A Girl Called Flotsam

by John Tagholm

  The Tube jolted her awake and a distorted voice informed her that they were being held to regulate the service and that they would be moving again shortly. She would be slightly late, which irritated her because that is what he would have expected and no part of her wanted to be second-guessed by the man with whom she was about to have lunch. Ahead of her Graham Roth would be waiting, no doubt receiving visits from other tables, joking with the maitre-d’, holding court in his inimitable way. She had worked for him for three years and it surprised her that never once had she been remotely seduced by this exterior charm, the blatant manipulation of those around him for his own ends. At a post production party at the conclusion of her first series, he had followed her towards the cloakroom and clumsily tried to kiss her and her resistance had taken them both by surprise. Life was complicated enough without sleeping with the boss, although she accepted that her denial of Graham Roth, Chief Executive of The Digital Corporation, was an exception rather than a rule. What made him any different from Joshua Myers?

  She fought her way off the train, pushing between a group of Japanese tourists for whom this overcrowded platform was more or less what they were used to but who wanted to take pictures of each other in front of the Tube sign. She skirted around them, part of a faster stream of people who knew where they were going, emerging into the light of Oxford Street and turning towards Mayfair. She noticed that a small line of Thames’ mud was lodged under one corner of the nail of her little finger on her right hand and whilst puzzling at how it had remained there, felt oddly comforted that she was carrying a reminder of yesterday’s adventure. She was familiar with the restaurant where he was waiting and knowing that Graham Roth did nothing by accident, wondered why he had chosen it as a place to meet, apart from it being a useful venue for showing off his prize winner. Would this be the second man she would cross swords with today?

  The Brasserie des Ouvriers was neither a brasserie nor was it for workers, at least not in the sense the French used both words. This was brasserie Michelin-style, a film-set background for expensive food and whilst at lunchtime its diners certainly worked, they came from the world of finance, fashion and the media and had little connection to factory workers and lorry drivers. Graham Roth sat under a large mirror promoting Ancre Pils from Strasbourg. He didn’t stand up when she arrived but merely offered her the seat with its back to the restaurant with an nonchalant wave of his hand. Even in this brief moment of greeting he took his eyes off her to see if anyone had registered her arrival. She didn’t like the man and yet she was amused at how little time it had taken to once again reaffirm this fact. He gave the briefest nod to a waiter who handed her a glass of champagne and before she had said a word, he raised his glass to hers and the lunch began.

  I am thirty-six years old, Beatrice Palmenter told herself and I am being lunched by one of the most powerful men in television and I am frankly indifferent and barely curious about what might follow. The component parts of why she felt like this were all contained within her, she knew, but they had not presented themselves in a pattern she could fully comprehend.

  ‘Did you celebrate at the weekend, Triss?’

  She was not fond of this reduction of her name and certainly not happy that he used it with such an assumption of intimacy. Thinking of Joshua, it crossed her mind that it was only men she didn’t like that shortened it in this way. The mirror above her was hung slightly forward so that she could see the restaurant reflected and could watch the other diners playing their own games of question and answer.

  ‘I removed panty liners from the shores of the Thames,’ she said.

  ‘Are you researching something for a new film?’ he replied without missing a beat.

  ‘Not as such. I was invited by a friend.’ She straightened her knife. ‘Do you know the Isle of Dogs?’

  ‘Not intimately, no.’

  ‘You should go. It’s quite restorative.’

  The verbal skirmishing continued over the hors d’oeuvres but the main course, both in terms of the food and the purpose of the meal, arrived at the same time.

  ‘What do you have in mind for your next project?’

  The way he asked the question made Beatrice aware that she didn’t need to answer and so, not for the first time that day, she shrugged and gave the impression that it might be this and it might be that.

  Graham Roth played with his sea bream, splitting the fillet in half and dividing it yet again before taking a neat mouthful.

  ‘Do you remember what this restaurant used to be, in a previous incarnation?’

  Of course she did, but she was going to wait for him to make the running, to declare himself as he surely would. In the distance she had glimpsed a possible motive for the lunch, beyond the celebratory.

  ‘You once touched on it in a proposal.’

  ‘I did, indeed.’ She was about to add “and it was rubbished from a great height” but that would have given him too much advantage.

  ‘Did you ever eat here when it was Chez Joseph?’

  ‘I would have been a child,’ she said, ‘but I knew those who did.’ The names were all on the list I gave you in my pitch, but you never read, she said in her head adding, also unspoken, why are you taking an interest again all of a sudden?

  ‘I’ve dug out the proposal you outlined a couple of years ago. I wonder if we shouldn’t revisit it.’

  She waited, again unwilling to play the game until he’d declared his hand.

  Once upon a time, in what now seemed another life, she had gone out with a chef who was beginning to make a name for himself and through him had met Joseph Troumeg, the celebrated food writer and restaurateur. He was in his early seventies then, but still carried about him the aura and glitter of the glory days when his name was on everyone’s lips. He had recently sold his group of restaurants and was, much to his displeasure, slipping from the public eye to be replaced, well, by people like her old boyfriend.

