Storyboard, page 3
There was a silence. If Hugh were not going to reply to this, nor was anybody else. “Hoppness didn’t have to choose this Agency,” P.A. said. “And I didn’t have to choose this Group. If you don’t think you can do the job, say so.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t say——” Desmond Bart said quickly, and Fidge said, “Do it if we have to.” Media was silent, and so was Marketing; creative problems didn’t concern them. Keith rubbed a piece of tissue paper from the cardboard box quickly over the palms of his hands to mop up the sweat, which had begun to combine with the new product to form a light lather. Hugh sat there, a gray cat, which is used to kicks, but goes on eating. He said, “I’m sorry, P.A. We were just feeling round the problem.” He gave the little ingratiating simper he only made when he was ill at ease. “We’re all supposed to do it, I believe. One of the messenger boys goes to I.P.A. classes in the evenings, and he was telling me——”
“All right, Hugh.”
“Is there a name yet?”
Keith said, “We’re supposed to advise them.”
“They haven’t got a wrapper then, if they haven’t got a name?”
Fidge Randolph said, “Now, there we can do something modern. With shapes. Modern shapes. I see it as a kind of——”
“There is some research on colours,” Keith said.
“—kind of——”
“In fact, Packaging Section did a test——”
“You mean there is a wrapper?”
“Five,” Keith said. “Packaging Section tested five.
*
But we don’t have to accept any of them, provided we can persuade Hoppness ours is better. We’d have to be sure of that, of course.”
“But if the product hasn’t got a name——”
“They left it blank on the wrappers they tested.”
Desmond Bast said, “I’ve always wanted to do something about soap. Something atmospheric. Mood. There’s a man in France I want to use. He does marvellous things with silhouettes to music. Very sensual things.”
“Silhouettes?”
“Very dark dream-figures. I’ve been wanting to use him for ages.”
P.A. said, “Perhaps we could leave the creative people to talk this out later. You know what’s wanted, Hugh.”
“Find a name first?”
“Find an idea first.”
“Of course. An idea! What has Foundation Soap been doing about media? I know Harold wouldn’t have brought his charts if he didn’t intend to tell us.”
“I was coming to that.” P.A. was a little sharp again.
Sophia wondered whether Hugh was teasing him intentionally, as a way of saving face. Or was it a death wish there, black death beneath the gray pussy-cat mask Hugh presented to the Agency? Harold Hartley, glittering like a dentist, began to arrange his charts on the easel. “It isn’t an easy problem, reaching single women,” he said. “They tried a lot of things before settling down to a basic, rather unimaginative pattern of TV and the women’s magazines. Here you see, when they launched, they were much more adventurous….” He spoke on, his finger jabbing at blocks and circles on the coloured charts, and Sophia remembered that she ought to be taking notes. Keith Bates, she saw, was already doing so. It’s another long evening for you tonight, Keith love, she thought; I wonder how often that man gets home to his family before eight-thirty?
*
In fact, it was nine-fifteen before Keith left the Agency, nine-thirty before he reached Victoria to catch the train to Purley. It was November weather. Currents of air which were not thick enough to be called fog, and yet tasted of fog, moved sluggishly about the station, and were crossed by grubby Irishmen beating their intermittent path from the Coffee Stall to the Gentlemen’s Lavatory. The people who always sit on the benches at railway termini were sitting on benches; they did not move when trains came in, nor yet when trains went out, but made themselves as small as they could within their coats against the draught, and sat on. The day’s litter lay about on the floor. The buffet bar had that cheerless quality, at once brown and overlit, which marks off the pubs which deal with transients from those which have an habitual trade. Keith ordered a gin and bitter lemon. This was the conventional “relaxing” drink at the end of an advertising man’s day, but it didn’t relax Keith. For Keith was never relaxed, as he would tell you himself, lighting another cigarette, fiddling with a pencil, walking uneasily about the office. “I can’t relax,” he would say. “Funny! I just can’t do it. Neurotic, I suppose.”
