Storyboard (15 page)

She oughtn’t to take people so seriously; that was her trouble. It was a sign of insecurity; other people shouldn’t be so important to her. The truly adult woman could cook a very special dinner for two, and sit down and eat it by herself with just—oh, Proust or Thomas Mann or someone for company. And when he—when Ralph —turned up an hour late, not having been run over, not having been in the least danger of being run over, not having phoned to say he hadn’t been run over, the truly adult woman, closing her copy of
Felix
Krull,
Confidence
Man,
would say, “I’m so sorry. I waited as long as I dared, and then ate mine before it spoiled. Yours is in the oven keeping hot.”

Men liked to be thought important, but not too
important
; they felt tied by that. Ralph was a wonderful person; of course he was; he had real intellectual
integrity
; he hadn’t sold out or anything. She must remember (she told herself) that she didn’t own him. If he disappointed her sometimes, just in little ways…. There’s nothing worse than trying to change a person…. Only it wasn’t like that (she cried); Sophia wouldn’t ever try to change Ralph. When he was inconsiderate and
careless of other people’s feelings, he wasn’t being true to himself; that was all. Naturally she couldn’t help
being
disappointed when that happened. Nothing to do with changing anybody. She didn’t make any claims on him. He knew he was free.

The chaperone had dried little Felicity’s tears, and the Make-Up Lady had wiped away the stains and
powdered
little Felicity’s face, and fluffed out her hair, and everything was ready for take 17. The studio doors were shut, the bright lamps lit again; the bell rang; the red light glowed. “Running!”—everything was running. “Smile!”—Felicity was smiling. Slowly, blindly, the camera moved towards Felicity like a monster in a
horror
movie. Felicity ignored the monster. “My mummy knows what I don’t know,” she said, and took a
mouthful
of Poppity Pops. “Cut! How was it, Jack?” (to the Cameraman). “O.K. by me.” “How was it, Sandy?” (to the Mixer). A yip from the Sealyham; it was O.K. by the Mixer. “What do you think, Sophia?” “Oh, I liked it, I think.” “Print that!” The Continuity Girl made a pencil cross against Take 17 on her Record Sheet. Felicity spat her Poppity Pops into the bucket. “Better do another for safe?” Yes, they had better do another for safe. Props refilled the bowl of Poppity Pops. Take 18. Felicity took a grip on her spoon.

Christian had been his usual bastard self over the advertising for Water Nymph, the new Cosmetic Soap; you could trust him for that. Nothing radical; just
making
sure that everybody knew that he would have done it better if he’d had time to see to things himself. It was so anti-climactic, that sort of thing, so unnecessary. It was enough to make you go off your own advertising. Sophia
had
gone off it. She didn’t care for it now. She didn’t care at all. She didn’t care if Hoppness turned the
whole campaign down, which they were bound to do anyway, being the unimaginative lot they were. Sophia had a fantasy in which she walked into a meeting with Hoppness one day, and shouted at them, “I’m a woman. And you’re not. And I
know
.”
But they hadn’t a
procedure
for that. Anyway … anyway … what did it all matter? You took trouble; you really worked; you put part of
yourself
into the bloody thing, and then Christian —Ralph would say that she shouldn’t involve herself in this way, but Ralph didn’t, couldn’t know how, if you were making something, even an ad, you couldn’t help using yourself to make it with. Specially if you were a woman. You used your own emotions; you had to. And then Christian—as if the client weren’t bad enough, without having things messed around for political
reasons
. That was one thing about Hugh. He didn’t play Agency politics. They just washed over him.

People couldn’t see; that was
their
trouble. Being
objective
about things was the same as being blind. Of course it hadn’t hurt the ads to change them a little—a headline here, a paragraph of copy there, something moved in a lay-out, a re-wording of the voice-over in the launch commercial. It was the way he had gone about it. That headline. A full-colour page for the women’s magazines. A misty picture taken (as it seemed) at dawn by the latest Royal photographer. Blues and grays and violets and pinks and rather a lot of grain in the picture, which at once made it different. A mother and child, walking together towards you against the background of an enchanted lake. And bluebells there somewhere. The headline was, “Like a Child’s Caress Comes the Birth of a New Kind of Beauty”. Hugh hadn’t known what it meant, but Hugh had said, “You’re the boss, Sophia,” and so she was for this campaign.

