Mark Mills - The Information Officer

There was no stopping it. What it would do when it reached the ceiling was anyone’s guess; structural engineering had never been his forte at college. Diagonal was bad, though; he knew that much. So was the fact that the doors in the apartment no longer closed properly.

His neighbors had long since fled, part of the great exodus that had all but emptied Valetta, Floriana, and the Three Cities, stuffing the surrounding towns and villages to bursting point. His refusal to budge had both puzzled and pleased them; at least someone was left to deter looters. But there was nothing noble and defiant in his decision to remain. From his bedroom window he had a direct view of Mitzi and Lionel’s flat in Valetta, and that kind of proximity was not something he’d been ready to give up. Well, not until now.

Theirs was a third-floor flat, large and light, overlooking Hastings Gardens. Max knew it well. He still had a key to the entrance door downstairs. The key was tucked away in the drawer of his bedside table, redundant for more than two months, ever since Mitzi’s abrupt termination of their relationship.

It had been hard to fault her logic.

“Everyone reaches for a crutch in war. That’s what we’ve done. We’re like two cripples leaning on each other. It can’t continue, Max. I’m a married woman. It has to stop.”

He knew her well enough by then not to argue. She rarely spoke in haste. She had thought the matter through and drawn her conclusion. Nothing he said or did would dissuade her.

“Okay.”

“I knew you’d understand.”

“I didn’t say I understood.”

They had been naked at the time. Five minutes later, he was fully dressed and heading home on foot, sticking to the shadows, as he always did. That’s when he remembered the key in his hip pocket. The black void beyond the bastion wall called out for it, but he kept it clutched tightly in his fist. He had always prided himself on his ability to cope with rejection, and he was happy to be able to ascribe the tears pricking his eyes to the dust carried on the stiff wind whipping through the streets.

His attitude had hardened considerably over the following days and weeks, especially when it became clear there was to be no change of heart on Mitzi’s part. Numb resignation slowly gave way to indignation, then to morose self-absorption.

Tellingly, Lilian was the first to note the change in him.

“What’s wrong?” she had asked as they were winding up one of their weekly meetings. “You’re not yourself.”

“Who of us is?”

She cocked her head at him as if to say, You’ll have to do better than that.

“I mean it. Life here … it’s like another incarnation. I can’t remember who I was.”

“So tell me.”

“What?”

“Tell me. It might help you remember.”

He spoke mostly about architecture, the curious and inexplicable passion that had nibbled at the fringes of his consciousness during childhood, and that he had finally acknowledged, just in time, a week shy of taking up the post he’d been offered by the Foreign Office while still a student at Oxford.

His university friends, taking the first teetering steps in their respective careers, were baffled by his decision to start over from scratch, dismissing it as the whimsy of someone who was an eternal student at heart, which probably wasn’t so far from the truth. His father, on the other hand, had embraced the idea. He’d even embraced Max—something he hadn’t done in years—congratulating him on his courage and offering to cover the cost of a small apartment in London for the duration of his studies.

His time at the Architectural Association had been a revelation, both thrilling and humbling after the dilettante posturing of Oxford, the endless round of dining clubs and debating societies. No one cared if he thought Ezra Pound or T. S. Eliot was the daddy of contemporary poetry. He felt stripped bare, naked, exhilarated. The work came first, their work, not someone else’s. He even learned to find beauty in the tedium of a technical drawing class, the utter silence of people doing rather than discussing. Yes, they talked about architecture—as he did now to Lilian—about its power to make the human spirit soar, and about the green shoots of the exciting new aesthetic pushing through the establishment soil. If he bored her, she didn’t show it.

That one conversation had marked a notable shift in their relationship. She might have been the instigator, but they both played their part in it. Almost imperceptibly, their weekly get-together became a twice-weekly get-together, and he found himself manufacturing further excuses to drop by the offices in Saint Paul’s Street whenever he was in town. The first time he invited her for a drink at the Union Club, it was on some doubtful professional pretext.

