by Sheila Burns
‘Of course not.’
‘Tell him nothing about me. Nothing!’ His voice had become sharp again, almost as if he felt that he walked upon a veritable quicksand of living, and that at any moment he could trip on it and be sucked down.
‘No nurse discusses her patients; that is one of the first rules that you learn in hospital, and no wise nurse ever breaks the rule!’
‘My wise nurse!’ he said, and tried to laugh, but maybe he was tiring, for she recognized the sound of weakness, and instinctively laid him more comfortably.
‘Now sleep,’ she told him.
Mandy got through to her mother within the hour, and told her how she had found matters here. Cam was not dying, but he was dangerously ill and it would be madness to attempt to move him before next week, if then. It would be easier for her mother to come out here than for her to fly Cam home.
Mrs Sykes said that her ankle was improving. The swelling had gone down surprisingly, and she had less pain. Whatever her doctor said, she intended to fly out (if it continued this way) and be with her darling. The idea of having Mother suddenly appearing was petrifying, but at the same time it might be the answer.
‘It would not be good for him as he is now, Mother. He needs quiet, calm, and lots of sleep.’
‘I’d be the little mouse!’ This was typical of Mother and Mandy almost groaned. ‘You can’t keep me from him. I love him so much, and would be so good to him. You don’t understand what I am suffering.’
If Mother was going to start this, then there would be no end to it, as Mandy knew. She went very quiet. Then the call suddenly died on them, and Mandy was not too sorry. At all costs she felt she must keep Mother away. Already she had the feeling that she stood on an unexploded bomb, for there was more about this flat, and about her stepfather, and the island, than she had yet understood. She went to the long window and looked down into the street just below her. On the steps of the opposite houses the Maltese men sat talking, and enjoying the first coolness of the day. What Luis had said had been right, for the evening was delicious. The bells jangled riotously from the Cathedral, already she knew that it was the Cathedral. She prepared for the trip round the island.
She bathed, which was comforting, and put on a little frock far too young for her mother, which had been given as a makeweight to urge her to come here. What a difference good clothes make to a girl, she thought.
It was then that Marina, the other nurse, told her that a gentleman had come for her, and her eyes danced. ‘It’s the Baron,’ she said, and with enchantment.
Chapter Four
Mandy had the feeling that she walked out to adventure. Her world had changed and it was an eternity since she and Richard Tate had gone round to that little café to celebrate the fact that now she was really a trained nurse. She felt that she would never see St Jeremy’s again, for she stood on the threshold of adventure which could be greater than anything else in her life.
Out in the street a big white car waited for her, and Luis got out of it, a man in a light suit with a deep-red tie. ‘So you are coming on a grand tour of my island?’ he asked.
He looked refreshed, and his very dark hair was glistening against his head, his eyes emotional. Instinctively Mandy got the feeling that he was an extraordinarily nice man and that she could trust him.
‘It is so kind of you to take me.’
The chauffeur laid a cotton striped cloth over her knees, and the car then slid off very quietly, turning out of the city through the Porte del Reale, and moving easily away. It was some time before they left the new houses and flats behind them, all of them with flat roofs, and Luis told her that most people had roof gardens atop them. They took the road to the right which ran along the coastline beside an almost soundless sea.
‘It has practically no tides here,’ Luis told her, ‘and the water is deliciously warm, you’ll find when you bathe. There is none of that awful cold shock when you enter the water, like you get in England.’
They came to St Paul’s Bay with the statue of the saint standing on the little island and glistening snowy-white in the brilliant moonlight. People were paddling in the sea, and laughing as they did it, calling to one another, moving about in the water, getting cool after the stress of the day.
‘Where would you like to go?’ he asked. ‘If we pursue the coast road and turn with it, we come back to Citta Veccia where I live. You could sup there if you wished, or return to a restaurant in Floriana, which is outside Valletta and has charm. What do you want to do?’
She left it to him.
