The Dust and the Heat

by Michael Gilbert

  “He’s come a long way in the last ten years,” said Blackett.

  “Did you know him in the War?”

  “I knew him as a long-haired cavalryman who affected gaberdine trousers and a polka-dot scarf as a substitute for the battledress provided for him.”

  “It was very curious how the old cavalry notions – shut your eyes, dig your spurs in and charge – got transmogrified into tanks and came out exactly the same at the other end.”

  “He’s got the right idea. Locate the enemy and hit him before he can hit you.”

  “Who’s the enemy?”

  Blackett considered this one as the taxi advanced down the Strand in a series of limited bounds.

  “Our main competitor at the moment is the Mallinson Group. They’ve been a lot longer in the field than we have and they’ve got a sort of personal tie-up with Naumann.”

  “Jacob Naumann?”

  “Yes. Do you know him?”

  “Very well. Dodgy old devil. I knew he had interests in dyes and chemicals. I didn’t know he went in for the toilet preparations.”

  “He’s not a manufacturer, agreed. But he’s on the Board of two of the three biggest retail chemists in England. If he says ‘Buy from Mallinson’, they buy from Mallinson.”

  “Suppose he was to say, ‘Buy from Mallinson or Quinn & Nicholson, whichever offers you the best product at the best price.’ No favouritism?”

  “If he only went as far as that,” said Blackett “we should be very happy indeed.” And to the driver, “You’d better turn into the Mall. We can walk up the steps.”

  The driver said, “OK guv, it’s your legs.”

  “That lawsuit he was talking about,” said Harrap. “Is it serious?”

  “Oliver seems to think he can handle it.”

  “Our legal adviser didn’t look too happy about it.”

  “Fergus Campbell’s a cautious bird. Good thing really. Oliver needs someone with a hand near the brake. This’ll do!”

  They got out of the taxi. Blackett paid the fare, adding a meticulously calculated tip, and the two middle-aged men then demonstrated their fitness to each other by walking, fast, up the twenty-nine steps beside the Duke of York’s statue.

  Other people were discussing Oliver Nugent that morning.

  In his sixth-floor suite in the offices of Mallinson’s Pharmaceutical Supplies Limited, in Clerkenwell, Victor Mallinson read the three typewritten sheets which his secretary had laid on his desk. He said, “Good work, Jennie. You managed to get it all down.”

  His secretary said, “Well, he talked a bit fast to start with, but I think it’s all there.”

  “Did anyone think it was odd – your scribbling away in shorthand?”

  “Not a bit. I sat just behind the press table, you see.”

  “Clever girl,” said Mallinson. “Very good.” He stroked his short, neat beard as he continued to read. His barber had been colour-tinting his hair for some time now, but he had refused to let him dye out the grey streaks in his beard. He considered them distinguished. “I see you’ve even put in the ‘Laughter’ and ‘Applause’,” he said.

  “Actually it went down rather well.”

  “I’m sure it did, Jennie. The Chairman’s speech always goes down well when he has increased profits and a larger dividend to announce. It’s what’s known in sporting parlance as a walkover. Would you see if Mr Crake is in his office? I’d like a word with him.”

  He had finished the report by the time Mr Crake appeared, and was leaning back in his chair staring at the ceiling, his slim beautifully tailored body forming a straight line from the top of his light brown, wavy hair to the polished tips of his shoes. He said, “Come in, Crake,” but did not move his head. “I’ve got an advance copy of what our friend, Mr Nugent, has been saying to his shareholders. I’d like your opinion of it.”

  Mr Crake was squat, dark and vulgar. His hair was so black and so strong that even had he shaved a great deal more carefully than he did, a large area of his face would have appeared to be permanently shadowed. His skin, where it could be seen, was pale, and this produced an illusion sometimes observable in people of this colouring that he was wearing white patches over his ears.

  He read the typewritten sheets quickly and grunted. “Not a lot there,” he said.

  “Except an insufferable impression of self-satisfaction,” agreed Mallinson.

  “He’s pleased with himself, and no error. There’s only one thing I don’t like about that set-up. Them nobbling Harrap.”

