‘That’s right, Mother, you do that,’ he said, sitting up to blow his nose and unwind his scarf. His father helped him and asked if he would care to come otter hunting one of these days soon. Mother closed in on this by asking what Mrs Bisham was wearing. She thought her blouses were usually rather low. ‘But she has such a lovely throat, hasn’t she?’
Jonas said they had smashing whisky, he’d say that for them.
‘I take it the Bishams were helpful, then,’ elderly Mr Wintle said indulgently. He had been racking his brains at the Air Ministry, trying to think of something to suit Jonas. But the only possibility available there just now was censorship, which really only appealed to hard-ups or semi-lunatics. Poor Jonas would be browned off at once, as he put it.
Mrs Wintle said she thought Mr Bisham was a charming man, as well as very famous, that was what was so queer. And she thought Mrs Bisham, except for her modern blouses, was a sweet person. She knew her solicitor, old Sir Tom, very well, but of course he was so old now he never went anywhere, and his wife was peculiar about whom she met. There was some vague talk about Marjorie Bisham having been married before, and divorced. But it was probably all nonsense.
‘That’s right, Mother,’ Jonas said to everything. His father went on with rather a long speech, partly containing entertainment value, but partly motive, about the advantages and disadvantages of being a solicitor. There was the hint that perhaps Jonas would like to read for the law, yet at the same time explaining that the law very often meant coping with unseemly things like Savile Row tailors who, after doing their utmost to make you have credit, suddenly turned shirty and threatened to make you bankrupt. Being a solicitor, elderly Mr Wintle explained, certainly made you see the very dregs of life, but at the same time it depended how you looked at these things, it was sometimes quite good for the soul. Jonas, however, threw up his hands at the mere mention of Savile Row, and started using obscurely advanced terms such as ‘Substituted Service’, adding, with new anxiety in his tone, ‘and I don’t pay them by Thursday, I’m afraid I’m for it. Sorry, pater.’ There was a tension. During it, the pater looked transfixed with surprise, and started automatically fishing for his cheque book. The mater started saying various things about it being a pity to lose the church habit, even if it was the fault of the church, and she looked very peaky and miserable and kind.
He had the quaint habit of kissing his father, as well as his mother, and when that was done they went off to bed saying to Jonas that in a few days they just knew he would be announcing the six o’clock news.
‘There are other things at the BBC besides announcing,’ he told them dully. ‘There’s music and there’s writing and there’s the technical side,’ he said, adding inventively: ‘And acting, I suppose, if you can get your nose in!’
Next morning, Jonas went up to London, and his mother went into Woking to the butcher’s. Waiting in the queue, she met Mrs Bisham. They both laughed at the state of affairs shopping had come to and wondered if the butcher would have the nerve to look them in the face when peace came again. And they talked about Jonas.
‘Ernest is going to give him a voice test,’ Mrs Bisham was pleased to be able to say. ‘But even if that fails, there might be something else.’ She drowned Mrs Wintle’s expressions of thanks by mentioning a certain fairly distant dinner party she hoped Mrs Wintle would come to.
She always felt sorry for the little Wintle family.
Accepting with pleasure, little Mrs Wintle beamed and said:
‘What a pretty little necklace you’re wearing, Mrs Bisham. I love coral.’
‘My husband gave it to me,’ Mrs Bisham said, and blushed like a schoolgirl. ‘Some unknown admirer sent it him from Italy!’
She had already discovered, by using the telephone discreetly, that Ernest was not going to Manchester tonight, or anywhere else. She was quite satisfied that he was in the Secret Service.
And strangely, and suddenly, she had fallen in love with him.
CHAPTER XI
IT was extremely ridiculous, of course. She really was behaving like a schoolgirl.
But at least the secret was hers, and it was her own heart, to behave as it liked.
As to his being in the Secret Service, she had no proof of it whatever, and she didn’t necessarily mean it was the Secret Service; she just meant that she was satisfied Ernest was not the mere vocal automaton he pretended to be. Why else would he keep a loaded revolver in his room? Moreover—it had gone from the drawer in which she had put it! This was the greatest discovery of all!
Whatever his double life was, it was clearly a dangerous one, and of course it was one which brought him great merit, even if it was never made public.
Perhaps one day she would confront him with her discovery—and tell him how proud she was of him. She would say: ‘I quite understand that you couldn’t tell me, Ernest. At any rate until the war was over. I’m not one of those silly sort of wives …’ And about the day when she found his revolver, she would say: ‘That was the day I fell in love with you.’ He would probably point out how stupid women were. But women did like a man to have character. She might say: ‘I wouldn’t have minded what it was you did, as long as you did something! You look cut out for unusual things, Ernest!’
She had begun to see him in a new light.
It was an exciting light.
In another exciting light—that of artificial daylight—Jonas Wintle sat at the microphone convinced that he had the ideal broadcasting voice. He said so.
The first sense of doubt assailed him, however, when Mr Bisham said crisply:
‘I’m afraid everyone says that here!’
