A Voice Like Velvet

by Donald Henderson

  He quickly laughed away her embarrassment. He said it was entirely his fault for putting it where he had, and he signalled the waiter.

  When the waiter mopped it up she sat wondering whether to say it was lucky to spill wine, or whether it would sound too young for him.

  He sat smiling politely at the proceedings and wondered the same thing, but thinking of the ritual which required dabbing some of the spilled wine under the other person’s ears. She had fairly large ears, and she wore little green rings fitted to the lobes.

  Later on, when they discussed that first lunch, it amused them a lot to think what a mutual ordeal it had been. Both thought it would never end, while hoping it would never end. ‘I kept staring at your hands,’ she told him. ‘I do like good hands.’

  At the lunch he had had to call her ‘Mrs Bud’, and it hadn’t fitted her at all. It had never occurred to her to revert to her maiden name.

  And when the ordeal of lunch came to an end both suddenly regretted that it was over. He said he had twenty minutes in which to get across a section of London and say into the microphone: ‘You have been listening for the last half hour to Sandy Macpherson playing at the organ of the Granada, Sheffield.’ For her part, she had to go and do some shopping. The afternoon suddenly stretched endlessly out for him. He would be in his little glass box, every now and again staring irritably at the clock to see if the programme was under-running or over-running, sliding to his feet and reaching over to the gramophone bank to play a fill in—which announcers did in those days—fading it out when the red hand reached the top. Then he would slide down into his seat again. ‘And now, for the next twenty minutes, parents can listen to messages from their children in America.’ The boy at his back would be coping with an armful of discs cut into bands. Each band would end: ‘Good-bye, Mum and Dad. Love to Aunt Maude. Keep your chin up …!’

  When she was putting on her gloves, he asked her if she would care to see him again.

  ‘Of course I would.’ She smiled positively.

  ‘I’m glad Bess hasn’t painted me in too sombre colours!’ He smiled too. There was the awkward business of paying the bill without seeming to flourish pound notes about.

  ‘Should she have?’

  He couldn’t think of an intelligent answer. He left it.

  Feeling there was a mild pause, caused by her silly remark, she said:

  ‘You wouldn’t be with the BBC if you weren’t eminently respectable!’

  It seemed to make things worse. They were ending badly.

  He assured her rather gravely that ‘that is all changed. The BBC is no longer frightened of divorce. Times have broadened.’

  ‘Let’s hope so,’ was all she could think of for that.

  Her own troubles touched her forehead then. He noticed there were three little lines which could appear above the bridge of her large nose.

  He thought: ‘It’s a nice nose …’

  CHAPTER IX

  IT was, however, Mrs Bud’s beautiful white throat that enthralled him most. Nevertheless, remembering the fatal fascination of Celia’s legs, he dismissed Mrs Bud’s throat firmly from his mind, at any rate for the time being. A successful marriage needed other qualities. As Bess pointed out those qualities from day to day, ‘I think she can cook, she likes cooking, anyway’, and, ‘she’s sweet with children, I’ve seen her on walks’, his cautious new defences started to crumble. As for throats, a beautiful throat like that needed the kind of jewel only very rich men could obtain. As well hang dynamite round her neck, as hang the jewels of his own collection there. Best to forget it. At any rate there were other things to think about for the moment. He would ask her to marry him, he had made up his mind.

  Now, knocking on her door two years afterwards, he suddenly thought of her throat again. In the locked drawer in his room was something worthy of it, the papers said it was worth five thousand pounds. But instead he must put his hand in his pocket and give her the little thing he had seen in an old shop. It was only coral.

  And just as when he had given her the puppy, now a long-legged animal called Lucas, her childish pleasure was a rich reward for him who had deserved no reward.

  He was under the sad necessity of trying to save his marriage, while it still could be saved.

  Her eyes were wide and looked a bit wet. She had been writing letters and she was turned round in her chair. She exclaimed: ‘It’s the second present you’ve given me of that kind, Ernest!’ She stressed ‘that’ slightly.

  He thought guiltily: ‘Only two—in two years? Well, of that kind. She means other than it being a birthday present or something.’

  ‘I’m trying to thank you for it,’ she said, frowning quaintly.

  He fidgeted a little and lit a cigarette.

  ‘It’s only a little thing.’

  ‘But it’s beautiful …’

  ‘It’s perfect in its way,’ he said, rather briskly. He wished he could say something of what was in his mind. But it would be dull to say he’d rather give her a five thousand pound necklace than a five pound one.

