A Voice Like Velvet

by Donald Henderson

  ‘Getting on for thirty.’

  ‘Much older than you look. But nothing wrong with that age to enter a sound firm like Ponds Corporation. In fifty years—providing you work hard—you’ll probably be earning between ten and twenty pounds a week. This music phase of yours—there’s nothing wrong with it—will of course pass. Here is your letter of admission. I have already written to the bank on your behalf.’

  Thus this ancient problem was no easier for Ernest than for a multitude of others. It had come to him later, that was all. Just before he was ready for it. Income versus Art, and all the arguments about playing for safety, or playing for your beliefs and your secret faith in yourself. He could never agree with those who thought an artist could not create what he wanted to create without that frightful preliminary toss-up. Perhaps one day it would be possible for the boy who wanted to paint or write or sing or play to get on with it at once without money worries, in the same way that the would-be businessman could get on with it from the word go, and paid for it into the bargain. Until the present, the would-be creators, who had problems enough to decide if they were even sufficiently gifted, had to set out into the darkness of probable hunger and squalor, at tenderer years than thirty. It was time that Dickens’s garret was burned down and forgotten. Mr Edwards was no better and no worse than his predecessors. He put it down to Ernest’s youth and said quite sharply: ‘Take my advice and put music out of your head.’ He would have said much worse about cat-burglary.

  ‘Supposing Beethoven had done that,’ Ernest explained, flushed. ‘Or Schubert.’

  He let out a guffaw. ‘So you fancy you are Schubert?’

  ‘No,’ he said, getting bored. What ought he to do with his life? There was such a lot of it.

  ‘We all have young ideas,’ Mr Edwards said.

  ‘Did you?’ he asked.

  Mr Edwards went into the drawing-room presently, shaking his head and looking very cross. Ernest heard him telling Miss Wisdon that he had been a little rude ‘and ungrateful’, and that he was afraid he was stupid into the bargain. He admitted Ernest looked intelligent enough to grow out of it ‘in time’. When he had gone, Miss Wisdon asked him in scandalized tones if he had been ‘polite to Mr Edwards? He’s such a great man, and Chapel.’

  ‘I tried to be,’ he said. ‘But I’m older than he thinks.’

  ‘I hope you will make a better impression on Ponds Corporation, dear. You are not at all old. Thirty is nothing. For a man.’

  ‘I want to learn about music. Not about banking, Miss Wisdon,’ he decided to explain. ‘When anyone wants to learn about banking, they’re received with open arms! Everyone understands immediately. They don’t get told, oh, you must go and write a symphony, here’s a letter of introduction, you will start on Monday at two pounds a week. Then, after fifty years, if you have written enough symphonies, you may earn ten pounds a week.’

  ‘Don’t scream, dear,’ prayed Miss Wisdon, scandalized afresh. ‘You look quite flushed, I’m sure you’ve got a headache.’

  And she asked him if he needed aspirin or Enos. He chose aspirin.

  Next morning he saw Violet balanced as usual on her manure heap. He had been set to sweep in between Miss Wisdon’s row of stone frogs, by the sun-dial. Violet was wiping her tongue along a stick of liquorice and eyeing him with that kind of disfavour which was also speculative. A high wind blew her mop in an easterly direction.

  ‘Squit,’ she said.

  ‘Good morning,’ he said, by now resolved to ease his ruffled vanity by some display of manhood. ‘I wanted to speak to you.’

  She turned her back, but he noticed she didn’t run away.

  ‘Would you like to come to the pictures?’ he enquired nervously.

  ‘Seen everything,’ her back said.

  ‘Well, we could go to a theatre.’

  ‘What sort?’

  ‘Something musical, if you like.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Saturday. Tomorrow. I’ve decided to start a job on Monday and I’ll be leaving here.’

  She swung round.

  ‘Leaving?’

  ‘Yes. I didn’t come here for always. Miss Wisdon only did it to oblige. My other house is being painted.’

  She would not commit herself, but he felt certain she would turn up, if only because he secretly prayed she wouldn’t. She ran in, and then ran back to say she had examined the papers and he could take her to the Shepherd’s Bush Empire, a twopenny bus ride, and that if she turned up, she’d meet him there in time for the first house. ‘I say if. I ought not to come out with you at all, after the way you treated me.’

