Human Voices

by Penelope Fitzgerald

  ‘Didn’t you get any music in Birmingham?’ asked Eddie Waterlow.

  ‘There’s a greater variety of concerts than in any place in England,’ said Annie stoutly, ‘but my aunt didn’t care for them, and my father never took me, except to Messiah at Christmas and Elijah in summer.’

  ‘Couldn’t you go on your own?’

  ‘I hadn’t the sense. I’m beginning to see that now.’

  ‘Didn’t you sing, Annie?’

  ‘Only in choir.’

  Eddie opened her mouth caressingly with the end of a chinagraph pencil.

  ‘Untrained! You will sing the high E for me, Trilby, Treelbee!’

  Annie wasn’t put out by his ways any longer. She thought he was probably a bit too much on his own.

  ‘What were you going to play? Oh, Dvaw-aw-rzhak.’ He liked to imitate the Pronunciation Section. ‘No, my dear, I don’t think so. Perhaps one should be grateful that there haven’t been any peasants in England for centuries, and if there had been they wouldn’t have sung and danced. Let me look at the Mood Label, “… the dance grows wilder and wilder, and at length the Devil laughs, with sinister effect …”, no, no, my dear, put it by. Refine yourself a little every day, that is my rule. I want you to learn how to listen to a whisper. Less is more! Annie, listen to less with me.’

  He sent Dvorák spinning into a bin. They sat down to hear Fauré’s Dolly Suite, two pianos nodding together through the afternoon, and the perpetually moving sadly unemphatic white sounds of Satie’s Socrate.

  ‘Have you ever shaken a concert pianist’s hand when he comes off the platform?’ Eddie asked her.

  Annie shook her head.

  ‘There’s no strength left in that hand at all! It hangs down like this from the wrist! All used up, all!’

  He was half disappointed when she asked him to play the Satie again, but at this stage of her life Annie liked everything. Most seriously he warned her that emotion must never intrude. If she ever had any strong feelings, let us say strong personal affection, she mustn’t let that attach itself to the music. The subject of music was music, he told her.

  The other juniors were also fond of music, and Teddy was an ambitious trumpet-player, but Annie’s intoxication was rather beyond them.

  ‘She’s single-minded,’ suggested Willie, who was unusual in appreciating his own qualities in other people.

  ‘That ought to make her understand RPD,’ said Vi.

  ‘He’s changed,’ said Teddy. ‘That’s a frequent phenomenon with men in middle life. Religion sometimes does it.’

  Yet Sam Brooks had not changed. He enjoyed playing at being what he really was, and in altering the Department’s routine he was playing directors. But he retained the great accumulation of grievances which was in fact one of his sources of nourishment, arising, as it did, not from envy but from indignation at the blindness and deafness of all around him. The new RPA had, perhaps, not been quite deaf enough, but he didn’t intend to think about that again. It was almost the only annoyance that he did not mention to DPP.

  Jeff was now in the front line of the BBC’s defence against the Ministries, Civil Defence, Supply, Economic Warfare, Food, Salvage, who riddled the Corporation with demands for more time on the air. Before the Home News they fell back, knowing it to be hallowed ground, but every other programme, and particularly those that might entertain the listeners, were required to give way at once. Poor Eddie Waterlow’s France Fights On was only the first of the fallen. Instructions to the public and hints – for example, towards saving tea, by using the tea-leaves twice – should, the Ministries felt, take precedence over all. The Director of Programme Planning might, in fact, have been felt to be fully employed, and yet Jeff was not surprised when Sam burst into his office.

  ‘Jeff, I want to put this to you, as one of my oldest friends.’

  ‘Surely you must have older friends than I am,’ Jeff protested. Their life in BH had become so secluded and so strange that it was difficult to remember at times where wives or friends could come from. However, Sam was just old enough to have been shipped out to France at the end of 1917. What had become of his cronies from the last war? But Sam, unlike every other contemporary, couldn’t remember much about the trenches. He’d devised a double spring for the Company’s gramophone, he knew that, so that records would play twice as long; the Commanding Officer had been delighted, but then, they had had only one record, A Little Bit of Fluff, the three cracks endlessly holding it up in the same three places, and blame for the tedium, Sam thought, had most unjustly been transferred to him. The Company had passed a vote of thanks to the Germans when the gramophone was caught by shrapnel.

