judicious thing to do, he wasn’t thinking about his job and how he was going to break the news on the island. He was thinking about Mitzi. If the subs were really leaving, then she would be too; posted elsewhere with her husband. Where would they end up? Alexandria, probably. He wrestled with the notion—separated from Mitzi by nigh on a thousand miles of water—but it was too big and unwieldy to get a grip on.
Hugh misconstrued his silence as professionalism. “Mum’s the word, but I thought I should tip you the wink.”
“Thanks, Hugh. I appreciate it.”
“You’ll find a way to present it in a positive light; you always do.” He rested a hand on Max’s shoulder. “Now go and join the other renegades in the crow’s nest. Freddie and Elliott are already up there. No Ralph, though—he called earlier to say he can’t get away.”
Max did as he was told, eager for the distraction of his two friends, the chance to throw a blanket over his confused feelings and put Mitzi out of his mind. Villa Marija had been occupied by a naval officer before the war, and its large flat roof, still referred to as the crow’s nest, was where the younger crowd generally gathered to flap and caw. Anything under the age of thirty was deemed to be young, and you were never quite sure what you were going to find when you stepped from the stairwell into the glare.
There was usually a pleasing smattering of adolescent daughters in colorful home-stitched frocks, still coming to terms with their new breasts, which they wore with a kind of awkward pride. Circling them, inevitably, would be the younger pilots, barely more than boys but their speech already peppered with RAF slang. They were always taking a view on things—a good view, a dim view, an outside view, a ropy view—or accusing one another of “shooting a line.” Enemy bombers were “big jobs,” enemy fighters “little jobs.” The cockpit was their “office,” and they never landed, they “pancaked.” The thing they feared most in a flap was being bounced by a gaggle of little jobs from up-sun.
Sure enough, the pilots were there, a bevy of slender young things with flushed complexions hanging on their every word. Others hovered nearby, one ear on the tales of doughty deeds. The airmen were the only ones in the garrison capable of carrying the battle to the enemy, and their stories offered a tonic against the daily round of passive resistance.
Freddie and Elliott were at the far end of the roof terrace. Freddie was making good use of a large pink gin, his face a picture of evident distaste at whatever it was that the tall American was telling him. Max pushed his way through the throng toward his friends.
“Gentlemen.”
“Ah, Maximillian,” said Elliott. “Just in time.”
“For what?”
“A little conundrum I was posing to Freddie here.”
“Is that what you call it?” Freddie grimaced.
“Well, it sure as hell is for their commanding officers.”
“Sounds intriguing,” said Max.
“It rapidly becomes disgusting,” Freddie replied.
Elliott laughed. “I hadn’t figured you for an old prude.”
“It’s got nothing to do with prudishness,” Freddie said, bristling. “It’s a question of … well, morality.”
“Ah, morality …”
“To say nothing of the law.”
“Ah, the law,” Elliott parroted, with even more skepticism.
“You trained as a lawyer. You must have some respect for the law.”
“Sure I do. You don’t want to screw with an institution that can send an innocent man to the electric chair.” Elliott turned to Max before Freddie’s frustration could shape itself into a response. “You want to hear it?”
“Fire away.”
“It’s very simple. You’re a wing commander taking a break from it all up at the pilots’ rest camp on Saint Paul’s Bay. You know it? Sure you do, from when Ralph was wounded.”
“I do.”
“Then you can picture it. It’s late and, okay, you’re a bit tight. But, hey, who wouldn’t be, after all you’ve been through these past months? Anyway, you’re feeling good and you’re looking for your room. And you find your room. Only it isn’t your room. It’s someone else’s room. And that someone else is in what you think is your bed with someone else.”
“You’re losing me.”
“Stay lost,” was Freddie’s advice.
“There are two guys in the bed, okay? And they’re, well, I don’t know how to put it….”
“I think I get your meaning.”
“Of course you do. You went to an English boarding school.”
“As did you,” said Freddie, “in case you’d forgotten.”
“And a sorry dump it was too. Anyway, they’re good men, officers, both of them. One’s in your squadron. The other’s not, but you know him. And he’s a first-class pilot, reliable, what you Brits would call a ‘press-on’ type.” Elliott paused. “What do you do?”
“What do I do?”
“What do you do?”