And Christian. “Yes,” Christian had said, studying it there, with all of them present. “Yes, I like that. It’s good; it’s very good indeed. Just right.” A long pause. He put his head on one side, while P.A. grunted. “There’s just one word I don’t like.”

“Yes, Christian?”

“Only one. ‘Birth’. It’s not right, is it?”

Hugh had said nothing at all. Hugh was no help. Hugh had told her before the meeting, “If you’ll take my advice, Sophia, you won’t get what the Americans call ‘ego-involved’—isn’t that rather a nice word? But it’s the worst thing to do.” A lot of good it was to tell her that. Of course she had been ego-involved, and still was. It was her campaign now. Everybody knew that. So she had blushed, and gone tense, and said, “I don’t see why,” and Christian had smiled.

“Well, it is a little close to ‘child’ in that headline, isn’t it?” he had said. “Like a
child’s
caress comes the
birth
of a new kind of beauty. I think we’d all agree that for most women—most unmarried women anyway, Sophia, eh?—childbirth has rather more unpleasant than pleasant associations. Don’t you think so really? And it is the younger, unmarried women we’re trying to reach, aren’t we, unless the strategy’s been changed?”

“Yes. Yes, it is.”

And Hugh had said, “I never notice that sort of thing. You are clever, Christian, being able to point it out.”

Just little things. The headline altered to, “Like a child’s caress comes the dawn of a new kind of beauty”. It probably hadn’t made much difference. Maybe
nobody
but Sophia could notice the difference. Maybe it was better the new way. Ralph was quite right. She shouldn’t get involved. Except that Ralph would never
be able to understand the fascination of it, and Sophia wouldn’t tell him, wouldn’t own to it, was even ashamed of it. In that way, she supposed, she wasn’t being frank with Ralph.

*

“Old Father Christmas, you know what he did? He upset the cradle, and nearly killed the kid. The kid blew a bubble, and hit him with a shovel, and
OUT
spells out.”

“Stephen, will you please stop singing that?”

“It’s my new poem. A boy told me at school.”

“Well, it’s not very funny, I’m afraid.”

“It’s not meant to be funny. It’s my new poem. A boy told me. Do you want to know who it was? It was Roger.”

“Who’s Roger?”

“He’s a boy at school. He knows a lot of things. Do you want to know something else?”

“What?”

Silence. A giggle from Stephen.

“Well what?”

“He told me a joke.”

“Yes?”

Silence again. Then, in a rush, “There was a man, see, and he had a little donkey, and he was going down the road with his donkey, and he was in the cart, see, and he was shouting, ‘Peas! Peas! Penny a pint!’ and an old woman come out —”

“
Came
out.”

“—came out of her house, and she said, ‘Stop! Stop! I haven’t had a pea for twenty years,’ and the man said, ‘Gee up, Neddy, there’s going to be a flood.’”

Now what? Stephen was looking at her sideways to see whether she would laugh or be angry. What did the
books say? Of course there was no doubt that children enjoyed this harmless sort of smut; all children had a range of excrementary jokes; you couldn’t be a teacher, and not know that. But Stephen was in a naughty mood. He was courting anger. Bored, that was his trouble. She would take no notice. “I don’t think that’s very funny really,” she said. “Are you going over to play with David and Anthea this afternoon?” School holidays!—Her patience bled away as if from an open wound. Why did the schools give them so long at Christmas, when there was nowhere for them to play?

“No.” Stephen did not want to go.

“We could ring them up. You could use the
telephone
.”

“No.”

“Or they could come here?”

“No.”

“Do you want to read your book then?”

“No.”

