Storyboard (25 page)

Sophia thought that Harvey Bodge had deliberately duped him, but this was unlikely. Harvey Bodge had many things to do with his time, yet he had taken trouble to find Ralph a publisher, and the book was now almost certain to be commissioned. Sophia had no balance, or she would have realized that it could not matter very much to Harvey Bodge whether the Foundation Soap article appeared or not;
The
Radical
carried four or five such articles every week, fifty-two weeks in the year, Harvey Bodge had wanted it written his way, not Ralph’s way; that was his prerogative. Perhaps he had flattered Ralph a little. People did flatter people so as to get their own way; one accepted that, and allowed for
it. But he had also suggested the book, and helped it
forward
, and in the long run a book would be more
important
and have more influence than fifteen hundred ephemeral words in
The
Radical.
Sophia didn’t appreciate that.

The meeting with Harvey Bodge had been on a Monday. On Wednesday night,
The
Radical
went to press. On Friday the article had appeared. He had not seen Sophia until Saturday. He could not be blamed for not having told her. And all this stuff, so often repeated, about giving up the whole stinking racket and going into teaching—none of it serious. And
she
talked of lying. “Betrayal”—it was the kind of cant idealistic waffle one didn’t expect from an adult personality. If one lived in the world, one made compromises. That was true in journalism, in advertising, in politics, in the academic world or anywhere else, and an adult knew it.

He would get over this feeling of unease. He had been upset, that was all. Hugh was a sensible man, and
perhaps
he would talk to Sophia. It was not that Ralph had an idea of reconciliation, although, like anyone else, he disliked having his week-ends wrecked by
pettiness
and bad temper. Ralph didn’t give a damn if he never saw Sophia again, but he would like to get the record straight.

Hugh was sitting in the big armchair, reading Zola’s
Germinal,
in the Penguin Classics edition. He had two dachshunds on his lap, and the third was snuffling into the side of the chair in an attempt to discover whether rabbits were hidden in the crevice where the arms met the seat. They left the chair as Ralph entered, and ran to him, biting the turn-ups of his trousers in welcome. Jill, who had taken to Ralph, and sometimes slept on his bed during the day, sat up and begged to show that she
was pleased to see him. “Jill! Jane! Sue!” Hugh said. “Come here, and behave. Isn’t it exciting about French novels? I can quite understand why the Victorians
disapproved
of them. The women in this book have just pulled off some poor fellow’s genitals, and they’re
carrying
them around the streets on a pole. Nothing like that ever happens in Trollope. The English go in more for
mental
cruelty, I suppose.”

“I’m awfully sorry to barge in like this.”

“Have you come in for a chat? When Sophia first suggested your coming to lodge, I was terrified you’d keep wanting to have cosy chats in the evenings. Only you never did, so now it’s rather pleasant to see you. Do sit down.” Ralph sat in the chair opposite. “I was
thinking
I might make some tea soon. I would say whisky, but I’ve run out, and I can never remember to re-order. When I run out of tea, Mrs. Rhodes just gets some more on her own, unless I remember, and get to Fortnum’s before she gets to the Co-op. I don’t know whether the Co-op do a whisky. If Jilly bothers you, throw her on the floor.”

“No, I like having her.” Jilly had already curled up like an anchovy on Ralph’s lap. Hugh said, “She always lies like that. I expect that’s why she’s got a bent back. I’d never win any prizes with her. Look at Sue, though; stretched straight out with her head on her paws like a Sphinx! Only her teeth aren’t right. It’s all a bit
confusing
.”

“I’ve had rather a row with Sophia.”

“About that article, I expect. What a fuss, I must say. I live in dread of Hoppness’ discovering you’re my lodger.”

“Christ! I hadn’t realized. Do you want me to go?”

“Not unless you want to. One does get used to people.
I don’t think they’ll find out if nobody tells them, and I certainly shan’t. I never see them. What does Sophia say?”

“Well, I got a lot of the facts from her….”

“Didn’t she know you were going to print them?”

“She did and she didn’t.”

“I always think one or the other is better than both.”

