The Hospitaller Moment
by Brian Howell
The Hospitallers had not exactly been rivals of the Templars, but, Gerard had read somewhere, they could have given them a run for their money. He was thinking about this as he leaned out over one of the stone walls of the Upper Barrakka Gardens that gave a view onto two prominent spits of land, home to the Three Cities, which had seen one of the most brutal battles of its era. In fact, part of that battle had started a little further along the shore on the very peninsula of land that Gerard was now standing on. The place was the fort of St Elmo, but something about what he had heard regarding the fort across the river, that of St Angelo, captivated him even more.
He looked round now to his right, in the other direction to that of St Elmo, towards the prosperous city of Valletta named after the Grand Master of the Knights of Malta, the figure who had been at the centre of it all. He tried to imagine how there had been upper ground there, the Sciberras Mountains, from which the Turks had fired their cannons incessantly on the fort during the Great Siege of 1565.
As an unknown writer, at least unknown to the wider public beyond having a few stories in small literary magazines, with no published books to date, Gerard couldn’t resist making an effort to picture these things whilst being in their setting, but he knew he could never actually write a big historical epic in the way his imagination wanted to dictate. Not even a potboiler, of which he felt sure there must be many set during the famous victory. No, for him, it would be something quiet, creeping, insidious, even. Above all, short. Despite these assertions, he had actually done some research before coming, just in case, though it was his instinct not to do that much; otherwise, how could you really turn off, on holiday?
Rosalind, who was at this moment off with the kids buying them ice cream, was a different breed. She was a highly-regarded, high-achieving academic art historian who wrote books and articles on her subject, nineteenth-century French art. He admired and envied her and was happy that their areas rarely overlapped except when she had time to read and critique one of his stories. It was always constructive criticism; she had no agenda, particularly. It was simply informed, maybe sometimes too respectful but you couldn’t ask for everything.
He looked around at the other tourists, not staring, trying to catch a few interesting actions, but he was not a documentarian; he wanted to catch a serendipitous moment though he did wonder if such a wish defeated the point – if it was conscious, as with the uncertainty principle. Didn’t the best such discoveries come when you weren’t looking for them, such as the time he was wandering around Porto during a festival and, as he was filming some lighted lanterns floating into the sky, a disembodied female voice said to him, Isn’t it a wonderful view? He fell in love with that voice but when he turned to look, she was gone. He assumed she had been pretty but that was just how his mind worked. He didn’t even think about the possibility that she might have been dumpy and unattractive, to him. Or that she might not have found him attractive, full stop. From that moment on, his mind started to work on an alternative narrative where he had seen the woman and somehow they fell in love.
‘We’re back!’ Cassie roared, almost jumping on him, cone in hand, despite being the older of the siblings.
James was shy and diffident, hovering around, as if not quite fully a member of the family, but given that the boy was only six, Gerard was not going to be judgemental. His own world at five had seemed barely to register what he saw even though he was excitable and living fully in his imagination as much as in his actions. Mercifully, both James and Cassie were still a while off being consumed by the inevitable pull of a mobile phone, though Cassie was hankering, understandably, in this day and age. Secretly, and perhaps selfishly, he hoped that some revolution might happen in the next few years so that the two could be saved the mind- and personality-sapping exigencies of the digital world.
Their first port of call was to be the nearby St John’s Co-Cathedral, not least because it would sate the needs of the whole family, firstly Gerard’s research for any number of objects connected with the Knights, including the burial places, and all the associated memorabilia; secondly, Rosalind’s curiosity about the Caravaggio (she had read that it was massive); and then, the kids, as long as they were well-behaved, would have plenty to discover, most especially the multi-media annexe, which Rosalind had read an article about on the plane trip over, notwithstanding the fact that it featured a famous beheading. But it wasn’t too much of a stretch to say that the children were gravitating towards art more and more, especially Cassie.
They made their way through what seemed like a central hub for tourists around the Pjazza Teatru Rjal, an open-air theatre built on the ruins of the bombed opera house, with a handful of lonely columns topped with Corinthian capitals supporting nothing but the sky, companioned with a somewhat melancholy saxophonist’s solo. It was just too crowded here but they reached the Co-Cathedral without incident, meaning neither James nor Cassie had run far enough away to almost disappear from sight and give him a heart attack. He would feel much more relaxed inside the building. To himself, and even though he knew he was one of them, he associated tourists with seediness, even as he looked at his beautiful blonde wife and fair-haired children.
It was a relief to arrive at the Cathedral and find only a modest queue. The exterior itself was not beautiful in any traditional way that appealed to Gerard, but it radiated strength and firmness. Added to this positive, its creamy yellow limestone walls brightened his mood, almost literally.
Gerard was in no way religious. Rosalind described herself as Anglican, which in her case meant that she could appreciate some aspects of the Catholic faith without any real attachment. Technically Protestant, Gerard leaned towards the more sober Northern Renaissance but did not shut himself off to beautiful works of art that came before and after the Reformation. Nevertheless, he had a passion for sixteenth century Dutch art, where Rosalind was more enamoured of her special area.
