Storyboard (12 page)

Christian said, “I did do something, but I’m not sure
I want to show it, P.A. It’s too off-beam, I think. When I talked to the Marketing people, I got the idea that this stuff would go out through chemists. But if it’s just going to be the usual Hoppness outlets——”

“What do you mean? Of course it’s going out through chemists. That’s our recommendation. Put this stuff into grocery outlets, and you’ll downgrade it.”

“Oh!”

Keith said, “They haven’t actually accepted that recommendation, P.A. They’re still considering it in terms of the general marketing strategy. They were
going
to give me some kind of preliminary opinion on it next week.”

“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.
Christian
, what have you got to show?”

Christian was at ease. He returned to his seat by the window. “Well, nothing so clear cut, I’m afraid,” he said. “I haven’t been working as hard as Hugh’s Group, partly because I’m naturally lazy, and partly because I’ve got too much else to do. Fidge, I wonder if you’d mind taking those lay-outs of yours down for a moment? We can always put them back again, later, if we really want to. I’ve got some bits of paper I’d like to pin up. And a tape. All very rough. Not finished like yours. No cellophane, Fidge, so they’re probably not even clean any more. All I wanted to do was set a sort of mood, you see. Old stuff really—not new at all, P.A.—as old as your approach, Hugh, but new for Hoppness. I asked Stefan to do me one or two things. I knew you wouldn’t mind, Fidge. He was telling me he gets very bored, and I know you’re overworked, so I didn’t want to bother you with them.” He took two lay-outs from a green folder, and pinned them to the board. They were very large, much larger than the size in which they might be
expected eventually to appear, and Stefan had covered the mounts with newspaper, a device which contrived to make the lay-outs themselves seem even more striking and original than they were already. They were two treatments of the same theme. On neither were there any words. “Very rough. Just scribbles really,”
Christian
said. “We haven’t bothered about copy or a
headline
or anything. Just the idea.” Roughly, strongly drawn in ink on cartridge paper, two women faced each other. Except that, Sophia saw, they were not two
women
, but rather two aspects of the same woman. On the left, she stood all virginal, her hair loose, her eyes clear. A heavy blue (was it poster paint or pastel?—pastel by the texture) covered the garment she wore, which was more a robe than an ordinary dress, and which flowed down to the bottom of the picture where it met and mingled with the heavy gold brocade of the ball-gown of the girl on the right. And this girl—this woman—this woman-girl—the twin of the other—wore her hair short, and stood there poised, confident, her eyes demure, in her sophisticated expensive dress, as beautiful as her other self and certainly not profane, as innocent indeed, but worldly with it, for both aspects of the girl in the lay-out represented an ideal. On one of the lay-outs, dawn and midnight gave a kind of background. On the other, blobs and splotches of blue and gold ink, scratchings and hatchings of black lines, combined to make a texture. “Just the feeling of the thing,” Christian said, and switched on the tape-recorder.

Sophia had heard the voice somewhere before on some Third Programme play with
musique
concrète.
So
Christian
had tapped his friends for talent. It was a good voice, she thought, both what people called “warm” and what people called “cool”—some confusion about
words there! Well then, it was a relaxed voice, limpid, forming the words and dropping them into time like pebbles in a pool. And it was also a friendly voice, warm in
that
way, speaking directly to you about something which mattered. This is what it said:

Sophia looked up sharply at Christian, who winked at her again. Nobody else had caught the reference.

“I’m not sure I quite understand that,” Hugh said.

“Let’s hear it again, shall we? Try looking at the
pictures
this time as you listen. Remember, I haven’t
written
any copy. This is just the feeling of the thing.”

Christian played the tape again. Damn you! Sophia thought; this is my idea, made positive. Keith and Tony Barstow stared dutifully at the lay-outs pinned to the board. Tony’s face bore the expression he wore when he went to church on Christmas Day. This was obviously quality stuff, even if he wasn’t quite certain what it was all about. He glanced sideways at P.A., who was
smiling
his “Now, chaps, we’re pulling together” or “
Onwards
to victory with Monty” smile, lips pursed, every wrinkle confident, the friendly understanding lines at
the corners of the eyes mustered and on parade. Tony became all the more certain about the quality of this stuff. Keith wondered, How can I sell anything like this to Hoppness? It might be brilliant; he supposed it was; but how could he sell it? Christian ran the tape a third time. Hugh said doubtfully, “It’s very evocative,
Christian
, but I’m still not quite clear what you’re
saying
.”

