Excursions in the Real World by William Trevor

Author:William Trevor [Trevor, William]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780140238457
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2014-10-05T16:00:00+00:00

'You'll be with Mr Baker,' Marchant Smith said, and led me through a maze of passages. Some of the doors bore visual indications as to the occupants of the rooms, or amusing suggestions as to the qualifications required for working within. From time to time the copy chief paused in his pace to examine these displays, his attention particularly held by a lifesize photograph of two faces behind bars, one bearded, the other grimacing comically beneath a penitentiary-style haircut. 'Droll,' he remarked in weary tones, and without knocking entered the room next door.

'Your trainee, Mr Baker.' He offered me to a raw-faced man in shirtsleeves and red braces, who looked me up and down, evincing what appeared to be mild revulsion.

'What I wanted was an assistant,' he snappishly observed.

'So you shall have, Mr Baker, since you need but turn our friend here into one.'

'I haven't time to turn him into anything.'

'Oh, that we had time, Mr Baker, for all we wish to do! Oh, that we had!'

With that he ambled off, pausing at the door to take his leave of me, inclining his head in a leisurely nod. 'I place you in Mr Baker's care with the utmost confidence,' he said.

There were broken veins all over Baker's nose and cheeks, which was what gave him the raw look. Crossly, he turned to a girl who was typing and told her to find me a corner somewhere. 'I didn't ask for you,' he said in case I was still under a misapprehension about this.

I learnt later that Marchant Smith had hoped to polish Baker into the kind of copywriter he believed he might become, but that the experiment had dismally failed. Baker was said to have been a bread-van driver, though this may well have been ornamentation on the part of the copy chief in an effort to emphasise his point that he had 'discovered' Baker and 'brought him on' only to receive hostility in return. His error in employing him rankled all the more because he usually sought to fill whatever vacancies cropped up from a somewhat different source: in the 1950s and '60s, Notley's was known in the trade as advertising's

'nest of singing birds' because of the number of aspiring poets it boasted.

A plump young man in a blue blazer was the first of these to introduce himself. 'I'm Ted Lucie-Smith,' he said in the room I shared with a waspish typographer, an assembler of point-of-sale display material, and a designer who the typographer said had aspirations to being a dance-band leader. Lucie-Smith spoke obscurely about contemporary art, at length about himself, and briefly about Clark's Shoes, for which he wrote some of the copy. It wasn't in the least difficult to write advertising copy, he assured me.

I, so far, had written nothing whatsoever. I had been allocated an old Olympia typewriter and a stack of flimsy yellow paper. The two telephones in the room were on my desk, one being a house phone, the other for making outside calls.

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