Storyboard (7 page)

“My dear, he’s bound to be terribly grateful. And it does mean you’ll keep in touch. Because, darling Sophia, I really think you should. For your own good.”

*

At breakfast on Monday, Keith said, “P.A.’s going to talk to Christian today. I don’t know what’ll come of it.” He was going through one of the periods when he thought it would help Sylvia if he discussed his work with her. There were other periods when he thought it would help if he didn’t.

“To Christian? About your soap? I thought that nice old man was doing it.”

“I wouldn’t call Hugh old. He can’t be more than fifty-two.”

“Well, I don’t know, dear. I only see him once a year, at your Agency Party. I thought he was old. We talked
about cooking or crochet or something. I can’t
remember
. I wasn’t very interested.”

Keith said, “Perhaps we ought to have him over for supper one evening. I know he lives by himself.”

“If you like. It’s a long way to come.”

“We haven’t had anyone over for a bit.”

“You haven’t been home.”

Stephen said, “If you don’t look out, you’ll swallow the pollywattle.”

“Will I, Steve?”

“There’s a pollywattle at the bottom of the packet. If you don’t look out, you’ll crunch it up.”

“It’s one of those plastic animals, I think,” Sylvia said. “Don’t worry, Stephen. We’ll look out for it. Eat your breakfast.”

“If you crunch it up, it’ll grow inside you. Then you’ll have a pollywattle inside you.”

“We’d turn into pollywattles ourselves, I expect,” Keith said. “How about that, eh, Steve? We’d go
hopping
about, flapping our wings and crowing.”

“Wouldn’t go to school.”

“You’d go to a pollywattle school, and learn knitting.”

“Woooh! Woooh! Woooh!”

Sylvia said, “What are you going to do about it, then?”

“What?”

“P.A. and Christian and that old man.”

“Nothing much I can do. O.K., Steve. You’ve been a pollywattle long enough.”

“I thought you and Hugh were in a thingummy—a Group or something?”

“We are.”

“Woooh! Wheee! Pollywattle!”

Sylvia said, “Stephen, put down your spoon, and stop
playing about. Either eat your cereal, or leave it alone.”

“Don’t be hard on him, dear.”

“I wouldn’t have to be if you didn’t encourage him.”

There was a silence. Stephen ate his cereal, not
playing
with it exactly, but allowing each spoonful to remain longer in his mouth than is customary. Sylvia said, “I mean, aren’t you supposed to sink or swim together, or something? You once told me it was like the Cabinet.”

“Well, I’ve got a great respect for Hugh, naturally.”

“You sound like Mr. Macmillan.”

“If P.A. wants to call someone else in——”

“Did you try to persuade him not to? I mean, I don’t
care,
but did you?”

“No. Of course not.”

“Why not? It doesn’t matter to me anyway. It’s not my business. You’re the one who’s always talking about loyalty, and how you all work together.”

“Why are you getting at me? Of course it’s your business.” A little voice inside Keith warned, “Stop now,” but he did not heed it. “Of course it’s your
business
. You’re my wife, aren’t you? What I do is your
business
. My work——”

“Your work! Really, the conceit of the man!” The little voice inside Keith said sadly, “Too late!” Sylvia spread one end of a piece of Ryvita too carefully with butter and marmalade, and too carefully put her knife down on the plate. Please, Keith thought, as she raised it to her mouth, would God please make sure that it didn’t break in two when she bit; something as little as that could bring on one of her headaches; she was so far gone towards one already. And the child! Stephen was too quiet, his eyes too wide. All the books said not to quarrel in front of a child. Perhaps she was right
anyway
. Keith didn’t want to behave in the way they did
in American advertising novels, always knifing each other in the back, metaphorically, that is. He ought at least to warn Hugh that P.A. was thinking of asking for another opinion, so that Christian wouldn’t take Hugh by surprise, and make him look foolish. Sylvia said, “Looking after our home is my business. I’m not
interested
in your advertising.” Nothing Keith said in reply was going to sound natural, so he made no reply. Stephen said, “Can I have another piece of toast? Daddy’s going to miss his train.”