“Then don’t hang around, Stephen. I’ve got work to do.” What work? The afternoon stretched ahead of her, gray and empty. There was never any reason to do
anything
; one could always put things off. Often when Stephen was at school, she would spend most of the afternoon, just lying with her feet up on the sofa, not reading, not even listening to
Women’s
Hour
on the radio, but lying there, supine, her mind a haze, putting off the beginning of some utterly unimportant household task. In the old days, she had been so active. People even used to say that she undertook too much. Years ago, before she had ever met Keith, while she was still a student at Exeter, Sylvia had gone with a girl-friend to visit the girl-friend’s aunt, who was dying of some sort of
creeping
paralysis in the Devon and Exeter Hospital. The
paralysis had begun in the aunt’s legs, her girl-friend said, and was moving slowly upwards. When it reached her heart, she would die. No wonder the aunt was so crotchety; you couldn’t blame her, could you?
When
it
reaches
the
heart,
you
die.
Morbid nonsense! She must make an effort; she must constantly remind herself to make an effort. “Shall we go to the pictures tomorrow afternoon, Stephen?” she said. “There’s bound to be something on somewhere.”

“Blood of the Werewolf. Roger says it’s smashing. His mum took him.”

“Who is this Roger?”

“A boy at school. His dad’s on the buses.”

They should never have sent Stephen to the local Primary School. It was all they could do to stop him from picking up an accent. Only, the Eleven Plus was so important, and nowadays (everybody said) children had a better education from the local authorities’ schools than from the little private kindergartens, inadequately staffed with uncertificated teachers. Once Stephen had safely passed the Eleven Plus and was in a Grammar School, the problem wouldn’t exist, because on the whole the Rogers of this world didn’t get through. But why, when there were plenty of nice children in Purley, Stephen should choose to make a friend of someone like. … However, his “friendships” never lasted long, which was one good thing.

She stopped, midway between the kitchen stove and the plain wooden table.
What
is
the
matter
with
me?
Why was it all haze and headaches nowadays? “Doctor, why am I so tired all the time?”—Really it was
too
like Keith’s old adverts. Why was so much of her life a
drifting
through the days? She could look back in time, even to so close a period as four years ago, when they had
been new in the house, and life hadn’t been like this. There had been so much to do—curtain-material to be bought and then made-up on the sewing-machine, wallpaper patterns to choose, the men to fix the heater, what to put in the hall, where to buy a standard lamp (when it was well known that there weren’t any good standard lamps to be had anywhere), how to adapt their own furniture to the new rooms—so much for Keith to admire when he did get home in the evenings, so much to talk about. She had been too busy then to make friends, and she had not expected to lose the friends they had. She had never expected to have to “make” friends. It wasn’t anything most people did. Friends were the people with whom one worked, the people who lived in the flat above; one simply chose those one liked, and was disinterested in those one didn’t like. And if one didn’t work, and one’s neighbours were a fence away, one could hardly be expected to go over with apple pies as they did in American films. Perhaps if Keith were not always on at her to join something, she would have joined. Perhaps if they went to church…. But all these people around here, they had their own groups. If they had wanted her to join, they would have asked.

If only she had her job again! In four years, when Stephen was going to Grammar School, she would
return
to teaching. She would not tell Keith; she would just do it. By herself, with no prompting, no help of any kind. She would get a job, and she would owe nothing about it to Keith.

“I wish daddy would come home soon,” Stephen said. “I’m tired of doing nothing.”

*

Client was to come in on Thursday. On Wednesday
night, Keith said to Sylvia, “By the way, Don Wallace was telling me he had a job you might like to do. If you could find the time.” On Wednesday night, Ralph said to Sophia, “Don’t you think advertising’s all a bit
dishonest
really?” And Sylvia said to Keith, “Why should he say a thing like that?” And Sophia said to Ralph, “Of course I do. Why do you ask?”

There would be three of Client, coming down from Luton to spend the whole day at the Agency. They would arrive at ten in the morning, and would be taken straight to the Meeting Room, and they would stay there, with a break for lunch at the Vendome, until they left to catch the five-fifty back to Luton. One of them would be of junior importance, and his equivalent among the Agency men was Tony Barstow; one would be the Advertising Manager for the new product, and his equivalent was Keith; and one would be the General Advertising Manager (with a seat on the board) for all the Hoppness products, and P.A. stood up to him. But it was Keith who would have to run the meeting. Very senior persons sat, as it were, like Olympians watching the play below. That was the convention.