A Home in the Sun Read online

  ‘Lydia followed, four years later but after a few years … we are all very unhappy when we live together. It’s better not. I have lived alone for five years and now Alexia is fourteen, Lydia is ten. I love my children very much and see them very often. But I do not love their mother and I have not loved her for a very long time. I doubt whether she ever love me, ever.’

  His emphatic tone and the glitter of his eyes moved her but she wasn’t about to let him off the hook. He hadn’t told her about his wife. He hadn’t explained the situation. She felt empty at the deception. ‘Giorgio,’ she said, carefully. ‘I am divorced. My husband found another woman while we were still married. I know that kind of pain. And I don’t think we should go out together again.’

  ‘I am separate,’ he declared forcefully. But he made no attempt to detain her when she said it was time for her to return to the office, hurrying down the narrow pavements of Tower Road and along The Strand.

  From then on, she changed the route of her lunchtime exercise, turning right out of the agency instead of left, following Sliema Creek to the yacht marina at Ta’ Xbiex. It was only two days before he materialised at her side as she sat watching the boats bobbing on the glittering, calm sea.

  ‘You’re booked on the trip to Gozo tomorrow.’ He looked tired, strained, but his shirt and tie were immaculate as always. ‘It’s your day off. Come and enjoy it. It will be a busy day for me and I will be occupied. I will not bother you.’

  ‘How did you find me?’ she demanded, ruffled at the way he popped up like a genie let out of a bottle.

  He pointed towards the road behind them and she turned to see a big cream bus decorated with a rainbow. ‘I saw you sitting,’ he said simply. He smiled sadly and left her.

  Next day, despite her better judgement, she took him at his word and mounted the gangplank of the boat to Gozo, the largest of the neighbouring islands. It was a beautiful day. The sea crossing was calm and Judith enjoyed the coach tour around the island, much quieter than Malta, with more terraced farms and narrow roads. She sat at the back while Giorgio stood beside the driver and held the tourists spellbound as he told them about the Neolithic G˙gantija Temple ruins.

  Despite his promise not to ‘bother’ her, at the end of the day he halted her as she made to follow the other tourists from the ferry. The other guide, a woman, must have been forewarned because she herded the rest of the passengers down onto the quay, leaving Judith and Giorgio alone with the creaking of the mooring ropes and the chug of small motor boats making their way up the creek. He gave her a small smile. ‘Tomorrow is my rest day. I spend it on a beach. To help me enjoy this, will you be my company?’ He thought for a moment, then amended himself. ‘My guest. I am sorry that I did not explain I have not lived with my wife for a long time. I was ashamed. My parents are so embarrassed my marriage did not work that I have grown used to not talking about it.’

  Judith failed to resist his sad, brown eyes.

  A trip to the beach wasn’t a commitment.

  And he was separated …

  They spent the day on the white sand of Anchor Bay at the north end of the island, talking, swimming in a sea barely ruffled by the breeze. In the evening they ate in Rabat, in the centre of the island, in a small cellar restaurant aromatic with goat’s cheese and herbs and lit by the dancing light of red candles in wine bottles.

  Judith enjoyed herself but doubts plagued her.

  He drove her home in the early hours, the stars bright against a black sky. Parking outside her flat beside the slack night-time sea, he cradled her face gently and kissed her, a deep, carnal kiss, a kiss of clear intent, a kiss that made her muscles melt. Seriously, he told her, ‘It’s a big thing we have and I think we should begin a relationship.’

  His words forced her to face a truth that had been niggling at her all day and into the evening. She sighed. ‘It might be big, if we allowed it. But, although you say you’ve been separated for years, you took me far away from your home.’

  He grew still. ‘I do not hide you.’

  ‘I think you do. Your wife lives in Sliema.’

  He stared at her for several long moments. ‘I apologise,’ he said, at last. ‘Yes, it is true, a little. Johanna and me have been separate for five years but I do not make people talk of her by making a parade of my feelings for you. Why give her that pain? She and I will be always apart but still we consider our daughters. They are good daughters and Johanna is a good mother. Also, my parents, they are unhappy their son cannot have a good marriage and I try not to make them more unhappy. They are my parents. My uncle Saviour and aunt Cass, my cousins and their children, we all live in this big village that has grown into a tourist town. My parents would hurt to feel the family embarrassed by me. You live in Sliema, you know Sliema. People know other people.’

