Storyboard (14 page)

Later on, as Keith found himself discussing seriously with the Manager whether it would lead to more sales if customers were routed clockwise or anti-clockwise round the store (for the Manager had been on a training course, and knew that such things should not be left to chance), it came to him that perhaps Consumer Research was the answer. It was surprising that he had never thought of it before. If he were to find Sylvia a job as an interviewer, it would be something that she could do in the mornings while Stephen was at school, leaving the afternoons free for shopping and the house, and in the evenings —oh, she would meet so many people, see inside so many houses, hear so many amusing things said, experience at second hand so many little human problems; there would be plenty to talk about. It wasn’t a job that
anybody
could do; he could tell her that, without any doubt.
The Consumer Research interviewers had to be—what was it?—practical psychologists. The organization only accepted people with training—trained nurses, trained teachers, just like Sylvia. If he could get her interested, there was no end to what she could make of it. An article for a women’s magazine, a little talk for
Woman’s
Hour
on the B.B.C.—so much use could be made of her
experiences
to build up Sylvia’s self-esteem, to extend her interest in life. He would talk to Donald. It could be arranged. He would set it up first, and then tactfully, making it seem as if
she
were helping
him,
he would sell the scheme to his wife. With so much experience in
selling
, he ought to be able to do that at least.

*

“Facts, Ralph!” said Harvey Bodge. “Just try to get the facts, my dear boy. That’s a researcher’s job, eh? You’re used to it.” Ralph said he was. “Facts make good journalism,” Harvey Bodge said, “and what’s more, they keep our hands clean. We must have clean hands, Ralph. We’re not one of the popular dailies. If we don’t have clean hands, we have nothing. It’s got to be facts for us. Find out what these people spend a year in confectionery advertising. Or tobacco. A million a year so that
children’s
teeth will rot more quickly. Two million to
promote
cancer. Facts shock. Opinion never does.”

The strain of any close relationship is living up to people, Ralph had discovered; that’s why children run away from home. If one were going to have a love affair at all (and after a month of it, Ralph was
beginning
to take his own for granted) then it ought to be comfy. D. H. Lawrence or no D. H. Lawrence, it seemed to Ralph that all the best things about love were the comfy things. Lying in bed together late of a Sunday morning, coffee and
croissants
(bought by Sophia at a
South Kensington
pâtisserie
)
for breakfast with butter spread thick and Tiptree jam, each of them reading a Sunday paper at the kitchen table (if Sophia would only get that other enormous polished thing moved out of the living-room, they wouldn’t have to sit around in the kitchen), going for a walk together or to the National Film Theatre in the afternoon, the Sunday roast in the evening with wine he would buy from the Off Licence, talking a while, music on the record-player, then back to bed again. A love affair was for the week-end; that was the time for it. Comfy. Comfy and cosy and
uncommitted
. What wasn’t comfy was to have to live up to somebody else’s idea of you. The strain of an affair with Sophia was that, although she looked up to him and deferred to him, which was pleasant enough, and wasn’t goofy and didn’t demand expensive entertainment or, indeed, that he should ever do anything he didn’t want to do, she did want him to
be
—not
to do, but to be. She expected qualities in him. She expected him to be
intelligent
and honest and civilized and considerate and all that; “expected” not in the sense in which the word is generally misused to mean the nagging of somebody who knows one doesn’t have those qualities, but thinks one ought to have them. No, Sophia really expected things of him. She thought he had them, and was
disappointed
whenever he showed that he hadn’t.

“How is the money spent? Where does it go?”
Harvey
Bodge said. “People always want to know that. Our sort of people, any sort of people,
fascinated
by money. I wish they weren’t, but they are. Find out what things cost. How much wastage. Facts. Suppose one
thirty-second
television commercial costs more to produce than the whole damned extravaganza in which it
appears
, eh? How about that? How much do those little
animals cost that they give away in the breakfast cereals? How many people enter for their competitions? If there are half a million entries, who reads them? Not Lady Barnett, eh? Not Lady Lewisham! Not any other lord or lady or television personality; you can’t tell me that. Facts. What do they mean, ‘Truth in Advertising’? Do they use the new miracle cleanser in their
demonstrations
, or is it really acid, eh? What about it? Suppose all the food’s made of rubber? Facts.”

