A Voice Like Velvet

by Donald Henderson

  ‘Delighted to meet you,’ said Mr Bisham cordially. He became aware that the gorilla which Lady Sudbury described as being the family safe was standing a little behind Hood, watching him. Bardner’s expression was somewhat ferocious. Was it his natural one? He looked a nasty bit of work, but perhaps he was kind to children and animals. Mr Bisham wished Lady Sudbury had been a little more explicit about her safe. How exactly did he function?

  Hood was thinking: ‘Well, I’ve met him! So Mrs Hood can’t say I didn’t!’

  They started some small talk and the room filled more quickly. Mr Bisham started to wonder what had better be his line of attack. Obviously the place was full of plain-clothes men, not counting Hood and Bardner. Hood said something about Mrs Hood being most interested when he got home to Shepherd’s Bush and told her he’d met him, and he said something modest in reply, and laughed. The gorilla had stopped staring at him and had moved away. Lord Sudbury was charging round the huge table, and round the crowd of guests, wearing the fiery expression of a farmer who is afraid the rooks may have been secretly walking off with some of his crops. ‘What do you think of Bardner?’ Hood was saying pleasantly. ‘He’s a beauty, isn’t he?’

  ‘Yes …’

  ‘He used to be a warder.’

  Mr Bisham was thinking: ‘Well, I’ve got all the time in the world—so long as I’m back in time to read the seven o’clock news tomorrow morning. I must on no account miss that, for, as it happens, there’s nobody to take my place.’

  He had started to think quickly. A rather tensely defiant mood had settled on him. He felt like a warrior at whose feet had fallen another gauntlet, rather a large one this time, but it only made him more defiant. He took his leave of the Inspector, who said, a little disconcertingly: ‘I hope we meet again, Mr Bisham. And I dare say we will, all right.’ When he moved away, Hood was leaning back against the wall of the Jewel Room with his hands in his pockets. It seemed to be a characteristic pose.

  When he had said his good-byes to Lord and Lady Sudbury and a few others, he noticed Bardner watching him again. Bardner had the eyes of a farmyard pig.

  Turning away from them, in the din of conversation, he found himself facing the Sudburys’ secretary and her collection box. She grinned expectantly.

  ‘We think your broadcasts are absolutely marvellous,’ she said unexpectedly, and stared at him through thick lenses, looking like a hungry thrush.

  He dropped something into her collection box.

  ‘I’m very glad …’

  ‘Ooh, thanks most awfully! Look, do tell me, are those cooking hints after the eight o’clock news recorded, or real? I’ve got a bet. I say they’re—’

  She was interrupted by other departing visitors.

  He muttered something and slipped down the wide staircase. At the foot of it he saw a maid and asked her if he might use the telephone.

  She took him to a cloakroom on the ground floor and left him there. He telephoned Marjorie. Leeman answered the ’phone and it was possible to hear Lucas barking. Marjorie was out, so he left a message to the effect that he had to go on a little journey and might miss the last train.

  ‘Very good, sir,’ came Leeman’s voice.

  ‘In which case I shall not be back until dinner time tomorrow.’

  ‘Very well, sir …’

  ‘I’m reading the seven and eight and the one and the six.’ He disliked telling Leeman this, but Marjorie liked to know so she could listen.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Leeman said, bored.

  ‘Good night, then.’ He rang off.

  He crossed the small cloakroom and stood staring at the window. Softly opening it, he saw that it opened onto a side street. Surprised at the simple convenience of this, he examined the catch and looked for alarm wires. But there didn’t appear to be any.

