Storyboard (19 page)

When she reached the kitchen, Stephen was still howling. He looked angry, his face all red and puffy with temper. He ran forward, and pressed his head against Sylvia’s skirt, and the last three handkerchiefs fell from his shoulder, and made a trail behind him. “The pot hit me,” he said. “The pot hit my shoulder.”

Of all the stupid things! It wasn’t as if she had left the handle in a dangerous position; the hankies had been on one of the back burners of the stove. But she controlled her own anger, and said, as gently as she could, “Darling, did the water get you?”

“Pot hit me.”

But obviously the water had splashed on him. His right arm and neck, and his side as far as she could see beneath the short-sleeved striped T-shirt, were red. Luckily scalds weren’t really serious, but it must be hurting him. “Darling, do be careful,” she said. “It might have got your eyes. I suppose you were playing about with those transfers. I told you to wait till
mummy
came down.”

“Pot hit my shoulder. It hurts.”

“Well, of course it does, Stevie. That’s why you know you must never touch the gas-stove. Now, just a moment, and I’ll put something on it to make it feel better.” There was some calamine lotion in the bathroom
cabinet
; that would be cooling. She took Stephen’s hand, and led him to the bathroom. She stripped off his
T-shirt
, and dried him down, patting gently at the wet with a towel; she knew better than to rub, when the skin was tender. It did look red—all his arm, and down one side of his neck and chest. The shoulder was a little bruised, she thought, as she moved it gently, but obviously not broken. There was nothing seriously wrong, thank
goodness
. (You oughtn’t to leave children alone in the
kitchen
, where they may come to harm. But that was the kind of silly, perfectionist stuff you heard on the radio. Let the people who gave that sort of advice try bringing up a child for themselves. One couldn’t spend the whole day on watch. Anyway, Stephen wasn’t an infant. He was eight years old.)

“There now! Isn’t that better? All cool and nice.” She spread the calamine lotion thickly with her fingers, so that Stephen could enjoy watching it go on. “Now you’ve got a new white skin. And later on, we’ll wash it all off.” Stephen had stopped crying, and was no longer angry, as far as she could see, but shocked and
frightened. He’d better go to bed for a while; it never did to take chances with children. “I’m going to give you some lime juice with ice in it. You haven’t had that for ages,” she said. “And then you can go to bed for a bit, Stevie, and mummy’ll tuck you up, and when you’ve had your sleep, we’ll have a game.” Stephen nodded his head, without speaking. The game was Beggar-my-Neighbour. Stephen loved to play; Sylvia did not.

With the lime juice, she gave him two Anadin, and he swallowed them obediently. Stephen liked taking pills, as long as the taste was not nasty. She gave him another to make certain, and took off his trousers and socks. Strange that he didn’t
say
anything, not even to complain, but gulped his juice, and swallowed his pills, and moved his limbs obediently. She decided that there was no need for pyjamas; sheets alone would be less abrasive. Stephen needed cool things about him, poor little mite. “No jamas,” she said. “We’ll go to bed in our nothings.” She pulled the sheet up to his chin, and then, very gently, the blankets, closed the curtains, kissed him on the brow, said, “Off to sleepy-byes then, Stevie. I’ll be just downstairs if you want me,” and left him. She was surprised to notice that her tiredness was quite gone.

*

They were still talking. They had been talking all morning. Instant coffee had been brought in, and a plate of Aunt Mary’s Homebaked Shortbread. Aunt Mary’s Cakes and Cookies, Ltd. accounted for a very tiny share of the Agency’s turnover, but, when it was possible to use one of the products advertised by the Agency, the Agency on principle used it. Notes had been made, and talked to, and discarded, so that Dave and
Peter, Keith and Tony, each had a little pile of crumpled paper in front of him. Grey and white debris had risen steadily in the ashtrays, and a stranger, coming
suddenly
into the room, would have found the atmosphere unpleasant. The current Strategy, and the Strategy
before
that, and the Provisional Strategy, and the Original Strategy, each of which had in some small way amended the others, had all been consulted many times. They were still talking.

“Let’s just recap, shall we?” Dave said. “As I see it, we have an end-result beauty shot in shot 2. That’s frame 3 of the storyboard.”