He showed her the great dome of Musta, fourth largest in the world, and drove through small towns and villages where the world had newly awakened to enjoy the cool of the night. The bells pealed.
‘They always do,’ he said.
They drove back past the Governor’s summer palace, with the strong sweet scent of orange blossom permeating the air, and so came to the restaurant at Floriana which he had spoken of. It was modern; it could almost have been London today; a big restaurant with a lightly sanded floor, musicians playing sweetly, but softly. About the whole island there was a sense of accompaniment, of tenderness, and in a strange way of love itself.
The manager recognized Luis instantly, bowed low and personally took them to a reserved table beside an indoor pool, where pale-yellow water lilies with orange hearts floated ecstatically on the water. A plumbago wreathed pale-blue blossoms against the wall, and standing everywhere were the light-blue lilies-of-the-Nile which she adored.
‘How pretty it all is! I am so glad that I came.’
‘It’s a change after hospital life.’
She confessed that a hospital could get a bit boring.
‘But that is over now, for you passed the examinations, and you are free to go where you will. Think how dreadful it could have been if you had failed and had had to return after the holiday and sit for the lot again! That is wretched. I did it at Cambridge when I was there.’
‘You were at Cambridge?’
‘At Trinity. My people wanted it.’
‘Tell me about your people,’ she asked him.
He had ordered drinks and they were set before them and accompanying them a crystal tray of appetizers, the sort of food Mandy had never seen in England. He told her that he had been a posthumous child, for his father had died in a car accident three months before he was born. He had come into the world as a baron, inheriting riches, but outside the island he never used the title. He had never known how cruel poverty could be, but had great pity for it. His mother had insisted on a first-class English education for him, sending him to Eton and on to Cambridge.
‘But you never work?’ she said.
His eyes flickered a little, half-amused. ‘Oh, but I do work, and hard. It would be crazy not to work. I do not think that would justify being alive at all.’
When he was at Cambridge his mother had re-married. Her loneliness had probably caused it, but he had never thought so, for a child finds it difficult to understand his parent’s sufferings. She had telephoned the news to him. She had, she said, met a most adorable man, and they had been married that very morning. The shock petrified him.
He had flown home only to find that she had already committed herself and the man was of the island, a mere fisherman who had been ambitious, but had little more to recommend him. He had married her because he thought that she had riches, admired the elegant casa in which she lived and had believed all these would be his. In truth, everything was Luis’s. He gave his mother an allowance and she shared his home. When her rough-and-tumble husband discovered what had happened, he tried to smash up the casa, with a ghastly scene.
Luis spoke sadly, and then the waiter brought the meal. Iced soup, a chicken pilaff with almonds on the rice, olives and peaches to eat with it. It was one of those unbelievable meals which suddenly made the evening all part of a lovely dream.
He went on talking. ‘In a way it was a good thing when the fellow got out and went. He found t
here was nothing to be gained from it, so he skedaddled.’
‘But how dreadful for your mother!’
‘Yes, it was utterly dreadful, and she suffered very much, poor darling!’ Mandy realized that his face had become unbelievably sad. ‘I took her away for a long holiday in Sicily. She had always loved Taormina, but that time Taormina seemed to have lost much of its joy for her. I thought later that she was getting over it all a little. It’s queer how one can deceive oneself this way. Then when we got home again she became nervy. One night I found the reason for it. The man had come sneaking back, wanting money from her and used to get into the casa and bully her.’
‘She owned up to it?’
‘No, I found him there.’
‘How dreadful for both of you.’
‘Yes, it was. I turned him out; he was half-drunk at the time, and it was a really beastly business.’
‘Did she know?’
‘Yes, she did. She came in at the time. I got rid of Pietro, threatened him with the police if we had any further trouble. I did not think that he would come back.’
‘What did she do?’
His eyes dropped, and Mandy saw that he was peeling an orange, pinky red, a colour one never saw on them in England. ‘I ‒ I had not reckoned on how this would affect her. She died.’
