31st Of February

by Julian Symons

  “I wouldn’t know – I wasn’t in it. But you must talk to Mr Wyvern about advertising being worth while.” Greatorex looked puzzled, and Anderson regretted the remark. He explained something about the new account, and the list of names that was required. Greatorex listened with almost pathetic eagerness. When he had left the room Anderson grimaced, said “Idealist,” and forgot him. But he began to think about what Wyvern had said in the pub. Was it true that he was slipping?

  He recorded mentally the mistakes of the day. Bagseed’s first telephone call had been handled well enough, but he should never have made that promise about delivery of the drawings on the second call. For that matter, he should not have forgotten the drawings. Then it had been a tactical error to adopt an even faintly critical tone to VV about the new account in face of his obvious enthusiasm. It had been foolish to make that remark to Greatorex reflecting on the sanctity of advertising. Above all, it had been foolish to ask Jean Lightley about the calendar.

  Was any of this important? Anderson asked himself, and answered No. It was not important, but it was disturbing. A successful advertising executive should possess above all things the kind of mind that enabled him to know when to be judiciously angry, when to blurt out his thoughts with calculated ingenuousness and when to keep to himself. Anderson had always regarded his own ability to judge the likely reactions of other people to any remark as his most valuable stock in trade. If he could no longer trust—

  But it was foolish to meander on in this way. With determination Anderson brought back his mind to the new account. VV’s instructions were always sketchy, but this time they had been more than usually inadequate. How was it possible to talk about this stuff at all without knowing something about its ingredients and history? Anderson decided that he had better talk to Reverton; and talking to Reverton, he reflected, might enable him to discover how he was regarded. He had always assumed that it would be only a matter of time, and a comparatively short time, before he was offered a place on the board. If Reverton had really made that remark to Wyvern (although Wyvern, who was malicious, was quite capable of inventing it), then he must be very careful in future.

  Reverton’s office was slickly modern, with bleached furniture and two abstract paintings on the walls; it offered a sharp contrast to the gloom of Pile’s office and the disorder of VV’s. Reverton sat behind his pipe at the desk and listened while Anderson talked in jerks, ticking off points on his fingers. One, before doing anything serious, they must have some dope about the secret process, not necessarily for use in the advertising, but for their own information and satisfaction. Two, they must think in terms of an educative campaign, as well as of the announcement of a modern miracle. They must remember that miracles were always greeted with incredulity. Three, they must test the product throughout the firm. Four, they must know the approximate price at which it would be marked. Reverton nodded again and again.

  I absolutely agree, Andy. I’m damned glad you’ve brought all this up. Between you and me, the trouble with VV is that he rushes into these things half-cocked.” He became suddenly solemn. “VV’s a great man. But when it comes down to practicalities he can be a bit of an ass, too.” Anderson said nothing. That was the kind of remark that it was dangerous to answer. “Now, point one. We’re fighting it out with people in South Africa about the process. They’re very cagey about ingredients and processing, but we’ll get it out of them in the end. Meanwhile just for the present we must go ahead on the assumption that we’ll have a story to tell on the manufacturing side, without making it the principal story.

  “Point two, education. I agree entirely. We advertising men have a duty to the public. I know all the smart boys think that’s funny, but it happens to be true. We’ve got a responsibility to society.” Puff puff. “We’ve got power – and we have to be careful not to misuse it.” Puff puff. “Think of this as an educative project, Andy, and you’ll have me with you.”

  Anderson still said nothing. Reverton took the small jar out of his desk. “Point three. This is the only sample of Number One that we’ve got at the moment. So we can’t test it out throughout the firm. I used it this morning, of course, but my beard’s not much.” He looked at Anderson’s blue chin.

  “I’d like to take it home and try it out this week. Then I’ll pass it on to Lessing.”

  “Good old Andy. Getting right down to brass tacks. Glad there’s another practical man in this organisation.” Reverton tamped down tobacco, looked at the small pot in Anderson’s hand and grinned. “Chin chin, Andy. Let me know how the old white magic works.”

  Back in his room again Anderson took off the cap and looked at the white paste again, then smelt it. There was an odour which faintly resembled eucalyptus. Anderson turned down his mouth in distaste and called in Lessing. Lessing sniffed, and shook his head.

