The Adjacent (34 page)

In the background of Krystyna’s story dark shadows hovered. The first was harmless and tragic, but it still had the power, decades later, to cause Torrance a pang of jealousy. She had not told him – she had no obligation to tell him – that not long before their day
together she had been involved with a young RAF pilot called Simon Barrett. In the ATA archive Torrance found Barrett’s short letters to her, innocent and happy and joking, an outline of a brief wartime romance. In one letter Simon Barrett pleaded with her to ‘put the past behind’. Later, Torrance discovered in the Air Ministry archives that Pilot Officer Simon Barrett, aged 21, had been captain of a Halifax bomber, returning in March 1943 from a raid on Stuttgart. The plane was shot down over the North Sea, with the loss of all the crew.

For Tomasz, the lover in Poland she had lost, the story was even darker. Sinister events had followed the collapse of Poland. It was not clear to Mike Torrance if Krystyna had known at the time what was happening, or had found out shortly afterwards. Possibly, she had heard enough rumours amongst the Polish exiles to have secretly feared it. The reality was that in April and May 1940, which was around the time Krystyna had travelled from France to England, the Soviet authorities in Occupied Poland rounded up the entirety of the officer corps of the Polish army and air force, some twenty-two thousand men in all, transported them to the Katyn Forest near Smolensk in Russia, and massacred them. Mass graves were discovered in 1943, at approximately the same time as Torrance had spent his summer’s day with Krystyna. Most of the bodies they found bore a single bullet hole in the back of the head. News of this gruesome discovery did not officially reach Western Europe until after the end of the war.

Krystyna had managed to escape the atrocity, but what of Tomasz? Torrance began to feel certain that there in the Katyn Forest, unmarked in some mass grave, lay the body of the young aristocrat whom he had believed was his rival.

There was not much more that he could check definitively while he remained in Britain. From several ancestry websites devoted to the Polish aristocracy he elicited the information that the last known holder of the Lowicz title, from the family Grudzinski, was Rafal, son of Bronisław. Rafal Grudzinski was thought to have died in 1940, and with him the title ceased to exist. There was no reference to a son called Tomasz, nor to any other children.

A year went by after this initial sweep through what records Torrance could find while he was in England. Sikorski’s government had left few traces or records after the war ended. He knew that to get more detailed information he would have to access not only army and regimental records in Poland, but also newspaper files
and civic archives. Torrance had no idea how much of this sort of material would have survived the havoc that Poland endured during its years of Nazi occupation and administration, the rounding up and deportations, the forced labour camps, the extermination camps. A journey to Poland became essential.

A few months after his wife Glenys died, Torrance made the visit he had been planning for so long. He intended it as a working trip – as well as the research he always enjoyed travelling abroad, because it gave him indirect background experience that came in useful for his books. This time, though, he wanted to make best use of the time, and conduct a thorough search of whatever records were available. Part of him was nonetheless curious to see the country from which Krystyna had come. He travelled to Kraków at the end of 1999. He was then 76 and he knew that it was almost certainly his last opportunity to travel abroad.

His searches added little to what he already knew, but more alarmingly they made him question even that.

Firstly, there was Krystyna’s birth family. Torrance went to Pobiednik, the village Krystyna had named – in fact there were two villages, Pobiednik Great and Pobiednik Small, a short distance apart. No trace of any family called Roszca could be found in either of them, and none of the present-day inhabitants he spoke to had ever heard of anyone of that name. Torrance was interested to see that Pobiednik had its own airfield: a small strip owned by an aero club. He was unable to discover whether or not it had been there in the 1930s, but the local people thought not.

Of Tomasz Grudzinski, or possibly Tomasz Lowicz, nothing could be found. Torrance searched libraries and databases without success. He spent two days in the civic archives in the Ratusz of Kraków, and although he found many references to land deals undertaken by Rafal Grudzinski, and the businesses in which he had an interest, and the taxes he had paid, and the woman he had married, and the noble titles he possessed, and the property and artwork of his that was seized by the Nazis, Torrance could find no reference to his children. As far as he could determine, Rafal Grudzinski had not had a family. The Lowicz line of inheritance was already set to be discontinued, even before the outbreak of war.

