understood that pulling the subs out of the island might be the judicious thing to do, he wasn’t thinking about his job and how he was going to break the news on the island, he was thinking about Mitzi. If the subs were really leaving, then she would be too; posted elsewhere with her husband. Where would they end up? Alexandria, probably. He wrestled with the notion—separated from Mitzi by nigh on a thousand miles of water—but it was too big and unwieldy to get a grip on.
Hugh misconstrued his silence as professionalism. ‘Mum’s the word, but I thought I should tip you the wink.’
‘Thanks, Hugh, I appreciate it.’
‘You’ll find a way to present it in a positive light, you always do.’ He rested a hand on Max’s shoulder. ‘Now go and join the other renegades in the crow’s nest. Freddie and Elliott are already up there. No Ralph, though—he called earlier to say he can’t get away.’
Max did as he was told, eager for the distraction of his friends, the chance to throw a blanket over his feelings. Villa Marija had been occupied by a naval officer before the war, and its large flat roof, still referred to as the crow’s nest, was where the younger crowd generally gathered to flap and caw. Anything under the age of thirty was deemed to be young, and you were never quite sure what you were going to find when you stepped from the stairwell into the glare.
There was usually a pleasing smattering of adolescent daughters in colourful home-stitched frocks, still coming to terms with their new breasts, which they wore with a kind of awkward pride. Circling them, inevitably, would be the younger pilots, barely more than boys but their speech already peppered with RAF slang. They were always taking a view on things—a good view, a dim view, an outside view, a ropey view—or accusing each other of ‘shooting a line’. Enemy bombers were ‘big jobs’, enemy fighters ‘little jobs’; the cockpit was their ‘office’; and they never landed, they ‘pancaked’. The thing they feared most in a flap was being bounced by a gaggle of little jobs from up-sun.
Sure enough, the pilots were there, a bevy of slender young things with flushed complexions hanging on their every word. Others hovered nearby, one ear on the tales of doughty deeds. The airmen were the only ones in the garrison capable of carrying the battle to the enemy, and their stories offered a tonic against the daily round of passive resistance.
Freddie and Elliott were well out of earshot at the far end of the roof terrace. Freddie was making good use of a large pink gin, his face a picture of evident distaste at whatever it was that the tall American was telling him. Max pushed his way through the throng towards them.
‘Gentlemen.’
‘Ah, Maximillian,’ said Elliott. ‘Just in time.’
‘For what?’
‘A little conundrum I was posing to Freddie here.’
‘Is that what you call it?’ grimaced Freddie.
‘Well, it sure is for their commanding officers.’
‘Sounds intriguing,’ said Max.
‘It rapidly becomes disgusting.’
Elliott laughed. ‘I hadn’t figured you for an old prude.’
‘It’s got nothing to do with prudishness,’ Freddie bristled. ‘It’s a question of…well, morality.’
‘Ah, morality…’
‘To say nothing of the law.’
‘Ah, the law…’ Elliott parroted, with even more scepticism.
‘You trained as a lawyer, you must have some respect for the law.’
‘Sure I do. You don’t want to screw with an institution that can send an innocent man to the electric chair.’ Elliott turned to Max before Freddie’s frustration could shape itself into a response. ‘You want to hear it?’
‘Fire away.’
‘It’s very simple. You’re a wing commander taking a break from it all up at the pilots’ rest camp on St Paul’s Bay. You know it? Sure you do, from when Ralph was wounded.’
‘I do.’
‘Then you can picture it. It’s late and, okay, you’re a bit tight. But, hey, who wouldn’t be, after all you’ve been through these past months? Anyway, you’re feeling good and you’re looking for your room. And you find your room. Only it isn’t your room. It’s someone else’s room. And that someone else is in what you think is your bed with someone else.’
‘You’re losing me.’
‘Stay lost,’ was Freddie’s advice.
‘There are two guys in the bed, okay? And they’re, well, I don’t how to put it…’
‘I think I get your meaning.’
‘Of course you do, you went to an English boarding school.’
‘As did you,’ said Freddie, ‘in case you’d forgotten.’
‘And a sorry dump it was too. Anyway, they’re good men, officers, both of them. One’s in your squadron, the other’s not, but you know him. And he’s a first-class pilot, reliable, what you fellows would call a “press-on” type…’ Elliot paused. ‘What do you do?’
‘What do I do?’
‘What do you do?’
‘Well, I order them to desist at once.’
Elliott laughed. ‘I think you can assume they desisted the moment you opened the goddamn door. Do you report them?’
‘Report them?’
‘To the Air Officer Commanding. It’s not a question of morality, or the law, or even of taste. I mean, I’ve never felt the need to place my penis in another man’s dung—’—‘Oh Christ,’ Freddie blurted into his gin—‘but it doesn’t stop me being able to make a judgement on the situation.’
Max thought on it. ‘I don’t report them.’
‘Why not?’
‘Morale. A squadron’s like a family.’
‘You’re