  ‘Hello, my name is Joseph Troumeg. The ‘g’ is silent,’ he had said in a routine she knew he had repeated many times, ‘unlike me.’ And, unlike Graham Roth, he had stood to meet her and had given a small bow as he introduced himself before ushering her into the best seat in the restaurant. During the next two and half hours Joseph Troumeg gave a bravura performance, sketching out his life in elaborate and amusing detail, stopping now and then to hear about her job and praising her boyfriend for his fabulous cooking. The following morning she had Googled him and was fascinated to read many of the quotes which were word for word what he had said to her over dinner. She took her researches further, phoning several of his ex-colleagues and one or two journalists, but she only heard more or less the same potted history.

  A few days later he called and invited her down to Deal, where he had a small house. How could she resist? The ‘small house’ turned out to be a double-fronted stuccoed villa just off the front decorated in what he described as ‘magpie camp’. There was reason for this invitation to the coast, of course. He continued his smooth encapsulation of his life, before handing her a folder which had a studied photograph of him on the cover and the grand title ‘JOSEPH TRO UMEG: A LIFE IN FOO D’. It outlined a series of programmes in which he revisited some of his favourite haunts, told a potted history of his life and cooked appropriate dishes to camera. From the look of the folder it had been through a few hands, although the practised restaurateur made her feel that she was its first recipient. She saw him a couple of times in London, where he had a flat in Chelsea and came to like the man who happily described himself as the outsider who transformed British cooking and eating. Her fascination was not so much to do with his celebrity – he counted queens, princesses and film stars as his disciples – but with the smoothly polished and repeated history of his life and times.

  She had no intention of doing a cookery show so she put together a proposal for a documentary which might easily have had the same title even though it had a rather different purpose, an exploration of why Joseph Troumeg, born in Fr
ance, should have become so successful in a country not noted for its love of food or indeed the French. She wanted to explore the strange fascination with the restaurateur and investigate his background and influences. She showed the idea to Troumeg who was distinctly lukewarm. ‘They don’t want to know about all that,’ he’d said. ‘They want the glamour and the cooking and the fancy locations.’ Nevertheless she had pressed ahead and shown the proposal to Graham Roth and this lunchtime she remembered his words as though they had been spoken to her yesterday.

  ‘A bit old hat, isn’t he? Hasn’t he been somewhat overtaken?’

  ‘I think there’s a bit more than meets the eye,’ she had replied. She couldn’t have substantiated that remark for it was instinctual and not based on much fact, but her nose for these things was usually accurate. ‘He’s a fascinating man who would make a very good story, one way or the other. And he really did make a difference to the way we look at food.’

  Graham Roth had shaken his head and that was the end of it. Until today. But she wasn’t going to ask him why the change of heart. He took two mouthfuls of strawberry panna cotta before continuing.

  ‘We’ve had an approach from an agent in association with a publisher. They think Joseph Troumeg is due for a revival. Isn’t this what you think?’

  ‘Not really. I thought he was an interesting man. I think he would have to be dead before we could revive him. Why do you think it might work now but dismissed it so quickly two years ago?’ Her tone was just as cold as she meant it to be.

  ‘Then, Beatrice, I judged the time not to be right. But things move on, do they not?’ Graham Roth usually got what he wanted and although his response did not quite have the same edge as hers, it nevertheless contained the ultimatum, take it or leave it.

  ‘It would be a different sort of cookery show,’ he said finally.

  She thought at first that she wouldn’t respond to this, but her irritation got the better of her. ‘But it wouldn’t be a cookery show. It would be a documentary.’

  ‘I’m sure you’d find a way of combining both formats,’ he concluded. ‘One way or the other, you won’t be able to avoid food. Anyway, think about it and let me know.’ With that he changed the subject and the meal quickly ran its course.

  The Tube back was less crowded and she sat slumped in the seat, her left ankle propped on her right knee and wondered precisely where she was, other than on the District Line rattling along the side of the Thames to Aldgate. Graham Roth was offering her a chance to make the film that she had more or less proposed and not so long ago was keen to make. And now she was resisting the idea and she tried to establish why. One of the answers was easy: it wasn’t the film Joseph Troumeg wanted and she would have to persuade him to participate. She realised, though, that she was in the grip of a larger malaise only part of which was caused by the whimsical and offhand way Graham Roth had offered her the project. She hunched lower in the seat and felt her body move as the train swayed its subterranean passage eastwards.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  She does not look back again, her bare feet carrying her up the hill away from the river and she thinks that what she can’t see might never happen. There is a quietness about the house, her mother stooped at the workbench, her back to the door working on a tiny axe head outlined in gold which she had seen her beginning the night before. Her mother hugs her, kissing the top of her head before tracing its shape with the palms of her hands and she looks up and tells her, as she herself had been told by her father, not to be frightened. But as she does, she remembers only too clearly their recent flight from their settlement in the west, burned and pillaged by the invaders, her mother’s workshop destroyed and her precious stones, glass, amber, garnets scattered in the earth to sink for generations. The girl runs the tips of her fingers around the gold rim of the axe and admires her mother for transforming a weapon of war into an object of beauty. Her mother continues to work on the small pendant but she herself is thinking of the men on the bridge which is, at one and the same time, the place she wants to be and where she does not. She slips out of the house and heads back to the point above the river where she often sits to watch the merchant ships arrive from places whose names she has never heard. From here she would watch her mother trade with the sailors, swapping a finished necklace or ring for a bundle of coloured stones, orange, ruby and emerald. But now the ships and sailors below have a different purpose and she wants to cover her face with her hands but can’t help but watch what happens next. In some ways she knows already and is merely witnessing a confirmation.

