Storyboard (13 page)

“It takes some to perk.”

“Hugh drinks Nescafé.”

“Perhaps we’d better have it in the kitchen. Once you get stuck in that sofa, you never get out.”

“I’ve discovered that.”

Much later that night, as they lay almost
uncomfortably
close together on Sophia’s single bed, their faces just faintly visible to each other in the glow of Ralph’s cigarette, he said, “Did you mean that about wanting to get out of advertising?”

“Of course. It’s a corrupting business.”

“So I’ve heard. Still, I’d like to know a bit more about it. I thought I might write something.”

Sophia stretched out an arm in the darkness, and ran her hand down his outer flank and along the firmness of his thigh, enjoying the way the hairs curled between her fingers and the skin beneath. If only one could relax all the time, and just let things happen, how manageable
life could be. At such a moment, not worrying about anything, not tense, just lying there, close, dependent and possessive, she knew that for her no career, no artistic achievement, nothing like that would give her completeness, but this warmth, this giving and getting, not sex but the afterness of it. Now indeed, gooeyness need not be held back. It was appropriate now. “I do like your legs,” she said. “People always go on about women’s legs being attractive, but I think men’s are much nicer.”

Slowly she drew her arm back across the shape of his body. If it were possible to sleep in this position, she would sleep, she thought. The point of Ralph’s cigarette waved in the air, as he searched for somewhere to stub it out. If only she could remember not to call him “
darling
” for at least some weeks yet, things might work out very well.

“L.P. Peters; 117 Sawton Road; Independent; Direct Supply; Last Order July 23rd, 4 cases large, 2 cases medium, no cases economy size. Note, this order
non-typical.
(Reduced Price Offer.)” It was Keith’s fourth call of the morning, and the time was getting on for ten o’clock.

During a Store-Check one gets through most calls per hour between nine and ten in the morning, because there are fewer customers in the shops that early. L. P. Peters, Keith deduced, would have his greatest number of customers in the evenings when the other shops were shut. This was a shop for L. P. Peters’s immediate
neighbours
, a shop to run out to quickly in the rain when something had been forgotten, a shabby shop, muddled and cluttered, with goods ill-placed on the shelves and no self-service. L. P. Peters himself served behind the counter, and was helped at busy times by Mrs. L. P. Peters. His grocery counter ran down the length of the shop. Behind it, the shelves reached up to the ceiling, and there was a small step-ladder so that L. P. Peters could get things down from the top; below it, more shelves held an overflow of larger packets, mostly of breakfast cereals and washing powders; upon it there was a glass case, containing Crisps, soap and toothpaste, and a number of small dispenser units for
confectionery
,
fish-paste and instant puddings. At the far end of the shop, a side-counter with a flap was set at
right-angles
to the grocery counter. At this counter, beer was sold, and cigarettes, Hall’s Empire Wine, V.P. Wine, Whiteway’s Port, Tarragona, Guinness, and Tizer the Appetizer. Elsewhere in the shop, placed wherever there seemed to be room for them, were large wire dispensers for bread, toilet paper, and the Week’s Special Offer, which was always the same jam reduced in price by the same amount. A cold cabinet held bacon, butter,
margarine
, and frozen fish and vegetables. A small cardboard mobile hung from the ceiling, and advertised a cake-mix L. P. Peters no longer stocked.

Keith wore a charcoal-gray suit with a white shirt, a dark tie, and a white handkerchief in the breast pocket. He wore his black Store-Check Store shoes instead of the suede shoes he usually wore to the office, and his
Store-Check
hat. Hoppness liked their Sales Force (and so, by extension, any other people in their employment who might call upon the Trade) to wear a hat, so that they could raise it when they entered a shop. Keith’s
Store-Check
hat was a black homburg. He disliked wearing a hat of any kind because his ears stuck out, so he would only put on his Store-Check hat just outside the door, and take it off again immediately he was inside. “Mr. Peters?” he said. “Good morning!”

“Oh yes?” said L. P. Peters.

“I’m from Hoppness, Silch and Company.”

L. P Peters looked worried, and a little furtive. “You’re a bit early, aren’t you?” he said. “I mean, last time you was here was——”

“I’m from the Advertising Department, Mr. Peters, not the Sales Department.”

“Oh yes?”

“I don’t know whether we’ve visited you before.” This was a lie. Keith knew perfectly well that there hadn’t been a Store-Check in this town since the war.

“I don’t know as you have. There’s a lot do come in. You can’t see them all, you know.”