Everyone looked once more at frame 3 of the
storyboard
. “And then again in shots 7 and 9 actually,” Keith said. “That’s frames 9 and 12.”

“And product-in-use?”

“Well, you get that in shot 7 too, don’t you?”

Dave smiled his most patient, friendly smile. “I don’t think we can have it both ways, Keith, do you?”

“Well, she’s just finished using the product in shot 7. That’s almost the same thing.”

“Not quite though, I think. Then again, we don’t see the end-result beauty in any kind of meaningful context of admiration.”

“Her daughter?”

“What we had in mind was some kind of—oh, night-club scene or something like that. Something within the average viewer’s experience, and yet quite obviously up the market, you know.”

“But that isn’t the approach here,” Keith said
desperately
. “I mean, surely we did all agree on the theme of the campaign? Natural beauty. The associations we’ve tried to give this product are all with
freshness
——”

“It’s not a deodorant, Keith.”

“— and innocence, and … well, naturalness. I mean, you don’t see a mother and daughter of this type in a night-club.”

“By George, no!” Tony Barstow said, determined to help. “Quite out of place there, eh? I mean,
you’ve
got a daughter just about that age, Dave. You wouldn’t let her go whooping it up in a night-club, I’ll bet.”

Peter Pope said earnestly, “As a matter of fact there is another point that may be relevant here, if I may make it, Dave.”

“Surely. Go ahead.”

“I haven’t mentioned it up to now,” Peter said,
producing
a piece of memo paper not yet discarded, with one item not crossed through. “Though I did take a note of it at the time. What we’ve been discussing so far have been points of detail in the Agency’s presentation. But I can’t help wondering whether the Agency is wise to use a mother and daughter subject at all, when you consider that the major market for this product, as Keith himself told us in his very able summary of our marketing objectives—and, of course, it’s in the Strategy—is women living alone; that is, mainly unmarried women.”

“I was going to come to that when we’d finished the preliminary work,” Dave said. “I have a note here … yes … yes, I have…. But since Peter’s raised the point….”

Keith looked down the table at P.A., who said, “Glad you’ve brought that up. We were wondering if you would. Keith wanted to cover it when he presented the advertising, but I warned him off it. Wanted to see if you’d appreciate the reasoning without our having to
tell you. Naughty of me, if you like. Still, I was pretty sure
you
would, Arnold.”

This was P.A. playing it tough, but you couldn’t play tough with Hoppness; they had an emollient quality which allowed them to slide over it. And it wasn’t any good (P.A., who knew so much about handling clients, would never learn that about Hoppness) trying to play them off against each other, because under their
peculiar
system of rules all points of view were equally worthy of consideration, and you only came out of a meeting having agreed to write one piece of advertising in three different ways. So all that happened on this occasion was that Dave said mildly, “Oh, we like to talk things out, you know. What was the thinking here, then, Keith?”

“Very simple really. I expect you’ve already guessed it,” Keith said. “The little child is the symbol of
innocence
, of course. Going one better than Pond’s
School-girl
Complexion, if you like—natural beauty is the beauty of the unspoiled child.”

“Ye … es.”

“And we also felt—very strongly, as a matter of fact—that primarily the way to appeal to unmarried
women
is through their function
as
women
;
motherhood, in fact. Mothers themselves do respond to children in
advertising
, as we all know, but they do also have a kind of backlog of experience of washing nappies, and broken nights, and that sort of thing. But for a woman without that experience—an unmarried woman, in fact—
looking
forward to motherhood in a much more sentimental way, the appeal is all the stronger. I mean, we men”—a smile, but it was wasted on them—“tend to look on marriage as a kind of tie, but most women look forward to it.”

“Is there any evidence of that?” Peter said. “Or is it just a statement of opinion?”

*

By twelve o’clock, Stephen was awake and restless. His brow was hot to the hand. Could he be running a temperature? His sleep seemed to have done him no good at all. Beneath the false white skin of the calamine lotion on his neck, Sylvia could see that blisters had formed. She drew the sheet down from his chest.
Wherever
the water had touched him, all down the side of his neck and chest, there were blisters, large water-blisters, some of them as big as pennies, close together all over his skin, so that they almost ran into one another to form one huge blister that would——But she must not panic. Such feelings are infectious; he could too easily catch her alarm from her. Calm was the thing; she would be calm. “No, you can’t get up, Stevie,” she said. “We’ll have lunch up here together instead. We’ll have a picnic on the bed.”

