Human Voices. Penelope Fitzgerald

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СКАЧАТЬ this Lise Bernard at 34, 25, 38. Are you with me?’

      ‘I’m not too sure,’ said Willie doubtfully. ‘By the way, she cries rather a lot.’

      ‘She’s mixed a lot with French people, that would make her more emotional.’

      ‘Not all foreigners are emotional. It depends whether they come from the north or the south. Look at Tad.’

      Taddeus Zagorski, the third of the junior RPAs (male), had arrived in this country with his parents only last October. How had he managed to learn English so quickly, and how, although he wasn’t much older than the rest of them and was quite new to the Department, did he manage to dazzle them with his efficiency and grasp?

      ‘I can’t seem to get to like him,’ said Teddy. ‘He’s suffered, I know, but there it is. He wants to be a news reader, you know.’

      ‘I daresay he’ll get on,’ Willie replied, ‘in the world, that is, as it’s at present constituted. It’s possible that we’re jealous of him. We ought to guard against that.’

      Tad, in fact, was emerging at the head of the counter queue, where, with a proud gesture, he stirred his coffee with the communal spoon tied to the cash register with a piece of string. He must have been doing Messages From The Forces.

      ‘My auntie got one of those messages,’ said Willie. ‘It was my uncle in the Navy singing When the Deep Purple Falls, but by the time it went out he was missing, believed killed.’

      ‘Was she upset?’

      ‘She never really heard it. She works on a delivery van.’

      The young Pole stood at their table, cup of coffee in hand, brooding down at them from a height.

      ‘You should have been off ten minutes ago,’ said Teddy.

      Tad sat down between them, precisely in the middle of his chair, in his creaseless white shirt. The boys felt uneasy. He had an air of half-suppressed excitement.

      ‘Who is that fellow?’ he asked suddenly.

      Willie looked up, Teddy craned round. A man with a pale, ruined-looking face was walking up to the bar.

      Tad watched him as he asked quietly for a double whisky. The barman seemed unnerved. In fact, the canteen had only obtained a licence at the beginning of the year, on the understanding that the news readers should not take more than two glasses of beer before reporting for work, and the shadow of disapproval still hung over it. Higher grades were expected to go to the Langham for a drink, but this one hadn’t.

      ‘I ask you about that fellow,’ said Tad, ‘because it was he who just came into Studio LG14. I was clearing up the Messages preparatory to returning them to registry, and I asked him what he was doing in the studios, as one cannot be too careful in the present circumstances. He replied that he had an administrative post in the BBC, and, as he seemed respectable, I explained the standard routine to him. I think one should never be too busy to teach those who are anxious to learn.’

      ‘Well, you set out to impress him,’ said Teddy. ‘What did you tell him?’

      ‘I told him the rules of writing a good news talk – “the first sentence must interest, the second must inform”. Next I pointed out the timeless clock, which is such an unusual feature of our studios, and demonstrated the “ten seconds from now”.’

      The familiar words sounded dramatic, and even tragic.

      ‘What did he do?’

      ‘He nodded, and showed interest.’

      ‘But didn’t he say anything?’

      ‘Quite quietly. He said, “Tell me more.”’

      Tad’s self-assurance wavered and trembled. ‘He does not look quite the same now as he did then. Who is he?’

      ‘That’s Jeffrey Haggard,’ Willie said. ‘He’s the Director of Programme Planning.’

      Tad was silent for a moment. ‘Then he would be familiar with the ten second cue?’

      ‘He invented it. It’s called the Haggard cue, or the Jeff, sometimes.’ Teddy laughed, louder than the din of crockery.

      ‘God, Tad, you’ve made me happy to-day. Jeepers Creepers, you’ve gone and explained the ten second cue to DPP …’

      Their table rocked and shook, while Tad sat motionless, steadying his cup with his hand.

      ‘Doubtless Mr Haggard will think me ludicrous.’

      ‘He thinks everything’s ludicrous,’ said Willie hastily.

      Teddy laughed and laughed, not able to get over it, meaning no harm. He wouldn’t laugh like that if he was Polish, Willie thought. However, in his scheme of things to come there would no frontiers, and indeed no countries.

      

      The Director of Programme Planning ordered a second double in his dry, quiet, disconcerting voice. Probably in the whole of his life he had never had to ask for anything twice. The barman, knowing, as most people did, that Mr Haggard had run through three wives and had lost his digestion into the bargain, wondered what he’d sound like if he got angry.

      The whisky, though it had no visible effect, was exactly calculated to raise DPP from a previous despair far enough to face the rest of the evening. When he had finished it he went back to his office, where he managed with no secretary and very few staff, and rang RPD.

      ‘Mrs Milne, I want Sam. I can hear him shouting, presumably in the next room.’

      On the telephone his voice dropped even lower, like a voice’s shadow. He waited, looking idly at the schedules that entirely covered the walls, the charts of Public Listening and Evening Meal Habits, and the graphs, supplied by the Ministry of Information, of the nation’s morale.

      RPD was put through.

      ‘Jeff, I want you to hear my case.’

      DPP had been hearing it for more than ten years. But, to do his friend justice, it was never the same twice running. The world seemed new created every day for Sam Brooks, who felt no resentment and, indeed, very little recollection of what he had suffered the day before.

      ‘Jeff, Establishment have hinted that I’m putting in for too many girls.’

      ‘How can that be?’

      ‘They know I like to have them around, they know I need that. I’ve drafted a reply, saying nothing, mind you, about the five thousand discs a week, or the fact that we provide a service to every other department of the Corporation. See what you think of the way I’ve put it – I begin quite simply, by asking them whether they realize that through the skill of the recording engineer, sound can be transformed from air to wax, the kind of thing which through all the preceding centuries has been possible only to the bees. It’s the transference of pattern, you see – surely that says something encouraging about the human mind. Don’t forget that Mozart composed that trio while he was playing a game of billiards.’

      ‘Sam, I went to СКАЧАТЬ