Collected Stories

Mulvihill’s Memorial

The man, naked himself, slowly removed the woman’s clothes: a striped red-and-black dress, a petticoat, stockings, further underclothes. In an armchair he took the woman on to his knees, nuzzling her neck with his mouth.

A second man entered the room and divested himself of his clothes. A second woman, in a grey skirt and jersey, was divested of hers. The four sprawled together on the armchair and the floor. Complex sexual union took place.

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.

‘How about Strollers?’ Lilia was asking, and Tip Dainty pointed out that Clark’s were using it already. ‘Cliff Hangers, Strath?’ Lilia repeated, but in his blunt, rugby-playing way R.B. Strathers said Cliff Hangers was useless.

Mulvihill’s sister, who was the manageress of a mini-market, was surprised when Mulvihill didn’t put in an appearance at a quarter to nine, his usual time on Fridays. Every other evening he was back by ten past seven, in time for most of the Archers, but on Fridays he liked to finish off his week’s work so as to have a clean plate on Monday. He smelt a little of the wine he drank in the Trumpet Major, but since he always told her the gossip he’d picked up she never minded in the least having to keep their supper back. She knew it wasn’t really for the gossip he went to the public house but in order to pass a few moments with Ox-Banham and R.B. Strathers, to whom he owed his position at Ygnis and Ygnis. Not that either Ox-Banham or R.B. Strathers had employed him in the first place – neither had actually been at Ygnis and Ygnis in those days – but Ox-Banham had since become the executive to whom Mulvihill was mainly responsible and R.B. Strathers was naturally important, being the managing director. Miss Mulvihill had never met these men, but imagined them easily enough from the descriptions that had been passed on to her: Ox-Banham tight-faced in a striped dark suit, R.B. Strathers big, given to talking about rugby matches he had played in. Lilia was peculiar by the sound of her, and Capstick, who designed the best advertisements in Ygnis and Ygnis, was a bearded little creature with a tendency to become insulting when, he reached a certain stage in drunkenness. Tip Dainty became genial.

Miss Mulvihill missed these people, her Friday people as she thought of them: she felt deprived as she impatiently waited, she even felt a little cross. Her brother had said he was going to pick up the timber pieces for the bookcase, but he’d have done that in his lunchtime. Never in a million years would he just stay on drinking, he didn’t even like the taste. Shortly after ten o’clock the Scotch terrier, Pasco, became agitated, and at eleven Miss Mulvihill noticed that her crossness had turned to fear. But it wasn’t until the early hours of the morning that she telephoned the police.

On the following Monday morning the employees of Ygnis and Ygnis arrived at the office building variously refreshed after their weekend. The body had been removed from the back lift, no trace of the death remained. The Hungarian, Wilkinski, was surprised that Mulvihill was not already in the office they shared, for normally he was the first of the two to arrive. He was still pondering the cause of this when the tea-woman, Edith, told him she’d heard Mulvihill had died. She handed Wilkinski his tea, with two lumps of sugar in the saucer, and even while she released the news she poured from her huge, brown enamel teapot a cup for the deceased. ‘Oh, stupid thing!’ she chided herself.

‘But however dead, Edith? However he die, my God?’

Edith shook her head. It was terrible, she said, placing the edge of the teapot on Mulvihill’s drawing-board because it was heavy to hold. She still couldn’t believe it, she said, laughing and joking he’d been Friday, right as rain. ‘Well, it just goes to show,’ she said. ‘Poor man!’

‘Are you sure of this, Edith?’ The fat on Wilkinski’s face was puckered in mystification, his thick spectacles magnifying the confusion in his eyes. ‘Dead?’ he said again.

‘Definitely,’ Edith added, and moved on to spread the news.

