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London. The Chairman had brought with him from his previous employers a nucleus of clients and of creative staff who had been working for those clients, and to that nucleus other nuclei had been attracted when the Chairman had persuaded F.R. and G.K., the other two founder-members of the Agency, to venture with him. Since that time the Agency had grown and grown into the tall glass-fronted building which now housed it, so that it would not now consider accepting as a client any firm which could not afford to spend more than £ 100,000 a year on advertising , and the only such client which still remained on the Agency’s list was the little Midlands manufactory which had once employed P.A.
    There were seven Directors now, all growing old. P.A., F.R., G.K. and the Chairman had been joined by B.C. (once the Advertising Manager of the Agency’s first really big account), L.T. (ex-schoolmaster, ex-journalist , and now the Agency’s Creative Director), and R.P. (the Company Secretary). The Agency was not a family firm. The Chairman had believed, when he founded it, that advertising skills and what is called flair are not necessarily inheritable, and each member of the Board had agreed to sell his stock holding when he retired to the man who should succeed him. The heirs of this succession would be drawn from the body of Associate Directors, not yet dignified by initials, who jostled and manœuvred, like fish too closely packed in a tank, for the Directors’ favours, and as the years passed and the Directors grew nearer the retiring age, the fish became more slippery and more determined.
    Increasing age and the long experience of power hadbrought out eccentricities in all the Directors, but P.A. was the most capricious. He enjoyed being P.A. He was a virtuoso in advertising. He did not simply anticipate the intentions of his clients; he reacted intuitively to their deepest temperamental needs, bullying the masochistic , steadying the uncertain, sage to the would-be sage, the plain man to the stupid, the man-of-the-world to the man-of-the-provinces, and had even sold to one client, whose temperament was ruled by boredom, what later turned out to be a spectacularly successful though dotty advertising campaign simply by telling him, “After all it’s your money. Why shouldn’t you have some fun spending it?” To his copywriters and artists, to the painstaking economists of the Marketing Dept., P.A. was an irritation only bearable because they knew that once he had accepted a campaign, at least the client would be sure to accept it also. But you never knew where you were with him; he was a chameleon. Sometimes he would discard all your carefully compiled market data, saying fretfully, “What the hell good is all this bumph? I need an idea. Don’t people have ideas any more?” and sometimes he would refuse to show to his client even the most brilliant campaign until every advertisement had been tested for memorability and meaning by a panel of working-class housewives in Norwich, checked against comparable experience in the United States, and reported upon by the psychologists of the Tavistock Institute. And the most annoying thing was that, virtuoso or not,
P.A. didn’t really know anything about advertising.
His intuition told him how to treat his clients, whom he met frequently, but nothing about the people who bought his clients’ goods, very few of whom he met at all. As for his subordinates at the Agency, P.A. did not need intuition to deal with them; it was for themto adjust themselves to him, and for him simply to be P.A.—P.A. in whatever persona he chose to adopt, P.A. the Tycoon, P.A. the Good Fellow, P.A. the Creative Genius, P.A. the Man of Decision, P.A. the Unhurried, P.A. the Leader of a Devoted Team, all these P.A. s and others, but always (centre-stage) P.A.
    P.A.’s office was on the first floor. Since it faced the square, most of the outer wall was of glass, and was covered by a long Venetian blind of