had never planned to become an accountant and still hesitated to call herself one since what she did felt like little more than bookkeeping. She had read maths at Oxford but made a mess of her finals, then rather lost her way in life. Short of money at the end of a long spell of erratic temping, she drifted into a job that involved bookkeeping and found she took a certain cool pleasure in it. She was put through accountancy exams by the firm she worked for and passed them easily, but she disliked corporate life. Contemporaries who had ended up in more artistic jobs, as chaotically freelance journalists, graphic designers, decorators and novelists, began payingher to do their accounts and tax returns for them. Soon they had recommended her to enough friends and colleagues that she found she could leave the tedious firm and work for herself with only a small loss of income. In London then Paris she proceeded to make a living in a way she could never have foreseen. E-mail and online tax returns had freed her, more than ever, to work wherever she chose to live.
She specialized in hopeless cases – the sort of people who hid their bank statements unopened behind the breadbin and couldn’t work out a simple percentage even on a calculator, had they possessed one, the sort of people who had yet to notice that both their laptop and mobile phone had calculators built into their software. She took on their messy lives and interesting jobs and ensured that, in one simple area, at least, they became orderly and predictable. It wasn’t a career. It would lead her nowhere and meant nothing to her emotionally but it paid her bills and gave her the quiet satisfaction of knowing that, like a dry cleaner’s or a baker’s, her skills would always be needed.
This morning’s client was a typical case, a fairly successful screenwriter and poet – not a friend – who, once a year, sent Laura a huge Jiffy bag into which she had stuffed twelve months of bank and credit-card statements, invoices, royalty statements and receipts for absolutely everything. Having sorted the large paperwork into calendar order, Laura proceeded to do the same with the receipts, smoothing them out, taking amagnifying glass and annotating pencil to the ones she couldn’t immediately decipher and discarding any that were plainly never going to be offset against the client’s tax bill.
She had a system involving twelve multicoloured wire post trays, one for each month, and a little notebook in which she meticulously noted the client’s name and the time at which each bout of work on their behalf began and ended. She even had a stopwatch for work-related phone calls. Most of her clients worked from home and, nervous about capital gains tax, needed reassurance as to what percentage of domestic bills they could claim back and what proportion of their car and petrol expenses should count for work and what for private use. Some, like the piano tuner, the cello teacher and the graphic designers, drove a lot as part of their jobs; others, like the screenwriter/poet, hardly used their cars for work at all and made a great effort to post letters or buy stationery on every trip in the car so that the trip could at least partially count as work related.
The screenwriter/poet either lived in a huge house or appeared to have refurnished and decorated her study several times in as many years. She would probably have been appalled to know how closely Laura noted this expenditure and how far reaching were her powers of recall. In fact Laura couldn’t have cared less so long as the numbers made sense and were recorded in the right places. The figures involved were relatively tiny and would be most unlikely ever to attract an inspector’sattention. Nevertheless she felt it her duty to keep clients on their toes by asking perhaps two awkward questions a year about the hotel bill from Mauritius (research for a thriller involving a soured honeymoon, apparently) or the four-figure
She specialized in hopeless cases – the sort of people who hid their bank statements unopened behind the breadbin and couldn’t work out a simple percentage even on a calculator, had they possessed one, the sort of people who had yet to notice that both their laptop and mobile phone had calculators built into their software. She took on their messy lives and interesting jobs and ensured that, in one simple area, at least, they became orderly and predictable. It wasn’t a career. It would lead her nowhere and meant nothing to her emotionally but it paid her bills and gave her the quiet satisfaction of knowing that, like a dry cleaner’s or a baker’s, her skills would always be needed.
This morning’s client was a typical case, a fairly successful screenwriter and poet – not a friend – who, once a year, sent Laura a huge Jiffy bag into which she had stuffed twelve months of bank and credit-card statements, invoices, royalty statements and receipts for absolutely everything. Having sorted the large paperwork into calendar order, Laura proceeded to do the same with the receipts, smoothing them out, taking amagnifying glass and annotating pencil to the ones she couldn’t immediately decipher and discarding any that were plainly never going to be offset against the client’s tax bill.
She had a system involving twelve multicoloured wire post trays, one for each month, and a little notebook in which she meticulously noted the client’s name and the time at which each bout of work on their behalf began and ended. She even had a stopwatch for work-related phone calls. Most of her clients worked from home and, nervous about capital gains tax, needed reassurance as to what percentage of domestic bills they could claim back and what proportion of their car and petrol expenses should count for work and what for private use. Some, like the piano tuner, the cello teacher and the graphic designers, drove a lot as part of their jobs; others, like the screenwriter/poet, hardly used their cars for work at all and made a great effort to post letters or buy stationery on every trip in the car so that the trip could at least partially count as work related.
The screenwriter/poet either lived in a huge house or appeared to have refurnished and decorated her study several times in as many years. She would probably have been appalled to know how closely Laura noted this expenditure and how far reaching were her powers of recall. In fact Laura couldn’t have cared less so long as the numbers made sense and were recorded in the right places. The figures involved were relatively tiny and would be most unlikely ever to attract an inspector’sattention. Nevertheless she felt it her duty to keep clients on their toes by asking perhaps two awkward questions a year about the hotel bill from Mauritius (research for a thriller involving a soured honeymoon, apparently) or the four-figure
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