  “Is that something which ought to alarm us?”

  “I dunno,” said Mr Crake. “It depends how easily you get alarmed. Harrap’s still got one foot in his old man’s set-up, Lathams.”

  “Certainly. And Lathams, as we all know, are sound, old-fashioned, merchant bankers. Founded in the year of the Fire of London and haven’t changed much since. I understand their clerks still write in longhand with steel nibs.”

  “Lathams,” said Mr Crake, “are Feinbergs.”

  “How do you know that?” said Mallinson, sharply.

  “It’s just one of those things I know. There’s a tie-up behind the scenes. Cross-guarantees at the bank. And Saul Feinberg is Jacob Naumann’s cousin.”

  “I see,” Victor Mallinson thought about this for a minute and then shook his neat head. “I don’t think it’ll make any difference,” he said. “I don’t think Naumann will upset a long-standing arrangement just because his cousin is interested in a firm that has a second-generation connection with one of our rivals. Do you?”

  “You can never tell what’s going to happen in the City,” said Mr Crake, “and that’s for sure. I’d be a bloody sight happier if we had this long-standing arrangement you talk about in black and white and signed over a sixpenny stamp.’’

  “It’s rested for twenty years on a gentleman’s agreement. They won’t alter it now.”

  Mr Crake expressed his opinion of gentlemen’s agreements in language which made Victor Mallinson wrinkle up the corners of his mouth. Then he said, “One thing, as long as they’ve got this lawsuit hanging round their necks they won’t have too much time to bother us.”

  “Do you know who’s running it?”

  “That sounds a bit cynical to me,” said Mr Crake. “Are you suggesting it’s a put-up job?”

  “It occurred to me as a possibility. We’d all like to discover what the base of their Handcharm is. We can’t get it by analysis because it’s vegetable not chemical. But if you forced their hand by alleging breach of an existing chemical patent – then they might be forced – in self-defence – to disclose what the base really is.”

  “Wouldn’t work,” said Mr Crake. “Not in an English court. The plaintiff’s got to prove his case. All the defendant’s got to do is bloody well sit tight.”

  “In an English court, maybe not. What about a French court?”

  “You never know what’s going to happen in a Frog court,’’ agreed Mr Crake. “Case the other day. Divorce. The husband wasn’t getting anywhere with his original case, so he switched ground and accused the barrister, who was appearing for his wife, of committing adultery with her. Tricky people.”

  Victor Mallinson said, “It would cost money to mount a case like that. I did hear a whisper the other day from someone at my club that the money behind the case might be coming from Germany.”

  Mr Crake told Victor Mallinson what he thought about Germany, too.

  Other people were discussing Oliver Nugent that morning. Simon Bargulder, in his shirtsleeves, wandered out of his office to look for Derek Wibberley. He could have rung a bell and had him fetched, but he welcomed the opportunity to take a stroll through his kingdom. Sleeves rolled to the elbow, displaying thick, hairy forearms, a plaited leather belt encircling his equator, he rolled down the passages of the advertising agency, which he had founded twenty-five years before with Harold French and which was now competing on level terms with the big three in the battlefield which is bounded by Kingsway, High
Holborn, Farringdon Street and Fleet Street.

  His course took him out of the executive suite, down a flight of stairs, along the clean and sterile corridors where the media analysts and data processors sat in their cells and worshipped at the altars of Market Research; past the room which housed their newest god, the computer, the first to be installed in any advertising agency in England; down a further flight of stairs and through double doors which led into the television studio, silent for the moment with the breathless silence of a soundproof room; and on into the corridor which housed the copywriters.

  Here he stopped a thin, untidy young man whose fair hair came almost to his shoulders, and asked him if he had seen Mr Wibberley.

  The young man started, threw his hair back from his face and muttered, “I think he’s in Art,” then scampered off down the passage.

  Bargulder chuckled to himself. He had noticed that, alone of all his staff, his copywriters resolutely refused to call him “Sir”. This way they preserved their artistic independence, he imagined.