When he began to sound a little hoarse, Jonas explained that it was merely nerves. His voice went dry whenever he was nervous. Indeed, everything about this visit had conspired to make him nervous and his throat went dry as a bone. The long, winding corridors, the hurry and scurry of people of both sexes and all nationalities and conditions, and the expensive-cum-alarming atmosphere of the studios, and this studio in particular, with its double doors, its glass windows, its peering faces and its peculiar chairs so reminiscent of Mayfair cocktail bars.
Jonas was also astonished to find that he and Mr Bisham were not alone. Somehow or other he had thought they would be. But Mr Bisham told him to sit down and wait for Mr Black, who was late, ‘as usual, but I expect he’s finishing another show in another studio.’ Mr Bisham ignored a sign saying ‘Positively No Smoking Please’ and walked up and down the limited space examining a green copy of Seven For A Secret, by Mary Webb. Jonas stared about him nervously, at the electric fan, and at the large water-jug and two glasses on a round, brown tray. There was a lamentable absence of whisky. Mr Bisham told him to have a drink and ease his throat. His throat already felt as if he had just been dragged out of a salt mine. Mr Bisham, while the water gurgled, thought: ‘I hope Mrs Mansfield is casual about windows.’ He disliked Yale locks or hovering by front doors in the gloom, or even the fog. Mrs Mansfield was coming to Broadcasting House presently and he might sound her further, now that his mind was made up. He would say: ‘How is the servant problem with you, Mrs Mansfield? My wife and I are fairly lucky at Woking, but they cannot remember to lock up last thing!’ Another little point was that he was getting somewhat bulky for small top windows. He must go and have a look at the houses in Mount Street. They were pretty high, weren’t they?
‘What do I do now?’ inquired Jonas hoarsely. He wiped his mouth and just then in came Mr Black. He was an extremely sinister figure to Jonas, with his corduroy trousers, brown, and his black, lowering eyebrows. But Mr Bisham treated him as if he was fairly human, if just a little beneath him. So far as Jonas was concerned, the sight of Mr Black browned him off utterly and his voice seemed to go for good.
Mr Black sat down and treated Jonas as if he was dirt. He put on headphones and started to speak into the microphone, ignoring Jonas completely. He was very polite indeed to Mr Bisham and apologized in refined accents for being lat
e. ‘But those ruddy Indians … Are you there, Disc Room? This is to be a voice test, for Mr Ernest Bisham. The speaker is called …’ He gave Jonas a dirty look, and Jonas got out his name hoarsely. At the same moment two huge ladies came into the studio and said they had booked the studio, they thought, for half-past, which was in ten minutes’ time, and would there be any objections to their sitting down and waiting, ‘since you are not actually on the air?’ They said they were concerned with a feature designed to put us all on better terms with Welsh coal-miners.
Mr Black, who was not at all Welsh, dealt coldly with the situation, using dirty looks and the word ‘ruddy’, and asked them how they would like it ‘if a crowd of women came in and sat down in the middle of your programme?’ They went out, looking daggers, but to Jonas’s consternation remained just outside the door and peered in at him, still looking daggers, at two minute intervals. Mr Bisham read Mary Webb and seemed engrossed only by that. Adding to his discomfort, Jonas became aware that through the small window on his right several girls with their hair hanging in nets were giving him a frank once-over. They were distinctly observed to give each other the thumbs down sign, in connection with him, and they stood about grinning. There was, however, one kinder than the rest, and she decided to come up to the window and stand there looking sorry for him. This brought a flush to his face which stayed there. Mr Black seemed to call her Annabella. What she called him could not be heard, since only he had earphones on. Jonas just saw her lips moving. Annabella didn’t seem to require headphones in her mysterious room. She just switched something on or off and now and again had a look at an extraordinary machine she was tending. After that she came back to the window and stared at Jonas and looked sorry.
‘Now,’ Mr Bisham said at last, and handed him Seven For A Secret opened at Page 111. ‘Just take no notice of us, and when Mr Black signals you with his hand—start reading until I tell you to stop.’ He said what was happening was that the girl through the window was looking after the cutting machine which was making a gramophone record of his voice, ‘We call them discs here. That’s absolutely all that is happening, but you can imagine you’re on the air, you’re speaking to your mother at home.’ Mr Bisham said that afterwards Annabella would bring the disc in and Mr Black would play it on the gramophone-bank there. He leaned on the back of a chair and folded his arms.
Mr Black said:
‘If you’re ready, then, Annabella? We’ll go ahead in … ten seconds from … NOW.’
To Jonas Wintle it was a horrible game, far worse than any of the games Alice had to play in Wonderland. His eyes became fixed on a dreadful red hand on the clock face, and at the same time, like a drowning man, he suddenly decided it was far worse than being shot-up in the sky, and he noticed a thousand distracting details. Mr Black had a huge wart on his raised hand, Annabella was yawning and powdering her nose, her lips distinctly saying to a colleague, ‘Go down’; Mr Bisham was glancing idly at his gold wrist-watch, and the two ladies outside the double doors had started to outrival the chatter and thunder of muffled voices and music newly belching from Annabella’s room; fusing with it came the strains of ‘God Save the King’ from another direction, and from a third the Chinese sound of a record being run backwards. A dozen hidden channels had sprung to life and open warfare. And, the moment Mr Black’s hand descended, Jonas had the sudden and positive conviction he was actually on the air, and he all but said, ‘Can you hear me, Mother?’ He stared at the microphone, which was hanging from the ceiling instead of standing on the table, distracting in itself, and said in fright: ‘Er, do I begin now …’ Mr Black snapped: ‘Shut up. Start. Sorry, I mean—begin now!’