  ‘It’s very kind of you.’

  ‘I wouldn’t do it for everyone.’

  ‘Well, thank you.’

  He retired to wait in dread for the following evening.

  When it came, he told Miss Wisdon he thought he would go and make sure of how to reach Ponds Corporation, so as not to be late for Monday morning, and she was very pleased, though she told him not to linger long in the West End on a Saturday night. She looked very grave about this, and so did Iris. The future seemed a dizzy and bewildering affair, and his evening with Violet offered some light relief. Perhaps it was at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire, once again within sound of music, or at any rate musical noises, that he decided Ponds Corporation could not be allowed to hold him for long, if at all. Violet turned up on the tick. She looked surprisingly nice, a trifle startling, wearing a little red hat with a huge white feather jutting out of the top of it. She was for a time surprisingly shy and subdued, blushing profusely when she said: ‘Hullo, Squit!’

  ‘Good evening, Violet,’ he said, raising a felt hat bought that very morning. ‘It is most kind of you to have come.’

  ‘I bet you thought I wouldn’t,’ she said.

  They went in. They were both very shy until a turn came on called ‘The Orchestra Conductor’, in which a man climbed up out of the orchestra pit with a fiddle and started to conduct the orchestra. A fat lady hurried on as if she was the outraged manageress about to send him off the stage. In two seconds they were fighting with such astonishing abandon, mainly involving the violin and the manageress’s skirts, that the audience, led by Violet, was in an uproar of delight, Violet rocking to and fro and reaching crescendo with the cry: ‘Ooh, my dear, she’s got her behind in his face …!’ It was a great success, and Violet kept up her enthusiasm with such verve that the gentleman in front kept turning round and asking her if she would mind keeping her hands to herself. What she said to him would not bear mentioning, but he got up and walked off to the bar with an expression of extreme horror on his face. Violet was very interested in the bar, but it was still a little improper for ladies to be seen in bars, so she had to be content with ice cream and chocolates. Out in the street again he had his first hint that something was wrong with the post-war world. Out-of-works were parading with banners round Shepherd’s Bush Green. The banners cried: ‘We want work. Where are your promises? We are the heroes!’ He took Violet home on the 17 bus. When they got off it was dark and she said: ‘We won’t go in yet,’ in sinister tones. She took him along a side street to some trees she seemed to know. He felt very nervous indeed. She said he had been ‘sweet’, and wasn’t quite the squit she thought, and that the rest of the evening was on her.

  ‘Oh?’ he said, puzzled. He was very young about women.

  ‘I love you. You’re sweet.’

  They were under the tree.

  ‘It’s very kind of you,’ he began.

  ‘No, don’t you understand? I’ll be your girl. I thought you were a sissy, but you’re not.’

  ‘A sissy?’

  ‘Oh, stop kidding,’ she giggled, ‘you are a One,’ and she dug him in the ribs. ‘Shall I take off my hat? Or what?’

  He supposed he owed quite a lot to Violet; for breaking the ice, as it were. She was quite nice about things, almost motherly. He supposed she was a naughty little girl. But he remembered her now as a cockney girl who got him the
biggest black eye of his life. When they got to her door at last he thought the evening was over. But thrills were the spice of life to her. She whispered that pa and ma would be in bed, and that they would have five minutes in the parlour, ‘so long as we are quiet’. Unfortunately, she omitted to inform him about the stairs leading off the hall to the basement. Tip-toeing in with beating heart, he missed his footing and fell with prolonged and resounding thuds down the twenty-four steps to Violet’s dropsical grandma’s kitchen. Dropsical grandma evidently slept there, for nightmarish screams broke out on the instant, being taken up by the sounds of creaking beds above, opening doors and a male voice bawling: ‘Who’s muckin’ abart darn there?’ Followed the massive vision of the Sanitary Inspector himself, replete with blunderbuss. Much of what he called him was now happily lost in the limbo where lurk all such unhappy misdemeanours, but he remembered a cuff which sent him reeling some four hundred yards backwards down the corridor. ‘You whipper-snapper,’ was one thing the Sanitary Inspector thought about him. ‘You seducer of innicent gells! Get art—afore I chuck you art!’

