How to Disappear (2 page)

With fearsome bangs on doors, the stewards pass down the corridor saying pack up, we'll be in port within the hour. And already night has fallen. Walking out on deck I face into a cold black wind and discern by degrees a fanlike glow in the distance like a sunrise in hell. This is the first hint of valiant Malta, a rocky riverless island which despite blockades and dreadful bombardments never surrendered to the Fascists in the Second World War. In 1942 King George VI awarded the entire citizenry the George Cross, which emblem has been incorporated into the national flag. Its population is reportedly of Carthaginian origin and the native language is of the Semitic family.

The approach and entry to the Grand Harbour of Valletta is a marvel I have not been prepared for. With the wind dropping and the water calming at every stage, bastion upon bastion of the greatest fortress in the world, tier upon tier climbing from knuckles of rock and floodlit a coppery orange, unfold their battlements and turrets in a slow, seemingly endless series of tableaux on either side of the channel. Above the wavy curtains of these massive walls, blue floodlight bathes classical buildings set among palm trees whose branches show up like tiny green herringbones. Sea-approaches are always magical – the finely graduated decoding of a mystery – and this approach to Valletta must be the most awe-inspiring in the Old World as that to Manhattan is in the New. Silently on smooth, jet-black water, the ship advances, saluted everywhere by this serrated magnificence.

Tucked on to a stone terrace is the Grand Harbour Hotel, a far smaller affair than it sounds. A young man of immense girth attends the night desk and his trusting comportment is very noticeable after my period of living in Palermo tensions. He puts me in Room 67, tiny, with a view over luminous castled water. I sprawl on the bed, letting mental pictures sift themselves. Sleep comes slowly.

The following day it is warm, with a few detergent-white clouds in a flat blue sky, and I discover what that man on board must have meant by Sicily being ‘civilisation': good food and stylish dress. Neither are Maltese attributes. But there is civilisation of another sort here: absolute safety in public places. I can walk where I want when I want. I can change money easily and quickly. The people are without suspicion or arrogance. None of that interminable Sicilian Arabo-Latin complication.

I also discover that the boat to Gozo leaves at lunch-time – soon! – and I scuttle aboard, slumping into a window seat with my luggage. The voyage isn't long and moves north-west along the Maltese coast, chugging past miles of ugly cement buildings. Oncoming – the bare creamy rock of little Comino Island – a relief – it is undefiled – and soon after, I scan the distant lineaments of Gozo…which isn't particularly green, and looks surprisingly built-up too, but the buildings at least are low. On the cliffs above Gozo's harbour several gothic-revival churches are brilliantly inappropriate.

Struggling ashore with bags, I am at once hailed from a car window by a taxi-driver. He reminds me of those trendy young men one sometimes met with in India who combined the cultures of several continents in a very odd way. This one has long hair drooping over his shoulders in black tendrils and he calls me ‘mate', ‘man' and ‘sir' all in the same stream of chatter. I sling my large bag in the back with no help from him and sit beside it with the smaller one on my lap. The driver certainly knows the Duke of Edinburgh Hotel – but he's not impressed.

At a set of traffic lights on the harbour road we are obliged to stop and my attention diverts to a man standing in the street, one of more conventional appearance than the taxi-driver. This other man is about thirty years old, sturdily built with short curly hair, and he's on the kerb staring straight through the window at me. No doubt about it – I'm being ‘clocked'. My skin prickles. His face has balanced features, but why its dark inquisitive eyes and somewhat irascible expression should be directed towards me I can't imagine. So at once on this island there is contact and a sense of, not hostility exactly but of, well, disquiet.

The Duke of Edinburgh Hotel is out of a novel by Lawrence Durrell or Malcolm Lowry. I am captivated the moment its Italianate facade appears at the bottom of Victoria's main street. The driver, pushing some of his tendrils behind one ear, tries to arrange future journeys with me but I tell him I'm going to rent a car, whereupon he says he has a friend who rents cars very cheaply and hands me a card with a phone number on it. As I pay the fare he adds ‘There is an excellent Country & Western night at Marsalforn.' I notice he's wearing cowboy boots. I never see him or his like again.

