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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 oughtto 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,