  ‘I’ve never seen one like it before or since,’ Sam remarked. ‘It had something in common with the Blattnerphone.’

  Still, why were they talking about the last war? Experience must be shared, and he believed his oldest friend would want to enter into his new distress. He had been at long last to inspect the Indispensable Emergency Personnel Quarters and found that his Department had been allocated something not much bigger than a coop. They would have to share washing facilities with Stores, Bookings and Long Term Contracts, but that would only mean a few reasonable adjustments. The point he wanted to make was that there was no provision for his four turntables. Room must be found; perhaps, after all, all this washing wasn’t necessary.

  ‘Have you spoken to Accommodation?’

  ‘I’m not satisfied with their replies. What’s more, I’m being kept in the dark again. The bells!’

  In the event of an enemy landing, church bells would warn the nation. Silent now for many months, they would be rung out in case of danger from every parish. The BBC had decided that it would be enough to supplement them with ordinary commercial recordings. Jeff thought that it would be better to tell Sam about this some other time.

  8

  Suddenly Sam Brooks’s designs came right, both for the forty-pound mobile recording equipment and the microphone windshield. It was almost as if the war was won. All the four juniors were summoned. Their Director was going to celebrate, he was going to take them out to dinner.

  ‘It’s impossible for all of them to be off duty together, Mr Brooks,’ Mrs Milne pointed out. ‘You’re aware of that, naturally.’

  ‘Tell Spender to find out what their duties are and look after the discs for a couple of hours, about eight till ten this evening.’

  ‘Mr Spender is a Permanent, Grade 3.’

  ‘Well, it won’t hurt him. It will familiarize him with the juniors’ work.’

  Mrs Milne reminded him that Spender had been an RPA himself for several years before reaching his present position.

  ‘That’ll make it all the easier for him,’ said Sam.

  Mrs Milne could hardly have explained, even to herself, why she was opposed to the whole scheme, or why, now that it appeared inevitable, she had to concern herself so much with the details.

  ‘Lyons in Piccadilly would do very nicely for them, Mr Brooks. They serve a cold baked potato there now, you know, instead of bread, to beat the shortages. Sometimes you have to queue for a while, but a baked potato is very filling.’

  ‘Book me a table at Prunier’s,’ Sam replied.

  He disappeared immediately with his drawings, surrounded by engineers.

  At the two o’clock changeover Mrs Milne summoned the RPAs to her office, to learn of their good fortune.

  ‘This is a very well-known restaurant, a French restaurant, and you must all of you consider your appearance.’

  She was falling imperceptibly into the tone of a Victorian housekeeper inspecting the slaveys.

  ‘Of course, some people think that, with Hitler at our gates, there shouldn’t be any of this luxurious and rather ostentatious eating out, particularly perhaps in the evening. We’re all of us asked to economize in our own way. The Governors were served with dried egg pasty at their last Board Meeting.’

  ‘They got whisky, too,’ said Teddy. ‘I saw it going up.’


  ‘I wish you were coming with us, Mrs Milne,’ Annie said, turning, on an impulse, towards her. Mrs Milne saw that she meant it, and if any one of the others had made the suggestion it would have been quite gratifying. They, after all, were in a sense children of the regiment, they had come before the cold winter of 1939 and were known all over the building; the boys, not really fully grown yet, were patted on the head and given small coins by Dr Vogel. Then she reminded herself, but not because she had forgotten it, that Annie Asra had been her own appointment. Mary Staples had referred to it only the other day, as a proof of how well things could be managed if all the interviewing was left to the two of them.

  Before leaving the office, Mrs Milne always arranged a candle and a box of matches, half open, with one match taken out and laid diagonally across the box, on RPD’s desk. This was in case the power failed and he needed a light in a hurry. She had never managed to get him to take very much interest in the arrangement, but it was the last thing she had to do before she left. Willing to extend her control for a little longer, she traced RPD to the fifth floor and asked what he intended to do about transport.

