Storyboard (21 page)

“Pack shot,” said Peter.

“Well, no. I think we’ve agreed to let the Agency try this experiment of not having the pack shot at the end. After all, we all know there are some commercials on the air which don’t have a pack shot at all.” Dave and Peter smiled the thin-lipped smile Hoppness kept for
advertising
of which they disapproved. “But of course,
wherever
the pack shot may come in the commercial, you’ll want to super the words, ‘A Product of Hoppness, Silch Laboratories’ over it.”

“That’s the lot, eh?” Tony said cheerfully, and drew a cat in two circles, five triangles, two dots, a hyphen, a crescent and some whiskers under his notes. Keith saw that P.A. was scowling. This was the end of P.A.’s bold new thinking on the new account. They were back to normal now. That would teach him to upset the Group Head and disorganize the Account Executives. All wasted. Tony began to shade in his drawing, because it was a black cat. Well, P.A. had been through this kind of thing before with Hoppness. You couldn’t be a
ty
coon
with them. Tycoons went through the Hoppness machine, and came out hamburger like everything else. Dave was looking at him, expecting some kind of answer, if it were only for Keith to suggest that they should move on in the agenda.

But it was not settled. Nothing was settled. Keith hadn’t wanted to do this advertising; he’d known it was wrong for Hoppness. Keith had been prepared to accept
Hugh’s first proposals, which had incorporated almost everything for which Hoppness were now asking. And he’d been convinced that he was wrong, and that this new approach was better; that it was more than better—it was right. He had said, “Yes, you’re right, Sophia.” Was he now to go back, and say, “No, you were wrong, Sophia.” Was that all his job was? It was always said that the job of an Agency was not to devise
advertisements
that would satisfy the client, but those which would sell the product. It was said so often that it had become a counter in argument, something which had value but not a meaning. But he had believed it.
Otherwise
his job was only to flatter businessmen out of an appropriation, to flatter money into the Agency’s
turnover
. You couldn’t go on like that; there was a
difference
between tact and eating dirt. Keith had always been convinced that Hoppness advertising was right for
Hoppness
products. Oh, he’d mocked them sometimes,
playing
along with the Creative people to keep them happy, but in the end he’d always said, “They may be
pedestrian
sometimes, but look at their success as a Company. You can’t laugh that away.” So he hadn’t minded the dependence on the Strategy, the endless revisions and amendments, because he’d been convinced that it was all part of the necessary process that produced successful advertising. But not now. If they accepted the principles of the Agency’s advertising for Water Nymph (why couldn’t they come out and
call
it “Water Nymph” instead of going on and on about “Product X”?) then they ought not to destroy it with such amendments. Keith wasn’t a Creative man, but even he could see what would happen. Tony might take notes, P.A. might scowl, but it was a crisis of conscience for Keith.

“I’m sorry. I don’t think we can accept,” he said.
Tony looked up at him in surprise, and the fingers of P.A.’s right hand froze in mid-drumming.

“You’d want to think about it, of course. We
understand
that.”

“I can tell you now that the kind of amendments you’re suggesting will kill the advertising, in our opinion.” Would P.A. support him? “If you feel they have to be made, we should like to withdraw the
advertising
altogether, and work on another approach.”

“Now, Keith——” “Now, wait a minute——” This was never done. It was the Hoppness credo that all creative work came from the Agency, that every
amendmen
t
was accepted by the Agency in the full
consciousness
of error and as a result of the inestimable benefit of working with Hoppness in profitable co-operation, and that if a campaign were ever withdrawn by the Agency, it was because the Agency itself had come to see that the campaign had been wrongly conceived.

“I’m sorry,” Keith said again. “We don’t feel we can compromise this. We’re always prepared to revise, as you know, but this goes too far in our judgment.”

“Quite right.” Thank God for P.A. Any of the other Directors would have disowned Keith by now. “May be a case for withdrawing the advertising altogether, as Keith says. We’d accept that. No case for changing it to this extent. Worst of both worlds. What you’re
suggesting
is good selling stuff. No argument there, eh, Keith?”

“No indeed.”

“Fights with our stuff, though. Selling in a different way. There’s more than one way of selling, eh, Arnold? Do it one way or the other. Not both.”