Should she feed him at all? “Feed a cold, and starve a fever”—he was certainly feverish. But this was not a matter for her to decide; she must ring the doctor at once. She should have done so before, except that scalds, unlike real burns, were known not to be serious, and he had seemed more fussed about his shoulder than … She must ring the doctor. She dialled the number,
listened
to the ringing tone, and almost at once (thank God they were so prompt!) the tone was broken, and a voice——It was just a voice, anonymous, metallic,
unconcerned
, the voice of the Answer Service. It said, “Dr. Harrison’s calls are being transferred to Purley 6739.”

“What? Wait a minute. Let me——”

“—This is a recorded message.”

“— get it down. I didn’t——”

“Dr. Harrison’s calls are being transferred to Purley 6739.”

“—quite catch——”

“This is a recorded message.”

“Purley 6739?”

“6739. This is a——”

One must not blame them. They had to go out, even when they were needed. Probably someone, somewhere, much worse…. A child also, perhaps, in a worse case than Stephen, because after all Stephen had only——She dialled the new number. The ringing tone. Again. Again. Again. A new voice. A man. She must not sound flustered or silly. “Is that Doctor Harrison?” she said. “I’m terribly sorry to bother you, but——”

“I’m sorry. I’m afraid we’re only taking messages for the doctor.”

“Oh…. He’s not——?”

“No. We’re just taking messages.”

She wanted to say, “Help me!” but if they were only taking messages, what could they do? Should she ring another doctor? But she was on Dr. Harrison’s list, and could not transfer without filling in a form, and getting permission from the Ministry; it took days, that sort of thing. Anyway, she must keep a sense of proportion. “Will you please ask Dr. Harrison to ring?” she said, and gave her number. “It’s Mrs. Bates. I am on his list. My son, Stephen, has had rather a nasty scald, and he’s badly blistered. I’ve put him to bed, but I’m rather worried about it.”

“Nasty … scald…. That’s ‘s’ for sugar—’ scald’? Shall I read the message back?”

“Yes, please. And if you’ll tell the doctor it’s
urgent
….” (Though he would be the best judge of that. Probably this sort of thing happened every day.)

“Urgent. I’ll let Doctor know as soon as he phones in.”

“When will that be, do you think?”

“I’m sorry. I can’t say.”

“You mean you don’t know?”

“No, we don’t know when Doctor’ll phone, so I can’t say.”

“Thank you.” A click. “Oh——” She had wanted to ask whether she should give Stephen anything to eat, but anyway the man wouldn’t know. Her best guide would be to leave that to Stephen himself. He could eat if he wanted to, and if he didn’t, she wouldn’t fuss or try to persuade him. Something … something light. Broth. One of those cubes of Maggi Chicken Soup, with hot water in a cup. And she would put an egg in it for nourishment.

When she brought him the soup, he sat up in bed, and supped it placidly enough. Perhaps her alarm had been exaggerated after all; these things often looked worse then they really were. She had even thought for a
moment
of ringing Keith and asking him to come home.
That
showed how upset she’d been. There wasn’t
anything
he could have done that she herself hadn’t done already, and it would have been very difficult to arrange at a moment’s notice on the day of an important
meeting
with Client. Black marks all round for Keith, there would have been. Even to tell him about it would be a mistake; he would need all his concentration today. And Keith might misunderstand about the saucepan; in moments of flap, one did look for some sort of outlet for blame. Later on, when the doctor had been and gone, and the Hoppness meeting would be over, and
everything
was under control, she would ring Keith and ask him to get home in good time. Let him feel a little panic
then,
when it could do no harm; it would be only fair, after what she’d been through. But not worry him now. Keith was, after all, much less level-headed about Stevie than she was.

There was a sound behind her. Stephen had vomited up his lunch. He began to cry, then retched again, then cried again. “It’s all right, Stevie,” Sylvia said, running to him. “You couldn’t help it. Mummy isn’t angry. It wasn’t your fault.”