She’d never been in a room with someone as posh as him. Her father would take this meeting alone as evidence that Barbara’s life in London was an astonishing social triumph.
She started again, without doing anything different, because she didn’t know what he was talking about.
‘It is you, isn’t it?’
‘What?’
‘That.’ He nodded at her mouth. ‘The accent.’
‘It’s not an accent. It’s how I talk.’
‘In the theatre, that’s an accent.’
He sighed and rubbed his eyes.
‘I’m sixty-three years old,’ he said. ‘I was the second-youngest director ever to work at the Bristol Old Vic. This is the worst play I’ve ever read. We meet at perhaps the lowest point of my professional life, and there is no evidence to suggest that there are better days ahead. I could be forgiven for not caring, I’m sure you’d agree. And yet I do care. And if I cast you, it would show that I’d given up, d’you see?’
She didn’t, and she said so.
‘Why are you resisting?’
‘I’m not.’
‘In the play. You’re resisting. And before I go on, I should say, yes, yes, Albert Finney, Tom Courtenay, Richard Burton, kitchen sink, marvellous, marvellous. But there isn’t a kitchen sink to be seen, unfortunately. The play is called In My Lady’s Chamber. So. Why are you resisting? You sound as though you’ve spent your life selling tuppenny bags of chips. You’d let a man like Nigel have whatever he wants, surely? I need the audience to believe, you see. I’m doomed, I know. I’m a dinosaur. These things are important to me.’
She was shaking with rage, but, for reasons that remained opaque to her, she didn’t want him to see.
‘Anyway. You were a darling to come in and try.’
She wanted to remember this man. She had a feeling that she’d never see him again, because he was tired and old and useless, and she wasn’t. But she needed to know the name, in case she was ever in a position to stamp on his hand when he was dangling perilously from his chosen profession.
‘Sorry,’ she said sweetly. ‘I didn’t catch your name?’
‘Sorry. Very rude of me. Julian Squires.’
He offered a limp hand, but she didn’t take it. She had that much pride, at least.
She went to see Brian and she burst into tears. He sighed, and shook his head, and then rummaged in his desk drawer until he found a red folder with the words VOICE IMPROVEMENT PROGRAMME written on the cover in large letters. It looked a bit like the book Eamonn Andrews consulted in This Is Your Life.
‘This won’t do you any harm whatever happens,’ he said. ‘I’ve recommended it to a lot of actresses. It’s very good, apparently. Michael Aspel and Jean Metcalfe. How Now Brown Cow and all that. She does speak beautifully.’
Her father loved Jean Metcalfe. She was on the radio, and she spoke in the sort of BBC voice that nobody in the whole of England, north or south, had in real life.
‘I could never sound like her in a million years.’
‘You don’t have to sound exactly like her. Just … a little bit … less like you. If that’s what you want. And if it isn’t, then let someone take all your clothes off and kill you by spraying gold paint all over you. You break my heart. Every girl on my books would kill to have your assets. And you want to ignore them.’
‘They’re not going anywhere. Can’t I be funny and have assets?’
‘It’s not me, you know that. It’s them.’
She examined the Voice Improvement Programme. She was the one who wanted to act, and acting was all about turning yourself into someone else, so what did it matter if she did that even before anyone gave her a job?
‘And while we’re about it,’ said Brian, ‘I wonder whether it’s time to stop being Barbara from Blackpool.’
He was thinking about the next phase of her career, of course. Nobody making a BBC play about unwed mothers down a coal mine would care whether she was called Barbara. But Sabrina had once been Norma Sykes. Steps had to be taken.
‘I thought that was what we were talking about.’
‘We’re talking about the Blackpool bit. We’re not talking about the Barbara bit.’
‘What can I do about that?’
‘You don’t have to be Barbara.’
‘Are you serious?’
‘Not … deadly serious.’
‘I’ll leave it, if it’s all the same to you.’
‘A bit deadly, then. Not … life-threateningly. But intimidatingly.’
‘You want me to change my name?’
‘You can always change it back, if it doesn’t work out.’
‘Oh, thanks.’
That was all it took for her to decide that she never wanted to be Barbara again: it would be a mark of failure, and she wasn’t going to fail. It didn’t matter. She could change her name and change her voice and she would still be her, because she was a burning blue flame and nothing else, and the flame would burn her up unless it could find its way out.
‘Have you got a name for me already?’