Storyboard (10 page)

Obviously the whole arrangement would be much more convenient than if Ralph had found something for himself. There would be things to work out between them—when to have baths, and how to share the
telephone
bill, and that sort of thing—but nothing that two reasonable people could not adjust. Perhaps Hugh would have quirks. Perhaps Ralph would discover that he himself had quirks. If so, no doubt the quirks could be accepted or reformed. Ralph was most grateful to Sophia. He said so in the lift, as she came with him to the ground floor. He was to make the move to town next week. He hoped that she would allow him to ring her up once he was settled in; Hugh would know her telephone number. Then they might go to a concert or something together, if Sophia would like that.

Sophia wanted to say, “Don’t think you have to, just because …” but of course she couldn’t say anything so gauche. Probably he was being polite. She had put him—or rather Deborah had put him—into the position where he felt he had to make such an offer. She was
embarrassed
for herself and for him, and wanted to refuse.
She had been extremely forward, she felt now, in
helping
to make this arrangement; she had set up a chain of obligation it would be difficult for them to break, and which he must increasingly come to resent. Had she not been behaving like a spinster looking for a man,
overeager
to help, to please, over-conscious now of having done so, over-ready in consequence to find and give a slight? Simply by doing this, she had made it impossible (as she now saw it) for Ralph to offer or for her to
receive
an invitation in a natural friendly way, when ordinarily it might have been the most natural thing in the world for the two of them to go out together.

So she thanked him very much, and said that she would be delighted to go with him to a concert or
something
.

*

Ralph had expected that the offices of
The
Radical
would have been more modern. Nothing about their letter-paper, nothing about the appearance of the
magazine
itself, which had recently been redesigned with a two-colour cover, had prepared him for the
inadequately
converted stables in Walton Street, just off the King’s Road, Chelsea, where
The
Radical
was produced.
The
Radical
had been founded in 1924 by a breakaway group of Socialists, whose position was, they said,
somewhere
on the true line which divided the arid
materialism
of the Webbs from the impracticability of William Morris. They had moved out the horses and moved in desks, and one of them had a small printing business in Wytham, where
The
Radical
was still printed. Although the stables had been more and more converted as time passed and
The
Radical
became respected and a political force, it did seem to Ralph that little unregenerate bits of them survived. The room in which he was given a
table looked more like a loose-box than an office, and surely there were traces of chaff on the stockroom floor?

The whole building was of a nasty khaki brick, and small windows were set in it. It was built side-on to the road; there was a large back door at one end from which the delivery van was loaded, and a small front door at the other. Once inside the front door, one discovered that most of the ground floor consisted of one large room, in which the desks of the Accounts, Subscriptions and Advertising Departments, jammed closely against each other, gave way eventually to the piles of back and current numbers that covered the area known as the stockroom. The Editorial Offices were a series of tiny rooms opening off this big room, and set together in a row against one wall. On the upper floor, which was reached by an open wooden stairway, were the
lavatories
, the Editor’s Office, the Literary Editor’s Office, the Conference Room, and a room which was always kept locked and which, under the conditions of the original lease, was let off to the King’s Road
Theosophical
Society.

The
Radical
came out every week. It cost ninepence, and ran at a profit. Like the
New
Statesman
and
Nation
and the
Spectator,
it gave its front half up to political
matters
, its back to literature. Like them it had benefited from the decision of the big corporations and trade associations to advertise to what are called “opinion leaders”, so that lucidly argued, passionately felt articles on the need for public ownership would be printed next to full-page advertisements composed in a documentary style, in which steel-workers told how they had bought their own houses and television sets and
industrial
journalists gave
ex
cathedra
opinions that private enterprise and increased exports went necessarily
together
.
Whimsical advertisements for soda-water flanked critical articles on James Joyce or correspondence on the after-care of discharged prisoners. Publishers’
advertisements
paid for the book reviews and Company
Reports
for the exposes of inefficiency and corruption in the City. Most of
The
Radical’s
readers bought it because they had always bought it and its arrival on the
doormat
every Friday was a reassurance that they still held the liberal opinions they knew they ought to hold, but which their way of living (if they allowed themselves to think about it) might seem to belie; these did not
actually
get time to read
The
Radical,
and placing this week’s number in the contemporary magazine rack were often horrified to find last week’s number still there
unlooked-at
. But simply to subscribe to
The
Radical
was for them a sign that they had not sold out, and was worth the ninepence. Other, younger readers, who spent their time more recklessly, bought it as a supplement to the Sunday papers, and read it all. And there were still a few readers who found in
The
Radical
a connection to others of their kind. Separated though they might be, some in Newcastle, some in Dudley, in Grimsby and in Greenwich, in Tunbridge Wells and in Tiverton,
probation
officers, personnel relations officers, teachers,
district
nurses, dentists, solicitors, keepers of museums, industrial consultants—

—and for these (for whom
The
Radical
had first been founded) it was a mine of fact, a buttress of opinion, another eye to see by, a living witness, in a world grown
corrupt and compliant, that reason and the principles of humanism still had meaning (and a little force) and that it was not yet too late, if only the people would take heed, for society to reform itself on lines that were not now exactly Marxist, and certainly not Benthamite, but generally in accordance with enlightened and sensible opinion as far as it could be collated. Lastly, the
corporations
bought
The
Radical
to read their own
advertisements
, and the common rooms bought it to put on common-room tables, and the politicians bought it, and had grown comfortably used to the fact that
The
Radical
was always upset about some piece of injustice and chicanery, but had usually managed to get its facts, not wrong enough to make any essential difference to the accusation, but wrong enough to be dismissed as biased and inaccurate, so that one never needed to take any action on the matter, which could clearly be seen to be one of
The
Radical’s
usual pieces of fuss and fume.

