31st Of February (9 page)

“Iss miraclus,” said Mr Divenga, whose attention seemed to have wandered. “Pleased to meet, Mr Anderson. Shall we go on now?” The directors about-turned.

“Is Number One the final form of your preparation?” Anderson asked. “I ask partly because I think we should impart a slightly different odour from the one it has at present before putting it on the market, and partly because I felt a rather curious sensation when I used it this morning.” Then Anderson made the most awful error of his advertising career. “I don’t know whether you’ve tried it yourself, Mr Divenga–” Three directorial faces looked back at him from the doorway, frozen in expressions of horror. Anderson stopped, speechless. But Mr Divenga seemed merely puzzled. “Senashun, what is senashun?” he asked.

“A kind of burning feeling just for a moment or two.”

An expression almost of alarm appeared on the little man’s face; but it vanished in a moment. “Iss sample,” he said, pointing to the pot on Anderson’s desk. “Iss all the time more miraclus. Experiment lavatories,” he said with a smile at Anderson which showed a mouthful of splendid teeth, “Soon get rid of senashun.”

He had gone, and the directors followed him. Mr Pile cast one backward glance over the top of his pince-nez at Anderson, and the glance was not friendly.

4

Jean Lightley stood awkwardly in front of his desk, with her weight resting on one foot.

“So you brought in my mail at about twenty-five past nine.”

“Yes, Mr Anderson.”

“You’re absolutely certain that this letter wasn’t with it?”

He held up Valerie’s letter upside down, and some distance away from Jean.

“I’m sure, Mr Anderson.”

“And it wasn’t lying on the desk when you brought in the mail?” She shook her head. “How do you know? It might have been put under another paper. That’s possible, isn’t it?”

A tide of colour went up from Jean Lightley’s neck into her face. “Yes,” she whispered, “but I don’t think so.”

“Now look, Jean, this is important. Are you sure you didn’t see anybody come into my room between half past nine and the time I came in this morning?”

“I didn’t, Mr Anderson,” she said. “But of course I wasn’t watching the door. I passed up and down the corridor though.” She sounded doubtful.

“All right, Jean.” He remembered the calendar. “Has that magic calendar of mine been behaving itself?”

“Yes,” she whispered. She almost bumped into Charlie Lessing at the door in her eagerness to get out. The copywriter looked after her.

“What’s on your mind?” Anderson asked. “And by the way, where were you at nine forty-five this morning?”

Lessing looked” injured. “I was at the BM historically researching into the history of shaving. The old English was ‘sceafan,’ perhaps derived from the Latin ‘scabere,’ which means scratch, or the Greek ‘skapto’ which means dig. ‘We’re not going to sceafan any more’–yes?”

“No.”

“A shaving tool was first known in the twelfth Egyptian dynasty,” Lessing said imperturbably, “and became common in the eighteenth. ‘The Egyptians had a word for shaving – modern man uses Depilo.’”

“Don’t keep calling it Depilo, that’s no good. Have you seen Mr Divenga?”

Lessing grimaced and spread out his hands. “Depilo? De pillow? Ain’t that what you sleep on, no? So there’s nothing to history, eh? Out, damned history.”

“Keep it up your sleeve. But I don’t think we’ll ever get past VV. Let’s look at that list of names Greatorex has made.”

“Some of them aren’t bad.”

They bent over the list. “All these portmanteau names are no good,” Anderson said. “Can’t be patented. And things like Secshave are no good either. But we might put forward –” The house telephone rang and he picked it up. VV’s voice said:

“Hey presto.”

“What’s that?”

Gleefully the voice repeated: “Say hey presto.”

“Hey presto.”

“No no. Say ‘Hey presto’ – can you see that at the top of an eight-inch triple? ‘Say Hey Presto – and forget about shaving.’ ‘Say Hey Presto for a silk-smooth jawline.’ ‘Say Hey Presto and no more cottonwool.’”

“Cottonwool?”

“After you’ve cut yourself shaving.” VV’s voice was faintly dubious. “Perhaps that one’s a bit obscure. But you see the possibilities. I think we’ve really got something with Hey Presto, don’t you?”

“I thought we were out for humanity, not humour.”

VV chuckled happily. “This is human and magical at the same time. Think it over, boy. Then come in and see me.”