  “They’ll have to find a way of getting rid of that smell. By the way, do you like the Crunchy-Munch scheme?”

  Anderson hesitated and then said: “Well, to be frank, I don’t. It’s too farfetched.”

  “Farfetched, hell. There really are vitamins in that stuff.”

  “And I don’t think we ought to try to sell a chocolate biscuit by a strip scheme. With rationing, it sells itself anyway. I roughed out some headings myself.” Anderson read them. “What do you think?”

  “Not much. I don’t think we want to be comic about the stuff. It’s not a joke; it’s got serious food value.” They argued for nearly half an hour. Lessing repeated the same points unwearyingly, his eyes mild behind the large round spectacles. Anderson had difficulty in keeping the conversation on the friendly plane that generally existed between them. Suddenly Lessing broke off. “Your calendar’s wrong. It says the fourth. Today’s the twenty-fifth.” Deftly he twirled the little knob and altered the date. Anderson stared at him, and at the calendar.

  “You want to scrap this strip scheme, then?” Lessing held out his hand for the copy and layouts.

  “No,” Anderson said with an effort. “No, I’ll present it to VV tomorrow morning and I’ll put up my own headings and copy as an alternative. Both anonymously, of course. Okay?”

  Lessing grinned. “Whatever you say. Let’s go out and have a cup of tea on it.”

  They went out and had a cup of tea and a piece of cake. Lessing told Anderson about the new words spoken by his two-year-old child, who said “Eyeoo” when she wanted her right shoe and “Effoo” when she wanted her left shoe. When they came back Jean Lightley met them in the corridor and gasped: “Oh, Mr Anderson, Mr Crashaw says he can’t let you have these drawings this afternoon after all.”

  Molly O’Rourke opened the door of her room, marked RESEARCH. “Thought I heard you. Bagwash is on the line, and he won’t take ‘Out’ for an answer. I think Mr Arthur’s in the eighth month of an idea and he wants you to act as midwife.”

  Pile’s secretary came out of the typing pool. “There you are, Mr Anderson. Can you spare Mr Pile a moment?”

  Anderson telephoned Bagseed, apologized for the delay in delivering the drawings and listened to complaints that Mr Arthur was right on Bagseed’s back. Mr Arthur wanted to see the drawings now. Mr Arthur thought they were not getting good enough service. Confidentially, Mr Arthur had said to him—

  A pulse was beating in Anderson’s forehead. He interrupted. “Mr Bagseed, you’re getting as much service from us as any other three clients put together.”

  “Well, really –” Mr Bagseed’s nasal voice almost expired. “And the moment your drawings arrive they’ll be sent up to you. Now, there are six people on my back, and I’m going to try to shake some of them off. Good-bye.” He told the telephone girl that he was out to any further calls from Kiddy Modes. He talked to Crashaw, who was apologetic. The artist who had started work on the drawings was eager to finish them himself, and they thought that would be a good thing after all. The drawings were going to the artist that night, and would be delivered tomorrow morning. Anderson saw Mr Pile, who wanted to know how Greatorex w
as getting on. “I may meet Sir Malcolm at the club tonight and he will be taking a – h’m – avuncular interest, you know.” Anderson said that Greatorex seemed rather old to be starting a career in advertising, and Mr Pile looked embarrassed.

  “To make a clean breast of it, he has – tried several occupations without complete success.” Did the eyes twinkle behind the rimless pince-nez? “But can I – report back – to Sir Malcolm in a satisfactory sense on his first day?”

  “He seems a bright enough chap,” Anderson said wearily. “And eager. That’s a great thing. He’s been with Lessing most of the time.”

  Mr Pile talked for another ten minutes. Back in his room once more, Anderson stared at the green carpet. He headed one sheet of paper with the words CRUNCHY-MUNCH and another with the words PREPARATION NUMBER ONE and stared at them. What a way to spend a life, he thought: Crunchy-Munch, the shaving revolution, and Sir Malcolm Buntz’s nephew. And for how many years now had that been his life. His triumphs had been a toothpaste, a chilblain ointment and a patent medicine, his disasters a breakfast food and a motor car. Could a life be more meaningless?

