Medusa

Nothing is more demoralising than being confined on board a sailing boat in port and at anchor, nothing to do but wait, and so many things I could have been doing ashore. Carp retired philosophically to his bunk, but though I followed his example, I couldn’t sleep. After lunch I got the inflatable into the water and the outboard fixed to its bracket in readiness. If I had been on my own I think I would have risked it, but I had Carp to consider and so I sat there in the helmsman’s chair watching the world go by, the sun hot on my bare shoulders, a drink in my hand and the sounds of Malta at work all about me.

Nobody else came out to us and time passed slowly. The flamboyantly painted dghajsas and ferries full of tourists scurried to and fro across the water between Valetta and Kalkara or Vittoriosa, and there were launches and service craft constantly moving among the vessels at anchor. Just before five the launch lying alongside the frigate’s gangway was manned again and an officer appeared on the deck above. I got the glasses, but I couldn’t be sure it was Lloyd Jones, the peak of his cap casting a shadow across his face. He was taken across the harbour to land by the Customs House where a car was waiting for him. Inside of an hour he was back on board. By then the sun was sinking over the Marsa township and the honey-coloured limestone of the older buildings ashore began to glow with a warmth that turned rapidly from gold to a fiery red.

By then the shipyard noises had been briefly swamped by the engines and horns of the rush-hour traffic. Lights appeared in the streets and on the wharfs, the windows of buildings blazed like a myriad fireflies, and suddenly the frigate was lit from end to end, a circlet of electric light bulbs. I think it was this that finally made up my mind for me. I went below, changed into a decent pair of trousers, put on a shirt and tie, then asked Carp to run me over to the frigate.

He looked at me hard for a moment, then he nodded. ‘Okay, if that’s what you want. You can always say it doesn’t count — as going ashore, I mean.’

It took us less than five minutes to cross the flat calm strip of water that separated us from the frigate. The launch had been hoisted into its davits so that, once I had checked that Lloyd Jones was the frigate’s captain and the Quartermaster had satisfied himself I really did know him, we were able to go straight alongside the accommodation ladder. ‘Want me to wait for you?’ Carp asked as I seized one of the stanchions and swung myself up on to the grating.

‘No.’ I didn’t want it made that easy for them to get rid of me. ‘Either they’ll bring me back or I’ll have them flash you up on their signal lamp.’

By the time I reached the frigate’s deck Carp was already on his way back to the boat and a very young-looking officer was waiting for me. He confirmed that Lloyd Jones was the Captain and when I told him I was a friend, he asked me to wait while he phoned. He came back almost immediately with Gareth Lloyd Jones. He looked very smart in an open-necked shirt, immaculately white, black trousers and cummerbund, and the gold of his new rank bright on his shoulder boards, a smile on that pleasant open face of his. ‘Mike. It’s good to see you.’ He held out his hand, seeming genuinely pleased. ‘John, take Mr Steele up to my cabin,’ he told the young officer, ‘and have Petty Officer Jarvis get him a drink.’ Then to me he said, ‘You’ll excuse me for a moment. There’s a party going ashore for supper at the invitation of a Maltese wine company and I want to have a word with them before they leave.’

He left me then, climbing the ladder to the helicopter flight deck ahead of me and disappearing round the hangar on the port side. John Kent, a dark-haired, dark-browed young man, who proved to be one of the seamen officers, led the way for me, up to the flight deck, for’ard past the illuminated funnel and in through a watertight door to a passageway that led across to the curtained entrance to the Commanding Officer’s day cabin. ‘Make yourself at home, sir, while I find the Captain’s steward.’

The cabin was a roomy one with a desk, two armchairs and a couch with a coffee table in front of it, and there was a small dining table by one of the two portholes with utilitarian upright chairs. The portholes, which had grips for steel shuttering, gave me a view of the concrete wall at the back of the quay and the lit buildings behind it rising to the back of the Senglea peninsula. There was nobody on the wharf or at the end of the shore-side gangway, which I could just see a short distance aft of where I was standing. The only sounds that penetrated the cabin were shipboard sounds of whirring machinery and air-conditioning.