Storyboard (3 page)

Foundation Soap combined a cream base with (
although
this was not made explicit in the advertising) a light dye which wore off within a few hours. The best foundation for make-up, as actors know, is a clean, but slightly oily skin. Ordinary soap cleans, but takes out the natural oils of the skin; Foundation Soap put the oil back again, and added also the delicate bloom of peach, apple blossom, magnolia, rose or gypsy, so that one had the illusion of wearing make-up even before make-up was applied. Obviously there were many people who would not buy Foundation Soap, or at any rate they would not buy it more than once. It was not a family soap. Many fathers and children will wash themselves with delicately coloured beauty soap containing genuine perfume from France if they happen to find it in the wash-basin;
indeed
, they may enjoy doing so. But going to school or to the office delicately tinted with gypsy is quite another thing. Soap is family property; once it has been used, it cannot lie on a dressing-table with cosmetics. So
Foundation
Soap was used mainly by women living alone or with other women. They formed a small market, Donald said; they were difficult to reach by advertising without wastage; but there were enough of them to make
Foundation
Soap a profitable product.

“Market wouldn’t stand another though, would it?” said P.A.

“Another Foundation Soap? I shouldn’t think so.”

“Hugh, what do you think?”

Hugh blinked, and sat up on the sofa. “Oh, I agree with Donald,” he said. “I always do.”

“Why?”

“He’s always right. I’ve been letting Donald do my Marketing thinking for ten years now.”

P.A. made the face which passed for a smile when he didn’t feel like smiling. It was a convention within the Agency that Hugh was irreplaceable because he had been around for so long—a sound man, if not brilliant; people like that, it was said, were needed as ballast. So you might strip Hugh of his accounts, but you could never get rid of him, and because this was generally known Hugh had licence, even from P.A.

“And if our people went into the market?” P.A. said.

“Hoppness? They’d lose some money; that’s all. I mean, if Hoppness wentin, Miles & Baker and A.M.P.O. would be bound to follow; you know what they are for not leaving well alone. And the market can’t take two Foundation Soaps, as Donald said, never mind four.”

“So what would happen to Pettifer’s?”

“They couldn’t keep it up, spending at
our
rate…. Oh, I see.”

“That’s right, Hugh,” P.A. said. “You do see. Pettifer’s would have to pull out. No more Foundation Soap.”

Donald said, “I shouldn’t think it would be worth our while to stay in either. The whole thing would fold.”

“But Pettifer’s would be out. Our clients don’t like outsiders coming into the soap field.” Sophia had a
momentary
wild mental image of the soap field, neatly hedged with chlorophyll toothpaste, light green and
shiny with wax and smelling of rose bouquet, while at the gate the Outsiders battered to get in. But already P.A. had become the marshal of his army, and it was up to Sophia to appear an intelligent staff officer. P.A.’s skin took on the tan of a desert sun, and he moved his head from side to side like a lizard as he included them all in his appreciation of the situation. “It’s a battle,” he said. “We’ve got to make a killing, and we’ve got to make it quick if we don’t want the other boys to come in.”

“Have we actually got a product yet?”

“Keith!”

“This is it,” Keith Bates said. He took five pieces of soap from a plain cardboard box, and handed them round. “They look rather
like
Foundation Soap
actually
,” he said. “Of course, that’s because we’re using the same formula, as far as the people in Chemicals have been able to break it down, and the same tints, and the same scents.”

“Looks like a flatter bar to me,” Fidge Randolph said.

“Well, yes, it is a bit flatter. It’s a sort of more modern shape really, they think in Luton.”

“I didn’t say more modern. I said flatter.”

Donald said, “How does it measure up weightwise?”

“Weightwise it’s the same.”

“And scentwise the same, you say?”

“Yes, it’s exactly the same scentwise.”

Hugh moved in his seat like a cat thinking of the
sandbox
. “Keith, do you mean that our U.S.P. is that this product is
flatter
than the competition? Is that what you’re saying?”

Sophia said, “Made To Fit Your Soap-Dish.”

“Well….”

“The Unique Sales Point for this product is what the advertising can give it,” P.A. said. “That too difficult for you, Hugh?”