  She suddenly got up and kissed him and said, simply:

  ‘Oh, Ernest …!’

  She was thanking him. She wasn’t much good at talking, either. She said now what she had more or less said two years before, about Lucas. ‘You must have gone to such trouble to find it. That’s what I appreciate so.’ Bess had said, concerning Lucas: ‘Don’t go to a shop. Aren’t men hopeless! Women like to feel a man has been to some trouble. Find one in a dogs’ home.’

  ‘They’ll be dirty and …!’

  ‘Of course they’ll be dirty! And thin. Don’t get a well fed one by telephone from Harrod’s! Women like sentiment!’

  He went obediently to various dogs’ homes, finally coming across old Lucas. He was called that then. He’d been taken in from the streets and he was emphatically dirty and thin. Curiously enough, he still looked the same, only taller, though he ate like a wolf and never missed a meal, even early morning tea. His make was still distinctly uncertain and the best you could say about him was that his grandfather might have been a badly bred airedale.

  When he left for London, he sat in the train and had new thoughts about his marriage. He again thought that, as when he had given her Lucas, the coral beads were a second clue to the success of his marriage. There had always been a flame burning dimly between them. It just wanted some little discovery to make it burn in the way it should and could. You couldn’t rely on giving her things. What was it? He sat in the train and frowned.

  Suddenly he thought it was because she was disappointed in him. He was what he seemed. (She had told him that she wondered if he was.) Well, he was. He was just a distinguished-looking man who read out loud. Where Bess was impressed beyond measure by it, Marjorie was not in the least impressed. He had as good as died on her almost at once. Chagrined by this decision, he thought again of his latest escapade, and Lady Stewker’s necklace in the drawer at home. And it came to him that he was a cat-burglar because he was disappointed in himself too. Unless he had this risky double life—he wasn’t a man of character at all. And he knew for certain he was going to take another serious risk of the same kind—again and perhaps again: so as to see what Destiny was trying to do with him.

  The man facing him in the carriage recognized him.

  He had large red ears and was one of those vacant, smiling men who liked to speak just loudly enough to be overheard by the rest of the carriage. Leaning forward, he pitched his voice embarrassingly:

  ‘Excuse me, I know you won’t mind my mentioning it discreetly? Aren’t you Mr Ernest Bisham, the announcer chap? Thought so—recognized you at once, from the Radio Times, or was it The Listener? All you announcers’ pictures were in it, a few weeks back.’ He proffered fags and said: ‘You’ll be glad to know I’m not one of those that criticize the BBC. I reckon it does a wonderful job, all things considered. But this I would like to say—why on earth don’t you give us more jazz, Mr Bisham? I’m fed up with all thi
s classical stuff. It’s all right for the few, but I like to keep my weekends bright. See what I mean? I wish you’d alter it.’ He beamed, leaned back and said he did hope he wasn’t speaking out of turn and hadn’t butted in in any way. It still wasn’t the era of the new General Forces Programme, which was something.

  It was the cue for a pitched battle between classical ‘stuff’ and jazz. During it, other beaming faces discreetly wondered why Mr Bisham didn’t have just two wave-lengths: one ‘absolute low stuff’, and one for ‘the absolute high-brows’. It would solve everything: everything, that was, except why the ‘Corp’ had so many talks, too few plays, so many chamber concerts, too few symphonies. However, they said, they jolly well knew all this talk against the BBC was ‘plain jealousy, Mr Bisham’, and they said they were satisfied the BBC had no ‘obstructionists’ like other big bodies had, and everyone was keen, friendly and overworked. The BBC was something more than just a branch of the Manchester Guardian.

  A little before Waterloo Station, the originator of the discussion, concluding a diatribe against the Brains Trust and for Monday Night at Eight, said he thought they would all agree, in any case, they all ought to hand it to the announcers. ‘Because, it isn’t only the reading, is it? Take these news bulletins, it’s writing it all! I reckon you announcers do a really wonderful job, Mr Bisham!’ In addition, they said, announcers were so good-looking.

