Storyboard (24 page)

Hugh said, “Try to look on the bright side, Sophia.”

“Keep my eyes shut, you mean?”

“That would be a way.”

Tony said, “Oh, I don’t know, Sophia. It’s still more interesting than anything else they’ve ever done. They were telling me they thought this was a real imaginative departure, and they’ve been wondering whether to
extend
it to some of their other products. It’s done the Agency a lot of good with Hoppness. They were really pleased with it.”

“And cut up about Keith as well?”

Creative people were impossible, Tony thought. You tried to be nice to them, and jolly them along a bit, and you fought for their ideas, but they never appreciated it. There was a sight too much licence given to creative people, in Tony’s judgment. Make them work to a tight brief and a tight time-schedule, and that was the way to get the best out of them. They didn’t understand
freedom
; they only abused it by trying to dictate marketing policy to you, or sat around and made sarky remarks. “Well, anyway,” he said. “It was a very successful meeting,” and left them to it. If ever Tony had an Agency of his own (and stranger things had happened), he’d make damned sure the creative people were kept in their proper place.

*

Sophia was weeping. It was awful, and it was unfair. It was awful for Sophia because she didn’t want to, awful for Ralph because he couldn’t bear that kind of thing. It was unfair on Sophia because she couldn’t help being a woman, and you couldn’t state a point of view
rationally when you were confused by tears. It was
unfair
on Ralph because you couldn’t rebut a point of view rationally when the whole thing had slopped over into emotion.

“You tricked me. You tricked and cheated me. It was despicable of you.”

Patience. A great calm and patience, so that she should see how unreasonable she was being. “There wasn’t a word in that article that wasn’t true. Not a word.”

“That’s not the question. It was confidential.”

She was lying now. “I told you I was writing an article,” he said.

“You told me you were writing a piece about
advertising
. You said you wanted to be balanced and sane about it all, not like those silly speeches in the House of Commons by people who hadn’t bothered to get up their facts, and not one of those pompous pieces about how it helps the export drive. You said people didn’t realize it was a com … complex of issues. We spent——” The bitterness of remembering, the humiliation of
having
been taken in! She choked, and would not face him. Her face would be all red and puffy, she knew, and what good did it do to talk about it when it had already
happened
? A betrayal was a betrayal, and you couldn’t be unbetrayed again. “We spent a whole week-end talking about it, and you took all those notes, and asked all those questions, and I thought you understood how muddled it all was, and it was so wonderful to find someone who could look at things objectively, and you said one had to try to take the Olympian view of the thing, and—Oh Christ! What’s the use? All you wanted to do was write a bitchy little piece about Foundation Soap.”

“Sophia, if telling me about it has got you into trouble at the Agency——”

“Who’s talking about that? I’m not talking about that.”

“What are you talking about then?”

“I’m talking about you. I’m talking about the kind of person you’ve turned out to be, if you want to know. I’m talking about lying and pretending, when you could probably have got what you wanted anyway by just telling me you wanted ammunition. If you weren’t so pompous and self-obsessed, you’d see that for yourself.”

Pompous! “Try to keep a sense of proportion,” he said. “It’s not pompous to——”

“Yes, it is. It’s pompous, and so are you. Pompous and self-satisfied. I don’t know why I didn’t see it sooner. I suppose I’ve been shutting my eyes to it; that’s all.”

Really, this sort of thing was impossible, and only showed what happened when one became too deeply
involved
with people; they imagined it gave them the right to say anything. “I am in fact”, he said deliberately, “writing a book about advertising. A book. In this book I intend to use a great deal of the information you gave me, after I have checked it with other sources, and I shall want to discuss in print and at length many of the issues we discussed together. So, if all you’re worried about is that your valuable contribution will not be used——”

“You didn’t say you were writing a book.”

“I hadn’t thought of it then.”

“Who’s going to publish it?” Sophia stopped weeping, and wiped her face with the sleeve of her jumper.

“I don’t know yet. One or two people are interested. I have to write a specimen chapter and a rough
synopsis
.”

