A Possible Life Read online

  ‘Think you could kill someone?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Unprovoked? With your bare hands?’

  ‘Well … If I was trained for it. If it was necessary.’

  ‘What would constitute a necessity?’

  ‘Self-defence. The defence of another.’

  ‘The national interest?’

  ‘I … suppose so.’

  Samuels, who had been looking out of the window, swivelled his chair to look Geoffrey in the eye.

  ‘We’re going to do some word association now. I say a word and I want you to say the first thing that comes into your mind. No hesitation. The very first thing.’

  ‘All right.’ Geoffrey licked his lips. It was like taking guard against Alf Gover.

  ‘Father.’

  ‘Confessor.’

  ‘Mother.’

  ‘Superior.’

  ‘Girl.’

  ‘Guide.’

  ‘Boy.’

  ‘Scout.’

  ‘Could you just pause a moment before—’

  ‘I thought you told me not to.’

  ‘I did, but you’re just completing set phrases. I want you to tell me what picture or feeling the word evokes for you.’

  ‘Right-ho.’

  ‘Jew.’

  ‘Israel. Bible.’

  ‘One word only. France.’

  ‘I see the shape of the map.’

  ‘Let’s try again. One word. France.’

  ‘Loire.’

  ‘Loss.’

  ‘Death.’

  ‘Victory.’

  ‘Cricket.’

  ‘Sex.’

  ‘Lust.’

  ‘I think that’s enough of that. Do you have a girlfriend?’

  ‘No. I’m in the army. We don’t really meet women.’

  ‘Before the war?’

  ‘There were no women at the school where I taught. Apart from the maids, but they were from a mental institution. At university I might ask a girl from home to go to a college ball.’

  ‘Did you sleep with any of them?’

  ‘No … No, they weren’t that sort of girl.’

  ‘Would you say you had a strong libido?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t know what average is. I do like girls.’

  ‘Have you ever had homosexual feelings? In the army for instance?’

  Geoffrey suppressed a laugh at the thought of the sweating Musketeers. ‘They’re not that sort either.’

  Dr Samuels leaned back in his chair. ‘If you go abroad you may see things you’ve never seen before. You may see things that none of us has ever seen. We don’t know. Would you describe yourself as robust?’

  ‘Yes, I think so.’

  ‘When did you last cry?’

  Geoffrey thought for a long time and shook his head. ‘I can’t remember. Perhaps when I was nine or ten.’

  ‘Are you good at being on your own? Do you have resources? In your head?’

  ‘I hope so.’

  ‘Were you an only child?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Samuels stood up. ‘This interview is over. I have no further questions.’

  ‘My God, Talbot, you’ve got to get me in on this French lark,’ said Trembath when Geoffrey reported back that evening.

  ‘I’ll see what I can do. Though I don’t recall your French being up to much.’

  ‘How the hell do you know? We weren’t even in the same year.’

  ‘We did a couple of conversation classes with old Madame Whatsit – when the man in your college was off sick. Don’t you remember?’

  ‘Vaguely,’ said Trembath. He stroked the moustache he had grown since receiving his commission. ‘I don’t suppose you could give me a few lessons, could you? Just to brush up? I’m desperate to see some action. If I sit round here cooped up much longer I’m going to lose my mind.’

  They had time only for an evening of Charles Trenet records before Geoffrey’s transfer came through. ‘The best way to sound French is to imitate someone,’ said Geoffrey. ‘As though you’re acting. I always mimic my grandfather, who was a garagiste in Clermont. Marvellous old codger.’

  ‘That’s exactly it,’ said Trembath. ‘The way you swallowed the “r” in “garagiste” and “Clermont”. Your Adam’s apple disappeared below your top button. And don’t forget, Talbot, I’ve never had the pleasure of meeting your grandfather.’

  ‘Well, imagine you’re Charles Trenet then.’

  When the paperwork was done, Geoffrey returned to London. He felt wistful about saying goodbye to the Musketeers, though the fact was, he admitted to himself on the train, his sentimental affection for the regiment had not been reciprocated. They might one day sail to North Africa, he presumed, if they were lucky; and what sort of baptism of fire might that be – in the sands of Tunisia? Doubtless he would have been left in reserve with the baggage in some Algerian port.

  At his final interview, Mr Green was joined by a man called Dawlish, whom Geoffrey liked a good deal less. Green might have been an enlightened manager in a family-run company; Dawlish had an air of deceit and cruelty about him. Geoffrey wondered if he had been transferred from another secret organisation of longer standing; he seemed to carry a history of calculation in his eyes, and Geoffrey could picture him disowning a stranded agent without a second thought: ‘Talbot? Never heard of him.’

  ‘You got a splendid report from the headshrinker,’ Green was saying. ‘Top rating. Your little trouble in Norfolk is of no consequence to us. I’d go so far as to say it was a recommendation. We’re not in the business of hiring 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 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 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 thought Pétain had been wrong to enter into official co-operation with the German occupier, but few of them seemed interested in doing much beyond making further introductions. In Paris he encountered a baker who had helped blow up an electricity substation near Rennes; but the Germans had shot twenty-five local citizens in reprisal while the baker and his fellow saboteurs had been driven out of town by angry residents. The Germans in the Occupied Zone were bad enough, but the French authorities in the ‘Free’ Zone were even more vigilant; and here civilian vendettas made any covert action dangerous: it was bad enough, Geoffrey quickly saw, having to deal with the Milice or the Abwehr without also having Mlle Durand falsely informing on a woman she thought might be stealing her boyfriend.

  Geoffrey helped sabotage a factory near Clermont-Ferrand and arranged drops of guns and stores to small resistance groups that his own organisation had recruited, but it was what Trembath would have called ‘farting against thunder’. Then, in the spring of 1943, the demarcation line was abolished overnight when the Germans, in a rush to protect the southern coast from the Allies based in Africa, occupied the whole country. At the same time they introduced a Statutory Work Order by which all young Frenchmen were required to go and work in German factories, and for the first time Geoffrey began to recruit French resisters in large numbers: better a hand-to-mouth life in the shadows, these young men told him, than the drudgery of a production line in Dortmund.