Medusa

He had that explosive way of asking a question and insisting on agreement at the same time. In any case, when you have had a few drinks, and the commitment is over two weeks away, it is easier to say yes than to think up some convincing excuse on the spur of the moment. ‘Bueno, bueno.’ He smiled, a glint of gold teeth. ‘So nice to talk with you, señor.’ I was dismissed, and I left the table with the feeling that if I had declined his invitation he would have seen to it that next time I needed a permit for something from the Mahon town hall it would not be forthcoming. But a speech in Spanish — or did he mean the local Catalan, which is very different? In any case, my Spanish was a hybrid of the two, having been picked up quite haphazardly as occasion demanded.

Somebody had thrown a pile of furze on the fire, the band half-drowned in the crackle of the flames. Florez passed, light on his feet, the young woman in his arms glittering with tinsel, the button eyes in his round face fixed on the table I had just left as though watching for an opportunity to ingratiate himself. I went back to the bar and stood there watching the shadows of the dancers moving against the limestone roofing and the far recesses of the great cavern. The dancers themselves were a flicker of fire-red images, the whole scene so lurid and theatrical that it seemed almost grotesque, the band thumping out a brazen cacophony of sound that ricocheted off the stone walls, the beat so magnified it almost split one’s ears.

‘Manuela has a good idea, no?’ a voice shouted in my ear. It was the Commander of the Naval Base. ‘Why does nobody think to use this place before? It is magnificent, eh?’

The music stopped abruptly, the dancers coming to a halt. Floodlights either side of the cavern entrance were switched on, spotlighting white-capped cooks and the charcoal fires with their steaming pans of soup and steaks sizzling and flaming on the coals. Lloyd Jones had stopped quite near us and I hailed him over. ‘I’d like you to meet Fernando Perez,’ I said. ‘He’s Jefe of the Navy here.’ I introduced him as Lieutenant Lloyd Jones of the Royal Navy, adding, ‘That’s right, isn’t it?’

I sensed a moment’s hesitancy. ‘In fact, I’m now a Lieutenant Commander.’ He laughed, a little embarrassed. ‘I’ve just been promoted.’

We offered him our congratulations and Perez asked him what he was doing in Menorca. ‘You are on leave per’aps?’ He had a good command of English, particularly sea terminology, having had a short exchange posting to an RN carrier, though quite why they sent him to an aircraft carrier when he was a gunnery officer I don’t know.

‘Yes, on leave,’ Lloyd Jones said.

‘You have a ship, or are you posting ashore, like me?’ And Fernando Perez gave a deprecatory little smile.

‘No, I’m very lucky,’ Lloyd Jones replied. ‘With the promotion I’ve been offered a ship.’

‘And where is that?’

‘I’ll be joining at Gibraltar as soon as my leave is up.’

Fernando turned down the corners of his mouth. ‘You are indeed fortunate. Except for the Americans, who have so many ships, like the Russians, all our navies are in the same boat, eh?’ He smiled, looking pleased at having achieved a touch of humour in a foreign language. ‘Myself, I do not have a ship since five, no six years now. Already I have been ‘ere three, stuck on a little island where nothing ever happen.’

‘But at least you have the biggest guns in the Mediterranean,’ I said.

‘That is true. But what use are they, those big guns? They belong to another age and we have so few ammunition … Well, you know yourself. We fire them once a year and everybody complain because windows are shaken all over Mahon, some broken.’

‘Are these the guns out on the northern arm of the Mahon entrance?’ Lloyd Jones asked.

‘On La Mola, yes. If you wish I take you to look at them. It is a Zona Militar, a prohibited area, but there is nothing secret about those guns, they ‘ave been there too long. Everybody know about them.’

They started talking then about the problems of island defence and after a while I left them to see that the girls were being looked after, Soo in particular. I didn’t want her standing in the queue and maybe getting jostled. In any case, she was becoming a little self-conscious about her figure, I think because all our friends knew very well she had lost the first. But she was no longer at our table. She was at Manuela’s. Petra, too, and they had already finished their soup and were tucking into steak and mashed potato, Gonzalez Renato sitting between them and everybody at the table flushed with wine and talking animatedly.