Perhaps Keith should not have begun his career as a barrister; he had not the temperament for waiting around. Besides (he saw now) he would never have been good at it. But one drifts into these things, each stage of preparation taking one on to the next, so that when, at the end, one discovers that the whole idea was a mistake, the train has gone too far for one to be able to drop off, and all one can do is to hang on miserably, waiting for the crash. Keith had spent three years reading Law, and then a year reading for Bar Finals, and then he had been called to the Bar and had spent a further year in Chambers, and then two years simply waiting for briefs which never came; it was like being an actor in that way, except that one didn’t have an agent and wasn’t allowed to take a fill-in job as a waiter in a coffee bar or a salesman in a shop. So Keith had spent most of the time at home, had dusted, swept, made the beds, done odd jobs, mended socks, cooked, and his wife had gone out to work. For four years.
Of course there had been a few briefs, dock briefs which brought in little money, but gave him experience and the feeling that he had been of use, just as an actor has his spells in repertory on starvation wages. Those appearances in court had taught Keith (slowly because one does not accept this sort of lesson easily, since its acceptance can be mortal) that he wasn’t any good as a barrister. He didn’t enjoy it, and he flustered easily. His one success (he made a story of it now in client-conversation over drinks) had been at a county court in North London, and came only because the plaintiff took a dislike to him. She was a landlady, a rather common sort of woman who let out rooms at a high rent to labouring Irishmen, and it was germane to the case that she habitually used foul language. Primly in the box she denied this. And Keith, because he was so serious, because he flustered, because he could never let well alone, went on and on hopelessly in cross-examination, wearing out the Judge’s patience, the patience of the reporters, the spectators, even at last the plaintiff’s patience, so that she told him sharply to bugger off because he was getting on her tits, and he won his case. It was a victory not so much snatched from failure as made out of it; it did him no good in his career, and even, indirectly, the final harm.
Because Keith decided to celebrate. He had an excuse—his first case won—and he had a reason—that even he, within this victory, could see defeat. “No dins tonight,” he said to Sylvia that evening. “I didn’t make anything. We’re going out.” They took money from the housekeeping jar, and dined in Soho. It was a fine summer evening, not yet dark even after the meal was over. They window-shopped for a while after leaving the restaurant, and drifted with the crowds before taking a bus as far as Marble Arch. They walked through Hyde Park. They walked through Kensington Gardens. They walked through the summer smells of warm grass and dust. They took a winding course among the trees, hearing the traffic on the Bayswater Road only as a muted buzzing, picking their way through the lovers and others who lay together on the warm ground in the dusk. Sylvia said, “It’s funny. We’ve walked miles, and I’m wearing heels, but I’m not a bit tired.” And indeed, they moved so slowly through a dream of summer; how could they be tired?
They had been married four and a half years, since just before Keith left Oxford, while Sylvia was teaching at a school in Cowley. They had settled down into a routine of marriage; there was no exploration in it any longer, and the imposition of each upon the other was done in more subtle ways now than in bed. But when they were back in Notting Hill, and had climbed the stairs of the house in which they rented a furnished flat, and had reached the landing of the third floor, and there before them was the door of their living-room, with the door of the kitchenette to the left and the bedroom to the right, he took her hand, and opened the right-hand door. And, since what one does in a dream does not matter, when she said, “Keith! Wait a minute!” he had not waited, but had gone on, langorously, without urgency, still in a summer dream, but yet on without waiting, and even to Sylvia being sensible had not mattered at that moment, and making love was for both of them like biting into a ripe peach and being bitten all at the same time, the whole delicious sensation stretched out as long as they could prolong it, all on a summer’s evening, until at last, still dreaming, they fell into a dreamless sleep.
Sensible married couples will tell you that these are always the occasions to beware, and so it was. Once Sylvia knew that she was pregnant, there was only one decision for sensible people to make. Keith gave up the Bar, and looked for some more immediate use for his qualifications. He found a job with the Agency, and Sylvia resigned her teaching post at Richmond High School to look after their home and their child. When the child was born they called him Stephen. That was eight years ago.
