Free Rough Treatment by John Harvey Page B

to ponder whether he should have taken a place on that course in man-management, then picked up the phone and dialed Midlands TV.
    “Mr. Roy is out on location,” announced a voice like high-gloss makeup. “I can put you through to the production secretary if you wish.”
    Resnick wished.
    “Engaged, will you hold?”
    Resnick held.

Seven
    Harold Roy’s father had named him after a bandleader, who specialized in comic songs and second-rate, searing clarinet. After thirteen years of alternately bullying or buying young Harold into spending his evenings and weekends practicing a number of instruments—piano, violin, clarinet (of course), even, for a particularly uncomfortable three months, the tuba—he had given in. His son would never emulate his namesake: he would not be a musician. Even Harold’s one attempt at a comic song—wearing a gingham tablecloth to entertain a Christmas gathering with “I’m Just a Girl who Can’t Say No”—had ended in failure. There had been muted applause and an aunt saying loudly, “Can’t carry a tune for his life, bless him!”
    Aware of disappointing his parents and seeking to make amends, Harold had shown an interest in drama school. Sure enough, they had clapped their hands and given him all the encouragement he had needed. That is to say, money in his bank account and a tilting end-terraced house on the borders of Lewisham and New Cross.
    Almost from the first, Harold knew that he had made a mistake. Classes in improvisation reduced him to a stuttering wreck; movement and dance brought back all those afternoons wasted with the metronome, only this time it was his feet and not his fingers that refused to obey the rhythm. A one-line part as an attendant lord in Macbeth made it clear to him that the only person who survived the entire experience without humiliation was the director.
    So a career was born.
    Harold knew he could ill afford to be proud and he espoused those projects no one else considered. A black comedy involving a legless man trapped in a cellar with twelve radios, each tuned to different stations; an autobiographical piece by a fiery working-class lad whose mother was a drudge, whose father was dying from pneumoconiosis and whose sister was selling herself on the streets of Cardiff; a wordless epic, thirteen hours with intervals, about Vietnamese peasants, for which the props included twenty-seven hoes and a gallon bucket of pigs’ blood nightly.
    Well, this was the sixties and Harold Roy knew better than to look back. Before the bubble burst he went into rep. Salisbury, Lancaster, Derby; Lady Windermere’s Fan, The Importance of Being Earnest, Charley’s Aunt. For every four Agatha Christies he put on a John Osborne revival.
    This was how he met Maria. Hard-bitten, attractive, opinionated, coldly sexy, Maria was perfect as the best friend who encouraged Jimmy Porter’s wife to leave him and then stays on to share his bed and do his ironing. When the curtain rises for the second act, she is in her slip at the ironing board and Harold took to secreting little notes between the folds of the creased shirts. Maria found this charming; she was at a loose end and, in Chester, Harold seemed the acme of sophistication. She hitched her wagon to someone she thought was going to make her a star and all he did was make her pregnant.
    All right, Maria thought, coming round from the anesthetic, the least you can do is make money.
    Harold’s first work in television was directing live drama for Granada. He waved his arms a lot, called actors of any sex “love”; most importantly, he got on first-name terms with the crew and saw to it that the cameramen were never in need of a drink after the unit had wrapped. He hung an expensive lens from his neck and was forever squinting through it, always looking for angles. He said yes to everything, no to nothing, he was always in work. His agent put him up for the latest Dennis Potter, the new John Mortimer; what he got was