“I’m going to wash my face.”

She had called him pompous, and that was
unforgivable
.
It was not pompous to be scholarly.
Sometimes
one had to be almost over-deliberate, but that was not at all the same thing. Pompous! It was such a stupid thing to say. Even allowing for her—one might almost call it hysteria—she was a bloody fool to say such a thing; it only showed how limited she was in many
important
ways. Ralph was as reluctant as the next man to admit to faults, but he knew what his faults were, and being pompous was not among them; that was one of the advantages of his lower-middle-class background. When a woman had been to bed with someone, if she truly loved and respected him, she couldn’t ever call him pompous. Suddenly Ralph had a horrible,
blistering
mental image of Sophia and himself in bed, of their making love together, of all the tender touchings, the lip-play and the finger-play and the final uniting rhythm that had been so difficult to achieve, all transfigured by that one word, “pompous” and become nasty and lubricious. Pompous people did not make love. A phrase—
the
mating
of
elephants.
How could Sophia say that to him?

Sophia wiped her cheeks with a damp flannel. She had called him pompous, and that was unforgivable. You couldn’t call people pompous. “Cheat”, “liar”—that would all pass over in a lovers’ quarrel, but never “pompous”. He wasn’t pompous. He had integrity. The two weren’t the same thing at all. Except that, even if he were keeping the rest of what she had told him for a book, it wasn’t integrity to take out the bits about Water Nymph and Foundation Soap, and print them on their own as an illustration of waste of advertising. To use it as an example in the context of a balanced article, that was one thing, but to use it on its own as an indictment was dishonest. To write a book and get it published
would take over a year (books were like babies, she had been told; they took nine months from the time you gave them to the publisher), and meanwhile that article would stand uncorrected. All those fine words—“sense of proportion”, “check with other sources”, “complex issues”—they were only being used to hide a piece of
dishonesty
, and it was pompous as well as dishonest to
pretend
otherwise.

“Why did you pick out Foundation Soap, then?” she said when she returned. “Why didn’t you keep that for your book too?”

“As it happened, that wasn’t my idea.”

“I don’t understand. You wrote it. Nobody else wrote it. It had your name at the bottom.”

“It’s perfectly simple, if you’ll only let me explain instead of——”

“Explain then.”

“I did, in fact, originally write the article in the way we’d discussed it. But when it was finished, Harvey felt——”

“Harvey?”

“Bodge. My editor. He felt that really there was enough material for a book.”

“How long was your article?”

“I don’t know. It’s not important. About three
thousand
words. It was too long, anyway.”

“And how long will the book be?”

“About sixty thousand words. Maybe more. I shall have to expand a bit, of course.”

“Yes, you will.”

“Anyway, Harvey said that not only was the piece itself rather longer than they liked, but that I’d quite simply tried to get too much in, and it might be rather—oh, too closely-textured for his readers to follow.
Journalism, even responsible weekly journalism, doesn’t get the same kind of serious attention that one would expect for a learned article. He was quite right; I should have realized that for myself. So I agreed with him, and he rang up one or two people, and there’s the prospect of a book.”

“But you published the article anyway. About
Foundation
Soap.”

“Well, yes. Harvey felt——”

“Harvey felt! What did
you
feel?”

“It was his idea, but I didn’t see why not. As a piece of reportage.” Sophia shouldn’t have asked him what he felt. He hadn’t thought about feeling anything, and now, quietly, insistently, the feeling he had refused to think about came pushing its way out of the ruck at the back of his mind. Taken out of context, the article might be considered one-sided, even though there was nothing in it which was not a fact. “There’s nothing in it which is not a fact,” he said. That, of course, was rather close to what the advertisers themselves said, except that in this case there wasn’t another side to present. It was,
incontrovertibly
, an example of conspicuous waste, and if it implied that all advertising was of the same kind, that was something he had never said, and he could hardly help it if other people were to read such an implication into it. Anyway his book would correct all that. When it came out, in about a year’s time. “I don’t see what you’re so upset about anyway,” he said. “Anyone would think you took advertising seriously. You told me yourself you were getting out of it, and going into something
worthwhile
like teaching. You said advertising corrupted the people who engaged in it, and you’d rather do a real job, and take less pay.”