  ‘Difficult,’ she acknowledged, sadly. The streetlights and the moonlight glittered in the ripples of Sliema Creek and Giorgio’s eyes. ‘I think it’s impossible, Giorgio. I’m not the kind of woman to be tidied away, kept secret from your family.’ She kissed his cheek in fleeting farewell. Then she jumped out of his car and raced safely through the entry door to her apartment building. The door locked automatically behind her with a soft, final-sounding click.

  The next day he surprised her at the office a few minutes before she would normally take her lunch. He’d never visited her there before. Solemnly, he faced her across her desk, ignoring his interested audience of Richard, two of Judith’s cousins Rosaire and Lino, and a couple looking at the details of a flat. Giorgio regarded Judith fiercely. ‘It is not impossible. If you want, we promenade ourselves. We go now to Tony’s Bar on The Strand and eat at a table on the pavement where everyone in Sliema can see. Every day, if you want, we do it.’

  His eyes were almost black and her head spun with how much she wanted to believe him. ‘I can’t let you make your life so uncomfortable, either for yourself or for those you love,’ she protested.

  So, instead, she allowed their love affair to begin – discreet, if not quite secret.

  In the UK, she would’ve thought nothing about a relationship with a separated man. The difference between the UK and Malta was that though it was the year 2000, unless the law changed – under discussion but a political hot potato – Giorgio would never take the next logical step to divorce.

  Richard was kind, though he didn’t approve of what she was doing. He’d married Erminia, a Maltese woman, when he’d been stationed on the island with the British Army in the sixties, so had some insight into what she was getting into. Probably too much. He frowned over the issue as they worked together at polished maple desks, guiding foreign buyers through the labyrinth of acquiring property on the island.

  Then one evening he took the two of them for a beer at a pavement café overlooking the creek that bobbed with boats in blues and reds. ‘It’s dangerous to go into these relationships half-heartedly,’ he warned them. ‘If one partner’s British and the other Maltese and you want to live in Malta, it’s better to embrace the whole thing, culture, religion – and marriage.’

  Giorgio grinned at the older man reassuringly. ‘I’d marry Judith if I could. I cannot, so we make our own rules.’

  Richard sighed. ‘If you think that, you’re barmy.’

  He was right, Judith found out. Although Giorgio moved into her flat after a few months, it turned out that they always worked around the rules of others, a sort of open secret. Giorgio did arrange a meeting at the flat with his parents Maria and Agnello but they stayed only a couple of minutes to point out that Giorgio was married to Johanna and that Judith was a divorced woman before walking out with cold looks cast Judith’s way.

  Giorgio saw his daughters, Alexia and Lydia frequently, but Judith was never invited along and she never tried to invite herself.

  The only member of Giorgio’s family who acknowledged their relationship was Giorgio’s aunt Cass, whose husband Saviour was Agnello’s brother. She had a soft heart and Giorgio was a favourite neph
ew so she met them occasionally for quiet meals of pasta and red wine. ‘I understand the situation,’ she kept assuring Judith.

  But their evenings out together were always well away from Sliema.

  Chapter One

  April 2004

  Tired of listening to a mechanical woman’s patient explanation, The phone you are trying to reach may be switched off. Please leave a message … Judith McAllister tossed her mobile phone onto a low table and prowled out into the heat on the open balcony to stare at the early-evening light dancing on the water of Sliema Creek.

  The creek, one of those deep fingers of sea that cuts into Malta’s coastline, reflected the intense blue of the sky just before it darkened to dusk. Red-and-white ferryboats shimmied lazily, returned from their day excursions around the island or to the sister islands of Gozo and Comino and emptied of early summer tourists. Those tourists had probably all gone straight to the aluminium tables beneath the yellow or blue umbrellas of the pavement cafés to cool off with a chilled Cisk beer.

