was in the dark while the others knew more than they were letting on? And where did Elliott fit? In one or other of the camps, or somewhere in between?
The questions kept proliferating, and Max was beginning to wish he’d taken Elliott up on his offer of barbecued fish, burgundy, and a heart-to-heart, when the steady wail of the “Raiders Passed” siren sounded outside.
He took himself up to the roof, where he smoked a cigarette and watched the dense pall of dust hanging over Ta’ Qali slowly disperse on the breeze.
Down below in the courtyard a fretful Father Bilocca was doing his best to marshal a bunch of boys into an ordered line, oblivious to the obscene gestures and the faces being pulled whenever his back was turned.
“Is everything okay, sir?”
Max hadn’t heard Pemberton join him.
“Fine. Just dandy. Smoke?”
Pemberton took a cigarette, and Max lit it for him.
“I hear Rosamund came up trumps.”
“She certainly did. I even have my own bathroom, not that there’s any water in the pipes.”
Rosamund had found him digs in Saint Julian’s, living with the Copnalls. Their eighteen-year-old daughter, Elizabeth, was a pale and pretty creature prone to blushing who worked in the naval cipher department at Fort Saint Angelo. Max could picture her state of agitation at having Pemberton living under the same roof. The same thought must surely have occurred to Rosamund.
“How’s Elizabeth?”
“She’s a fine pianist.”
It all sounded very Jane Austen: the daughter tickling the ivories for the benefit of the handsome house guest. Rosamund was definitely up to something, but he couldn’t see it yet.
“I had a shot at that piece for the Weekly Bulletin.”
Max took the sheet of typed text. “That was quick.”
“It probably shows.”
He was clearly eager for Max to cast an eye over it there and then.
“The length looks good. I’ll let you know.”
For want of anything better to do, he started to read the moment Pemberton had disappeared back down the stairwell.
He read it twice, trying to find fault with it, something, anything. The tone was spot on, muscular and defiant yet not too triumphalist. He didn’t play to the heroism of the Manchester boys working the Bofors gun—that spoke for itself—rather, he presented the young gunners as workers at the coal face, grinding out a slow but inexorable victory. The mining metaphor was a small stroke of genius. It resonated with danger and hardship and collective enterprise, and it carried with it the shared experience of a people who daily descended into the earth. The theme also permitted him to round off the piece with a comic touch. There were no coal mines on Malta, a detail that seemed to have escaped the notice of the Italians, who in the early days of the conflict had proudly announced the destruction of a Maltese coal mine by the Regia Aeronautica—still the cause of much hilarity across the island.
Pemberton had done well, more than well; the article was pitch-perfect. So why, then, did it leave Max cold? A few hours before, it would have had him racing downstairs to congratulate the author.
Pemberton would get his pat on the back, and the piece would go out in the Weekly Bulletin, but Max would know it for what it was: another lie peddled to the masses. They weren’t one happy family pulling together in adversity. His experience at the Cassars’ house had made that starkly clear to him.
He remembered something that Charles Headley, his former boss and mentor, had said to him soon after his arrival at the Information Office.
“You know what the great thing about our line of work is, old man? I’ll tell you, it’s very simple. A lie can make its way halfway round the world before the truth has a chance to put its boots on.”
There was probably no less truth in those words now than there had been at the time, but for once Max found himself calling into question the words’ central assumption—that the power of a lie was something to be admired and cherished.
How much angrier would those grieving women at the Cassars’ have been with him had they known the truth about Carmela’s death? The answer, he suspected, was that they would have been less angry.
Thanks to Lilian, he knew the Maltese well enough by now to say that they would at least have respected him for his honesty. They were an ancient people, a wise people. They had seen civilizations come and go around their island home, and yet they were still there,