  In a similar state of tension, Jonas Wintle paced about in a similarly small room; but it was a room high up in Broadcasting House, and he was not searching for alarm wires. There were alarms enough in his new department, without wires. Except for himself, the room for the moment was empty. He sat on a leather sofa, or he got up and paced to the narrow window, there to stare down at Portland Place. He several times thought of suicide, but it seemed such an unpleasant end. The clock on the buff wall was ticking, its repulsive red hand jerking round to the moment of his next crisis. In this the most harrowing and responsible department in the entire Corporation—called Recorded Programmes Department—his short life in it had produced crisis after crisis, and at any moment it would produce yet another. The public called it ‘playing gramophone records’—if only it was as simple as that! Mr Wintle, as he was now called, had not yet got over his last job, which had been the six o’clock news, and over which Mr Black, his Shift Leader, had told him he had made ‘a complete hash, Mr Wintle. What was the trouble, if I may ask?’ He loathed Mr Black as no man loathed a member of his species ever before, and in vain did he protest that the ‘trouble should be accredited to that Mrs Mansfield woman, who had had a coughing attack in the middle of her broadcast, and again just before the end cue of it, thereby confusing the cue altogether. I was in consequence eight seconds late in playing the trumpet voluntary, Mr Black.’ Mr Black, cold, said that the whole point of the trumpet voluntary had been to round off the talk, which goodness only knew needed something. He hitched his brown corduroy trousers and said, cold, that eight seconds late on a cue was worse, far, than murder ‘here’, and he was still waiting for an adequate explanation. He said that coughing attack or no coughing attack, Mrs Mansfield was entitled to her concluding fanfare of tin trumpets; they had been recorded with great trouble in Stalingrad itself, and if Mr Wintle had an atom of intelligence—which he clearly had not—he would have drowned Mrs Mansfield’s disgusting coughing with trumpets from Stalingrad. ‘You should have faded it up and drowned it, Mr Wintle,’ Mr Black said, cold.

  Even colder, and looking daggers, and sweeping his hair out of his angry eyes, Mr Wintle pointed out that he could not possibly know if red-haired Mrs Mansfield was going to stop her disgusting coughing and say her concluding sentences. She might then have spoken right into the trumpets from Stalingrad. He trembled.

  Mr Black, trembling too, said he was supposed to use his judgment ‘here’. He pointed out that in the short time Mr Wintle had honoured them with his presence, he had (a) left some discs in a taxi, and with only forty minutes to go before the programme was due on the air, and (b) said ‘oh, dear’ in a studio without looking to see that the red light was on—‘we were deluged with letters, one even came from Aberdeen, Mr Wintle, postage paid’—and (c) been exceedingly rude to Mr Mundy about Brahms. Mr Black said did he not like Brahms? And he said he must in any case bury his feelings ‘here’ and think only of the public, no matter what the public might think of him. As for the hash he had made of the six, he should realize that the public got home feeling exceedingly tired and irritable for the six, because it had not had its dinner, and now, in consequence, the Corporation would be deluged with letters, ’phone calls, telegrams and cables all asking what happened at six; there was some very curious coughing at the end of Mrs George Mansfield’s speech, followed by a long pause and then a roaring burst of trumpets from Stalingrad; had Russia concluded the war, or what? There was also a grave risk of having offended Marshal Stalin, not to mention Mrs Mansfield, when she heard about it. In short, Mr Wintle would undoubtedly go on the carpet first thing in the morning, and probably out on his ear sometime during the late afternoon. And serve him right. At this rate, he had better be an announcer, and just speak. He couldn’t say anything more scathing than that, unless it was to put him solely on ‘dubbing’. Dubbing, as Mr Wintle knew already, was an appalling invention whereby you were obliged to stand with a large stop watch in one hand and a telephone receiver in the other, while you watched a disc rotating at frightening speed on a black turntable. Somewhere else in England, the noise it was making, whether it was a trumpet fanfare or an extract from one of Mr Churchill’s spee
ches, was being re-recorded on a cutting machine tended by somebody far less friendly than Annabella. Annabella was the one saving grace in the entire building.

  Jonas Wintle paced about, thinking of Annabella, and of Mr Black, who was at the moment in the bowels of the building attending a recording of ‘What I Think of Sergeant Majors, by A Little Wren.’ It was to be played by Mr Wintle after the seven o’clock news next morning, as a punishment, the punitive quality being in the necessity for rising at six for fear of being late. He thought wistfully of Annabella, wondering what his mother and father would behave like if he brought her down for a weekend. Could he trust them not to be too old-fashioned? If so, it would be quite wizard.

