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 p.r.o.nunciation, 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. .h.i.t 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 pa.s.sed 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 partic.i.p.ants 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 circ.u.mstances 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 doc.u.ments 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 unst.i.tched. 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 Emba.s.sy 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, Krzy Zasugi za Dzielno. 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 circ.u.mstances.'

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 ma.s.sacred them. Ma.s.s 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 ma.s.s 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 t.i.tle, from the family Grudzinski, was Rafal, son of Bronisaw. Rafal Grudzinski was thought to have died in 1940, and with him the t.i.tle 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 n.a.z.i 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 Krakow 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 Krakow, 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 n.o.ble t.i.tles he possessed, and the property and artwork of his that was seized by the n.a.z.is, 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 Pozna 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 ident.i.ty of every victim of the Katyn ma.s.sacre, 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 Krakow 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-alt.i.tude 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 alt.i.tude of more than ten thousand feet. The plane was picked up again when it left London airs.p.a.ce 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 alt.i.tude, 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 c.o.c.kpit 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, sc.r.a.ping 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 rea.s.surance. 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 pa.s.s 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 pa.s.s 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, anch.o.r.ed 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 gla.s.s. 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 gla.s.s is so thick, why the view outside is distorted.'

Tarent then remembered, in a glance of rational memory, the bottle-gla.s.s 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 rea.s.sured 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 pa.s.s 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 pa.s.sed 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 G.o.d, 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 a.s.sume 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 h.e.l.l. It was h.e.l.l 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 pa.s.s 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.