Just for a moment, Dave and Peter were noticeably flustered. First Keith had broken the rules, and now P.A. was talking nonsense. Of course there was only one
way of selling, and that was the Hoppness way. If you questioned that, you questioned the whole basis of the Hoppness philosophy. Dave and Peter had only been doing their job in gently guiding this new creative
approach
of the Agency’s into the familiar Hoppness channel.

But the fluster passed. It was one of the things you knew about Agency people that they were liable to
sudden
, irrational gestures, standing on their dignity and that sort of thing, and if you were a Hoppness man, you allowed for that. “Let’s just leave it there, then,” Dave said smoothly. “If the Agency will think about the points I’ve made, and perhaps even rough out some advertising along those lines, we could discuss them both, side by side. Then we’d really see where we are, because I don’t think we’re so far apart.”

“I suppose we could do that,” Keith said. “What do you think, P.A.?”

“Oh … surely.” The revolt was already over. Keith, though he did not yet know it, would go through a series of tiny compromises and concessions that might last over ten presentations and two months, convinced each time that he had given nothing essential away, until at the end of it all what the Agency put into the
newspapers
and on to the television screen was just Hoppness advertising like all the rest.

Only for the time being there was an intervention. Arnold Brady had not always been a Hoppness man; he was of a slightly older generation, and Hoppness, who caught them young, had not caught him young enough. “I’m not sure that we’ve fully appreciated the Agency’s thinking,” he said. “What Keith said there, earlier on, about the essential similarity of all our
advertising
has been worrying me for some considerable time.
I think we might have something different here. I’d like to talk round it a little longer.”

*

Past three o’clock. She had waited and waited, and the doctor hadn’t come. Oh, she wasn’t blaming him. It was winter. People had flu. He would have many calls to make, and couldn’t take them out of order. But she couldn’t wait for ever while Stephen lay there, sleeping and yet not resting, tossing and turning, dozing for a moment and crying when he woke, and still not seeming to know that she was his mother, and still the blisters beneath the calamine. Once in a wintry February she had gone to the doctor’s surgery at six o’clock for a heavy cold, and Surgery had not begun until seven because he had been delayed by calls. She couldn’t wait here till seven when Stevie was so sick.

If only they would send an ambulance! The doctor himself couldn’t do more when he came. Rules! Rules! People could be killed by rules. She remembered having read long ago in some local paper about a traffic
accident
in which a motor-cyclist had been knocked down by a tradesman’s van. The tradesman had insisted on
leaving
him lying there in the road where he had fallen, lying there in a pool of petrol because the rule was that nothing must be moved until the police came, and the motor-cyclist had been burned to death when a carelessly discarded cigarette landed in the petrol. Burned. Not scalded. A scald was not as serious. She was mad; she must have been mad—“not serious”? What did she mean, “not serious”, when he was lying there, all
blistered
, and all she’d been able to do for him was to put on calamine, so that he looked like a little ghost between the white shrouds of the sheets? Now this was silly. This was foolish, to think such thoughts. Stephen had a
temperature
,
and he had been scalded, and certainly it was serious, but soon the doctor would come. What right had he to pull down the pan from the stove, when she had left it on a back burner? Stupid! Inconsiderate!
Disobedient
! Children were like that. He was a tie on her, and always would be. She said it out loud, “The
doctor’s
coming soon. He’ll soon be here,” as she did often talk to herself, or to the radio, or to some household thing during the lonely days with nobody by. Perhaps to say it, “The doctor will be here in no time,” would make her believe it.

No good. The seconds were long; the minutes were longer; five minutes made an hour. How long did it take for a child to die? (Hysterical question.) How long for blisters to break out all over your skin, how long for the blood in your veins to boil up to a fever? These things took no time at all; it was only help which was long in coming. Help me! Absolve me! It wasn’t my fault. If she could telephone, talk to Keith—but no, that was the last thing she wanted to do, to talk to Keith, the very last thing of all. It would be better if she herself were to die, to sink away, way down deep, deep into the—unless she could do something, unless she could cope, could move in some way the terrible weight of blame which crushed her, could save Stephen, could make him well again, and go on as before. Then she could talk to Keith.