  ‘Tell DPP I’ll need his taxi,’ said Sam impatiently.

  DPP’s taxi-driver allowed all five of them to get inside, Willie being small, and destined to provide exceptions. Regent Street was closed to traffic while the shop fronts were being reinforced, so they went round by Marble Arch. There had been showers all day. In Green Park the barrage balloons were going up in a flock through the tepid evening sky, while inside the taxi a pastoral atmosphere also reigned, the juniors content with their newly restored guardian.

  ‘They cost £500 each, you know, Mr Brooks,’ said Willie, gazing at the silver-fleeced balloons, which seemed to be fixed and grazing in the upper air. ‘It’s going to be a serious matter if we lose two or three of those.’

  In St James’s they got out and waited on the pavement while the taxi was paid off, then entered the grand restaurant through whose doors came a whiff of the lost smell of Paris. Inside the brownish glitter of the two mirrored walls reflected a heroic display which rejected the possibility of change. Even the diners, many of them in uniform, seemed to have escaped time. Some of them could have sat opposite Clemençeau or Robert St. Loup, and one, with his great starched napkin at the ready, might almost have been General Pinard.

  Willie lingered rather behind the others, talking to the sedate commissionaire in his chocolat au lait-coloured uniform. Then he came confidently over to their corner table.

  ‘Mrs Milne thought we wouldn’t know how to behave in a place like this,’ he observed.

  ‘I’m not sure that you do,’ Vi said quietly. ‘What were you talking about to that man at the door?’

  ‘I was asking him if he’d seen Frédé. I described him as well as I could from what you told me. After all, a chap like that must see a lot of Frenchmen come and go.’

  ‘Frédé wouldn’t ever come to a place like this, it’s expensive.’

  ‘French people spend a remarkably high proportion of their income on food,’ said Willie seriously.

  ‘Well, he’s not spending it over here, anyway. You didn’t see him. He couldn’t wait to get rid of Lise and be off.’

  Teddy was talking to RPD about wine, and, by a method as old as Socrates, was made to feel that he had chosen the champagne which they eventually ordered. Annie looked at de Gaulle’s proclamations, pasted to the walls of the beautiful shadowy room. I’m beginning to know those by heart, she thought.

  Prunier’s were inclined to think that it must be a First Communion outing. There was a spirit of indulgence suitable to a godfather in the way the host demanded the best there was, and then, as it happened, Annie was wearing a white dress. It was, in fact, one she’d been obliged to get for choir competitions, in a style not likely to have been chosen by anyone but the Vicar’s wife, with a view to Christmas and to further competitive events, and made in white silk from Anstruthers’ Fabric Hall. She wouldn’t have put it on if Mrs Simmons hadn’t taken it out, and exclaimed, and insisted that it would only take her ten minutes to iron it, though in fact it came to much more like half an hour. Of course, she had to wear it then. The white dress caused the head waiter to place her on Mr Brooks’s right.

  Boiled lobsters came, and the table was almost hidden by the fringed sea creatures, resting between their cracked tails. None of the juniors liked the taste of them fresh. Seaweed and a taste of drains, thought Vi. But they bent their faces low, their sensations must not be guessed, and Sam, who deceived himself so often, was easily deceived by these children. They worked together as though following an unseen cue, one of them talking while the others concealed the bits and pieces, with tactful haste, under the lobster’s carapace on their plates.

  ‘They plunge them head first into boiling salted water,’ declared Willie. ‘That instantly destroys life.’

  ‘I’ve done it often enough with shrimps,’ said Vi, ‘but it’s hard to tell whether they’ve gone in head first or not.’

  She had intended to check Willie when they got to the restaurant, but by now she felt that it wasn’t worth while. Champagne is bought and drunk to lead to such changes of mind, and Vi had drunk three-quarters of a glass. So too had Teddy.