  He pulled up his thoughts again. That was the way Wyvern would think; those were not the thoughts of an executive who was looking for a place on the board and believed it to be almost within his grasp. There was a job to be done and you did it – well or badly. To give the job itself a moral value was a lot of nonsense.

  And then he noticed the desk calendar. The date it showed was the fourth of February. He felt suddenly very angry at the idea that somebody was playing this kind of vulgar and unpleasant joke on him. But there was a simple way to stop it. He pressed the buzzer for Jean Lightley and kept his finger on it, so that she came running into the room. He asked her questions. Gasping, she reiterated that she had not touched the calendar since she put it to the right date that morning. She did not know who had been in the room. “But nobody would alter your calendar, Mr Anderson.” She looked as if she thought he was mad.

  “Somebody has.” He said it very gently. “It’s been altered three times today, Jean. Unless there’s a magic spell on it.”

  “A magic spell!”

  He articulated clearly, as one would to a child. “Now I want you to take this calendar outside, and keep it in your room for the rest of the week. Then we shall see if the spell works when it’s on your desk as it does when it’s on mine. Do you understand?” She nodded. “That’s good, then. Off you go.” She retreated, her eyes flickering from his face to the brass calendar. When she was outside the door Anderson sighed with relief and regret. Relief that the calendar was out of the room, and regret that again he had acted foolishly. It remained to be considered who would want to worry him – and who would choose exactly that way to do it.

  That remained to be considered. In the meantime, it was certain that he would do no work that afternoon on Crunchy-Munch or Preparation Number One. He put on his hat and overcoat and left the office. On the way out he passed Mr Pile, who looked at him sharply, but said nothing. Mr Pile did not approve of staff leaving before the office closed at five-thirty, not even men who had a place on the board almost within their grasp.

  5

  It is well known that, in our carboniferous era, managers and administrators frequently find their lives separated into two distinct parts which involve a division of the personality. Fiction and film have familiarised us with the capitalist who is a tyrant to his employees, but an emotional slave to his wife and children; with the gangster whose eyes well with tears at thought of the old folk while he is treating the young ones with summary brutality; or with the theme ingeniously reversed, of the executive unendingly patient in his office, but brusquely unpleasant outside it. The case of Anderson resembled this classic businessman’s schizophrenia. In his capacity as advertising executive he had developed through years of training an incisive intelligence, and the ability to make quick and generally correct decisions about the people and problems confronting him; as a private citizen he was erratic, irresponsible and quite incapable of assessing the motives from which people act, or of maintaining a viewpoint for any length of time. This double nature was the cause of most of his misfortunes. A man of strong personality who wishes to achieve practical success in life will no doubt do so; a man of weak personality who recognizes his own limitations may batten very well off the strong or the rich; but Anderson’s personality combined strength and weakness in ways of which he was quite unaware. Such a combination is dangerous both to its possessor and to those who come into contact with him. Anderson, who was not by nature inclined to investigation of his own character, had become vaguely aware of this fact in the past few weeks.

