Storyboard (16 page)

Sometimes a Creative Group Head would be called in to such a meeting, to present the advertising to the Client. Christian often did so. Clients enjoyed talking to Christian; he moved so much in the world. Perhaps Christian should have been asked to present this
campaign
. But not Hugh. Keith had been quite right to exclude Hugh.

Keith was worried; no doubt of it. Not about the advertising, his Goodness no! It was wonderful,
brilliant
, too good for Hoppness in a way, as he had told Sophia. It had the real creative
flair
the account needed; it had a cosmetic feel to it, and that was right, he was
sure of that. If Keith had misgivings, it was only about his ability to do justice to the advertising. Luckily it spoke for itself. But would it speak to Hoppness?

So he was tense on this Wednesday night. No wonder he was tense.

And Sophia was snappish. No wonder to that either. Remember they’re only advertisements, she told
herself
; remember. But what was the good of that? They were not
only
advertisements. She should never have accepted Ralph’s invitation to the theatre. She should have had a bath, and some hot milk, and at least four Per-Somnia, and gone to bed early.
The
Radical
had asked Ralph to write a hundred and fifty words on a musical version of
The
Ticket
of
Leave
Man
performed by a semi-amateur cast at Hampstead as a Christmas entertainment. In New York, she supposed, this sort of thing would be done in the round, and done better. “Why do you ask?” she said.

“Oh … no reason. It just crossed my mind.”

“I don’t suppose it’s any more dishonest than
anything
else. This coffee reminds me of the Albert Hall. Or the Old Vic. Isn’t there anywhere to put the cup?”

So Ralph was choked off. And at his own home in Purley, Keith found that, however urbane his manner might be in persuading a client, when he spoke deviously to Sylvia his ears went red. Perhaps he should have put it off until after the meeting with Hoppness, when he would be calmer. “It was just something Don thought you might enjoy,” he said. “We were talking about it.”

“Why?”

“Oh…. I don’t know.”

“Do you often talk about me to your friends at the office?”

“No, of course not, Syl. Don was saying how difficult
it is to get the right sort of interviewer for the Consumer Research Panel; that’s all. And he wondered if you might be interested in helping out sometimes. I just said I’d ask you. You’re not committed to anything. If you don’t want to do it, I’ll tell him.”

“I haven’t said I don’t want to do it.” Sylvia
considered
. She stacked the plates, and put them in the sink. She sat down again, and poured tea. Keith lit a
cigarette
. Sylvia thought,
It
might
be
just
the
sort
of
thing. 
Occa
sionally
anyway.
A
break.
Hadn’t she decided only the other day that she would get a job? But Keith’s ears were red. “You asked him,” she said. “You weren’t just talking about it. You went and asked him.”

Bloody woman! She did this sort of thing; she’d done it before. She would have a suspicion, no more than a guess, the merest guess, something she couldn’t possibly know, and she would hit him with it as fact. Whether she were right or wrong, the effect on him was always the same. He blushed; his voice had a shake in it;
meeting
her eyes became a conscious, difficult thing, so that he would hold his gaze too steady, and look too long. Now, whether he were to lie or tell the truth, it would still come out as a lie.

“Well, did you or didn’t you?” Sylvia said. “And don’t lie about it. I’m not a child, you know.”

Keith found that he couldn’t answer. The unfairness of it, especially when he was so worried about the
Hoppness
meeting! All he had done was to try to help her. Not that he could tell her this, since Sylvia never allowed that she needed help.

“You did then?”

“I just thought of it during the Store-Check. I thought it was the sort of thing you might like. Meeting people. If you don’t want to do it—”

“
You
thought! And what did Don Wallace think?”

“Well, Don —”

“Did he think you needed the money? Trying to get a part-time job for your wife?”

“No, of course he didn’t. Don’s a good——”

“What then?”

“What do you mean?—’ What’?”

“What did
he
think when you came and asked him to find me a job?”

