the-writing-room/association-of-income-and-other-affinities/chapters/02-the-nature-of-vivienne-ashworth.md

# Chapter Two: The Nature of Vivienne Ashworth

Fourteen Wellington Road was not, in the language of Croydon architecture, a *distinguished* building. It was a Victorian terraced house, three storeys, with a narrow front garden in which two roses grew with a kind of determined, slightly pathetic ferocity. The roses were not good roses. They were the sort of roses that you bought from a garden centre for £3.99, planted in soil that was not quite right, and then left to their own devices, whereupon they produced, at irregular intervals, small, slightly crumpled blooms that looked as though they had been in a minor argument with a passing bicycle. The house had a bay window on the ground floor, behind which the office of Ashworth & Dale was situated. The bay window was frosted on the lower half, which was a good thing, because the upper half contained, at various times, stacks of paper that reached, in their most ambitious configuration, to the top of the glass, creating the impression of a small, paper-based avalanche that was perpetually on the verge of occurring but never, in the four years that Vivienne Ashworth had occupied the premises, actually did.

Vivienne was forty-one. She was not, by any objective standard, beautiful. She was, however, *distinctive*, which was not the same thing but was, in the context of Croydon, arguably more valuable. She was tall, in the way that some women are tall, which is to say that they are not merely tall but *tall in a way that is slightly inconvenient for doorframes*. Her hair was auburn, cut in a style that was, in 1984, either very much of the moment or very much not, depending on the day, and which she maintained with the kind of fierce, daily attention that a medieval knight might have paid to the polishing of his shield. She wore, on most days, a skirt suit in a colour that could be described as "commercially motivated purple," and she had a small, almost imperceptible scar on her left eyebrow, which she had acquired in 1976 during an argument with a client who had called her a "fucking tart" in a voice that was, Vivienne had later reflected, "not sufficiently modulated to justify the violence I subsequently employed."

The argument had ended with Vivienne throwing a letter opener at the man's ear. The letter opener had missed the ear but had connected with the eyebrow. The man, whose name was Desmond Fawcett and who had run a small import-export business in Pecknam, had not come back. Vivienne had not felt remorse. She had, however, felt a certain satisfaction in the fact that the scar made her look, in a way, *more* serious, and that she had, in the subsequent months, noticed that clients who looked at her face before they began to speak tended to choose their words with slightly more care.

The firm, Ashworth & Dale, was, in the strictest sense of the word, a *partnership*. Vivienne Ashworth and a man named Reginald Dale. Reginald Dale was fifty-four, a thin man with a thin mustache and a thin voice, who had joined the firm in 1979, three years after Vivienne had taken over the practice from the original owner, a man named Arthur Ashworth, who had died of a heart attack while watching a football match on a Saturday afternoon in November. Reginald had been Arthur's bookkeeper, and Arthur had named him in his will, and Vivienne had inherited the practice by marriage, and the three of them had, for four years, operated in a state of uneasy, mutually suspicious coexistence.

Reginald did the books. Vivienne did the *thinking*. This was not a precise division of labour, but it was a useful one, in the way that saying "I'll drive and you'll navigate" is a useful way of describing a car journey without specifying the exact route, the speed, or the fact that the navigator will, at approximately the halfway point, become convinced that they are driving in the wrong direction.

Reginald's role was to take the numbers that clients brought in—messy, contradictory, often faintly suspicious numbers—and arrange them into the shape of a tax return. He was good at this. He was, in fact, very good at this, and he did it with a kind of quiet, almost meditative precision, like a man who was not so much filling in forms as *arranging furniture in a room that he was not allowed to enter*. He worked from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., took his lunch at 12:30, which was always the same sandwich (cheese and pickle, on wholemeal, with the crusts removed), and left at 5:05, because he had a bus to catch, and he did not like to be late for his bus.

Vivienne's role was to look at the numbers that Reginald had arranged and to ask questions. Not *what* questions. Not *how* questions. *Why* questions. Why had this client, a self-employed carpet cleaner in Carshalton, suddenly developed a £4,000 expense for "office refurbishment" in a year in which he had not, as far as Vivienne could establish, entered his office? Why had this client, a retired bus driver in Thornton Heath, declared a loss of £12,000 on a "horse-riding venture" that, upon inquiry, turned out to consist of a single, rather sad-looking pony named Duchess, which was kept in a shed in the garden and which, Vivienne had noted, did not appear to be *riding* so much as *being ridden at, very slowly, by its owner, on a Tuesday afternoon*?

