Soft

by Rupert Thomson

  ‘Herring?’ Connor said. ‘I’m not sure I know him. What kind of relationship do you have?’

  ‘We’ve been working together since April. We get on pretty well –’

  ‘Remember what you said a few weeks ago about firing the agency?’ Connor paused, then smiled slowly. ‘Looks like we might need them after all.’

  A rapid chinking sound broke into Jimmy’s thoughts and he looked up to see Bridget tapping her drink with a cigarette lighter.

  ‘You didn’t hear a word I said.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Jimmy said. ‘I just lost track.’

  She slumped back in her chair, her hand still toying with the lighter. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  It annoyed him, the way she seemed to expect disappointment, the way she carried that expectation around with her. It tired him. He wondered if he could catch it from her, like a disease. It didn’t seem beyond the bounds of possibility. He thought that perhaps it would be best if he didn’t see her again.

  ‘You’re only interested in yourself,’ she was telling him now. ‘You don’t give a shit about what anybody else is doing.’

  He was watching her carefully. Her face looked clammy. Like blancmange.

  ‘You’re dishonest and deceitful.’ She paused. ‘And underhand.’

  Which might not be a bad thing, he thought. After all, they were qualities that would come in pretty useful during the next few months.

  ‘You’re incapable of a relationship.’

  With you? he thought. Yes, you’re probably right.

  Somehow, though – and this disconcerted him – he didn’t manage to go home. Somehow, he managed to stay out with her till one in the morning, by which time they were both drunk. Somehow, he found himself in the back of a taxi, her lipstick black and glistening as triangles of orange light spun through the car, her cigarette three sparks on the road behind them, her mouth suddenly on his …

  During the night he woke up, a dream still real in his head. He had dreamed about the dark-haired secretary. She was sitting on his sofa in Mornington Crescent, her thin gold chain gleaming in the sunlight that slanted through the half-open picture-window. He had said something to upset her, though. He had said something he shouldn’t have, and she had turned away from him, her eyes damp and despairing, staring into the corner of the room, her lips drawn tight (strange how clearly he remembered her). He was trying to explain that he hadn’t meant it. What he’d said had come out wrong. He’d been joking. But she only shook her head. Tiny rapid movements – fractions of a movement, really. He couldn’t make her understand. She went on sitting there, the sunlight in the garden and a warm breeze streaming in, her face hard, yet wounded. And then, inexplicably, the roar of the tube, and the window black behind her …

  He was finding it hard to breathe. Bridget had left the central heating on, and she had drawn the curtains, too. There was no light in the room, no air; he felt as if he had been sealed in a tomb. Her clock’s green numerals said 3:25. Sitting on the edge of the bed, he began to dress.

  ‘Don’t go.’

  He looked round. ‘I’ve got to.’

  ‘Be nice to me,’ she murmured. ‘You could at least be nice to me.’

  By the time the taxi pulled up outside his house, it was four-fifteen. On the main road the traffic had quietened down. He could hear the giant ventilation units in the building behind him. An eerie sound. Like someone breathing out, but never running out of breath. To his left he could see the shop in the Esso petrol station. A dark-skinned man sat behind the cash-till, his mouth stretched in a yawn. From a distance he appeared to be singing.

  Once inside his flat, Jimmy emptied his pockets on to the bedside table and then, for the second time that night, took off all his clothes. Through the window he could see the gnomes arranged in small groups on the Astroturf. They looked wrong in the dark – ill-at-ease, almost embarrassed. They looked the way people at a cocktail party might look if, suddenly, and for no apparent reason, the host turned off all the lights. Somehow it reassured him, though, to see them standing there, outside his window, in the gloom. He climbed between cold sheets and was asleep in minutes.

