Human Voices

by Penelope Fitzgerald

  ‘Well, does he know your London address?’

  Lise wasn’t sure, and it wouldn’t do anyway. She had a room in a Catholic hostel attached to a convent near Warren Street.

  ‘How do you know he’ll turn up at all?’ asked Teddy. Lise replied that she was psychic, with the result that she had a certain sensation in the points of her breasts when Frédé was near at hand.

  ‘Who’d be a woman?’ Teddy thought.

  All this time Lise had remained steadily in low spirits. RPD had made only a half-hearted attempt to tell Mrs Milne that Miss Bernard was very unusual, probably talented, should not on any account be overworked, and so forth. His heart was not in it. She was less responsive than the deadened walls of the studios. But now her sluggish energies seemed to revive, at least to the extent of asking other people to do something for her.

  The mobile unit had been sent by Archives to capture the scene at de Gaulle’s new headquarters in Westminster. Here, in a dusty bare room, those who had made the decision to join France Libre signed their names, and afterwards drank a pledge to Victory from a barrel of red wine in the passage. ‘Not much of a sound picture there,’ said the recording engineer, who had flatly refused to let Dr Vogel accompany him. ‘You’ve just got them taking this oath, footsteps coming and going on the bare boards, a nice bit of echo there, your wine coming out of the tap and a few more words, nothing in English, though.’

  ‘Did you see anyone who looked like a sapper?’ Lise asked him with dazed, heavy persistence.

  ‘Search me, sweetheart.’

  ‘He’s bound to come there one day. He’s sure to want to stay in England.’

  ‘Well, we’re going back tomorrow to see if we can get some more atmosphere. With luck, one of them might smash a glass.’ The RE told Willie Sharpe that Lise seemed pretty well idiotic. ‘You don’t make allowances for human hope,’ Willie replied.

  And yet, out of the two hundred thousand French troops brought over here and quartered at random, in the miraculously fair weather, wherever a space could be found, they did come across Frédé.

  They were out for a breather in Kensington Gardens – Della and Vi, with Lise, who had made them go there in the first place, dragging behind. You often saw French soldiers in the gardens, detachments of français libres and of the vastly greater number who had not signed on and were waiting to go back home as soon as they got the chance. There wasn’t much for them to do in a park, but then, there wasn’t much for them to do anyway.

  Della never went out looking less than her best. She wore a striped silk blouse with a deeply suggestive V-neckline under her red linen costume; on the lapels of this she pinned, on alternate weeks, her RAF wings, naval crown, Free Polish, Free Czech, Free Norwegian, Free Dutch and Free Belgian flashes and the badges of Canadian and New Zealand regiments. Her hair was gallantly swept back in sparkling ridges and she advanced on high heels, ready to receive or repel any opening shots in the way of glances, remarks, or hard cheek. Under persuasion, Lise had also bought a pair of strapped high-heeled shoes. Della felt almost professionally insulted at the idea of a friend trying to meet her fiancé, if that was what he was, without tarting herself up at least a little. Vi looked her usual self in a cotton dress she had made on her mother’s machine. It was all right, but no more than that.

  Kensington’s leafy glades were full of lovers and, at a discreet distance, workers off work, each with their own thermos. The girls passed close enough to the anti-aircraft battery to hear and take no apparent notice of the long whistle that followed them. At last they chose to sit on the ground at the edge of the dingle, with a good view of the Peter Pan statue. ‘I expect the man who made that died young,’ Della said. It was odd for them, after eight hours in BH, to sit on the grass, picking off bits of grass and chewing them, under the lazing clouds.

  When the French soldiers appeared they came in two groups, and from opposite directions, a few français libres to begin with, idling across from Hyde Park. They stopped at the bridge and looked at the water, not as if they knew each other very well as yet. Someone had given them cigarettes and they had evidently stopped by previous arrangement to hand round the packets and allow themselves one each. Quite a few of them had légionnaires’ chinstrap beards and Della, who had never seen these before, kept pointing. Vi jerked her elbow down. Without a word Lise heaved herself to her feet and began to stumble forward on her strappies, but the other way, towards the Round Pond.