Inside, they were met initially with an explosion of the Baroque. Rosalind, wearing a wistful smile, went straight towards the altar with the children. From his angle, he thought that maybe she genuflected for a moment towards the figures at the back of the altar but that surely couldn’t be. He let it go. As for the nave and the ceiling and its overpowering richness of decoration, he couldn’t take it all in right away, thinking he’d get some relief by escaping into one of the smaller chapels on the side of the nave. As it turned out, he was met with anything but relief; rather, he experienced even greater detonations of sensory perception as he attempted, and at first failed, to make sense of different sculptural elements and plaques. He could not read Italian or Latin, knowing only a smattering of phrases (Rosalind could have helped him out here) and he was not about to start googling on his phone even if he was allowed. He inevitably thought of certain Dutch still life paintings, as if they had come to life, or at least achieved three-dimensional form, with all kinds of marble objects such as flags on poles, a shield, a helmet, possibly a small cannon, all in a festoon arrangement. The name on the plaque below this, Nicolas Cotoner, meant nothing to him, but he would check that, at least. All of this was to say nothing of two crouching slave statues on either side of the plaque, and, high above, a female figure blowing a horn, and a putto posed as if he were holding the shield in the centre of a pyramidal stone tablet.
‘Darling’, Rosalind’s voice interrupted his thoughts, tunnelling into his ears as if overheard from another location. That had happened a few times in his life. He had sometimes been in one room where he had left friends talking and had overheard their conversation as clear as if he had been listening through speakers via a microphone. Just a few times, but those instances had stayed with him.
‘Listen, I’m going to take these little devils to see the Caravaggio. And then James is really excited about the digital show in the little annexe. Will you meet us up there? It’s just around that corner, up some stairs’, she added, pointing to a sign near the entrance.
‘Sure, fifteen minutes? I just want to look at a few more of these.’
‘Daaad, come on,’ James tugged at his hand. It was unusual, for it was usually Cassie who did that kind of thing. But he didn’t create a scene.
As Gerard moved from one chapel to the other, parallel to the nave, he saw similar displays to the Cotoner, there being several ‘langues’ or ‘languages’, it turned out. Again, he did not know what these signified. Eventually, he found a leaflet that detailed the layout of the cathedral and mentioned how each ‘langue’ represented a division of the Knights of Malta, whose patron saint was of course St John the Baptist. He must have read about them at some point and forgotten this detail about how they were organised. Indeed, it came as a shock to be reminded that many of these knights had been buried under the tiles of this very edifice.
Suddenly, he remembered his promise, so he made his way to the oratory that held the Caravaggio. The canvas was huge, sweeping in its gaze yet extremely intimate. He’d taken so long over the chapels that he barely had time for more than this quick glance. It seemed a sacrilege.
Now, he entered a dark space and went up some stairs that doubled back on themselves, not quite sure where he was going, even with the signs. He had the feeling that he had entered a hastily-constructed labyrinth. It was a crazy thought, given the exhibition had been established in such a prestigious venue.
There was a small room with a St Jerome by the artist. They weren’t there so he went into the exhibition proper, following a digital display on the floor of some of the artist’s well-known works, imagining surprising James or Cassie by covering their eyes from behind, then wondered if that was the best thing to do to a child while he or she was looking at a beheading. If Rosalind had been with him at this very moment, she probably would have said he was overthinking. She was not one to censor him for anything unless it was truly daft. True, she had had to on occasion point out some things about bringing up their children and general house duties that she would have said, very gently, required common sense. He in turn had said he really didn’t have common sense, barely knew what it meant, really. She just laughed whenever he said that.
His steps had taken him to another digital display, this time quite large, that invited people to enter a space and stand in front of a rendition of the Beheading of St John from the oratory. As he did so, he realised he hadn’t even looked for Rosalind or the kids, but he reasoned they couldn’t have gone far. The display was straightforward enough, imposing grids of lines to emphasise the vanishing point of the painting and simulate a 3D space, focusing in on different figures in turn to isolate their role in the depiction of the saint’s downfall. Absurdly, the simplicity of this multimedia display probably served to draw him into a Caravaggio more than he had ever felt before and he felt a very strong urge to go back and spend time with the original, which after all was just a few minutes away.
Turning away, he almost expected to see Rosalind and the kids hovering behind him as if they had been playing hide-and-seek all this time, but no, they weren’t there. He moved back down the dark staircase and around back to the oratory. Still, he was damned if he wasn’t going to have a good look at the painting this time.
The huge canvas itself was annoyingly far away and relatively high behind a screen, so the irony was that you could see the real thing yet not be intimate with it or really even be sure what you were looking at if you hadn’t already taken the trouble to research it, albeit the general architecture of the painting, its very clearly depicted group of four participants and bystanders to the left, its two onlookers through a window grating on the right, something he particularly liked because it reminded him of some of Hoogstraten’s trompe l’oeil works, and the large area of empty space all worked despite his physical distance from the work itself to draw him in.
That would have to be enough, he guessed, until he had a chance to come back.
Where on earth were they? he thought, not for the first time.
‘He was a knight, you know,’ a voice said.
It was Rosalind’s voice, but she was, impossibly, right across the other side of the nave, not even on the oratory side.
‘What, Caravaggio?’ Cassie said in childish wonderment.
He almost shouted Rosalind’s name, out of relief, but he could hardly do that in a cathedral.
‘Oh, my . . .’ he said, reaching her, almost on the point of tears.
‘Darling, what’s wrong? Are you O.K.?’
‘I wasn’t . . . oh, it’s nothing. I heard your voice.’
‘When?’
‘Just now, and Cassie’s. At least I thought so.’
‘Love, I’ve been standing here looking at them. They’re having such fun.’