There was a silence. If Hugh were not going to reply to this, nor was anybody else. “Hoppness didn’t have to choose this Agency,” P.A. said. “And I didn’t have to choose this Group. If you don’t think you can do the job, say so.”

“Oh,
I
wouldn’t say——” Desmond Bart said quickly, and Fidge said, “Do it if we have to.” Media was silent, and so was Marketing; creative problems didn’t
concern
them. Keith rubbed a piece of tissue paper from the cardboard box quickly over the palms of his hands to mop up the sweat, which had begun to combine with the new product to form a light lather. Hugh sat there, a gray cat, which is used to kicks, but goes on eating. He said, “I’m sorry, P.A. We were just feeling round the problem.” He gave the little ingratiating simper he only made when he was ill at ease. “We’re all supposed to do it, I believe. One of the messenger boys goes to I.P.A. classes in the evenings, and he was telling me——”

“All right, Hugh.”

“Is there a name yet?”

Keith said, “We’re supposed to advise them.”

“They haven’t got a wrapper then, if they haven’t got a name?”

Fidge Randolph said, “Now, there we
can
do
something
modern. With shapes. Modern shapes. I see it as a kind of——”

“There is some research on colours,” Keith said.

“—kind of——”

“In fact, Packaging Section did a test——”

“You mean there is a wrapper?”

“Five,” Keith said. “Packaging Section tested five.

*

But we don’t have to accept any of them, provided we can persuade Hoppness ours is better. We’d have to be sure of that, of course.”

“But if the product hasn’t got a name——”

“They left it blank on the wrappers they tested.”

Desmond Bast said, “I’ve always wanted to do
something
about soap. Something atmospheric. Mood. There’s a man in France I want to use. He does
marvellous
things with silhouettes to music. Very sensual things.”

“Silhouettes?”

“Very dark dream-figures. I’ve been wanting to use him for ages.”

P.A. said, “Perhaps we could leave the creative
people
to talk this out later. You know what’s wanted, Hugh.”

“Find a name first?”

“Find an idea first.”

“Of course. An idea! What has Foundation Soap been doing about media? I know Harold wouldn’t have brought his charts if he didn’t intend to tell us.”

“I was coming to that.” P.A. was a little sharp again.

Sophia wondered whether Hugh was teasing him
intentionally
, as a way of saving face. Or was it a death wish there, black death beneath the gray pussy-cat mask Hugh presented to the Agency? Harold Hartley,
glittering
like a dentist, began to arrange his charts on the easel. “It isn’t an easy problem, reaching single
women
,” he said. “They tried a lot of things before settling down to a basic, rather unimaginative pattern of TV and the women’s magazines. Here you see, when they launched, they were much more adventurous….” He spoke on, his finger jabbing at blocks and circles on the coloured charts, and Sophia remembered that she ought
to be taking notes. Keith Bates, she saw, was already
doing
so. It’s another long evening for you tonight, Keith love, she thought; I wonder how often that man gets home to his family before eight-thirty?

*

In fact, it was nine-fifteen before Keith left the Agency, nine-thirty before he reached Victoria to catch the train to Purley. It was November weather. Currents of air which were not thick enough to be called fog, and yet tasted of fog, moved sluggishly about the station, and were crossed by grubby Irishmen beating their
intermittent
path from the Coffee Stall to the Gentlemen’s Lavatory. The people who always sit on the benches at railway termini were sitting on benches; they did not move when trains came in, nor yet when trains went out, but made themselves as small as they could within their coats against the draught, and sat on. The day’s litter lay about on the floor. The buffet bar had that cheerless quality, at once brown and overlit, which marks off the pubs which deal with transients from those which have an habitual trade. Keith ordered a gin and bitter lemon. This was the conventional “relaxing” drink at the end of an advertising man’s day, but it didn’t relax Keith. For Keith was never relaxed, as he would tell you
himself
, lighting another cigarette, fiddling with a pencil, walking uneasily about the office. “I can’t relax,” he would say. “Funny! I just can’t do it. Neurotic, I
suppose
.”

