She heard his voice every day on the wireless. There was a formal style to the way he spoke, clipped and precise, what her brothers would call a mouth full of plums. He had told her that once one had been on air one developed an addiction to the microphone, one preferred it to the back room, but she now wondered if he felt stymied, being a kind of manservant to the people who actually made the plays and concerts and talks. It was odd. He was famous, that is, everyone must know his voice, but not a soul knew his name. He was anonymous, correct, informative. ‘Next, we bring you …’
When he rang her a few days later it was to say there was a position coming up that might suit her, on the nail, actually, and was she interested? Listening to him she experienced a strange sensation of doubling, of a voice ringing in her head that ought to be echoing round a room. (And it’s almost like an instruction, she thought. I’ll have to be careful about that. A person could go mad.)
‘At the BBC?’
‘Oh, no, far more glamorous. A pal is working for a new film production company, it’s called Harlequin Pictures and they shoot out at Shepperton, but the head office is on Regent Street and they’re looking for a Girl Friday. I’ve put you up for it. They’re expecting you to ring and arrange an interview.’
‘Look, is this above board?’
‘Of course. Would I send you anywhere that wasn’t thoroughly respectable? And it certainly is all that. I heard they were doing a Dickens next, all a bit old hat for my taste. Do you know Eisenstein’s little book about Dickens?’
‘No. Will I be expected to?’
‘Of course not, it was just a tangent.’
‘I don’t know what you mean sometimes.’
‘You’ve heard of Dickens, surely?’
‘I’m not completely ignorant. I did go to school, you know.’
But what had she learned there? Evidently not the same things as Roland. She did not know who Eisenstein was. She felt ignorant and annoyed with her herself for being so uninformed. One came to London expecting one thing, and it turned out to be a shove back to the classroom. She had not been aware before of her limitations. Her reputation at home was that of a wayward local beauty, the Polack girl with her hoity-toity voice and her dismissal of all the available beaus. And she had a shameful uncle who had run off with his shiksa secretary. One escaped suburbia to the metropolis and thought one would fit right in, but in London one needed to know about plays and actors and concerts and paintings and how to eat foreign food. She felt hollow, like a set of Russian dolls, containing only smaller and smaller versions of herself.
‘And if you get it,’ he went on, with something that sounded to her like a smirk, ‘well, we have a pact, don’t we? I’ll definitely take you up on it.’
‘Oh, don’t be absurd, do you honestly think …?’
‘We’ll see. Let me know how you get on.’
Robin Rose said, ‘Oh yes, Roland’s girl, can you get down here today? Will four be all right? You can make that, I hope.’ She said she could not, she could come at quarter past five, after work. He said, ‘Well, I suppose we’ll have to manage until then, but honestly, you’ve no idea what it’s like here and it’s not what I got myself into this game for, answering the bloody telephone.’
On the bus to Regent Street, dawdling at traffic lights, she thought how easy it was to lose one’s bearings in London, how you could never leave the house without your copy of the A–Z map book in your handbag or pocket, for even a walk to the corner shop might take a sudden wrong turn and then you didn’t know where you were, the unfamiliarity of the buildings and the sense that you would never find your way back to where you had started took hold and you panicked. If she was going out of the small central core of the West End she preferred to take the tube, for at least the name of the station told you where to get off. She recognised very little. London was a few random dots of familiarity; she had no idea how the sections fitted together. It rushed straight at her, a stampeding crowd of streets and alleys and great landmarks.
The office was undistinguished, a side door, a bell, a handwritten sign announcing its presence on the third floor. It was above a shop selling luggage. It was not a first-class, luxury shop but a place where one would hope to find good quality at a reasonable price. She couldn’t imagine where its trade came from, for who had the money to travel these days? Still, a couple were buying a set of matching suitcases so the lure of abroad was still alive. She overheard them speaking eagerly of their train crossing the Alps, descending into the heat and light and sensual colour of Italy – ‘The fruits, the vegetables!’ they cried and Paula had no idea why one would rhapsodise about the products of a market garden, gnarled apples, wrinkly carrots.
The door was answered by a pinkish young man who lived up to his surname, blushing at nothing, blushing at the sight of her, blushing at the sound of her shoes tapping up the stairs behind him. Blushing when she patted her hair and licked her lipsticked lips.
‘They’ll be back soon, they’re on their way back to town. I’m not interviewing you myself, I’m just supposed to show you into the office and have you wait till they’re here. I’m sure they’re on their way. They’d better be. I can’t hang around forever.’
‘Who am I waiting for, exactly? I was only given your name.’
‘Didn’t he tell you? It’s Mr. Agnew and Mr. Fulton. They run the show.’
