02 _ Maltese Goddess, The (3 page)

“My husband is an exceptional designer, I know. But it is the colors I love the most,” she replied. “They remind me of Italy, of Florence. It is one of my favorite places in all the world. It is where I learned to love architecture, and I suppose set the stage for my life with Martin. When I told him that, he said he chose the colors for me,” she said.

Then I got down to work, Marilyn very obligingly and competently helping me by taking down the measurements as I called them out. There were five pieces of furniture ranging from a huge mahogany sideboard to a large armoire that were to be consolidated with the shipment from the shop. Most of them were in the front of the house, not far from the door. I measured each one of them, estimated their weight to help Dave out, and then marked each with a yellow sticker with my initials on it to make sure there would be no mistake when Dave’s men arrived to get the furniture. I was going on ahead to Malta, and Marilyn had pointed out to me that while the maid was home every day except Wednesdays, her day off, she and Martin were normally out during the day.

“I go to my club, every day, once I’ve gotten the house organized. I love it there. Do you know it? The Rosedale Women’s Club downtown,” she said, naming a very swank women’s club that I had taken out a trial membership in a couple of years earlier during a period of forced inactivity shortly after my divorce.

It had seemed like a good idea at the time, getting fit in the company of women only. But after subjecting my somewhat zaftig figure and my grey jogging sweats to the scrutiny of women whose tights and headbands actually matched their leotards, and whose main topic of conversation seemed to focus on the latest color of nail polish, I had returned to my solitary morning jog. I was surprised that an obviously intelligent but shy woman like Marilyn Galea would be a member of such a club, but perhaps she was more gregarious in other people’s company, or more likely she was simply to the manor born, which I was not.

I changed the subject. “Tell me more about your husband,” I said. “He mentioned he is going back to his roots with this house in Malta. Is that where he is from originally?”

“Yes, it is. Galea is a very common Maltese name. He was born in the town of Mellieha on the main island. His family was not well-off—his father had a little shop in the town. But Martin, Martin was born ambitious, I think. He and a friend of his talked their way into the international school in Malta and charmed their way into the homes of the international set. The principal of the school recognized his talent and helped him get a scholarship in architecture at the University of Toronto—Canada and Malta continue to have ties because of the old British Commonwealth connection.”

“Are his parents still living there?”

“No. Both of them died several years ago. Before I met him.”

“Have you seen the house?” I asked.

“Not yet,” she replied. “I’ve never been to Malta. I’m looking forward to it, to seeing where Martin comes from, the village where he grew up. He doesn’t talk about it much.”

“Will I see you there then?”

“No. This is a business trip. Martin is going to Rome for a couple of days to see to a project he’s working on there, then he goes on to Malta. You know Martin.” She smiled. “Always looking for the next big commission. He’s gotten back in touch with a boyhood friend of his, who’s also done very well for himself in the interim, and who hopefully will see that Martin gets connected to all the right people in Malta. Martin is entertaining some people as soon as he gets there. I’m not at liberty to say whom. But here, come and have a coffee with me in the kitchen. Would you like an espresso or a cappuccino?” she said, changing the subject abruptly.

“Sure,” I said. I’d already noticed during the house tour that the kitchen was equipped with a commercial-sized espresso machine. It was an impressive space. White marble floors, brushed stainless-steel counters and cupboards, and the de rigueur, in that neighborhood, huge built-in refrigerator and six-burner professional stove. “Do you enjoy cooking, Marilyn?” I asked. You could run a small restaurant out of this kitchen.

“Not really.” She smiled. “Coralee does most of the cooking,” she said, gesturing toward the young woman who had opened the door when I arrived, and who was now chopping some vegetables at the far end of the kitchen. “

“Cooking has never been my forte, neither for that matter has housekeeping. Sheltered childhood!” She smiled again. I recalled her bluestocking upbringing.

After asking Coralee to make us cappuccinos, she led me off the kitchen to a small room. I say small, but it was probably the size of my living room. Here it seemed small. It was decorated quite uncharacteristically in a pink chintz, and seemed, and I do not mean this unkindly, a little worn. I noted with some surprise that the Indonesian Worryman I had given her the day before was sitting in a prominent place on the desk.

