Novel fragment 2: late Eton vintage. Potential?

The Countess of the Leeks

St. David’s Day comes at an awkward moment, a crisp time, fertile only with deadlines. The saint’s leek is not a product of unlashed cornucopia, green, disproportionate, inevitably phallic, a thyrsus to be battered about by a leering, tasteless Green Man. Instead it is doomed to be yoked, until the Day of Judgement, to the potato; and it forms that most institutionalised of green soups, often made worse by some lofty claim to be “vichyssoise”.

Tamara served some into a bowl for the man at the front of the line. The kitchen’s St David’s Day Special vichyssoise was not a soup-like enough soup to spill much, which was a mercy; it just propelled itself downwards as if magnetically repelled by the stainless steel ladle. The notion rather pleased Tamara, but she was unsure whether stainless steel was even magnetic, and she let the concept be submerged in apathy and leek.

The alcoholic named Arthur who was now taking away the soup-bowl was not technically a beggar, but a pauper. He had told her this on her first day and had never failed to remind her since then.

“Pauper, not a beggar. I know these things. I have a Law Degree.”

“2:1?” Tamara suggested. This was a ritual. She knew he would say Double First, but she had herself got a 2:1, so this was the guess she offered. She did not like to deviate from patterns.

“Double First,” Arthur replied stoutly. “I came top. I’ve told you before.”

He had always been ungrateful about being fed, which Tamara thought quite admirable. She was prepared one day to be bitterly ungrateful, given the chance.

***

She hated being charitable more every week, but she couldn’t resist turning up to the kitchen. She was mesmerised by the way her co-caterers – yes, they called each other that, my co-caterer here, our co-caterer Katy, in one euphonious case – seemed to drain energy and happiness from exposure to misery. Not even dramatic misery, not Botswana or Barnado’s, just greyness and soup and sometimes croutons.

Throughout her professional week, Tamara showed the industry and pleasantness that had won her plaudits at school and university, jobs at every interview, and occasional disoriented men, in drastic cases, for her ugliness was not of the sort then marketed as beauty. Everyone relied on her at work, whatever work happened to be. On the Sunday evening following her stint at the soup kitchen, she did not go directly back to her flat in the evenings. She would put on a navy blue waterproof with a hood and walk to the off-licence where she purchased a bottle of vodka and a grey packet of cigarettes, which she would consume throughout the night (she was not susceptible to either substance at any other time).

She draped the hood of her coat over her head while still standing among the bottles and the packets, invariably the only woman in the shop, not counting the teenagers and one harassed, respectably dressed red-headed wife (or ex, or widow; she wore two rings, one thick and gold) who stopped by, more or less monthly, and bought ten packs of Silk Cut, paying with three £20 notes. Tamara noted and counted the appearances of this rare but regular visitor, a fellowwoman, sister and twin, recognised as such by Tamara because of the searing, ugly exhaustion on both their faces.

On the eleventh, and last time that the red-headed woman and Tamara met at the off-licence, they happened to talk. There wasn’t usually much conversation there; the shopkeeper was a Muslim, who sold and shortchanged the refreshments of Shaitan with indomitable sullenness, though occasionally youths of his blood would drop by on motorbikes, quick to smile, their eyes glinting in Tamara’s direction. She found this flattering to an extent – Anglo-Saxon men didn’t bother extending the privileges of the fairer sex to its less fair constituents – but she had a morbid horror of Muslims, especially at night, which had once led her to vote for the British National Party; so she never invited them further by speaking. She was in any case incapable of initiating speech in this place. Here she was not Tamara Kellwinch MacDonald, imperturbable and as efficient as stainless steel. She became for twelve hours a creature of flesh, dependent on poison’s maternal caress.

A combination of extenuating circumstances brought this exception to the rule, a conversation, into being. The red-headed woman spoke first, so Tamara only had to react, to reply, which took less effort, needed less dignity. They were outside the range of any obstructive third party, alone in the cold and dark of the street, providing for each other the only sources of light and warmth. But none of this mattered particularly; Tamara had been waiting for the red-headed woman to make an approach for eleven months, and whatever and whenever she had spoken, she would have been attended to.

It started with a satisfied intake of breath, but that was a sign in itself. Tamara knew that the other woman knew it was perfectly possible to smoke happily and silently; the sound meant the stranger wanted Tamara to know that she was happy, which probably meant she was about to talk.

“Don’t know what I’d do without that place...” The comment, meaningless in itself, was fascinating because the woman’s voice was nothing like her face. It was beautiful, soft and contented. Tamara looked through the miasma at the woman’s features, wondering if they had ever been beautiful, soft or contented, but after her examination she doubted it. There was the class thing, as always, but Tamara had always seen that the woman was upper middle-class, 1a socio-economic, whatever; she wouldn’t have guessed that she had a beautiful voice as well. She had expected the whine of a generous alimony.

So she said something she herself found unexpected. “I’m there every Sunday evening. Like evensong at a church.”

The red-headed woman found this very funny; her laugh burst into an alarming cough before she staunched the wound with tar. A little worried, Tamara came closer and made as if to pat her back, but the older woman waved her off impatiently. She gave the girl a shrewd look, one of her eyes half-closed, and then whispered, as if she was uttering something indecent, “Are you a Catholic?”

Tamara laughed now. “Yes. Haven’t been to church since I was confirmed, though.”

“It’s often the way,” the red-head reassured her. The talk now lulled, but in the clear expectation that it would pick up again after the ash had been shaken from its tip. Tamara now felt she had the right, too, to ask personal questions.

“What’s your name?” she wondered, nervousness apparent. She often thought it strange that any human communication was possible, when discovering a name, the chrism of real understanding, was always so awkward.

“Isabel,” Isabel answered, and then glanced to her hand, where her two rings pressed hard upon the cigarette’s malleable side. “MacDonald.”

“That’s my name too, Tamara Kellwinch MacDonald.”

“Kellwinch?”

“Yes, it is funny, but don’t laugh, it’ll set you coughing again...”

“What a good girl you are, my dear Kellwinch. I hope you aren’t good enough to acquiesce to the Government and give up, otherwise I suppose we won’t meet next month.”

The audience was over – Isabel walked firmly to a small, dark car, and Tamara listened to the departing engine. Then she thought for a moment, returned to the off-licence, and gave back the bottle of vodka, much to the shopkeeper’s irritation.

***

Tamara regarded herself as a facilitator of light industry. This could grant her a certain comfort when she needed it, even pride, like being a captain of light infantry. After leaving university, she had helped draft advertisements for paper napkin installations. Then she had become involved in designing paper napkin installations. During a health-scare she had persuaded institutions to convert paper napkin installations – some of which she recalled from the previous phase of her existence – into cleaner heat-emitting drying machines; on the rise of Green Awareness, she had joined the advisory board of Flaxen, a company devoted to stopping carbon-emitting drying machines and replacing them with recycled paper napkins. The environmental Flaxen paid less well than she had expected, as if ideological virtue was included in remuneration.

But talent was recognised, and the company threw about titles and responsibilities like some mediaeval king, compensating for his meagre treasury. So it was that Tamara, after less than a year, found herself with few equals in the Flaxen offices, Manchester, and only two superiors; Harold Green, (surely a surname born of deed-poll?) and Will Blackford, his more visible lieutenant. Above these somewhere, a London office lurked, which, if it had been at all interesting, would have been mysterious. Flaxen made the bulk of its profit out of tedium.

“Hello, James,” Tamara said. Her exalted position’s only extra salary was that she could call Jamie James and he would still have to smile at her. But it wasn’t a pleasure to be exploited too often. This small nastiness had been earned by a long career of niceness.