She waited for an hour. She redid her face in her compact mirror. She read yesterday’s paper picked up from the floor. She heard Robin next door pecking fretfully at a typewriter with a pair of uncertain forefingers. There wasn’t a single picture on the wall to look at, only piles of paperwork haphazardly dripping off the desk. The sofa on which she sat was made of the skin of long-dead cows stuffed with the hair of long-dead horses. Everything stank of tobacco and very strong coffee. Was there the faint trail of a woman’s perfume that was not her own or was she imagining it? Was there a streak of lipstick on the mirror as if someone had kissed their own reflection? There were scuff marks of heels on the skirting boards. The whole place was terribly dowdy and could not be associated in her mind with the glamour of the cinema. Out of such squalor, dreams could not be spun. She heard steps, it must be them, then a lavatory chain sounded and water flushing. It was impossible to believe that motion pictures could emerge from this cramped, chaotic environment.
Eventually they turned up, barging in, she thought, like they owned the place, then remembered that they did and that it was only that she had been waiting so long that she felt disturbed by their presence, flinging their hats onto the sofa and throwing off their coats. ‘So Robin was right,’ one of them said, ‘she is here, hurrah!’
Agnew was in his early thirties: short, tweedy, already balding, a slight stutter on certain consonants, flapping in, in an old Burberry mackintosh and taking off leather driving gauntlets as if he were a chauffeur. Fulton was a completely different type, an air of hastily assembled opulence clung to him, in a slightly shiny silver-grey suit and a maroon tie embellished with tiny silver moons, as if he was destined to be in front of the camera not behind it. He was lighting a cigar as he entered the room. Unlike Agnew he had an accent.
The two men sat down in rotating wooden chairs behind adjacent desks. Nobody seemed to have emptied the ashtrays for days. Together, talkative, they came across as a comedy double act, making incomprehensible in-jokes to each other. Apart from the wild variance of their appearance, it was difficult for Paula to work out where one ended and the other began.
‘So which role are you auditioning for?’
‘I beg your pardon? I’m not here for—’
‘Is it saucy secretary or downtrodden office dogsbody?’
‘I’m here for—’
‘Yes, yes, we know, but we like to have at least a hint of how you’ll play the part.’ The one with the accent winked. The one with the stutter picked up a half-smoked stub from the ashtray and lit it.
‘C-c-c-can I offer you …?’
She ignored him.
‘I’m secretary at present to a managing director, a bed-linen company.’
‘Bed linen! Oh my.’
‘My shorthand and typing speeds are—’
‘Yes, yes, I suppose you must have certificates, we won’t need to see them. We just need someone who will run around after us. Type up the contracts, make sure they’re signed and whatnot. They turn up behind the sofa, covered in coffee stains, and that’s no good. We ourselves tidy up after big egos and wayward souls. You wouldn’t have to do any of that. You’re not thinking of getting married in the next few months, are you?’
‘No.’
‘Oh good, we really can’t accommodate a pram in the office.’
‘Young Robin might take a fancy to her.’
‘Well, he’ll have to keep his sticky mitts off. No fraternisation between the ranks, out of the question.’
‘You might, from time to time, have to place a trunk call to Los Angeles.’
‘I’m sure I could do that.’
‘And we might as well get it out of the way now, do you want to be in the pictures?’
‘I’m not an actress.’
‘That’s not in itself a barrier, but such self-awareness is refreshing. So it’s all excellent, because we need a secretary more than we need a starlet. And can you start, say, tomorrow?’
‘Are you not seeing anyone else?’
‘No time, no time, we have to be back on the lot in the morning. I could spare an hour first thing to show you the ropes.’
‘He’s mixing you up with the gallows scene in the next picture. Tale of Two Cities. We’ve got a marvellous young man for Sydney Carton. Quite the sensation.’
‘We’re not doing that one.’
‘So you say.’
‘Henderson is just a pretty face.’
‘We’ll talk about this later. Can you be in by nine?’
‘No, I have to give notice.’
‘Oh, sod that, give them a bell and tell them you’ve got polio or something. Get here first thing, bring your pencils and whatnot. The typewriter is brand new. Robin is hopeless. He gets through the ribbons like nobody’s business and puts the carbon sheet in the wrong way round but he’s an Oxford man, you know, can’t expect him to be practical.’
Abruptly, the two men rose to their feet and each extended a hand. She was bundled out of the office down onto the street without actually having said she was accepting the position.
On the bus she tried to disentangle the two men from each other. Who had said what? Why were they so like Tweedledum and Tweedledee?
She told Mr. Topping her mother had been taken ill and she must return home at once to look after her.
‘Oh, yes, you must hold the fort,’ he said, sounding as though he had somebody already in mind to replace her. Had her work not been satisfactory? she asked. ‘It was top notch, the best, it’s just …’ But he changed the subject abruptly. There was a hint of something like relief in his voice. She couldn’t quite put her finger on it. Later she wondered if he had been slightly let down when she had arrived with her excellent recommendation from the college, something that did not quite suit. As if behind her name, Miss Phillips, there was something he had not expected. Or she was imagining it, and he was one of those old-fashioned men who believed a woman’s place was always to be a helpmeet to others and that to tend at a sickbed was the highest calling.