My God, dead! Wilkinski continued to reflect, for several minutes unable to drink his tea and finding it cold when he did so. Mulvihill had been the easiest man in the world to share an office with, neither broody nor a bore, a pleasant unassuming fellow, perhaps a little over-worried about the safety of his job, but then who doesn’t have faults in this world? He’d been happy, as far as Wilkinski had ever made out, with his sister and their dog in Purley, a few friends in on a Saturday night to cheese and wine, old films on the television. Anything to do with films had interested him, photography being as much of a hobby as his do-it-yourself stuff. In 1971, when Wilkinski’s elder daughter married, Mulvihill had recorded the occasion with the camera he’d just bought. He’d made an excellent job of it, with titles he’d lettered himself, and a really impressive shot of the happy couple coming down the steps of the reception place. Unfortunately the marriage had broken up a year ago, and the film was no longer of interest. As dead as poor old Mulvihill, Wilkinski thought sadly: my God, it just goes to show. Ernie Tap low, the art buyer’s assistant, came in at that point, shaking his head over the shock of it. And then Len Billings came in, and Harry Plant, and Carol Trotter the typographer.

Elsewhere in the building life continued normally that morning. The confectionery manufacturers arrived to see the proposals Ygnis and Ygnis had to put to them concerning the promotion of their new chocolate bar. Ox-Banham displayed posters and advertisements, and the labels and window-stickers Mulvihill had designed. ‘Go,’ one of the confectionery men said. ‘Yes, I like that.’ Ox-Banham took them down to the television theatre and showed them a series of commercials in which children were dressed up as cowboys and Indians. Afterwards his secretary, Rowena, poured them all drinks in his office, smiling at them and murmuring because it was part of her duty to be charming. Just occasionally as she did so she recalled the conjunction that had taken place in the office on Friday evening, Ox-Banham’s wiry body as brown as a nut in places, the smell of his underarm-odour preventive. She liked it to take place in the dark, but he preferred the lights on and had more than once mentioned mirrors, although there were no mirrors in the office. They took it in turns, his way one week, hers the next. The only trouble was that personally she didn’t much care for him. ‘I want you to fix it immediately,’ she’d said in her no-nonsense voice on Friday, and this morning he’d arranged for her to be moved into the copy department at the end of the month. ‘I’ll need a new girl,’ .he’d said, meaning a secretary. ‘I’ll leave that to you.’

Ox-Banham introduced the confectionery men to R.B. Strathers, in whose office they had another drink. He then took them to lunch, referring in the taxi to the four times Strathers had been a reserve for the South African rugby team: often a would-be client was impressed by this fact. He didn’t mention Mulvihill’s death, even though there might have been a talking point in the fact that the chap who’d designed the wrapper for the Go bar had had a heart attack in a lift. But it might also have cast a gloom, you never could tell, so he concentrated instead on making sure that each of the confectionery men had precisely what he wished to have in the way of meat and vegetables, solicitously filling up the wine-glass of the one who drank more than the others. He saw that cigars and brandy were at hand when the moment came, and in the end the most important man said, ‘I think we buy it.’ All the others agreed: the image that had been devised for the chocolate bar was an apt one, its future safe in the skilful hands of Ygnis and Ygnis.

‘Wednesday,’ said Miss Mulvihill on the telephone to people who rang with messages of sympathy. ‘Eleven-thirty, Putney Vale Crematorium.’

As the next few weeks went by so life continued smoothly in the Ygnis and Ygnis building. Happy in the copy writing department, Rowena practised the composition of slogans and thought up trade names for shoes, underwear and garden seeds. She wrote a television commercial for furniture polish, and explained to Ox-Banham that there would now be no more Friday evenings. She began to spend her lunchtimes with a new young man in market research. Unlike Ox-Banham, he was a bachelor.

Bloody Smithson telephoned Strathers to say he was dissatisfied with Ygnis and Ygnis’s latest efforts for McCulloch Paints. Typical, Ox-Banham said when Strathers sent for him: as soon as little Rowena’s home and dry the old bugger starts doing his nut again. ‘Let us just look into all that,’ he murmured delicately to Bloody Smithson on the telephone.

‘There are private possessions,’ Wilkinski said to Mulvihill’s sister, on the telephone also. ‘Maybe we send a messenger to your house with them?’

‘That’s very kind, Mr Wilkinski.’

‘No, no. But the filing-cabinet he had is locked. Maybe the key was on his person?’

‘Yes, I have his bunch of keys. If I may, I’ll post it to you, Mr Wilkinski.’

