Storyboard (4 page)

Eight years. Keith had moved from the Agency’s Marketing Department, and had become an Account Executive. His seriousness, his over-conscientiousness were assets now. Everything about Keith convinced clients that Keith thought of little else in life but their business, and they were right. At first, with his
allegiance
divided between a number of smaller clients, Keith had been worried; there had been too much going on in his mind at once. But that was over since his
appointment
as Account Manager of Glo; Hoppness, Silch did not approve of divided loyalties any more than Keith
did, and Glo took up all Keith’s time. They did approve of Keith, however: “We really feel he speaks our
language
,” they said. Keith had been round the factory, and seen how Glo was made; Keith could tell you the formula of Glo, and knew how it was different from New Fiz, Super, Shining Blue and Gentle. He had watched Performance Tests, and Product Demonstrations, and had taken part in Blind Tests. He had been on Store Checks, and had spent a week with the Glo Sales Force. He knew what Glo’s share of the market was this year, and what it had been last year, and what it ought to be next year. He read reports and wrote reports about Glo, made and received telephone calls about Glo, devised strategies for Glo, and revised strategies for Glo, and hypothesized strategies for a hypothetical Glo if Glo should ever change. Every week he took advertisements for Glo to Luton to show them to Hoppness, Silch, and came back from Luton to the Agency with suggestions for amendments which (he was genuinely convinced)
improved
the advertisements, and he carried the amended advertisements back to Luton the next week, and
returned
, just as convinced, with further amendments, and talked to members of the Creative Group within the Agency about these amendments, and became less
convinced
that they improved the advertisements, but
inclined
to think that they might reasonably be made as a gesture to Hoppness, and took the re-amended
advertisements
back to Luton, and became more and more worried about the client’s suggestions for yet further amendments. And when these so many times amended advertisements did finally appear in the press or on television, there was always work to be done on the advertisements which were to follow, and on test
campaigns
which came to nothing, or simply on the process
known to Hoppness as “thinking through an idea”—a process that might continue through six months and eighteen submissions before it was decided that the idea wasn’t a very good one after all. Yes, Keith thought about Glo for most of the time. He did not, as Sophia had guessed, often get home before eight-thirty, and when he went to bed, his feet itched.

Glo was kept in Keith’s kitchen in the special plastic holder you could get by sending away the top of a packet of Glo and a postal order for one and sixpence, but Sylvia did not use it. A year after Keith had taken over the account, Glo had begun to give Sylvia a rash. In fact, nowadays
all
Hoppness products gave her a rash. This irritated Keith. He explained to Sylvia that there were no
major
differences in the formulae of any of the synthetic detergents put out by the three main companies, and that if Star (a Miles & Baker product) didn’t give Sylvia a rash, there was no reason why Glo should. It was just psychological, he said. So there was a quarrel because, over the past few years, Sylvia had grown very sensitive to words like “psychological” and “psycho-somatic”; she did not care to have them used in reference to her. She insisted that even her migraine attacks were of physical origin; she had an aunt who suffered from migraine, and these things were known to run in families.

They did quarrel sometimes, Keith and Sylvia, but not more than any other married couple, Keith thought. (He didn’t want another drink. Relaxing might be the conventional thing to do after a hard day at the office, but shouldn’t get out of hand. Besides, his train would be in by now.) Mostly about Stephen, and that too, he supposed, was usual. Stephen was such a bright,
intelligent
boy; he was so imaginative. Anyone could tell that
he would grow up to be something—well, creative, a writer perhaps, or an actor, or a painter or musician, someone who lived in limelight, whom people looked up to, someone who had power over people, just as clients, as P.A., as so many people had power over Keith;
that
wasn’t a question of money (Keith made a very good salary, as a matter of fact), but of—well, power—of being the sort of person who had power. Since Keith saw Stephen for so little of the time, it was natural that he should—not spoil the boy, but make as much as he could of what time he had. They shared a world
together
, a world of made-up things, of gollywockets and the Fire Engine International and the brabsome tiger who swept the floors. Stephen would come and watch while Keith dressed and shaved in the mornings before going to work, and often their conversation would
continue
through breakfast; perhaps Sylvia felt left out sometimes, but she did have Stephen for the rest of the day, when he wasn’t at school. There oughtn’t to be jealousy between the parents over a child, Keith knew. All the books disapproved it, but it was obviously quite natural that a certain amount of jealousy should exist; one ought to accept that, and make allowances for it.

