V. (69 page)

Veronica was kind. Her time with Stencil was entirely for him. No appointments, whispered conferences, hurried paper work: only resumption of their hothouse-time - as if it were marked by any old and overprecious clock which could be wound and set at will. For it came to that, finally: an alienation from time, much as Malta itself was alienated from any history in which cause precedes effect.

Carla did come to him again with unfaked tears this time; and pleading, not defiant.

"The priest is gone," she wept. "Whom else do I have? My husband and I are strangers. Is it another woman?"

He was tempted to tell her. But was restrained by the fine irony. He found himself hoping that there was indeed adultery between his old "love" and the shipfitter; if only to complete a circle begun in England eighteen years ago, a beginning kept forcibly from his thoughts for the same period of time.

Herbert would be eighteen. And probably helling it all about the dear old isles. What would he think of his father . . .

His father, ha.

"Signora," hastily, "I have been selfish. Everything I can do. My promise."

"We - my child and I: why should we continue to live?"

Why should any of us. He would send her husband back. With or without him the June Assembly would become what it would: blood bath or calm negotiation, who could tell or shape events that closely? There were no more princes. Henceforth politics would become progressively more democratized, more thrown into the hands of amateurs. The disease would progress. Stencil was nearly past caring.

Demivolt and he had it out the next evening.

"You're not helping, you know. I can't keep this thing, off by myself."

"We've lost our contacts. We've lost more than that . . ."

"What the hell is wrong, Sidney."

"Health, I suppose," Stencil lied.

"O God."

"The students are upset, I've heard. Rumor that the University will be abolished. Conferment of Degrees law, 1915 - so that the graduating class this year is first to be affected."

Demivolt took it as Stencil had hoped: a sick man's attempt to be helpful. "Have a look into that," he muttered. They'd both known of the University unrest.

On 4 June the acting Police Commissioner requested a 25-man detachment from the Malta Composite Battalion to be quartered in the city. University students went on strike the same day, parading Strada Reale, throwing eggs at anti-Mizzists, breaking furniture, turning the street festive with a progress of decorated automobiles.

"We are for it," Demivolt announced that evening. "I'm off for the Palace." Soon after Godolphin called for Stencil in the Benz.

Out at the villa, the drawing room was lit with an unaccustomed brilliance, though occupied only by two people. Her companion was Maijstral. Others had obviously been there: cigarette stubs and teacups were scattered among the statues and old furniture.

Stencil smiled at Maijstral's confusion. "We are old friends," he said gently. From somewhere - bottom of the tank - came a last burst of duplicity and virtu. He forced himself into the real present, perhaps aware it would be his last time there. Placing a hand on the yardbird's shoulder: "Come. I have private instructions." He winked at the woman. "We're still nominally opponents, you see. There are the Rules."

Outside his smile faded. "Now quickly, Maijstral, don't interrupt. You are released. We have no further use for you. Your wife's time is close: go back to her."

"The signora -" jerking his head back toward the foyer - "still needs me. My wife has her child."

"It is an order: from both of us. I can add this: if you do not return to your wife she will destroy herself and the child."

"It is a sin."

"Which she will risk." But Maijstral still shuffled.

"Very well: if I see you again, here or in my woman's company -" that had hit: a sly smile touched Maijstral's lips - "I turn your name over to your fellow workers. Do you know what they'll do to you, Maijstral? Of course you do. I can even call in the Banditti, if you prefer to die more picturesquely . . ." Maijstral stood for a moment, eyes going numb. Stencil let the magic spell "Banditti" work for an instant more, then flashed his best - and last - diplomatic smile: "Go. You and your woman and the young Maijstral. Stay out of the blood bath. Stay inside." Maijstral shrugged, turned and left. He did not look back; his trundling step was less sure.

Stencil made a short prayer: let him be less and less sure as he gathers years . . .

She smiled as he returned to the drawing room. "All done?"

He collapsed into a Louis Quinze chair whose two seraphim keened above a dark lawn of green velvet. "All done."

Tension grew through 6 June. Units of the civil police and military were alerted. Another unofficial notice went out, advising merchants to close up their shops.

At 3:30 P.M. on 7 June mobs began to collect in Strada Reale. For the next day and a half they owned Valletta's exterior spaces. They attacked not only the Chronicle (as promised) but also the Union Club, the Lyceum, the Palace, the houses of anti-Mizzist Members, the cafes and shops which had stayed open. Landing parties from H.M.S. Egmont, and detachments of Army and police joined the effort to keep order. Several times they formed ranks; once or twice they fired. Three civilians were killed by gunfire; seven wounded. Scores more were injured in the general rioting. Several buildings were set on fire. Two RAF lorries with machine guns dispersed an attack on the millers at Hamrun.

A minor eddy in the peaceful course of Maltese government, preserved today only in one Board of Inquiry report. Suddenly as they had begun, the June Disturbances (as they came to be called) ended. Nothing was settled. The primary question, that of self-rule, was as of 1956 still unresolved. Malta by then had only advanced as far as dyarchy, and if anything moved even closer to England in February, when the electorate voted three to one to put Maltese members in the British House of Commons.

Early on the morning of 10 June 1919, Mehemet's xebec set sail from Lascaris Wharf. Seated on its counter, like some obsolete nautical fixture, was Sidney Stencil. No one had come to see him off. Veronica Manganese had kept him only as long as she had to. His eyes kept dead astern.

But as the xebec was passing Fort St. Elmo or thereabouts, a shining Benz was observed to pull, up near the wharf and a black-liveried driver with a mutilated face to come to the harbor's edge and gaze out at the ship. After a moment he raised his hand; waved with a curiously sentimental, feminine motion of the wrist. He called something in English, which none of the observers understood. He was crying.

Draw a line from Malta to Lampedusa. Call it a radius. Somewhere in that circle, on the evening of the tenth, a waterspout appeared and lasted for fifteen minutes. Long enough to lift the xebec fifty feet, whirling, and creaking, Astarte's throat naked to the cloudless weather, and slam it down again into a piece of the Mediterranean whose subsequent surface phenomena - whitecaps, kelp islands, any of a million flatnesses which should catch thereafter part of the brute sun's spectrum-showed nothing at all of what came to lie beneath, that quiet June day.