Perhaps, thought Mary, they really would rescue each other in turn. Perhaps the city would stand. For now, though, she could only hold Tom’s hand. The snow settled. One settled.
The searchlight beams rose from their rooftop installations, up through the swirling snow, and played in blue-white circles on the base of the clouds. One could follow the elegant line of a beam up into the whiteness of the storm that spanned all of Europe in its vortex. One could take in the vast sweep of the winter and follow a thin searchlight beam down again into the vigilant city and understand how very fragile it was: a woman and a man holding hands, on streets made nameless by snow.
“I love you,” she said.
“Do you?”
She smiled. “Oh, let’s not go to my parents’. It isn’t far to your place.”
There was an urgency now in the heat of their hands as they clung to each other. This snow would thaw. These winds would blow the clouds away. The next night might see a bomber’s sky.
December , 1940
ALISTAIR SAILED THE BOAT while Simonson—one of two other captains attached to 200 Battery, 10 Heavy Anti-Aircraft Regiment, Royal Artillery—fished for tunny with a trawling line. In a fourteen-foot sailing dinghy, half a mile off the east coast of Malta, with a breeze blowing in off the immaculate Mediterranean and with two bottles of the local beer in a string bag trailing in their wake to cool, the war seemed improbable and excessive.
“No, I’m afraid you will have to run it past me again,” said Alistair, nudging the tiller with his toe. “There’s a man called . . . ?”
“Something Hitler,” said Simonson. “Axel? Albrecht? German chap.”
“And he wants . . . ?”
“To take over the running of the world.”
“What, all of it?”
“So I hear.”
Alistair frowned. “With all its tedious responsibilities along with the evident perks?”
“One imagines the fellow has weighed it up and decided to press on regardless.”
“Has he considered how vexatious it would be to find oneself in charge of us? Or how independent-minded the Americans are? I should think it would be frowned upon to turn up in Manhattan and start directing the traffic. As a European, I mean.”
“My dear boy, these are questions we Brits have thrashed out over centuries. One cannot expect a Hun to have quite the same level of insight.”
Alistair got his pipe alight while steering with one foot, trimming the jib with the hand he held the match in. He puffed white smoke that the wind scooped away prettily over the russet cloth of the mainsail.
He said, “This German fellow sounds like a card.”
Simonson gave the trawling line an experimental tug. “He has only one testicle, you know.”
Alistair raised an eyebrow.
“Oh yes,” said Simonson. “It is well known.”
One thousand miles to the west lay Gibraltar; one thousand miles to the east, Alexandria. Though it was nearly Christmas and the water too chilly for swimming, it was pleasant in the sun and the two men were comfortable in white shirts and civilian slacks. Simonson pulled in the trawling line to check that the spinner was not tangled.
He spat in disgust. ‘Two hours and not a single bite. Fish are Nazis.”
“Maybe you’re using the wrong lure.”
Simonson shook his head. “The fish are mocking me. They know I’m famished and they’re swimming six inches behind the spinner, in their silvery lederhosen.”
“They are goose-swimming,” said Alistair, using a hand to approximate the motion.
“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.