The Adjacent

by Christopher Priest

  Two men were standing in the corridor where he had been directed – one was Dennis Fielden, the other was an RAF officer he did not recognize, but he assumed it must be the Adjutant. As soon as he was noticed walking towards them, the officer nodded to Mr Fielden, then walked briskly away. Mr Fielden greeted him in the corridor, then ushered him into the office. Torrance noticed he was not wearing his cap, so he removed his own. Fielden closed the door. They remained standing.

  He said without delay, ‘Aircraftman Torrance, I have managed to trace Second Officer Roszca for you, but I’m afraid I bring sad news. Krystyna Roszca has been posted as missing and is believed to be dead. She was delivering a plane as a regular part of her job, when she appears to have diverted from her planned course. She did not arrive at her destination. No wreckage was found, so it is thought that she might have made an emergency landing in water somewhere. Part of the route she filed would have taken her close to the Thames Estuary, and the diversion she took from that course almost certainly led her out over the sea. It seems possible that she somehow lost her bearings, became unable to find her way back to the right course and was forced down when she ran out of fuel.’

  Torrance had taken in only the first few words, the giddy sensation of bad news rushing through him.

  They were both silent for a while, then Torrance said, ‘Sir, when did this happen?’

  ‘It was last year, towards the end of August. She was rota’d for the delivery on the twenty-seventh of that month.’

  ‘Is it absolutely certain she is dead?’

  Torrance had somehow sat down – he did not remember doing it. He was on a hard wooden chair placed behind the door of the office. The ATA pilot was standing beside him, leaning over with an expression of sympathy. He was calm, steady, tall. He placed a hand on Torrance’s shoulder.

  First Officer Fielden said, ‘Michael, I am really so very sorry.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’

  After Fielden had left, Torrance was unable to face going back to work straight away. He left the Adjutant’s office, walked along the corridor and found an empty room at the end. Inside, with the door closed, he hid there alone.

  16

  In the summer of 1944 Mike Torrance was transferred to an RAF base in southern Italy, where he serviced P-51 Mustangs and P-38 Lightnings operated by units of the USAAF. He remained attached to this section until the end of the European war, when he returned to England. He was demobilized at the beginning of 1946.

  In 1948 he met his wife, Glenys, and they set up home together in the south-east London suburbs, on the Kent side. They had three children, two boys and a girl. Torrance worked in a number of jobs after the war, but in 1954 began working for a medium-sized advertising agency in Bayswater Road, not far from Notting Hill. He was trained as a copy-writer, which was work he found stimulating and creative. He worked well in advertising for a few years and enjoyed what he was doing, but in the end he found copy-writing something of a blind alley. He was developing a taste for different kinds of writing. He transferred to the subsidiary of an American chemical company with an office in Bromley, closer to his home, and there he was appointed senior journalist. He was responsible for writing and producing all manner of printed material, from straightforward descriptions of products, to publicity handouts and the house journal, published every month.

  Some years later, emboldened by both his enjoyment of the work and the belief that he was doing it well, he gave up paid employment altogether and started a new career as a biographer, working for himself as a freelance. He began modestly, producing short biographies of service personnel who had performed acts of exceptional bravery or gallantry in the Second World War, and these were commissioned and printed by a specialist military history publisher. Later he branched out into political and social biographies for the general market, where he was soon established as an authority in his field.

  He rarely thought about Krystyna Roszca in these years – his professional life was full and he was absorbed in the experience of seeing his young family growing up. Eventually the age of retirement approached.

  For Torrance this felt like a mere technicality of the calendar, because as a freelance the prospect of ceasing work was arbitrary and unnecessary. He was in good health, had active commissions for the work he was engaged in, and was planning more books as far ahead as ever. Even so, he was conscious of a general slowing down and he became more introspective than he had been before. He continued with his usual work as normal, but with increasing frequency his thoughts returned to the summer of 1943 and his brief romantic interlude with Krystyna, the flier from Poland, the girl, the young woman, who had cried and held his hand. He had not thought for many years of the secret she had imparted to him, her mother’s love-name for her. Malina – it came back to him immediately. He said it quietly to himself, using Krystyna’s own Polish pronunciation, with the emphasis on the long middle ‘i’.

  He thought about her with increasing interest and attention, quietly remembering himself at that time, at the age he had been: so shy, young, callow, inexperienced, unprepared for a worldly woman like her. He began to wonder – how had he seemed to her? He realized, belatedly, what she had achieved: that fierce independence and brave initiative that had given her a role in the defence of her country, the hours of dangerous flying while the Luftwaffe dive-bombers hit the towns and the fighter planes searched for any target they could find, the escape from the invasions, the nightmare overland journey to safety across Europe as war was erupting everywhere around. When he met her he had been not much more than a boy, uprooted from home, thrown into the hurly-burly of a wartime RAF station, just about getting by. Looking back, Torrance felt abashed by his memories of himself: his insular background, his unawareness of the wider world, his lack of experience with girls. At first Krystyna had seen in him, he knew, a reminder of someone else, her real lover, but somehow by the end of their day that was no longer so important. He believed she had been responding to him, not to her memory of someone else.