Everything else Wilkinski had tidied up: Mulvihill’s paintbrushes and his pencils, his paints and his felt pens. Strictly speaking, they were the property of Ygnis and Ygnis, but Wilkinski thought Miss Mulvihill should have them. The filing-cabinet itself, the drawing-board and the green-shaded light, would pass on to Mulvihill’s successor.

When the keys arrived, Wilkinski found that Mulvihill had retained samples of every label and sticker and wrapper, every packet and point-of-sale item he had ever designed. The samples were stuck on to sheets of white card, one to a sheet, and the sheets neatly documented and filed. Wilkinski decided that Mulvihill’s sister would wish to have this collection, as well as the old Four Square tobacco tins containing drawing-pins and rubber bands, a pair of small brass hinges, several broken pipes, some dental fixative and two pairs of spectacles. Mulvihill’s camera was there, side by side with his projector. And in the bottom drawer, beneath ideas for the lettering on a toothpaste tube, were his films.

Pleased to have an excuse to walk about the building, Wilkinski made his way to the basement and asked Mr Betts, the office maintenance man, for a large, strong cardboard carton, explaining why he wanted it. Mr Betts did his best to supply what was necessary and Wilkinski returned to his office with it. He packed the projector and the camera with great care and when he came to the vast assortment of neatly titled films, all in metal containers, he looked out for one that Carol Trotter wanted, to do with her father’s retirement party. ‘A Day in the Life of a Scotch Terrier’, he read, and then ‘A Scotch Terrier Has His Say’ and ‘A Scotch Terrier at Three’. A note was attached to the label, ‘Mr Trotter’s Retirement Occasion’, a reminder that the film still needed some editing. Wilkinski put it aside for Carol Trotter and then, to his surprise, noticed that the label on the next tin said, ‘Confessions of a Housewife’. He examined some of the others and was even more surprised to read, ‘Virgins’ Delight’, ‘Naughty Nell’ and ‘Bedtime with Bunny’.

Closer examination of the metal film-containers convinced Wilkinski that while most of the more exotic titles were not Mulvihill’s own work, two or three of them were. ‘Easy Lady’, for instance, had a reminder stuck to it indicating that editing was necessary; ‘Let’s Go, Lover’ and two untitled containers had a note about splicing. ‘My God!’ Wilkinski said.

He didn’t know what to think. He imagined Mulvihill wandering about Soho in his lunch hour, examining the pictures that advertised the strip joints, entering the pornographic shops where blue films were discreetly for sale. None of that fitted Mulvihill, none of it was like him. Quite often Wilkinski had accompanied him and his camera to Green Park, to catch the autumn, or the ducks in springtime.

Wilkinski sat down. He ran the tip of his tongue over his rather thick lips. They had shared an office since 1960, yet he had never known a thing about this man. Clearly Mulvihill had bought ‘Virgins’ Delight’ and ‘Bedtime with Bunny’ to see how it was done, and then he had begun to make blue films himself. Being in terror of losing his job, he had every day passed humbly through the huge reception area of Ygnis and Ygnis, its walls enriched by pictures of shoes and seed-packets and ironworks, and biscuits and whisky bottles. Humbly he had walked the corridors that rattled with the busyness of typewriters and voices in trivial conversation; humbly he had done his duty by the words and images that were daily created. Wilkinski recalled his saying that he’d always wanted to be a photographer: had he decided in the end to attempt to escape from his treadmill by becoming a pornographer instead? It was a sad thing to have happened to a man. It was an ugly thing as well.

Still, Wilkinski had a job to do and he knew that in the carton destined for Purley he must not include such items as ‘Let’s Go, Lover’ and ‘Confessions of a Housewife’ because of the embarrassment they would cause. His first thought was that he should simply throw the pornographic films away, but even though he had emigrated from Hungary in 1955 Wilkinski was still aware that he had to be careful in a foreign country. Assiduously he avoided all trouble and was notably polite in tube trains and on the street: it seemed a doubtful procedure, to destroy the possessions of a dead man.

‘Films?’ Ox-Banham said on the telephone. ‘You mean they’re dirty?’