“Quite right, Steve. Darling, I must go.” He washed his hands at the kitchen sink, and went quietly up to the bedroom to put on his jacket. Some sort of gesture needed to be made. Sylvia still sat stiffly at the kitchen table, her head drooping forward as it did when she was tired, as she so often was, or depressed. He kissed the back of her neck. “I’m sorry, darling,” he said. “You’re quite right. It is unfair. I’ll have a word with Hugh.”

“‘Bye, daddy.”

“‘Bye, Steve. We’ll finish that story tonight if I can get home.”

“You never get home.”

“I shall tonight. Good-bye, dear. I’ll try to be back for dins.”

“Ring me if you can’t.”

“Yes, of course. ‘Bye.”

“Good-bye,” Sylvia said. The door closed. Soon she heard the car start; it would be left at Purley station until Keith returned. Sylvia had never learned to drive. Keith could not understand why she would not. But when the shops were so close, and the school so close, why did she need a car? They’d never had a car in the old days. She had plenty of time to walk. “Well, I
suppose
we’d better get off to school,” she said to Stephen.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do with you next week when the holidays begin.” Stephen said, “Drawing
today
.” Neither of them talked much as they walked to school. Stephen knew well enough by now when his mother was about to have a headache, and, unless he himself had any reason to fuss her, lay low. Sylvia tried to empty her mind as she walked, and simply become receptive to the world around her. One of the women’s magazines she read had recommended this as a way of relaxing tension and getting right with life. Later on, she would lie down for a while. After the washing-up, and the cleaning, and making the beds, and shopping, there would be little to do until four o’clock when she went to collect Stephen from school. She could easily make time to lie down if she felt like it. Easily.

*

Christian, who was known throughout the Agency and not least to himself as the Agency’s most brilliant man, Christian who had worked in nine different
agencies
and never stayed longer than eighteen months at any of them, Christian who had friends in show business and friends in the peerage and friends in journalism and friends in the arts and lived a rich full intellectual life, and was known to give champagne parties on Sunday mornings to which the Chairman was invited and came, Christian who had married a famous fashion model with brittle bones and no eyebrows at all and had sired two children on her whose pictures “at home” had been published on the front page of the
Tatler,
Christian who was rumoured to have been in the Navy with the Duke of Edinburgh and to have called him “Philip”,
Christian
whose professional life as a Group Head within the Agency was complicated by the fact that he grew so bored with his own accounts that he was always trying
to get rid of them but could never resist what he called the lure of a new advertising challenge and what his enemies called meddling, Christian was having a busy day.

He went to the Agency’s newest, youngest, most
cosseted
Art Director, a Pole who had come down from Cambridge to design sets for Madame Rambert, and of whom it was known that the Agency would never be able to keep him (though it tried at
£
2,250 a year) because he had a brilliant future in the theatre, and said to him, “Stefan, aren’t you bored with what you see in the papers?”

Stefan had a tiny office to himself; it was one of the conditions he had made that he could not share a room. The walls were painted white, and had remained bare. Stefan had not put up any clever
montages
of pigs in Piccadilly Circus, he had not hung paintings or
drawings
of his own or caricatures or blown-up fuzzy
photographs
of girls in the rain or even advertisements on which he had worked; he had not painted murals or draped pieces of interestingly textured fabric from part of the ceiling; the walls were bare.

In the centre of the office was a large flat board, fixed to a steel frame so that it could be tilted at any angle. Fastened to the board was a piece of cartridge paper, on which Stefan was arranging strips of cellophane of
different
colours and widths at angles to each other. These formed a kind of border to three strips of grey paper of equal width, staggered one beneath the other in the centre of the paper. These strips carried a headline,
lettered
in black. It read, “F
ASTER
! S
AFER
!
L
ONGER
-L
ASTING
! N
EW
R
ELIFE
F
OR
S
INUS
C
ONDITIONS
.”

Christian said, “And the copy?”

“Something about the strain of modern life. It should
go there, I think.” Stefan pointed to a small patch of white at the bottom right-hand corner of the page. “An interesting use of space. It is only the medical press, so I can enjoy myself.”

“What do you think about soap advertising?”

“Boring.”

“Want to start thinking about it now? Perhaps it doesn’t have to be boring.”

“I could try.”

“If you were given a free hand …”

“Are you going to give me one?”