  Although the sun was sinking behind the building, the summer had begun early in Malta and the heat was intense. Judith wasn’t much of a sun-worshipper now. In her twenties and thirties she’d basked at every opportunity but maybe wisdom had come with maturity and now, at forty-four, she was wary of blistered skin or pounding headaches.

  The Strand, the teeming road between herself and the boats, was busy with cars, orange buses, and karrozzini – Malta’s traditional horse-drawn carriages. She gazed down into the street, half expecting to see Giorgio demonstrating his knack of parking his bright red MG in impossibly tight spaces. A glance at her watch told her he was much later than expected.

  She’d rushed home from work two hours ago but found their flat empty and silent. After showering, she’d slipped into a floaty dress the colour of bluebells and dried her dark hair so that it lay sleek over her shoulders. Still no Giorgio. Maybe he’d stopped for a drink with his mates?

  She turned her head and narrowed her eyes to gaze inland up the creek towards the bridge to Manoel Island, the smaller boats bobbing at cheery red or yellow buoys and the luxury cruisers, the ‘gin palaces’, moored behind the bridge in the yacht marina. She suspected Giorgio was deliberately late. He’d been irritated that she’d worked this afternoon when he wanted her to go scuba diving.

  ‘But it’s Saturday, and I have the air!’ he’d complained, indicating the newly filled silver oxygen cylinders, dark eyes indignant. ‘This dive has been arranged for a week. We have good weather.’ She’d recently introduced Giorgio to scuba diving and he was showing the beginner’s impatience to be underwater all the time; go further, deeper, push the limits of his Open Water diving qualification without bothering with further training.

  She’d stroked his thick, dark hair, satin against her skin. ‘It’s a pain on your weekend off. But they’re important clients, Giorgio. We’ve been wooing them for months so I can’t let Richard down by missing the meeting. It’s not his fault they had to reschedule.’ Giorgio was well aware she’d invested part of her savings, including her divorce settlement, into Richard Elliot Estate. Almost all that had been left had recently gone into Giorgio’s business, Sliema Z Bus Tours, but even that wasn’t enough to prevent him from occasionally testing her commitment to Richard. Giorgio wanted always to be first in Judith’s life. He was like a boy, thinking he could get his own way if he pushed her hard enough, smiling into her eyes and trying to charm her. She’d pressed a soft kiss to his lips. ‘We can dive on Sunday. The sea will still be there.’

  His eyes had softened as he’d accepted her kisses but he’d refused to miss the dive he’d set his heart on. ‘No, because I work this Sunday. If you work Saturday then Charlie Galea will be my diving buddy.’

  Alarm had lanced through Judith. ‘He’s not much more experienced than you, Giorgio—’

  He’d kissed her again. ‘We’re both qualified to Open Water Diver, Judith.’

  ‘But so inexperienced—’ Her words had been lost in laughter as he smothered each one of her objections with a kiss.

  Now, Judith sighed as she watched the small, neat horses whisking their tails in the shafts of the karrozzini. Apart from her instincts rebelling at the thought of novice divers buddying up with no experienced diver nearby, her own opportunity to dive this weekend had probably gone. Giorgio would have let Charlie use her air and he’d be working tomorrow, when Judith was free.

  The sun had been a demon in Sliema today. She would have loved to escape it by sinking into her beloved, beautiful, hushed turquoise world of weightlessness, to revel in the water gliding coolly into her wetsuit and skin as she signalled all-OK to Giorgio and their bubbles fizzed around them. It was magical to descend slowly over a drop-off to where schools of fish darted like shining rainbows.

  Scuba diving was all the more fun now Giorgio had qualified and they could dive together. Even decompression halts had become a pleasure. The cobalt-blue panels of her wetsuit entwined with the scarlet of his as they hung together in the water to watch elongated beams of light filtering down from the surface.

  She let her eyes half-close as she enjoyed the memory of combined body warmth and water chill.

  Curling her bare toes away from the hot concrete of the balcony, she wandered back indoors to the shady kitchen. The windows stood wide open in an attempt to release the hot air of the oven that contained a kept-warm-for-too-long lasagne.