Perched on a chair in the ladies’ bar—amusingly nicknamed the snake pit, which didn’t amuse her—she told him the story of her father, a captain in the Yorkshire Light Infantry who had spent a year of his life on Malta, recuperating from injuries sustained in the Salonika campaign. Malta had catered to well over one hundred thousand sick and wounded during the Great War, and had come to be known as “the nurse of the Mediterranean.” Lilian’s mother, like so many other Maltese girls at the time, had been a volunteer nurse, and she’d lost her heart to the lanky Yorkshireman in her care, marrying him a few months before he was sent back to the front. George Flint wasn’t killed by a Bulgar bullet or bomb; he died from malaria in September 1918, a few days before the war in Salonika ended.

Her mother had never remarried, unable to square the concept with her faith, although it hadn’t stopped her from disappearing off to Italy a couple of years before the outbreak of war, on the arm of a visiting professor of archaeology from the University of Padua. This was the reason Lilian now lived with her aunt’s family in Mdina. The invitation to dinner there had followed a few weeks later.

With its walls and ramparts and sweeping views, Mdina reminded him of a number of hilltop towns he had visited in France with his father before the war, and while it lacked a cathedral to match those of Laon or Vézelay, it more than made up for this in other ways. As the seat of the Maltese nobility, its streets and squares were lined with stately palaces, mostly built in a restrained baroque style. The same graceful architecture was evident in the churches, convents, and seminaries that accounted for almost all the other buildings in the compact citadel. The effect was ordered, aristocratic, ecclesiastical; and an ancient peace seemed to hang over the place, a silence broken every so often by the slap and scuff of leather sandals on stone as friars and nuns shuffled about their business.

Lilian’s aunt, her mother’s younger sister, had married into one of the more ancient families, acquiring a convoluted title in the process, although she insisted on being addressed simply as Teresa. Her husband, the twentieth baron of something or other unpronounceable, was an officer in the Royal Malta Artillery. He commanded an antiaircraft battery near the fuel reservoirs at Birzebbuga in the south of the island, and he was rarely around, which left his wife, his niece, and his two young daughters free run of the palace on Bastion Square.

At dinner, Max had been a little put out to find himself seated next to Teresa at one end of the long table, while a handsome and amusing young captain with the 2nd Battalion Cheshire Regiment monopolized Lilian at the other end. He drew some consolation from the fact that Teresa appeared to know a fair amount about him already, although this didn’t stop her from quizzing him further. She was an attractive woman with a ready laugh and large eyes made for drawing confidences from strangers, especially ones who had consumed too much fine red wine.

He told her about his life back home in England, about the big house in Oxfordshire where he had grown up, the farm that came with it, and the fields and woods and lakes that had served as his playground when he was a boy. She wanted more, though. What was his father like? A modest, soft-spoken man. Kindhearted, if slightly remote. And his mother? She was dead. How? In childbirth. Giving birth to him.

Silence. The same awkward silence that always followed this revelation, as if people were weighing in their minds the exact extent of his culpability. But Teresa was different.

“How terrible that you did not know your mother.”

“I couldn’t say. I’ve nothing to compare it with.”

“Are her family still in your life?”

“They’re French. She was French.”

“And her name?”

It didn’t come readily to his lips. In fact, he couldn’t remember the last time he’d uttered it.

“Camille.”

He was too far in by now to extract himself, so he told her the story, in so much as it had been handed down to him. His father, the youngest of three sons, had always harbored dreams of being a painter, dreams that had carried him to Paris against the wishes of his parents. The advent of war, along with a creeping recognition of his own creative limitations, conspired to foul his plans, and in 1914 he returned to England with his French bride—the daughter of a notary who had lived in the same apartment building in Paris. Both of his brothers were dead within a year. Miraculously, he survived the Western Front to find himself first in line, the sole heir, to a small estate north of Oxford.

It was the kind of life Max’s father had never wanted or imagined for himself, but Camille’s death in childbirth a short while later sealed his fate. A number of local ladies pounced on him, and he was too disorientated and weak—yes, weak—to repel the pushiest candidate.

“Your stepmother?”

“Sylvia.”

“How old were you?”

“Too young to remember.”