  Forgetting everything, he glanced again at the Schedule lying on the yellow table. He wanted to make quite sure which studio his next job was in, for it was a job for Mr Mundy. Mr Mundy wanted one of his Brahms programmes dubbed, because somebody had expressed a curious dislike for his last programme and had gently lowered all his discs into the gentlemen’s lavatory basin. They had become scratched and he felt the public was entitled to as good a reproduction as he could give. On the Schedule it said: ‘Dubbing Brahms for Mr Mundy, Studio Five, nineteen hundred hours to twenty hundred hours’, and in pencil it put, ‘Mr Wintle, and please don’t be late, it’s that swine Mundy.’ Mr Mundy was a bewhiskered producer and Mr Wintle shared the general regret that his interest in Brahms caused him so constantly to rush up and down the studio with his arms in the air. Just as you were trying to negotiate a tricky change-over from the end of the first disc to the beginning of the second, or from the end of the fifth to the beginning of the sixth, Mr Mundy seemed to anticipate the erratic cut of a bar that you were probably going to make, and he liked to let out a roar like a gored bull. The result, so far as Mr Wintle was concerned, was that he jumped at least eight bars and wished he was dead.

  Thinking of this, Mr Wintle felt extremely browned off and went down in a lift to the studio.

  Mr Mundy was already bending over a long row of rotating discs on the vast gramophone bank. He was making marks on the discs with a long yellow pencil and above his tousled head artificial daylight lent an artificial gaiety to the scene, suggestive of torture in a beautiful Chinese garden. He ignored Mr Wintle and plied his yellow pencil. Mr Wintle started to click on various switches and stared in a glazed fashion at the control panel. A needle was protesting in frantic terms against Mr Mundy’s view of Brahms. Mr Mundy kept lowering the needle over the disc, and then shoving up the pot’meter so that there was a shattering roar of Brahms, to which he made hearty vocal chorus and swung his arms heavenwards. Through the window, Annabella was eating an orange. It was too much for Mr Wintle. An orange? On a sudden impulse, utterly unnerved by Brahms and oranges, he rushed out and along to Home Presentation.

  Haggard, he put his head in and said:

  ‘Could I speak to Mr Bisham, please?’

  He was quite resolved now. The sight of Mundy had done it, not to mention the fiasco at six. And the sight of those Brahms discs, and those yellow lines, and those waving arms … He would be an announcer or die in the attempt; it was a nice, quiet life, you just read out loud …

  He was told that Mr Bisham was off duty.

  ‘Well, when will he be back?’ he cried frantically, drawing curious eyes towards him.

  ‘He’s reading the seven in the morning.’

  ‘The seven …?’

  The seven. He too was concerned with the seven. That little Wren, he would have to play the disc. Well, he would implore Mr Bisham to get him out of this dreadful department. Meanwhile … Brahms!

  With leaden steps he went back to the studio.

  Mr Mundy was standing motionless and for some curious reason was tugging his beard and singing ‘Lead, Kindly Light’.

  At the Bolivar, an hour and three minutes later, Mr Black, cold, approached a flannel-suited heap slumped over the cocktail bar. He said:

  ‘So there you are! What happened?’

  He then said (getting no reply) that Mr Mundy thought he had ‘no love of Brahms, or indeed, of music’, and that he had ‘no musical sense’. He ‘didn’t know where a bar of music ended, or where it began’, moreover he ‘had played the opening announcement last, and the closing announcement first, and, in consequence, the whole thing would have to be dubbed again if Mr Mundy was not to disappoint Scottish listeners.’ And who would have to do it? ‘Why, I shall, Mr Wintle! Instead of going to the Feathers. After this, perhaps you’d just better do plain recordings, or give ten-second cues.’ He said that Mr Wintle had let down the whole department and that it was probable he would have to go before the Board of Governors. He then had a gin, neat, and went out. Mr Wintle decided to go along to the Dover Castle; it had a nice country kind of atmosphere, even if it was polluted by BBC officials. He stayed there until it was time for dinner with Annabella, thinking.