Seeing Cassie and James wandering around the cathedral, skipping on stones, then rushing into a side chapel, then out again, he understood how carefree she was while he was mini-panicking.
‘I didn’t know he was a knight,’ he said, almost forgetting the confusion over the voice, then started to worry that she might think his mentioning the knight thing again was a jibe at her. But from her next words, she did not seem to have taken it that way.
‘Oh, yes, I didn’t want to spoil that for you!’
‘Great,’ he said, in his most neutral tone.
‘Let’s get the kids and get out of here,’ she said in the mock-tone of a character in an action movie.
❧
‘What did you think of the Caravaggio?’ he said later that evening out of the blue as they lay in bed.
‘I don’t go a bundle on him, but it’s powerful, that one.’
‘Certainly is.’
‘There’s something about it, I guess. Something unexpected, gentle, within all the violence on show. The woman with the bowl even reminded me of a Vermeer.’
‘The older one . . . covering her ears, yes, she shows compassion,’ he agreed. ‘It’s so hard to reconcile what you hear about his life with the understanding he shows of his subjects, sometimes.’
‘And that thing about his being a knight of the order,’ she reminded him once more, adding ‘and that snippet you heard from someone . . . in the church. Funny.’
‘What?’
So it wasn’t Rosalind after all. It made no sense to him but he had better leave it. But that didn’t explain his hearing Cassie’s response as well.
‘If I didn’t know better, I would have said that James and Cassie were acting out some fighting scenes, as if they were knights . . .’
‘Battling the Turks?’ she offered.
‘Yes, a Maltese knight fighting a Turk.’
‘Who was who?’
‘Oh, no idea!’
They laughed.
‘They were kind of ferocious. I even took them outside for a while. You were . . . I don’t know, in your world.’
It could have sounded mean, but she finished the last words with a knowing, tolerant smile.
He almost said, Yes, worrying about where you all were, but he held back. He knew she had a point.
‘I’m sorry. I got distracted a bit . . .’
‘No worries, lover.’
Sometime in the morning they heard the cannons. James and Cassie ran into their room shouting battle cries out of the window while puffs of smoke wrote themselves onto the sky.
‘What’s that?’ Cassie queried.
‘Charge!’ shouted James, turning and launching himself onto the double bed.
‘Probably commemorating the siege, I dare say,’ offered Rosalind. Then, ‘My God!’
‘What?’
‘It’s 12:00! That’s probably why they’re shooting off cannonballs,’ she chuckled.
‘Well, not exactly cannonballs, I wouldn’t think!’
‘Good point!’ she conceded. ‘Or even heads, for that matter . . . Wow, we really slept that long?’
‘I guess we didn’t give ourselves time to recover, going straight out like that, first day.
He waited a while till Cassie and James had moved into the other room.
‘What did you mean by heads?’
‘Oh, the knights fired their Turkish prisoners’ heads back over the harbour.’
‘Charming. I wonder if the Turks repaid the Knights in kind’ was his shocked response. Then he added, ‘Speaking of guns and . . . heads . . . , I’d like to see St Angelo,’ he suddenly remembered. ‘We saw it from the Gardens.’
‘Righteeho!’ was her breezy answer.
‘Righteeho!’ Cassie and James echoed from the other room.
❧
The trip across the water to the Three Cities took no more than ten minutes.
Before long, in sweltering heat, they were all trooping up a long ramp and the minute they entered a short tunnel and another ramp they felt relieved, but they would soon be outside again as they discovered the warren of paths, arches, open spaces, and levels. This place, they found out, was not only known for its role in the Great Siege but for centuries of resistance to invasion as well as for its or strategic importance right up to the end of WWII. It would be a puzzle, in many senses, to work out what area belonged to or defined a given era as they walked from one point to another, whether it was somewhere where ammunition had been stored, or places such as the guardiola towers around the fort that kept an eye on the Grand Harbour and the rest of Birgu and Senglea, or the different gun batteries. Partial, however, as Gerard was to stories of heroism of the last World War, it was still the period around the Siege that riveted him. This was all the more unusual for him as, aside from a short period in his teens when he was interested in all things mediaeval, he had not had an interest in war, battles, or anything relating to these now-ancient conditions of life, and even less so of anything that smacked of the Crusades. True, he leaned towards exploring aspects of the Late Renaissance but it was firmly rooted in what he saw in artworks. This country, however, was somehow different: it was about a Christian island, an archipelago, overcoming a seemingly insuperable power that in turn, should it succeed, threatened the rest of Europe. The contradiction was that he was not a church-goer or Christian in any meaningful sense, and certainly open to almost any culture he could think of. He wasn’t exactly an atheist, either. That was going too far. He simply did not need religion in his life but one had to respect people whose lives and cultures had revolved around it, whether they had any choice in the matter or not, because that is what made them and their peoples what they were today. As long as there was still the freedom to choose, which was the case in many countries now.
After they had bought their tickets, Rosalind, as ever, went ahead with Cassie and James, telling Gerard to take his time. He would always come when needed. He passed through a warren of rooms with historical displays that weren’t of immediate interest to him. Too soon, he thought.
As he emerged, he just saw a fugitive red shoe attached to one of his daughter’s feet disappear around the corner ahead. Turning, he moved through an arch and up along a small path. As he came up the lane, he heard Rosalind’s voice say, ‘And Caravaggio was imprisoned here for a while, as were many knights, and slaves’, followed by an ‘Ooh’ from their impressed children. How did she know so much? He guessed she had simply read it on a plaque, but when he reached the building where they should have been, they had already moved on.
