Christopher Priest - The Separation

Meanwhile, no reply had ever come from Sam Levy in Masada: Levy had always been a long shot, because for one thing there was no guarantee that the old man was even still alive. Levy’s link with Sawyer could anyway be a red herring. However, over the years Gratton had learned that there was rarely such a thing as coincidence. Everything was ultimately connected. He had a hunch that Levy’s offhand remark about the Sawyer he knew in the RAF meant that they were quite likely one and the same, but with or without a response from Levy there was still no guarantee he would be able to ‘find’ the real Sawyer.

He realized that the Sawyer book could rapidly become a waste of time, involving a lot of fruitless research for a book that he might never be able to write, let alone publish. The puzzle could turn out to be not a puzzle at all, but a misunderstanding by Churchill, even a mistake or a misprint. It wouldn’t be the first time that an idea for a book led nowhere. Nor would it be the first time historians had been misled by Churchill, that arch manipulator of twentieth-century history.

Then the decision was made for him. A few minutes after he arrived home and was still unloading his car, his neighbour brought round the various large postal packages she had taken in for him while he was away. Among them was a small, firmly packed parcel with Masada stamps and postmark.

Gratton attended to his necessary chores. As soon as he could, he settled down in his office and opened Sam Levy’s package. He then went back and read, at last, the Sawyer notebooks.

The next morning, after a night of shallow sleep, he was out of bed early. He telephoned his agent, leaving a message on her voice-mail to put the American social history project on hold. He went to his car and set off across the Pennines, speedily retracing his route of the day before, back through Buxton towards the town of Bakewell.

Bakewell was a place with which he was unfamiliar, somewhere he passed through in his car from time to time, with no reason to stop. While Wendy was still alive they occasionally used Bakewell as a base for walks, parking their car in the town then exploring the countryside around, but since her death Gratton had given up that sort of thing, endlessly promising himself he would return to taking regular exercise as soon as his current workload eased.

He was looking for Williamson Avenue, an address that sounded straightforward enough. Bakewell was a small town, so when he arrived he began cruising the streets, looking for the road. He stopped at a newsagent’s to buy a street plan, but they had sold out. He asked the man behind the counter if he knew where Williamson Avenue was. He was directed out of the town, towards Monyash. He turned back when he reached the countryside without seeing the road.

He located it in the end, surprisingly close to the centre of the town: it was a residential road off another residential road, with fairly modern houses down one side and a parade of recently built shop units on the other. The address Angela Chipperton had given him was number 17, which was a laundromat. The maisonette above was empty. According to the man who ran the pharmacy next door, it was used for storage by a firm of magazine distributors. Clearly no one lived there.

Gratton drove to the information centre at the town hall and carried out a systematic search. First he discovered that houses in Williamson Avenue had been demolished about ten years earlier to make way for the shops, but they had stood, derelict and uninhabited, for several years before that. There were no Chippertons in Bakewell, no Sawyers and no Grattons. Nor were there any Chipperfields, Sayers or Grattans, or at least not any with names or initials even close to those of the woman he was trying to locate. He cast his net wider, scouring through the directories for towns or villages in the area with names similar to Bakewell: he found a Blackwell, a Baslow, a Barlow and of course a Buxton. He drew a blank in all of them: there was no one with a name even remotely similar, certainly not in any Williamson Road or Street or Lane or Avenue.

In the car he again studied Angela Chipperton’s covering letter. There was no possibility of mistake: her address was printed on the notepaper in an unambiguous typeface.

He drove home, feeling irritated rather than intrigued. The attraction of the Sawyer story was the puzzle it presented: Mrs Chipperton merely added another layer of enigma that seemed designed only to waste his time.

That evening, putting aside his irritation, he re-read the Sawyer notebooks, then looked again at the material Sam Levy had at last sent to him.

Mr Stuart Gratton, Cliffe End, Rainow, Cheshire, UK

August 3, 1999

Dear Mr Gratton,

I hope you will quickly understand why I’ve taken such a long time to answer your letter of enquiry about Flight Lieutenant Sawyer. I apologize for that, also for not even responding with an acknowledging postcard. I can explain the delay by asking you to look through the enclosed, which I’ve been working on ever since I received your letter. You will understand where most of the time has gone, perhaps. However, I can read between the lines of your letter so I’ll assure you I’m still in pretty good health, in spite of being eighty-one next year. The wounds I received during the war, after being latent for many years, have come back to haunt me. Walking is difficult, as is getting in and out of bed, sitting down or standing up, etc., but once I’m in place somewhere I don’t feel inconvenienced. My wife Ursula died last year, so I have had to leave the house you mentioned. I’m now living in some style with my niece and her family. I have a room to myself, my library is intact, I have online access, my brain still feels sharp enough and overall I have a pleasant life. I hope to be good for a few more years yet!

Turning to the subject of your letter.

I’d already come across that remark about Sawyer by Churchill. In fact, the memorandum is part of the dossier I was compiling at the time you wrote to me, so we are clearly thinking alike. (I’ve included it in its approximate chronological place.) Yes, the Sawyer he mentions is almost certainly the Sawyer I flew with for a time. I can only say ‘almost certainly’, though, because you are correct in thinking that there’s a mystery about the man.

It was Sawyer’s strange behaviour during the war that personally involved me. At first it was a mild irritation, then it became a potential threat to the safety of the whole crew, then, after the war, it became the small mystery it still is. I don’t pretend to have solved it, but I do think that what I’ve found may help lead you to an answer. However, not everything is as clear as even that might seem to make it. Churchill had it both wrong and right, as he often did.

The first-person account attached to this letter is my own short description of how I met JL (Flight Lieutenant Jack Sawyer), what happened while we flew together in the RAF and how it ended in tragedy. The rest of the pages make up the dossier I’ve compiled: the various photocopies, internet downloads, tear-sheets, newspaper cuttings and so on, that I’ve been collecting for some time. Some of them were fairly hard to locate, but if you have access to the internet and as much spare time as me, it’s amazing what you can turn up with a little perseverance. I imagine you’re an old hand at this kind of thing, but for me it has been an interesting journey through the past. Perhaps I should warn you that my dossier raises more questions than it answers.

And I should also warn you that you’ll probably not enjoy everything you learn from the papers, but I know that as an historian you can take that sort of rub.