Anderson put down the telephone, and began methodically to tear up the sheet of paper containing Greatorex’s names. Reverton’s square head was poked round the door, for once pipeless. He said with mild interest: “Copy Department having fun tearing up copy?”

“VV’s had a brainwave. He’s found a name for our anti-shave preparation. Hey Presto.” Decisively Anderson tore the sheet of paper across again, and dropped it in the wastepaper basket. “There go about a hundred ideas for names.”

Reverton’s square face and Lessing’s round one both looked serious. “It’s got something,” Lessing said.

“‘Say Hey Presto – and forget about shaving.’” Anderson was ironic.

“Yes, I can see that,” Reverton said. They were his highest words of praise. “You don’t like, Andy?”

“It’s not whether I like it – though I think it stinks. But it’s just exactly the line he told us not to work on.” Reverton raised his eyebrows. “Humanity, not humour, he said, and I think he was right. Is ‘Hey Presto’ human? It sounds pretty comic to me.”

“Now look, Andy,” Reverton said earnestly, “You’re losing your sense of proportion. It’s good this name, don’t you agree, Charlie?”

“I think so, yes.”

“All right then. You know me, Andy. I’m one of the boys myself; I think like you, I know what’s on your mind. You like ideas to come from the copy boys and the Studio and then go up to the directors, not come down the other way. So do I. We all know directors are pretty dumb – I ought to know, I’m one myself.” He laughed heartily. “But it can happen that a director gets hold of a bright idea. This is it.”

Perversely, against the sense which told him he had better keep silent, Anderson said “I still think it stinks.”

The telephone rang. Anderson picked it up and made a face.

It was Bagseed. Reverton and Lessing went out. With an effort, Anderson adjusted a tone of false joviality over his voice and said, with the forestalling technique familiar to advertising executives and others engaged in selling material which they have had no hand in producing, “I know what you’re after, Mr Bagseed, you’re after those drawings.” The forestalling technique was justified upon this occasion by the fact that, at the moment these words were spoken, Jean Lightley came in with drawings in her hand. Mr Bagseed whined, cajoled and threatened until Anderson said brightly: “Those drawings are on the way up to you
now,
Mr Bagseed.” He looked at the drawings, which showed odiously fat little girls and unnaturally demure little boys wearing a variety of clothing, and told Jean Lightley to send them up immediately to Kiddy Modes. When she had left the room he tilted his revolving chair back against the wall, and sat staring at the green carpet. Looking up, he was surprised to see the neat brown suit of Greatorex in front of the desk.

“I knocked, but you didn’t answer.” Greatorex coughed. “I wondered if you’d had a chance to look at those names for the new preparation.”

Anderson pointed to the wastepaper basket. “There they are.” He held up a warning finger. “Don’t get the idea they were no good. I thought two or three of them were pretty bright. But that doesn’t matter.” He let the revolving chair drop to the ground with a bump. “What matters is that VV has had an idea himself.”

“That’s Mr Vincent?”

“That’s Mr Vincent. He’s decided to call the stuff Hey Presto. That’s the decision and there’s no argument about it, unless VV changes his mind. So –” He indicated the torn up pieces of paper.

“Hey Presto,” Greatorex said. “Well, that’s a pretty good name.”

I think it’s a terrible name. I’m the creative man on the account. But that doesn’t matter either.” Anderson tapped the desk with his finger. “Lesson number one in advertising. Be original, but don’t be too original, because people won’t like it. And remember that until you get near the top nine-tenths of what you do won’t even be considered. You’ll sweat your guts out for no purpose whatever. It’s disheartening, but that’s the way it is. Now, here’s advertising lesson number two.” He laid another finger on the desk. “Have you got another copy of that list? All right then, don’t throw it away. VV may change his mind – or the client may not like VV’s idea – then that list may be very useful. Understand?” Greatorex nodded, but looked at him oddly as he left the room. Anderson reflected again that he was a fool to be saying such things. A month ago he would not have said them. Why was he saying them now?