To his relief, he found them, the kids climbing onto a cannon, as he remembered doing when he was their age in Greenwich. Even with that background, he had no idea about which cannons were which size and what kind of ball they took and the concomitant damage they did, though this was something he might have to look into. From the main terrace, according to a plaque he had seen, he must have been looking at Kalkara to the right, with Valletta to the left. They all had such beautiful names, he thought, if you included Cospicua and Senglea. As he mused over this, he thought he heard the sound of metal scraping and looked around to see where it had come from. He was sensitive to certain sounds, he had noticed recently. More and more, there was something odd about his hearing, he thought, especially for his age. Whether that was connected to his overhearing from a distance sometimes, he did not know.
He walked over to Cassie and James, hugging them both, trying to imagine how their world was. He could at least remember how he had thought and imagined his world when he was their age, moments, like pretending to drive a bus in London by sitting behind the driver in a Routemaster, trying to work out what that strange knob with serrated edges was. He never did find out. He supposed he could find out in a second now on the internet, but maybe he should leave that as a mystery, something he could ask someone about on his deathbed. If they went for their phone immediately, he would say, ‘No, let it be a mystery’. Find out in the afterlife, something whispered.
He was fascinated by the guardiola towers, which Cassie and James were now running in and out of. These structures had a triptych of openings, too large to be called embrasures, but they did offer some protection from attack. He couldn’t resist getting Rosalind to stand in one and taking a few photos of her, the breakwater to the harbour in the background. Unlike with him, it was virtually impossible to take a bad picture of his wife. She rarely lost that resting face look of calm curiosity and contentedness and smiled easily. Inevitably, he thought of the first time he learned her name and happened to know an impressive quote from Shakespeare’s As You Like It. He didn’t go looking for it after the fact, he insisted later. It was serendipity, or Fate. So, when the moment was right, early on, he trundled it out: ‘Of all the pictures fairest lined / All are black to Rosalinde’, though he had actually remembered it wrongly as ‘faces’. She did not correct him: it turned out later that she knew it. Same difference, he had thought, unnecessarily.
The three of them moved off again, away from him, through an arch, and disappeared.
On one side of this open area, there was a plaque identifying the next level up as the mediaeval castle that had been added to by the Knights in the sixteenth century to serve as their headquarters. The staircase and the alcove-like spaces were very bare and he couldn’t imagine his whole family was hiding anywhere around here. He almost felt with the heat that he could brush up against the limestone and melt into it if he wasn’t careful. There was a plush-looking room with armchairs, the whole shielded by glass, so no entrance there. Then he heard that scraping sound as if metal were making contact with a surface. He looked around and saw some limestone dust falling from the wall. He turned hurriedly back down into the courtyard and proceeded on through a huge open door to a new area with a chapel.
‘Did you see the ghost?’ Rosalind said when he caught up with them in the chapel in front of a statue of Christ on the cross.
‘Ghost?’
‘In the magisterial palace, up the stairs.’
‘The what? You know how I feel about ghosts. I don’t want the kids to start seeing them all over the place, either.’
Rosalind just laughed at his seriousness. It was a healthy laugh, one that did not rile him as many of his friends’ laughs did. She reached out and squeezed his hand to mollify him.
Then, he was genuinely horrified to see Cassie cross herself over by the altar.
‘Cassie,’ he hissed. ‘What are you doing?’
‘I dunno.’
‘I think she got it from one of her friends at school. She’s Catholic.’
Or you? He thought, but he didn’t say it.
‘Oh great. Tell her we aren’t bloody . . .’ he stopped himself, remembering where he was. And his hypocrisy. He would likely as not end up praising the Knights in his story or novel for standing up to the Ottomans.
‘O.K., I guess that happens. I probably even did it once myself as a kid.’
At that moment, he remembered a Jewish boy living in his street in south London whom his neighbours always mentioned in a hushed voice as if he were something odd. At that early age, he’d had no idea what a Jew was and had never had anything against people of that race, so he was baffled when he did start to come across anti-Semites. It was all so baffling to him.
‘I think there’s one more level, the cavalier,’ Rosalind said. ‘And more guns,’ she smiled at James, who suddenly seemed extra excited.
‘You’ve really done your research, darling. You can’t have got all this from that guide you bought.’
‘Ah, shucks,’ she joked. ‘I’ve got a few books at home and there’s always this little horror.’
She was referring to the phone in her hand, not either of their kids, who were already running off.
On the cavalier, the highest point in the fort, a little like a large platform with even more guns on different sides, as well as places that were more obviously the sites of modern weapons, they had more or less a 360° view of the surrounding area. He was getting used to the layout that to him a few days earlier had made only the barest impression, when it had been almost completely abstract.
After a brief look around, Gerard’s attention fixed on a display.
‘Darling, we’re going down. There’s a shop. See you there.’
She gestured down a staircase to a general area on the next level.
‘Sure, I’ll be with you soon.’
What he thought at first was a simple view of the Three Cities he realised was more involved, something to do with lines of fortification called the Cotonera, a familiar name. Despite his initial research into the Siege, he was realising how little he knew about the layout and history of the city, now. He did a quick sighting of some of the landmarks indicated with what he could see in the distance, but it was a little too much to absorb all the details right now. He took a photo of the displays to study later.