Ralph had not realized that the staff of
The
Radical
would be so old and so young. The generation in
between
seemed to have been lost. He discovered that this was because the older members of the staff were
determined
to keep in touch, and hand on the torch, and all that; it was the only thing to do;
The
Radical
wasn’t going to become out of date and doctrinaire if they could help it. In their forties, they had never felt any great need to keep in touch; they were in touch, the only people who
were,
as it had sometimes seemed to them. But at sixty, the sensible man adjusts to the fact that he is growing old. At the age of sixty, however, “the young”, the people to whom one says, “
your
generation”, are not forty odd, but twenty odd, and the staff of
The
Radical
now consisted of mellowing old men who
remembered
Brailsford and arrogant young men who
didn’t even remember Laski. Into this company, though he reminded himself that he was a scholar
au
fond
and not a journalist, Ralph fitted well enough. He was to do bits of reportage, bits of reviewing, and was promised a series of articles on the problems of local government. On occasional press days, he might be needed to
deputize
for the Assistant Editor at Wytham where the
printers
were, but he could count on free time for his own work. “After all‚” said the Assistant Editor, who had a high beaked nose and whose skin was pale blue like London milk, “we all do it, one way and another.
Television
for us, and research for you.”

“Television?”

“
Tonight,
What
the
Papers
Say,
Press
Conference,
Panorama,
Searchlight;
that sort of thing. They used to talk about radio dons, but now it’s television journalists—our sort of journalists anyway; you couldn’t expect the popular ones to be very articulate. Most of it’s B.B.C., but even the commercial companies like being serious for part of the time, provided it’s not peak time; they have to, I suppose, if they want to keep their licences. When it all started, one couldn’t tell whether they’d go for Culture or Current Events, but after the first six months Current Events won. Quite right too! Who wants to watch the Hallé playing popular classics, when they can have us talking about teenagers, or the H-bomb, or the traffic problem, or the Middle East, or just about anything really, as long as it’s controversial? Have you found anywhere to live yet?”

“Yes. A room in Kensington.”

“Rather a traditional way of living. I hope you’re not going to wear a duffel-coat to the office. Piers Paraday used to do that, but one always felt he was playing at it rather.”

Ralph was determined to like and be liked. A piece of his past inside him, the pre-Grammar School bit which remembered the thin back garden and the wooden fence, the smell of the chickens’ food in the kitchen, and the other fusty smell in the front room where the only books were a set of H. G. Wells given away by a newspaper in the nineteen-thirties, a piece which
remembered
his cousin Harold who had bettered himself by getting a job in a bank, and rows and rows of
identical
houses in the rain, and going to the pictures with the Children’s Club on Saturday mornings, and Spam and chips, and the way the teachers at the Primary School talked differently from his parents, this part of him
resented
the Assistant Editor’s manner, but it had been much overlaid—deliberately overlaid—by other ways of thinking, particularly recently by what Ralph conceived to be the academic way of thinking, in which a certain arrogance and a detached view of the way in which ordinary people lived were usual. So he only said, “It’s not as traditional as it sounds. Someone I know found me the room, so I’m not one of the exploited. You know the sort of thing—own key and use of kitchen.”

“Admirable. You must come out to supper with us some time. We live at Richmond, because my wife has money.”

“My landlord’s really the—well, I suppose the boss, in an organizational way—of the girl who found me the room. He’s never let a room before, and he seems quite harmless. I’m much more experienced at it than he is. He keeps dogs, though.”

“If you’re lodging in a Kennels, I don’t envy you.
Mais
chacun
a
son
goût.”

“No, nothing like that. He’s in advertising actually. A huge office, all plate glass, and carpets, and gladioli in
the Waiting-Room—you know the sort of thing.”

“Indeed I don’t. You must find our own little office quite a come-down. It’s rather too hot in summer, and very cold now because the room’s so huge. All the heat goes right up to the ceiling, and stays there. It’s not quite so bad for us, because we have little electric fires in our own offices, and one sits over them, though even those tiny rooms never get warm—the partitions don’t go all the way up, you see. I suppose this landlord of yours is all right. I’m afraid I don’t know any
advertising
people. Some of one’s own generation do go into it, as you know, but one loses touch.”

“Yes. I’ve found that.”

“Where do you yourself stand, as they say?”

“On advertising? Well, I don’t know—the orthodox left-wing view, I suppose. It’s not really my field, so I haven’t thought much about it.”

“Bodge was saying he thought it was time we did something.” (Harvey Bodge was the editor of
The
Radical
.) “He thinks it corrupts the people, and corrupts the language, and the people are more corrupted
because
the language is corrupted, and the language is more corrupted because the people are corrupted.
Something
like that. So he’s against it for political and literary reasons.”

“Bit extreme, isn’t it?”

“Don’t ask me. If I were doing an investigation, I might take it as a working hypothesis, and see what came out. Do you have the
entrée
to advertising circles?”