In her digs on Montagu Street there was a residents’ lounge. It was decorated with drooping palms and housed a small library of popular novels, the morning’s Times and Daily Express, a radiogram in a walnut case and a semi-private telephone kiosk concealed beneath a metal hood with a stool, a ledge and the two volumes of the London telephone directory.
She occasionally went down to borrow a book and would find a fellow resident reading the newspaper and listening to the BBC, a finger held to a shushing mouth. Her father, who had brought her down in the Humber and installed her in her new home, had looked around it and said that there were bound to be card games and conversation with the other guests, but they were a middle-aged lot and it had proved hopeless for launching a social life.
She felt as though she was vibrating between two lives. It was looking likely that if things didn’t pick up (and she had heard nothing further from Roland, that Pre-Raphaelite gaffe must have sunk her) she would have to go home. She could hold her head high and say she had survived London but found no further use for it, a point proven. Then do a closer survey of the eligible young Jewish boys of Liverpool; perhaps there was one she might have missed. There were a few boys not yet discharged from the army, serving in glamorous situations abroad, one was an army doctor. There was the ‘Ringo’ boy she had danced with at Bernice’s wedding. According to her brother Benny, he was branching out from the family garment business to open up a high-class gown shop on Bold Street. But all she could remember of their encounter was being sick on a French cigarette.
Voices streamed through the mesh grille of the radiogram, rebounded about the walnut cabinet and took up a commanding presence among the room’s knick-knacks, muting the tick-tock of the mantelpiece clock. The sound of the wireless reminded Paula of her childhood, of its early presence in her life, and words that were spoken in a way she had never heard anyone in real life speak, so the people in there seemed to her to be magical creatures, invisible forms that could extend their range far beyond the secret place they inhabited. She had heard the stuttering King, she had heard the sonorous Prime Minister, she had received news of battles and retreats and victories, and also the gaiety of dance bands and the seriousness of high-brow plays she did not understand. She had asked her father to explain the word ‘felicitous’ to her, he had taken her into town and bought her a black, cloth-bound dictionary.
‘With all the words you’ll ever need,’ the bookseller said, ‘and then a few more again!’
Yet what right did she have to these words, to this great language, which the bookseller had also told her ‘is not pure, like Latin, it’s a mongrel tongue, you’ll find French and Latin and Anglo-Saxon all mixed up in there. Have you ever wondered why there are two words for the same creature? Cow when it’s in the fields, beef when it’s on your plate? One reflects the tongue of the serfs who tended the cattle, from the Old English, cu, and the other the Norman landowners who ate it. Beef, from the French, boeuf, do you see?’ She had gone home with her dictionary and studied it. Learned the true meaning of the words she had heard on the BBC. Pusillanimous. Rebarbative. Olfactory. But on what occasions might she ever need to actually say them? None had yet arrived.
There was a class of person, Roland was amongst them, who did not have to buy this knowledge; they grew up in its understanding. She could pass as one of them, but knew she wasn’t, not really; the abrupt appearance of an Uncle Itzik demonstrated that. She had always felt like an actress and was attractive enough to have become one, with a calm inexpressiveness in school plays, not lively, an air of disdain which suited parts written for women of a greater maturity. That seemed to be what she was acting here in London. Her father had the belief that people take you for what you say you are, how you seem to be, and so one must be careful about outward appearances. Apparently she looked exactly like the secretary to the managing director of a firm of bed-linen manufacturers. But then Itzik turns up. It was all so confusing. I’m only twenty; how should I know how the world works? she said to her mirror reflection.
When she came down to the sitting room one evening to return a half-read book, she heard Roland speaking to someone, a monologue without interruption, or the other person’s voice was too low to hear. Now what is he doing here? she thought. He does hold the attention, that boy needs interrupting from time to time. He was talking about talks, about a series of talks on the modern novel, self-confident, perfectly enunciated, with a deliberate precision which was not quite how he spoke in person.
‘Oh, the wireless,’ she said to the empty room. ‘He’s on it.’
She had sometimes tried to imagine the actual people, the faces to whom these radio voices were attached, and had come up with a general idea of a man with fair hair and pale blue eyes, such as the fathers of some of her school friends whose names were preceded by titles such as Captain or Major and, once or twice, Flight Lieutenant. They were the only people in her orbit who were not large of lips and nose, or rather short, inclining to mid-life bulk, and gold-rimmed glasses, food stains on their ties. She had imagined the BBC voices like a row of tin soldiers, a platoon of such men, all identical. They were the King in various guises, only without the stutter.
He had not given her his telephone number and she would not have rung him if she had it. A girl waits, she is taught to wait, she does not initiate, she does not act, she hangs around in hope of being animated. She tracked his presence throughout the evening. Sometimes he was there, sometimes it was someone else. She began to form a view of him at variance with the louche rule-breaker, the anarchist she had met only twice. Maybe he was quite nice after all. He announced plays, talks, musical recitals, readings, serialisations. Would he be entrusted with imparting such significant information if he was untrustworthy or subversive? The BBC was more or less the government, after all.
