Everyone Brave Is Forgiven(99)

When the signals officer on the ramparts of Fort St. Elmo put down his binoculars and reported that the fishing boat had gone out of visual range, the brass bands were stood down. Officers and men folded their parade uniforms and put on the frayed and malodorous battle dress that they had lived in these many months. The admiral’s launch was returned to its mooring and covered with the stained tarpaulin that made it look, from the air, like any of the harbor’s little boats. Its tank was drained of diesel oil, which was needed for the electric generators in the forts. The admiral himself, who was on the same rations as the men, found that he could barely lift his arm to return the salute when his subordinate came to report that the operation had been a success.

The scraps of food that the fishermen had left were collected into a basket, covered with a cloth, and taken to the central stores to be allocated to one of the batches of soup that would be distributed to the starving garrisons.

“Well,” said Simonson, his feet up on Alistair’s metal desk, “you are not a handsome man, but I will admit that your plan went off well.”

“The men were magnificent, weren’t they?”

“I daresay they needed it. Nice to be the ones dishing it out for once.”

Alistair lurched, sat down on his cot and closed his eyes.

“All right?” said Simonson.

“Give me a moment. I’ll be fine.”

Simonson lit a cigarette, rocked back on his chair, and exhaled. “I don’t think you will be fine, Alistair.”

“No, I don’t suppose I will.”

“Do you think we might get that arm taken off for you now?”

“The surgeon still feels I can keep it.”

“We wouldn’t be keeping the surgeon if we had any choice. He is a sawbones and I’ll bet he learned medicine at the Army Veterinary College.”

“Then be glad he hasn’t put me down.”

“But he is killing you, isn’t he, in his way? Letting your arm fester like this? Look at you—it’s up to your shoulder.”

Alistair tried to think, through the nausea. “We haven’t had much luck, have we, with the men who’ve gone into his theater?”

“We’d get you a Navy surgeon. They’d pipe you aboard, whip the arm off, and send you away with rum. We’d just have to watch they didn’t issue you with a hook hand and a parrot—you know the Navy.”

Alistair cradled the arm. “I’m not sure.”

“Think of that girl of yours. She’d put you straight.”

“She still doesn’t write.”

“But I shall still have to write to her, if you die from this infection. You know how I hate writing those letters.”

“Drop it, won’t you? It makes me nervous when you’re tedious.”

“It makes me tedious when you’re dying. Be a good chap, won’t you, and get the arm taken off? Then I can have you evacuated. There’s an orderly queue of cripples and grotesques. As soon as your number comes to the top of it, they fly you home on the mail plane.”

“I’d rather stay and help.”

“You’re no help dead.”

The sirens sounded. Simonson stood wearily.

“Enjoy every moment,” said Alistair.

“Will you think about what I said, and let me have your answer?”

Alistair turned away, then nodded.

“Good man.” Simonson put on his cap and left, and the garrison crept back into its shell to take another beating.

Alistair looked out over the harbor. He heard the aircraft before he saw them. They came in as they always did, from the north, and he steadied his field glasses to watch them. They were Heinkels, lined up along the horizon with their fighter escort larking above. The RAF had nothing to put up against them and so there was nothing for the German fighters to do. Alistair imagined they practised aerobatics and scored the others’ maneuvers for aesthetics and technical difficulty, while far beneath them the grubby Heinkels laid their turds of high explosive.

Through the glasses one could sometimes catch a glimpse of a bomber pilot through the frontal glass of his aircraft. They still wore jackets and ties to the fight. Alistair tried to make out the pilots’ faces, but they were too distant. He would have liked to know how the enemy looked as he approached the Maltese coast.

Alistair tracked the bombers until they were almost overhead and the stonework blocked his view. The fort’s Bofors guns and 3.7s opened up. It was not the ceaseless barrage it had been a year ago. Now, having little ammunition, the gunners did their best. The bombs began to fall. Alistair was too weak to go down to the shelters and he sat on an empty ammunition box, took up the brushes with his left hand and worked at the restoration. The explosions made dust. Grit got into the thinners.

He had cleaned every part of the painting now, making good around twenty square inches a day. The Madonna, now that she was freed from her soot, was a catch. She made Alistair forget the hunger and the nausea of his infection. He had long ceased to make any distinction between his own Mary and the one who was restored, inch by inch, as he worked. Bombs hammered down, falling all around the fort, cratering its great courtyard. Alistair ignored them. He hardly worked, simply looked back at Mary. The poison from his arm slowed his mind.

He had started with the hem of her dress, working up the lines of the obscurest folds, perfecting the mix of the thinners and learning the minimum pressure required to shift the grime and soot. Next he had moved on to the dress’s salients, revealing profane shifts of red. Her hair came next, imperfect, tangled here and there, swept back from the face but otherwise scarcely tamed. After two months he had trusted his technique sufficiently to expose her hands, and finally her face.