  Mr Bisham walked sedately towards the wartime look of Broadcasting House. It was a wartime black lighthouse instead of a peacetime white one. The Langham Hotel, its windows blinded with brickwork, was on the left, and the gutted Queen’s Hall and All Souls, Langham, on the right. A couple of khaki-painted recording cars stood outside the entrance to the black lighthouse, which was dotted with Mr Commissionaire Eady, and his white gloves, and policemen. Young gentlemen with large moustaches and corduroy trousers went in and out; messengers went in and out holding armfuls of gramophone records, or armfuls of papers and manuscripts and memos. Mr Bisham thought about the conversation in the train, and generously supposed it was reasonable for most people to imagine announcers were entirely in charge of all radio broadcasts, and that there were no such elements as former newspaper editors, news writers, talks writers, play writers, feature writers, producers, actors, composers, orchestras, expert disc players, and an enormous army of eager technicians and aging administrators; and this didn’t include liftmen, cleaners, waitresses, receptionists, departmental directors, typists, booking clerks, telediphonists, telephonists, charwomen and the Board of Governors. It was natural, perhaps, for the ‘masses’ to think only of announcers and the Director-General, for they were constantly in the news, whether it was press or radio, and whether it was pleasant or unpleasant. They would not have thought of a studio attendant, or of the person who caused horses’ hooves or a door slam in the middle of a play; of Arthur, the handsome club steward, or of actors and actresses hurrying anxiously along at 10 a.m. to Studio 3A. Any bent, greying figure shuffling towards a temporary building belonging to the BBC in New Cavendish Street, might be a director going to yet another Board Meeting, or an author attached to the best-seller called Front Line Family, adored by the American public who were moved daily to sending parcels of tea and sugar to the Robinson Family (those emblems of wartime Britain). The public, happily, did not have to think of these urgent things, and thought only, ‘what is wrong with the BBC?’ pretending that something was much more wrong with it than with the MOI, or any other branch of the Civil Service. The public really knew they loved their radios, turning them on all day, the very moment they stepped into their flats or houses, and had nothing against the BBC whatever. They just allowed themselves to be influenced by professional writers who had quarrelled with somebody whilst in the BBC, and had then, for a couple of weeks or so, turned journalist. The public did not realize these things, and would drop dead if the Director-General announced: ‘We are closing down! You think you can do better, so get on with it!’ The public—which is pubs and drawing-rooms and club bars and soldiers and sailors and airmen and bored hostesses—did not think of red lights, or clocks with red second hands, or headphones, in 1944: the pictures could not portray such—or did not—and films always showed a stupid-looking man standing behind a glass panel, usually wearing a beard, and stabbing out a long forefinger whenever it was the cue for a player to speak his next line. The films seemed ashamed to depict things as they really were; and although it might be technically difficult to show a red light in a film story, surely there was nothing against showing the actors grouped round the mike, or mikes, holding their scripts without embarrassment or noise as they acted their parts: tiptoeing away afterwards to make room for the next. They were not like the children in Children’s Hour—one of the BBC’s charm-programmes—who were likely to suck sweets into the microphone, so that the noise they made sounded like the sea breaking on the rocks below.

  Mr Bisham realized that a few years before he had been just as ignorant about it all as the film people and the public still were. He had not actually thought that announcers wrote the news, or that they decided how much jazz there would be today, and whether Mr Middleton would be asked to speak tomorrow. But he had been considerably in the dark and thought it all most romantic. The truth was, sadly, nothing was romantic once you had seen the other side. It became just an industry.

  He often wondered about his job. What did people think of announcing now? There was the surprising feeling that it really was considered very glamorous indeed. Letters to The Times often criticized them, but the same letters spoke of announcers by name and hailed them as family friends. It was attractive to think your voice could enter the privacy of a strange room and win friends.

  When he had first broadcast, Mr Bisham had not foreseen this possibility quite to this extent; for he had not then known, any more than anyone else, that his name would be announced one day as well. It had never occurred to him that millions of people might have the right to know something about you; they knew your name and your voice—now they must know all there was to know.

  Well, all?

  Bess just turned up one day and said: ‘The radio. Just the thing for you, Ernest. They need your sort, and as it happens I can give you an introduction to somebody who knows the ropes.’

  Remarkable things usually came from quiet beginnings.

  Entering Broadcasting House, he showed his pass briefly. He went to Home Presentation, thinking distantly: ‘Small beginnings?’

  He was trying to remember the small beginnings that had enabled him to get away with Lady Stewker’s pearls.