  CHAPTER VI

  MISS WISDON was waiting on the doorstep in her nightie, swathed in a red flannel dressing-gown. Her eyes were round. Ernest supposed it was then that she decided he was ‘no good’. She declared: ‘Oh, poor Mr Edwards,’ in a pitying voice, and she declared: ‘Those poor Ponds Corporation!’ If only the Sanitary Inspector hadn’t slammed his door like thunder, Ernest might have reached his bed without losing Miss Wisdon’s good opinion. Miss Wisdon put a piece of raw steak on his eye, saying what a good thing it was only a bit of skirt, a remark which baffled him at first.

  She said: ‘I realize, of course, I have had nothing to do with young men, but I had no idea things like this went on! And we don’t even know them!’ She always said ‘we’, presumably including Iris. ‘Whatever will Ponds Corporation say to your eye on Monday? How did you come to get it?’

  ‘I fell down some stairs.’

  ‘On your eye?’

  ‘I’m very sorry indeed, Miss Wisdon,’ was all he could say. He was too exhausted for true penitence, and felt sick. In addition, there was that part of his conscience which smarted from the evening. He felt filled with shame.

  He sat back balancing the steak on his right eye, and wondering if anything was happening to Violet. Wickedly, her giggle came back.

  ‘You’re sweet … Do you like me?’

  ‘… Yes.’

  ‘Say you love me?’

  It had been most improper and undignified.

  And he was as good as engaged. From his window next morning he spied Violet already on her manure heap. It was a comfort to know she was still alive and able to suck liquorice and hadn’t got an eye like his. Miss Wisdon was very prim indeed that Sunday, saying he was to stop in bed, and to keep the blinds down. He was to ‘think quietly, dear. We should all contemplate, now and then. Especially on Sundays. And not only about the future—but the past.’

  So he spent that Sunday in restful contemplation, his complexion a trifle red. He contemplated the creaky noises Miss Wisdon made downstairs as she moved about her little house, and the noise she made down there in the little drawing-room on her harmonium. She played hymns which were very fitting comments on his new and dastardly character, and he hoped they would encourage God to forgive him. She played ‘There’s a Friend for Little Children, Above the Bright Blue Sky’, and she burst into song with ‘O God, Our Help in Ages Past’. She had a trembling, sincere little voice with a catch in it; it brought out her gentleness. She was a dear old lady and he always hoped she never married Mr Edwards. She came upstairs and read to him out of the Apocrypha.

  ‘Great travail is created for every man, and a heavy yoke is upon the sons of Adam, from the day of their coming forth from their mother’s womb, unto the day for their burial in the mother of all things.’

  She said it was out of Ecclesiastes, and he wondered why it should be so. It did sound as if this world was a kind of punishment meted out to people for sins committed elsewhere at some other time.

  Thus he spent the day contemplating Life and Death, and wondering whether his sin of yesterday would debar him from passing St Peter at the Pearly Gates. Perhaps he would look gravely at him and say: ‘There was Violet and the Shepherd’s Bush Empire’: and over there would be Violet with her black mop of hair and her white legs, ready to walk with him down that slippery incline into Dante’s horrible Inferno. Miss Wisdon had a book of the most wonderful pictures of the Inferno, and all the various punishments for all the various sins. Dante had thought of everything. Opinion, however, informed him that Dante was definitely Freudian, and he thought he was repressed.

  He didn’t see Violet again. It happened to be two more weeks before he left Miss Wisdon’s care, but Violet was sent away somewhere for a change of scene. A number of notes were exchanged between her family and Miss Wisdon, the latter reading them with a horrified expression and exclaiming to herself: ‘Oh, how shameful, what dreadful people!’ He kept very quiet.

