'He'll have no reason to complain once I get back into advertising. And listen, I truly don't mind working in it for a while, so stop worrying. Wherever I go I'll come back the same.'
'That's all I'll ever want,' Ben said, and eased himself into her. She hugged him and slowed down his rhythm with hers, waves of warmth growing in her before the flood. Afterwards she laid her head on his chest, breathing in the smell of the two of them, before drifting off to sleep. Sometimes she liked this kind of sex best of all, the kind which was so gentle and familiar it felt like stability made flesh. If their books raised their life to new heights, it mustn't leave this behind. 'Not too far,' she murmured drowsily to Ben's sleeping face.
ELEVEN
The night before her interview at Ballyhoo Unlimited, Ellen leafed through her portfolio and was impressed by hardly anything. She had already preferred her illustrations for Ben's books, but now she saw that it wasn't just a matter of her having developed her skills: nearly all the work in the portfolio was dated. Admittedly some of the assignments – a teenage fashion store, a chain of discos which had been meant to light up the winters of half a dozen Norfolk towns but which had winked out before Johnny was born – would inevitably have dated, but why should she expect the agency to take that into consideration? She quite liked the work she'd done on the campaign to advertise the houseboat holiday firm, but that wouldn't be enough. She pulled out all the material which seemed stale to her, gazed wistfully at her depleted portfolio, and came to a decision. 'I'm going to show them Broads Best.'
Ben glanced up from copying changes of address from last year's Christmas cards. 'I should hope so. It's your work.'
'It isn't quite that simple.'
'Then it should be, and if anyone can make it so, you can. And if you ever bump into Sid Peacock you can tell him from me to insert himself up himself and twist.'
'I can't imagine ever seeing him again,' Ellen said on her way to the back room. Beside the desk in front of the large window which in daytime gave the room all the light it could hold, one shelf of the deep bookcase contained a few copies of each of the two Sterling books, Ben's battered electric typewriter, pots of Ellen's brushes bunched like withered blossoms waiting for the spring to return their colour to them. A pile of folders of her work occupied the bottom shelf. She extracted the Broads Best folder and took it to the desk, where she rested her elbows on either side of it without opening it. She was suddenly afraid that it would prove to be less inspired than she remembered it to be.
It hadn't seemed inspired only to her, judging by Sid Peacock's behaviour. He was the head of what he liked to call his department of Noble Publicity – an office in which he'd worked with Ellen and an older man called Nathan, who was gay and who openly loathed him. Sid, who was three years older than Ellen, had borne his wide tanned face and Oxford accent like presents he was offering the world, and smelled of aftershaves with savage names. Whenever the agency bosses had assigned him a campaign he would call a brainstorming session, draining Ellen and Nathan of their ideas and usually preferring his own. Three years of this and no promotion had begun to frustrate Ellen, but there had been no other opening for her in Norwich. Then the agency had acquired the Broads account and she had lost her innocence.
Broads was the oldest brewery in Norfolk, and its directors had wanted to give it a new image. Everyone at the agency had been delighted to have the account – at least, until Broads had turned down all the proposed campaigns. The directors didn't like spacemen drinking their ale in free fall, they didn't care for anything involving computers, they especially disliked the idea of associating their product with pop stars or film stars, either current or nostalgically revived. After several rejections Sid had stormed into the office. 'It's like talking to mummies. Why the hell did they bother coming to us if they think they know more than we do about what's up to date?' And Ellen had begun to wonder if the agency was missing the point – if they couldn't make the future of the brewery by delving into its past. She'd thought she remembered something she'd once heard about the ale, and over the weekend she had tracked it down in a history of Norfolk.
Something you may not know about Broads Best, she'd scribbled on her pad, and then Ten things you may not know… On Monday Sid hadn't seemed particularly impressed but told her to come back to him if she managed to develop the idea. On her way home on Friday she'd seen a jigsaw in a toyshop window and had realised how the campaign could work, and she'd been so eager to show him that she'd arranged to meet him in the office on Saturday morning. She'd let him hug her to express his enthusiasm for her idea, but when he'd tried to give her breasts a clammy squeeze she'd poked him in the stomach. 'Let me see your work when it's finished,' he'd said like a spinsterish schoolmaster, flinching out of reach.
Her growing anger at her memories of him made her open the folder on the desk. Her designs still looked as impressive to her as they must have looked to Sid. This man once said it was England's proudest ale was the first thing people might not have known about Broads Best, printed above a tenth of the picture which the other nine slogans gradually assembled, her portrait of Henry VIII with a tankard in his hand. But when she'd taken it to Sid he'd grimaced at it. 'I used to think it would be clever to advertise tartar control with a toothbrush getting rid of Genghis Khan. Too clever by half,' he'd said, and she had felt so disappointed and vulnerable that she didn't wonder why he told her, as if he was doing an undeserved favour, that he would show her idea to their boss.
She ought to have realised what Sid was up to. Nathan would undoubtedly have warned her, but he'd been on holiday in Marrakesh that week. A few days later, when the junior partner had congratulated her on helping Sid visualise his idea for the Broads Best campaign, she had been too stunned to argue, and by the time her rage had been clamouring to be articulated it would have seemed too like an afterthought, a lie. Besides, she had seen enough of the partners to be pretty sure that they would have regarded the Saturday incident as negligible and would probably have dismissed her accusation as an attempt at revenge. Worst of all, Sid's self-righteous look had made it clear that he would have treated her more fairly if she had given in to him.
She'd let herself believe that the whole sordid incident had become irrelevant once Sid Peacock had moved to an agency in London and she had become pregnant with Margaret, but now she saw that she ought to have laid claim to her work for later use. Perhaps she still could, she thought as she took the folder to show Ben. 'Would you hire me?'
'You bet I would, and so would anyone with any sense.'
'Yes, but you're married to me.'
'Anyone with any sense would be,' he said, and made a face at having contradicted himself. 'As soon as my aunt's home and can sit with the children we'll go out for dinner. We'll have plenty to celebrate.'
In the morning Ellen walked the children to school, Johnny racing ahead to each intersection and glancing back for her to tell him he could cross, Margaret holding her hand and chattering about fashions, records, changing schools next year, a classmate who was rumoured to have been off school with her first period… The children were plenty to celebrate, Ellen thought, and so long as the family was happy, what else mattered? Sometimes she worried that they wouldn't grow up normally with a writer for a father and an artist for a mother, but they kept reminding her that it seemed unlikely. At the school gates they each gave her a fleeting kiss and ran off to join their friends, and she walked home to prepare dinner before heading for the interview.
Ben had left her the Volkswagen with a note on the driver's seat: IF YOU'RE HALF AS PROUD OF YOURSELF AS I AM OF YOU YOU'LL SLAY THEM.
She smiled at that and drove into Norwich, and had time to stroll from the car park through the pedestrianised streets to arrive at the long new building of yellowish stone near the cathedral less than five minutes before she was due there.
A lift which smelled scented and which hummed to itself on one note eased her up to the third floor. Past an accountant's office where women were typing what headphones told them and another door which looked as if whatever name its pane once displayed had been frosted over, she found the reception area of Ballyhoo Unlimited beyond glass doors as wide as the room. Fat blue settees dwarfed by posters almost big enough for billboards faced each other across a floor padded with blue carpet. The two men waiting on the settees glanced at Ellen and then resumed their nonchalant expressions as the receptionist behind the desk between them greeted her, raising her face as if her eyes and her cherry-red smile were fixed. 'Mrs Sterling? You're first in,' she said.
Ellen smiled apologetically at the men as she sat down. Her companion on the settee, a man who was