“This is my office,”‘ she said, noticing my glance about the room. The room was very neat, and I could see what looked to be financial ledgers, indicating to me that she was the one who looked after the smooth running of the Galea household. I found myself wondering why Marilyn Galea could not have taken on the house in Malta. She struck me as perfectly capable of managing the project as well as I could.

“The office was originally my mother’s,” Marilyn went on. “She died when I was very young, but I remember being in this room with her. Martin let me keep the room the way it was. You know how architects are,” she said. “Even something so small as the placement of a bar of soap in the bathroom is a design feature, and one they must therefore control. It was a major concession on his part.”

“This is your family home, then, is it?”

“Yes. We moved in after my father died about ten years ago. He’d roll over in his grave if he could see what Martin has done to it.” She laughed. “But it seemed to be the sensible thing to do. Martin was just getting started, and building a new house seemed out of the question. Now I think we both like it.” As she spoke she twisted her pearls, which I had the impression she always wore, and I knew, somehow, that the pearls had been her mother’s, and like the office meant a very great deal to her for that reason.

Coralee brought us the coffee and we began to chat. I must say it never ceases to amaze me what we’ll tell a relative stranger. Here I had just met Marilyn Galea and soon we were chattering away like old friends. At least I was chattering. She asked a lot of questions. I told her all about the shop—she was fascinated by the idea that I had just made up my mind to go into business and had done so.

I told her about meeting Alex Stewart when I moved into my little house in Cabbagetown, about how he had kind of adopted me, and how now, on a pension, he came into the shop every day to help us, out of the goodness of his heart, and certainly not because of the pittance we were able to pay him. How, even in his seventies, he was a whiz on the Internet and was probably, even as we spoke, online getting me an airline ticket to Malta.

I told her about my parents, my father a retired diplomat, about my two-year relationship with Lucas, who was, I told her, probably the nicest man on the planet. In short I told her everything. Well, not quite everything. I did not tell her that in the dying days of my marriage, when I was coming to realize that Clive’s penchant for very young women and his distaste for an honest day’s work were not a temporary aberration but a permanent condition, I had come dizzyingly close to succumbing to the charms of Martin Galea.

Common sense and good taste had won a moral victory then, but it was by a narrow margin, and it still caused me some embarrassment to think of the way I’d behaved. Above all, I hated to think that this down-to-earth woman, in whose kitchen I was sitting, knew anything about it. It was yet another reason why Martin Galea usually got what he wanted where I was concerned, with the one exception, of course. I really wanted him to keep his mouth shut about those unhappy days of my past, and Galea, from what I’d heard, was not above using what he knew about people to advance his career. Nothing so sordid as blackmail, to be sure, just a sense that there was a little tally of past sins to accompany the list of owe-me’s.

While we were still chatting, my cellphone rang. It was Alex. “How do you feel about flying out tonight?” he asked. I muttered something. “I’m having real difficulty getting you connecting flights. Essentially from here you can get to Malta through London, Paris, or Rome. London is fully booked. In Rome they’re having one of those regular strikes of theirs. There’s a seat on an Air Canada flight that will get you into Paris in time to make an Air Malta connection to Luqa.”

“Where?”

“Luqa—Malta’s airport. I’d better get you some reading material on the country, I can tell. Will you go tonight?”

“Sure. No problem. I’ll head home now and pack. Got a weather report for me too?”

“Of course. Winter. Rain gear a good idea, a jacket for evenings. But lots warmer than here. We’re supposed to have an arctic blast in the next few days—minus fifteen or so at night”

“In that case, I’m on my way,” I said, laughing, not realizing that even while I was thousands of miles away the Canadian deep freeze would cause me no end of trouble.

I said good-bye to Marilyn Galea and thanked her for the coffee and her help with the furniture. I told her that Thomson Shipping would be picking it up in the next day or so, and that Alex or Sarah would call her to let her know when. She gave me the names and telephone number of the couple who were the caretakers for the property in Malta, checked to see that her husband had given me the right set of plans, and made j careful note of Dave Thomson’s address and phone number, as well as that of Sarah and Alex.