‘Some you might call domestic. Others I think they could offend a lady.’

‘I’ll come and have a look.’

‘Some are of a dog.’

Later that day Ox-Banham arrived in Wilkihski’s small office and took charge of the films, including the ones of the dog. He locked them away in his own office, for he was personally not in the least interested in pornography and certainly not curious to investigate this private world of a label-designer who had remotely been in his charge. He didn’t destroy the films because you never could tell: an occasion might quite easily arise when some client or would-be client would reveal, even without meaning to, an interest in such material. Topless waitresses, gambling clubs, or just getting drunk: where his clients were concerned, Ox-Banham was endlessly solicitous, a guide and a listener. It was unbecoming that Mulvihill should have titillated himself in this way, he reflected as he stood that evening in the Trumpet Major, getting more than a little drunk himself. Nasty he must have been, in spite of his pipe and his Harris tweed jackets.

In time the carton containing Mulvihill’s effects was delivered to Purley. Miss Mulvihill returned from the mini-market one evening to find it on the doorstep. In the hall, where she opened it, she discovered that her brother’s keys had been returned to her, Sellotaped on to one of the carton’s flaps; only the key of the filing-cabinet had been removed, but Miss Mulvihill didn’t even notice that. She looked through the white cards on which her brother had mounted the items he had designed at Ygnis and Ygnis; she wondered what to do with his old pipes. In the end she put everything back into the carton and hauled it into the cubbyhole beneath the stairs. Pasco bustled about at her feet, delighted to be able to make a foray into a cupboard that was normally kept locked.

An hour or so later, scrambling an egg for herself in the kitchen, Miss Mulvihill reflected that this was truly the end of her brother. The carton in the cubbyhole reminded her of the coffin that had slid away towards the fawn-coloured curtains in the chapel of the crematorium. She’d been through her brother’s clothes, setting most of them aside for Help the Aged. She’d told the man next door that he could have the contents of the workshed in the garden, asking him to leave her only a screwdriver and a hammer and a pair of pliers.

She had always been fond of her brother; being the older one, she had looked after him as a child, taking him by the hand when they crossed a street together, answering his questions. Their mother had died when he was eight, and when their father died thirty years later it had seemed natural that they should continue to live together in the house in Purley. ‘Let’s have a dog,’ her brother had said one Saturday morning nine years ago, and soon after that Pasco had entered their lives. The only animal the house had known before was Miss Muffin, their father’s cat, but they’d agreed immediately about Pasco. Never once in their lives had they quarrelled, her brother being too nervous and she too even-tempered. Neither had ever wished to marry.

She’d put a rose in, she thought as she ate her scrambled egg, the way you could in the grounds of the crematorium, a living thing to remember him by.

A year went by in Ygnis and Ygnis. The new man who shared Wilkinski’s office was young and given to whistling. On the telephone he addressed his wife as ‘chick’, which began to grate on Wilkinski’s nerves. He possessed a 1951 Fiat, which he talked about; and a caravan, which he talked about also.

Established now in the copy department, Rowena Smithson was responsible for a slogan which won a prize. She had been put in charge of a frozen foods account and had devised a television campaign which displayed an ordinary family’s preference for a packet of fish to a banquet. In Ygnis and Ygnis it was said more than once that Rowena Smithson was going places. Foolish in her dishevelled middle age, Lilia was said to be slipping.

During the course of that year Ox-Banham interested himself in one of Ygnis and Ygnis’s three receptionists, a girl who wanted to get into the art department. The Trumpet Major continued to profit from the drinking requirements of Capstick, Lilia, Tip Dainty and R.B. Strathers. Several office parties took place during the year and at the end of it the Ygnis and Ygnis chairman was awarded an OBE.

‘Well, I quite appreciate that of course,’ Ox-Banham said on the telephone one morning after that year had passed. He was speaking to Bloody Smithson, who had not ceased to give him a bad time, forgetful of all that had been arranged in the matter of placing his daughter in her chosen career. Rowena was shortly to marry the man she’d begun to go out with, from the market research department. The man was welcome to her as far as Ox-Banham was concerned, but when her father was disagreeable it gave him no satisfaction whatsoever to recall how he’d repeatedly pleasured himself with her on the floor of his office. ‘Let’s iron it out over lunch,’ he urged Bloody Smithson.

