A Possible Life Read Online Free PDF Page A

straight-up-and-down foot soldiers. Many of our recruits are foreign nationals. Most are civilians. We’re after mavericks, people who may not fit in to normal life. Are you with me?’
    Geoffrey had always felt that his best quality was exactly the opposite: the ability to fit in anywhere without a fuss. As he felt Dawlish’s eyes bore into him through a pair of horn-rimmed glasses, however, he thought it best to say nothing.
    ‘You start training at once,’ said Green. ‘We have a residential course near Brockenhurst in the New Forest. Here’s a travel warrant.’
    On his way to Southampton, Geoffrey called in to see his parents and surprised his mother outside clipping at a runaway jasmine. She disliked gardening, thinking it an English affectation and watching with disdain as her husband struggled with the lawnmower. In France, grass simply grew.
    Geoffrey’s father came home from his office at lunchtime and they were able to eat at a table in the garden. Mrs Talbot cooked some young courgettes from the vegetable patch and served them with a rice dish made from leftovers. It was surprisingly palatable, though Geoffrey’s father grumbled about eating the ‘marrows’ before they were fully grown.
    ‘What’s the food like in the mess?’ he said.
    ‘Not bad at all. The regiment prides itself on feeding well.’ Geoffrey put down his beer glass. ‘I have to tell you something. I’m switching to a different outfit.’
    ‘Not the RAF, I hope,’ said his father, glancing up at the sky. ‘I mean, bloody brave chaps and all that, but—’
    ‘They live only a few weeks,’ said his mother.
    ‘No, don’t worry. It’s a sort of irregular outfit.’
    ‘Commandos?’ said his father.
    ‘Not exactly. I can’t tell you much about it. I shall be going to France in due course.’
    ‘Ah, sabotage, I suppose.’
    ‘Which part of France?’ said Geoffrey’s mother.
    ‘I don’t know yet.’
    ‘I wish I could come too.
Je voudrais bien voir
.’
    Mrs Talbot sighed and sat back in her chair. Very faintly in the background there was the sound of a single-engine plane, perhaps a Spitfire, Geoffrey thought, on a training exercise from one of the grass airfields in Sussex. Considering the war for civilisation they were daily waging with the Luftwaffe, the noise was oddly peaceful, not much more than the buzz of a distant bee in the hot afternoon.
    For a moment the three of them, the small family unit, looked at one another and Geoffrey had the sensation of time stopping, as though all his childhood summers were rolled into that moment: the slow days when sun glowed on the brick of the village almshouses with their fiery beds of dahlias and wallflowers tended by old men in cardigans; the bubbling white of the water that ran beneath the bridge by the church in which, flat on the grass, he would dip his hands to cool them, then splash his face; the road when he bicycled past the cottage hospital on his way home from school and saw the patients wheeled on to the grass to lie in the drowsy afternoon with a wireless faintly playing through an open door.
    Then the Lysander was touching down on French soil on a night as dark as any secret-service planner could have wished. The little plane had come in beneath the German coastal radar and flown low for another thirty minutes before Geoffrey felt the bounce of its wheels on the grass field. It came to a halt, leaving him tilted back in his seat by the steep nose-to-tail slope.
    ‘Thank you, ladies and gents,’ said the pilot to the sound of unclipping seat harnesses. ‘We have reached our destination. Please be sure to take all your belongings with you.’
    Geoffrey and a female agent threw out their cases and clambered down a fixed port-side ladder. Of the half-dozen torches that had lit the landing strip, a single one remained alight in the woods beside the field, where Geoffrey and his partner were greeted with silent handshakes and went their separate ways. The refuelled