  When the Second World War ended, Torrance, like many of the people who had been caught up in it, deliberately pushed it to the back of his mind. He had had enough of war, of life in the RAF. He almost never spoke of his experiences. Even when he met Glenys, six months passed before he mentioned he had been in the RAF, and even then he minimized his role and barely spoke of it again to her. With his work on the early biographies, corresponding with veterans and sometimes interviewing them, Torrance realized that what had happened when he met Krystyna was not at all unusual. So many of the war’s participants were young, even the ones who had distinguished themselves in action. Nearly everyone was away from their families for the first time, thrown into the controlled chaos of service life. For many, the prospect of action and the fear of death heightened the need for friendships, for love, and the consequent separations, weeping, regretting, reunions, hopes, fearing not just their own deaths but those of the people they knew or loved or simply worked with. All those bereavements, families broken for so many reasons, so many liaisons and relationships and new starts and false hopes and tragic outcomes.

  His meeting with Krystyna was the one wartime experience that had left a real mark on him. He recalled the account of her life in Poland, which he had written up from memory in 1953 while he was still working in unsatisfying jobs. At the time it felt like a way of making what happened coherent, something he could complete and finish. In this sense he had succeeded. He had not read his account or even thought about it for years. He searched his room, his desk, his cupboards, his old and inefficient filing – finally he found it, stuffed into a box file of papers which his wife had put to one side for possible recycling. He rescued it, read it.

  It was full of memories, and it made him think about how he had heard of Krystyna’s death.

  There was something unexplained about the way she died, and it still nagged at him. While he accepted as true what the gentle ATA officer, Dennis Fielden, had told him, he felt from
the first moments that it could not be the whole story. In the larger process of consciously leaving behind everything that happened to him in the war, Torrance had let this small mystery drift into the past. Millions of people had died, many of them in unexplained circumstances – it was in the nature of war, with its violent events, sudden deaths, guilty acts, secrecy.

  But it still seemed unlikely to him that Krystyna would allow herself to get lost, or would divert from her planned route. It was of course possible she had crashed, through a mechanical failure of the aircraft, or by enemy action, or because of bad weather, but it was against everything that he knew about her that she would simply lose her way. No wreckage had been discovered, which he presumed meant that nothing had been found along her known route. He had seen her flying, admired her skill, her natural way of piloting – also her determination, the inner strength and individuality, all her hopes and wishes. If she had diverted from her route there would have been a reason.

  Torrance decided he would try to find out what it might have been. He had learned a few skills of his own since becoming a writer. Notable among them was an ability to search and research, to explore boxes of dusty papers, to ransack newspaper libraries, to elicit half-concealed information from official bodies. He had many contacts, friends, ways and means. He knew it would help to be able to speak Polish, an ambition he had nurtured for many years, so he sent away for an audio course, then later took privately tutored lessons.

  The facts were easier to find than he had at first expected, because in the post-war years many official papers and documents were released into the public domain, with many more becoming accessible after the collapse of the Soviet Union. This made the prospect of going to Poland much less of a concern. For researchers it became a matter not of trying to find out if the information existed, but of locating exactly where it was. In Britain, the aircraft manufacturers had released a huge amount of information about the serial numbers and marques of the aircraft they had built, when the planes were completed and where they were delivered. Among many other authorities the ATA had made their archives public and their pilots’ logs and delivery schedules were available to be consulted. In a few cases, where the pilots had died in service or gone missing, personal effects were still on file, including some letters. Krystyna’s file had several personal effects. Among the letters were two of the ones he had written to her himself, the ones that she had never answered. He started reading the first, but when he noticed the date, two days after she went missing, he was unable to go on to the end. In the same file Torrance found the little purse, the one that had started everything. It was now empty. The bright colours, which had so entranced him in that monochrome wartime world, had faded, and the red piping was coming unstitched. He held it for a while, consumed by memories, then sadly replaced it.

  The first thing Torrance discovered about Krystyna was her full name: Krystyna Agnieszka Roszca. Foreign Office records revealed that she had been admitted to Britain firstly as a refugee, then accredited as a serving member of the Polish Air Force attached to the Polish government in exile. All this confirmed what she had told him about herself. He could find no information about her birth family. The rest of her story was corroborated in broad outline: certain elements of the Polish Air Force had escaped to Romania, their equipment was confiscated, and they were told to leave the country in the early part of 1940.

  From the Polish Embassy in London he discovered facts about her he had not known. She had been given a rank in the Air Force, presumably by the general she had named: a temporary commission as Porucznik, or Lieutenant, Roszca. After living in Britain for some time she had eventually been given some back pay by the Poles, and a small stipend every week, but this was discontinued when she joined the ATA.

  More interesting still was the fact that Sikorski’s government had awarded her a medal for her flying duties during the invasion: the Cross of Merit for Bravery, or in Polish, Krzyż Zasługi za Dzielność. The citation read: ‘Porucznik (Temporary) K. A. Roszca – for selfless bravery in the defence of national borders, and the life and property of citizens in especially difficult circumstances.’

  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 inh
abitants 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.