The lunch that look place was a sticky one, bitter with Bloody Smithson’s acrimony. Only when coffee and glasses of Hine arrived on the table did the man from McCulloch Paints desist and Ox-Banham cease inwardly to swear. Then, quite unexpectedly, Bloody Smithson mentioned blue films. His mood was good by now, for he’d enjoyed being a bully for two hours; he described at length some material he’d been shown on a trip to Sweden. ‘Awfully ripe,’ he said, his large blood-red face inches from his companion’s.

Until that moment Ox-Banham had forgotten about the metal containers he had locked away after Mulvihill’s death. He didn’t mention them, but that evening he read through their neatly labelled titles, and a week later he borrowed a projector. He found what he saw distasteful, as he’d known he would, but was aware that his own opinion didn’t matter in the least. ‘I’ve got hold of a few ripe ones that might interest you,’ he said on the telephone to Bloody Smithson when he next had occasion to speak to him.

In the comfort of the television theatre they watched ‘Confessions of a Housewife’, ‘Virgins’ Delight’ and ‘Naughty Nell’. Bloody Smithson liked ‘Virgins’ Delight’ best. Ox-Banham explained how the cache had fallen into his hands and how some of the films were apparently the late Mulvihill’s own work. ‘Let’s try this “Day in the Life of a Scotch Terrier”,’ he suggested. ‘Goodness knows what all that’s about.’ But Bloody Smithson said he’d rather have another showing of ‘Virgins’ Delight’.

Ox-Banham told the story in the Trumpet Major. ‘Not a word to my daughter, mind,’ Bloody Smithson had insisted, chortling in a way that was quite unlike him. The next day all of it went around the Ygnis and Ygnis building, but it naturally never reached the ears of Rowena because no one liked to tell her that her father had a penchant for obscene films. Mulvihill’s name was used again, his face and clothing recalled, a description supplied to newcomers at Ygnis and Ygnis. Wilkinski heard the story and it hurt him that Mulvihill should be remembered in this way. It was improper, Wilkinski considered, and it made him feel guilty himself: he should have thrown the films away, as his first instinct had been. ‘Mulvihill’s Memorial came to be called, and the employees of Ygnis and Ygnis laughed when they thought of an overweight advertising manager being shown ‘Virgins’ Delight’ in the television theatre. It seemed to Wilkinski that the dead face of Mulvihill was being rubbed in the dirt he had left behind him. It worried Wilkinski, and eventually he plucked up his courage and went to speak to Ox-Banham.

‘We shared the office since 1960,’ he said, and Ox-Banham looked at him in astonishment. ‘It isn’t very nice to call it “Mulvihill’s Memorial”.’

‘Mulvihill’s dead and gone. What d’you expect us to do with his goodies?’

‘Maybe put them down Mr Betts’ incinerator.’

Ox-Banham laughed and suggested that Wilkinski was being a bit Hungarian about the matter. The smile that appeared on his face was designed to be reassuring, but Wilkinski found this reference to his origins offensive. It seemed that if Mulvihill’s wretched pornography brought solace to a recalcitrant advertising manager, then Mulvihill had not died in vain. The employees had to be paid, profits had to be made. ‘It isn’t very nice,’ Wilkinski said again, quietly in the middle of one night. No one heard him, for though he addressed his wife she was dreaming at the time of something else.

Then two things happened at once. Wilkinski had a telephone call from Miss Mulvihill, and Ox-Banham made a mistake.

‘It’s just that I was wondering,’ Miss Mulvihill said. ‘I mean, he definitely made these little films and there’s absolutely no trace of them.’

‘About a dog maybe?’

‘And a little one about the scouts. Then again one concerning Purley.’

‘Leave the matter with me, Miss Mulvihill.’