  There the summer turf of the gardens was dotted with more French soldiers coming over the ridge, who suddenly all sat or lay down, like a herd on a fine day. They were determined not to go any farther. A refreshment van, driven by a middle-aged woman in a navy-blue beret, pulled up and parked itself among them. On its side you could read, painted in white, the words ANGLO-FRENCH AMENITIES COMMITTEE. She opened up the side of her van and began to count out rolls of bread and paper cups. Nobody took any notice of her.

  Lise gracelessly panted up the slope to within speaking distance. A man got to his feet. True, she’d never told them exactly what this Frédé looked like, but this one was short, and not even dark. It was deeply disappointing, and at the same time confusing – Lise made an awkward grab and then lost her footing, then righted herself and clung on to him, taller than he was and much heavier. She seemed to be wrestling with the dishevelled khaki creature.

  ‘I wouldn’t have thought she’d got it in her,’ said Della. Stir it up, she thought. She only wanted for Lise what she’d have liked for herself.

  ‘Yes but those aren’t Free French,’ said Vi. ‘He’s got into the wrong lot.’ She was frightened. Against the protests of Frédé and his cronies Lise was crying out in French, and when she did that she seemed to turn into another person, or let out the one she had been all along. This made the girls feel queer.

  By now the FLs on the bridge had finished their cigarettes and put the stubs away inside their caps. Sighting the others on the opposite slope only two hundred yards away, they warily advanced through Peter Pan’s dingle. Then some of them began to run in ragged formation, like boys anxious to get into a football game, the small, neat and elegant ones in front, as though trained, others in the rear beating up clouds of dust with their boots from the dry earth. Lise and Frédé disappeared from sight as the hostile forces engaged, the front runners gesturing, with one fist clenched and one stiffened arm pointing beyond the horizon of the park. They shouted something, as hoarse as rooks, then their voices pitched higher into uproar. The people who had come for a nice afternoon in the gardens stood where they were and stared.

  ‘They’re having a political altercation,’ said a man with his children. ‘Where’s their NCOs?’

  There was a sound of something flat hitting something flat – say a wet cloth on a kitchen table. It was a slap on the face. Just for a moment the girls could see Frédé staggering and holding his jaw in his hand like toothache, with thick blood running through the fingers, but it wasn’t Lise who’d hit him, she was still half up and half down, but nowhere near him any more. It was one of the FLs, and now they were all going down in twos and threes, rolling on the ground in squalor, with banging heads and seams splitting, showing a flash of whitish-grey pants.

  ‘The soldiers!’ Della cried. ‘They’re fighting! They can’t do that!’

  Those who were on their feet snatched up the rolls from the counter of the refreshment van and the summer air was streaked with missiles. The woman in the navy-blue beret was running away towards the Round Pond. Money fell from her bag onto the grass. The food she had prepared was trodden to a pulp and thrust and plastered into angry faces. There was nothing to laugh at, the sight of the homesick boys battering away at each other was like the naked spirit of hate itself.

  The torn bread lay scattered everywhere. ‘They’re not English, you can’t expect them to understand the shortages,’ Vi thought. ‘Thank God, there’s Lise.’ She was making her way towards them, looking swollen and ugly.

  ‘Where’s Fré
dé?’

  Two policemen were approaching in the distance, followed by five or six corporals, who had perhaps been absent without leave in the wine-bars of Kensington. The riot died down, the culprits began to explain themselves.

  ‘He won’t stay,’ Lise sobbed, ‘he doesn’t want me any more. They hit him. He wants to go back to Lyons.’

  ‘We’ll have to take her with us, Della. She can’t go back to that convent place looking like that. She’s distraught.’

  But Della was going out dancing at the Lyceum. ‘I’ve got to go and get into my black, but it isn’t that that takes the time, it’s ringing up to see if anyone can lend me some pearls or a white collar. If you’re going to wear black you have to have some little touches.’