  He ran his man to earth in the colour-photography section of the Art Department. Wibberley was standing behind a camera crane, focusing it on a girl who was dressed from the waist downwards in corduroy trousers and gumboots, and for the remainder in a stretch-nylon bathing dress. Behind her was a boldly executed design of sand, cliffs and sea. In front of her a cardboard seagull rotated slowly on a wire.

  “For God’s sake,” said Wibberley, “can’t someone control that damned bird? Every time we get into position, the bloody thing twists round and blocks out Stella’s right eye.”

  The girl said, “If you bring the camera any closer they’ll be able to look down my throat and see my tonsils sticking out.”

  “I’m sure they’re as utterly beautiful as all your other projections,” said Wibberley. “Oh, hullo, sir. I didn’t see you.”

  “When you’ve finished,” said Bargulder, “I’d like a word. There’s no great hurry.”

  “I’ll come now. Thomas can carry on. I’m only getting in his way really.”

  Back in his office, which was furnished to look as much like a gentleman’s study and as little like an office as possible, Bargulder pushed a box of cigarettes across the table to his subordinate and said, “I’ve been thinking. Might it be the right time to promote Quinn & Nicholsons to three-star rating?”

  Derek Wibberley flushed with pleasure. In a voice which he tried to keep carefully non-committal he said, “Well, sir. If you really think they’re worth it.”

  “At the moment, to be honest, I doubt if they are. In a year they may be. This is a case when I should like to be ahead of public opinion, not behind it.”

  Firms who had accounts with Bargulders were placed by them into three categories, one-star, two-star and three-star. These were carefully considered and as hard to alter as the ratings of a Michelin restaurant. Not more than a dozen clients at any time would qualify for three-star status, and it was the first time that any of the accounts for which Derek Wibberley was responsible had been considered for the accolade. It was more than an honour. It meant that a higher budget would automatically be allotted to his projects for them. It meant that he could get priority from any department in Bargulders for their work. It meant an almost unlimited entertainment account for their senior executives; and for Derek Wibberley, too, come to that.

  “I think they’re the most enterprising firm in the toiletry market,” he said. “It’s extraordinary how they’ve come on in the last seven years. Mallinsons are the only people who are ahead of them, I should say.”

  “Who looks after Mallinsons?”

  “Pedersen.”

  “Ah yes,” said Bargulder, “Hendrik Pedersen. A nice fellow. A very nice fellow.” He sounded like a tiger saying, “A very nice goat.”

  “I’m talking to Oliver Nugent’s partner, Nicholson, tomorrow, about some plans they have for a new soap. We’re having lunch together.”

  “Excellent. Where are you going?”

  “I’d booked a table at the Columbine.”

  “The Columbine,” said Bargulder, with a hint of reproach in his voice. “For a three-star client? My dear boy! The Savoy.”

  Other people were discussing Oliver that morning. In small, untidy offices in Gresham Street and Old Jewry, where the real money in the City ebbed and flowed at the behest of a few inconspicuous but extremely shrewd men, his name was being mentioned, and the horoscope of Quinn & Nicholsons was being studied and discussed by the soothsayers and astronomers of high finance.

  3

  “It’s not what goes into the bottle,” said Derek Wibberley, “it’s what you put on the label. Have some more sparrow grass. Waiter!”

  “Not too much of the melted butter,” said Dumbo. “Got my figure to think of. I’ve been getting very fat since I gave up squash last winter. Do you come here much?”

  “It’s handy for the office,” said Wibberley. In fact, he had never been there before in his life, but a third glass of Corton had filled him with confidence and his youthful face was flushed.

  “There’s a lot to be said for working in London,” said Dumbo enviously. He looked round the crowded grill room, recognizing (at different tables) an actress, a publisher and a socially minded dean. “Normally I have a sandwich and a glass of beer at our local. Now that we’ve opened a London office, I may get up here a bit more often.”

  “I expect we shall be seeing a good deal of each other,” said Wibberley. “You need us as much as we need you.”