Startled, Mandy gasped, ‘She died? But ‒ what caused it?’ and the nurse in her said cardiac, of course.
‘She died by her own hand.’ There was sheer agony in his voice, the true pain which always terrified her, like a man who has got a knife stuck into his heart and twisted. ‘We ‒ we could not bring her round. She breathed for a short while, then she ‒ she died.’
The awful part was that there was nothing that anyone could say and Mandy knew this. For a moment she felt the blood rush to her head, a tide of sympathy, of misery for him and awareness of his suffering, then the nurse in her rose, for this was one of the situations which any nurse had to face during her career.
‘Maybe she had come to the end of the road. Maybe there was nothing more that you could do for her?’
‘That is true. She had a lot of sorrow losing my father as she did, then this happened.’
‘I know, but remember that she would not have wanted you to be hurt, and to suffer, for her sake. That would have worried her too much.’
He nodded. ‘I’ve thought of it a thousand times, and I know that there was no more could be done, but that does not comfort me.’
‘You should have married,’ she said gently.
‘No. I made up my mind then that I would never marry. I had hurt her so much, I had done the wrong thing, and I would never risk that with another.’
‘But she would have wanted you to marry? Surely she would have wished the name to continue?’
He said not a word but turned pale. Then he pushed away the orange on the plate beside him and the waiters brought up a trolley loaded with exquisite sweets. She looked at them with admiration. Profiterole, banana mousse, Mille Feuilles, meringues foamy with cream, and a tipsy cake garnished with fresh fruit. When the trolley had been wheeled away again, she turned to him.
‘I am so sorry,’ she said, with real sympathy.
He spoke slowly, his dark eyes avoiding her bright blue ones. He had, he said, at that time made a vow. He had felt terrible, torn two ways as he had followed his mother’s dead body to the churchyard with the cypresses and the exquisite marble steps rising up to the chapel, where the bell tolled. He had seemed then to be someone dissociated from his own mother, someone whom he did not really know or understand, and his own tragedy monopolized his world. He had loved her deeply, but possibly had exaggerated the position, misled by the tragedy and pain of her death; then he had made a vow to dedicate his life to the island for ever.
‘To serve my island,’ was what he said, and for a moment the velvet-dark eyes watched her furtively. She could see the deep sorrow in them, and the overwhelming pain that memory evoked in him. ‘I felt that I owed this to my mother’s memory.’
‘You should have married,’ she said gently, but he made no answer, and she got the feeling that the silence was almost a knife splitting them apart. ‘Your family would then have continued and your children would have inherited everything.’
‘Maybe,’ he said softly. Again the word seemed to bite. There was silence and the musicians began to play. It was absurd that Mandy had the feeling that a certain sorrow had suddenly come to this place, and she had a deep sense of unhappiness which she would not have had for the world. He stayed so silent that it was unreal, and sitting there she did not know what to say about it; it was Luis who changed the subject.
‘Your stepfather? Do you know why he came here?’ and his tone had changed completely. He was himself again, the pain had gone out of his eyes and the sense of tragedy from his voice.
‘I’ve no idea. He ‒ he just goes about.’
‘For fun?’
‘I don’t think it is entirely for fun; he deals with selling things.’ Not for the world would she reveal the truth.
‘What does he sell? Maybe there could be something that I want?’ He folded his arms, and leant forward over them. His eyes were gaily amused. There was no trace of that sheer agony which had been there a few minutes ago when he had spoken of his vow.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Curios, perhaps? Precious jewels? Something like that?’
‘I don’t know.’ For half a moment she had nearly said that Giuseppe had brought a little flat parcel tonight, but she knew that would be treachery. It had seemed unbelievable that there could be trouble about something so innocent, but she had taken against Giuseppe on sight. She found herself talking of him. She tried to remember what Cam had said about holding her tongue, and she meant to say nothing committal. She spoke of Giuseppe’s arrival.