Perhaps Keith should not have begun his career as a barrister; he had not the temperament for waiting around. Besides (he saw now) he would never have been good at it. But one drifts into these things, each stage of preparation taking one on to the next, so that when, at the end, one discovers that the whole idea was a
mistake
,
the train has gone too far for one to be able to drop off, and all one can do is to hang on miserably, waiting for the crash. Keith had spent three years reading Law, and then a year reading for Bar Finals, and then he had been called to the Bar and had spent a further year in Chambers, and then two years simply waiting for briefs which never came; it was like being an actor in that way, except that one didn’t have an agent and wasn’t allowed to take a fill-in job as a waiter in a coffee bar or a salesman in a shop. So Keith had spent most of the time at home, had dusted, swept, made the beds, done odd jobs, mended socks, cooked, and his wife had gone out to work. For four years.

Of course there had been a few briefs, dock briefs which brought in little money, but gave him experience and the feeling that he had been of use, just as an actor has his spells in repertory on starvation wages. Those appearances in court had taught Keith (slowly because one does not accept this sort of lesson easily, since its acceptance can be mortal) that he wasn’t any good as a barrister. He didn’t enjoy it, and he flustered easily. His one success (he made a story of it now in client-
conversation
over drinks) had been at a county court in North London, and came only because the plaintiff took a dislike to him. She was a landlady, a rather
common
sort of woman who let out rooms at a high rent to labouring Irishmen, and it was germane to the case that she habitually used foul language. Primly in the box she denied this. And Keith, because he
was
so serious,
because
he flustered, because he could never let well alone, went on and on hopelessly in cross-examination,
wearing
out the Judge’s patience, the patience of the
reporters
, the spectators, even at last the plaintiff’s patience, so that she told him sharply to bugger off
because he was getting on her tits, and he won his case. It was a victory not so much snatched from failure as made out of it; it did him no good in his career, and even, indirectly, the final harm.

Because Keith decided to celebrate. He had an excuse—his first case won—and he had a reason—that even he, within this victory, could see defeat. “No dins
tonight
,” he said to Sylvia that evening. “I didn’t make anything. We’re going out.” They took money from the housekeeping jar, and dined in Soho. It was a fine summer evening, not yet dark even after the meal was over. They window-shopped for a while after leaving the restaurant, and drifted with the crowds before taking a bus as far as Marble Arch. They walked through Hyde Park. They walked through Kensington Gardens. They walked through the summer smells of warm grass and dust. They took a winding course among the trees,
hearing
the traffic on the Bayswater Road only as a muted buzzing, picking their way through the lovers and others who lay together on the warm ground in the dusk. Sylvia said, “It’s funny. We’ve walked miles, and I’m wearing heels, but I’m not a bit tired.” And indeed, they moved so slowly through a dream of summer; how could they be tired?

They had been married four and a half years, since just before Keith left Oxford, while Sylvia was teaching at a school in Cowley. They had settled down into a
routine
of marriage; there was no exploration in it any longer, and the imposition of each upon the other was done in more subtle ways now than in bed. But when they were back in Notting Hill, and had climbed the stairs of the house in which they rented a furnished flat, and had reached the landing of the third floor, and there before them was the door of their living-room, with the
door of the kitchenette to the left and the bedroom to the right, he took her hand, and opened the right-hand door. And, since what one does in a dream does not matter, when she said, “Keith! Wait a minute!” he had not waited, but had gone on, langorously, without urgency, still in a summer dream, but yet on without waiting, and even to Sylvia being sensible had not mattered at that moment, and making love was for both of them like biting into a ripe peach and being bitten all at the same time, the whole delicious sensation stretched out as long as they could prolong it, all on a summer’s evening, until at last, still dreaming, they fell into a dreamless sleep.

Sensible married couples will tell you that these are always the occasions to beware, and so it was. Once Sylvia knew that she was pregnant, there was only one decision for sensible people to make. Keith gave up the Bar, and looked for some more immediate use for his qualifications. He found a job with the Agency, and Sylvia resigned her teaching post at Richmond High School to look after their home and their child. When the child was born they called him Stephen. That was eight years ago.