His agony proceeded.
Hearing the record of his voice played over, some minutes later, Jonas was embarrassed to hear it begin:
‘Er, do I begin now? Shut up. Start. Sorry, I mean—begin now. Trewern Coed was a typical border village, not quite sure of its nationality, mingled in speech, divided between … between, er, blue-roofed cottages of Wales and the red-thatched ones of Shropshire … oh, Lord, I’m going to sneeze, I’m thoroughly browned off by this …’
Mr Black stopped the record.
He looked uncannily pleased.
Never in his life had Jonas felt so humiliated by anything. Quite apart from the crash of his sneeze, which sounded like a last broadside from the Scharnhorst, his voice was ghastly. In fact, he was fully prepared to disown it.
Mr Bisham was very kind about it and said that everybody disowned their voice when they first heard it recorded, yet it was at once recognizable to others.
It sounded, none the less, like a death knell to his hopes of being an announcer.
When Mr Bisham had to hurry away—somebody named Mrs Mansfield had called to see him, wasn’t she the wife of that chap who made so much money out of bricks?—Jonas started to trail despondently out of the studio with the little bit of paper Mr Bisham had signed in order to permit his exit. ‘I’ll let you know what they decide,’ he said to Jonas. ‘But there are other departments, as I said last night,’ he said encouragingly but ominously. ‘You noticed what Mr Black was doing—what about that? Fond of playing records?’
Mr Black gave him one look and left. Playing records? It was too browning off for words! Jonas Wintle’s brown hair fell over his eyes and he looked sick. Suddenly Annabella was standing there. She was actually in the studio this time, and she was painting her nails with a little brush. ‘Hello,’ she said, rather as if they hadn’t met—which they hadn’t, really. She was wearing sandals and her long red toes stuck out at the top, though quite attractively.
Mr Bisham went along to the room known as the Drawing Room. It was the room in which distinguished people sometimes came to discuss their pending broadcasts, or other business. Afterwards, they were often taken along to a smaller room in another part of the building, which room, although smaller, had more homely furnishings and the attraction of a large tray full of stimulants suitable for customers shattered by their recent ordeal of being ‘on the air’. Here, the modest, the vain and the eccentric had the opportunity, if they wished, of flopping back into arm-chairs and gasping: ‘Yes, please—and the merest splash!’ then was the time for understanding that the poor old BBC ought not to be criticized quite so harshly; whether it was Variety or Intellectual, broadcasting was not the simple thing it had appeared, and when you thought of the organization involved in providing entertainments to please all minds for twenty-four hours every single day, including Sundays, well, let the critics come up and have a shot at it.
The Drawing Room itself had a slightly more forbidding aura. It was done in mahogany and leather, and although there was a cupboard full of mahogany coloured whisky, it was always kept locked. It was a kind of promise of things to come. To open it, you had to sign something. The Radio Times and The Listener sat on a round table, and Mrs Mansfield sat on the unusually long settee. She was very powdered. She had four rows of diamonds about her powdered neck, and on her fat arms were encrusted sapphires, rubies and emeralds in rich and tasteless abandon. Mr Bisham’s smiling eyes were on her truly magnificent necklace and he was thinking, ‘How wasted there; imagine Marjorie in it!’ Mrs Mansfield was altogether exotic. There was her queerly red hair and her inaccurate daub of orange colouring along her large lips. She smiled broadly—grinned was the better word—at Ernest Bisham, the Announcer, and declared that for a long time she had been positively determined to meet him; (Lady Stewker had said the same thing). Several things occurred to Mr Bisham as he sat beside her and offered her a cigarette. She said: ‘No, thanks—is it dreadful of me, I take snuff!’ Snuff, thought Ernest Bisham, and felt like backing away! She sniffed up great gusts of it into huge nostrils which threatened to split. Her snuff-box was crusted with jewels and was most attractive. A pity Marjorie didn’t care for snuff. Might she like to start a collection of snuff-boxes? He felt amused, but again wished Marjorie might benefit from his adventures. Mrs Mansfield started to talk about the ‘little
broadcast’ which her husband had influenced her to do instead of him; he hated talking. How alike all these old dears were, thought Mr Bisham. They were determined to meet an announcer and assumed announcers would inevitably be in charge of their broadcast. He politely explained the routine, and that there were many departments here, and gradually led up to more personal matters. He wanted to make sure Mrs Mansfield would not suffer by his visit. For instance, she said her husband had given her the snuff-box. She was clearly sentimental about it, even though she sounded a bit bored by George Mansfield. So he would not dream of taking the snuff-box. But the necklace? Oh, she said, ‘I just wanted it, and I made him draw a cheque. Someone else was after it, I was determined to have it.’
A Voice Like Velvet Page 11