“I’m sure there are.” Then jovially, “But at least I haven’t come to sell you anything, Mr. Peters. In fact, I just want you to help me, if you’ll be so good.” Then sincerely, “Of course I know you must be a very busy man.” A lie again. L. P Peters wasn’t as busy as all that, with the shop empty, and no assistant needed to help him. No, you’re not busy, L. P. Peters, Keith thought. Not as wealthy as all that either, when your first reaction to someone who might be a salesman is fear that he may want you to tie up more cash in stock. Sawton Road was a turning off the High Street, and L. P. Peters was far, far too close to the recently modernized self-service grocery of the Marlborough chain. Scraping along from month to month, knowing most of his customers by name, wondering whether to close the shop for a week’s holiday in summer, deciding he’d better not (were there little Peterses?), changing his mind and going anyway, putting up a little wall inside his head to hide away money worries and the economies he ought to make, and losing his temper with Mrs. Peters every time she came too close to the wall or suggested—but he must not sentimentalize, Keith reminded himself, about
someone
who was after all only a statistic, only a dying cell in a healthy organism, a cell that had to die if the organism were to grow, a cell named L. P. Peters, who had a wife, and a rather dirty white coat, and no customers at ten o’clock in the morning, for whom trade would be slack all day until round about six, when the regulars came in for bread and Tolly Ale and Woodbines and small tins
of baked beans in tomato sauce and half-pounds of sausages and perhaps Glo. “I wonder whether you’d mind if I were to count how many packets of Glo you have,” Keith said. “It’s really just a sort of check on our advertising.” Did L. P Peters have the telly? Plenty of L. P. Peterses did, usually on somebody’s Easy Payments Plan. It saved them money in the long run, since with the telly they never needed to go out at night. And if the Payments were Easy enough … “I don’t know if you’ve seen any of our television commercials,” he said.

“Oh yes. There was a woman hanging out clothes.”

“No, that was for Super. We just do Glo.”

“There was two children, looking at each other like.”

“That was New Fiz.”

“Something about a washing machine. About how it didn’t hurt the rollers.”

“I’m afraid that could have been rather a lot of
people
. They all say that. We——”

“A girl dancing about, was it?”

“No, we——”

“About how it shone in the dark? I shall get it in a moment. There’s such a lot of them, you know; the wife and I can’t keep them straight. Was it hands?”

“That’s Gentle.”

“About how it’s got blue in it?”

“Well, quite a number of——”

“Yes, that’s it; I remember now. About how it’s got blue in it for whiteness.”

“Not quite——”

“And then there was two women doing a test or
something
. I was saying to the wife, you want them to guess wrong sometimes; you really do. I mean, it does get a bit monotonous when you know what they’re going to say. Mrs. Peters likes the little cartoon ones best.”

“Yes, well we find —”

“Of course, it’s all put up, you know, those interviews and all that; I mean, the way they always say the right thing and that. Mrs. Peters, she’s very interested in that kind of thing, you know. I mean, she used to make up little verses, like. She wrote one to
Housewives’
Choice,
and had it read out on the radio. I always say, you should come to her if you want to know what to put in your adverts and that. I often tell her, when she says something witty, you know, ‘You just write that down, my dear,’ but with the programme changing she doesn’t really have the time.”

“I’m sure we’d be very glad to see some of Mrs. Peters’ ideas. We always do want to know what people think.”

“Well, it’s like she says; it’s only expressing yourself really, isn’t it, writing?”

“Still, I think you’ll agree that our advertising for Glo is doing quite a good job in selling the product?”

“I don’t know really. Mostly they just come in and say, ‘What’s threepence off this week?’ and I tell them, and they buy that. I don’t think it’s the advertising, you see, so much as the money to them.”

“I think that if you were to look at your invoices for last year as against this, Mr. Peters, you’d find that you’d ordered more Glo this year. And sold more too, of course.”

Next to the cash register on the grocery counter was a large spike mounted on a wooden block. All L. P. 0Peters’ invoices for the past three years were stuck on this spike. Like butterflies, each invoice had been killed by L. P Peters when he had pierced it with the spike, and, once dead, it had no more to do with the daily life of his shop. He simply did not know how many packets
of Glo he had sold last year, Keith realized. The Agency’s Marketing Department might deal in trends and waves and planned expansion, but L. P. Peters just tried to sell what he had ordered, and gave thanks when he
succeeded
. Really when one considered how complicated and full of trouble other people’s lives were, one ought to feel almost ashamed at worrying so about one’s own.