The hotel foyer is shadowy and noiseless, spacious and cool, with old brown furniture which looks as though it's rooted to the floor. I expect someone to pop up from somewhere and ask me what I want but nobody does, so I slowly skirt the walls. To my amazement they are hung with typewritten testimonials, now yellow with age, from the British Royal Family, the Governors of Malta, and Winston Churchill's private secretary, saying thank-you so much for this and for that, it was so very kind of you to do what-ever and how wonderful your hotel is. Once upon a time, it would seem, this was quite a place but now the hotel is desolate – not a soul around – nobody – nothing. A few keys on hooks behind a dusty reception-desk of varnished wood are the only clue that we might be in a place of accommodation. As with the man at the traffic lights, its interest verges on the sinister.

Peering about, I edge my way into a murky vestibule and along a corridor lined with framed photographs. They too are from long ago, from the dance-band days before the war and a decade or so after it. The men wear black tie, the women sparkly evening-dresses; bottles chill in silver buckets on white damask tablecloths; and couples dance. Obviously the photographs were taken here, in the ballroom presumably, which looks art deco. Maybe it's through there…But I find myself in a bar, recently redecorated in the Gozitan Cotswold style – tapestry chairs and knobbly wooden tables – oh, a voice at my back has said ‘Hullo'. It's not an unfriendly voice, and I do not jump, but turn round and reply ‘Hullo'.

‘Do you want to stay?' asks a dreamy young woman in jeans.

‘I do please.'

‘Only you?'

‘Yes, that's right.'

Have I displeased her by being only me, or by wanting to stay in the first place? It's impossible to work out what her curdled expression might mean. Maybe she's not displeased at all.

‘Is anyone else staying here?' I venture.

‘I think there's one couple staying… Some people moved out this morning.'

The bed & breakfast rate is of a cheapness which says that if you like you could stay here for ever, so at once I feel safe. She hands me Key Number 3, explaining that it's for Room Number 2, and calls mildly round the corner to an invisible presence which turns out to be an exceedingly tall chambermaid with a few long teeth in her upper jaw, who is persuaded to desert the mop-bucket and show me upstairs. The dreamy young woman smiles at last and melts away into a recess and I never see
her
again either.

The staircase displays more photographs, this time of the Royal Family itself, of both the official and unofficial kind, and they are hung so haphazardly as to suggest an irrepressible excitement: couldn't wait to get them up and don't care where they go. But now that the excitement has ebbed away, the photographs look random, poignant, even apprehensive.

At the top of the staircase I come to a large landing with a high ceiling. Its floor is laid with beautiful floral tiles, original nineteenth-century ones. A gilt mirror all foxed across, a console table and giant linen chest strive to an idea of grandeur whose appeal lies not in the achievement but in the attempt. After the shadowed uncertainty below it is so light-hearted up on this airy, flowery dance-floor of a landing, that I can't help letting out a little laugh or two. Big Bertha looks round at me and shuffles on again. She really is one of the tallest women I've ever seen.

My room is a suite. Heavy double doors, once painted dark blue, open into an ante-room which has steps down to a bedroom with two beds, several cupboards, and another tiled floor in pretty colours. Beyond is a bathroom with ants scurrying round the bath-tub as though in a white rollerdrome. Overhanging it there's a water-heater which Bertha switches on with pride, flicking at the ants with a cloth. Her English is not superb and when I say I'm from London she grunts and says ‘Yes, garden', opening a door of frosted glass on to a balcony above the rear of the hotel. There's a small swimming-pool out there containing no water. I divine at once that it will be possible to sit on the loo and stare through the open door at lemon and palm trees without being exposed. The balcony has a washing-line complete with wooden pegs and the afternoon sun streams on to it. Yes, one could live here for quite a while.

When Big Bertha has gone, half chuckling to herself, half amazed, having strenuously tried to refuse my tip, I test the bed. Comfy. Linen sheets, cream woollen English blankets, worn but spotlessly clean. Attached to the high ceiling is an electric fan which works. They tear out fans these days, lower the ceilings and install air-conditioning, but thankfully not here. I am describing the place in some detail because it is a rarity, an example of a kind of sanctum which has almost disappeared from the world. In how many tropical and subtropical rooms like this have I slugged from a bottle, or with luck kissed a neck smelling of sunshine, or opened a book, or daydreamed when the body has come to a horizontal halt but the mind is yet adrift with trains of thought flowing like silken scarves into empty spaces. The Fonseca Hotel, Aurangzeb Road, New Delhi, where I stayed with Sarah – it was a spacious Lutyens villa now demolished (someone said there is a Holiday Inn on the site). That fabulous hotel in Trivandrum with the teak interiors and white muslin mosquito-nets. It was called, I think, the Mascot. Is it still there and in proper shape? The Constellation in Vientiane, becalmed and mysterious during the monsoon season before the Communist takeover, or the Christina in Mexico City, with its vestigial French trimmings – do they retain anything of their anachronistic allure even if they are still extant? Those passe hotels with big cheap rooms, they were so sexy and useful, and heady with escape from personal history and with opportunity to live anew.