Eight years. Keith had moved from the Agency’s Marketing Department, and had become an Account Executive. His seriousness, his over-conscientiousness were assets now. Everything about Keith convinced clients that Keith thought of little else in life but their business, and they were right. At first, with his allegiance divided between a number of smaller clients, Keith had been worried; there had been too much going on in his mind at once. But that was over since his appointment as Account Manager of Glo; Hoppness, Silch did not approve of divided loyalties any more than Keith did, and Glo took up all Keith’s time. They did approve of Keith, however: “We really feel he speaks our language,” they said. Keith had been round the factory, and seen how Glo was made; Keith could tell you the formula of Glo, and knew how it was different from New Fiz, Super, Shining Blue and Gentle. He had watched Performance Tests, and Product Demonstrations, and had taken part in Blind Tests. He had been on Store Checks, and had spent a week with the Glo Sales Force. He knew what Glo’s share of the market was this year, and what it had been last year, and what it ought to be next year. He read reports and wrote reports about Glo, made and received telephone calls about Glo, devised strategies for Glo, and revised strategies for Glo, and hypothesized strategies for a hypothetical Glo if Glo should ever change. Every week he took advertisements for Glo to Luton to show them to Hoppness, Silch, and came back from Luton to the Agency with suggestions for amendments which (he was genuinely convinced) improved the advertisements, and he carried the amended advertisements back to Luton the next week, and returned, just as convinced, with further amendments, and talked to members of the Creative Group within the Agency about these amendments, and became less convinced that they improved the advertisements, but inclined to think that they might reasonably be made as a gesture to Hoppness, and took the re-amended advertisements back to Luton, and became more and more worried about the client’s suggestions for yet further amendments. And when these so many times amended advertisements did finally appear in the press or on television, there was always work to be done on the advertisements which were to follow, and on test campaigns which came to nothing, or simply on the process known to Hoppness as “thinking through an idea”—a process that might continue through six months and eighteen submissions before it was decided that the idea wasn’t a very good one after all. Yes, Keith thought about Glo for most of the time. He did not, as Sophia had guessed, often get home before eight-thirty, and when he went to bed, his feet itched.
Glo was kept in Keith’s kitchen in the special plastic holder you could get by sending away the top of a packet of Glo and a postal order for one and sixpence, but Sylvia did not use it. A year after Keith had taken over the account, Glo had begun to give Sylvia a rash. In fact, nowadays all Hoppness products gave her a rash. This irritated Keith. He explained to Sylvia that there were no major differences in the formulae of any of the synthetic detergents put out by the three main companies, and that if Star (a Miles & Baker product) didn’t give Sylvia a rash, there was no reason why Glo should. It was just psychological, he said. So there was a quarrel because, over the past few years, Sylvia had grown very sensitive to words like “psychological” and “psycho-somatic”; she did not care to have them used in reference to her. She insisted that even her migraine attacks were of physical origin; she had an aunt who suffered from migraine, and these things were known to run in families.
They did quarrel sometimes, Keith and Sylvia, but not more than any other married couple, Keith thought. (He didn’t want another drink. Relaxing might be the conventional thing to do after a hard day at the office, but shouldn’t get out of hand. Besides, his train would be in by now.) Mostly about Stephen, and that too, he supposed, was usual. Stephen was such a bright, intelligent boy; he was so imaginative. Anyone could tell that he would grow up to be something—well, creative, a writer perhaps, or an actor, or a painter or musician, someone who lived in limelight, whom people looked up to, someone who had power over people, just as clients, as P.A., as so many people had power over Keith; that wasn’t a question of money (Keith made a very good salary, as a matter of fact), but of—well, power—of being the sort of person who had power. Since Keith saw Stephen for so little of the time, it was natural that he should—not spoil the boy, but make as much as he could of what time he had. They shared a world together, a world of made-up things, of gollywockets and the Fire Engine International and the brabsome tiger who swept the floors. Stephen would come and watch while Keith dressed and shaved in the mornings before going to work, and often their conversation would continue through breakfast; perhaps Sylvia felt left out sometimes, but she did have Stephen for the rest of the day, when he wasn’t at school. There oughtn’t to be jealousy between the parents over a child, Keith knew. All the books disapproved it, but it was obviously quite natural that a certain amount of jealousy should exist; one ought to accept that, and make allowances for it.