  Vi did not contest this. ‘You can come home with me for a bit,’ she said to Lise. ‘My mother won’t mind.’

  They took a bus to Hammersmith. Vi paid both their fares, as although Lise had succeeded in hanging on to her bag she seemed, as often, to have no money with her. But it was a mercy she hadn’t lost her BBC pass and identity card.

  They walked up a quiet side road, simmering in the late afternoon heat.

  The gate of Vi’s home hung open among shaggy evergreens.

  ‘Don’t shut it, it’s always open.’

  ‘It’s a big house,’ said Lise.

  ‘It has to be. There’s nine of us.’

  She went into the dark hall, lit by stained glass, with the air of an eldest child who expects to restore order, and listened for a moment to the noises from radios, hammers, pulled lavatory chains, taps running and a piano banging to identify who was at home, and whether they were more or less doing what they ought to be.

  ‘You can’t come across the hall, it’s the English Channel,’ said a small boy who was sitting on the stairs.

  ‘Where’s Dad?’

  ‘Still at the shop.’

  ‘Where’s Mum, then?’

  She was thought to be putting on the kettle. To oblige the child they retreated through the front door and walked round by the lawn, dug up and planted with vegetables, the one rose-bed, the rabbit-hutches, coal-shed and coke-shed, and entered the kitchen by the back scullery.

  ‘You want to put these in water at once, Mum,’ said Vi, lifting a pile of crimson ramblers out of the sink. ‘This is Lise Bernard, from work.’

  Mrs Simmons was a broadly-based woman in an overall, not at all disconcerted by Lise’s appearance. Having revived her memories of 1914, she in fact expected girls to be in tears. There was no question as to where Vi’s kind heart came from. At home, however, one of her duties was to moderate its excesses.

  ‘Sit down, Lizzie,’ cried Mrs Simmons, who didn’t get names right. ‘You needn’t mind showing your feelings. I daresay tea will help. But I can’t pretend it’ll alter the fact that he’s far away.’

  ‘He’s in Kensington Gardens,’ said Vi.

  She kept remembering Frédé’s face, dark and mad, with the blood oozing through his fingers.

  ‘Perhaps Lise could share my room for a bit. She could manage ten shillings a week on what we get, couldn’t you, Lise?’

  In both Mrs Simmons’ mind and Vi’s the three-year-old’s cot moved out of Vi’s room and one of the boys went onto the lounge sofa and to compensate for this Chris, the merchant seaman, was asked to bring him something special by way of a souvenir. There was no need for either of them to explain further. It would be no trouble at all.

  Lise appeared to be glad to leave the convent, but who could tell what she really thought? She seemed to have relapsed into her old sloth. One would say that she had given up the power of choice. Yet ten days later she left her job at Broadcasting House without saying goodbye. She did not come back to Hammersmith either, and Mrs Simmons couldn’t think what to do with her few things. Finally Vi forbade her to mention the subject more than twice at any one suppertime.

  3

  ‘Jeff,’ shouted Sam, ‘do you remember that French general that came to the studio and died?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Has anyone told you that you buggered up the whole thing?’

  ‘Not in so many words.’

  ‘But just tell me this, have you faced the fact that we didn’t record him, not one single word? Nothing in the can, nothing to process for Archives. If you’d got to mess about with the transmission you could at least have put him on to closed circuit. Nobody bothered to tell me this, of course. It’s only just been brought to my notice.’ Jeff felt relieved. If Sam had indignantly offered to go to his defence, or even realized that some defence might be necessary, the situation would have been so disturbed that he’d have felt sea-sick. Nations fall, relationships have a duty to stay firm.

  Sam’s rage subsided into a regretful, eager anxiety. ‘We’ve no decent French atmosphere, those Free French signing on were very disappointing, I’ve had Vogel in to listen to them and he just kept shaking his head. The wine coming out of the barrel isn’t satisfactory.’

  ‘We might try substituting white for red, perhaps.’

  Sam ignored him.

  ‘And now they say they’re bringing Eddie Waterlow back from Drama to do some programme, France Fights On was the provisional title, sixty minutes of transcriptions I bloody well shouldn’t wonder.’