“Look here, Syl, it wasn’t like that at all.” (But of course it had been. Keith’s overdone unconcern: “Old Sylvia gets a bit bored in the mornings. You know how it is. I just wondered if she could help at all, if we were doing anything in the Purley area.” And Don had said, “It’s untypical. All AB country. But there might be something a bit more downscale within range.”)

“What was it like then?” Sylvia said.

“I told you. We were just … talking. I may have brought the matter up. I can’t really remember.”

“You did bring it up. You went to see him about it, didn’t you? What did you tell him about me?”

“I may have said you get a bit bored. Something like that. Nothing important, Syl, for goodness’ sake.”

Sylvia leaned across the table, and slapped his face. Keith looked at her. He didn’t feel angry; just dazed, with a hint of tears. Once, long ago on the sea front at Scarborough, he had said something—it was something witty and amusing; he was fifteen, and he had thought it witty—it was about his aunt’s new dress. And his father had hit him, just like that, across the face, with no
reason
for it. It was like going through a paper hoop; the world went to bits around you, but you were still there, and when you looked the world was still there also, but
something had happened. His father had never hit him before. Sometimes, when he was a child, his mother, with a hairbrush—but nobody had needed to punish Keith; he was not ill-behaved. Sylvia stood up, and said, “If you ever do a thing like that again, I’ll leave you.” and Keith sat where he was, still unable to speak. “Anyway,” she said, “how could I possibly do a job when you know I get so tired.” She left the kitchen, and went upstairs. He knew she had gone into the spare room, where she would sleep that night. It was so
unfair
on the night before such an important Client
Meeting
.

*

It was unfair, Sophia felt, to take her snappishness out on Ralph. And it was even unfair to try to make
conversation
about Brecht, about theatre-in-the-round, about Hampstead, about any general worthwhile
intelligent
subject, when her mind was so set on another. She had a duty to Ralph to take things seriously; she should not have accepted his invitation if she didn’t intend to be a real companion. So, as they drank a before-bed cup of tea together back at Sophia’s flat, she said, “It’s not straightforward dishonesty, you know, because there isn’t much of that. You can’t lie. Anything you state as a fact, must be a fact. All you can do is to create a sort of impression. I mean, I used to work on a rheumatism remedy. What it was really, was a sort of local
anaesthetic
, which you rubbed in. You can’t cure rheumatism; nobody can. Anyway, you’re not allowed to use the word ‘cure’ in any patent medicine advertising; it’s forbidden. And rheumatism’s mostly psycho-somatic; people wanting attention. So all we could actually promise was ‘Quick Relief’, which was true. And they wouldn’t have gone on buying the stuff if it hadn’t
helped. Only we had to make it
sound
like a cure, or they wouldn’t have tried it in the first place.”

“But don’t you think that people ought to be told the truth, and then left to choose for themselves.”

“It
was
the truth. ‘Quick Relief.’”

“No, but really the truth.”

“I don’t know. Everything’s so complicated, Ralph. I know you have to have principles and all that, but they never fit when you try to apply them. Suppose we’d said, ‘Amipax won’t cure your rheumatism. Nothing will. But it’ll stop the pain for about half an hour.’ First the newspapers and the telly would have refused the advertisement because we’d told the truth and said, ‘Nothing will cure rheumatism’, and you aren’t allowed to knock the competition.”

“Aren’t allowed?”

“Of course not. Not right out. Your competitors buy time and space too, you know, and the newspapers and the telly won’t risk offending them. Do you want any more cake?”

“No…. No, thanks.”

“And then, after all, it is a psycho-somatic thing. None of our ads ever said Amipax cured rheumatism, however we may have implied it, but we kept getting
letters
from people who said they’d been cured, and our own Legal Department wouldn’t let us use them.
Probably
all they’d needed was something to rub on, and anything would have done. So what’s the truth? Seems to me there are as many truths about that kind of thing as there are people.”

