Chapter 49
Ten days later, while Bobby had gone into Valletta for a lunch appointment with one of his RAF colleagues, Riva heard the sound of an air raid over Valletta.
She crossed her fingers and told herself it would be fine.
But an hour or so later she heard a knock at their apartment door.
It was January and cold, so she threw on her robe and went to open up.
She saw Addison first, standing solemnly before her eyes, then she registered the policeman in uniform who was looking at his feet.
Riva just stared at him, already knowing, her body beginning to shake.
‘I’m so sorry, madam,’ the policeman said, finally glancing up.
She took a step back and tried to shut the door.
Addison moved towards her, held the door open.
‘Bobby,’ she whispered. ‘Not Bobby. Please … not Bobby.’
‘A direct hit,’ the man was saying.
She ran for her coat. ‘I have to go to him.’
Addison stopped her. ‘No, Riva. No.’
She couldn’t stop the tears nor the low groan that emerged of its own accord. She heard Addison talking to the man and she walked away. This was not happening. It could not be happening. The policeman and Addison followed her inside.
‘When?’ she asked as a feeling of icy unnatural calm took over.
‘About two hours ago,’ the policeman said.
‘His body?’
Addison’s look was anguished. ‘You know how it can be.’
Riva knew. During the worst of the siege, she had seen the broken bodies.
The pieces of people. The pieces of families.
Had seen them so indistinguishable from rubble that only a hand or a foot was left.
Had seen it all and yet they’d all believed the bombing was over and done with.
How could this be? Bobby. Her Bobby. She couldn’t comprehend it.
Once the policeman left, she crumpled onto a rug and Addison let her lie, just sat on the sofa, his hands resting on his knees, his head bowed. When she looked closely, she saw tears rolling down his cheeks. She went to him, and they sat together, both of them trembling in disbelief.
During the following days and nights, grief tore her apart.
They had not even been married for eight months.
She had thought she’d felt grief the time he had left her to marry someone else.
It had been nothing of the kind. Not while he still lived and breathed.
Loss, yes, betrayal too, and anger. But not the grief, the utterly corrosive grief that comes with the impossible knowing that the person you love above all others no longer exists.
Does not have a body. Cannot ever walk or talk or breathe, or eat, or make love again.
She circled the apartment, unable to keep still, praying that one time she might glance back and he’d be sitting there and smiling.
She longed for his touch. Physically. Mentally.
Emotionally. Just the brush of his hand against her cheek as he passed her as she sat lost in a book. That would be enough.
‘Why Bobby?’ she shouted at the walls, his chair, their bed. ‘Why?’
Silence. There was no rule for death. No formula for surviving the pain as time slid between day and night. No respite.
Addison let himself in one morning. ‘I’ve arranged the funeral. I hope that’s all right.’
She recoiled, hating to think of it. ‘I don’t think I can be there. I’m so sorry. But few people knew we were married, and I would weep, and people would gawp. Bobby wouldn’t have wanted that.’
‘Of course. I’ve informed his mother. Travel is impossible so she won’t be here either. We can talk about the headstone later.’
Riva nodded and Addison left.
The headstone! She didn’t want a headstone.
Bobby’s death wasn’t real. It couldn’t be real.
Her memories rose and dissolved with the beating of her heart, with the pulsing of her blood, with her ragged uncertain breath.
She didn’t sleep, didn’t see how she could ever sleep again.
She even dragged up memories of her old life in Paris.
Would she ever go back there? She doubted it.
This was where she belonged now. Here, where Bobby was everywhere and nowhere.
She held wordless conversations with him and in the weirdest way she felt as if she’d known that this was going to happen.
Somehow. That there had been an inevitability about it she couldn’t explain.
His return. Their marriage. The depth of their love, the depth of her pain.
She cried and fell to her knees, her world and her life in pieces.
When the time came for Simon Wilson-Browne, the solicitor, to sit in Addison’s living room to read the will, Riva sat up straight on a hard-backed chair, digging her nails into her palm to prevent herself from crying.
‘Sir Robert has left you almost everything, Mrs Beresford,’ Wilson-Browne said after a few moments and then read the exact wording in the relevant clauses.
She heard the words, but distantly as if happening in another room and spoken to another version of herself. ‘And his mother?’ she eventually asked, glancing at Addison.
He nodded. ‘Taken care of. The house in England is already in her name and she has her own private income. Bobby saw to that when he became a pilot.’
‘I’m glad.’
‘Back then he knew the lifespan of a fighter pilot could be brief,’ Addison added. ‘As all of our lives on this earth are.’
It seemed as if Addison had somehow known he also hadn’t got long left.
Because the time came just a few short weeks later when she went upstairs and found him looking as if he was pretending to have fallen asleep in his favourite armchair.
But there was no breath, no pulse, no life.
She sat beside him, holding his hand in the silent room, and waiting while his butler called the doctor.
‘Oh Addison,’ she whispered, stroking his lifeless hand. ‘I’m so sorry.’
‘A heart attack,’ the doctor said when he came an hour later.
A broken heart, she thought.
Confronted so soon by this second unexpected loss, she could not bear it. She withdrew, physically and emotionally, and found a kind of solace in absolute silence where she faced the darkest hours of the darkest night. Alone.
And even as the war ground on, it seemed as if she were the only one left alive on the island. She would see no one, not even Otto. And when the war ended, if it ever ended, she would stay on in Mdina, forever wearing only black.
