followed the only course open to him when he’d left Frances in 1961. He still loved her, still often would rather spend time with her than anyone else, but he never wanted to get back into the claustrophobia of always being there, always being answerable.
In a way, his leaving her had been as romantic as Hugo’s leaving of Alice. But, unlike Hugo, Charles hadn’t thought it was all possible, that a new woman could make it all all right again. He had left so as to keep some illusions. He didn’t want just to sink into a middle age of disappointed bickering. Nor did he want to feel guilty if he had affairs with other women.
Of course, it hadn’t worked. Guilt had remained in some form in all his affairs and much of the time he had been just lonely. But his single state gave him a kind of perverse integrity.
The situation had been complicated when it transpired that Frances had developed some sort of boyfriend. Charles never knew how serious the relationship was. The only thing he did know was that, illogically, it made him jealous.
And so, even more illogically, did seeing Frances so wrapped up in the twins. He felt excluded, as he had when she had been pregnant with Juliet.
That was the trouble. Whenever he saw Frances, unwelcome emotional confusion crowded into his mind. When he didn’t see her, he could exist quite happily from moment to moment, without thinking all the time that feelings had to be defined and formalized.
At the christening he hardly saw her. It was a public occasion, there were other people there, he had no real chance to ask her the sort of questions he wanted to. Or felt he ought to.
He went through it all in the train on the way back to London. He must ring Frances — soon. They must meet and talk, really talk.
The day had increased the unease which the atmosphere between Hugo and Charlotte had fomented in him.
He tried to think if there was anything comforting that had emerged. Only the fact that his son-in-law Miles, Mr. Prudent, king of the insurance world, with a policy for every hazard, had not insured against twins.
The Monday recording session was for a series of radio commercials, which was much less hairy than the voice-to-picture session which had preceded it. All Charles had to do was to read some copy in the same voice that he had used in the television commercials.
Not very hard work. And well spread out. Even this simple job was to be done in two sessions: half of the commercials were to be recorded the following Tuesday morning.
The whole voice-over business still puzzled him. Giving a couple of dozen readings of a banal endorsement for some product which no self-respecting housewife should be without didn’t fit into his definition of acting.
Still, the money was good, potentially very good. And it was different. And so long as one didn’t take it too seriously, it was better than sitting at home waiting for the telephone to ring.
It had started out of the blue some two months before with a bewildered call from his agent, Maurice Skellern. Someone from Mills Brown Mazzini had been enquiring about Charles Paris’s availability for voice-over work. That had led to a series of in-house voice tests in a tatty studio at the advertising agency.
Presumably (though no one ever actually told him so) these had been successful because within a week he had been summoned to a session of voice-to-picture tests. These had been more elaborate, in a swish professional dubbing theatre, and attended by an enormous gallery of advertising people, all of whom, it seemed, had the right to give him notes on his performance.
Again (though nobody actually said so) he must have been successful, because soon after he was summoned to put his voice to three television commercials, which were apparently on test transmission in the Tyne-Tees area.
It was Hugo Mecken he had to thank for this new development in his acting career. It seemed that Hugo had secured the account for a new bedtime drink which was being launched by a huge Dutch-owned drugs company. The drink was to be called Bland and the campaign had been agreed on some months before. It was to be led by a cartoon character called Mr. Bland who wore a top-hat and tails. In the launching series of animated television commercials he was to visit a tribe of little fuzzy red creatures called the Wideawakes. When presented with cups of Bland on a silver salver by Mr. Bland, they gradually turned pale blue and fell asleep. Over their snoring, Mr. Bland intoned the words, ‘Bland soothes away the day.’
The voice of Mr. Bland, which, if the campaign took off as it was hoped, would be a very lucrative assignment, had gone to Christopher Milton, a well-known stage and television actor (who, apart from his current success in the musical Lumpkin! at the King’s Theatre, was said by Hugo recently to have signed a contract for? 25,000 to do an in-vision commercial for instant coffee).
All this had been agreed with the Brand Manager for Bland, the animation voice-track was recorded and the animation work was started. From which point all should have gone well until the launching of the product.
But during the interval between the agreement of the campaign and the completion of the three test commercials the Brand Manager for Bland had been appointed European Marketing Manager for the huge Dutch- owned drugs company. His successor on Bland, a Mr. Farrow, saw the commercials and, as a matter of principle, didn’t like them. Because of the proximity of the launch date and because of the enormous cost of the animation, he couldn’t afford to make radical changes in the campaign. So he homed in on the voice.
It was totally wrong, he cried. Far too patronizing, too light, it didn’t treat the product seriously enough, suggested that the whole sales campaign was a bit of a joke. Hugo and his associates held back their view that little fuzzy red figures called Wideawakes were not going to look very serious however funereal the voice that addressed them and said yes, of course he was right and they had rather suspected this might be a problem from the start and they’d go straight off and find another voice.
By coincidence, on the very evening of the meeting at which this decision had been made, Charles Paris was appearing in a television play. It was one of the few jobs he had had in a very lean year and he was playing an avuncular Victorian solicitor. His voice was somewhat deeper than usual because he had had a cold at the time of the recording.
Whether it was this odd voice quality or the fact that he had worn tailcoat and top-hat that made him seem to Hugo to be the ideal Mr. Bland, Charles never knew. Secretly he thought it was partly that Hugo knew that he would be easy to work with and that the Creative Director desperately needed to come up with something new. It was evident that Hugo, in a business that thrives on ideas, was beginning to run out of them.
He could feel the pressure from the inventive minds of younger copywriters and the task of finding the new voice for Mr. Bland was a competitive issue in the agency. There were other members of the staff with other candidates and the results of the voice-to-picture tests could well cause some realignment in the creative hierarchy of Mills Brown Mazzini.
So when the new Bland Brand Manager, Mr. Farrow, chose Charles Paris from the test, Hugo was over the moon. It was then that he had started the showing off and parading of his new discovery which had so annoyed Charles at the Backstagers’ party.
(For Charles the success was not without irony, because it involved getting one up on Christopher Milton, whose path he had crossed during the accident-haunted rehearsals for the musical Lumpkin!)
Charles was now familiar with the small commercial recording studio where he was to work. Through the glossy foyer with its low glass desks and low oatmeal couches, downstairs to the tiny Studio Two.
God knows what the building had been before conversion. A private house maybe, with the studio as a larder. The conversion had consisted mainly of sticking cork tiles on every available surface. In spite of the expensive recording hardware, the whole operation looked unfinished and temporary, as if all the cork could be stripped off and the studio equipment dismantled in half an hour so that the real owner would never know what his premises had been used for during his absence.
Hugo and Farrow were already sitting in the control cubicle. Hugo looked tired and nervous.
They started recording. The copy was so similar to the television version that any notes on performance given in those sessions were still applicable, but Farrow was determined to give them all again. Like all Brand Managers (indeed it is an essential qualification for the job), he was without artistic judgement.
Charles had now done enough of these sessions to know how to behave. Just take it, do as you’re told even if it’s wrong, don’t comment, don’t suggest, above all don’t try to put any of yourself into it. The agency and, indirectly, the client had hired his voice as a piece of machinery, and it was their right to use it as they thought fit, even if the owner of the machinery knew it wasn’t being used in the best way. At worst, there was the comfort that