“Yes, but …”
The
Radical
would say that if
democracy
were to work, choice must be as free as possible. Leave democracy out of it, if humanity were to work it had to be on the basis of individual choice individually
undertaken. Choice was never free (we knew that
nowadays
), but there was usually an amount of freedom within narrow limits. But what if the right to be
deceived
by advertisements were part of the choice. There was a prissy, mandarin phrase, not often used now, which went, “I should prefer not to believe …” One had the right, if one were human, not to believe the truth. Local government was not as complicated as this, Ralph thought.

Sophia said, “I never know what people mean when they talk about honesty and dishonesty. I don’t think you can draw a line like that; intentions aren’t so clear. I mean, take all this stuff about motivation research. You only do it because you want people to feel happy about your product, and the people themselves want to feel happy, and if you can make them happy they pay you for it by buying your jelly, or baby powder, or
whatever
it is—like paying three bob for a seat at the
pictures
. You put babies into an ad because they’re so cuddly, and women get a sort of warm feeling from
looking
at them. Well,
you
can say that the advertising’s manipulating people, and turning on mother love like water from a tap, which I suppose it is, but
I
can say that what I’m doing is making people feel good—and I really mean ‘good’, because what you feel if you’re a woman thinking about babies is sort of noble—and it’s good for people to feel good, whatever caused it. Like therapy. All this hidden-persuaders stuff. Maybe people smoke cigarettes because they want a nipple to suck, but the want came before the cigarette or the advertising, and it won’t do them any harm to smoke your cigarette instead of somebody else’s—though, mind you, cancer comes into that and makes it worse. You don’t invent the want, and you don’t make it worse by recognizing it.
Seems to me to be only common sense to find out the real reason why people want things, and then sell them your brand of the thing by knowing what that reason is. Do you see what I mean? It isn’t—you know—simple at all.”

Get Sophia on to her own subject and she really did talk, Ralph thought. Usually it was he who talked, and she who listened. It was
piquant
to turn the experience the other way about. What a pity he couldn’t make notes of all this! She seemed to be muddled about it all, as one would expect, and it was certainly interesting to see the processes of self-justification at work in her. He’d always assumed that advertising people had to have some kind of rationalizations for what they did. Usually Sophia was more clear-headed, and that was why she was giving advertising up, as she had told him, but even Sophia must sometimes share—Just the same, it was obvious that the whole picture couldn’t be seen in the clear black and white terms of Harvey Bodge. That was where Ralph’s own academic training would be so
useful
in keeping a sort of balance.

“No, what I hate about it mostly is the waste,” Sophia said. “That’s what I really hate. Competition’s all right. At least—” she looked timidly at Ralph for reassurance. “At least, I suppose it is if it leads to an improvement in the product. But when you just use advertising to kill things——”

“Kill things? How?”

“You know, like buying up somebody’s invention, and then not using it. I don’t know if people really do that; it was in
The
Apple
Cart,
so I suppose they do. But what I’m working on now, for instance; that’s only being launched so as to drive something else off the market.”

“I don’t understand.”

“It’s quite simple. There’s something called Foundation Soap. It’s quite a good idea, but it’s only got a limited market—women living on their own. I suppose you could say there were too many women like that nowadays, but it’s still only enough for one Foundation Soap. And now we’re launching another exactly like it, called Water Nymph, the New Cosmetic Soap, and since we’ve got more money, we’ll win. I mean, we’ll advertise much more, and we’ll give the chemists a
bigger
discount if we have to, and maybe even lower the price.”

“But if it leads to a lower price——”

“Oh, it wouldn’t be an economic price. We’d have to come up again, once we’d got rid of Foundation Soap. Only I expect we wouldn’t bother; we’d just let the whole thing die. Hoppness are only doing it because they don’t want anybody else coming into the soap market. They think there’s enough competition as it is, with the other two. It’d probably be easier to let Water Nymph die, because if they didn’t, one of the others might launch something like it, and the whole thing would start again.”

“Yes…. And you’re working on this?”

“More or less. Of course, it may not be quite
identical
, you know. I’m not sure they’ve matched the colours exactly.”