When he reached the shop-cum-café, they had obviously moved on. There was no rush. Rosalind could easily call him on his mobile if they couldn’t find each other. Sometimes, he didn’t even remember that it was with him constantly, albeit the battery was always running down. Did he remember to bring his charger? Wherever they were, they must be making their way down, even though they could double back at some point. There was always some doorway or room to pop into and get lost in.
Half giving up, he started to make his way down, but took a slight diversion to the courtyard in front of the magisterial palace. Facing the palace was something called the Nymphaneum, which he had barely noticed because he had been so focused on the palace before. He thought it was a lovely name for any place, but here, wonderful. It was a shaded alcove with a Renaissance forced perspective in the ceiling. It was very clever, he thought. There was a wooden table with chairs, but he really wasn’t sure if members of the public were supposed to sit there. He wondered what British soldiers must have made of such a hedonistic place when stationed there over the previous two centuries.
He was about to leave when he heard something, an echo perhaps, like a rush of voices, a shout. Was it one of those instances where he sometimes heard a clash, often a bang, inside his head just before he fell asleep, except this time it was during the day? He had never had it diagnosed. He just felt something around him, almost as if the air was thicker. Of course, looking around, there wasn’t a soul to see, but there was a momentary, almost subliminal flutter, like a scene, an image, interposing itself into his vision, shifting colours and definition like some corrupted videotape or even digital glitch. Was it heat stroke? He had never suffered from that before. The final straw was when he felt something rub against his bare arm. It was warm and smooth, but there was nothing or no one near him.
He moved down the steps, in almost a panic. He needed to find Ros and the kids to stay calm.
At the entrance, James was waving around a little model of a knight and Cassie had a trinket with a Maltese cross on it.
‘Sorry, I got caught up and you’d already left the shop.’
‘Had to find a loo. Are you O.K.? You look sort of flustered.’
‘Maybe the onset of a migraine,’ he half-lied. It was not that he didn’t have migraines, as did she, but it would serve as an explanation for now.
Soon, they were walking around the backstreets of Vittoriosa, or Birgu, and Cospicua. James and Cass were getting tired and wilting in the sun, like their parents. They would have to find somewhere to eat inside, then have a rest in the hotel.
In the restaurant, Rosalind observed his solemn face and enquired, ‘Do you want to have a day off, by yourself, to explore, or write? I can take care of the nippers. It’s no problem.’
He had a dilemma. He intensely hated being on his own, a disposition he had suffered from his whole life. It was at war with an equally powerful longing to break away from time to time. His marriage with Rosalind should have been the perfect situation, but sometimes her understanding led to feelings of guilt and even resentment, as bizarre as that seemed. Well into adulthood, he had been accompanied by the childish feeling that he would get lost if he strayed too far from home and perhaps his fairly frequent travels abroad, before marrying and since, had exacerbated this irrational tendency, not to mention his permanent state of uxoriousness. The fact that he was a confident father seemed to play no role.
‘How many days does that leave us, five?’ he asked.
‘Hmm. Yeah, more or less.’
‘O.K. Maybe I’ll go somewhere you don’t fancy.’
‘Or just wander, see where it takes you.’
‘If you like it enough, we can go back together.’
❧
He decided to take Rosalind up on her offer, despite his misgivings. He liked the idea of Gozo, the island in the north, but they would almost certainly go there together, so he decided to hop on one of the bus services that went round the main island. It reminded him inevitably of their holidays in Hawaii. But this excursion was not around the island so much as a cultural tour of the inland as well as the coast. Nevertheless, he decided to stay on the bus till the Blue Grotto, not getting off at Mosta. Whatever he did, it would inevitably be a scouting trip.
Soon after alighting from the bus, he found himself walking down a hill to a small inlet where long boats were parked on a slope, and down to a modest ticket office. At the bottom, the small fishing boat being piloted by one man efficiently whisked tourists onboard six at a time. He found himself at the front, with two young women squeezed in next to him. As they pulled out, Gerard suddenly became aware of bikini’d flesh and displayed muscles along the side of the jetty and swimmers in the water, but it really didn’t distract him too much, as might have been the case ten years earlier and certainly before Ros. The few times they joked about being tempted by someone else, he had always assured her she had no need to worry about him wandering. On this occasion, he was more curious about working out which languages were being spoken around him. They were predominantly Italian and from time to time he heard French.
After a short trip out on the open water, the boat started to cut in and out of various small cave-like inlets. The shallower the water became near the inlets, the more various were the blue, green, and turquoise reflections he could make out, and these sometimes made him think he was seeing different sea creatures, not necessarily fishes, but maybe some ancient, even extinct sea animals.
His mind wandered back to Ros and the kids. He wondered what they were doing right now. And he felt guilty. He might as well have been a Catholic, he joked. What was this obsession with Catholicism? Was it some kind of insecurity that his loved one would gravitate away from him and use it as a weapon against him? It was pure paranoia. He knew she loved him, and he knew that she knew he loved her.
At some point, he heard the boatman suddenly start talking about the history of the area and in particular the grotto and fishermen who lived and worked here. He didn’t remember much, but one thing he took in was that apparently during the Second World War, locals had hidden in the various caves around this blue grotto. At the same time, he felt one of the women, a brunette, looking at him. Their thighs were touching, he was aware, but there was nothing either could do about that, given the lack of space. He found himself thinking of the life, if it could be called such, that La Valette had lived aboard a galley as a slave during the time he had been a prisoner of the Turks. Was he feverish? More to the point, what must the woman be thinking? Women, let alone women 15-20 years younger than him, didn’t look at him that way, not usually, not ever, really. It did occur to him that he could be taken for a single man or divorcé. It was hardly outlandish. And he never but never wore a ring.