The telephone call came late in the day, and when Wilkinski tried to see Ox-Banham it was suggested that he should try again in the morning. It pleased him that Miss Mulvihill had phoned, that she had sought to have returned to her what was rightfully hers. He’d considered it high-handed at the time that Ox-Banham hadn’t bothered to divide the films into two groups, as he had done himself. ‘Oh, let’s not bother with all that,’ Ox-Banham had said with a note of impatience in his voice.

Wilkinski hurried to catch his train on the evening of Miss Mulvihill’s call; Ox-Banham entertained Bloody Smithson in the television theatre. ‘No, no, no,’ Bloody Smithson protested. ‘We’ll stick with our Virgins, Ox.’

But Ox-Banham was heartily sick of ‘Virgins’ Delight’, which he had seen by now probably sixty times. He thought he’d die if he had to watch, yet again, the three schoolgirls putting down their hockey sticks and beginning to take off their gymslips. ‘I thought we were maybe wearing it out,’ he said. ‘I thought I’d better have a copy made.’

‘You mean it’s not here?’

‘Back in a week or so, Smithy.’

They began to go through the others. ‘Let’s try this “Day in the Life of a Scotch Terrier”,’ Ox-Banham suggested, and shortly afterwards a dog appeared on the screen, ambling about a kitchen. Then the dog was put on a lead and taken for a walk around a suburb by a middle-aged woman. Back in the kitchen again, the dog begged with its head on one side and was given a titbit. There was another walk, a bus shelter, the dog smelling at bits of paper on the ground. ‘Well, for God’s sake!’ Bloody Smithson protested when the animal was finally given a meal to eat and put to bed.

‘Sorry, Smithy.’

‘I thought she and the dog –’

‘I know. So did I.’

‘Some bloody nut made that one.’

Ox-Banham then showed ‘Naughty Nell’, followed by ‘Country Fun’, ‘Oh Boy!’ and ‘Girlie’. But Bloody Smithson wasn’t in the least impressed. He didn’t care for ‘Confessions of a Housewife’ any more than he had the first time he’d seen it. He didn’t care for ‘Nothing on Tonight’ and wasn’t much impressed by anything else. Ox-Banham regretted that he’d said ‘Virgins’ Delight’ was being copied. This tedious search for excitement could go on all night, for even though Smithson continued to say that everything was less good than ‘Virgins’ Delight’ Ox-Banham had a feeling that some enjoyment at least was being derived from the continuous picture show.

‘You’re sure there isn’t another reel or something to that dog stuff?’ the advertising manager even inquired. ‘I wouldn’t mind seeing that dame with her undies off.’ He gave a loud laugh, draining his glass of whisky and poking it out at Ox-Banham for a refill.

‘I think that’s the bloke’s sister actually. I don’t think she takes anything off.’ Ox-Banham laughed himself, busy with glasses and ice. ‘Call it a day after this one, shall we?’

‘Might as well run through the lot, Ox.’

They saw ‘Come and Get It’, ‘Girls on the Rampage’, ‘A Scotch Terrier Has His Say’, ‘Street of Desire’, a film of boy scouts camping, scenes on a golf course, ‘Saturday Morning, Purley’ and ‘Flesh for Sale’. It was then, after a few moments of a film without a title, that Ox-Banham realized something was wrong. Unfortunately he realized it too late.

‘Great God almighty,’ said Bloody Smithson.

‘You opened the filing-cabinet, Wilkinski, you took the films out. What did you do next?’ Ox-Banham ground his teeth together, struggling with his impatience.

‘I say myself it’s not nice for the sister. The sister phoned up yesterday, I came down to see you –

‘You didn’t project any of the films?’

‘No, no. I think of Mulvihill lying dead and I think of the sister. What the sister wants is the ones about the dog, and anything else, maybe boy scouts, is there?’

‘You are absolutely certain that you did not project any of the films? Not one called “Easy Lady” or another, “Let’s Go, Lover”? Neither of the two untitled ones?’

‘No, no. I have no interest in this. I get the box from Mr Betts –’

‘Is it possible that someone else might have examined the films? Did you leave the filing-cabinet unlocked, for instance?’

