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.
PART 6
The Cold Room
1
THE SIXTH
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,’
‘I need to get out of this place,’ Tarent said, and realized he had formed a whole sentence.
‘Don’t we all?’
‘I haven’t read anything by Graham Greene,’ he added. Coherent thoughts were forming for the first time in what felt like several days. It was an idea outside himself, the surrender he had made to the obsessions and fears and the loss of logical thinking. ‘Yes, I have, I think,’ he added, remembering an old book about Brighton.
‘I’ve read a couple of his novels,’ Lou said. ‘And some of his short stories – I taught them a few years ago. But I’ve seen all of Fellini’s films.’
‘I can speak again.’
‘You’ve never stopped,’ Lou said. ‘You ran a fever and you were talking for hours.’
‘What did I say? Did it make sense?’
‘No.’
‘Do you mean you heard but couldn’t understand, or that you don’t want to tell me?’
‘I heard. I couldn’t understand most of it. It doesn’t matter – I’m used to people recovering from shock. Years ago I trained as a nurse.’
‘My wife was a nurse.’
‘That was Melanie?’
‘How do you know about Melanie?’
‘You kept saying her name. I knew your wife had died, but her name wasn’t on the database. I think you said she’d been killed by someone. Was that recently?’
‘Last week,’ Tarent said. ‘Or perhaps the week before. I’m out of synch with the world. I’ve lost days, dates.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘So am I.’
‘You told me you were in Turkey. Was that where it happened?’
‘There was some kind of terrorist attack, and Melanie was accidentally caught up in it.’
Tarent fell silent, trying unsuccessfully to remember what he might have said before, not only when he was delirious but also when he first met this woman. It was difficult to think like that, think back, because his memory of recent events was in disorder. He remembered Melanie with love and sadness, but he also remembered the woman who would only tell him he should call her Flo. Was that her real name? He could not remember if he had found that out. The disorder in his mind held a new kind of fascination for him, and he felt himself slipping back into it, a confusion he wanted to embrace.
Lou must have sensed something. She took his head in her hands, held him until he opened his eyes. He realized what had happened, breathed deeply a few times.
‘Is nursing what you do now?’ he said. An effort of will, an intent to sound normal.
‘No – I told you. I’m a teacher. Nursing wasn’t for me. I was coming out of my teens. I passed most of the exams, then I was employed by an agency for about a year before moving on. The only work I could find was abroad and I didn’t want to leave the country. Is that why your wife went abroad?’
‘Did I say that too?’
‘Turkey.’
‘My god, yes. I’m sorry. I keep forgetting what I’ve told you. Turkey was a part of what happened to me. I must have been out there too long, because now I’m home I feel as if this country has changed out of all recognition. I assume it’s just the way I see it now. I feel stuck in the past, but in some way I find completely confusing it’s a past I never actually knew. Or that’s how it feels. No, Melanie wanted a change. She was a theatre nurse and after several years the job became too much for her. She was trying relief work. I went with her to Turkey because I wanted to be with her, and I thought I could probably take photographs for the syndicate I work for. Anyway, I was interested to find out what was happening, but then we both did find out and I think we wished we had stayed here.’
‘How long were you away?’
‘I lost track of that. We were travelling for ages, then several months went by when we were at the field hospital.’
‘How do you think things have changed in Britain?’
‘It’s hard to say. When you’re away from home for a long time you tend to build up a false memory of what you’ve left: you keep thinking about either the best, or the worst of it. The ordinary, everyday stuff, your normal life, is something you don’t hold a clear memory of, because when things are ordinary you just do them. In Turkey everything was so bad for us, endlessly dangerous and depressing and threatening – Melanie sometimes worked a sixteen-hour day, which was too much for anyone. I shouldn’t have been there with her. I ought to have realized that before we left. After the first few days I had time on my hands. I spent hours alone, day after day. I was bored, but life was dangerous and unpleasant. I stayed inside the compound most of the time. I used to think about being a child again, doing what I had done then, seeing the sea, walking in woodland, playing with other children, just being happy and safe. I know it sounds infantile. Although in reality my childhood wasn’t particularly happy, and when I think back I can’t find any memories of actually doing those things. So it’s a sort of false nostalgia, something I must have made up or borrowed. Perhaps I saw it in a film once, or read it in books. My father died when I was very young, and although I took British citizenship years ago I’m half American, half Hungarian. My mother worked in London so I grew up in this country. I was in London most of the time – I don’t recall a visit to the sea even once. Even though I did not have that particular childhood, it felt natural to look back and think how much better life was, or might have been, or perhaps might have been what I thought it ought to have been.’