“What’s the matter with her, anyway?” Ralph said. “She doesn’t give a damn about advertising or
Foundation
Soap or any of that. She told me herself she couldn’t wait to get out of it.”

“People do say that.”

“She meant it.”

“And mean it too. But they don’t
do
it, you know.”

“She said advertising corrupted people.”

“Oh dear!” Hugh said. “I’ve been in it twenty years, and it would have been more except for the war. I don’t feel very corrupted, but perhaps there never was much in me to corrupt. I went in during the thirties, you see. There wasn’t anything like the same competition then. Advertising wasn’t so glamorous, and there was less of it, and the only advertising novel was a detective story by Dorothy Sayers. Nowadays so many young men and women at the universities have read
The
Agency
Game
and all those American books, and even the women’s
magazines
keep giving us advertising heroes in their short stories. The Agency likes us to keep up with what they’re writing in women’s magazines, and I do read the stories when I remember. In office time, of course; I’m rather scupulous about that. There was one the other day about a young advertising executive with an unruly lock of dark hair over his forehead, and twinkling blue eyes, and a pipe, and he worried too much, so he had a network of fine lines on his forehead, but luckily his secretary——”

“Hugh!”

“I’m sorry. Sophia often says ‘Hugh!’ in just that tone of voice. I do run on rather, but it’s not age or
anything
; I always have. Anyway, in my day advertising wasn’t even respectable, but nowadays undergraduates rather like the idea of being creative and very highly paid, and hidden persuaders and that kind of thing, and they all put ‘Advertising’ as first choice after the B.B.C. on the forms they fill out for the University
Appointments
Boards. I see such a lot of applicants, and they’re all much cleverer than I was. I only took a pass degree, and then I was tutor for a while to a rather stupid boy who’s gone into the House of Lords now, though he was only an Honourable then. I think it was having known an Honourable, even if he was only eleven, that helped me to get the job in the thirties. Nowadays some of them are Honourables themselves.”

“Hugh, I didn’t mean you yourself were
corrupted
.”

Hugh giggled. “Go on, Ralph. You know you did,” he said. “Everybody says advertising corrupts the
people
who do it; it’s one of the things one says
automatically
, without bothering to test it against the people one actually knows, because it ought to be true. What’s more, when Sophia told you she wanted to get out of
advertising
and go into teaching, I’ll bet you never once asked yourself whether she’d be any good at it. Just because teaching’s badly paid, that doesn’t mean anyone can do it, you know.”

“I never suggested——”

“And just because advertising is thought to be
immoral
, that doesn’t mean anyone can do it either. It’s not at all easy to do. Not well.”

You couldn’t dislike Hugh, so it was possible for him
to tell you things. Hugh didn’t storm at you as Sophia did. He was rather a diffident little man, and he had not, as far as Ralph could see, made anything of his life, so it was easy for Ralph to sit there, with a dachsund curled up on his lap and with the promise of tea and the
likelihood
of walnut cake, and listen to Hugh in the most chummy way, and even to realize that he ought to know or to have worked out for himself some of the things that Hugh was saying, but not to resent this realization,
because
the way Hugh spoke never implied an ought.

Hugh said, “I’ll tell you something. Sophia’s a natural copywriter, much better than I am. I don’t think she’d be much good as a teacher, though. No patience, and she gets so upset when people don’t follow; she couldn’t have stuck that Honourable of mine for a week. I’d be a better teacher than Sophia, except of course that I don’t know anything, but I wouldn’t mind about that, while she’d go mad. People have to do what they’re good at, you know.”

“Marriage?”

“That’s different again. I don’t know how good Sophia would be at marriage; I should think your experience of her is greater than mine in that way. She’s a very
considerate
person, I think, and perhaps rather unselfish—that’s said to be a bad thing in mothers, but it’s never the children who complain. Sophia does tend to overdo things a bit. I don’t mean physically; that’s something one works out for oneself, I suppose. But she might have ideas about being a wife and more ideas about being a mother, and that could be exhausting. Have you been thinking of——?”

“Not really. We haven’t discussed it.”

“Yes, well as far as advertising is concerned, she is good at that.”

“What about if someone were good at killing people, Hugh?”