Then I left her. I still have a vision of her standing in the doorway as I pulled out of the driveway. A tall, plain woman painfully shy but rather nice, married to a little boy—a disarming, talented little boy, perhaps, but a little boy nonetheless.

TWO

First the animals, creatures of the Pleistocene. Driven before a great wall of ice that almost imperceptibly encroaches on their grazing lands, they move further and further south, onto a narrow band of land, a bridge, that stretches across the sea. But then the thunder of a great earthquake, the waters rush in. The land bridge becomes a chain of little islands, and then a very few. In this tiny archipelago, there is no going forward and no turning back. Trapped on this rocky shore, struggling for survival, they become, as the ages go by, smaller and smaller. Stunted hippopotami, elephants the size of dogs. Then silence, the Cave of Darkness, extinction.

But what is this? Digging in, cowering in the dark of caves. Troglodyte! Will you move into the light?

I was in such a dazed state when I arrived in Malta, the previous day a blur of activity that got me to the Paris flight just in the nick of time, then to the Air Malta flight by the same narrow margin, mat I almost missed the hand-lettered sign with the interesting phonetic treatment of my name.

MISSUS MCLEENTAK, it read, held by a rather nice-looking young man in jeans and a Hard Rock Cafe T-shirt Presumably the age of mass media and production has brought us more than the comfort of seeing T-shirts advertising the same establishment anywhere in the world, but at that very moment I could not think what.

Actually the reason I almost missed it was that I was absolutely mesmerized by the appearance and antics of one of my fellow passengers on the Air Malta flight from Paris. He was dressed safari-style, whether because he thought Malta was the kind of place that required that sort of attire or as a matter of affectation, I couldn’t know. In any event, he was wearing cowboy boots, khaki pants, one of those matching khaki short-sleeved shirts with an excess of pockets, and a wide-brimmed hat of the bush ranger variety, one side snapped up, that one associates with the Australian outback or the Serengeti. This one sported a leopard print band, and dipped over a pockmarked face, a bulbous nose, and florid complexion that indicated its owner should probably swear off the booze from time to time.

This fellow, whom I’d named for my own amusement GWH for Great White Hunter, had begun his performance even before the plane got off the ground in Paris. While everyone else was attempting to get seated, he was up and waving bills in assorted currencies in the direction of the cabin attendants. It seemed he wanted them to put the bottle of champagne— Dom, he called it—he’d brought on board in the refrigerator and to serve it to him at his seat. He was sitting with a lovely lady, he said in a stage whisper that could be heard halfway to Nairobi, and wanted to impress her.

The well-trained cabin crew, who had the good taste to regard the proffered money and the champagne as they would a basket of scorpions, explained to him that one was not supposed to bring one’s own liquor for consumption on the aircraft. GWH apparently felt the rules did not apply to him. Finally the head cabin steward, realizing that GWH would be very disruptive to the comfort of the other passengers if they did not comply, agreed to take care of the champagne.

The “lovely lady” in question was an attractive middle-aged woman who appeared never to have met GWH, and was, I suspect, no more thrilled than I would be by this intimacy forced upon her by Fate in the form of the Air Malta computer.

In fact, she looked as if this flight was to be the longest three hours of her life. The aircraft was small, and had been overbooked, so it was absolutely full, even after some passengers volunteered, lured by the offer of cash and accommodation, to wait for a later plane. I myself had been tempted by the thought of a few hours in Paris and a nice afternoon nap after an all-night flight, but had decided to forge on.

In any event, I was seated across the aisle and back one row from the lovely lady and the GWH, and could tell that about thirty minutes into the flight, she was becoming desperate. At this point, in what I took to be a splendid gesture of Christian charity, a gentleman seated behind me, a priest in black robes and a cross on a long chain around his neck, told the cabin attendants that he would be pleased to change seats with her. The message was discreetly delivered and accepted with genuine gratitude, I’m sure, and the priest took his seat beside GWH.