  Halfway through December, Jimmy arranged to meet Richard Herring for a drink in Soho. It had been a crisp, bright winter’s day. If you breathed in deeply, you could smell knife-blades and the skin of apples. Towards the end of the afternoon, the sky browned along the horizon, like paper held over a fire; at any moment, you felt, it might burst into dramatic flames. Once the sun had gone, though, the temperature dropped, and people hurried through the streets with their heads bent, as if afraid of being recognised. Jimmy reached the pub first and sat in a corner booth with a pint of Guinness. A small crowd stood at the bar, the overflow from some office lunch or party. They had been drinking for hours, and now they were telling jokes. It seemed like a good place for what Jimmy had in mind. If Richard chose not to take his proposition seriously, then all that background laughter would come in useful. It’s all right, Richard. Just kidding. Ha ha. At that moment, with the clock showing ten-past six, Richard pushed through the door, his face tight and bruised with cold. Jimmy waved him over.

  The timing of events can seem coincidental, but if you’re responsible for the timing, if you planned it, then you know it’s no such thing. Jimmy had chosen the moment carefully – partly because Christmas was close and everybody in the industry was beginning to relax, but also, and more importantly, perhaps, because of what had happened earlier in the week. On Tuesday the advertising agency had presented their campaign for Kwench! and ECSC had rejected it. It wasn’t the campaign that had been asked for. It didn’t fit the brief. An awkward meeting, then, with consternation, even bitterness, on one side, and disappointment on the other. But, sitting in the pub that evening, Jimmy elected not to mention it. He felt Richard had to bring the subject up himself – and, looking at Richard he suspected that he wouldn’t have too long to wait: a subtle tension showed under Richard’s eyes and around his mouth, almost a kind of guilt, which gave his usual aristocratic nonchalance a brittle edge. They had been talking for less than twenty minutes when Richard lifted his glass and began to swirl the Guinness round inside it.

  ‘About the presentation,’ he said.

  Jimmy feigned a sombre look.

  ‘They’re having another crack at it.’ Richard put his drink back on the table and studied it with narrowed eyes, as if assessing the quality of the product. ‘They should come up with something before the holiday.’

  ‘Thing is,’ Jimmy said, ‘it’s Connor. He’s not happy.’

  Richard stared even harder at his glass. Behind him, at the bar, two men and a woman were singing ‘In the Bleak Midwinter’. The woman wore red high-heels and held a thin cigar in the air beside her ear. One of the men had put on a paper hat, but it was too small for his head, and it had split.

  ‘Connor,’ Jimmy said thoughtfully. ‘He’s not happy with the work. In general, I mean. He’s thinking of making you pitch.’ Jimmy mentioned the names of two other agencies, both famous for their creativity.

  ‘Jesus.’ Richard propped one elbow on the table and let his forehead drop into the palm of his hand. He stared at the table, his eyes unfocused. If the agency lost the account, his job would be on the line.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Jimmy said after a while. ‘I might be able to talk to him.’

  ‘What about Tony?’

  ‘Ruddle?’ Jimmy shook his head. ‘No real influence. Not any more.’ He couldn’t resist a smile. ‘It’s strange,’ he said, studying the end of his Silk Cut, ‘I seem to get on pretty well with Connor …’

  ‘If you could have a word with him,’ Richard said, without lifting his eyes from the table, ‘I’d really appreciate it.’

  ‘Yeah.’ Jimmy sighed. ‘Another drink?’

  Up at the bar the woman with the cigar was still singing ‘In the Bleak Midwinter’ – all by herself this time. She was making up her own words: it was no longer the ‘ground’, for instance, th
at was ‘hard as iron’, no longer the ‘frosty winds’ that ‘made moan’. Though drunk, the man in the paper hat was beginning to look daunted.

  When Jimmy returned to the booth with the drinks, he made sure he sat down more heavily than usual. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘you’re not the only one with problems …’

  ‘No?’ Richard looked almost hopeful.

  ‘This is strictly between you and me, Richard.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I’ve got an issue here,’ Jimmy said.

  He explained what he needed. Richard listened and then, when Jimmy had finished, he said, ‘How much money are we talking about?’

  Jimmy told him.

  The skin tightened on Richard’s face. He lifted his glass and drank almost half of what was in it. Behind him, and seemingly in response to this sudden intake of alcohol, the man in the paper hat slid sideways off his stool. The woman stared at him for a moment, then laughed a deep, inhaled laugh.

