Storyboard, page 10
“A wonderful beauty is born.”
Sophia looked up sharply at Christian, who winked at her again. Nobody else had caught the reference.
“A wonderful beauty is born.
Mot a new kind of beauty …
a very old kind …
the only kind …
the beauty you want him to find in you …
the beauty that comes from inside …
the beauty that comes from you …
your own true beauty …
yours …
the only kind.”
“I’m not sure I quite understand that,” Hugh said.
“Let’s hear it again, shall we? Try looking at the pictures this time as you listen. Remember, I haven’t written any copy. This is just the feeling of the thing.”
Christian played the tape again. Damn you! Sophia thought; this is my idea, made positive. Keith and Tony Barstow stared dutifully at the lay-outs pinned to the board. Tony’s face bore the expression he wore when he went to church on Christmas Day. This was obviously quality stuff, even if he wasn’t quite certain what it was all about. He glanced sideways at P.A., who was smiling his “Now, chaps, we’re pulling together” or “Onwards to victory with Monty” smile, lips pursed, every wrinkle confident, the friendly understanding lines at the corners of the eyes mustered and on parade. Tony became all the more certain about the quality of this stuff. Keith wondered, How can I sell anything like this to Hoppness? It might be brilliant; he supposed it was; but how could he sell it? Christian ran the tape a third time. Hugh said doubtfully, “It’s very evocative, Christian, but I’m still not quite clear what you’re saying.”
Why couldn’t Hugh have the sense to admire it, Sophia asked herself helplessly. Hadn’t he learned yet that Christian wasn’t just a copywriter, and you couldn’t kill his ideas with common sense? If only Hugh would say, “That’s very good, Christian. That’s wonderful. I wish we’d come up with that. Of course, now you’ve shown us the way, we’ll try to get some of that feeling into the advertising,” then the whole thing might pass over and the advertising hardly be affected by it, because obviously Keith and Tony hadn’t yet realized that this “feeling” of Christian’s amounted to a new idea, her idea. She said, “It is very good, isn’t it? I think Christian just wants us to get a bit more romantic, cosmetic feel into things. Perhaps we’ve been a bit sort of stark and reason-why. I don’t see why we shouldn’t do that, do you, Hugh?”
Keith said with relief, “Yes, that’s exactly what I was thinking.”
Christian said, “Come now, Sophia! Aren’t you being a tiny bit unfair to your own idea?”
“Sophia’s idea?”
“Now, Hugh, you know perfectly well I never have any ideas of my own. Je suis le plus grand voleur du monde, as Picasso once said. I’ve been picking Sophia’s brains. After all, if you didn’t want the idea, I thought I might as well play about with it a bit to see what came out. But I do believe in giving credit where it’s due, and all the credit for this one belongs with Sophia.”
Mischief maker!
“Sophia?”
“Well, it was a sort of … What I wanted to say in a way, P.A., was that make-up was bad for your skin.” One of the disadvantages of being a woman was that in an emotionally tense situation one blushed more easily than a man would, and had more difficulty in breathing naturally. Nor would a man be likely to burst into tears. Sophia said, “Hugh and I did talk about the idea a bit, but it was very unformed then, and it just sounded rather silly and … and negative … so we dropped it. We really didn’t think it was worth going on with—‘Make-up is bad for your skin’.”
“Natural beauty!” Christian said. “Beauty without make-up. The real you. I must say I thought it was rather good, Sophia.”
“It is good. It’s right,” P.A. said. “It’s different. It’s what we ought to be doing.” He returned to his desk, and sat down. He spread his hands, palms downwards, on the blotter in front of him, and spoke decisively. “We seem to have achieved the object of the exercise,” he said. “Very successful. Congratulations all round. Will you see to things from now on, Hugh? I think you’ll agree that the new line’s the right one.”
“Perhaps Christian would like to—”
“Oh, I don’t suppose Christian’s got time. Too busy making a mess of his own accounts. Besides, it wants somebody good and solid to think this thing through. Too big for a dilettante, eh, Christian? Throw you to Hoppness, and they’d pull off your wings like boys with a dragonfly. Hugh’s tougher than you are. Let him do it. You’ll do it, Hugh. You won’t let them pull your wings eh?”