Did Mrs. Peters have headaches? Did she get tired? It seemed not, if she were always so witty and so
creative
. Like Mrs. Peters, Sylvia watched the telly, but she was more choosy about it;
Panorama,
Tonight,
and
Moni
tor
,
were what she liked. Sylvia didn’t switch over to the commercial channel except when Keith was at home and wanted to see one of his own advertisements, and had to watch half an hour of
Wagon
Train
to be sure of catching it. On these occasions, Sylvia would place
herself
inconveniently close to the standard lamp, and read in an obvious way, and Keith would turn the sound down low so as not to disturb her. Ridiculous only to think of her like this, as if they were always at odds! There must be something neurotic about Keith if his mind dwelt so nowadays on what was unhappy about his home-life. Projection—it was probably all
projection
. He was worried about the new Hoppness account, and this coloured his thinking about everything else. At 24 packets per case in the large size and 48 in the medium, L. P. Peters had ordered exactly 96 packets of each, and there were 40 packets of the large and 62 of the medium left. “You don’t sell so many of the smaller size then?” Keith asked. Maybe if Sylvia, like Mrs. Peters, had more to…. The Bridge Club, the Amateur Dramatic Society, the Young Conservatives—there were so many things going on, if she chose to
take an interest. Or if, on the rare occasions Stephen was taken over to spend the afternoon with a friend from school, Sylvia were to stay and chat with the friend’s mother…. But she always said people had more to do with their time.

And as for the Bridge Club or anything like that, there Stephen himself was a reason for not joining. He had to be taken to school, and collected again at four. He couldn’t yet be left in the evenings without a sitter. At holiday times, he was always round her neck. “No, we don’t sell so many of the medium,” L. P. Peters said. “Not when there’s anything off. They like to get as much as they can, if you see what I mean—fourpence off the large instead of threepence off the medium like. Makes it seem more of a bargain.”

“Why not order the economy size then, Mr. Peters? They’d get sixpence off that, and it’s a bigger margin for you.”

“Oh, yes? Well, I never have more than the two, you see.” L. P Peters, who had come a long way out of his shell, went suddenly back in again. The shop-door opened, and an old lady in a dusty brown hat came in. L. P Peters looked relieved to see her. “Will there be anything else, then?” he said to Keith.

“That’s the lot, thank you very much.” The old lady began to tack about the shop, picking a roll of Soft Blue toilet paper out of the dispenser and putting it back again, fingering the sausages in the cold cabinet, ending her hesitant course at the corner of the counter where the Crisps were sold, and leaning over it to peer at the tins of stewing steak and luncheon meat on the shelf beyond. “You’ve been very helpful,” Keith said. “Most helpful!”

“Oh, yes?”

“I’ll say good-bye then, Mr. Peters. I hope we shall meet again.”

“Good morning, Mr….” As Keith left the shop, the old woman said, “I only come in for Kit-e-Kat. I only come in for that this morning. Just the Kit-e-Kat.” L. P. Peters began to move the steps into position for a climb. Keith passed the window, carrying his
Store-Check
hat under one arm, and went on into the High Street.

If she could feel that she were doing something
useful
…. It would have to be part-time; just the mornings maybe. Something that would take her out of herself, Keith thought. Something they could talk about in the evenings when he came home. He might be home late sometimes; he supposed he was; Sylvia knew by now that it couldn’t be helped. But when he did get home, dammit, he wanted it to
be
a home. He looked forward to it. Other women might complain that their husbands disliked being tied, went off adventuring after the Office Party or a Client Evening, visited nude shows in the early afternoon, all that sort of thing which Keith knew went on. There was nothing like that about him; nothing. He was domestic. He liked to sit by the fire and talk. He liked doing little things about the house, when he had the time for it. He liked to feel Sylvia snuggle up to him in bed at night, even when (as usually now) nothing followed the snuggling—wasn’t it he who had insisted on a double bed instead of twin beds, when first they moved to Purley?

Yes, he looked forward to getting home, and it was disappointing to discover when he did that there was nothing to talk about any more, except perhaps what Stephen had been doing during the day; they ought to have some other topic of conversation besides the child.
Keith was devoted to Stephen. Whenever he was home early enough, he would go up, and see the boy in bed, and they’d have a fine time exploring their imaginary country, and telling stories. Some boys, he knew, were frightened of their fathers, but he’d avoided that with Steve. But there ought to be something else for Sylvia and Keith to talk about. There ought to be some other barrier against the sulks, the boredom, the irritation, the headaches. So that, if she had something to do,
something
she enjoyed doing, in which he himself might
reasonably
take an interest…. He turned in to the
Marlborough
Self-Service in the High Street, and introduced himself to the Manager, who was at least fifteen years younger than L. P. Peters, and wore a suit darker and smarter than Keith’s. “Now, look! I’m terribly busy, old boy,” the Manager said. “There’s the Stockroom back there. Why don’t you go through, and tell me what I want, eh?”