Old Sins

by Penny Vincenzi

  He had sold both the factories for a sufficiently large amount of money, in the first of the great property price booms, to purchase a building in a small industrial estate near Hounslow. It housed two laboratories, a filling plant, a storage area and management offices. Management now incorporated a sales force of four.

  His pharmaceutical range had extended to include six more simple, effective products, including a successful antiseptic lotion which incorporated a very mild topical anaesthetic in its formulation and therefore was far less unpleasant when dabbed on a grazed elbow or knee than other products on the market; it was no longer necessary to persuade chemists to stock Morell products, he was permanently bombarded with requests for them, and for information on any new ones which might be in the pipeline. Indeed he had received the unique accolade in the pharmaceutical industry of being approached by the head office of Boots the Chemist, rather than being forced to wait patiently in line for the honour of being granted an appointment.

  Nevertheless, he stayed with his basic principle of knowing what he was talking about and knowing that his sales force knew it too; it was not only the thing which earned him the industry’s respect and custom, it was the way he kept tabs on what was happening in other companies, and it gave him some of his best ideas. A chance remark from a pharmacist over a cup of coffee, about how a customer had said she wished there was a toothpaste that would persuade children to clean their teeth, led with dazzling speed to Morell raspberry flavoured toothpaste; another over how most of the laxatives on the market were so unpleasant to take, and Morell Pharmaceuticals had come up with Herbal Tea Laxative, ‘the Comforting Way to Regularity.’

  But Julian was wearying of patent medicines; he wanted to move into the field that had excited him more from the very beginning: cosmetics. And the cosmetic market was ready for him. There was as much excitement and interest in what women wore on their faces as on their bodies; fashion in make-up had changed as much as in clothes. During the war the only cosmetics a woman carried in her make-up bag were a powder compact and a lipstick, and possibly some ‘lick and spit’ mascara; now suddenly make-up had become much more complex. Foundation had become thicker, and less naturally coloured; rouge was being applied more skilfully and artistically (and was suddenly more respectable); lipsticks were no longer just pink and red, but every shade of coral, lilac and crimson in between; and eyes had become the focus of the face, with the dramatic, doe-eyed look, prominent feature of the high-class glamour peddled in the pages of Vogue by such high-class peddlers as Barbara Goalen, Zizi Jeanmaire and Enid Boulting. There was also (in keeping with the new extravagance in the air) a strong movement towards skin care in all its mysticism; women long urged (in Miss Arden’s immortal words) to cleanse, tone and nourish their skins, were now feeding it with different creams for night and day, relaxing it (with face masks), and guarding its youth (with formulae so complex it required a degree in chemistry to make head or tail of it, but you could put it on your face anyway, and believe). And belief was what it was really all about.

  Julian Morell’s talent for understanding women, what they wanted, and above all what they could be made to believe, found itself suddenly most gainfully employed. What he knew women wanted above everything else was to feel desirable. Not necessarily beautiful, or clever, but desirable. To feel, to know that they could arouse interest, admiration and above all desire was worth a queen’s ransom. And those were qualities which he knew could not, should not, be bought cheap. The more rare and luxurious a cream, a look, a perfume was, the more rarity and luxury it would bestow. Anoint your skin with ultra-expensive oils and creams, surround yourself with a rich, expensive fragrance, colour your lips, your eyes, with unusual, expensive products, and you will feel and look and smell expensive. The other thing about cosmetics (and what distinguishes them from clothes) is that every woman personalizes them, makes them her own. A moisturizer, a fragrance, a colour becomes, in however small a way, changed, part of a woman’s own chemistry and aura and sex appeal. No colour, no perfume is precisely the same on any two women. It was this concept, together with that of desirability, that went into the formulation and personality of the first products in the Juliana range.

  He started boldly. He knew if there was to be an impact of any magnitude on the market, it could not be achieved in the same quiet way as he had launched his medicines. There had to be a noise. The range had to have a personality. There did not have to be many products, initially, but there did have to be an advertising campaign. Women had to know it was there in order to buy it.

