The film ended; a square of bright light replaced the sexual antics on the sheet of cartridge paper which Mulvihill had attached to the back of his drawing-office door. He switched on a green-shaded desk light, removed the cartridge paper and the drawing-pins that had held it in place. Packing away his projector in the bottom drawer of his filing-cabinet, he hummed beneath his breath an old tune from his childhood, ‘Who’s Sorry Now?’. The projector and Mulvihill’s films were naturally kept under lock and key. Some of his films he could project at home and often did so; others he did not feel he could. ‘Whatever are you doing, dear?’ his sister some- times called through the door of the garden shed where now and again he did a bit of carpentry, and of course it would be terrible if ever she discovered the stuff. So every Friday evening, when everyone else had left the Ygnis and Ygnis building – and before the West Indian cleaners arrived in the corridor where his office was – Mulvihill locked the door and turned the lights out. He’d been doing it for years.
He was a man with glasses, middle-aged, of medium height, neither fat nor thin. Given to wearing Harris tweed jackets and looking not unlike an advertisement for the Four Square tobacco he smoked, he travelled every day to the centre of London from the suburb of Purley, where his relationship with his slightly older sister was cemented by the presence in their lives of a Scotch terrier called Pasco. By trade Mulvihill was a designer of labels – labels for soup-tins and coffee in plastic packets, for seed-packets and sachets of shampoo. The drawing-office he shared with a Hungarian display artist called Wilkinski reflected the work of both of them. The walls were covered with enlarged versions of designs that had in the past been used to assist in the selling of a variety of products; cardboard point-of-sale material stood on all the office’s surfaces except the two sloping drawing-boards, each with its green-shaded light. Paintbrushes and pencils filled jam jars, different-coloured papers were stored in a corner. In different colours also, sheaves of cellophane hung from bulldog-clips. Tins of Cow paper adhesive were everywhere.
Being at the ordinary end of things, neither Mulvihill nor Wilkinski created the Ygnis and Ygnis glamour that appeared on the television screen and in the colour supplements: their labels and display material were merely echoes of people made marvellous with a red aperitif on the way to their lips, of women enriched by the lather of a scented soap, and men invigorated by the smooth operation of a razor-blade. From Ygnis and Ygnis came images lined always with a promise, of happiness or ecstasy. Girls stood aloof by castle walls, beautiful in silk. Children laughed as they played, full of the beans that did them good. Ygnis and Ygnis was of the present, but the past was never forgotten: the hot days of summer before the worst of the wars, brown bread and jam, and faded flowered dresses. The future was simple with plain white furniture and stainless steel and Japanese titbits. In the world of wonders that was Ygnis and Ygnis’s, empresses ate Turkish Delight and men raced speedboats. For ever and for ever there was falling in love.
Mulvihill took his mackintosh from a peg on the wall, and picked up the two short pieces of timber he’d purchased during the lunch hour and with which, that weekend, he hoped to repair a bookcase. He didn’t light his pipe, although while watching ‘Confessions of a Housewife’ he had filled it with Four Square, ready to ignite it in the lift. ‘Evening, Violet,’ he said to the big West Indian lady who was just beginning to clean the offices of the corridor. He listened for a moment while she continued what she had been telling him last Friday, about a weakness her son had developed in his stomach. He nodded repeatedly and several times spoke sympathetically before moving on. He would call in at the Trumpet Major for a glass of red wine, as he did every Friday evening, and chat for a quarter of an hour to the usual people. It was all part of the weekend, but this time it wasn’t to be. In the lift which Mulvihill always took – the one at the back of the building, which carried him to the garage and the mews – he died as he was lighting his pipe.
In the Trumpet Major nobody missed Mulvihill. His regular presence on Friday evenings was too brief to cause a vacuum when it did not occur. Insisting that a single glass of wine was all he required, he never became involved in rounds of drinks, and it was accepted that that was his way. R.B. Strathers was in the lounge bar, as always on Friday, with Tip Dainty and Capstick and Lilia. Other employees of Ygnis and Ygnis were there also, two of the post-boys in the public bar, Fred Stein the art buyer. At a quarter past eight Ox-Banham joined Strathers and his companions, who had made a place for themselves in a corner. Like Mulvihill, Ox-Banham was known to work late on Fridays, presumed to be finishing anything that had become outstanding during the week. In fact, like Mulvihill, he indulged a private hobby: the seduction, on the floor of his office, of his secretary, Rowena.
‘Well, how are we all?’ Ox-Banham demanded. ‘And, more to the point, what are we having?’
Everyone was having the same as usual. Lilia, the firm’s most important woman copywriter, was drunk, as she had been since lunchtime. R.B. Strathers, who had once almost played rugby for South Africa and was now the managing director of Ygnis and Ygnis, was hoping to be drunk shortly. Tip Dainty occasionally swayed.
Ox-Banham took a long gulp of his whisky and water and gave a little gasp of satisfaction. Rowena would be leaving the building about now, since the arrangement was that she stayed behind for ten minutes or so after he’d left her so that they wouldn’t be seen together. In normal circumstances it didn’t matter being seen together, an executive and his secretary, but just after sexual congress had taken place it might well be foolish: some tell-tale detail in their manner with one another might easily be still floating about on the surface. ‘Point taken of course,’ Rowena had said, being given to speaking in that masculine way. Hard as glass she was, in Ox-Banham’s view.
‘The confectionery boys first thing Monday,’ he said now. ‘Neat little campaign we’ve got for them, I think.’
Lilia, who was middle-aged and untidy, talked about shoes. She was clutching a bundle of papers in her left hand, pressing it tightly against her breast as if she feared someone might snatch it from her. Her grey hair had loosened, her eyes were glazed. ‘How about Cliff Hangers?’ she said to Tip Dainty, offering the term as a name for a new range of sandals.
Lilia’s bundle of papers was full of such attempts to find a title for the new range. The sandals were well designed, so Ygnis and Ygnis had been told, with a definite no-nonsense look. Tip Dainty said Cliff Hangers sounded as if something dreadful might happen to you if you wore the things, and Lilia grinned extravagantly, her lean face opening until it seemed entirely composed of teeth. ‘Hangers?’ she suggested. ‘Just Hangers?’ But Tip Dainty said Hangers would make people think of death.
Ox-Banham talked to Capstick and R.B. Strathers about the confectionery people and the preparations that had been made by Ygnis and Ygnis to gain the advertising of a new chocolate bar. Again there had been the question of a name and Ygnis and Ygnis in the end had settled for Go. It was Mulvihill who had designed the wrapper and the various cartons in which the bar would be delivered to the shops, as well as window-stickers and other point-of-sale material.
‘I like that Go idea,’ Ox-Banham said, ‘and I like the moody feel of that scene in the cornfield.’ His back was a little painful because Rowena had a way of digging her fingernails into whatever flesh she could find, but of course it was worth it. Rowena had been foisted on him by her father, Bloody Smithson, the awful advertising Manager of McCulloch Paints, and when Ox-Banham had first seduced her he’d imagined he was getting his own back for years of Smithson’s awkwardness. But in no time at all he’d realized Rowena was using him as much as he was using her: she wanted him to get her into the copywriting department.