Everyone Brave Is Forgiven(61)
“Well of course,” said Simonson. “They are the master plaice.”
While they both looked back at their wake, a floating mine bobbed in it. Only the topmost part, black and lethal with protruberances, broke surface in the troughs of the waves. They could only have missed it only by inches.
“Ah,” said Alistair, “the upwind mark. I must ask the Commodore to paint them a little brighter.”
They tacked the boat and had another look as they went back past.
“Would it have gone off if we’d hit it, do you suppose? With our wooden hull? Or do they only trigger by magnetism?”
“How curious are you to find out?”
“Absolutely not at all.”
“Let’s try to miss it all over again then, shall we?” said Alistair. “I suppose we ought to be getting home, in any case.”
“Oh god, is it wartime already?”
“Look on the bright side: it’ll be dinner when we get back.”
Simonson groaned. Dinner that night would be with the regiment in Valletta, in Fort St. Elmo at the mouth of Grand Harbour. Having shaved and dressed, they would go down into the bowels of the fortress that had survived Malta’s great siege in the sixteenth century. In the officers’ mess room they would sit at folding aluminium tables to eat the pitiful rations of the present blockade: a small lump of bully beef let down with flour and potato, and on every third day the tinned Maconochie’s stew that was so foul it was almost a blessing to have it in ever smaller quantities as the convoys became harder to fight through to the island.
Alistair grinned at his friend’s displeasure. He pulled in the beer net while Simonson let out the trawling line.
“Do me a favor?” said Simonson.
“Ask away,” said Alistair, prising the tops off the beers.
“If we don’t catch a fish, butcher me and tell the cook I’m pork.”
“Don’t flatter yourself that it hadn’t already occurred to me. I’m a sentimental fool for letting you have a beer first.”
They headed for the land, pointing in to St. Paul’s Bay where the apostle had been shipwrecked. Alistair had checked every particular of the account in Acts against the relevant Admiralty chart and found nothing wanting. He had been on Malta three months now and he liked the way the island lived in the full embrace of time. In London, bedded in its clay, one viewed history as a reworkable legend, a great entertainment of doubtful veracity and liable in any case to revision whenever the next mudlark waded into the Thames at low tide and pulled out some iconoclastic sherd.
London was a crowd-pleaser, a protestant, a voluntary amnesiac, living to disinter stories only to arrange their bones in a sly new order. But Malta was permanent rock, with barely an inch of topsoil. Time, having nowhere to hide, had colonized the surface instead and lay there with its full duration exposed. In niches in the limestone studded with fossil shells, Alistair had seen eight-thousand-year-old statuary hung with paper garlands on the feast days of the saints. In a tiny, dark, incense-smelling chapel into which he had strayed to have a moment away from the war, Alistair had found what he thought might be a Caravaggio. The priest had neither known nor minded—he had simply said that the painting was by a local artist.
Alistair finished his beer while it was still cold, and flipped the empty brown bottle over his shoulder into the depths. Their white wake hissed through the sea.
“What are you smiling about?” said Simonson.
“I had a love letter in this morning’s post.”
Simonson yawned. “I get three a week.”
“But my family is not disgustingly wealthy, so I can actually take it as proof of my looks.”
“Go to hell,” said Simonson, “and tell them I sent you.”
“I suppose you own the place.”
“Fifty-one percent, old boy. One maintains a controlling interest.”
“I’ll be sure to keep it warm for you. She is called Hilda, by the way.”
“I didn’t ask.”
“No, but you were curious.”
“My curiosity about you, Heath, is the curiosity Freud had for hysterics, or Mendel for peas. You help to confirm my theories.”
“She is called Hilda and she has fabulous eyes, like . . . well, I don’t know. Like themselves. They’re unique.”
Simonson looked thoughtful. “O Hilda, your eyes like a simile, you wrote to a commoner in the military.”
Alistair ignored him. “She declares her love in the first paragraph.”
“How impossibly vulgar. Oh, what now? What are you smirking about, vile man?”
“I’m flattered to have elicited such an unscientific response from you.”
“It is only that one cannot condone willfulness, in women or in horses.”
“I’ll be sure to let Hilda know. If you’ll loan me a sugar lump, I shall pop it in the envelope.”
“Surely you don’t plan to dignify her with a response?”
‘I can’t say I’ve given it much thought.”
Simonson ruffled Alistair’s hair. “That’s more like it.”
Alistair had, though. How honest and uncomplicated Hilda had been, snuggled up beside him at the Lyceum. It would have been convenient if he could have fallen in love with her, and not Mary. They could have gone on weekends away, the four of them, and laughed with pristine teeth like those chummy couples in the ads for Blackpool Beach.