Lou was sitting beside him, staring down silently at her hands. They were gripped together tightly, the skin on the back of each hand was corrugated by the pressure, her knuckles were straining under the skin.
‘When I came back here,’ Tarent said, ‘I think I was unconsciously looking for that. Being in the field hospital was hell. It was hell to work in, for Melanie and the rest of the medical staff, but it was just as bad to be there, to experience it. Turkey has become a desert – the climate has changed more than anyone outside the region knows. The whole of the Mediterranean basin has become unfit for habitation. I don’t suppose the people are suffering there any more than other places where the really hot weather has kicked in, but it’s more or less unlivable now. I can’t imagine what parts of Africa or Asia must be like. After Melanie was killed, the government transported me back to Britain straight away. It was like arriving in a different world. These storms – are they always as bad as this?’
‘Recent ones have been. There were two or three late last year that caused a vast amount of damage.’
‘Weather in Britain was always a joke, but there was never anything like this before. Is it just because of climate change, or is something else behind it? When I was being brought here I had to be transported in an armoured personnel carrier. I thought those were only used where there is an active insurgency, when you genuinely need to be protected. Aid teams routinely go everywhere in them. I didn’t know Mebshers were in use here, that things had become that bad. When I was inside the Mebsher, trying to see outside, it was like being carried through a waste land. Buildings down, floods everywhere, most of the trees destroyed. Then London: I was in a car at that stage, before they put me in the Mebsher. I had to pass through London for some reason, but the officials blanked the windows of the car so I couldn’t see out. Why do you suppose they did that? What I could see of the city had been transformed. The same in the country. Military everywhere, and police. And then this process of government devolution: every official function being moved out to the provinces.’
‘There’s an undeclared war in progress,’ Lou said. ‘People here say it’s going to be the last war ever, the war that will end everything. They say the insurgents have some new kind of weapon – something we can’t defend ourselves against.’
2
Another piece of blown debris slammed heavily on the roof and they both reacted as if something had physically burst into the room. Moments later a large branch skidded down past the window, half fell against the n
earest metal strap and crashed into the yard outside. Tarent knew he was talking too much, as if some barrier inside had loosened. He concentrated on finishing the soup, which was cool now. Lou sat beside him, saying little. He kept thinking about Melanie, already a victim of this final war.
Later that day, as the winds at last started to abate, he began to feel as if he was regaining control of himself. Lou had returned to her own room. He looked at more of his pictures from Anatolia, but they depressed him. He could not carry on with that for long. He went online, searching for news channels or sites, but the government controls on the internet were as strict as those he had encountered abroad. All sites, channels and platforms were now graded according to security levels – the security clearance Tarent had been given for his journey abroad did not apply to the internet, and he had lost internet status when he went abroad. Almost nothing was accessible to him now. He went to find Lou, knowing he was becoming dependent on her, which was wrong, but needing to talk, which was essential. He felt guilty about that, but there was little he could do about it. She was all he had. His mind was starting to feel cluttered again.
As soon as she let him into her room he was overtaken by an irresistible desire to sleep. She let him lie down on her bed.
He woke up many hours later. There was the sound of wind, but it was quieter now. Lights were on in Lou’s room and there was a smell of cooking. The door to the bathroom was open, but the light was off in there. The windows to the outside were blackened by night. Lou was on the far side of the room, seated with her legs drawn up in one of the chairs. She had a book on her lap, but her head was bent forward in sleep. Disoriented by this strange awakening, it took him a few minutes to leave the bed. He woke Lou gently, led her to the bed, made sure she was lying down.