The Information Officer

the exciting new aesthetic pushing through the establishment soil. If he bored her, she didn’t show it.

That one conversation had marked a notable shift in their relationship. She might have been the instigator, but they both played their part in it. Almost imperceptibly, their weekly get-together became a twice-weekly get- together, and he found himself manufacturing further excuses to drop by the offices in Saint Paul’s Street whenever he was in town. The first time he invited her for a drink at the Union Club, it was on some doubtful professional pretext.

Perched on a chair in the ladies’ bar—amusingly nicknamed the snake pit, which didn’t amuse her—she told him the story of her father, a captain in the Yorkshire Light Infantry who had spent a year of his life on Malta, recuperating from injuries sustained in the Salonika campaign. Malta had catered to well over one hundred thousand sick and wounded during the Great War, and had come to be known as “the nurse of the Mediterranean.” Lilian’s mother, like so many other Maltese girls at the time, had been a volunteer nurse, and she’d lost her heart to the lanky Yorkshireman in her care, marrying him a few months before he was sent back to the front. George Flint wasn’t killed by a Bulgar bullet or bomb; he died from malaria in September 1918, a few days before the war in Salonika ended.

Her mother had never remarried, unable to square the concept with her faith, although it hadn’t stopped her from disappearing off to Italy a couple of years before the outbreak of war, on the arm of a visiting professor of archaeology from the University of Padua. This was the reason Lilian now lived with her aunt’s family in Mdina. The invitation to dinner there had followed a few weeks later.

With its walls and ramparts and sweeping views, Mdina reminded him of a number of hilltop towns he had visited in France with his father before the war, and while it lacked a cathedral to match those of Laon or Vezelay, it more than made up for this in other ways. As the seat of the Maltese nobility, its streets and squares were lined with stately palaces, mostly built in a restrained baroque style. The same graceful architecture was evident in the churches, convents, and seminaries that accounted for almost all the other buildings in the compact citadel. The effect was ordered, aristocratic, ecclesiastical; and an ancient peace seemed to hang over the place, a silence broken every so often by the slap and scuff of leather sandals on stone as friars and nuns shuffled about their business.

Lilian’s aunt, her mother’s younger sister, had married into one of the more ancient families, acquiring a convoluted title in the process, although she insisted on being addressed simply as Teresa. Her husband, the twentieth baron of something or other unpronounceable, was an officer in the Royal Malta Artillery. He commanded an antiaircraft battery near the fuel reservoirs at Birzebbuga in the south of the island, and he was rarely around, which left his wife, his niece, and his two young daughters free run of the palace on Bastion Square.

At dinner, Max had been a little put out to find himself seated next to Teresa at one end of the long table, while a handsome and amusing young captain with the 2nd Battalion Cheshire Regiment monopolized Lilian at the other end. He drew some consolation from the fact that Teresa appeared to know a fair amount about him already, although this didn’t stop her from quizzing him further. She was an attractive woman with a ready laugh and large eyes made for drawing confidences from strangers, especially ones who had consumed too much fine red wine.

He told her about his life back home in England, about the big house in Oxfordshire where he had grown up, the farm that came with it, and the fields and woods and lakes that had served as his playground when he was a boy. She wanted more, though. What was his father like? A modest, soft-spoken man. Kindhearted, if slightly remote. And his mother? She was dead. How? In childbirth. Giving birth to him.

Silence. The same awkward silence that always followed this revelation, as if people were weighing in their minds the exact extent of his culpability. But Teresa was different.

“How terrible that you did not know your mother.”

“I couldn’t say. I’ve nothing to compare it with.”

“Are her family still in your life?”

“They’re French. She was French.”

“And her name?”

It didn’t come readily to his lips. In fact, he couldn’t remember the last time he’d uttered it.

“Camille.”

He was too far in by now to extract himself, so he told her the story, in so much as it had been handed down to him. His father, the youngest of three sons, had always harbored dreams of being a painter, dreams that had carried him to Paris against the wishes of his parents. The advent of war, along with a creeping recognition of his own creative limitations, conspired to foul his plans, and in 1914 he returned to England with his French bride—the daughter of a notary who had lived in the same apartment building in Paris. Both of his brothers were dead within a year. Miraculously, he survived the Western Front to find himself first in line, the sole heir, to a small estate north of Oxford.

It was the kind of life Max’s father had never wanted or imagined for himself, but Camille’s death in childbirth a short while later sealed his fate. A number of local ladies pounced on him, and he was too disorientated and weak —yes, weak—to repel the pushiest candidate.

“Your stepmother?”

“Sylvia.”

“How old were you?”

“Too young to remember.”

This was a lie. Strange and mildly unsettling memories still came to him from time to time, static images, snapshots, cold and stark and remote: the high shine of his father’s shoes on the day of the wedding … a faceless woman dressed all in white and framed in a doorway … his nanny holding him at the nursery window, watching the wedding party return from the church. Whether or not they were reliable memories, he couldn’t say. It was quite possible that his brain had assembled them from photographs and hearsay. He knew for a fact, however, that Sylvia had insisted he shouldn’t attend the ceremony.

“Did they have children?”

“I have a half brother and sister, not much younger than me. Roland and Elizabeth. Elizabeth’s a fine woman.”

“And Roland?”