  He thought about his other experiences in his new, exotic life. He divided his thoughts into two, alternating between profound gloom and attempted optimism. He always felt optimistic when he had occasion to contact the Lady Announcers, whose beatific glamour, even when they knitted and waited to speak to the boys over there, inspired him to all that was soulful; under such an influence, he had once even achieved a successful transmission of a cut version of the Brains Trust, for short wave, notwithstanding rows of discs chopped riotously into sections by a yellow pencil, and notwithstanding having to ‘set up’ four change-overs with the headphones on, whilst running, and only a split second or two to do it in. Indeed, so smoothly had it gone that the Duty Engineer entered the studio, wearing an uncanny expression, and asked him if he was sure he had got the right discs—there must surely be something wrong somewhere? Duty Engineers were pale and not like other people.

  Relapsing, however, once again into gloom, he remembered sadder moments, such as when he was down for Radio News Reel, and disagreed with the producer as to the exact sound of a Spitfire at ten thousand feet, and was sent as a punishment to the simpler task of recording Cardinal Prugg in Studio One. Cardinal Prugg arrived in full regalia, escorted by two choristers. He had stubbly hair and a ruddy, jovial countenance, and was exceedingly muscular. His closing cue was ‘… behind the chapel’, but the Cardinal kept thinking of new things to add, about chapels, and so Jonas had to start the whole thing all over again, saying heavily: ‘No, sir, please don’t start until I’ve given the ten-second cue … We’ll be going ahead in ten seconds … from … NOW.’ Ordinary recordings were very simple and humiliating.

  CHAPTER XV

  ANNABELLA stood powdering her nose and talking to a friend called Mavis in the Control Room. Mavis had long black hair and bare legs with gold plated ankle bangles. They had been given her by the director of one of the departments she had been in before being promoted to this department. The Control Room was electric with voices and lights, both artificial. The artificial daylight was uncanny. Mavis put plugs in switches and answered telephones.

  Whenever she had a second, she continued an animated theory for Annabella’s benefit about how either writing or producing Talks was the best job in the BBC. The secret of radio writing, she said, was to do it as if you were talking: you put ‘it’s’, instead of ‘it is’, and if ever you got stuck you just put, ‘fade up sound of tanks clattering through country village’, or, more simply still, ‘up sinister music link—and hold’. About being a Talks Producer, Mavis said you really didn’t have to do anything, except steer fiery colonels into studios for their war comments, and stand staring at them with a large stop watch in your left hand. Mavis started to think of several other interesting jobs, if only you could get a transfer from one department to another without having to resign first, but was distracted by her telephones and switches. When a programme started to end in Studio Two, she listened to the closing music and watched for her cue to buzz in Studio Eight A, which, to the theme song of ‘An Old Violin’ was to start an eerie hour of a new series called ‘The Violin Murders’
, with a famous actress in the cast; she wasn’t there in the flesh, of course, it had been recorded on tape, because soon she would be in a new West End play and they were rehearsing. Mavis told Annabella she would rather have liked to have gone on the stage, her people thought she was quite like Fay Compton in Blithe Spirit. Annabella said: ‘I don’t know how you stand Control Room, with all these plugs, and all those pale engineers.’ Mavis said she used to be in the disc library. All those archives, simply anything was better than that, except possibly the telediphone crowd, who had to wear headphones and rattle down foreign dispatches from war correspondents onto typewriters. The really best job in the place, she said now, was announcing, of course, if you were born with a golden voice. But if you really wanted a cushy time, you should be a producer, most of them couldn’t produce kittens. Dabbing a pink puff on her high cheekbones, Mavis invited Annabella to gin in the canteen. They went along, chattering, and there was Mr Wintle, half seas over. He was sitting on a black glass table, talking to a friend about the New Recorded Programmes Manager, a Mr Lark, who complained that he had fallen in love for the fifth time in five weeks. It was difficult for managers, Mr Lark had explained to the shift, with so much music and beauty around.