The Silence at Twenty to Three

On the second Tuesday of February the phone did not ring at twenty to three.

Rowan had gone into a four-minute record, as she had gone into a four-minute record at half past two on something over six hundred nights, and she sat with the phone monitor in front of her and the record running and at four minutes past she had to come out of it and say something.

What she said was, "That is Bobby Womack, and it is twenty-five to three, and the ovens on Fern Row have gone on without us tonight." Which is nothing. It is a sentence about a bakery. She has listened back to it once and says that she can hear herself deciding, in the half-second before without us, not to say I hope Bill is all right, because there were about nine hundred people awake in that town and she was not going to hand nine hundred people a worry at twenty-five to three on the strength of one missed phone call.

He did not ring on the Wednesday either. On the Wednesday she did not mention it at all, and the emails started at about nine in the morning, and by the Thursday afternoon the station had had thirty-one of them and Prit rang her at home, which he does not do.

She had already rung the bakery. She had rung it at ten past nine on the Wednesday morning from the garden centre car park and got the day manager, who was perfectly friendly and had no idea who she was and said that Bill was off and that she could not say more than that, which is the correct thing for a day manager to say and which told Rowan everything except the part she wanted.

It was Serafina who found out, because Serafina drives a taxi and taxi drivers find out. She rang the studio at ten past one on the Thursday night, off air, and said, "Do not put me on. He is in the infirmary. He went in on the Monday night at work and he has had a bleed on the brain and he is on Ward Four and he is alive."

Rowan said thank you. Then she said, "How do you know?" And Serafina said that she had taken his daughter from the station to the infirmary on the Tuesday morning at twenty past six and that the woman had cried in the back of the car for eleven minutes and had then apologised for it, and that she had not charged her, and that this was the whole of how she knew and she would rather it went no further than the studio.

Rowan had two hours and fifty minutes of that Thursday show left and she has said that she has never worked harder in her life than she did in the first forty of them.

Because she could not say it. It was not hers. There is a version of that night in which a presenter with a warm voice and a big audience tells a town that a much-loved man has had a bleed on the brain, and the town responds beautifully, and it is broadcasting of the sort that gets played at award ceremonies, and it is also a serious breach of a sixty-three-year-old man's privacy committed by somebody he has never met outside a telephone.

What she did instead, at ten past two, was this. She said: "A lot of you have emailed the station about Bill this week, and I want to say something about that once and then leave it. I do not put anything on this radio about anybody that they have not told me themselves. Bill has not been on the phone this week and I am not going to speculate about why, on air, at two in the morning, in front of the whole town, because he is a private man and because it is not mine to say."

And then, after a beat: "What I will do is this. I am going to play the record he asked for in November, the one he made me play twice because he said I had ruined it by talking over the front of it. And if you are the sort of person who does anything in these situations, then Fern Row bakery opens at half past six and it is a working bakery with three staff and it has been short-handed all week."

She played it. It was four minutes and eleven seconds long and she did not talk over the front of it.

The bakery sold out of everything by twenty past eight the next morning and then again on the Saturday, and the day manager rang the station on the Monday, extremely confused, and Prit explained it to her and there was a pause of about nine seconds on the line before the woman said, "Right," in a voice that had gone.

Rowan has been asked about this on a panel at a radio conference in front of a hundred and forty people and gave an answer that annoyed the panel, which was that it was not a moment of great broadcasting and that the correct decision that week was the boring one, which was to say nothing, and that everything else was just a woman playing a record.

She went in on the Sunday, which is her night off, at three in the afternoon, with nothing, because she could not work out what a person brings.

Bill was in a bay of four beds by the window and he was propped up and there was a weakness down his left side that was obvious and a difficulty with speech that was not, until he tried a long sentence. His daughter was there, over from Dundee, and she stood up when Rowan came in and said, "Oh," and then, "You are the radio," and then burst into tears, and then apologised for it, which Rowan by then understood to be a family characteristic.

Bill looked at her for a while. Then he said, quite slowly, "Twenty to three." And Rowan said, "Twenty to three." And he said, "Ovens went on without you," which is not what she had said on air, it is the wrong way round, and she has never worked out whether he had heard it from somebody or had made it up himself in a hospital bed, and she has never asked.

They talked for about forty minutes. Not about the stroke. About the football, the weather from a window on Ward Four, a documentary he had half watched on the ward television, the fact that hospital bread is an insult to a man in his position. Rowan did not once ask him how he was, on the grounds that eleven other people that day would have, and she is fairly sure that this is why the second visit happened, and the third, and all the ones after.

His daughter walked her to the lift. In the corridor she said, "He has listened to you every night for three years." Rowan said that she knew. And the daughter said, "No — after Mum. He could not be in the house. He got the nights because he could not be in the house, and then he got you, and I live four hundred miles away and I have spent three years being grateful to a woman on the radio and being ashamed of being grateful, and I would like to have said that to you properly and not by a lift."

Rowan Kestle, who had presented radio for twelve years and had a voice that four hundred thousand people had once heard say good morning, you, stood by a lift on Ward Four and could not think of a single thing to say, and in the end said, "He calls me kid."

And the daughter laughed, properly, for about nine seconds, and said, "He called Mum kid. He is sixty-three, he calls everybody kid, do not let it go to your head," and the lift came, and Rowan went down four floors and out through the car park and sat in her car for twenty minutes.

He was back on the phone in eleven weeks, from home, at twenty to three, which is nothing to do with a bakery any more because he is not going back to the bakery and everybody involved knows it.

The voice is different. It is slower and it loses a word every so often and comes back for it, and on a bad night the whole call is four minutes of a man doing something that is visibly hard. Rowan does not help him with the words. She worked that out on the first night after about ninety seconds, from something in the quality of the pause, and she has held to it ever since, and Bill has never mentioned it and neither has she.

The audience adjusted in roughly one call. There was one email, from a man who wrote to suggest, in a tone of enormous reasonableness, that the calls were now difficult to listen to and might be better recorded and edited. Prit replied to it himself, which he almost never does, and the reply was two sentences long, and Rowan has never been shown it and has never asked to be.

What has changed is the shape. He does not have a bake to get back to, so the call does not end at four minutes, and it has crept out to seven and on one night in June to nineteen, which cost Rowan two records and an entire segment and which she would do again tomorrow.

And he has started saying things. Not many and not often, and always sideways, in the middle of something about the football: that the house is loud in a way it was not when he worked nights; that he had not been in a bed at two in the morning for twenty-six years and did not care for it; that his daughter wants him in Dundee and that he is going to have to have that conversation with her and has been putting it off since April.

He said that last one on air, on a Thursday, at ten to three, to nine hundred people, having never in six hundred calls said anything personal at all, and Rowan sat in a room nine feet by eleven with her hand flat on the desk and said, "That is a hard one, Bill," and let four seconds of radio silence go past, which is a very long time, and which she has been told by three separate professionals was the correct call.

He said, "Aye." Then he said, "Right, that is me, God bless," which is not the sign-off, the sign-off has the second lot in it, and he has not once used the old one since the February and Rowan has never asked him about that either.