  ‘I want you to know that I’ll always treasure this moment,’ he said suddenly. ‘Land, sea, or air, I don’t know where, But when the sad thought comes to you, Be sure that I’m remembering too.’ While Teddy half-rose to his feet, toasting his own certainty of living for ever, the debris on the table was swept away and replaced by a beautiful red currant tart.

  The waiter described a flourish with his tongs over the melting crust. Like all good waiters he was a fine adjuster of relationships, particularly when children were to be served, and he estimated the RPAs as that. Children had to be addressed with an eye on the adult who was paying for them, but directly, too, as from one who had a family to support at home.

  ‘You are the youngest, you do not mind being served last?’ he asked, poised over Willie with a fatherly smile.

  ‘Perhaps, since you’ve put that question, you’d like my considered opinion,’ Willie replied, ‘I don’t just mean on the comparatively trivial matter of eldest and youngest. When peace comes I think it shouldn’t be too difficult to get the governments of the world to consent to my scheme of alternative roles for all human beings. It’s generally accepted already that if everyone were to eat one day and have nothing at all on the next we could ensure world plenty. But I’d like to see more than that. Those who serve and those who are served would also change places in strict rotation, so that to-morrow evening, for example, you in your turn would be waited upon.’

  Vi roused herself. ‘I shouldn’t like to be here when you’re doing the serving, Willie. There’d be long delays all round.’ She added, as kindly as she could, ‘You shouldn’t go on like that, he’s got other tables to look after.’

  Willie turned red. ‘I can be thoughtless at times,’ he said.

  Their Director gave them all a little more champagne, ignoring the just perceptible hint not to do this, sketched by the retreating waiter. The infants are getting overexcited, his shoulders said. And now Sam, leaning back in his chair and filling such a noticeable space, began to exert a natural power which few people had ever seen, but which answered in human terms to his ability with electrical equipment. Some of the same qualities are needed to organise people and things, and though Sam did not understand his juniors, he knew how to make them happy. Without even noticing Willie’s embarrassment of a few moments ago, he conjured it away. He told them stories, delaying as he drew near to an end so that they were on the verge of seeing too well what was going to happen next, then pausing and asking them if they’d like to finish for him, but they were under a spell, and could not.

  In these engrossing tales Eddie Waterlow appeared, and the Director General, and the last-minute removal of drunken commentators from the microphone, and the sad deafening of Dr Vogel as h
e knelt down to record the opening batsman at Old Trafford. Lured into the circle of words, knowing how much he was putting himself out, they felt themselves truly his guests, ready to do anything for him. Teddy’s laughter must have been some of the loudest ever heard at Prunier’s.

  Annie’s eyes were bright and her attention was almost painful, but she did not laugh as much as the others. It was not her way. That would not quite do for Sam, and without leaving the rest of them he turned to his right and concentrated his whole attention for a moment on her. She looked back at him fearlessly, sitting solid and composed in her peculiar white dress.

  ‘Are you enjoying yourself?’

  Annie nodded, but that was not enough for him.

  ‘You know, I’ve remembered now what it is, I mean who it is, you remind me of, Annie. It’s a French picture by Monet, or Manet, it doesn’t really matter which, a girl, or perhaps a boy, dressed in white, and sitting at a café table, all in shade, under a striped awning, but there’s very bright sunshine beyond that, and there’s some older people at the table too, with glasses of something in front of them, wine I suppose, but none of them are really looking at each other.’

  ‘I’m sorry you don’t know whether it was a boy or a girl,’ said Annie mildly. He saw that she had not given in.

  ‘You haven’t been with us as long as the others. I should like.…’ He was improvising. ‘I should like to give you a present. The best! There’s no point at all in a present unless it’s the best one can give.’

  ‘I don’t know what the best would be, Mr Brooks.’ She was not worried.

  It was a game.

  ‘I shall give you a ring.’

  They had all of them been with him in the studio and knew how dexterous he was, but none of them would have believed that he could take the inch of gold wire still dangling from the champagne bottle, pierce the end through one of the red currants and give it three twists or flicks so that the currant was transfixed, a jewel on which the blond light shone. His broad fingers held the wire as neatly as a pair of pliers.