As late a train as this was never crowded; that was the compensation in catching it. Keith found an empty grubby compartment, opened his dispatch case, and began to re-read Research Section’s report on a sample consumer-reaction to the new soap. There would have to
be
a name, of course; indeed, there would have to be several, so that they could be tested against each other. It was Hugh’s job to think of a name. What was usually done in these cases was that a printed slip would be sent to everybody in the Agency, asking for suggestions, and a small prize would be offered for the name eventually
chosen. Curious that the prize always seemed to be won by one of the Mailing Boys or a girl from the Telephone Exchange. Something wrong with the Copy
Department
there?—over-oriented to marketing thinking and not to names? Or was it just that Mailing Boys were closer in their basic thinking to clients? Hugh was a sound man—as sound a man as Keith himself, the same
sort
of man really. He was the only man for Glo. The Agency had long since discovered that brilliant creative people didn’t do on Glo; working in the Hoppness way destroyed such people, and they were likely to leave advertising altogether or to slit their wrists. But was soundness enough for this present problem? Would not brilliance, after all, be needed? The sound way to sell Foundation Soap had already been tried, and it had done very well—for Foundation Soap. This new product, if it were to establish itself, might need a new approach, a brilliant approach. But how did one get brilliant advertising through the mincing machine of Hoppness, Silch? Over and over went the wheels on the tracks; in and out of identical suburban stations went the train, stopping and starting, stopping and starting, and in the end one was bound to get to Purley, just as in the end—but no! There was no such certain destination to Keith’s train of thought.

He arrived home at ten-thirty. Sylvia was just about to go to bed; there was a casserole for him, keeping warm in the oven. He did not delay her, but ate his
supper
in the kitchen, and then followed her. The light on the bedside table was still on, and she was reading a book from Boots. He undressed, and got into bed. When she had finished her chapter, she turned the light out, and eventually each of them went to sleep.

Every evening, when Hugh Grover opened the door of his flat, there would be a dog looking at him. She was a miniature long-haired dachshund, called Jill, five years old, with a muzzle beginning to gray and a body that had thickened after two whelpings. She had two brown eyes, set in a warm brown pointed face; in certain lights, they glowed like amber. Her body was brindled, marked with chocolate along the joints, so that Simon Purvis had once called her the “do-it-yourself-dog” and affected to believe that Hugh had put her together from a pattern supplied by the makers of Scrapps. She was serious and sentimental, and much longer than she was high, and she stood there in the middle of the hall, with one front paw raised a little in the air and her head cocked on one side to add a note of inquiry to her
permanent
seriousness. Jill and Hugh would stand there, he at the door and she planted solidly on the old piece of carpet which covered the hall, just looking at each other, and then Hugh would say, “Well, Jill? Are you glad to see me?” and she would rush forward, making little moans of delight and reproach, and begin
mumbling
at the legs of his trousers. And at that same signal there would appear from the kitchen, living-room or bedroom of Hugh’s flat two more dachshunds, as low, as long-haired, as brown, but nothing like as broad, their tails feathered and carried high, who would throw
them-themselves
at Hugh, jumping and yelping in welcome as he sat on his heels and tried to pet them all three at once.

This welcome was a ritual, and could not be rushed. When it was done, from the kitchen Mrs. Rhodes, the housekeeper, would call, “Are you there, sir?” (He was always there.) “Your tea’s ready. I’m just off,” and Hugh would reply, as he always did, “I’ll have it in the
kitchen, Mrs. Rhodes,” where, in any case, she would already have laid it.

