“To confuse the Germans, should they ever intercept a dispatch.”
Lilian laughed before drawing to a halt on the pathway.
“Over here,” she said quietly, setting off across the grass.
“Why?”
“My cousins.”
“What about them?” he asked, falling into step with her.
Felicia and Ena were two leggy creatures in their early teens.
“I know what they’re like. They’ll be watching from their bedroom.”
She led him beneath the boughs of a large orange tree. It was so dark that he sensed rather than saw her take a step toward him.
They kissed briefly, almost cursorily, their lips barely touching.
There was nothing cursory about their second kiss. She pressed her body against his, and the warm tip of her tongue forced its way between his lips.
“Don’t stop,” she said, when they broke off briefly.
And when they finally separated, he bent to recover her cardigan from the ground and replaced it around her shoulders.
“Oh dear,” she said. “Now I’ll have to lie to them at breakfast.”
“Oh well. In for a penny, in for a pound.” He slipped an arm around her waist and pulled her toward him. She avoided his lips.
“And then I’ll have to tell Father Tabone in confession that I lied to them, and he will want to know why.”
“And when you tell him, he’ll say, ‘Lilian, Lilian, not the soldier under the orange tree story again.’”
She gave a horrified gasp and playfully pinched his arm. “You think I am like that, do you?”
“I think I want to kiss you again.”
She didn’t resist, and this time her hands roamed beneath his shirt and up his back.
No thoughts of Mitzi had intruded at the time. Only later, during the long ride back to Floriana on the motorcycle, the searchlights roving the heavens high above his head, did he weigh those first tentative embraces against the urgent abandon that had always marked his lovemaking with Mitzi.
Mitzi had unleashed something in him, presented him with a side of himself that he’d never known existed—a dark and sometimes unsavory side. Maybe it was her guilt, but there were occasions when she had required him to dominate, even demean her. And he had duly obliged, warily at first, like an observer hovering above the bed, then more willingly.
He had since abandoned his theory of an errant wife’s unconscious desire for castigation, partly because it was insulting to her. Did errant husbands feel obliged to act out their guilt with their lovers? Somehow he doubted it. And besides, who was he to pass judgment? An embarrassingly brief encounter with a girl named Felicity after a May Ball at Oxford and a bit of awkward fumbling with Eleanor had represented the entire scope of his sexual experience. Who was he to say what people got up to in the privacy of their bedrooms?
Moreover, since terminating their affair, Mitzi had shown no signs of guilt or regret for what had passed between them. He had fully expected her to withdraw from him, to avoid him whenever possible, but their public relationship had suffered no such reverse. If anything, it had flourished under the unsuspecting eyes of their friends and acquaintances. He still found it strange to spend time with her in company—knowing every inch of the lean body beneath the cotton frock, as well as its most intimate requirements—but her ability to carry on with life regardless had allowed him to package up and parcel off the memories.
That had all changed at Hugh and Rosamund’s drinks party.
A voice straight from their private past, from the flat overlooking Hastings Gardens.
This was the reason he’d been unable to sleep, his brain in open rebellion, deaf to the dictates of his weary body, thoughts of Lilian and Mitzi swirling endlessly, aimlessly, around and around in his head, overlapping, intertwining. And as if that hadn’t been bad enough already, the dead dance hostesses had somehow entered the mix, the pale, lifeless features of Carmela Cassar rising to the surface every so often like some ghoulish phantasm clamoring to be heard. She was unhappy with him, and she had every right to be. What had he done for her? What had he
He knew of a number of individuals, men as well as women, who had cracked up and been carted off—one had even tried to end it all with a tube of Veronal—but until now it had never occurred to him to feel much sympathy toward them.
Outside, the first bombs were beginning to fall on Grand Harbour, and a couple of the big guns were barking back. The Bofors wouldn’t open up until the Stukas showed, which they would after the 88s had had their sport, if the pattern of the past week was anything to go by.
Flakes of plaster showered from the ceiling as he wandered through to the living room. Strangely, the prospect of observing a bombing raid on his doorstep almost seemed like light relief after the mental inquests of the past few hours. He pushed open the shutters and stepped out onto the balcony.
He just had time to register the pall of dust hanging over the dockyards and Senglea before a column of water erupted from French Creek. It stood tall and upright, frozen in motion, before collapsing in on itself. Down below, by the bastion wall, the boys in the Bofors gun pit were scanning the skies. If anyone had a right to crack, it was them, especially since the Germans had started targeting the gun emplacements. They didn’t appear too perturbed, though. A couple of them were even laughing.