‘No, no. I get the box from Mr Betts, maybe ten minutes. The cabinet is closed and locked then. The property of a dead man, I say myself –’

‘So no one could possibly have projected one of these films?’

‘No, no. The sister rings me yesterday. She is anxious for the dog ones, also boy scouts and others.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake, Wilkinski!’

‘I promise I find –’

‘They’ve all been destroyed. Everything’s been destroyed.’

‘Destroyed? But I thought –’

‘I destroyed them myself last night.’

Returning to his office, Wilkinski paused for a moment in a corridor, removed his spectacles and polished them with his handkerchief. People hurried by him with proofs of new advertisements and typewritten pages of copy, but it was easier to think in the corridor than it would be in the office because of the whistling of Mulvihill’s successor. Ox-Banham had looked almost ill, his voice had been shaky. Wilkinski shook his head and slowly padded back to his drawing-board, baffled by the turn of events. He didn’t know what he was going to say to Mulvihill’s sister.

What happened next was that Bloody Smithson removed the McCulloch Paints account from Ygnis and Ygnis. Then Rowena Smithson walked out. She didn’t hand in her notice, she simply didn’t return after lunch one day. The man in market research to whom she was engaged let it be known that the engagement had been broken off, and made it clear that it was he who had done the breaking. A rumour went round that the big shoe account – a Quaker concern and one of Ygnis and Ygnis’s mainstays – was about to go, and a week later it did. Questions were asked by the men of the chocolate account which Ox-Banham had gained a year ago, and by the toiletries people and by the men of Macclesfield Metals. Hasty lunches were arranged, explanations pressed home over afternoon brandy. Ygnis and Ygnis in Trouble a headline in a trade magazine was ready to state, but the headline – and the report that went with it – was abandoned at the eleventh hour because it appeared that and Ygnis had weathered their storm.

Wilkinski tried to piece things together, and so did the other employees. In the Trumpet Major it was said that for reasons of his own Bloody Smithson had sworn to bring Ygnis and Ygnis to its knees, but neither Wilkinski nor anyone else knew why he had become so enraged. Then, making a rare appearance in the Trumpet Major, the market research man to whom Rowena Smithson had been engaged drank an extra couple of Carlsbergs while waiting for the rain to cease. Idling at the bar, he told Tip Dainty in the strictest confidence of a scene which had taken place at the time of the crisis in the Smithsons’ house in Wimbledon: how he’d been about to leave, having driven Rowena home, when Bloody Smithson had thundered his way into the sitting-room, ‘literally like a bull’. Mrs Smithson had been drinking a cup of Ovaltine at the time, Rowena had not yet taken off her coat. ‘You filthy young prostitute!’ Bloody Smithson had roared at her. ‘You cheap whore!’ It apparently hadn’t concerned him that his daughter’s fiancé was present, he hadn’t even noticed when the cup of Ovaltine fell from his wife’s grasp. He had just stood there shouting, oaths and obscenities bursting out of him, his face the colour of ripe strawberries.

By half past ten the following morning the story was known to every Ygnis and Ygnis employee: Mulvihill had made a film of Ox-Banham and Rowena Smithson banging away on the floor of Ox-Banham’s office. Mulvihill had apparently hidden himself behind the long blue Dralon curtains, which in the circumstances had naturally been drawn. The lights in the room had been on and neither protagonist in the proceedings had been wearing a stitch.

At lunchtime that day, passing through the large, chic reception area, the people of Ygnis and Ygnis hardly noticed the images displayed on its walls. The messages that murmured at them were rich in sexual innuendo, but the hard facts of a dead pornographer briefly interested them more. ‘Mulvihill!’ some exclaimed in uneasy admiration, for to a few at least it seemed that Mulvihill had dealt in an honesty that just for a moment made the glamour of the images and the messages appear to be a little soiled. Wilkinski thought so, and longed to telephone Mulvihill’s sister to tell her of what had occurred, but of course it was impossible to do that. He wrote a letter instead, apologizing for taking so long in replying to her query and informing her that the films she’d mentioned had been destroyed in error. It was not exactly a lie, and seemed less of one as the day wore on, as the glamour glittered again, undefeated when it came to the point.