Medusa by Hammond Innes Page B

sayanything. She had hold of Lloyd Jones’s arm and seemed in a much happier frame of mind, humming to herself as we walked down the grass-grown track to the road where I’d left the car.
    There was no wind, the sky clear and the moon a white eye high in the sky as I turned the car off the Villa Carlos road on to the steep descent to Cala Figuera. ‘Have you ever seen anything so beautiful!’ Petra exclaimed. ‘I love it when it’s still, like this, nothing stirring on the water, and Mahon a white sprawl above it. Sometimes I wake up in the night and pull back the tent flap. It looks like an Arab town then, so white, and everything reflected in the water. It’s so beautiful.’
    â€˜Malta is better,’ Soo cut in. ‘What do you think, Gareth? You’ve just come from there.’ She was sitting in the back with him. ‘The buildings are so much more impressive, so solid. You haven’t seen Malta, have you, Petra? Compared with Valetta and Grand Harbour – well, you can’t compare them, can you, Gareth? Mahon is just a little provincial port.’
    â€˜But still beautiful.’ Petra’s tone, though insistent, was quite relaxed. ‘And from Bloody Island I can see the whole sweep of it.’
    â€˜I don’t think beautiful is the right word for a port,’ Lloyd Jones said. ‘Not for Malta anyway.’ Out of the corner of my eye I saw him turn to Soo. ‘Impressive now. I think impressive is the word. Those old strongholds, the great castles of the Knights that withstood the Turks and the German bombs.’ And he added, ‘But Gozo – Gozo is different somehow. I took a boat out to Gozo. That really is beautiful.’
    I looked at them in the mirror. They were sitting very close together and she nodded, smiling happily. I think it was her smile that prompted him to say, ‘I’ve been thinking, you know, about this visit to Cales Coves.’ He leant forward suddenly, speaking to Petra and myself. ‘I saw the inlets this afternoon, but I was only there a short while.It would be nice to see them by moonlight. And it’s not far off my way back to Fornells, so I’ll join you if I may.’
    We had reached the end of the road and I turned the car on to the raw gravel of our new car park. We were facing the water then, close beside his little Fiat, and there was a yacht coming in under motor, her mains’l a white triangle in the moonlight as she moved steadily across the crouched outline of the hospital ruins.
    â€˜If Gareth is going,’ Soo said suddenly, ‘then I’m going too.’
    â€˜It’s your bedtime,’ I told her. ‘Remember what the doctor said. You shouldn’t have been dancing really.’
    â€˜Well, I’m not going to be left behind on my own, that’s definite.’ And then, as Lloyd Jones helped her out, she was asking Petra whether she could lend her anything. But she had come ashore with all the clothes she needed. ‘You never know,’ she said as she retrieved her holdall from under the trestle table in the chandlery. ‘It can blow up pretty fast here and you only get caught out at a party once with a full gale blowing and nothing to change into. I’ve never forgotten it. I got soaked to the skin and so cold …’ She went with Soo up the stairs and into the bedroom.
    Lloyd Jones followed them with his eyes, and when the door was shut he seemed suddenly ill-at-ease, as though unhappy at being left alone with me. ‘I’ll get you something more suitable to wear,’ I said and went into the back premises, where I found him a spare sweater of mine and an old pair of working pants.
    We made a quick change right there in the chandlery. ‘You knew I was a Naval officer.’ He was staring at me. ‘The moment I arrived here, you knew. Do you have a rank? you asked.’ I didn’t say anything, an awkward silence growing