  By the time the Norsemen’s longboats appear on the eastward approach of the river, the men had gathered on the bridge and the quays to the north, just beneath her. Somewhere her father is with them. She can see they are wiser now and better armed with their long spears and shields lined up in defiance of an enemy they are beginning to know and understand. In amongst the closely formed ranks, she imagines her father is thinking of the beauty that his wife creates, the amulets dripping with pendants, the fabulous geometric brooches, the bracelets in gold and silver, all the colours that sparkled in his life.

  This time the defenders are determined to keep the bridge intact and a protective wall of shields flanks the down river side. The longboats come relentlessly closer, no fearful pause in their progress. On the brow of the hill, unseen to her father, she watches from what will later be the top of Pudding Lane. From this distance the viciousness of the battle is muted, although the sounds of clashing metal and the cries of the men carry distorted up the slope. She has lived twelve years, each one punctuated by conflict like this and the spectacle unfolding in front of her is just a normal part of her childhood. She can see the boats manoeuvre alongside the bridge in a vain attempt to attach ropes, each one repelled in a shower of spears. A longboat breaks away to land at one of the quays on the near shore and the roar of the Norsemen is frightening. In the various melees and with shields raised in front of their faces, it is not possible for her to make out her father but each man that falls sends a blow to her heart. A second wall of shields holds the attackers by the quay and gradually they are pushed back to the water, not turning to run but stepping backwards as they fight towards the protection of their boat.

  Out in the centre of the bridge she senses the last moments of the life of her father are about to happen. Does she imagine how it ends? Does she see the axe that is thrown from the deck of a longship? She hopes that her father neither sees its flight nor feels its blow. He tumbles from the bridge and is dead before he hits the water, his body to float down river to slowly decompose, to wash in and out with the tides, the parts of this loving father, carpenter and farmer, deposited here and there on river bed and foreshore, his skull finally coming to rest in the mud at the mouth of the Walbrook, close by where the Cannon Street railway bridge will stand and where, precisely nine hundred and three years later, it will be wrongly identified as that of a Roman soldier slain and beheaded by a Celtic attacker and offered to the river in sacrifice.

  Somehow she knows what has happened even if she hasn’t seen it. When the longboats have departed and the defenders regroup to repair their wounds and assess the damage wrought by the attack, he is not one of their number. A search up river fails to produce his body and they know what she knows, that he has been taken by the waters and lost forever. On the hill she accepts that she will never see her father again, grateful for their final moments on the bridge. When eventually she comes home to have the news confirmed, she embraces her mother and senses in that moment that she is different, that she has been handed, unspoken, a new responsibility, the gift of continuity.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Beatrice Palmenter could not have told you what she had been thinking as the train arrived at Monument, but in the few seconds it took to orientate herself she became conscious of a feeling of dread, a weight pressing on her chest, a physical reaction to an unspecified event. She found that she was gripping the red shiny armrest for support whilst trying d
esperately to remember what she had been thinking, or dreaming, in the moments before. However unpleasant her lunch with Graham Roth she couldn’t imagine that it would produce such a response and she folded her arms across her chest for protection and comfort. As the Tube continued on its way, the unease began to subside and she became more alert to the feeling and its possible cause. The images in her mind were unformed and just out of reach but they seemed just as real as the carriage in which she was travelling. She was returning to an apartment which would contain the smell and reverberations, real or imaginary, of another failed relationship, having spent two hours with a man whose judgements and manner she thoroughly disliked. Although he had offered her a project that she herself had proposed not long ago, he had done it without affection, the production simply a way of holding on to her so that he, himself, could benefit from her status. It was easy to see how both events might have depressed or angered her, but then she had actually wanted the end of the relationship with Joshua and rather liked the idea of making a film about Troumeg. But contained in her feelings was fear and she knew that neither man had the ability to produce this in her. The Tube passed onwards, under the City to Aldgate and she emerged blinking into the bright afternoon sun, none the wiser nor, as she was ready to accept, willing to question any deeper.