43 lines
3.4 KiB
Markdown
43 lines
3.4 KiB
Markdown
# The Association of Income and Other Affinities
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*A Novel*
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## Summary
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**Croydon. 1984. The miners are still out. The pound is still the pound. And on the fourth floor of the Crown Office on Sutherland Road, a Senior Inspector named Gerald Firth is sitting in a beige room, reading a manila envelope, and feeling a tightening in his chest that he cannot, for the life of him, explain.**
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**Fourteen Wellington Road, a quarter of a mile to the east, in a Victorian terrace with two dog roses in the front garden that are not, strictly, roses, a woman named Vivienne Ashworth is looking at a tax return and thinking about cabbages. She is not a bad person. She is not, in the language of the Inland Revenue, a *criminal*. She is an accountant who *plans*, who *relocates*, who puts the numbers in the dark and lets them *become* something else. And the becoming is, in her view, the point.**
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**They should not meet. The file says they should not meet. The drawer says they should not meet. The beige says they should not meet. And yet.**
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**Gerald notices the cabbages. Vivienne calls him Gerald, though his name is not Gerald, and he does not know why, and she does not know why, and the not-knowing is the point. The chair wobbles. The teacup makes a sound. The telex clicks like metallic teeth. The roses are in the genus. The deduction is wrong and made anyway and known to be wrong and filed anyway and the anyway is the point.**
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**And then there is Martin. And Colin Whitfield. And a company in Surrey that trades in something that is not carpets, and not pensions, and not cabbages, and not the point. And a phone call on a Friday afternoon that changes the shape of the income without changing the amount. And a signature in a drawer that was supposed to be closed.**
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**This is a story about two people on opposite sides of a form. It is a story about a Savoy cabbage in a fridge in Croydon. It is a story about the colour beige, and the colour green, and the colour of a bruise that has almost healed but not quite. It is a story about the specific, particular, individually irreplaceable nature of a wobbly chair. It is a story about what happens when the pattern does not fit in the drawer.**
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**It is, in the strictest sense, a love story. In the looser sense, it is a thriller. In the truest sense, it is about cabbages.**
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---
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*'"The funniest, strangest, most quietly devastating book I have read since* The Go-Between *decided to do a bit of accounting."* — **The Guardian**
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*'"I read it in one sitting and then immediately checked my own tax return. I am not proud of this."* — **Sally Rooney**, *(presumably)*
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*'"A novel in which the word 'point' appears approximately four hundred times, and every single one of them is load-bearing."* — **The Times Literary Supplement**
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---
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*Fiction | 416pp | £16.99 hardback*
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*Published by Chatto & Windus | March 1985*
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## Part One: The Investigation
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- [Chapter One: The Nature of Gerald Firth](chapters/01-the-nature-of-gerald-firth.md)
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- [Chapter Two: The Nature of Vivienne Ashworth](chapters/02-the-nature-of-vivienne-ashworth.md)
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- [Chapter Three: The First Visit](chapters/03-the-first-visit.md)
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- [Chapter Four: The Queue](chapters/04-the-queue.md)
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- [Chapter Five: The Cabbage in the Fridge](chapters/05-the-cabbage-in-the-fridge.md)
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- [Chapter Six: The Second Visit](chapters/06-the-second-visit.md)
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- [Chapter Seven: The Friday](chapters/07-the-friday.md)
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