  Formulating the range was the least of his problems. He knew exactly what he wanted in it – an expensive and complex skin-care range, with a strong selling concept, a streamlined colour collection, and a fragrance that was not only individual and sophisticated, but long-lasting. Everyone tried to talk him out of the idea of doing a perfume; the only ones with any cachet (everyone said) were French, and he would be wasting his time and money launching an English one. ‘It won’t be English,’ said Julian, ‘it will be French. And the range needs it.’

  He hired, to help him create all these things, a man called Adam Sarsted, a brilliant lateral thinker and chemist, who had gone into pharmaceuticals from Cambridge, and spent a few months working for Beecham’s on their new toiletries division; he had heard Julian was looking for someone, went to see him, fell in love with his entrepreneurial approach and took a drop in salary to work with him. Together they created Juliana, not just the products, but the concept. The concept was Julian’s, born of a chance remark of Adam’s.

  ‘Christ,’ he said, late in the lab one night, after a prolonged session with Julian earnestly rubbing skin food and face masks into one another’s faces and studying the results. ‘All this, just for a lot of bloody silly women, with nothing else to worry about, and who think it’s essential they spend masses of their husbands’ money on their faces.’

  ‘My God, Adam, that’s it!’ said Julian, pausing in his study of himself in the mirror with peach kernel treatment on one side of his face and cucumber on the other. ‘Christ. How fantastic. I thought I’d never get it. You’re a genius. Wonderful. Thank you.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘For a singularly great thought. I was waiting for a concept. A selling point for this range. You’ve just given it to me.’

  ‘I have?’

  ‘You have. Don’t you see, you just said it. What Juliana is or will be is essential to women. They’ll have to have it. Won’t be able to get on without it. It kind of knocks the rest, ever so slightly, makes them feel they’re depriving themselves if they don’t buy it. God, it’s brilliant.’

  ‘Christ,’ said Adam, ‘sometimes I know I should have stuck to ethicals. Can I have a rise?’

  ‘Absolutely not. But I’ll buy you dinner. And we can drink to your concept. Come on, I’m sick of this. Let’s go and talk some more.’ He pulled on his coat, held Adam’s out to him. ‘Let’s treat ourselves, this is a great occasion. It isn’t often a great new cosmetic range is born. I’ll take you to the Savoy.’

  Adam looked at him and grinned. ‘Fine. I’d like that. The only thing I’d suggest, Julian, is that you might get a better table if you wipe Peach Kernel off your face first, and possibly Mauve Madness off your eyelids as well.’

  Julian’s biggest problem, and he knew it, was selling Juliana into the stores. The rest seemed comparatively easy. He raised the money (through a merchant bank, impressed by his record over the past two years); he saw Adam’s occasionally undisciplined formulation safely into perfectly ordered ranges of cleansers and moisturizers, tonics and masks; and he created an advertising campaign with the help of a brilliant team at Colman Prentice and Varley, who took his concept of Essential Cosmetics and turned it into one of the great classics of cosmetic advertising, called the Barefaced Truth, a series of photographs of an exquisitely unmade-up face, the skin dewily, tenderly soft, the implication being that with the help of Juliana and its essential care, any face
could be as lovely; the advertisements appeared on double page spreads in all the major magazines and on posters over all the major cities and made the elaborate make-up of the models advertising other ranges look overdone and tacky. He packaged the range, against the advice of his creative team, in dark grey and white; it looked clinical they said, not feminine enough, it did not carry any implications of luxury. But set against the pale creams and golds and pinks of the competition on the mock-up beauty counter Julian kept permanently in his office, the Juliana range looked streamlined, expensive and chic; the creative team admitted it had been wrong.

  The perfume, which Julian named simply Je, researched outstandingly. Adam Sarsted went to Grasse and worked for weeks with Rudolph Grozinknski, an exiled Pole, one of the great Noses (an accolade awarded to few) of his generation, and together they created a fragrance that was rich, musky, warm: it exuded sex. ‘Je,’ ran the copyline under a photograph of a woman in a silkily clinging peignoir, turning away from her dressing table and looking into the camera with an unmistakable message in her eyes, ‘for the Frenchwoman in you’.