He looked away, in an obviously deliberate manner, then felt silly and self-conscious and even started thinking that he might have unnecessarily seemed unfriendly. How can you be thinking one moment of Ros and the kids, and then start imagining that a younger woman is eyeing you up? he thought. Probably she was twenty-five, possibly a bit older, like her neighbour. Was it something to do with what the boatman had said that she hadn’t understood in English and was going innocently to ask him? More to the point, did she think that because he was English he was making some kind of calculation that he was older than her and he might know more about something to do with the British and the French in the Second World War. No, that was just crazy. That was just so abstract. That was him thinking, nothing more. He kept thinking of this and various extrapolations of it as the boat entered yet another small cave and was almost beginning to feel dizzy.
In this state, he started to think that the boat was not just entering a liminal space, but rather it was cutting out the space, that it was almost opening a portal; it was not a science fiction fantasy for him, yet it might be an opening up maybe to a point where his consciousness might fade any moment.
Suddenly something fell on his leg. It was the hand of the woman, which had slipped as the boat suddenly lurched from a stray wave.
After that, there was a slight awkwardness, to be sure, then a gap opened up, and for some reason the woman felt she had to say something.
‘You . . . are English?’
‘Oh, yes.’
‘Oh, good.’
‘Why good?’
‘Ah, just a connection, I think.’
‘Can I ask you why you are here?’
‘I’m with my family, but, you know, I’m just having a break, sort of researching something.’
‘Ah, la recherche, moi aussi . . . I’m sorry, do you speak French?’
Now was the time to reveal exactly how little French he spoke or say something witty or self-deprecating, he guessed. He opted for the latter of the latter.
‘Very little, I’m afraid. My main subject was German. It’s more for some fiction I’m writing about Malta.’
‘What, a novel?’
‘Could be. Or a short story, or a novella.’
‘You know La Valette?’
He nodded.
‘Do you know about his daughter?’
‘No. I thought the Knights were all celibate.’
‘I guess he was married before he was made a knight’, she said, smiling.
‘Anyway, what is so interesting about his daughter?’
‘Well,’ she said, ‘it’s terrible, really. She was murdered by her husband. It was just after the end of the siege, her father’s greatest achievement. It broke his heart.’
He thought he almost heard a crack in her voice as she said the word ‘heart’.
He thought about the phrase. Broke his heart. Wow. What would it take to break the heart of a man of the standing of someone such as La Valette?
She looked at him as if she were following the train of his thought. Her expression was open, both intelligent and seemingly trusting of a stranger, and she was ridiculously beautiful. If she had been a character in one of his stories, he would have left his description at that. As a writer, he did not believe in describing the features of a character, because words could not be equivalent to the image made by a sketch or painting and certainly not a photograph or film, so why bother? He also did not believe in the trendy orthodoxy of showing and not telling. Too many of his favourite writers had thrived from writing hundreds of thousands of words of telling. Of course, you could and often had to ‘show’ a certain amount. No harm in that. He was more likely to say that a certain female character of his looked like Monica Vitti or a figure painted by Van Eyck or any other of the Flemish masters. It wasn’t his fault if the reader didn’t know what those real, concrete images looked like, especially with them freely available on their phones. Following this logic, he thought that this real woman looked a lot like Catherine Deneuve, who had that same look of innocent wonderment but minus the slight look of wariness. If pushed to describe a specific part of this woman that stood out, it would be her arched eyebrows which had small peaks in their middles. Perhaps his inclination this way was what made him a fan of the French nouveau roman of the 60s.
‘So is that what you are researching?’ he said, picking up the thread.
‘Ah, not exactly. I am m researching the Siege, especially Fort St Angelo and the other fortifications.
‘Oh really?’ he pursued, trying to mask his excitement. ‘I was just there the other day.’
‘We can go . . . but . . . ah . . . you have your family.’
‘My wife wouldn’t mind if we went today.’
He said this with a lump in his throat. He knew he was in some way doing something wrong, even as he sought to justify it to himself.
They caught the bus straight back to Valletta. Even though they were lucky with their connection, he was wondering if the fort wouldn’t be closed by the time they got there.
‘What if it’s closed?’ he said.
‘It’s no problem. I want to show you something special you can’t get a ticket for, anyway.’
He didn’t inquire any more, leaving it hopefully to be a nice surprise.
Checking his phone, he saw it was running low, but got off a message to Rosalind to say he’d be a little late but on time for supper. They would probably go out and he would be on the hunt for retsina, a wine he adored, but had so far had no luck finding. He didn’t mention his new companion. It really wasn’t necessary. She didn’t need to know, in the scheme of things.
She was true to her word. As they approached the entrance to the fort and he made to go up the ramp to the main entrance, she took him by the arm, leading him up a temporary-looking set of steps that led into a gangway that hugged the curtain wall of the fort and ended at a small arch. They walked down a neglected, almost garden-like space that made him think of Bosch, and out into an open area that gave directly onto the harbour. They had to negotiate a number of large slabs of stone till they reached the furthest point before the water. Silently, they walked out back over the slabs, wondering at the purpose of certain capstan-like structures around which ran large grooves.