Like so small a matter as being late for dinner on Wednesday. Of course he should have telephoned, but he was still new enough at journalism to forget time
during
the bustle of a press day. So he had left the office late, and he had hurried back to the flat to get a bath, and change into older, more comfortable clothes, and he had actually been in the bath when Sophia herself had telephoned, so that Hugh had taken the call. It was embarrassing. She, he supposed, had been embarrassed enough at having to call (except that she hadn’t had to call; she must have known he would come when he could), and he had been embarrassed at being claimed like a parcel or a pet—“Hugh, has Ralph left yet,
because
dinner’s getting spoiled?” And Hugh had fussed, not knowing what to reply, and had tiptoed like a
pussyfoot
conspirator to the bathroom door, and whispered, “Have you gone or are you here?” If one’s guests were late, they were late. One didn’t ring them up about it; one accepted the fact, and turned down the gas for a while. Sophia was getting to be altogether too
impossible
.

Harvey Bodge said that he could see this investigation working out not as one article, but a series of articles. It could be important. It was bound to lead to questions in the House, and might trigger off a Royal
Commission
.
So Ralph must be sure to get the facts. Ralph had already begun to feel a little ashamed of the pink file of printed material which was all he had so far collected. The Legion Publicity Reports would tell him what was actually spent on advertising and by whom, but as for such matters as the cost of making a television
commercial
, rubber food, faked demonstrations, and all the trickery that Harvey Bodge was hinting at—well, he supposed that Sophia could help him there. He would have to be honest with her. He would have to tell her why he wanted to know. If she were really, as she had said she was, eager to leave advertising, she’d probably be glad to help. A ritual purification. Queen’s Evidence. “Just facts, Ralph,” Harvey Bodge said. “Stark,
unemotional
, unembroidered facts. If we don’t
exer cise
——”

“A responsible judgment?”

“That’s right.” There was the famous twinkle, just as it had flashed out, indomitable in spite of swollen feet, at every halt during the Aldermaston march, just as it had been caught and fixed by Karsh of Ottawa, when
Harvey
Bodge had been making a lecture tour under the sponsorship of the C.C.F. Party of Canada. “If we don’t exercise a responsible judgment, Ralph, there’s nobody else who will.”

What with the reportage and the reviewing and the bits of sub-editing when the Assistant Editor was doing his fortnightly television programme,
The
Straight
Answer,
for Granada, Ralph wasn’t getting much time for his own work, and now this investigation, it seemed, was to eat up his time entirely. It was worth doing, or so he supposed; Harvey Bodge would say, no question of it. But it wasn’t what he had come to London to do.

“Starshot Productions. Director: P. Sedges.
Cameraman
: J. Hatch. Scene 27035. Take 16.”
Behind the chalked numerals of that “16”, Sophia could see “15”, “14” and “13” inadequately erased. On take 15, the little girl had forgotten her words. On take 14, the camera had begun tracking in too late; on take 13 too early; on take 12 it had joggled on the track; nothing had seemed exactly right with take 11; take 1 had been so long ago, and anyway one didn’t expect just one take of a shot. Nevertheless, they might have to end up by printing take 1. The Clapper Boy held up his board before the camera. He was a very young man in a very striped T-shirt and faded jeans; his name was Ted, and he intended, he had told Sophia, to emigrate to Canada where there was no class distinction, as he had heard. “Quiet, please! Keep it very quiet, please!” the
Assistant
Director said. The bell rang, and the red light glowed outside the studio door. If there were ever a fire in the studio, they would not be able to find a louder bell to give the alarm, and would wait there, quiet and obedient as mice, for the Director to say, “Cut!” and release them. From a concealed cubby-hole at one end of the studio there came a
beep-beep,
and then a yip which meant, as Sophia now knew, “Sound running!”—the Mixer, who was a taciturn man, kept a Sealyham, and had trained it to speak for him in these matters. “Running!” said the Cameraman; “Mark it!” said the Assistant Director; “Poppity Pops. My Mummy Knows. Take Sixteen,” said Ted, the Clapper Boy; then he shook the wooden clapper board in the face of the camera, made a little bob, and withdrew. “Now, Felicity!” the Director said winningly, and a little girl, sitting with painted precocity in a blaze of studio lights, dipped her spoon into a bowl of breakfast cereal. The
camera began to move slowly forward along its wooden tracks. (Why couldn’t film cameras have rubber tyres like the ones in the television studios?) Just out of camera range, the Director jumped up and down, and smiled, and made little encouraging gestures at Felicity. A one and a two and a three, and she halted with her spoon halfway to her mouth, parted her lips (“A big,
big,
smile, Felicity!”) and spoke in the careful accents of the Italia Conti, the Cone Ripman or the Aida Foster school. “My mummy——” she said. “Hold it!” said the Cameraman, “she moved too far. Her pigtails went out of frame.” “O.K. Cut it! Save the lights!” the Assistant Director said, “And open the doors, somebody. My God, it’s hot in here.” The little girl put down her spoon demurely, said, “Felicity’s tired,” and burst into tears. Ted, the Clapper Boy, wiped the “16” off his board, and chalked in “17”.