  “That’s right,” said Dumbo. He thought Wibberley was a nice young man. Just the sort who would have made a good junior officer. An agreeable manner, but obviously a good brain too. Much of what he had said about advertising seemed very good sense. Dumbo had never thought deeply about advertising before. It was money you paid out because it was the right thing to do, and in the hope of some vague future unspecified benefit. Like putting money into the plate at church. Now it appeared that there was more to it. Wheels within wheels.

  “The trouble with toiletries,” said Wibberley, “is that they’re too easy to imitate. Take your Handcharm. Your rivals haven’t discovered how you make it, and maybe they never will, but they’ve already started to market products of their own which are so like it, in make-up and general appearance, that the poor old muddle-headed public simply doesn’t know which is which. Hand-lustre, Palm Balm, Finger Charm. All sold in packets and bottles which are just different enough not to infringe your trademark and registered design, but near enough to it to deceive anyone who’s shopping in a hurry with a vague idea of what it was they heard last night on the telly.”

  “It sounds,” said Dumbo, “no more for me – well, just half a glass, then – it sounds as though research is just a waste of time and money. I mean, why bother? All you have to do is wait around and see what your rivals are doing and copy it with a few subtle variations.”

  “You’re forgetting one thing. The time element. It takes time to get your substitute out and advertise it. We reckon, at Bargulders, that if you handle the original promotion properly you’ll get an absolutely clear run for a year and a pretty favourable field for a year after that. At the end of the second year you might just as well stop pushing. There’ll be so many people on the band-waggon it’ll come to a grinding halt.”

  “What exactly do you mean,” said Dumbo, “by handling the promotion properly?” He had his eyes on the actress. She had nearly finished and he reckoned she was going to have to squeeze past him to get off the banquette.

  “The promotion itself has got to be based on a novel idea. It needn’t be very profound, but it’s got to be something no one’s ever said before in exactly that way. The first man who was bold enough to tell girls that their armpits were smelly made a fortune. Most of the basic ideas have been thoroughly worked over by now though, but you can get a new slant. Like that ‘Commando’ toothpaste for men we did for you. Brush sex into your teeth. You remember that?”

  “I do indeed. I
was so impressed by our advertising that I tried it myself for six months. It didn’t seem to make much difference.”

  The actress was a disappointment. Seen from a range of one yard the schoolgirl complexion had dissolved into a surface coating of matt colour put on in apparently aimless blots and whirls. It was like looking too closely at an Impressionist painting.

  “She models advertisements for the Mallinson group,” said Wibberley. “You wouldn’t think she was forty-five, would you? You’d like a glass of port? Or would you prefer brandy?”

  “Neither,” said Dumbo firmly. “A cup of black coffee.”

  “Just coffee then, waiter. And you might bring me some cigarettes. The other thing you’ve got to be terrifically careful about is security. If one of your rivals gets wind of what you’re doing – the style of thing and the market it’s being aimed at – there’s nothing to prevent him preparing something on similar lines. Then you’ve lost the advantage of timing. In fact, you get the worst of both worlds because, if he times his exercise correctly and gets in just ahead of you, he gets an extra push from your advertising campaign.”

  When, at a quarter to three, Wibberley finally called for, and signed, the bill, he added the name of the agency under his own and waited for a few minutes, finishing his cigarette before getting up. He knew perfectly well that the floor manager would be telephoning the agency to check his authority and he wanted to give them plenty of time to do it. In a month or so, when they knew his face, such precautions would be unnecessary.

  As they were leaving, a pair at a corner table, deep in conversation, caught his eye. He said, “Isn’t that your new director, Harrap?”

  “That’s right,” said Dumbo. “Wilfred Harrap. I noticed him as we came in. Why?”

  “That chap he’s lunching with is Jacob Naumann’s chief buyer, Horton. Mallinson won’t like it when he hears about that.”

  “Will he hear about it?”

  “Oh, certainly he will.”

  Mr Crake said, “I told you not to bloody well write him down too soon. He’s crafty, and he doesn’t box amateur, three rounds of two minutes each and no holding in the clinches. He’s a pro and the sooner we treat him as a pro the better.”