Older people get set in their ways. Hugh wondered, as he often wondered, whether he ought not to make a change in the habitual order some day, eat a different sort of biscuit, take his tea in the living-room, try a lightly boiled egg instead of the usual peanut butter. He read, as he always read, the writing on the side of the biscuit tin: “The full flavour of these biscuits can best be appreciated if utilized with cheese.” Walking along Piccadilly on his way back to the Agency after lunch, he had observed the man on his right spit neatly into the trouser-turnup of a man in front. What strange things one saw every day in London, and how little
surprised
one was at the time! City life was not
natural,
of course, but it was natural to those who lived in cities. He buttered two biscuits, then spread them with
peanut-butter
, then broke them in half. A half for Jill, and a half for Jane; a half for Sue, and a half for Hugh. Human beings eat more tidily than dachshunds. Now Mrs. Rhodes had collected her bag from the hall, and put on her old black coat and a dusty hat which pulled down on both sides of her face, and stood at the kitchen door, blinking at him and shifting from foot to foot. “I’ll be off now,” she said, as she always said, and Hugh said, “Won’t you have a cup of tea, Mrs. Rhodes?” and Mrs. Rhodes said, “I’ve had mine,” and went.

The case against “getting set” (he knew because he had written copy for vitamin pills) was dietary. The vitamin people depended, if not for their sales at least for their sales’ message, on the fact that a certain
proportion
of elderly people living alone would stop
bothering
to prepare food for themselves, and would try to live on tea and bread-and-butter; behind the
“Doctors
know …”
and the
“as we grow older it is easy for the body to go short of essential vitamins and minerals …”
and even the downright
“Vitamins can PROLONG your life …”
there would be the fact of some old man who had died of malnutrition in Wapping. Well, it was true, Hugh told himself; all perfectly true. Old men and women in Wapping and elsewhere couldn’t be bothered with
buying
liver, and fresh vegetables were a bother when one only wanted a quarter of a pound at a time, and if one could afford the pills instead, why not?—though he himself kept healthy with peanut-butter and eggs and nourishing stews which he heated up from day to day. It was not difficult. He had Mrs. Rhodes to shop for himself and his dogs, and for anything special he could send his secretary to Fortnum’s during the lunch-hour.

After tea they went for a walk round the block, as they always did when the weather was fine. And on Saturday and Sunday afternoons they would go to
Kensington
Gardens. There were people at the Agency who thought of Hugh as a friendless person, though
self-contained
. It was foolish to think so. A dog-owner is never without friends. All sorts of people whom Hugh would never have met, never have thought of meeting, would stop to admire the dachshunds and to chat.
Kensington
children would come up politely and ask to pat them. Nursemaids in brown uniforms would stop their prams, and throw up their hands, and exclaim to their charges, “Look, darling! Look at the pretty dogs!” Old ladies would say, “How sweet!” and grown men would pretend to be frightened. Once a woman who looked like the late Lady Mountbatten (though
she,
as it turned out, had been in India at the time) had asked Hugh where she could buy a similar dog, and a
well-known
actor who walked his Labrador in the park on
Sunday afternoons had once sat down beside Hugh and talked affably for twenty minutes. Americans were
always
getting into conversation. Dachshund-owners in particular would go out of their way to cut across Hugh’s path, so that their dogs and his could play together while they discussed with Hugh the moodiness of dachshunds—how they had days when they just would not eat, how snobbishly they spurned most other dogs but dachshunds and poodles (and particularly seemed to dislike corgis, which was ridiculous when you remembered that the Royal Family was so attached to corgis), how obedient they were, how devoted, how intelligent, how
disobedient
, how fickle, how stoical when bitten by wasps, how timid, how you only had to scratch twice at the earth to start them burrowing, how they chased sticks, how they ate pencils. Hugh was the confidant of many dachshund-owners in the park. He was more; he was a sort of uncle, for he had three. The hour or so he spent there on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon was his most sociable time. And none of these people had any claims on him.