Why couldn’t Hugh have the sense to admire it, Sophia asked herself helplessly. Hadn’t he learned yet that Christian wasn’t just a copywriter, and you couldn’t kill his ideas with common sense? If only Hugh would say, “That’s very good, Christian. That’s wonderful. I wish we’d come up with that. Of course, now you’ve shown us the way, we’ll try to get some of that feeling into the advertising,” then the whole thing might pass over and the advertising hardly be affected by it,
because
obviously Keith and Tony hadn’t yet realized that this “feeling” of Christian’s amounted to a new idea,
her
idea. She said, “It is very good, isn’t it? I think Christian just wants us to get a bit more romantic, cosmetic feel into things. Perhaps we’ve been a bit sort of stark and reason-why. I don’t see why we shouldn’t do that, do you, Hugh?”

Keith said with relief, “Yes, that’s exactly what I was thinking.”

Christian said, “Come now, Sophia! Aren’t you being a tiny bit unfair to your own idea?”

“Sophia’s idea?”

“Now, Hugh, you know perfectly well I never have any ideas of my own.
Je
suis
le
plus
grand
voleur
du
monde,
as Picasso once said. I’ve been picking Sophia’s brains. After all, if
you
didn’t want the idea, I thought I might as well play about with it a bit to see what came out.
But I do believe in giving credit where it’s due, and all the credit for this one belongs with Sophia.”

Mischief
maker!

“Sophia?”

“Well, it was a sort of … What I wanted to say in a way, P.A., was that make-up was bad for your skin.” One of the disadvantages of being a woman was that in an emotionally tense situation one blushed more easily than a man would, and had more difficulty in breathing naturally. Nor would a man be likely to burst into tears. Sophia said, “Hugh and I did talk about the idea a bit, but it was very unformed then, and it just sounded rather silly and … and negative … so we dropped it. We really didn’t think it was worth going on with—‘Make-up is bad for your skin’.”

“
Natural
beauty!
” Christian said. “Beauty without make-up. The real you. I must say I thought it was rather good, Sophia.”

“It is good. It’s right,” P.A. said. “It’s different. It’s what we ought to be doing.” He returned to his desk, and sat down. He spread his hands, palms downwards, on the blotter in front of him, and spoke decisively. “We seem to have achieved the object of the exercise,” he said. “Very successful. Congratulations all round. Will you see to things from now on, Hugh? I think you’ll agree that the new line’s the right one.”

“Perhaps Christian would like to—”

“Oh, I don’t suppose Christian’s got time. Too busy making a mess of his own accounts. Besides, it wants somebody good and solid to think this thing through. Too big for a dilettante, eh, Christian? Throw you to
Hoppness
, and they’d pull off your wings like boys with a
dragonfly
. Hugh’s tougher than you are. Let him do it. You’ll do it, Hugh. You won’t let them pull
your
wings eh?”

“I’m not always sure I should notice if they did.”

“That’s right. If we want Christian again we’ll ask him in to have a look at things, eh? No need for any more than that.”

As they left the meeting together, Hugh said, “Was that really your idea, Sophia?”

“I’m sorry, Hugh.”

“No. It was very good, I thought, once Christian had explained it. Did you and I really talk about it
together
?”

“More or less. I did sort of mention it, but——”

“I don’t suppose I took much notice.”

“Not much.”

“Do you mind that, Sophia? You never say.”

“Sometimes. Do you mind about my telling
Christian
?”

“Perhaps it’s about time you moved out of my Group. People generally do. What I’m really good at, you know, is breaking people in. If you stay too long, you might get permanently broken. That wouldn’t do. They ought to give me somebody new; somebody just down from Cambridge, who’s written all the lyrics for the Footlights. The last one I had like that lasted four months, and then went into I.C.I.”

“Hugh, you are awful. You don’t change.”