“Do you equate the two?”

Ralph thought. “No, I was making a debating point,” he said. “Just the same, you do seem to suggest that all jobs are equally worth while, and I’d say teaching’s worth more than advertising.”

“Are we talking about being paid for things or doing them?”

“Doing them.”

“Ah … well…. Even the man who’s good at killing people might turn to butchery, and there’s a place for him until we all go vegetarian. Are the people who mind lavatories better or worse than the presidents of banks? Society needs both, only the qualifications are different, and we pay the presidents of banks better.” Hugh rubbed the top of Sue’s golden-brown head, and she closed her eyes, and yawned in pleasure. “I can’t think why they call them red,” he said, “when anyone can see they’re brown. I wish I didn’t get so muddled about things, Ralph. I do get muddled very easily, I’m afraid. Maybe we shouldn’t have what I suppose you’d call an urban industrial society—well, maybe we shouldn’t live in cities and work in factories, which is advertising
language
for the same thing. But we do, and it didn’t start overnight. Things happened, and
it
happened, and here it is for the time being; it’s part of a historical process. Should that be ‘an historical’? I’ve heard people say that, but it never sounds right to me.”

“Go on, Hugh.”

“Well … society does change, I know. It’s changing all the time as more and more things happen, and
sometimes
it seems to change rather quickly because we’re in the middle of it, and at other times it changes rather
slowly because it all happened a long time ago. But it changes, that’s the main thing, and we can help to change it, I suppose; only we’ve got to accept that
whatever
changes we can make are bound to be small, and also that the changes themselves will change, if that doesn’t sound too complicated, because whenever people start talking about ‘worth while’ what I think they always mean is that they’d like things to stop and be like that for ever, and I’m sure that’s not right. And lastly, while we are changing society, if we do try to do that (and I’m afraid I never do), we’ve got to go on living inside it, because there isn’t anywhere else to live. So I don’t see why Sophia shouldn’t be a copywriter if she’s good at it.”

“And if it destroys her? This dynamic society of yours does destroy people, you know.”

“Well, it may, but not unless she lets it. You’ve got to make a distinction between being destroyed physically—starved to death in slumps and that sort of thing, or poisoned by radiation in the atmosphere because people keep letting off H-bombs, or being blown up by one if it comes to that, nasty things! I was reading——”

“I meant morally.”

“That would be her own fault. She doesn’t have to be.”

“If the job’s corrupting?”

“She’s still a human being, Ralph. She doesn’t have to let it corrupt her. You know, we’re doing rather a gentle little job at the moment for Amalgamated
Papermakers
. Famous quotations. It’s what’s called ‘
prestige
’, which always seems to mean half-pages in
The
Times.
We’ve just finished one—‘No Man Is an Island’, and then a lot of stuff about bringing people together all over the world through the medium of great ideas
enshrined
in books. I rather enjoy it really; you can write
sentences with conjunctions in them. And there’s some modern-looking art work—Bantu tribesmen and Oxford undergraduates in a sort of
montage.
Well, of course, it’s all true in one way, but quite untrue in another. That’s often the way with quotations, which is why advertisers find them so useful.”

“Men
are
islands, you mean?”

“Yes, I do. How quick you are, Ralph! I’d rewrite it: ‘Every Man is an Island’. People say, ‘Only connect’, and that’s another quotation, except that I’d want to add, ‘And don’t forget to disconnect afterwards’.
Anything
can corrupt anybody if it’s allowed to. Teaching certainly can. The Agency can corrupt you, and so can I.C.I., and so can the House of Commons, and so can running a restaurant, and so can building the Taj Mahal, if you let any of those things take you over. Some things are important. Making art is, if you can do it, and responding to art is, and watching a sunset is, arid loving people is, and getting married is—oh, and maybe even looking after dachshunds is, if that’s what you choose to do. Because all these things are expressions of you, and only you can do them in your way. Those are important—the you-things, the things in which you are yourself, not dominating anyone else or being dominated by them. Connect like anything, be a copywriter or a teacher or anything, join up and help people and change society or anything, but don’t give up the island, I say.”