The Centre of the Green Read Online Free PDF Page B

so much of their childhood among strangers. It must have been easier for her to tell Alfred than to tell her father—whom she would tell tonight. Now Julian began to feel dizzy, and he sat down at his desk again to recover. The telephone rang. “Just coming,” he said, “I got held up.”
    His wife’s voice answered him. “What on earth do you mean, Julian? I just rang up to say I won’t be in when you get back. Make yourself some tea, and don’t wait for me.”
    “Yes, of course, Penny. Must ring off now. I’m on my way to a meeting.” He heard his wife replace the receiver at her end before he could finish; Penny could not bear anyone to hang up on her. “You needn’t be so bloody hasty. I was going to wait for you anyway,” he said, and put down the phone. Immediately it rang again, and he left the room without answering it.
    In Mike Barclay’s room, the meeting was already under way. There were the Art Director, the Television Director, the Marketing Man and the two Account Executives, who were Mike himself, and his assistant, Tony Barstow. “Ah, Julian,” Mike said. “Glad you managed to make it. Can you find somewhere to sit?”
    “After all, I’m a consumer myself,” the MarketingMan was saying to Tony Barstow. “I work with consumers . I live among them. My wife’s a consumer. So are most of my friends.”
    “Surely.”
    “If you haven’t got the consumer slant on this sort of thing, you might as well not try. It’s all very well to be clever and gimmicky—it’s a great temptation; we all know that—but you’ve got to offer the consumer some sort of benefit, or your advertising doesn’t work.”
    “No,” Tony said intelligently, “it just doesn’t work, does it?”
    “No, it doesn’t.”
    “No, I suppose it doesn’t.”
    Mike said, “Herbert—Tony—shall we just put Julian in the picture before we go any further?”
    “Sorry, Mike.”
    “That’s all right, Tony.” Mike placed the tips of his fingers together, and leaned back in his chair. Tony gazed at him, his brown eyes earnest and intelligent. The Marketing Man began to fill an old pipe from an oilskin tobacco pouch. Art leaned forward, Television back. The telephone rang, but Mike did not answer it. Instead he said pleasantly, “Do something about that, Tony, would you please, like a good chap?” and Tony slipped obediently from the room; the others could hear him, saying to the secretary outside, “I say, Sheila. Can you cope? Mike doesn’t want to be disturbed.” They sat in silence, waiting for him to return. Then Mike said, “Julian, we called this meeting because we feel the time has come to rethink this whole problem of Buttertoffs altogether. I think we really want to consider very seriously whether we’re on the right lines.”
    “Client turned down the campaign?”
    Mike smiled. Clients did not turn down campaigns when Mike submitted them. “Tony and I had a littletalk before Client came in, “he said,” we decided not to show him anything. Of course, he was disappointed, but we told him we’d like to consider our thinking a little longer, and then we had a general discussion on—oh, a number of points.”
    “What’s the matter with the campaign? I thought we agreed——?”
    “Of course, we did. My dear Julian, nobody’s criticizing your copy. It’s just that Tony and I had the feeling —didn’t we, Tony?—that it’s—well, a little bit pedestrian . That may be the right approach, of course. I’m just not sure.”
    The Art Director said, “Well, I thought it was all a bit dull at the time. I said I thought it was a bit dull, didn’t I, Julian? I remember I said I thought it needed something a bit extra.”
    “Exactly. Some sort of plus quality.”
    “I thought we were going to get it in the art work,” Julian said.
    Mike smiled easily. “Let’s not bicker about it, shall we?” he said, “life’s too short. After all, an advertisement’s only as good as the thinking behind