“I’m not always sure I should notice if they did.”
“That’s right. If we want Christian again we’ll ask him in to have a look at things, eh? No need for any more than that.”
As they left the meeting together, Hugh said, “Was that really your idea, Sophia?”
“I’m sorry, Hugh.”
“No. It was very good, I thought, once Christian had explained it. Did you and I really talk about it together?”
“More or less. I did sort of mention it, but——”
“I don’t suppose I took much notice.”
“Not much.”
“Do you mind that, Sophia? You never say.”
“Sometimes. Do you mind about my telling Christian?”
“Perhaps it’s about time you moved out of my Group. People generally do. What I’m really good at, you know, is breaking people in. If you stay too long, you might get permanently broken. That wouldn’t do. They ought to give me somebody new; somebody just down from Cambridge, who’s written all the lyrics for the Footlights. The last one I had like that lasted four months, and then went into I.C.I.”
“Hugh, you are awful. You don’t change.”
“No, I don’t change much, Sophia. Still, I think you’d better handle this campaign of Christian’s, since it was your idea. All this creative stuff gets a bit beyond me at my age.”
*
She was stiff and awkward. She didn’t want to antagonize him, but she couldn’t let him go any further; she knew she couldn’t; she felt all frozen and frightened.
“No?” he said.
“No. Really. I’m sorry.”
“Just as you like.”
As Ralph took his hand away from the breast which seemed to her unnaturally swollen, almost painfully so, disappointment washed over Sophia, loosening the stiffness, relaxing her, turning all that ice into tepid water, but weakening her, emptying her. Ralph’s arm still lay along the back of the sofa. It was awkward for him to move it away; he looked and felt awkward, doing it. Sophia wanted to say, “Come back. Put your hand back if you want to. Feel me, squeeze me, if you want to. Didn’t they ever tell you not to take No for an answer? Didn’t they tell you that women like to be … like to be …” But it wasn’t true. She hadn’t wanted him to go on. She didn’t like to be. She didn’t want … She didn’t know … she didn’t want things to change, but now they were changed, whatever happened. She had been clumsy; she had hurt his pride. Last time, the time with Paul (but she tried not to remember last time), things had gone wrong for a different reason. She had been permissive then—that was it; permissive—permissive from the beginning, and where had that landed her but in embarrassment and avoiding him on the Agency stairs? She couldn’t pretend; that was her trouble; she lacked that so valuable talent. She could go gooey, she knew. Most of her life seemed to have been spent in making a wall around all that gooeyness. But that wasn’t anything to do with passion, as men understood it. What they meant by passion was physical jerks, and crying, “Oooh! Oooh!” and digging your nails into their backs, and at first they didn’t know (didn’t care?) that this wasn’t real, and perhaps if she were good at pretending they never would know. What could she do, for Christ’s sake, when it wasn’t allowed to take people seriously, when anyway she didn’t know Ralph (or Paul, or anybody) well enough to take him seriously, and yet she hadn’t the technique to put off, to postpone a pass without rejecting it, even to know when a pass was sincerely meant or whether it was simply doing the expected thing after taking a girl to a concert? She couldn’t say, nobody could ever say, “Just at the moment I’m rather frozen up, I’m afraid, because I don’t know you, and because of rather a lot of things that have happened before. But please don’t go away. If you try again in three or four weeks’ time when I’ve grown used to you, it will probably be quite all right.” Nobody could say that; the moment was always now. So, since she could say none of these things, and since she wanted very much to stop him going, she only said, “I’ll get the coffee”.
Ralph’s ears had gone red, she noticed; that was always a bad sign in men. He began to get up from the sofa, but the table was in the way. “Please don’t bother,” he said. “I really ought to go.”