It was all ready now; it was all done. The lay-outs for the press advertising of Water Nymph, the new
Cosmetic
Soap (not “Petal” any more, and not “Improved” any more; Christian had pointed out that if something were said to be new, people expected it to be improved anyway, and that no good would be done to the general cause of advertising by leading them in any way to question that assumption), the lay-outs, the television storyboards, a tape of the sound, they were all done. Sophia could afford to give her mind to Poppity Pops again for a while. She could afford to spend a day
shooting
. (How upper-class that sounded! Out with the guns on the moors, two paces behind the dog, which was two paces behind its master. So different from the lights and the fug and the strained tempers where now, in her own different manner, she shot!) She could afford to be away from the office. Indeed, it was politic. If Keith or any of
the Account Group were beginning to fuss with second thoughts, she would rather be unavailable. (“Tell them they can ring the studio if it’s really urgent.”)

The Poppity Pops lay there in the dish, losing some of their sparkle as the bright lights were switched off
between
takes. Each Poppity Pop had been painted with glycerine. Powdered glass would have given them even more of a sparkle, but little Felicity had to put the
Poppity
Pops in her mouth. When each take was over, Felicity spat the Poppity Pops into a bucket, and the dish was topped up again from the pile which Props was industriously painting. Because Poppity Pops sparkled so in the dish, they brought a sparkle to the eyes of your family, when you gave them Poppity Pops for breakfast. That was why you should bring the
Poppity
Pops sparkle into
your
home. Children know that Poppity Pops are
fun
to eat, but Mummy knows that the makers of Poppity Pops have added honey for energy,
vitamin
C for health, calcium for growing bones, and many other essential vitamins and minerals the body needs.

It wasn’t that Sophia was unreasonable. One expects consideration even from a stranger, and all the more from one’s—Sophia boggled at the word “lover”. From Ralph then. She had a right to expect consideration from Ralph. If you’re—if you’re fond of people, you put yourself in their place sometimes. You say, “I’m late. She’ll wonder where I am. I’ll ring up.” You can’t know, of course, you can’t possibly know of the mixture of anxieties, reproaches and self-reproaches that run together, lapping and overlapping in her mind—“Has he been run over? Should I turn the gas off? Why hasn’t he rung? He might at least ring? If I finish
cooking
, and just try to keep things warm, they’ll dry out. Should I have started so early? If he’s been run over….
Absent-minded. May not look where he’s going. A bus. A lorry. Lying there. Crowds of people. Nobody
helping
. Me just watching from outside the people. Blood. I’ve never been able…. Has he forgotten? Everything spoiled. If I made some more sauce, and poured it over? Inconsiderate. Terrible to have hated him for being late, when all the time he’s lying there.” You can’t know about all that if you’re Ralph; you can’t even guess at it. But you can ring up. You can do that much. Sophia wasn’t being unreasonable in thinking that he ought to have phoned. It wasn’t as if she’d liked phoning Hugh to find out. She’d hated it, as a matter of fact.