A Possible Life Read Online Free PDF Page B

merely quiet but timeless.
    ‘The “friendly” Frenchmen are the worst,’ said Alain. ‘Do you know how many French and German security organisations we’re dealing with? Fourteen. Do everything yourself. Never write anything down.’
    ‘How do I get across the demarcation line?’
    ‘By train.’
    ‘But surely they—’
    ‘Not in the train. Under the tender. The driver will explain.’
    ‘So there are some friendly French.’
    ‘The railwaymen are mostly Communists. They hate the Nazis. Go to the café in the marshalling yard at six. Ask for Benoît. Take a toothbrush.’
    Geoffrey did as he was told and found himself led to the wheels of a locomotive tender. Benoît was a stout, red-faced man with a spotted neckerchief under his overalls who seemed to regard the evening’s work as a joke of subtle if colossal proportions. Geoffrey was not sure who the butt of it was meant to be: himself or the enemy. Beneath the water tank was a space just large enough to take a man lying down, concealed from the outside by the vertical sides of the tender. When Benoît passed him in some wooden planks, Geoffrey was able to make a floor by resting them on the struts of the chassis and so convert the area, for which there was no other obvious use, into a coffin-shaped, one-man compartment.
    ‘
Dormez bien!
’ chuckled Benoît as he strolled off.
    Geoffrey wondered, not for the first time, whether the French were taking the calamity of their defeat and occupation as seriously as they might. Through the spaces between the planks, he could see the rails and points go slowly by as the locomotive backed on to the train; they moved out of the siding on to the main line where he heard the sounds of the public address system, reminding him of visits to his mother’s family in Limoges; then the stationmaster’s whistle and the sound of steam escaping as the driver hauled on his levers and the train jolted forward, cracking Geoffrey’s head against the chassis; then another, slightly less pronounced, shudder, for which he was better prepared; then another and another till the train picked up speed and the wooden sleepers began to move smoothly past beneath him.
    This was more like it, Geoffrey told himself; this was an adventure. Why then, did it not feel like that? For some of the time he felt horribly enclosed, gazing at the floor of the water tank a few inches above his face; then he noticed the beginnings of cramp in his right hip and turned on to his side; but for most of the journey, for an hour or more, he felt only a sense of unreality, as though all of this was happening to someone else.
    The train stopped at four stations and then again a fifth time in open country. Geoffrey was aware of a voice calling out to him. With Benoît’s help, he extracted himself from his shallow grave and stood by the side of the track in the darkness. They were in the Occupied Zone, but far from any German or French police; he was free now to ride in the locomotive, alongside the amused Benoît and his fireman. As the train picked up speed, Geoffrey watched the dials and pressure gauges and found it hard to suppress an absurd schoolboy pleasure, while the pine-heavy scent of the countryside drove into his face.
    After drinking some wine with his new friends at the station, Geoffrey found a barn in which to sleep before completing his journey by bus the following day. He met the leader of the Barrister circuit and delivered his message; he was told that Dentist would in due course receive coded instructions from a BBC broadcast advising them of a replacement.
    He made his farewells and saw that he was for the moment a free man in an occupied country. How best might he impede the enemy?
    For two years Geoffrey ‘commuted’, as Mr Green put it, between grass landing strips in England and France. Most of his work seemed to consist of putting people ‘in touch’ with other people. He met plenty of French patriots along the way, people who