As late a train as this was never crowded; that was the compensation in catching it. Keith found an empty grubby compartment, opened his dispatch case, and began to re-read Research Section’s report on a sample consumer-reaction to the new soap. There would have to be a name, of course; indeed, there would have to be several, so that they could be tested against each other. It was Hugh’s job to think of a name. What was usually done in these cases was that a printed slip would be sent to everybody in the Agency, asking for suggestions, and a small prize would be offered for the name eventually chosen. Curious that the prize always seemed to be won by one of the Mailing Boys or a girl from the Telephone Exchange. Something wrong with the Copy Department there?—over-oriented to marketing thinking and not to names? Or was it just that Mailing Boys were closer in their basic thinking to clients? Hugh was a sound man—as sound a man as Keith himself, the same sort of man really. He was the only man for Glo. The Agency had long since discovered that brilliant creative people didn’t do on Glo; working in the Hoppness way destroyed such people, and they were likely to leave advertising altogether or to slit their wrists. But was soundness enough for this present problem? Would not brilliance, after all, be needed? The sound way to sell Foundation Soap had already been tried, and it had done very well—for Foundation Soap. This new product, if it were to establish itself, might need a new approach, a brilliant approach. But how did one get brilliant advertising through the mincing machine of Hoppness, Silch? Over and over went the wheels on the tracks; in and out of identical suburban stations went the train, stopping and starting, stopping and starting, and in the end one was bound to get to Purley, just as in the end—but no! There was no such certain destination to Keith’s train of thought.
He arrived home at ten-thirty. Sylvia was just about to go to bed; there was a casserole for him, keeping warm in the oven. He did not delay her, but ate his supper in the kitchen, and then followed her. The light on the bedside table was still on, and she was reading a book from Boots. He undressed, and got into bed. When she had finished her chapter, she turned the light out, and eventually each of them went to sleep.
Every evening, when Hugh Grover opened the door of his flat, there would be a dog looking at him. She was a miniature long-haired dachshund, called Jill, five years old, with a muzzle beginning to gray and a body that had thickened after two whelpings. She had two brown eyes, set in a warm brown pointed face; in certain lights, they glowed like amber. Her body was brindled, marked with chocolate along the joints, so that Simon Purvis had once called her the “do-it-yourself-dog” and affected to believe that Hugh had put her together from a pattern supplied by the makers of Scrapps. She was serious and sentimental, and much longer than she was high, and she stood there in the middle of the hall, with one front paw raised a little in the air and her head cocked on one side to add a note of inquiry to her permanent seriousness. Jill and Hugh would stand there, he at the door and she planted solidly on the old piece of carpet which covered the hall, just looking at each other, and then Hugh would say, “Well, Jill? Are you glad to see me?” and she would rush forward, making little moans of delight and reproach, and begin mumbling at the legs of his trousers. And at that same signal there would appear from the kitchen, living-room or bedroom of Hugh’s flat two more dachshunds, as low, as long-haired, as brown, but nothing like as broad, their tails feathered and carried high, who would throw them-themselves at Hugh, jumping and yelping in welcome as he sat on his heels and tried to pet them all three at once.
This welcome was a ritual, and could not be rushed. When it was done, from the kitchen Mrs. Rhodes, the housekeeper, would call, “Are you there, sir?” (He was always there.) “Your tea’s ready. I’m just off,” and Hugh would reply, as he always did, “I’ll have it in the kitchen, Mrs. Rhodes,” where, in any case, she would already have laid it.