  Anderson was the only child of a bank manager; and soon after his birth in 1909 his father and mother moved from a small terrace house in Wood Green to a new and more commodious establishment in Ealing. This house, in which the child grew up, was built in a modern Tudor style of architecture. It had an oak door with studs, imitation Tudor external beams and plaster, and leaded light windows. The fireplaces were modern with coloured tiles, except the fireplace in the lounge; which again was an imitation Tudor open fireplace in bright red brick. There was a wooden fence in front of the house protecting a neat small lawn, which Anderson’s father mowed on week ends during the summer. At the back of the house was another small lawn with flower beds. The house was called “Tudor Vista,” and it was situated in a road of similar houses, each of which, however, differed from the others in some small architectural details. Tudor Vista fulfilled the ambitions of Anderson’s parents. It gave his father a garden, modern plumbing and a touch of the picturesque, all of which had been lacking in the house at Wood Green. His mother was happy to move into such a really nice neighbourhood, with really nice people in it. The importance of this achievement could be understood only in terms of the background from which Anderson’s father and mother had escaped: on his father’s side the family had been small, unsuccessful tradesmen struggling with a grocer’s business; on his mother’s they had been, even more humiliatingly, in service. Anderson’s parents never spoke of these things; he learned of them through his maternal grandmother, who came to live with them when her husband died. When she talked to the child of the family in which she had been for many years second housemaid he was puzzled, and asked her why she worked for other people. “To make my living, silly,” she said, and told him of the great house near Wimbledon Common, the six servants that were kept, and the two gardeners – her husband had been one of them. “Like a park –” she said to Anderson – “the garden was like a park,” sniffing contemptuously at the little patches of lawn tended so carefully by Anderson’s father. In the child’s mind the garden was like Richmond Park, where he had once been taken for a picnic; great pies were eaten from spotless white cloths laid on the grass, fluid was poured from strange bottles into little metal cups, everyone always wore their best clothes, deer flickered in and out of the shade. He could see the park, but he could not visualize the great house she described with its wide stairway and splendid gallery nor understand his grandmother’s contempt for the small rooms and funny windows of Tudor Vista, and for the dainty teas provided by his mother for the ladies of the neighbourhood. Sometimes his grandmother appeared at these teas, and at the social evenings when a near-by husband and wife came round for a game of whist or auction bridge, interrupted after a couple of rubbers by a long pause for refreshments, neat little sandwiches or fragments of sardine placed upon fingers of toast. Hers was an awkward presence upon these social occasions, however, for she would not sit quietly nodding in the inglenook. “I think I’ll be clearing away now,” she would say, or “I’ll just be washing up while you play your hand of cards.” Mrs Anderson would say quite sharply, “Sit down, mother, do,” and would say that she had made the necessary arrangements for the daily woman, Kitty or Mary or Bessie, to come in that evening. There was not the slightest necessity for anybody to stir. But somehow Anderson’s grandmother would find her way out to
the kitchen, and there could be heard among the rattle of plates, talking altogether too familiarly to Bessie or Mary or Kitty. It was a relief to his mother, Anderson thought years later, that Granny died peacefully in her bed when he was nine years old.

  That was in 1918, just before the end of the war. His father had been upset when he was rejected for service because of his flat feet. A quiet little grey man with an inoffensive moustache, he said little, but after his rejection mowed and trimmed the front and back lawns with fanatical care. His mother was upset also; but his parents’ distress seemed to Anderson, when he looked back on it, to have been more social than patriotic. It was the right thing to go to the war, the thing other people were doing, and it was an unpleasantly individual mark to be separated from service by flat feet. The flatness of his father’s feet had always been a joke, but after his rejection for national service it was treated very seriously. “He suffers from a disability in a manner of speaking,” his mother would say to visitors, adding with a sigh, “It kept him out of the army.”

  The war went on, there were shortages, Bessie was replaced by Elsie, Anderson went to a local high school. And then the war was over, the cost of living was high, and there were thousands of people who kept it high by deliberately refusing to work. Anderson’s father spoke about them with a passionate anger, an anger the more noticeable and impressive because he was usually so quiet. “If they can’t work let them starve,” he would say. “It’s not can’t work, it’s won’t work. There’s work for everybody to do that wants work. Those miners.” And words would fail him to describe the treason of the miners, whose positive refusal to hew coal for the nation he compared with his own readiness to serve his country.

  But the treachery of the miners was not sufficient to wreck the financial stability of Tudor Vista, although Mr Anderson pulled his small moustache upon occasion with more than customary vigour. When Anderson was twelve years old, an event occurred of some importance in his life. He won a scholarship, but did not take it up. Acceptance of the scholarship would have meant attendance at a public school as a boarder, and a certain financial strain upon his parents. It was, therefore, superficially surprising that his father was anxious to take the scholarship, while his mother’s influence was thrown, in the end decisively, against it. Why had she not wanted him to take the scholarship? Anderson wondered afterward, and decided that the incident provided a clear indication of the extent and limits of her snobbery. The limit of her ambition had been reached with occupation of Tudor Vista, dainty teas and people in for auction bridge. She understood the social scale represented by attendance at the local grammar school, and membership of the tennis club; public school and university, however, meant nothing to her but an alien world whose inhabitants had queer aspirations beyond anything she could conceive. Mrs Anderson divided people into three social classes: “Stuck up,” “a nice class of person,” and “rather common.” It is probable that she disliked those who were stuck up even more than those who were rather common.