While they were getting dressed, he took a more reasoned tack, pointing out that it would be her word against his. Even if she persuaded people of the truth, her reputation would still be in tatters. “I understand,” she said. And she seemed to.
The following morning she was at breakfast at eight o’clock sharp, composed, if somewhat more subdued than usual. This was put down to the prospect of returning to Bremen after a glorious month in the Alps.
She had gone on to marry a wealthy corn merchant. He knew this because over the years he had asked after her, and Lutz had filled him in on the dreary details of her life: another child, a new holiday house by the sea, her charity work for the unemployed. Unsurprisingly, the war had restricted these updates, but he still thought of her with something approaching affection. She might not have been the very first, but it was she who had triggered the first stirrings of life in him, she who had set him on the road. He had taken wrong turns, dangerous deviations that had almost proved to be his undoing, but he was wiser now—more cautious, more patient, and far better at covering his tracks.
DAY FOUR
MAX HAD BEEN HOPELESSLY AWAKE FOR HOURS, WRESTLING with the sheet, when the building wail of the siren cut through his thoughts. The windows were shuttered, but a pale dawn light leaked into the bedroom through the crack in the wall. He’d tracked the progress of this jagged fissure over the past month with a mixture of curiosity and alarm. It had set off on its journey from the floor beside the chest of drawers, traveling in fits and starts on a diagonal path toward the ceiling, widening to a hand’s width as it went. At a certain moment it had disappeared behind the only picture in the room —a naive watercolor of some unidentifiable fruit in a bowl—only to reemerge a week or so later from behind the shell and coral frame and carry on its way.
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,
“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,
