Chapter 42
After that Riva kept her distance. She saw him in the gallery but did everything she could to avoid them meeting again. Linda noticed she was behaving a little stiffly and took her aside.
‘I don’t know what’s happening to you, but you have to keep your mind on the job. A mistake by any of us can result in certain death for one of our pilots. You understand that, don’t you?’
Riva nodded.
‘Good girl,’ Linda added, not unkindly. ‘This war is hard on all of us. Did you lose someone? Is that it?’
‘In a manner of speaking.’
Linda patted her shoulder.
After that warning Riva kept her head down and thought of nothing but work.
A couple of weeks later, after the ‘Tally-ho’ had been called, one of the other plotters broke down in tears. Linda quickly ushered the girl out.
Riva turned to Tilly, a bright young woman of about twenty with bleached blonde hair. ‘What was that about?’ she whispered.
‘She’s married. Been having an affair with someone in the military. Linda’s going to have to let her go.’
Bobby instantly came to Riva’s mind.
‘The RAF can’t do anything about unmarried staff getting together when they’re off duty. But they won’t have this. Not the extra-marital affairs. Bad for morale. The man involved was a pilot and I heard he’s already been posted elsewhere.’
While the days melted into each other, the nights became more exhausting and even more severe.
There were four watches with about fourteen women in each.
An unbroken watch was kept for twenty-four hours of every single day.
In the intense atmosphere of the plotting room, men and women worked closely together.
Lives depended on everyone getting things right and emotions were more highly charged than under normal circumstances. Off duty they let off steam together.
Riva and everyone else who worked in the war rooms had a special pass to show the military police if they were stopped at night. They had to be so careful. You couldn’t light a cigarette outside, and all the streetlights were permanently shut down. The nights were black as pitch.
Dances were held in the afternoons, between three and six, but Riva rarely went.
Leave it to the youngsters, she thought.
She liked to walk, though, always staying aware of where the nearest air raid shelters were.
They used railway tunnels, cellars, basements, and openings in the sandstone cliffs which were riddled with passages and tunnels, formed over the centuries.
It was on one of these off-duty walks in the Upper Barrakka Gardens that she bumped into Bobby again.
Though ‘bumped’ was not quite the word. She saw him coming before he saw her, and she momentarily froze.
When he did see her, he paused then began to walk towards her slowly, carefully using his stick.
Her heart melted and she bit her lip to suppress tears that had suddenly appeared from nowhere.
‘Hello, Riva,’ he said, and he smiled, looking so forlorn she held out her hand. She hadn’t meant to. It had happened involuntarily.
He took her hand.
‘Shall we sit?’ she said. ‘I mean your leg …’
‘Yes. I can’t walk so far these days.’
‘Does it hurt?’
‘Now and then.’
But she saw him wince as they reached the bench and he bent his leg to sit.
‘Oh Bobby,’ she said.
‘I wasn’t expecting to see you in the war rooms. It shook me.’
‘Me too.’
‘Might we at least be friends again? I know you don’t want to hear it, but I’ve missed you, Riva. I’ve missed you like hell.’
She sighed. ‘Why did you leave without telling me? That’s what hurt the most.’
‘It was cowardice. Plain and simple.’
‘And your mother. It was her plan for you?’
He nodded, looking glum.
‘How is she?’
‘Oh, you know.’
Riva nodded. ‘And children? Do you have children?’
He shook his head. ‘Look, I didn’t do right by you, or by my wife. I couldn’t love her. I cared for her, looked after when she was ill, but I couldn’t love her. It’s always been you, Riva. I—’
‘Stop, Bobby. Stop. I really don’t want to hear this.’
He gazed at her. ‘I have to say it. Leaving you was the biggest mistake of my life.’
She swallowed rapidly and her voice came out more bitterly than she’d intended. ‘But in leaving me, you solved your financial problems, so that’s just fine, isn’t it?’
‘Riva, please.’
She shook her head.
‘This … it’s eating me up. I’m begging you to forgive me.’
‘I …’ She paused and then realised something.
‘What?’
‘It isn’t my forgiveness you need. It’s your own.’
He stared at the ground and for a while neither of them spoke.
‘Life is short,’ he eventually said. ‘Especially now. You know that. Riva, is there any chance we could begin again?’
And suddenly all the years had come full circle. She’d struggled to accept what had happened but now time suddenly concertinaed, and it was as if the intervening years, the anguish, the grief, the anger had simply faded.
‘Maybe,’ she said.
He hugged her to him so tightly she couldn’t breathe.
‘Let go,’ she finally managed to say.
‘I will never let go of you, not until my dying breath.’
They had precious little free time but over the next few weeks, they began to spend any moments they had off duty together, mainly in Mdina, away from curious eyes.
It was only a few hours they had and apart from Addison, who beamed to see them so happy, they kept themselves to themselves.
This now was different, a less bright, less sparkly, more muted shade of love.
Love that had been marked by experience, by betrayal, and now by forgiveness.
They were meant to be together because look, despite everything, here they were.
Again. She’d thought she’d understood what their love had been the first time round.
She had understood nothing. It had been fuelled by desire, passion, excitement, and longing.
An addiction. Drunk on love, they’d been frenzied, subsumed into each other, and almost destroyed by it.
And yet there had been joy, something ineffable, never spoken of, never identified, never needing to be identified, but now gone for ever.
The kind of love that could be felt only by the young.
A young Riva, a young Bobby. So, this now.
What was this? A deeper love, the connection between them yet again beyond words?
Did that mean the love would change in another ten years’ time, in twenty, in thirty?
Was she too old to still carry a child? Did it matter?
He had found her again. She had found him.
And it was as if they knew each other intimately and at the same time not at all.