“The only thing is, it’s Fidge Randolph’s account. I’ve just been asked for a few suggestions. Nothing official.”

“Fidge is a sweet fubsy bear, and I love him. Are you going to give me something to work on, or leave me alone?”

“Leave you alone.”

“You want something you can sell the client, or
something
to shock?”

“Let’s just shock them a bit first. We can try
something
to sell later, if we have to. Will you keep quiet about it?”

“Who talks to me? I’m the only intellectual Art Director in the building.”

“Ah, that’s so true, Stefan. But you won’t stay with us.”

“No. I shan’t stay. I’ll think about soap.”

Christian was so busy. He went down three floors to Marketing, and had a word with Peter Wicklow, Don’s assistant. He was elaborate and discreet and allusive, and he left Peter’s office with three Market Surveys, a couple of Reports on Performance, and a piece of depth research on Compulsive Washing. When Christian had
gone, Peter said, “Something up, I shouldn’t wonder,” and went off to tell Don that Christian was nosing about. Meanwhile Christian collected from the
Information
Department a folder of clippings of soap
advertisements
and another folder of clippings of cosmetic
advertisements
. He sat in the darkened Viewing Theatre, and watched over and over again all the television
commercials
the Agency had made for Glo. And at
five-thirty
that evening he just happened to be leaving the building at the same time as Sophia.

“Sophia, my bloody love,” he said. “I never see you nowadays. Are you as thirsty as I am? Come and have a drink. We’ll go to the Ritz because it’s close, because it won’t be full of advertising people, and because this is one of my grand days anyway.”

“Well, I was on my way home.”

“Now you’ll miss the rush hour. Lucky you!”

Sophia had never been to the Ritz before. There was no denying it had—well—atmosphere; it was so gray and quiet. Christian said they’d drink Manhattans,
because
he was feeling American as well as grand. Sophia had never had a Manhattan before either. Christian said it was about time Sophia moved out of Hugh’s Group, and that everybody in the Agency knew it. He said he’d had his eye on her for a long time; he was an unblushing opportunist, he said, and knew bloody well who could write in the Agency’s Copy Department, and who wouldn’t know a piece of good advertising if one hit them in the face, and Sophia could, and Christian wanted her for his Group. A man who looked like a viscount came over to them, and Christian introduced him to Sophia, and he was a viscount. They all three had Manhattans. Some people at the bar waved to Christian and the viscount, and then the viscount borrowed five
nicker from Christian and went to join them. Sophia boldly asked, “Will he pay you back?” and Christian replied, “That’s the extraordinary thing. He always does.”

Christian had a date at seven, so there was only time for one more Manhattan. Christian said, “What about this Foundation Soap thing, love? Have you had any ideas?” and Sophia said, “What’s the use of having ideas? I’m working for Hugh,” not feeling at all disloyal in saying it because everyone in the Agency knew about Hugh, and Christian said, “Poor bloody love! It must be stifling. It really must.”

So then Sophia told Christian she’d had a sort of idea. Not really worked out, just a sort of fuzzy off-
the-top
-of-the-head sort of thing. Knocking copy. Hugh just wanted to tell the same sort of story, but Sophia thought Foundation Soap had missed a trick. The Foundation Soap advertisements said, “Never a time without beauty,” which was all right really as a promise and hadn’t done them any harm, but they never said, “Make-up is bad for your skin.”

“Bad for your skin?”

“Well, it is. You have to keep putting it on, and
taking
it off. It clogs up all the pores, and then you have to buy more stuff to get rid of blackheads. When you’re not putting grease on to make your skin supple, you’re buying astringent lotion to dry it up again. It’s all so—so
contradictory,
Christian. I mean, of course we adore fussing about with lotions and creams and all that, and we read all the beauty news in the magazines, but even there you keep on getting that old bromide about
nothing
being better than cold water and a hard brush, and it does set up guilts; I’m sure of that. Manufacturers are always putting out these all-purpose cosmetics that are
supposed to do everything at once, but nobody’s come right out and said make-up is bad for your skin. Only
we
could. Nobody would need to slosh things on or pat stuff in, and they could just concentrate on lips and eyes, which are fun anyway. Do you see? And all the art work would be ravishing women with beautifully
made-up
eyes, and skin like——”