  On the Monday, at nine sharp, without knowing quite why, he presented himself at Ponds Corporation near Jermyn Street. He loved the West End, with its cinemas and theatres all being busily scrubbed and polished ready for the exciting night to follow. Restaurant mats were being shaken, names being put up in lights, and shop windows tidied and polished. Limousines were to him full of members of the public coming to buy tickets for the new symphony he had written, just then enthralling London. He asked for Mr Barclay without enthusiasm, handing in his letter of introduction. Ponds Corporation was a maze of wire and glass cages, you could make of it a bee-hive, its real workings hidden within sinister doors marked: ‘Directors’ and ‘Board Room’. On the surface, marked with nothing, there was the hurry-scurry of the busy bees, darting at typewriters and comptometers and wire baskets full of papers. Several people glanced at his black eye, Mr Barclay himself starting back at it and exclaiming: ‘I hope you don’t fight! We don’t want ruffians here!’ He said he had heard from Mr Edwards and that he would have thirty-five shillings a week, and that he must wash a good deal and never have dirty collars or frayed cuffs. Mr Barclay had big, round features, making him think of a huge baby. He was podgy. He looked as if he lived with Mother and was made to have Ovaltine every night before he got into bed. ‘You must keep your strength up,’ Mother probably said. She probably lived in Beckenham.

  ‘You won’t, will you?’ Mr Barclay said.

  ‘What?’ he said.

  He stared. ‘That wasn’t very polite. You must call me Sir, young man. I say I hope you won’t have frayed cuffs.’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘And don’t ever be late. It’s nine till six. You will usually have Saturday afternoons off.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Don’t go into public-houses. Have you ever been in one?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, don’t. Just because others go into them, there is no occasion for you to. You must say, “No, thank you. I’m not thirsty.” You can be quite polite.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Go into Lyons or Slaters. I’ll tell Mr Grayson to keep his eye on you. You want to start as you mean to go on. You look a bit dreamy. I hope you aren’t that; you want to keep your mind on your work.’

  Ernest had the strongest possible feeling that his Destiny was not here. Why had he come here? Just because one could not write a symphony, but must ‘do’ something.

  ‘You will be under Mr Grayson. If you take my advice you will learn typing and shorthand, it’s the thing. You’re keen, aren’t you?’

  ‘Keen?’

  ‘To get on. Show keenness and you will get on. Mr Grayson will like it if you are keen. And so will I. And so will Mr Edwards, he’s one of the directors. Well, go and sit over there and I will see if Mr Grayson is ready for you.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  He sat on a wooden bench with holes in it like a baby’s chair. Mr Barclay picked up a telephone, holding the
whole thing above himself, and shutting his eyes importantly. A worried little man came cringing up to him with very frayed cuffs indeed and looking about a hundred and fifty.

  ‘What?’ Mr Barclay opened his eyes and snapped at him. ‘What? I am not aware that I said anything of the kind?… Go away.’

  ‘Very good, Mr Barclay,’ the little man said, and he hurried away to his lair in the shadows.

  ‘Put me through to Mr Grayson,’ Mr Barclay shut his eyes and said.

  Miss Wisdon said: ‘Well, how did you get on? I hope you were polite? And did they notice your eye?’

  It was probably a claustrophobia which made people shrink intuitively from this environment or that, choosing by instinct the Army, the Navy, or the Air Force; the office or the open road.

  Bank life was outside his range of things.

  While, in banks and offices, there would be those to whom any other sort of life, with its risky freedom, would be intolerable.

  Mr Grayson was a handsome, grey-headed man, very pleasant. Ernest felt able to confide in him his worry. He said he was not fitted for life in a bank and was interested in music, if anything, but preferably nothing.

  ‘I wanted to paint once,’ Mr Grayson confided in him. He shook his head ruefully.

  He would say no more. There was no need. Ernest became the more convinced that if anything was to be done he had better do it now, in case it became too late. It was at these vague and dangerous moments that life was shaped.

  So he had only two pay days at Ponds Corporation Limited. He could still recall Mr Barclay’s astounded face when he told him he had decided, after due deliberation, to give him a week’s notice. It had been insane even to start here, and, whatever the future might have in store for him, it was neither music nor banking. Mr Barclay, informed briskly of this, flopped back in his leather chair as if he had been pole-axed. Everyone else having told Ernest Bisham that he was very young, even for nearly thirty, Mr Barclay now told him that he had better realize that he was not young, and that he ought to have settled down into a career long since. Mr Barclay would not have it that careers often started at forty, or fifty, or even sixty, and ended successfully. He thought they started the moment you left school or college. Mr Barclay, not having heard anything much about radio, and never having heard about television, had not the imagination to visualize any possible career ahead for Ernest Bisham. He leaned forward in exasperation and said to Ernest: