The Information Officer

platform at Lewes station as he’d been boarding the train back to London. He had waited till Haywards Heath before opening it, and he had still been pondering its contents when the train drew into Victoria station a good while later.

In the letter, she went on to say that she would not be writing to him again while he was away at war. Anything she had to report would only appear trite and commonplace when set alongside his own experiences. Also, there was a strong likelihood that her letters would not reach him, and as strong a likelihood that any reply of his would not reach her. These silences would only fuel her fear that he had been killed.

Rather, she preferred to trust entirely to Providence that he would return safely—as she knew he would—and she looked forward to that moment. Meanwhile, these words would have to suffice. He could carry them with him wherever he went, dip into them at will. They were not limited by time or place. They were eternal and infinite.

He knew that there had always been a special bond between them—even when he was a ten-year-old schoolboy and she his twenty-one-year-old French teacher—but it was strange to see it spelled out in her hieroglyphic scrawl. Hunched on a bed in a crumbling room in a bombed and besieged city, her words, paradoxically, now made more sense to him than they ever had.

In many ways, the letter was a declaration of love—not a physical love (although she confessed that not long after he had graduated from Oxford there had been a moment when she had wanted to carry him off to bed with her, and had even come within a hairs-breadth of putting the proposition to him).

The love she spoke of was something else. It was to do with a man having many fathers in his life, and sometimes more than one mother. She wasn’t looking to set herself up as a replacement, but she couldn’t deny that she had sometimes felt and acted as such. She listed the qualities in him that had stirred those feelings in her.

Rounding off the letter, she wrote:I don’t know what you made of what you saw today, but if the house under the Downs is still my home when you return, then it is also your home. And if I have moved on, then I will have packed your bags and carried them with me. This is as much as I have ever promised anyone, but it is far less than you deserve.

“Deserve” was a big word. It suggested that he had earned the right to her feelings, and he could find little in his behavior of late to justify this exchange. The brass door key in his hand was evidence enough of that.

He felt the tears brimming in his eyes and he willed them to disappear. When that failed, he wiped them away on the back of his arm.

He didn’t know what he was weeping for.

For Lucinda? Her kind words? England on a May day? The person he used to be? The person he had become? The lack of sleep? The pinch of hunger? The remorseless hail of bombs? The death of his friends? The faceless German pilot in the burns ward? Carmela Cassar?

Maybe he wept for all of these things.

Or maybe just one: his mother, Camille.

The morning limped by, hot and humid. Max spent much of it editing copy for the Weekly Bulletin and waiting impatiently for Lilian to call him back. By noon, everyone was remarking on the fact that an air raid had not yet materialized.

Neither had Lilian.

There was still no sign of her at the office, and no one was answering the phone at her aunt’s palace in Mdina. There was nothing in the reports to worry about; two bombs had fallen on Rabat at about three A.M., but that was it.

An hour later, Maria put the call through to his office.

“Good of you to show up at work,” he joked.

“I’m not at work; I’m at home.”

She sounded tired, drained, downcast. And with good cause, it turned out. A childhood friend of hers, Caterina Gasan, had been killed by one of the two bombs that had fallen on Rabat, her family home receiving a direct hit that had made a mockery of the concrete shelter in the basement. Caterina’s mother and her younger brother had also perished in the ruins. Her father and her elder brother, the two men who had laid the concrete with such confidence, had both survived almost entirely unscathed.

Max had met Caterina only once, back in March, but he could see her clearly: short, voluptuous, full-lipped, and feisty. He could see her rapt expression, lit by the screen, while Dennis O’Keefe and Helen Parrish warbled their way through I’m Nobody’s Sweetheart Now at the Rabat Plaza. They hadn’t agreed on the merits of the film, but he had enjoyed her efforts to persuade him of the error of his ways.

“God …,” he said, pathetically.

“What God?” Lilian replied.

“You don’t mean that.”

“Don’t I? It doesn’t make sense, not Caterina.”

“It’s not meant to make sense.”

There was a short silence before she spoke. “I want to see you.”

“That’s lucky. I want to see you too.”

“Can you come to Mdina?”

“I’ll be there in twenty minutes—Luftwaffe permitting.”

Ena, the younger of Lilian’s two cousins, answered the door to Max. He could see from her eyes that she’d been crying.

“They’re in the garden,” she said simply, taking him by the hand and leading him there in silence.

They were seated at a tin table in the shade of an orange tree: Lilian, her aunt Teresa, and Ralph. It was a