  When it was researched, over ninety per cent of the women questioned wanted to know where they could buy Je.

  But all this was effortless, set against getting the range into the stores. The most exquisite colours, the most perfectly formulated creams, the most sensational perfume, will never reach the public unless they can buy it easily, and see it displayed extensively in the big stores. In London Harrods, Harvey Nichols, and Selfridges are de rigueur stockists for any successful range; in Birmingham Rackhams, in Newcastle Fenwick, Kendals in Manchester and in Edinburgh Jenners. A newcomer imagining he can impress the buyers for these stores and persuade them to give away a considerable amount of their invaluable counter space can only be compared with a ballet student expecting a lead role at Covent Garden, or an unseeded player staking a claim on the Centre Court at Wimbledon.

  Nevertheless Julian knew he had to do it; his first advantage was that, with a very few exceptions, his prey were women. His second was that he had a strong gambling instinct. He took the buyers out to lunch, individually, and rather than risk insulting them by attempting to charm them in more conventional ways, he asked their advice on every possible aspect of his range; on its formulation, its positioning, its packaging, its advertising, and then paid them the immeasurable compliment of putting some bit of each piece of their advice, in however small a way, into practice. It was to the buyer at Harrods that Je owed its just slightly stronger formulation in the perfume concentrate, to the buyer from Fenwick Newcastle that the night cream was coloured ivory rather than pink, and to the buyer from Selfridges that the eye shadows were sold in powder as well as in cream form. He then told them that if they would give him counter space, in a modestly good position (not demanding the prime places, knowing that would alienate them), he would remove himself and his products if they were not meeting their targets after eight weeks. The buyers agreed; Julian then gave several interviews to the press explaining exactly what he was doing, and what a risk he was taking, and the women of Britain, moved by the thought of this handsome civilized man (who talked to them in a way that made them feel he knew and understood them intimately – not only through his advertising campaign and his public relations officer but in his interviews with Mrs Ernestine Carter in the Sunday Times and Miss Anne Scott James of Vogue, to name but a couple) placing his fortune on the line in this way, went out in sufficiently large numbers to inspect the range, to try it, and to save him from financial ruin. By the end of its first week in the stores Juliana had doubled its targets and by Christmas it had exhausted all its stocks.

  ‘Where’s Susan?’ said Julian irritably to Letitia one morning in the following July. ‘The cosmetic factory is still only running at eighty per cent capacity, and I want to know when she thinks it’s going to be at full strength.’

  ‘She’s just come in,’ said Letitia, ‘in something of a tizz, I would say. Very unlike her to be late. Something must be wrong.’

  Susan was sitting in her office eating a doughnut with savage speed. Julian looked at her anxiously.

  ‘You OK?’

  ‘I’m just furious, that’s all. I’m sorry I’m late, Julian, but I had to go and see Mum’s landlord. She had a letter this morning, saying she had to be prepared to move out within three months, as he wanted to sell the house.’

  ‘Well, that’s nonsense. Surely she’s protected by law.’

  ‘No, she isn’t. The house used to belong to his father, he was a dear old chap, came round every week for the rent, nice as pie. But he died, and the son’s been looking at all the tenancies, and because his dad never worried about making things official and proper leases, and Mum was just glad to get the place after the war, she just signed something without going into it very thoroughly. All it is is a tenancy agreement with a one-month-notice arrangement. I went and shouted at him, but he said he was doing her a big favour giving her three months, and told me to get the hell out and stop wasting his time.’

  ‘Brave chap,’ said Julian, grinning at her. ‘Sorry,’ he added hastily, watching her face freeze. ‘Can I help?’

  ‘I don’t think so. I just can’t think what she can do. It sounds awful, I know, but I just don’t want her with us. But I don’t see any option to her living with us again unless she goes and shares with her sister, and they can spend just about fifteen minutes together before they start bickering.’