‘It’s for the ships to moor,’ she provided.
Then, she turned towards the wall, beckoning him, not forgetting to warn him not to slip.
‘Soyez attention. C’est un peu glissant, je pense. Sli . . . ppery?’
‘Sure.’
Now he saw they were moving towards a rusted iron gate, or maybe they were just bars blocking the entrance. But there was enough space to squeeze through.
Ahead, there was a short flight of steps with access to an open space, but she was leading him down, in near-total darkness now.
‘Are you sure it’s . . .’
She made a light shushing sound.
She got out her phone for light. It helped but it didn’t prevent them from brushing thighs as they entered a narrow tunnel. She seemed unbothered.
He was not claustrophobic, but dark narrow spaces like this always reminded him of a time he used to play as a young child by the Thames in Greenwich. There were, as he recalled it, damp cave-like rooms, perhaps for storage in past years, decades, centuries old, for all he knew, that could be explored by him and his friends, but there was always the dread sensation that they could fill up any time with water, so it was not a place you wanted to get trapped in, for whatever reason. He still sometimes had nightmares about those places.
‘Where are we going?’ he said, regressing more and more to that past childhood, wild by comparison to what children were allowed to do these days.
‘Tenez ma main,’ she encouraged.
‘I . . . I think we should go back, don’t . . .’
He could not finish his sentence because his near-utterance had been closed off by the warmth of her mouth and the realisation that she was around him, her hair, her breasts up against him. She had performed this manoeuvre in the near-dark so quickly that he had not had time to draw back. In the process, she had dropped her phone and it was totally dark. Embracing, they fell down together with a thud, him on top of her. In the dark and near silence, while they tried to recover themselves and her hand searched for the phone, he felt as if nothing else existed and he wondered for a few moments where he was. Lost within himself, he was taken back a few decades earlier to the time a woman taller and much sturdier than him had whisked him off his chair at a party onto the dance floor and completely enveloped him. Such moments, if followed through, could last a lifetime. That moment was not sustained but the memory resurfaced now and then.
They stayed on the ground in the narrow space where they had fallen, hugging, fairly shocked.
‘How far do you think this goes?’ he asked her.
Did he mean the double entendre? Whether he did or not, she obviously didn’t register it or show it in any way.
‘Some say it goes all the way to the other fortifications, even as far as the Cotonera.’
That word again, that name. And the word, fortification itself, probably ramparts in French.
Her body was warm. He did not feel the need to go into her. This was enough. This was beautiful and horrible at the same time. She completely trusted him but he did not know what was motivating her. Need for an older man, though not one too old?
‘I would like to show you more, les enceintes fortifiées, les courtines, they’re all around us, not just in the forts, in the tunnels.’
Almost out of a sense of duty, or the feeling that a certain illictness had been accessed and explored, that he might literally be dragged down somewhere they ached for and yet feared, they made their way back through the gate into the light, back to the agglomeration of stones with their odd grooves or runnels on the edge of the water.
There were even a couple of people fishing they had barely noticed earlier, standing right on the edge of the rocks like the distant anglers on the Parisian island in La Grande Jatte.
They were holding hands.
This was crazy, he told himself.
At this moment, as he looked towards Valletta across the harbour, he realised he felt dizzy once more, but it was too late to stop his foot slipping and going from under him. He fell into the ditch-like structure that surrounded the spherical rock, and everything went black, once more.
‘Mon Dieu’ were the last words he remembered before he lost complete consciousness.
❧
Around this time, Rosalind received a phone call from a woman with a French accent seemingly from Gerard’s own phone. After checking she had the right person, Rosalind learned that Gerard had slipped, stepping out of the boat on the way back from the grotto and knocked his head on the jetty. The woman wanted to know if Rosalind wanted to come and pick him up. It was not serious enough for an ambulance, she thought. Sensing Rosalind’s hesitation or confusion, the woman offered to bring him back to Valletta.
‘Maybe that would be best,’ she replied, possibly running the risk of sounding a little distant but she hardly wanted to go into detail about having the kids with her.
‘It’s very kind of you . . . if it’s not too much trouble. Er . . . is he awake right now?’
‘Non, il s’est endormi maintenant. Oh, I’m sorry.’
‘It’s O.K. I speak French.’
She almost wanted to attach a smiley to her comment but that was hardly appropriate or even possible right now.
‘So?’
‘I’m sorry. You’ll probably be coming back by bus?’
‘Yes.’
To the woman’s mind, the deceit was overwhelmingly necessary. She would never be able to explain how it had all happened without giving something away and raising Gerard’s wife’s suspicions.
The fact was that Gerard’s injury was actually extremely serious. He had recovered enough to stumble away with her help from where he had fallen but only made it a few hundred yards, bleeding from the head. They had almost reached the jetty for the boat to Valletta, a stone’s throw away from the church in which La Valette’s daughter had been married, but he fell into her arms and she knew she had to call an ambulance.
She had let them take Gerard away. They seemed to believe her when she said she was just a stranger who had found him and helped.
This was when she decided to call Gerard’s wife.
❧
Rosalind couldn’t help wondering how the woman could have got Gerard’s phone and worked out how to call her if he had suddenly collapsed as she had said, but she would just have to put it down to her resourcefulness.
