Alistair
Alistair could not lose his smile, though the bombers were wicked and rapacious. Sometimes there was only an hour in each day for the civilians to swarm up from the shelters, to throw out the night soil, to queue for kerosene, and to take in the new ridges of rubble where the ageless streets had stood. Then the bombers came again and everyone fled back underground. The surface became foreign, the underworld familiar.
Sometimes Alistair was caught in a raid and he had to go to ground with the islanders. In the neolithic burial chambers where the old bones had been pushed to one side, in the Roman catacombs reconsecrated with miniatures of the Virgin, in the cold and dripping new tunnels gouged deep in the yellow rock, the fathers of the crammed-together families met his eyes while the walls shook. The children whimpered and the mothers rocked them, and Alistair joined them to pray: “Heart of Jesus, heart of Mary, make the bombs fall in the sea or in the fields.”
Alistair,
I cannot imagine what you are moaning about—a blockade by the enemy is nothing. Think of what I go through in Pimlico, entirely encircled by the inferior types of Chelsea and Belgravia. It is hell.
There is opportunity here for your restorative talents, if you have the heart for it. You should report to me at your earliest convenience. In uniform, for heaven’s sake, as you clearly cannot be trusted to dress yourself.
Insightfully,
Mary
Whenever the airmail made it through, Alistair forgot the hunger. At all other times he was obsessed with it. One early morning he put the jar of Tom’s blackberry jam into the bright slit of light from the arrow loop in his room. The aperture commanded a field of fire across the harbor approaches. Conversely, it drew in the full brightness of the rising sun and fired it through the jam jar. The color rose with the sun, from venous to arterial. Every tiny pip, suspended in its matrix, cast a black light of shadow.
Sharpness flooded his mouth. How far had he carried this jar? How many different tents and barracks and forts had he shared with it? Once he had hoped to eat it with Tom at war’s end; now he hoped only to take it to Tom’s grave. Surely he wouldn’t crack now. And yet his mind, unsolicited, came up with endless helpful reasons why it would be sensible to open the jar.
These mornings were the hardest, just after waking, when one splashed the well water on one’s face and drank a bitter yellow glass of it to fill the stomach. The water tasted of Malta itself, ancient and recessive, steeped in cordite and blood. The stone was porous, the hunger insatiable. Alistair put his hands to the jar and began to twist the lid. He stopped himself, and picked up a pencil instead.
Mary,
As usual, you are delusional. The uniform is far worse than the civilian wardrobe—even mine. This you would see if you were not blinded by the sheer glamor of this war. One sports a Sam Browne belt (which I am sure you would carry off better than I) and a cap with a polished leather peak. If it were not for the legitimizing effect of guns, enemy, etc., then the outfit would suggest nothing more nor less than the presence, within the psyche of the wearer, of perversion of the most florid stripe. Your handwriting conveys the same to me, by the way.
Astutely,
Alistair
Today the battery was to rotate to Fort Bingemma, away from the city, on an escarpment high on the Victoria Lines in the northwest of the island. It was time. Alistair’s men were broken and somnambulant. Three of his thirty-five were dead, and seven in Simonson’s troop. The enemy’s bombing had not let up for eighty-six nights. Up in the hills the regiment could regroup and re-equip. Perhaps, in the countryside, there would be a little more to eat.
Alistair looked out to sea one last time. The northwesterly screamed through the signaling masts of the ships in Grand Harbour. The waves came in and in, as they always had. To the horizon clung a haze from the smokestacks of the encircling warships, corraling the island in time.
To: Cpt Alistair Heath, RA
From: Mairie & Northe, Solicitors at Law
Re: Slander
Sir,
We are commanded by our client, Miss Mary Anne Elizabeth North of London, SW1, to convey her intention to pursue you in law in the eventuality that you do not immediately and in full retract in writing your vile calumny, viz, that our client is delusional. Your comments apposite to her handwriting our client will allow to stand, but wishes us to communicate to you a fact of which your own various letters constitute proof abundant, viz, that our client’s written submissions are qualitatively superior not only in calligraphy, but also in composition, to your own.
Legally,
Mairie & Northe