  ‘Obviously you don’t have to give it to me all at once,’ Jimmy said. ‘It can appear in instalments, if that makes it easier. A bit here, a bit there.’ He paused. ‘It’s only paper, remember.’

  Richard looked up, a sudden belligerence lowering his eyebrows, drawing his chin forwards. ‘Where’s the money going?’

  ‘I can’t tell you that.’

  Richard didn’t take his eyes off Jimmy’s face.

  ‘It’s not going to me, if that’s what you’re thinking.’ Jimmy smiled wistfully into his drink. ‘If only. No, it’s just a problem I’ve inherited.’

  A silence fell between them, but Jimmy had the feeling Richard believed him.

  At last, and with a faint sardonic smile, Richard said, ‘How soon would you need,’ and he paused, ‘the first instalment?’

  On Monday, at eleven in the morning, Richard called. Jimmy thought he was going to say that he had changed his mind, that he couldn’t possibly involve himself in something so dubious, and in an attempt to postpone his own disappointment he told Richard how ill he had been on Friday night. For lunch that day he had eaten roast teal on a bed of Puy lentils, he said, and then, if he remembered rightly, he had drunk Guinness with Richard, at least five pints. Suddenly, towards midnight, he felt as if his stomach was alive inside him, whole somehow, like a trapped animal. He seemed to have spent most of the weekend in his bathroom, bent over the toilet bowl.

  ‘I thought teal was a colour.’ Richard was laughing.

  ‘It was,’ Jimmy said. ‘I won’t describe it to you.’

  ‘Listen,’ and Richard scarcely paused, ‘that paperwork you asked me for, I’m having it biked over. It should be with you by midday.’

  Strategically, Jimmy thought it would be a mistake to sound too relieved, or too grateful. Instead, he simply told Richard that he was seeing Connor for lunch, which allowed Richard the room to draw his own conclusions. At the end of the phone-call it was Richard who thanked Jimmy rather than the other way round.

  In the restaurant that lunchtime Jimmy studied the menu for less than a minute, then ordered a Caesar salad and a bottle of mineral water. It was all he could face. Also, it would fix him in Connor’s mind as one of a new breed of marketing executives; the clean-living image was bound to appeal to Connor, who had spent most of the last decade in Southern California.

  As Jimmy’s decaffeinated cappuccino arrived, he began to tell Connor about the meeting with Richard and the subsequent delivery. The American had been looking out across the restaurant floor, thinking he had recognised someone, an old colleague, but now his head turned back towards Jimmy, turned slowly, remorselessly, which gave Jimmy the feeling that he was at the planetarium, observing the movement of a celestial body.

  ‘You solved it already?’ Connor said.

  ‘I think so.’

  Connor wanted to know how.

  ‘I told him you were thinking of moving the account. I told him I’d try and talk you out of it. If that was what he wanted.’

  ‘You blamed me?’

  A bubble of fear rose through Jimmy as he wondered if he’d gone too far. ‘It seemed the obvious thing to do.’ He paused. ‘It seemed believable. Your reputation …’

  ‘Yes. I can see that.’

  Jimmy reached into his jacket pocket and took out an envelope. He handed it to Connor, who prised the seal open with his big, blunt fingers. Connor lifted out the invoice and unfolded it.

  ‘Twenty-five thousand,’ Jimmy said.

  ‘Well,’ said Connor, smiling, ‘it’s a start.’

  Synchro

  For the launch of Kwench! ECSC UK hired the top floor of a five-star hotel in Kensington, complete with roof garden, swimming-pool and a panoramic view of the city. It had been Jimmy’s idea to have the water in the pool dyed orange, but Connor had thought of the synchronised swimmers, a stroke of genius which, in Jimmy’s opinion, proved the American was worth every penny of his reputedly enormous salary. An orange swimming-pool, it was memorable in itself – but then, while the champagne was being served, nineteen girls stepped out on to the terrace, dressed in tight-fitting orange hats and sleek blue one-piece bathing-costumes. In single file, they marched towards the deep end, their heads thrown proudly back, their toes pointing. They climbed down into the water and, accompanied by the soundtrack from the first Kwench! TV/cinema commercial, they began to run through various routines, their movements graceful, intricate, and perfectly orchestrated. Every now and then, observing a music cue, perhaps, or following some logic of their own, the girls broke out of the patterns they were creating and formed the word KWENCH! on the surface of the pool. The first time this happened, there was an involuntary gasp from the crowd, and then delighted laughter and a small, spontaneous burst of applause.