‘I don’t like him,’ she said.
‘A lot of Maltese look worse than they are, I can tell you that.’
‘He turned so offensive.’
‘Did he now?’ and he laughed. ‘Well, don’t you stand for that! Just say “No” firmly, because firmness is the only language they understand, take it from me.’
‘I’ll remember.’
The orchestra was playing sweetly. It was a pot pourri of favourite tunes, and they had gone back into the romantic past to weed out music which had the love flavour. It was People will say we’re in love. Mandy did not know why the tune seemed to go right down into her. In the last few days so much had happened, the summit of three years’ hard training had gone into her life, and she had changed. This time last week she would never have believed that she could be sitting here eating a luxurious meal, with a very handsome young man who had made a vow of celibacy. She did not know why she thought again of that ridiculous vow, but she did.
‘You’d like coffee on the verandah?’ he asked.
‘Is it nice?’
‘Much nicer and also cooler than here,’ and he waved to the waiter to bring the coffee as they went on to the verandah beyond. It was cooler. Far lovelier. Here the music was even more romantic than it had been in the restaurant. People will say we’re in love, she thought.
Don’t make a fool of yourself, she thought, and tried to make some fanatical effort to silence the recurring doubt within her. This man was not what he seemed. In a way she doubted him, yet in another way adored him, and this on such a short acquaintance. She wondered what she ought to do, perhaps never see him again, yet she knew that this would be the hardest thing of all. It was such a short acquaintanceship, yet already it had gone too far for her.
A covered verandah with fans purring in the roof, ran round the restaurant, so that wherever they looked they could see the island. The vivid light of Valletta, the far hills of Citta Veccia, and the road to St Paul’s Bay. The bright lights were like fallen stars, and there was the fragrance of verbena, of freesias, and of roses. Already she had been told that in the island all flowers lived but for one day, because it was too hot for them,
but what ecstasy that one day could be.
He went over to the balustrade, and somehow it was like the romantic taffrail on some exciting cruising vessel. In the Grand Harbour there were the lights of the ships, and in the sky a great plane was coming in, winking signals to the aerodrome. From behind them was the sound of laughter and chatter, and the musicians were still playing that enchanting tune, People will say we’re in love.
‘You like it?’ Luis asked her.
‘I adore it.’
‘I was lucky meeting you as we did.’
‘You knew that I was terrified?’
‘I had an idea. People generally show it when they are scared stiff, and all that worry was for no reason.’
‘I see, but nothing could have stayed it.’
‘I know.’
Mandy paused. It seemed a long way from St Jeremy’s Hospital, and at this hour Sister would be going her rounds, with a nurse walking just behind her. She had thought that world would go on for ever, and suddenly she had outstripped it, and had travelled unbelievably far. She was a whole two thousand miles from St Jeremy’s now.
‘How lucky I was to come here,’ she said.
‘And as you are here, why not stay a little while? Don’t leave Malta too soon? I want to show you the temples. I want to take you into St John’s Cathedral myself, for no one but a Maltese can show you our treasures, and so much that we have. We are a proud people, you know.’
‘I realize that.’
He said, ‘There is Hassan’s Cave, Hagiar Kim, the cave where St Paul preached in Citta Veccia, my own home. You have got to see it all.’
‘I shall certainly stay longer than originally planned, for it would be impossible to return on Tuesday. It will be at least a week before Cam could be moved, if then.’
‘Then stay that week, stay two weeks? See Malta, and love it.’
Mandy was amazed at the fervour of his voice, and she thought suddenly, ‘Stay here and love Malta, and love a Maltese man,’ then instantly jerked herself together. It was a romantic dream, but nothing more. Looking at him she saw that his face was tense, almost drawn, and that those very dark eyes were deadly serious. She wondered why he looked at her in this way, and if there was something about him that she would never understand. One day would he tell her? Or was all this a dream from which there would be an awakening, and a cold hard morning to follow?