He pulled out of his pocket the letter from Val, spread it before him on the desk, and read every word of the letter carefully as though in the hope that the wording of those hurried phrases or the shape of the handwriting or the texture of the blue paper would tell him something of the circumstances in which this letter had been written, and to the utterly unknown and unsuspected lover who now lay like a shadow across his past life. Who had been her lover? Somebody in his own office, somebody to whom Val had talked of him, laughing about him as a cuckold almost too easily deceived. Who could it have been? Reverton, Lessing, Wyvern, Vincent? She had known them all slightly, and thought little of them. It was impossible that she could have written to any of those men the words on the sheet of paper, that she should have said to any of them, “I love you dearly.” And yet she had done so; in death she triumphed over him through hasty words of love. What assignations did this letter represent, what clandestine meeting, what furtively delightful brushing of hands even in his presence, what pleasant deceits! Reverton, Lessing, Wyvern, Vincent: which of them had been her lover? The letter gave him no answer.

5

The small window of Anderson’s office looked on to the backs of three similar blocks of office buildings, separated from Vincent Advertising by a deep, narrow well. On three sides, looking out of Anderson’s window both upward and downward, one could see through other windows girls typing, men surrounded by sheets of paper, girls looking in filing cabinets and sharpening pencils, men making notes in books or speaking to strange machines, tea being made and drunk. Wyvern was fond of standing at the window and saying that the contemporary world could be seen in microcosm; with, he added too aptly as he stared down the dark well, the bottomless pit which was the destination of all worshippers of Mammon, all those who sold their souls for a mess of pottage, all who had installed a piece of clockwork in their heads in place of a mind.

Anderson’s room was never fully illuminated by sunlight, but on sunny afternoons a bright searchlight shaft would cut across his desk, liven the colour of a small, sharply defined area of carpet, and play upon the hatstand. This February afternoon was sunny; and giving himself an occasional quarter turn in the revolving chair, Anderson sat watching the parallelogram of sunlight become narrower and narrower until it was a finger strip touching one edge of his penstand and gleaming on a worn segment of carpet. The telephone rang, people came in and out asking questions and bringing tea; he made no attempt to do any work, but sat staring in front of him. He thought – although the word is not truly applicable, for the images that passed through his mind seemed almost wholly casual and involuntary – of Val in relation to those four men, of her gestures and actions in their company. One day at the annual outing Lessing had helped her out of a charabanc. Anderson saw now with strange clarity the grip of Lessing’s hand upon her arm just below the elbow, fingers pressing deeply the soft flesh of the upper arm. Lessing, Lessing, a randy married man? Once at a party, Val had been missing for half and hour and then had returned, dragging somebody by the hand, saying: “Look what the cat’s brought in.” There, smiling behind his pipe, letting himself be pulled into the room, with a great show of good-humoured reluctance, was Reverton. But Reverton, like Lessing, was a man happily married, with two children. Surely not Reverton. Wyvern? A disappointed artist, tediously cynical, always droning on about his obligation to his mother. But then Val had always liked them to go out drinking with Wyvern because she said he was such good company. There was a particular ridiculous phrase they used instead of saying “Cheerio.” Anderson saw Wyvern raising his glass and saying “Shorter days,” and a clink as Val’s glass struck it and she responded: “Longer nights.” And VV? But he could recall nothing about VV in connection with Val, except a vague impression of the elaborate courtesy with which he always treated women.

The afternoon passed away; the sunlight faded, and the daylight; Jean Lightley came in, touched the electric switch and exclaimed: “Why, Mr Anderson, you’re sitting in the dark. I thought you had gone home.”

Anderson, slouched in the revolving chair, moved a little.

“No, Jean, I have not gone home.” And I should like, he thought as he caught among those other glimpses of the past a picture of the pink bedroom, the modernist sitting room, the dishes in the sink, the thin layer of dust over all, I should like never to go home.

6

“Down hatches and mud in your eye,” said Molly O’Rourke. “This is my fourth and I can’t feel a thing. They’ve doctored the whisky. I say, I say,” she called. The barman came up. He was a large man with a sad, ugly prize-fighter’s face. Several strands of almost colourless hair were plastered down on his head. Molly thrust her nose and her glass forward at the same time. “Is this stuff doctored?”

“I beg your pardon?” The barman’s voice was surprisingly almost a tenor.

“Castrated, if you’ll pardon my French. Do you adulterate,” Molly O’Rourke said with a twitch of her chalky nose, “The potency of this allegedly Highland distillation with an ad-mixture of—”