  ‘Seems to be going pretty well.’

  Jimmy turned to see Raleigh Connor standing beside him. Connor was wearing a short-sleeved sports shirt and a pair of casual trousers. His forearms, which were thick and tanned, reminded Jimmy of cold roast chicken.

  ‘It couldn’t be going better,’ Jimmy said.

  During the thirteen-week run-up to the launch he had been surprised by the smoothness of the operation. Their only real worry had been that the advertising spend might be seen to be too meagre (of course, if you counted the cost of Project Secretary, it wasn’t meagre at all), but Jimmy managed to take that worry and turn it to the company’s advantage. In a daring presentation to the sales force at the end of January, he had stressed the product’s secret formula, a cocktail of natural ingredients that would enhance the lives of all consumers, and he had claimed that its unique character would be reflected in the marketing, part of which would be subterranean, invisible – a mystery promotion. In reality, of course, no such promotion existed. It was just a smoke-screen – a sort of double-bluff, in fact – but the sales force went away happy, believing they could create excitement on the strength of what he had said, and the off-trade order figures for the following month showed that his strategy had worked. People sometimes argued that marketing was damage limitation, the art of preventing things from going wrong. If that was the case, then ECSC UK’s marketing of Kwench! had been exemplary.

  ‘It looks so effortless, doesn’t it,’ Connor said, and, as he spoke, the girls sprang up out of the water, their bodies vertical and seemingly suspended for a moment in mid-air. ‘You have to watch what’s happening below the surface, though. You have to see the work they’re putting in.’ Moving closer to Jimmy, he pointed down into the pool. Jimmy saw the girls’ hands rotating frantically.

  Connor shook his head, impressed. ‘They say it’s like running the four hundred metres without breathing.’

  ‘You don’t notice it, do you,’ Jimmy said. ‘I mean, you’re not supposed to.’

  They might have been discussing their own clandestine schemes, Jimmy thought, and, judging by the smile on Connor’s face, he thought so too. During the past few weeks they had developed a peculiar affinity, a kind of understanding; at times they seemed to be able to
communicate in code. Connor gripped him briefly by the upper arm, sealing something, and then withdrew into the crowd.

  Jimmy remained beside the pool. As all the girls were wearing identical hats and bathing-costumes, it was hard to tell them apart, but Jimmy had already decided which one was the prettiest: whenever they formed the word Kwench! in the water, she simply turned on to her back, became the top half of the exclamation mark. He watched the swimming until it ended, then he moved away. He had been drinking champagne since midday, and he thought it was probably time he did some of the coke Zane had biked over that morning. A shame he had to do it alone, but then he could hardly offer it to Richard Herring, could he?

  The toilets were spotless – gleaming sinks and mirrors, white towels piled in downy heaps, the hypnotic trickling of water. Once he was locked into a cubicle he felt in his pocket for the tiny envelope. He chopped the coke on the cistern, which was flat and black, almost as if it had been designed for that very purpose. Yes, the smoothness of the launch had astonished him. In January, for instance, the agency creatives had presented to the company again, and this time they hadn’t tried to be too clever. They had produced a three-stage poster campaign, based on a gradual revelation of the Kwench! logo, and a TV/cinema commercial that did the same job, only in a slightly wittier and more dramatic way, the central image being a visual pun in which the top half of the Kwench! exclamation mark doubled as a glass filled with the product. The tagline said, simply, Kwench it! Straightforward advertising, but effective, energetic – bold. During the presentation Jimmy had applauded the agency’s achievement. He had also coined a new phrase, exclamation marketing, which Connor had been repeating ever since.