This was a lie. Strange and mildly unsettling memories still came to him from time to time, static images, snapshots, cold and stark and remote: the high shine of his father’s shoes on the day of the wedding … a faceless woman dressed all in white and framed in a doorway … his nanny holding him at the nursery window, watching the wedding party return from the church. Whether or not they were reliable memories, he couldn’t say. It was quite possible that his brain had assembled them from photographs and hearsay. He knew for a fact, however, that Sylvia had insisted he shouldn’t attend the ceremony.

“Did they have children?”

“I have a half brother and sister, not much younger than me. Roland and Elizabeth. Elizabeth’s a fine woman.”

“And Roland?”

Max hesitated, reaching for his wineglass. Idle. Overweight. Overbearing. Cruel.

“Roland’s all right.”

Any pretense of a relationship had disappeared long ago, when Roland—not for the first time—had referred to Max’s mother as “that French whore.” Dr. Tomkins, the local GP, had done a good job of resetting Roland’s nose, although it still veered a little to the left when viewed in certain lights.

Even as he had landed that punch, Max had known that Roland hadn’t been wholly to blame, that he had only been parroting the words of his mother. Sylvia had worked tirelessly over the years to drive a wedge between Max and her own son. Everyone knew the reason why. Everyone knew what was at stake.

Max had toyed with the idea of forgoing his birthright, of stepping aside and allowing the estate to pass to Roland—and maybe he still would—but prolonging their distress offered some small satisfaction for their hostile treatment of him over the years, the injustice of which still filled him with impotent and uncomprehending anger in his darker moments.

He labored under no illusions—he’d had a privileged upbringing, and to complain about it seemed somehow perverse—but he had always felt himself very much alone in the world, and he held Sylvia and Roland largely to blame for this. His father was exonerated on the grounds that he had never given Max cause to doubt their special bond. They shared many of the same interests. Whether it was facing each other across a chessboard or fiddling with the guts of some motorcycle or casting flies for trout on the river, they both knew that those private moments were more about reinforcing their silent alliance than about the activity itself. They discussed literature and art and films, and all the other things that Sylvia deemed too trivial to be aired at the dinner table, such as the book his father had been working on for the past ten years or more.

It was a biography of the young Frenchman Jean-François Champollion, who, in spite of his lowly origins, had won the race to decipher the Egyptian hieroglyphs, beating the most eminent orientalists in Europe to the coveted prize. It was a story well worth telling, but why his father should have devoted so many years of his life to the subject was anyone’s guess. Max suspected it was something to do with the idea of a young man setting his sights on a goal and persevering in the face of insuperable odds—something his father had failed to do. He also suspected that the book would never be completed, because if it ever were, his father would no longer have an excuse to potter off to the London Library or the British Museum on the train.

Max had had no intention of sharing any of this with Teresa, but the words had just tumbled from his lips, almost as if he were under the spell of some sorceress, which he began to think he might be.

“Maybe he has a lover in London,” Teresa remarked.

“That’s … well, an unexpected observation.”

“Why?”

“From a Catholic.”

“Say what you like about us Catholics, but we understand human weakness.” She gave a knowing smile. “And I see from your face that the idea is not such a bad one for you.”

No, it wasn’t: his father stealing a few moments of happiness in the arms of a lady friend. He just felt a little foolish that it hadn’t occurred to him before.

Meanwhile, down at the other end of the table, the captain from the Cheshires was evidently doing a good job of entertaining Lilian, judging from her laughter. A few weeks before, it wouldn’t have mattered to him. Now it did. So much so that when the evening finally broke up, he was quite ready to leave, to be gone. That impulse vanished the moment Lilian asked him to stay on a while longer. There was a work matter she needed to discuss with him.

It was a chilly, clear night, and she held her woolen cardigan tight around her shoulders as they strolled in the palace garden, their feet crunching softly on the gravel pathway.

“You looked like you were enjoying yourself with the blond Adonis from the Cheshires.”

“Tristran.”

“Of course. How could I forget?”

“He’s very brave.”

“Really?”

“Yes, he told me.”

In the darkness he could just make out the gleam of her teeth.

“You know what? He probably is. The Cheshires have had the dirty end of the stick for quite a while.”

“You’re defending him?” she asked.

“Yes. No. I hate him.”

They both knew there was another message buried in the words—an admission on his part—and he quickly filled the awkward silence with a question.

“So, what did you want to talk about?”