  There was a note for him, dated the morning before, and marked Personal. It was from the dreadful woman herself and it said:

  Just to thank you terribly for being so absolutely sweet over my broadcast. I was absolutely petrified and I could never have done it without you. And I just know the result of my charity appeal will be simply splendid—because you announced it. I shall ring up, may I, and ask you to dine?

  One of the telephones rang and it was Home News Talks wanting a second voice; they had a war story from Russia and the quality of the recording was not clear enough on disc.

  One of the other announcers sprawled on the day-bed and said: ‘Oh, Bisham, old Lady Stewker’s ’phoned you four times. She says she’s getting masses of jewellery for her war effort—but somebody broke in and pinched her most valuable necklace! And it wasn’t for the war effort!’

  Mr Bisham was looking at the duty schedule.

  ‘I suppose it was insured,’ he commented.

  ‘Yes …’

  ‘Well, she won’t really lose anything.’

  Scarcely five minutes had passed before she ’phoned again. Mr Bisham felt amused, knowing how rich she was, and knowing how anxious she had been to collect other people’s jewellery for the war effort. She was crusted in jewellery from top to toe, but she would part with none of that.

  She said she was mortified by the robbery and had a splitting headache. She said she
telephoned Mr Bisham because she had no husband to advise her.

  ‘The police will surely advise you,’ he said politely into the telephone. Really, the demands on announcers’ sex appeal was limitless!

  ‘Is she flapping?’ somebody asked him.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It seems it was worth five thousand pounds.’

  Waiting, later on, for the red light and to start saying, ‘This is the BBC Home and Forces Programme, here is the nine o’clock news, and this is Ernest Bisham reading it’, he saw again the image of the necklace lying on the loose sheets of paper before him; and he tried to picture it on Marjorie’s bosom. ‘Russia,’ he announced firmly to Marjorie and the other twenty million, ‘has made a further advance in the vicinity of Kiev.’ And he wished the young man standing at the gramophone bank behind him would stop fidgeting. It was a long time yet for his cue. Through the window, the girl at the control panel was calmly powdering her tiny nose. He became irritatingly aware of her actions out of the corner of his eyes. She had no soul! He had a very good mind to log it against her—but he knew he had a reputation of being rather kindly, if a little stuck up. ‘Salerno,’ he continued, his voice brighter through thinking of this, ‘Salerno has again been the scene of fierce fighting …’

  Marjorie was listening.

  She always listened if she possibly could. If the three Misses de Freece, or the Wintles, were her guests, she always said, ‘I’m sure you would like to hear the nine o’clock news,’ meaning quite apart from the fact that Ernest was reading it. And if she went out to dinner she would ask her hostess, ‘Could I hear the news? Ernest has started a cold and I do want to hear if he sounds all right.’ Everybody was always enchanting about it, not to say a little glassy-eyed, and she was often forced to feel that people envied her her tremendous marriage. What a lucky woman she was, their faces said. Her Ernest was not only charming, and well off presumably, but he was a famous announcer. His name was a byword (and it was her name) and he was a public figure (and so she was too). No wonder their attractive house was getting more and more popular. There were no cars any more, but people actually walked to have sherry or dinner with them. They sometimes came by train all the way from London. Titled people, too. Mr and Mrs Bisham were asked to open all the whist drives and bazaars, and huge handbills announced such items as: ‘Ernest Bisham, the Announcer, has consented to open Lord Sudbury’s sale of gems in aid of the Russian Red Cross on April 19th next at 21 Belgrave Square, London.’ Placards frequently said, in italics: ‘Mrs Ernest Bisham, wife of the announcer, will be in the chair.’ Secretly, Marjorie didn’t like it very much. But she wanted it for Ernest, because she felt he wanted it. She told Bess she was really a background wife and had a dislike of public life. Platforms terrified her. But Bess said firmly it was her duty to help Ernest to become and remain a national figure. She owed it to the Bisham name. And when Ernest actually had to have a telephone conversation with Mrs Winston Churchill, though he could not say what about, it really did seem clear that Ernest had reached a public position which, at any rate in relation to society and the war effort, could not be taken lightly. And so far as life in 1944 was concerned there remained only one little cloud: neither she nor Ernest could truthfully say they were in love with each other. There was something wrong. There was some strange unseen wall built up between them which would not allow of anything deeper than a real affection and a mutual respect. Twice he had seemed to try and break it down. But it was still there, and there was the feeling that both were trying in vain to make each other happy. What was wrong? To fall into marriage was an easy thing; to fall into love was a complicated thing.