“No, I don’t change much, Sophia. Still, I think you’d better handle this campaign of Christian’s, since it was your idea. All this creative stuff gets a bit beyond me at my age.”

*

She was stiff and awkward. She didn’t want to
antagonize
him, but she couldn’t let him go any further; she knew she couldn’t; she felt all frozen and frightened.

“No?” he said.

“No. Really. I’m sorry.”

“Just as you like.”

As Ralph took his hand away from the breast which seemed to her unnaturally swollen, almost painfully so, disappointment washed over Sophia, loosening the
stiffness
, relaxing her, turning all that ice into tepid water, but weakening her, emptying her. Ralph’s arm still lay along the back of the sofa. It was awkward for him to move it away; he looked and felt awkward, doing it. Sophia wanted to say, “Come back. Put your hand back if you want to. Feel me, squeeze me, if you want to. Didn’t they ever tell you not to take No for an answer? Didn’t they tell you that women like to be … like to be …” But it wasn’t true. She hadn’t wanted him to go on. She didn’t like to be. She didn’t want … She didn’t know … she didn’t want things to change, but now they were changed, whatever happened. She had been clumsy; she had hurt his pride. Last time, the time with Paul (but she tried not to remember last time), things had gone wrong for a different reason. She had been permissive then—that was it; permissive—
permissive
from the beginning, and where had that landed her but in embarrassment and avoiding him on the Agency stairs? She couldn’t pretend; that was her trouble; she lacked that so valuable talent. She could go gooey, she knew. Most of her life seemed to have been spent in making a wall around all that gooeyness. But that wasn’t anything to do with passion, as men
understood
it. What
they
meant by passion was physical jerks, and crying, “Oooh! Oooh!” and digging your nails into their backs, and at first they didn’t know (didn’t care?) that this wasn’t real, and perhaps if she were good at pretending they never would know. What could she do, for Christ’s sake, when it wasn’t allowed to take people
seriously, when anyway she didn’t know Ralph (or Paul, or anybody) well enough to take him seriously, and yet she hadn’t the technique to put off, to postpone a pass without rejecting it, even to know when a pass was
sincerely
meant or whether it was simply doing the expected thing after taking a girl to a concert? She couldn’t say, nobody could ever say, “Just at the moment I’m rather frozen up, I’m afraid, because I don’t know you, and because of rather a lot of things that have happened before. But please don’t go away. If you try again in three or four weeks’ time when I’ve grown used to you, it will probably be quite all right.” Nobody could say that; the moment was always now. So, since she could say none of these things, and since she wanted very much to stop him going, she only said, “I’ll get the coffee”.

Ralph’s ears had gone red, she noticed; that was
always
a bad sign in men. He began to get up from the sofa, but the table was in the way. “Please don’t bother,” he said. “I really ought to go.”

If he went now, she’d lose him. Not a ladylike thought, nor an independent one; not a career girl’s thought. It shouldn’t have mattered to her, except that now Ralph was so much more than Ralph. He was real life, a genuine person, all that. He was—oh, integrity and the values of scholarship. He did things worth doing, said things worth saying, thought things worth thinking. He showed up her artificial life. There must be some one thing which would make him stay, which would cant the whole relationship on to a normal basis, so that neither of them would feel embarrassed or under obligation to the other. “Ralph,” she said, “I would. I really would, only I’m not very good at it when I don’t know people.”

Ralph had begun to move between the edge of the table and the sofa; it was not something one could do
quickly. All his actions so far had been governed by a not very clear sense of what was proper in the
circumstances
. An academic life does not usually put one in the way of a wide variety of sexual adventures, so that Ralph had not known exactly what was expected of him, and had been afraid that, if it were anything much, he would be shown up as inexperienced and clumsy. Sophia’s refusal had left him feeling relieved and humiliated, and ashamed of both emotions. Now he realized that she was as inexperienced in the skilful management of these affairs as he was. He stood there, with the edge of the polished table pressing into his stomach, considering. Sophia blushed. She said, “I’ll get your mac. It’s in the bedroom.” Ralph sat down on the arm of the sofa, and said, “Maybe coffee would be a good idea. Shall I help?”