Human Voices. Penelope Fitzgerald

a Staff Officer to a lunch party, wait till he collapses from over-indulgence, then on to the graveyard. And I’ve had to send two of those out to France.… Jeff, were you asked to break this to me?

      ‘In a way.’ As they left the meeting one of the Directors had drawn him aside and had asked him to avoid mentioning the new recommendations to RPD for as long as possible.

      Sam was floundering in his newly acquired wealth of grievances.

      ‘Without even the commonplace decency … no standbys … my cars, well, I suppose you did your best there … my girls.…’

      ‘In my opinion you can make do with the staff you’ve got,’ Jeff said. ‘One of your RPAs was talking to me in the studio just now, and I assure you he was very helpful.’

      

      When he had done what he could Jeff walked out of the building. It was scarcely necessary for him to show his pass. His face, with its dark eyebrows, like a comedian’s, but one who had to be taken seriously, was the best known in the BBC. He stood for a moment among the long shadows on the pavement, between the piles of sandbags which had begun to rot and grow grass, now that spring had come.

      DPP was homeless, in the sense of having several homes, none of which he cared about more than the others. There was a room he could use at the Langham, and then there were two or three women with whom his relationship was quite unsentimental, but who were not sorry to see him when he came. He never went to his house, because his third wife was still in it. In any case, he had a taxi waiting for him every night, just round the corner in Riding House Street. He hardly ever used it, but it was a testimony that if he wanted to, he could get away quickly.

      RPD seemed to have forgotten how to go home. Mrs Milne suggested as much to him as she said goodnight. Her typewriter slumbered now under its leatherette cover. He gave no sign of having heard her.

      

      Long before it was dark men in brown overalls went round BH, fixing the framed blackouts in every window, circulating in the opposite direction to the Permanents coming downstairs, while the news readers moved laterally to check with Pronunciation, pursued by editors bringing later messages on pink cards. Movement was complex, so too was time. Nobody’s hour of work coincided exactly with the life-cycle of Broadcasting House, whose climax came six times in the twenty-four hours with the Home News, until at nine o’clock, when the nation sat down to listen, the building gathered its strength and struck. The night world was crazier than the day world. When Lise Bernard paused in doubt at the door of RPD’s office, she saw her Head of Department pacing to and fro like a bear astray, in a grove of the BBC’s pale furniture, veneered with Empire woods. He wore a tweed jacket, grey trousers and one of the BBC’s frightful house ties, dark blue embroidered with thermionic valves in red. Evidently he put on whatever came to hand first. Much of the room was taken up with a bank of turntables and a cupboard full of clean shirts.

      When he recognized who she was he stopped pacing about and took off his spectacles, changing from a creature of sight to one of faith. Lise, the crowded office, the neatly angled sandwiches, the tray with its white cloth suitable for grades of Director and above, turned into patches of light and shade. To Lise, on the other hand, looking at his large hazel eyes, the eyes of a child determined not to blink for fear of missing something, he became someone who could not harm her and asked to be protected from harm. The effect, however, was quite unplanned, he produced it unconsciously. All the old lechers and yearners in the building envied the success which he seemed to turn to so little account.

      ‘He just weeps on their shoulders you know,’ they said. ‘And yet I believe the man’s a trained engineer.’

      ‘Sit down, Miss Bernard. Have all these sandwiches. You look hungry.’ When he had put his spectacles on again he couldn’t pursue this idea; Lise was decidedly overweight. ‘I like to get to know everyone who comes to work for me as soon as possible – in a way it’s part of the responsibility I feel for all of you – and the shortest way to do that, curiously enough, I’ve found, is to tell you some of the blankly incomprehensible bloody idiotic lack of understanding that our Department meets with every minute of the day.’

      Lise sat there blankly, eating nothing. He picked up the telephone, sighing.

      ‘Canteen, I have a young assistant here, quite new to the Corporation, who can’t eat your sandwiches.’

      ‘That’s National Cheese, Mr Brooks. The manufacturers have agreed to amalgamate their brand names for the duration in the interest of the Allied war effort.’

      ‘I believe you’ve been waiting to say that all day.’

      ‘I don’t want anything, Mr Brooks, really I don’t,’ whimpered Lise.

      ‘Not good enough for you.’ He looked angrily at the window, unable to throw them out because of the blackout. Then he sat down opposite to the girl and considered her closely. ‘You know, even though I only saw you for a few minutes at the interview, I was struck by the width between your eyes. You can see something like it in those portraits by – I’m sure you know the ones I mean. It’s a sure index of a certain kind of intelligence, I would call it an emotional intelligence.’ Lise wished that there was a looking-glass in the room.

      ‘Some people might find what I have to say difficult to grasp, because I let my ideas follow each other just as they come. But people whose eyes are as wide apart as yours won’t have that difficulty.’ He took her hand, but held it quite absent-mindedly.

      ‘You may find Broadcasting House rather strange at first, but there’s nothing unusual about me. Except for this, I suppose – it just so happens that all my energies are concentrated, and always have been, and always will be, on one thing, the recording of sound and of the human voice. That doesn’t make for an easy life, you understand. Perhaps you know what it’s like to have a worry that doesn’t and can’t leave room in your mind for anything else and won’t give you peace, night or day, for a single moment.’

      Now something went not at all according to programme. Lise began to sob. These tears were not of her usual manageable kind, and her nose turned red. Having no handkerchief with her she struggled to her feet and heaved and streamed her way out of the room.

      ‘Bad news?’ asked Teddy, meeting her in the corridor. Set on her way to the Ladies, she only shook her head. RPD’s gone for one of them at last, he thought. Jeez, I don’t blame him. But Della, expert in human behaviour, thought this impossible.

      ‘Why?’ Teddy asked. ‘He’s capable.’

      ‘If it was that, she wouldn’t be crying.’

      

      When Lise did not come back, Sam was at first mildly puzzled, and then forgot about her. But he was still oppressed with the injustice that had been done to him in the name of truth, in the name of patriotism too, if you thought of the cheese sandwiches, and the added injustice of being abandoned without a listener. In the end he had to turn to Vi, too busy and perhaps too accustomed to his ways to be quite what he wanted, but not tearful, and always reliable. By this time, however, having been sorting out administrative and technical problems since five in the morning, he was exhausted. He put his head on her shoulder, as he was always rumoured to do, took off his spectacles, and went to sleep immediately.

      Twenty minutes passed. It was coming up for the nine o’clock news.

      ‘Aren’t you exceeding your duties?’ said one of the recording engineers, putting his head round the door. ‘You’ve got a situation on your hands there.’

      ‘If that’s a name for cramp,’ said Vi.

       2

      The second year of the war was not a time when the staff of BH gave very much thought to promotion. But, even so, it seemed odd that Jeff Haggard and Sam Brooks, who, though they could hardly be termed Old Servants, had been bitterly loyal for more than ten years, should be nothing