Dickie had chosen a bad time to call. Mondays were always frenetic at Pearson’s, and this Monday morning had been more so than usual. Grace had just emerged from a long meeting with all of the copywriting department and the two Mr. Pearsons—a “buck your ideas up” meeting, the sort which took place every time another advertising agency seemed to be running ahead of them. On this occasion they’d lost a longstanding client—Potter’s meat spread—to a rival. They’d sat in the boardroom with the air of a bunch of skulking schoolboys waiting to be given a good thrashing. All but Grace, the only female copywriter, who made it her habit to be perversely chirpy at such meetings—giving her best, brightest smiles to the slightly doddery Mr. Henry Pearson, while insisting to Mr. Aubrey Pearson that the problem, in the case of Potter’s, was not their advertising campaigns, but the name of the product itself. “What does ‘meat spread’ conjure up in one’s mind?” she’d asked the room at large.
