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.
He turned the nose of the dinghy farther into the bay.
“Damn it,” said Simonson. “Must we really go back?”
“Anyone would think you didn’t enjoy the war.”
“It’s this island I can’t stand.”
“You don’t find it exotic?”
“Heath, I detest Malta. Anywhere grain will not grow is no place for a man. My greatest hope is that one of the bombs will hole this island below the waterline and it will sink, and then we can all go home with the Navy.”
“But you like the people, at least?”
“I loathe the people. They are feckless and swarthy and nauseatingly loyal. They are hardly better than niggers.”
“They’ve been hospitable to us.”
“They’ve been hospitable to the Phoenicians, the Carthaginians, the Romans, the Vandals, the Byzantines, the Arabs, the Christians and the French. If Mussolini had got here five minutes before us, the locals would be whistling Puccini.”
“Wouldn’t we be innkeepers too, if we happened to live on the crossroads?”
Simonson drew himself up. “If England has twenty-eight-ton breech-loading Mark Ten coastal artillery pieces, it is so we do not need to be innkeepers.”
Alistair laughed. “Haven’t you caught a fish yet?”