After a week she started to be bored by the idea of him; boredom was her condition anyway, why should he not be added to that state? He had been a short explosion of excitement in her life in London, which had reverted to the same routine of the Friday-night family dinner in Finsbury Park and keeping at arm’s length her uncle, at the request of her mother, who had been very odd about him, as had Uncle Jossel. Something to get to the bottom of there, but her questions had been deflected. She could still hear her mother’s voice on the subject of forest boyfriends. Paula found it all quite amusing and enjoyed the barely credible notion that her mother of all people had a racy past. Why not? She was allowed to have had her fun, up to a point.
Itzik dropped round one evening with an invitation to another lecture. The landlady was dispatched to her room to get her. A gentleman had called, ‘not a young man, I’m afraid, a foreign gentleman.’ He had already turned on the radio when she got down there. Roland’s voice spooled through the room like a satin ribbon. ‘Why, here is our friend Roland,’ Itzik said. ‘Wouldn’t you say he knows everything?’
‘He does seem to, but I’m sure he’s just reading what’s written down, he can’t make it up himself.’
‘Only obeying orders. I believe you had lunch with him, was it successful?’
‘Quite successful, thank you.’
‘I won’t enquire. The man has a reputation but I am sure you can look after yourself. Mina Mendel’s daughter will never get lost in the forest.’
‘There are no forests here. Well, the New Forest, but that’s just ponies.’
‘Ponies?’
‘So they say, I’ve seen pictures of them.’
He was holding a bundle of leaflets. ‘Our latest venture,’ he said, ‘after the success of Comrade Propp. Perhaps I can leave some on the table.’
‘Is this how you advertise?’
‘Yes, we put them where we can. We even have people who will leave some for us at the BBC. We hold lectures, people hear about them, they attend. Sometimes you get to know the people who come, it’s our business to get to know them. The BBC is a very interesting place, full of ideas. Very open-minded individuals, some of them.’
‘I see. How long have you been here, by the way? In England, I mean.’
‘Oh, no more than a few months. The bare tick of a clock.’
‘And how do you find it?’
‘Full of bourgeois decadence, what do you want me to say?’
‘I’ve no idea. I don’t find it decadent at all; it’s terribly respectable from what I have seen, here and at the office. Bourgeois, though, that’s probably right. What’s the Soviet Union like? Very different, I suppose.’
Merchant seamen with red enamel stars on their caps and pea coats had often been seen strolling through the streets of Liverpool. Mina had accosted a pair and shouted, ‘Where are my mother and brother and sister? Do you know them, what happened to them, are they still alive?’ Louis had to pull her away. The sailors looked bewildered, smiled, held their fingers to their mouths and mimed smoking a cigarette. ‘They want something,’ he said, ‘they’re not going to give you any true information. Come on, walk fast, they might follow us.’
Now Itzik began a rehearsed speech about the superiority of the Soviet system, of factory production and harvests. Paula shut her eyes and thought about a boy in Liverpool called Marvin Goldberg and the latest news of his courtship of the beautiful, wealthy Gloria Brassey (Sammy’s niece) of Queen’s Drive and whether she would be nabbed right under his nose by Bernie Abelson who was muscling in, the last time she heard. For Gloria, it was agreed, could marry absolutely anyone in Liverpool, including the son of the Lord Mayor if she wanted.
The telephone rang and as there was no one else there to do so, she answered it, hoping it might be for someone on the top floor so she could run up to fetch them and by the time she returned her uncle would be gone.
She had heard Roland’s voice so often on the wireless it was shocking to hear it reverberating down through the receiver into her eardrum, as if he had jumped from the wooden casing into her own head.
‘Hello there, Miss Phillips, sorry I haven’t been in touch, you know, one thing and another, but I enjoyed our morning together, I’d like to see you again if that’s possible. Are you free tomorrow evening?’
‘Aren’t you at work? You didn’t tell me you were on the wireless, I’ve just heard you!’
‘Didn’t I? I barely remember myself half the time and I suppose I expect people to just know anyway. I’ve just come off shift.’
‘How funny that that’s what you do for a living. I think I must have grown up hearing you.’
‘Not really, I only joined last year.’
‘I have no idea how you would get into that sort of thing. Where do you start?’
‘It’s more a word-of-mouth arrangement; my tutor put me up for it.’
‘I see. Not that different from the principal of my college getting me my job, I suppose.’
‘Oh, yes; it’s all connections, one way or the other.’
‘People have very different ones, though. Connections, I mean.’
‘Nobody is going to recommend me as a secretary.’ He laughed and assumed a high, mincing tone. ‘Oh, Mr. Quinn, shall I take a letter? But will you come?’
‘I suppose I might for an hour.’
‘As long as you like.’
When she put the phone down, her uncle was still there.
‘So, you see him again? A nice boy, do you think?’
‘I wouldn’t have said he was nice, he’s probably very unreliable.’
‘You see him because your mother would not approve. Of course she wouldn’t. And she will blame me if it all ends up in trouble. How could you do this to your dear old Uncle Itzik?’
‘That will be my lookout.’
‘Send my fond greetings to the family, particularly to the second Mrs. Mendel. I’d like to hear more about her.’
What a figure he cut, in his too-long trousers, the turn-ups frayed, that goblin face, she thought. And yet he went home to the embassy and sheltered behind its high white, implacable walls. He was important. He was as close to her in blood as her Uncle Jossel.