When he went to the records of the Poznań Uhlan Regiment, which Krystyna had specifically named, Torrance was shown names and details of every Hussar officer who had served between 1920 and 1939, when the regiment was disbanded by the German occupiers.
There were many Tomaszes on the lists, and several Grudzinskis, but none with both names.

Although the Polish authorities had done years of work in establishing the identity of every victim of the Katyn massacre, Torrance could also find no reference to a Tomasz Grudzinski in the interminable catalogue, or at least he could not see any officer of that name, or one close to it, whose background was the same as the man he sought.

By the time he left Poland and returned home, Torrance was convinced that Tomasz, the man he had as a youth envied and feared so much, had either been eradicated from history, or, a much more puzzling conclusion, might never in fact have existed at all.

He made no more enquiries into Krystyna’s Polish background.

However, he had at least worked out what must have happened to her at the end, and he had not needed to travel to Kraków for that. ATA records and logs were enough.

On 27 August 1943, approximately five weeks after the day she and Torrance met, Krystyna was rostered to fly a newly built Spitfire XI from the Supermarine factory near Southampton, to an RAF airfield in East Anglia. The Mark XI she flew was exactly as she had described it to him: it was designed for long range high-altitude reconnaissance, equipped with powerful cameras and extra fuel tanks. There were no weapons.

Her flight plan that day was uncomplicated: a more or less straight line across southern England, with an estimated flight time of less than an hour.

According to air traffic control records she appeared to deviate from her course not long after taking off, and headed towards London. Her plane was routinely tracked on radar until it crossed central London, which it traversed at an altitude of more than ten thousand feet. The plane was picked up again when it left London airspace and began heading along the Thames Estuary and out towards the North Sea. When it was last observed the Spitfire was seen still to be gaining altitude, and had turned a few degrees to port, on a bearing of about 80 degrees.

There were no further sightings of the Spitfire, and, as Dennis Fielden had informed him so many years before, no wreckage of it was ever found.

Torrance believed that he alone could imagine what had happened. He pictured the slim young woman in her blue uniform, her distinctive dark-brown hair pressed inside the flying helmet,
strapped into the narrow cockpit of the plane she considered the most beautiful ever made, flying it for the first time, wearing it like a second skin. She had probably given no conscious thought to what she was about to do. She followed her instincts, her mind spinning in a sort of ecstatic rapture. In this haze of happy completion she quickly took the Spitfire into the summer sky, flying it high and far, releasing herself from the bonds of war, through the white clouds, across the blue, scraping the roof of the world, flying without end, heading home, touching nothing but the free air and the endless sky.

THE EYE OF TS FEDERICO FELLINI SWEPT OVER THE COUNTRY
from the south-west and now covered much of Lincolnshire and southern Yorkshire. The outermost rainbands stretched as far down as the Thames Estuary. Violent winds attacked the North Sea coasts, and on the far side of the sea Denmark reported mountainous waves and substantial damage to coastal defences. At Warne’s Farm, Tibor Tarent’s refuge, there was a brilliant electric storm followed by a brief period of bright sunshine and a misleading calm. The first main winds, on the leading edge of the storm cell, struck the Warne complex in the early hours of the morning. Tarent was woken by the noise as soon as the gale moved in over the buildings, shaking the walls and hurling rain and ice particles at the windows. He huddled under the bedclothes in the dark, terrified by the screeching of the gale and the many shuddering thuds as pieces of storm-driven debris crashed against the reinforced outer walls. By the time Lou Paladin left her own room and came to his, he was crying with fright. She stayed with him until dawn.