These were the questions that Vivienne asked. And the answers to these questions were the thing that Ashworth & Dale sold. Not, strictly, tax evasion. Vivienne did not use the word "evasion," and she did not use the word "dodging," and she did not, on any occasion, use the word "cheating." She used the word *planning*. Tax *planning*. The *strategic management of fiscal exposure*. The *optimisation of the relationship between the individual taxpayer and the State*. These were the words she used, and they were, she had come to believe, *true*, in the way that all words are true, if you hold them up to the light and look at them from the correct angle.

Mrs. Patricia Underwood's return had been a small job. A quiet job. Reginald had done the numbers, and Vivienne had looked at them and had, in the course of looking, made three small changes. A reclassification of the pension income from "earned" to "non-earned." A deduction of £87.50 for "home office maintenance" (Mrs. Underwood's study, in which she did her crosswords and listened to the Radio 4 programme *Thinking Aloud*, was, in Vivienne's view, a *home office*, and the logic was, if not airtight, *sufficiently leak-resistant*). And a small, almost invisible adjustment to the interest income on the building society account, which, if you read the relevant section of the Income and Corporation Taxes Act 1970 with a certain flexibility of interpretation, could be classified as "exempt income" on the grounds that it was "incidental to the holding of a personal investment."

It was not, Vivienne reflected, *brilliant* work. It was not *original* work. It was, in fact, the sort of work that a second-year student at a good university could have done with a few hours' reference to a text by Pannings and Davies. But it was *clean*. It was *tidy*. It was the sort of work that, if the Inland Revenue looked at it, would produce a small, faint frown, but not a *large* frown. And a small, faint frown was, in Vivienne's experience, the most one could hope for.

She was sitting at her desk, in the bay window of 14 Wellington Road, on the morning of the fourteenth of March, 1984, and she was looking at Mrs. Underwood's file and thinking about cabbages.

This was not, in this case, a coincidence. Or rather, it was a coincidence, but it was the kind of coincidence that, if you were sufficiently attentive, revealed itself to be not a coincidence at all but a *pattern*, and patterns, Vivienne had always believed, were the most honest form of communication that the world offered.

She had been thinking about cabbages because, the previous evening, she had gone to the greengrocer's on the corner of Sutherland Road and Croydon High Street, and she had bought a Savoy cabbage for £1.49, and she had carried it home in a plastic bag, and she had set it on the kitchen counter, and she had looked at it for a long time, and she had thought: *this is a vegetable that has been growing in the dark, underground, for months, building itself up in the cold, in the silence, in the absence of light, and it has done so not because it is masochistic but because it is* necessary, *because the darkness is not a punishment but a* medium, *the way that clay is a medium to a potter, and the cabbage is* becoming *something in the dark, and the dark is not the absence of the light but the* presence *of the becoming, and I think, perhaps, that this is what I do, in my work, every day. I take a number, a small, bright, exposed number, and I put it in the dark, and I let it* become *something else, and the something else is not a lie, it is a* transformation, *and the transformation is* true.

She had not, she should note, said any of this aloud. She had thought it, silently, while the Savoy cabbage sat on the kitchen counter and the radio played The Smiths, and the sound of "This Charming Man" drifted through the kitchen in a way that was, she felt, slightly inappropriate for a cabbage, but then again, cabbages, like people, did not always choose their own soundtrack.

Now, on the fourteenth of March, she was back at the office, and the Savoy was in the fridge, and the Mrs. Underwood file was open in front of her, and she was looking at the three small changes she had made and thinking: *this is fine. This is* good. *This is* clean.

She did not know, of course, that on the fourth floor of the Crown Office on Sutherland Road, approximately a quarter of a mile to the east, a man named Gerald Firth was sitting in a beige office, reading a manila envelope, and feeling a tightening in his chest.

She did not know, and she was, for the moment, content not to know.