“I——” The unfairness, to bring that up! One said
things, and in a way one meant them, and in a way one was just saying them; everybody knew that. It was
symbolic
truth, not meant to be taken as a statement of immediate intention. “Why bring that up?” she said.

“Why bring it up? You brought it up. You said
yourself
——”

“If you’d only just admit that you’ve been duped by this Bodge man, and tell me you’re sorry——”

“—you were going to give the whole thing up. I
suppose
I was a fool to believe you. You advertising people, you live amongst lies for so long that after a while——”

“—instead of making excuses for yourself in that
pompous
way, I could respect you for it. Only it would take more moral courage than you’ve got, I suppose, so you just go on pretending——”

“What do you mean—’duped’?”

“Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it?”

“No, it isn’t.”

“He wanted one sort of article, and you gave him another.”

“What’s that got to do with it? You don’t think I’d ever——”

“No, of course you wouldn’t, Ralph.” She was tired now, and could see clearly. He wasn’t so much—Ralph. Not as intelligent as she’d wanted to believe. Not as honest. If he were, as she had believed him to be, the opposite of the people in her world, why then, she hadn’t realized that he would have the opposite of their good qualities also, that he would lack common sense, that he would lack judgment. He could be flattered. He could be fooled. He wasn’t as tolerant as Hugh, as
considerate
as Keith, as intelligent as Christian. He could be weak. Her mind turned over from him in a weary revulsion. She said, “If Harvey Bodge had told you to
rewrite it because it was too—oh, balanced, or whatever you want to call it—integrity would have come popping out of you like goose pimples. So he told you it was too good for
The
Radical,
and ought to be made into a book, and you rewrote it anyway, just as he wanted it. So you’re bloody stupid, as well as bloody pompous.”

Ralph could feel the facade he kept for the world and for himself, cracking and falling apart like the cat in the Tom and Jerry cartoons. It would come together again, just as the cat always came together again as good as new after every disaster, but not as quickly as the cat. “I
am
going to do a book,” he said, but it was just words. “I’ll get my coat,” he said. People ought not to be allowed to hurt people. Women ought not to be allowed men.

Walking down the Fulham Road, he remembered that his toothbrush and shaving things were still in the bathroom at Sophia’s flat, but he would not go back for them.

*

Tony Barstow said, “Nearly home now. Just one or two little things they’d like us to strengthen. Like here where it says, ‘No ring round the bowl’, they’d like you to add the words, ‘No ring at all’.”

“No ring round the bowl—no ring at all.”

“How about this article in
The
Radical,
eh? Proper old schemozzle there is about that. Hoppness say they think there’s been a leak. Luckily the chap’s got one or two of his facts a bit wrong, so Arnold’s going to write a letter. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. Nobody in our
market
reads
The
Radical.
”

*

Ralph hadn’t been to the office. It was one of the days when he didn’t have to go in if he didn’t want to, and
he didn’t want to, so he hadn’t gone. He’d spent much of the morning at the British Museum, but he hadn’t been able to settle to anything. One oughtn’t to allow oneself to be upset by what uninformed people said, but of course one did, and was. Ralph could see Sophia’s point of view. The position was not as simple as she thought, but no position ever was as simple as people thought; the practice of scholarship taught one that at least. He left the Reading Room, and wandered for a while among the acres, as it seemed to him, of marbles, which very soon began to look identical. The process of making things available to people in museums entailed taking them out of use, taking these marbles out of the light and into the gloom, taking them out of the place where they had been designed to be and into a place where everything looked more or less the same and institutional with it. Reactionary, heretical thought! Better to preserve things, even in a museum, than have them destroyed and motels go up in their place. His own mother had kept a great many useless objects in a
cupboard
under the stairs.