They spent the next day in close companionship, while the storm battered the outside of the building and the nervous exhaustion seeped slowly out of him. On the night of the main storm Lou slept alongside him in the same bed, but it was only for mutual comfort and reassurance. Once he had surrendered to the immense backlog of nervous strain, Tarent was its helpless sufferer and victim, no longer in control. A small part of his mind remained sufficiently detached to feel surprise at the intensity of what was happening,
but intelligence was no match for fear. Most of the time he just gave in to it – he cried, he writhed with physical pain, he jabbered senseless words. He had the sense that he had become untethered from reality, yet he was too frightened by what was happening to fight for control. He lay awake for hours – when he slept it was a fitful sleep. He could not speak coherently, he could not keep food down, he could not think. He was daunted by memories of the savage violence he had witnessed in Anatolia, the illnesses of the small children, the mutilations the women had suffered, the insensible revenges taking place, the vast and intolerable heat, the brutality of militiamen, the indifference of uniformed soldiers, the smells of dying and death.

His cameras had captured images of everything. His memory was stronger, but his mind was under threat.

On the second morning there was a lull in the full ferocity of Federico Fellini. Lou warmed up some milk for him and he sipped it slowly. Thirty minutes later he was still managing to keep it down. Lou gave him two biscuits to nibble on, and they stayed down too.

Tarent knew he was almost certainly not losing his mind, but even so for the time being rational thought had deserted him. He could not concentrate on anything. He listened to Lou whenever she spoke, trying to disentangle her words from the chaos of his own thoughts.

‘The storm will pass later today,’ she said, into the silence around him but raising her voice above the constant roaring and howling from outside. ‘It will intensify again soon. The trailing edge of the storm will pass over us, but it’s not likely to be as bad as before. The storm has already been downgraded, but there’s another system behind this one and it is heading this way.’

A broad metal strap, one of many visible from the window, ran down from the roof of the building, anchored somewhere on the ground. It whipped and shrieked when the wind caught it.

Lou said, ‘We’re safe here so long as we don’t go outside. They claim the buildings can withstand cyclones up to and even beyond Level 5. Those straps hold the roofs on.’

She seemed to Tarent to be speaking slowly and pedantically, like a radio announcer conveying an important piece of public information. Even so, he had trouble following what she said. He was thinking about Melanie again, remembering the agony of realizing she was dead, but also Flo. What had happened to her when the vehicle was destroyed? Was it the same explosion that killed them both? He was no longer sure. Lou was stroking the side of his face.

Whenever he raised himself high enough from the bed to take a look at what was happening outside, Tarent was astonished by the amount of debris that had fallen into the wide quadrangle that lay between the buildings. As well as many branches and bushes, and other pieces of broken vegetation there were large pieces of metal, some of them bent or twisted sheets, beams of shattered wood and a thousand shards of broken glass. Often these wind-borne projectiles smashed against the rain-streaked windows. He pushed against the window by the bed, testing its strength.

Lou laid a calming hand on his arm. ‘The windows won’t break. That’s why the glass is so thick, why the view outside is distorted.’

Tarent then remembered, in a glance of rational memory, the bottle-glass distortions of what could be seen from inside the Mebsher.

The Mebsher – he had remembered what it was called. He tried to say the word but it would not form.

Lou must have gone away while he slept, because he was alone when he woke. She returned not long afterwards. She gave him a drink of water and although he resisted the idea of being helpless and in need of nursing, he was reassured by her sitting beside him. He consumed the tinned soup she heated up for him. Somehow she had found fresh bread.

Something large bashed against the side of the building. For a moment the lighting in the room flickered. They both reacted, but Lou calmed him.

‘There are three back-up circuits,’ she said. ‘The lights never seem to go out. I watched the news on TV just now. The only news channel I could find was from Helsinki. They said the next storm coming out of the Atlantic is TS Graham Greene and it’s about two days behind this one. At the moment it’s predicted to be Level 3, so although it’s a full cyclone it won’t cause as much damage. It might pass over more slowly, though. They also thought it was possible it would veer away from this part of the country. Not a big problem for us, anyway.’