  ‘They’re not exactly bringing him back, it’s only that he wrote them such a very sad letter. He doesn’t understand life in Manchester. He’s never lived north of Regent’s Park before. I don’t suppose his programme will ever come to anything.’

  ‘The point is that I oughtn’t to be harassed about programme material at all – I oughtn’t even to be consulted – the only thing that’s of interest to me at the moment, the only thing I can think about and talk about, that is whenever I’m lucky enough to find anyone in this place who has the slightest comprehension of what I’m saying, the thing that’s so much more important to me than happiness or health or sanity, is the improvement I’m hoping to make to the standard microphone windshield. The windshield, I mean, for the mobile units in battle areas. Whatever they choose to say, Directors, DG, Higher Command, War Cabinet, Prime Minister, you name it, I’m not sending my units back into Europe without a better windshield than the one they’ve got.’

  ‘When do you envisage this new invasion taking place?’ asked Jeff with interest.

  ‘Not for six months. I’ll have it ready by then. They’ll have to wait till then.’

  They had been on the telephone, but Jeff now went down to the third floor. Sam was sitting with a scale drawing in front of him. Mrs Milne was just leaving the room, and remarked: ‘I’ve just been saying to RPD that by the end of the present emergency none of us will feel inclined to trust foreigners again.’ But she could scarcely be heard above the deafening sound of The Teddy Bears’ Picnic which was playing at high volume on one of the turntables. Today’s the day the Teddy Bears have their Picnic.… It was the engineers’ favourite testing record, with its curious changes from low level to high. Jeff lifted the needle and switched off.

  ‘Don’t do that!’ cried Sam.

  ‘You know I’m not interested in your box of tricks.’

  ‘I’m obliged, in the face of criticism, and my present state of under-manning, to do two things at once.’

  ‘I think you ought to come out for a bit.’

  ‘Out? Out?’ Sam took off his glasses and gazed with his child’s eyes.

  His expression changed and he spoke humbly.

  ‘Perhaps I don’t lead a very healthy life. If ever I do go out of BH I hope I don’t look different from other people, but I feel different.’

  ‘Do you mean you’re getting afraid to leave the place at all?’

  ‘They don’t seem to encourage me to go out with the cars any more. I don’t know why that is.’

  ‘I didn’t mean that. I was thinking of your own place, Streatham Drive, isn’t it, I came to dinner there last summer, perhaps you remember.’

  ‘I’d like to ask you again, but I don�
�t quite know if anyone’s there.’

  ‘Who knows if you don’t?’

  ‘My wife’s evacuated herself, you know, to the country.’

  ‘You haven’t mentioned it.’

  Sam pondered.

  ‘She’s learning to drive a tractor, which I rather think she’s always wanted to do. A friend of hers is married to a farmer, they’re producing Vegetables for Victory. Plums, too, I think, all this is near Pershore.’

  ‘How many acres?’

  ‘How many acres do people have? What are you talking about? You don’t know anything about farming anyway. We were discussing the Archives. They’re threadbare. It’s not only omissions through mismanagement, like your general. For example, we’ve no Stukas. When we’re asked for dive-bombing we have to borrow from Pathé Gazette.’

  Jeff envied Sam the number of things he didn’t notice, and even more his absorption in a fairy-tale world of frequency responses, a land of wire and wax where The Teddy Bears’ Picnic was the password and the Fool could walk protected by his own spell. It was less envy, though, after all, than playing with envy, but it reminded him that when he himself had got out of the army and finished at Cambridge he had certainly not intended to be an administrator. Perhaps even now he could scarcely be called that, as his system depended so largely on considering his own comfort. Even his refusal to have a secretary was a kind of luxury, enabling him to ignore at least half his correspondence as not worth a reply. The Old Servants, though they had never been able to fault his methods, could not accept them. ‘DPP will hardly be able to do without a secretary if tea-rationing is introduced,’ Mrs Milne had begun to say, ‘and it’s threatened.’