A Possible Life Read Online Free PDF

Lysander was already turning into the wind for take-off.
    Waking the next day in a village house at the end of a lane that led from the square, Geoffrey washed and shaved briskly before going downstairs. He was wearing clothes suitable for a commercial traveller; all of them were of French manufacture except the trousers, which had had their English label removed and a French one sewn in. He carried a packet of cigarettes made from ‘
caporal
’ tobacco – the word ‘corporal’ supposedly showing they were superior to the tobacco of the simple ‘
soldat
’, though still appallingly rough to his taste. On the other hand, the showy tie-pin, made in Lyons, was rather a good touch, he had to admit. ‘Pierre Lambert’ was his name; roofing was his business.
    The lady of the house offered him some breakfast – stewed coffee, yesterday’s bread and a scrape of jam with no butter. He was in the so-called ‘Free Zone’, where the French were allowed to police themselves without German supervision, but it was clear that their ‘freedom’ did not extend to the table. Geoffrey wondered if life might be better in the coastal Occupied Zone where at least the locals would have illegal access to what the Germans were piling on to their own plates. He ate beneath the grudging eye of his hostess, finishing what he was given and careful not to ask for more. The woman was not as welcoming as he had expected; she showed little gratitude for the fact that he was risking his life for her countrymen; there were no fine words or toasts to the freedom of the Patrie. Geoffrey felt she viewed him rather as just another player in the baffling number of organisations that beset her previously quiet rural life.
    He walked for an hour or so to a nearby village where there was a railway halt, then took a train to the local town where he was to meet the head of the so-called ‘Dentist’ circuit, an Englishman who would be known to Geoffrey only by his code name ‘Alain’. The journey was a pleasant one through fields of dwarf oak and walnut trees and the occasional grey-shuttered station, where the train took on water and Geoffrey could hear the birds singing as gleefully as though the Nazis were still bottled up behind the Rhine. He read his French novel and rehearsed imaginary conversations in which he explained to French or German security officers the vagaries of his life as a salesman. ‘Yes, of course I travel a good deal. I miss my wife Hélène and our small child, whose name is Laurent. Would you care to see a photograph?’
    Alain turned out to speak French with what sounded to Geoffrey like a Wolverhampton accent. He seemed worried and downcast. Dentist’s wireless operator, a close personal friend of his, he explained, had been captured by the Vichy secret police a few days earlier.
    ‘I had no idea,’ said Geoffrey.
    ‘Well, of course you had no idea,’ said Alain. ‘There was no one to transmit the news. And they took his set.’
    They needed to make contact with another circuit, called ‘Barrister’, in the Occupied Zone not far from Bordeaux, Alain said; they had to ask Barrister’s man to transmit a message asking London for a replacement wireless operator and set. ‘So I’d like you to go and tell Barrister. As a matter of urgency.’
    ‘Isn’t that a job for a courier?’ said Geoffrey, who had expected to be put in charge of blowing up power stations, laying the explosive, as he had been taught, flush against the machine. ‘I mean, couldn’t we get a friendly Frenchman to relay a message or post a letter?’
    They were sitting in a tidy front room of a ‘safe house’ on the outskirts of the town. Through the window they could see the life of the citizens carrying on as it must have done for centuries, the postman on his bicycle, the women talking outside shops, the red-nosed man in the
bar-tabac
with his newspaper, a horse and cart on its way to a field. The absence of motor vehicles made it seem not