The man at the hospital had said that if Stephen were brought, they could not turn him away. She couldn’t wait for the doctor. There was no time, when Stephen was so seriously hurt. He would call too late, and they would write above Stephen’s head, write into the stone the words, “His mother waited”. The doctor would never call; she was sure of that now. They put too much
work on doctors nowadays; their rounds were too long. No wonder accidents happened.

A taxi. She could wrap him in a blanket so that he wouldn’t get wet, and take him in a taxi. It wouldn’t be as comfortable as an ambulance; there would be no men in white coats; but it would be quick. In a blanket to keep him warm. In a blanket so that nobody would see. She would give the doctor five more minutes, and then phone for a taxi. And, in case the clock should be slow, she would count the minutes herself.

*

In the Meeting Room, the discussion had widened. “Maybe we should make a bargain offer,” Arnold
suggested
. “Sign off with, ‘What’s more, you can take
advantage
of this opportunity——’”

“Unique opportunity.”

“‘—unique opportunity to gain Natural Beauty for yourself by buying your first tablet at a special bargain price.’ Something like that.”

*

Sylvia wept in the taxi. She sat there, leaning back for comfort and safety as it said in the little notice on the pull-down seat, her arms round Stephen, trying to
protect
him from every bump in the road, from the swaying at the corners, holding this child wrapped in a blanket who did not know who she was, and she wept silently. The taxi-driver, she supposed, must think it odd.

If only the traffic lights would stay green! If only God were not blind, were not colour-blind, were not deaf to her so urgent prayers. Perhaps he was like the doctor, and had to take his calls in order. She prayed and prayed, and it was for such a little thing, so easy to grant, that the lights should stay green. An ambulance, a fire engine, could crash the lights, but even when
there was nobody coming the other way, a taxi must wait.

She was in the shopping centre now. People on the pavements on either side went about their business as if nothing had happened. A policeman held up his hand to stop the taxi so that a mother could wheel her
perambulator
across the road. But was not Sylvia a mother, and was her need not greater than this trifling need of the woman to cross and loiter before the window of a furniture shop? Couldn’t he see? Couldn’t he tell? Couldn’t the taxi-driver find some way to tell him? It was so unfair when she was doing her best.

The lights were green, but a lorry was trying to turn, and blocked the way. The taxi-driver sounded his horn. Stephen made little whimpering sounds, “Want … Want …”; it was all he ever said. And Sylvia wept in the taxi while the lorry, clumsily, carefully, slowly
taking
its time edged its way round somebody’s M.G., and made off down the road in the opposite direction, with a piece of rag drooping in the rain from the back of its over-long load. And the lights went back to red. And Dr. Harrison, who had rung the bell twice and waited in the porch much longer than he ought, decided that Mrs. Bates must have exaggerated the disaster in her telephone message, and had now gone out to do the shopping, just like a woman.

*

When Sylvia reached the hospital, the tears were still wet on her cheeks, and all she could say to the nurse in Casualty was, “He doesn’t know me”. One part of her knew that she looked a mess and sounded incoherent, and despised her for it, but this part of her was not dominant at this time, and could do nothing to alter
matters
. “He doesn’t know me,” Sylvia cried, and wept
again, and the little West Indian nurse took Stephen from her, and led the way past the people in Casualty, past those in plaster and those in bandages, past the boy with the septic finger and the girl with the
discharging
ear and the mothers of both of them, past the patients and past the relations and into a separate waiting-room off the main hall.

“Please don’t make me wait. I’ve been waiting around all day. I can’t wait any longer,” Sylvia said, and the little West Indian nurse, her dark face very serious and competent beneath the starched white cap, said, “No, lady. Doctor is coming straight away,” and laid Stephen down on a leather-covered couch, and arranged his blanket on top of him, saying, “You lie there, sonny. Doctor will come to help your pains. Your mummy
waiting
over here.” Then she turned Stephen over, just as gently, and took his temperature
per
rectum,
smiling bashfully at Sylvia as she said, “Not good to do it in the mouth, when he is ill and cannot hold it. This way does not hurt him.”