Victoria's main street, accelerating in steepness to the small central square with its red telephone box and red pillar box, is lined with classical buildings of high quality put up in the local golden stone. These include two enormous theatres, the Aurora and the Astra, each belonging to one of the island's two principal brass bands. At 9 pm it has grown cold and dark, the streets are empty, there is no passeggiata in this land, the Gozitans don't go out, and there isn't a single restaurant open, only a couple of bars lit by the heartless glare of strip lighting. Inside them a few gnarled peasants smoke and growl. From the citadel's breezy ramparts one sees perhaps as many as twenty churches presiding from as many hills, near and far, all picked out in yellow lightbulbs like Harrods or the Maharajah's palace at Mysore. It is a unique sight, so many large churches within such a small non-urban compass. They are lit like this because Easter is approaching, which for Christians is a mixture of misery and exultation, hideous death and weird resurrection, but which usually affects me more directly as the spring festival, joyous herald of the flowering year.

Back at the Duke of Edinburgh I discover the hotel restaurant is open, the only one in Victoria open at night-time, and I order a pizza which is all that's on the menu. Pizzas, seemingly, are what keep the hotel going. Mine is excellent, but the other diners don't give me so much as a glance and I retire to my room with the remains of a bottle of Gozitan red – good colour, robust taste, no tartness or trace of additives. It's called Bacchus Wine on its charming label – and so… here I am on the island with the wonderful four-letter name, with my muscles easing as the ruby liquid suffuses them. But now that I'm here – well, what am I going to do?

I think I am going to do nothing. It seems to be what the locals are doing. In which case I'd better rent that car. In places like this you require a car if you are to wander aimlessly, lest you find yourself having to take buses to specific destinations. The bedroom has grown chilly, so I switch on the heater. The only other guests in the hotel, the couple, are lodged in the suite next to mine, presumably for the maid's convenience. Through the wall the sounds of their love-making socialise the silence. No, I'm not envious. I have all that back in Palermo – otherwise, yes, I should be envious. And I don't grow a sympathetic erection either, but am rendered cosy by the pulsations from the other side of the wall as though we were three dogs in a kennel. Then I get an erection…

In the morning I awoke too early for breakfast, and when I awoke again it was too late. In theory I always like to go down for breakfast – but in the event it's always a bind, falling out of the shower and into one's clothes and down the stairs in a mist of semi-wakefulness. Over at the car-hire, the agent pooh-poohs my enquiry of ‘Do I leave a deposit?' This is remarkable, as is the fact that the car is one of half a dozen parked in the road outside his office, all of them unlocked with the keys inserted and ready to start. Surely we are in the only place in the entire Mediterranean region where such a thing is possible? The gears of mine are pretty much wrecked – it takes some fishing about to find one – but driving on Gozo is sheer honky-tonk pleasure. All roads splay out from Victoria, so basically you move in the direction you wish to go and trust to instinct. You may be on the wrong road but you cannot get lost.

Between stone-walled fields in a landscape of mesas and wild flowers, past yellow houses with green shutters, I head for the principal sight of the island, the prehistoric Ggantija Temples, but they are closed to-day and I judder on to Ramla Bay. I don't think it's warm enough to swim in the sea but you never know. Ramla is embraced by cliffs stacked in flakes and by terraces of maize and is overlooked by Calypso's cave. One of her caves, that is. Her various caves are disputed by historians. But this is the finest beach in a not very beachy archipelago and developers therefore are always trying to destroy it. The Government has resisted – to date. There are only three other cars parked where the road peters out. The sand is orange and blank except for a couple of stragglers, a van selling snacks, and a man with shaggy hair leading a donkey. An onshore wind has driven up the waves into frothing bands and I have a dutiful paddle where their extremities soak away into the sand. The water's freezing.