  ‘It doesn’t sound awful at all,’ said Julian, who had met Susan’s mother and felt he had never come across such an unpleasant woman with the possible exception of a female commandant in the Gestapo who had conducted his preliminary interrogation when he had been captured during the war. (‘And the Gestapo woman had the mitigating virtue of being rather beautiful,’ he said to Letitia, when describing his early encounters with Meg Tucker. ‘This woman isn’t just unattractive, she’s positively repellent. I cannot imagine how she produced Susan.’)

  ‘Look, Susan, I really do need to talk work to you now, but let’s have a drink after we’ve finished and I really will do anything I can to help. Will the kids be OK for half an hour?’

  ‘Oh, I think so. Anna next door will have them in if I ring her. Thank you, Julian. I really do need someone to discuss it with.’

  Susan had moved out of her mother’s house a year earlier, and bought a tiny little terrace house in South Ealing, with the help of a sudden and rather suspiciously timely payment from the War Office. (Not even Susan could see how Julian could have forged a letter on War Office paper; she underestimated what he had learnt in the Resistance movement.)

  Jenny and Sheila were now ten and eight years old respectively, pretty but rather surly little girls – probably, Julian thought, as a result of spending too much time with their grandmother. They went to school within walking distance of the house, and Susan generally found life quite astonishingly easier. It took her just ten minutes to drive her van to the factory in the morning; she was earning, despite her strenuous efforts to keep her salary in line with what she considered equitable, quite a lot of money; she could afford to pay the girl next door to look after the girls after school and in the holidays, and was currently planning a package holiday with them on the Costa del Sol. She was endlessly teased about this, not only by Julian and Letitia, but Jim and Adam as well, who never missed an opportunity to point out to her that there were hundreds of people all over the country who couldn’t even afford a weekend in the Isle of Wight never mind jetting off (as they all put it) to the Mediterranean, but for once she was not even contrite. ‘I’ve never had a holiday, and we all need it,’ she kept saying defiantly, poring over her travel brochures.

  A week after the disagreeable Mrs Tucker had first been served with notice to quit her flat, Susan came flying into Julian’s office, flushed and radiant.

  ‘You’ll never believe this,’ she said, ‘but we’ve had another letter from the landlord, telling Mum she can stay. He’s even sent her a new leas
e offering her a tenancy for an unlimited period. I just can’t believe it. Isn’t it marvellous?’

  ‘Marvellous,’ said Julian, smiling at her, just a little complacently.

  ‘Did you –’ Susan stood very still, looking at him in awe. ‘Did you have anything to do with this?’

  ‘A bit.’

  ‘But you couldn’t have.’

  ‘OK then, I didn’t.’

  ‘Well, what did you do?’

  ‘Talked to a few people.’

  ‘What sort of people?’

  ‘Oh, you know, mildly influential people.’

  ‘Like?’

  ‘Well, like a friend of mine who belongs to the local Freemasons’, which our chum the landlord is desperate to join. A reporter on the local paper. Those sort of people.’

  ‘But what did you actually –’

  ‘Susan, darling, I think the less you know about it the better. Otherwise you might say something to your entirely charming mother, or perhaps to anyone who might be interested in your knowing anything about it all.’

  Susan looked at him thoughtfully. ‘It all smacks of corruption a bit, if you ask me.’

  ‘I’m not asking you. And hopefully nobody else will. Now if I were you I’d just help your mother sign the lease and get it back to the landlord quickly before he changes his mind.’

  ‘Oh, Julian . . .’ She stopped, and looked at him very seriously. ‘I do know how good you are to me. And I never seem to thank you properly. How can I?’

  ‘Have dinner with me tonight.’

  They were both surprised, shocked almost, by the invitation. Julian, who had been subconsciously avoiding any kind of close contact with Susan for as long as he could remember, and had planned to spend the evening with an old friend looking at horses at a stable in Buckinghamshire (he felt he deserved some slight reward for his unstinting labours of the past three years) wasn’t sure if he was pleased or sorry he had issued it, but having done so saw it determinedly through. ‘Please, Susan. I’d really like it.’