Alistair put down the letter and stood at the arrow loop window. He watched the forenoon glittering over the sea. In the distant haze he could just make out the flashing signal mirrors of the Italian blockade ships. If one forgot for a moment that the messages wished one evil, they were beautiful.
He washed off the parade grime by sponging himself from his metal basin. He put on a fresh shirt, and since there was half an hour before Christmas lunch was to be served, he visited the men in their mess room. Post would have come for them too, and one couldn’t second-guess the mood of the men. Airmail had the particular violence of recency—it might leave them upbeat, or homesick, or a queer mix of the two—and so it was prudent for their officer to drop by and project a soothing equanimity. Sweethearts might blow cold or hot after all, and mothers might ail or improve, but the 3.7-inch heavy anti-aircraft gun would always provide a stable firing platform, providing that the leveling jacks on each corner of its carriage were competently deployed. This was the sentiment an officer should diffuse.
He spent a brisk twenty minutes with the men, made a joke of their minor gripes and a note of their major ones, and reached the officers’ mess in time for grace. Army and Navy together, they were sixty seated at two long tables with Lieutenant Colonel Hamilton presiding. Alistair was last to arrive and he hurried to his place, nodding his apology. Hamilton returned an affable nod, then bowed his head in prayer.
“Lord,” he said, “on this holiest of days, we thank you for food and ammunition. May our ships get through and the enemy’s get lost.”
They all said “Amen” and then the orderlies brought in something that the cook had made out of bread crumbs and canned malevolence.
Alistair lifted the corner of his with a fork. “I don’t know whether to put mustard on it or marmalade.”
“Or whether to eat it or give it a Christian burial,” said Simonson. “Did Santa bring you any post?”
“Not this time.”
“Maybe you weren’t nice. Cheery bastard keeps a list, you know.”
“Whereas you . . . ?”
Simonson twirled his knife like a swagger stick. “I had three letters from two girls. They both think they’re the only one, of course.”
“I’m sure you’re the only millionaire they write to.”
“You don’t know the right sort of girl, is your problem. When we go on leave, I’ll introduce you around town.”
“I fear that your sort of girls would cut my poor body to ribbons, simply by using their accents.”
Simonson ignored him. “ ‘Of course if I can just make major before we go back, then my damned brother shan’t have the last laugh after all. When one is a major dear god the women one can have! I shall bag a gorgeous debutante and parade her in silks before dear Randolph’s hag of a wife.”
“I suppose it’s lucky the Germans started all this for you.”
Simonson frowned. “Is everything quite all right? You seem out of sorts.”
“I’m weary from all the excitement.”
“Damn it, Alistair, if you get all out of shape over a brass band, wait until you see some real action.”
“Do remind me to tell you about my trip to France, one day.”
“Exchange visit, was it?”
“We exchanged withering fire, if that counts.”
“And do you still keep in touch?”
“Oh yes. You see, I’m hoping to go back one day.”
“But in all seriousness, what’s wrong?”
For a moment Alistair considered telling him. But of course, it wasn’t the right thing. The war, after all, was a legal riot and a bright pageant and a marvel of near-misses. It was a perfect adventure until proved otherwise, and so it would hardly be a kindness, on Christmas Day, to produce evidence. One pulled crackers for the snap of their mild detonation.
Simonson patted him on the back and told him to buck up, and they ate with the chatter of their brother officers around them. For dessert the cook had turned up tinned apricots. They had them in the smallest bowls, but the fruit still looked lost. Each officer had exactly two and a half little apricot halves in a quarter-inch of clear syrup. They drank water from the fort’s well, which tasted of its own yellow limestone sides and whatever Turks and Moors had been thrown down there over the centuries.
Hamilton stood and tapped his glass for silence. “The King.”
They all rose. “The King.”
They drank his health in well water and left in ones and twos, hungry.
Alone, Alistair set Tom’s jar of blackberry jam in the arrow loop window and stared at it until a thin moon rose over the sea.
January, 1941