Beattie breathed out loudly. Victor, without looking, could tell that she was glancing at him, immobile, waiting in his little cell. She said, “Play us that section again, Tony, will you?” Victor could hear a tone in her voice that said she was fighting a losing battle but was at least trying to claw back a little authority.
And Tony had said, “Sure.”
Victor, sitting half-drunk now in the half-dark, hot with the remembered embarrassment, was trying to claw back a little of the rage he had felt at that moment. He didn’t want to lose it, he had to hang on to it, because now it was all he had. Up there, Harry Phoenix had, unknowingly, all right, but all the same, flayed him alive. Every single nerve ending in his body was now open to the air and hurting atrociously. Harry had killed him. To be thrown off a job, that was death. When this got out, and it would get out, believe it, he would be dead. He might as well open his veins right here on the sofa and save everyone the time.
He took another swig from the now nearly empty bottle. Of course, that was it. He had a bottle. Wait for Harry outside, hit him with the bottle. No, those Aikido nuts had lots of cute ways of dealing with bottle-wielders, especially half-drunk bottle-wielders, even in the dark.
But he was in Soho, for God’s sake. There must be a dozen pubs within a hundred yards where he could buy a gun. All he had to do was walk into a pub and — and do what, exactly? “Double scotch, please. Oh, and a .357 Magnum, if you have one.” What did he know about buying guns? He just didn’t have the contacts. He groaned. There must be something, some way. Wait a minute. Didn’t Harry have a kid who went to school in Hammersmith somewhere? Perhaps that was it. Yes, kidnap the kid, you could work it out, collect him one afternoon, your father asked me to pick you up, no, no, no, that was no good, either, he was losing his mind.
He slumped back on the leather sofa. And just what was wrong with Crispy Codburgers anyway? That campaign had added a full seven points to the client’s share of the market. Codburgers. Strange. It was on this very sofa, in exactly this position, that his first big chance had come.
He had been waiting here for what was her name, that dizzy blond creature that he’d met in Manchester, a presenter on one of those dizzy daytime magazine programmes. She’d come down to London to do a voice-over, pantyhose, something, and he’d met up with her, taken two days off which they spent in his penthouse flat in the Barbican, hardly leaving the bedroom, hardly leaving the bed, for that matter. Two of the most exhausting days of his life, he remembered.
And he’d been here on this sofa, waiting for her to finish her session and come to lunch, when the door from the stairs up to the studio level was thrown open and Adrian Ryland came in, or rather boiled in. Adrian Ryland was a very fat and very in director of television commercials whom Victor had briefly met in Frank’s office. Met was putting it a bit strong, perhaps. Frank had tried to introduce Victor as one of his up-and-coming stars, but Adrian had been in a hurry to leave, always was in a hurry to leave, and had said, “Send me a demo. I’ll be in touch.” They’d sent him a demo tape and he hadn’t been in touch and that was that.
But now Adrian Ryland was boiling into the reception area, red in the face and clearly livid. Like a lot of his breed, he was taking it out on the receptionist, a feisty temp who didn’t know what was going on, but she did know that it wasn’t her fault that his bloody voice artist hadn’t turned up, nor was it her fault that his bloody commercial was slotted for tonight on Thames, and she told him so.
Adrian Ryland wheeled around in desperation and his eye fell on Victor. He stopped wheeling. His eyes narrowed in an attempt to dig out Victor’s name from some internal filing system, and then he came across.
“Vernon,” he said.
“Victor, actually,” said Victor.
“Victor,” said Adrian Ryland without missing a beat, “you’re one of Frank’s, aren’t you? Come with me. You’ve got a strapline to do for me, and if you mess it up, you’ll never work again, got it?”
A strapline turned out to be the last telling line at the end of a TV commercial which summed the whole product concept up. And this had been for, for what the hell was it, oh yes, a female deodorant called Trust™, for God’s sake. Just where did they dig up those names? And where did they dig up the people who dug them up?
"All it takes is — Trust.” That was the line. And they had done seventeen takes in the tiny Soho studio before that tiny, infinitesimal pause before the word “Trust” was absolutely right, and the intonation on the word itself was perfect. The pause and the intonation, of course, were implying all sorts of things, because the images on the screen were of a man and a woman obviously on the point of Doing It, and the word Trust had to come just at the point where She looked up at Him with a sickeningly Audrey Hepburn under-the-eyebrows look and an equally stomach-churning little smile. But at the end it was perfect.
Adrian had stood up, put on his camouflage jacket, and said, “All it takes is a sick-bag. Thanks, everybody, that’ll do me. Victor, very nice. Very nice, indeed. Be in touch.”
And, wonder of wonders, so he had. And after that, so had they all been in touch. All because of those five words. Victor had never seen the dizzy presenter from Manchester again, although he had seen and experienced plenty like her since.
From Trust™ Victor had gone to Frutigums, from Frutigums to Swish (kitchen cleaner), from Swish to Smist (air freshener) to Grobbles (God knows) to the famous Crispy Codburgers, and thence through a hundred, a thousand products whose names looked as if they were cheating moves on a Scrabble board or small towns in Serbia.
Victor became a Voice. One of the Few, the happy Few. He was up there with the Allens, the Jarvises, the Tates, and the Barkworths. You saw them chasing from Soho studio to Soho studio, with a shoulder bag full of scripts, one after the other, sit down in the voice booth, lay the script out, do a voice check, do a couple of dry runs to get the tone right to the director’s satisfaction (or more likely that of the client, the Frozen Pea man or the Toothpaste man or the Grobbles man, sitting on the sofa behind the director out of the light), and then Bob’s your uncle, one take and it’s done. On to the next.
Voice was a small community. In London, there were really, if you were honest, only a couple of dozen. The ones who got the work day after day, who could walk into a studio on five minutes’ notice, take a piece of mawkish drivel and in one take, all right, say two, give it the crushing authority of a pronouncement by St. Paul.
Mind you, let’s remember that the audience for this stuff consisted of people who thought that the First Letter to the Ephesians would probably run: “Dear Mr. and Mrs. Ephesian, Thanks very much for the socks you sent me. Remember me to the Galatians when you see them next. Love, St. Paul.”
It was all probably a load of bollocks, whatever the marketing people trumpeted. But even so, there was a certain satisfaction in taking some copy so saccharine that if you listened to it twice you were diagnosed diabetic, written by some wet-behind-the-ears Media Studies graduate, and making it sound just like English. Not, perhaps, as much satisfaction as your real acting, but the money was just great.