If he went now, she’d lose him. Not a ladylike thought, nor an independent one; not a career girl’s thought. It shouldn’t have mattered to her, except that now Ralph was so much more than Ralph. He was real life, a genuine person, all that. He was—oh, integrity and the values of scholarship. He did things worth doing, said things worth saying, thought things worth thinking. He showed up her artificial life. There must be some one thing which would make him stay, which would cant the whole relationship on to a normal basis, so that neither of them would feel embarrassed or under obligation to the other. “Ralph,” she said, “I would. I really would, only I’m not very good at it when I don’t know people.”
Ralph had begun to move between the edge of the table and the sofa; it was not something one could do quickly. All his actions so far had been governed by a not very clear sense of what was proper in the circumstances. An academic life does not usually put one in the way of a wide variety of sexual adventures, so that Ralph had not known exactly what was expected of him, and had been afraid that, if it were anything much, he would be shown up as inexperienced and clumsy. Sophia’s refusal had left him feeling relieved and humiliated, and ashamed of both emotions. Now he realized that she was as inexperienced in the skilful management of these affairs as he was. He stood there, with the edge of the polished table pressing into his stomach, considering. Sophia blushed. She said, “I’ll get your mac. It’s in the bedroom.” Ralph sat down on the arm of the sofa, and said, “Maybe coffee would be a good idea. Shall I help?”
“It takes some to perk.”
“Hugh drinks Nescafé.”
“Perhaps we’d better have it in the kitchen. Once you get stuck in that sofa, you never get out.”
“I’ve discovered that.”
Much later that night, as they lay almost uncomfortably close together on Sophia’s single bed, their faces just faintly visible to each other in the glow of Ralph’s cigarette, he said, “Did you mean that about wanting to get out of advertising?”
“Of course. It’s a corrupting business.”
“So I’ve heard. Still, I’d like to know a bit more about it. I thought I might write something.”
Sophia stretched out an arm in the darkness, and ran her hand down his outer flank and along the firmness of his thigh, enjoying the way the hairs curled between her fingers and the skin beneath. If only one could relax all the time, and just let things happen, how manageable life could be. At such a moment, not worrying about anything, not tense, just lying there, close, dependent and possessive, she knew that for her no career, no artistic achievement, nothing like that would give her completeness, but this warmth, this giving and getting, not sex but the afterness of it. Now indeed, gooeyness need not be held back. It was appropriate now. “I do like your legs,” she said. “People always go on about women’s legs being attractive, but I think men’s are much nicer.”
Slowly she drew her arm back across the shape of his body. If it were possible to sleep in this position, she would sleep, she thought. The point of Ralph’s cigarette waved in the air, as he searched for somewhere to stub it out. If only she could remember not to call him “darling” for at least some weeks yet, things might work out very well.
5
BLIND ALLEYS
“L.P. Peters; 117 Sawton Road; Independent; Direct Supply; Last Order July 23rd, 4 cases large, 2 cases medium, no cases economy size. Note, this order non-typical. (Reduced Price Offer.)” It was Keith’s fourth call of the morning, and the time was getting on for ten o’clock.
During a Store-Check one gets through most calls per hour between nine and ten in the morning, because there are fewer customers in the shops that early. L. P. Peters, Keith deduced, would have his greatest number of customers in the evenings when the other shops were shut. This was a shop for L. P. Peters’s immediate neighbours, a shop to run out to quickly in the rain when something had been forgotten, a shabby shop, muddled and cluttered, with goods ill-placed on the shelves and no self-service. L. P. Peters himself served behind the counter, and was helped at busy times by Mrs. L. P. Peters. His grocery counter ran down the length of the shop. Behind it, the shelves reached up to the ceiling, and there was a small step-ladder so that L. P. Peters could get things down from the top; below it, more shelves held an overflow of larger packets, mostly of breakfast cereals and washing powders; upon it there was a glass case, containing Crisps, soap and toothpaste, and a number of small dispenser units for confectionery, fish-paste and instant puddings. At the far end of the shop, a side-counter with a flap was set at right-angles to the grocery counter. At this counter, beer was sold, and cigarettes, Hall’s Empire Wine, V.P. Wine, Whiteway’s Port, Tarragona, Guinness, and Tizer the Appetizer. Elsewhere in the shop, placed wherever there seemed to be room for them, were large wire dispensers for bread, toilet paper, and the Week’s Special Offer, which was always the same jam reduced in price by the same amount. A cold cabinet held bacon, butter, margarine, and frozen fish and vegetables. A small cardboard mobile hung from the ceiling, and advertised a cake-mix L. P. Peters no longer stocked.