She’d had few black clothes of her own but found Addison’s wife’s clothes – black shawls, long skirts, and silky blouses.
All out of date but she didn’t care and wore them, even though they were too big and made her look like a witch.
One day she unlocked his wife’s jewellery box too and wore her earrings, long dangly earrings made of gold with precious gemstones set into them. Rubies, emeralds, sapphires.
Meanwhile Otto kept on calling and knocking at her door.
Some weeks later she relented and let him in, and they drank wine together.
‘Well,’ he said with a grin. ‘You’ll be pleased to know I have news about Stanley Lucas.’
‘Oh?’
‘He’s been arrested, charged, found guilty and sentenced to prison for the maximum five years.’
‘For the girls?’
‘No. That would have carried a far heavier sentence. Unfortunately, he appears to have got away with that. But he couldn’t wriggle out of this one. He’s been skimming off army supplies – black market profiteering.’
‘Just as we suspected.’ She knew Lucas would probably never face justice for Anya and the other girls, but this was something at least.
‘Was he still involved with the trafficking of girls?’
‘No. It seems he shifted his focus. For people like Lucas, war delivers fresh opportunities.’ He paused then asked her if she had thought about what she might do next.
She didn’t know. Didn’t have a clue.
‘You could come back to the paper,’ he suggested.
She shook her head.
‘Will you stay here?’
‘In Malta?’
‘I meant Mdina.’
‘Where else?’
This hidden palace, her palace, had tightened its grip around her, but the meeting with Otto had unleashed something and it made her realise she had to get out before she became even more isolated and forlorn.
She began by taking short walks around Mdina itself, gradually recognising one or two of the people who lived there or were servants to the people who lived there.
On her third outing, a grand old lady also dressed in black stopped to talk to her outside the cathedral.
‘Forgive the intrusion,’ she said with a little bow. ‘Please accept these and allow me to offer my sincere condolences.’
‘Thank you,’ Riva muttered as she took the delicate white roses, and the woman passed by. Had the woman been coming to see her, she wondered, or was it just chance that she had been carrying a bunch of flowers?
A whiskery man stopped her the next day in the public square in the heart of the city. ‘If there is anything I can do,’ he said. ‘I knew Addison well.’
Of course, most of these people must have known Addison. He’d lived in Mdina for so long and his wife Filomena had been born there.
Riva kept the outings brief while she gathered her courage to go farther afield.
She had thought hearing people speak of her loss would make her feel worse.
It hadn’t. In Villegaignon Street, just across the square from the cathedral, she stopped outside the Palazzo Santa Sofia, her favourite building and realised what a strong affinity she felt for Mdina and its people.
A silent woman in a silent city.
They were very private those who lived there, but some began leaving offerings at her door. More flowers, books, even a basket of fruit. They left little cards wishing her well and she had been so touched it made her cry.
Despite the kindness of strangers, grief continued to constrict her until her life became so small she felt she might disappear completely.
So eventually, on a brilliantly sunny day, she braced herself, left the city walls and set off for the cliffs at Dingli.
She forced herself to walk there, one foot in front of the other and, once there, she gazed at the luminescent multicoloured ocean and the haze of the empty horizon.
Gazed and gazed until her eyes stung. She tasted salt on her tongue, felt the wind snatching her hair free from its clips, smelt the seaweed and remembered her first sight of the island back in 1925.
The girl she had been. Where was she now?
Grief had unleashed something wild inside her that she’d almost forgotten.
It had been a different kind of wild back then and she longed for those irresistible carefree days.
But this was where she was now, and she didn’t know what to do.
The memories tipped and wobbled inside her, and she could do nothing but lift her arms in resignation and call out to the gods of the ocean.
Tell me what to do. When the war ends. Tell me.
And the gods of the ocean did give her an answer, or so she liked to think.
By the time the war was over, she still hadn’t been up to Addison’s apartment.
He had left the entire palace to her, but she had been too numb to care.
Hadn’t been up there since the day the solicitor read the will, but now she unlocked the door and went inside, her heart in her mouth.
Even after all this time it still faintly smelt of him.
Cigars. Wine. Even flowers, lilies perhaps, that smelt of death.
Addison’s butler was long gone, of course.
The apartment was dark, so she opened the shutters and threw open the windows for fresh air.
Until that moment she hadn’t clearly known what to do with her loss, but then she went to Addison’s study, took out all his remaining work and contemplated it.
The next day she returned and a few days after that; it took all her strength, but she phoned Gerry in London.
Losing Bobby had felt like a grief that could have no end and that was right.
It should have no end. It – and he – was a part of her, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t live her life.
‘I didn’t know if the phone lines would be working,’ she said when Gerry picked up.
‘It’s wonderful to hear your voice,’ he replied. ‘How are you, sweetheart?’
‘You know, one foot in front of the other.’
‘Are you eating?’
The kindness in his voice brought tears to her eyes.
‘I wish I could be there,’ he said. ‘Will you come to London? I can still help you find a job.’
‘It turns out I don’t need money. But actually, I have a different idea. Might you be interested in publishing a third and final volume of Addison’s work?’
She smiled when he replied. Gerry was thrilled and she could hear the excitement as his laughter spilled down the line.
‘Oh my dear girl. As soon as I can, I’ll be there,’ he added. ‘The very moment.’
‘No, I think I might come to you in London, after all. I could do with being away from here for a while. I’ll bring a case full of Addison’s work with me and get the rest shipped over.’
‘You have a recent passport?’