In truth, the call could not have come at much worse a time. She had been lying back against two huge pillows, stroking James’s head as he fell asleep after their morning excursion and lunch. She had been in shock after coming across an effigy of what she presumed was a baby Jesus in a church dedicated to his name. It was not that it had any religious significance for her but rather that the image of a smiling, almost grinning, infant in swaddling clothes with its outsize head and one of its small teeth looking like an incipient fang, the whole backlit very gaudily in a gold light, made her think of her worst fear, of the death of a young child. It made her think of some of the more extreme depictions of the Mexican Child Jesus with its exaggerated facial features. The fact that it looked like a figure staring directly out of the side of a small coffin as if through a glass panel at the spectator sent a shiver through her. It made her hold on to Cassie and James in the church hard to the point where they had both asked her to stop as she was hurting them. Images passed through her mind of so many times when they been in some danger, whether it was some fear she had of them drowning on a beach on holiday or stepping out in front of a car, some just normal, sensible, everyday fears, some genuine near-misses. In response, she had squatted down to their level and hugged them and said, ‘You two are my greatest loves. Nothing is more important to me than you’. They nodded but still looked a little bewildered. Cassie said, ‘And Daddy?’ Without any hesitation, she blurted, ‘Of course!’
❧
Rosalind decided to go to the bus terminus rather than wait for the call in the hotel room, just in case they got back earlier than expected. There were a dizzying number of bus stops and she just couldn’t work out where Gerard’s would be coming in from. But there was surely no way they would miss him when he did come, even if there was no phone call.
Now, with Cassie and James muttering on about all kinds of things that enter children’s minds seemingly unbidden, she started to fret. What in hell was going on? Where did she get the stupid idea from to let him go off on his own like this with her taking care of the kids on her own? To calm herself a little, she entertained a dialogue with him.
‘You know, I do not think you’re a failure, you know that?’
‘I know, I know,’ his imagined self replied.
‘You think that I am some kind of elevated successful career person, I know.’
‘It’s true, I envy you a bit, your stability, your job security, being an art historian, all that.’
‘Just that?’ she teased her non-present husband.
‘Oh, not just that. I love that you are a woman and I adore women. If that’s a crime, do away with me now.’
‘What was that line?’
‘About your name?’
‘No, not that, I mean about misogyny . . .’
‘Oh, about me being a philogynist . . .’
‘. . . and not a misogynist.’
They laughed together.
They laughed, except he wasn’t there.
Cassie, as if visiting from another world, said, ‘Mummy, what are you laughing at?’
‘Oh, darling, nothing, I was just thinking of a joke,’ she lied. Her daughter looked unconvinced, belying her incredibly young years.
Actually, tears were beginning to well up now.
What if he never came back, just went . . . missing?
This really can’t be, she thought. What am I going to do?
‘You are strong, stronger than me. You know it,’ the phantom voice continued. It was taking on a . . . life . . . of its own. She was no longer controlling it.
❧
He had read about the Hospitallers and how they started out as people who took care of the sick and injured pilgrims during the Crusades in that part of the world and how they had mutated into one of the fiercest fighting forces. They had lasted longer than the Templars, to be sure. Their greatest moment had been the Siege of Malta in 1565 under La Valette. Gerard could not for one moment imagine the deprivations that these men must have lived through during the Siege itself. They were not even liked at first by the native Maltese, it seems, whose homeland they had usurped, albeit with the blessing of Charles V, after their eviction from Rhodes.
All this said, he could not stop himself imagining life then, down to the horribly apposite fact that he was now hospitalised himself, even if he could barely recognise where he was. For sure, there were definitely doctors and nurses moving about him, but from time to time he found his mind drifting off and maybe his body drifting down dark spaces such as tunnels, where he heard men working, usually digging, many of them slaves of Turkish origin. At one point, he found himself outside on a cavalier, surrounded by the deafening sound of cannonballs being fired in both directions, looking down at the army assaulting the fort, his fort. And as he looked around his immediate surroundings, at the many deceased defenders, he saw a single head fly through the air at incredible speed and shatter into tiny fragments, merging with the dust and shattered rocks. As his mind replayed the incredible scene, he could not but see the head again and again, almost in slow motion, its features undeniably familiar.
❧
Rosalind arrived with James and Cassie in train at the hospital to find her husband in a coma. The bus had never arrived and there had been no call. It was only back at the hotel that she had been told of his hospitalisation. There was no sign of the French woman, it seemed.
‘How are you, my love?’
She could think of nothing else. No way of knowing if he could hear, as the doctor had said. No visible movement.
❧
From his side, Gerard was moving his fingers and his eyes and engaging in what he thought was a conversation with his wife. At the same time, he was sitting at his desk writing his book. He had seen the battle, he had been there, and now he was in a hurry to put that on paper.
Brian Howell is an author and teacher living near Tokyo, Japan. He has published three novels and three short story collections since 1990. His collection, The Man Who Loved Kuras, was published by Salt, in 2022. Recent short story publications include The Forest Has Ears and The Field Has Eyes in The Ekphrastic Review (online) and All-over in Fiction on the Web (online) as well as People Are Looking At Me (Raphus, 2025); his chapbook short stories, Pictures of Yukio (Zagava, 2024) and The Two Keisukes, (Zagava, 2025); and the chapbook short story, In The Garden, Raphus Press (2025). His latest short story collection, The Fracture and Other Stories of Modern Japan, was published by Zagava in 2025. His novella and short story collection, The Study of Sleep and Other Stories, is due from Raphus Press this year. Howell loves cycling, art, movies, TV, and listening to podcasts (a lot).