Keith wore a charcoal-gray suit with a white shirt, a dark tie, and a white handkerchief in the breast pocket. He wore his black Store-Check Store shoes instead of the suede shoes he usually wore to the office, and his Store-Check hat. Hoppness liked their Sales Force (and so, by extension, any other people in their employment who might call upon the Trade) to wear a hat, so that they could raise it when they entered a shop. Keith’s Store-Check hat was a black homburg. He disliked wearing a hat of any kind because his ears stuck out, so he would only put on his Store-Check hat just outside the door, and take it off again immediately he was inside. “Mr. Peters?” he said. “Good morning!”
“Oh yes?” said L. P. Peters.
“I’m from Hoppness, Silch and Company.”
L. P Peters looked worried, and a little furtive. “You’re a bit early, aren’t you?” he said. “I mean, last time you was here was——”
“I’m from the Advertising Department, Mr. Peters, not the Sales Department.”
“Oh yes?”
“I don’t know whether we’ve visited you before.” This was a lie. Keith knew perfectly well that there hadn’t been a Store-Check in this town since the war.
“I don’t know as you have. There’s a lot do come in. You can’t see them all, you know.”
“I’m sure there are.” Then jovially, “But at least I haven’t come to sell you anything, Mr. Peters. In fact, I just want you to help me, if you’ll be so good.” Then sincerely, “Of course I know you must be a very busy man.” A lie again. L. P Peters wasn’t as busy as all that, with the shop empty, and no assistant needed to help him. No, you’re not busy, L. P. Peters, Keith thought. Not as wealthy as all that either, when your first reaction to someone who might be a salesman is fear that he may want you to tie up more cash in stock. Sawton Road was a turning off the High Street, and L. P. Peters was far, far too close to the recently modernized self-service grocery of the Marlborough chain. Scraping along from month to month, knowing most of his customers by name, wondering whether to close the shop for a week’s holiday in summer, deciding he’d better not (were there little Peterses?), changing his mind and going anyway, putting up a little wall inside his head to hide away money worries and the economies he ought to make, and losing his temper with Mrs. Peters every time she came too close to the wall or suggested—but he must not sentimentalize, Keith reminded himself, about someone who was after all only a statistic, only a dying cell in a healthy organism, a cell that had to die if the organism were to grow, a cell named L. P. Peters, who had a wife, and a rather dirty white coat, and no customers at ten o’clock in the morning, for whom trade would be slack all day until round about six, when the regulars came in for bread and Tolly Ale and Woodbines and small tins of baked beans in tomato sauce and half-pounds of sausages and perhaps Glo. “I wonder whether you’d mind if I were to count how many packets of Glo you have,” Keith said. “It’s really just a sort of check on our advertising.” Did L. P Peters have the telly? Plenty of L. P. Peterses did, usually on somebody’s Easy Payments Plan. It saved them money in the long run, since with the telly they never needed to go out at night. And if the Payments were Easy enough … “I don’t know if you’ve seen any of our television commercials,” he said.
“Oh yes. There was a woman hanging out clothes.”
“No, that was for Super. We just do Glo.”
“There was two children, looking at each other like.”
“That was New Fiz.”
“Something about a washing machine. About how it didn’t hurt the rollers.”
“I’m afraid that could have been rather a lot of people. They all say that. We——”
“A girl dancing about, was it?”
“No, we——”
“About how it shone in the dark? I shall get it in a moment. There’s such a lot of them, you know; the wife and I can’t keep them straight. Was it hands?”