  An open bottle of red wine waited on the worktop. She poured herself a second glass and returned to the sitting room to try Giorgio’s phone again. The phone you are trying to reach …

  A fat lot of use that was, she thought.

  Restlessly, she prowled back into the living area, pausing before the mirror to fidget with the layers of her dress, selected to complement her golden-brown eyes and the nutty highlights in her hair. Then, after slotting a CD of smoochy songs into the player, she sank into a chair, her bare feet cooling pleasantly on the tiled floor, her head tipping comfortably back. ‘Giorgio’s playing bloody games, Judith,’ she said to herself.

  He probably thought she’d be too pleased to see him when he finally sauntered in to be angry. He’d press his body to hers and emphasise his displeasure at being abandoned today in a teasing way. ‘So, now the work is finished and you have time for Giorgio?’ And suddenly being with him would be more important than making complaints about where he’d been until now.

  That’s how it was. Being with him was always more important than everything else.

  The entry system intercom buzzed, jarring Judith out of her thoughts. She jumped up and she reached for the handset. ‘Giorgio, I thought you were never coming! Have you forgotten your key?’

  A hesitation. Then, ‘Judith, it is Charlie Galea. Can I speak with you?’

  Her heart raced at the sound of Charlie’s voice. Wondering whether Giorgio was ill, she said, ‘Of course, Charlie. Come up.’ She pressed the button to release the front door.

  Charlie Galea was just younger than Giorgio, thinner and taller. He lived with his wife and three small children in San Gwann, behind Gzira and Ta’ Xbiex. She knew him a little; he was another recent addition to the diving fraternity, hanging out at the same bars as her and Giorgio after dives.

  Footsteps sounded on the concrete stairs and then Charlie stepped through her pale-green front door and into the entrance area that opened out into the other rooms, his black shorts and flip-flops dusty, dark curls coarse with dried salt water.

  He was drawn and ill at ease as she showed him into the sitting room where he could sit down, looking horribly uncomfortable. She wondered suddenly whether Giorgio was drunk and had sent gullible young Charlie Galea to make his excuses. Or perhaps to fetch Judith, so that Giorgio could sparkle his eyes at her and urge her to join the fun.

  ‘Coffee?’ she offered tentatively.

  He shook his head. Cleared his throat. Then, unexpectedly, slid a hand across his eyes.

  Silence.

  Despite the heat of th
e summer day, Judith felt a chill slither around her. Was Charlie crying? She forced her lips to form words. ‘What’s the matter?’

  The young man sucked in a deep, shuddering breath. ‘There was an accident, today. With Giorgio.’

  Her heart lurched. Judith sat forward, fists balling, heart pummelling her ribcage from the inside. ‘How bad?’ she managed.

  He shook his head, sniffing. ‘Very bad. There was a jet ski—’

  Her stomach tossed like a pancake. ‘Oh no!’

  The story came tumbling out as Charlie fought tears in order to speak and his command of English faltered. ‘There was plenty of sea for everyone. Anchored there was a cruiser but not close to shore. We see it before we go down.

  ‘Under the water, we hear engines as we come up, but we are at the end of our air, waiting at three metres to decompress. We are well within the fifty-metre zone and we send up our marker buoys already. We are safe to surface, we think.’ He wiped his face with his T-shirt, his eyes wide and hopeless. ‘But there were two jet ski, put in the water from the cruiser maybe. They move so quick, right inside the reef. Giorgio, he surface first …’

  Judith gasped. Horrific images flashed into her mind: Giorgio mown back under, his respirator torn from his mouth as the roaring beast of the jet ski bounced across the water and too close to shore, ignoring the significance of the colourful surface marker buoys that should have told them there were divers below.

  Her heart beating in her throat, she jumped to her feet. ‘He’s alive?’

  Charlie nodded. ‘But bad.’

  ‘I should have been there.’ She was the more experienced diver. She would have heard and understood whether the telltale buzz of engines was near enough to be a danger. ‘Is he in St Luke’s hospital, at Gwardamanga?’ She tried to control her breathing so she could hear Charlie’s reply.