The Tax Exile, page 23
‘It’s marvellous,’ said Kate.
‘It’s wonderful,’ said Fred. ‘Let’s get out of here. If somebody doesn’t buy one in a minute you’re going to get depressed.’
The publishers were far from depressed. They had their offices in a small house in Bloomsbury and Fred and Kate were escorted to a room on the second floor where guests were entertained on publication days with white wine. Kate introduced Fred as her fiancé, but it was to her that people wanted to talk.
‘How are they coming along?’ asked a young man who looked as if he had hardly had his first shave. ‘We want the summer one within a month. Keep the conveyor belt going.’
‘Your fiancée is a very clever girl,’ murmured a man with a clipped moustache and a middle European accent, who seemed to be almost salivating at the prospect of huge sales. ‘Very beautiful, too.’
The room was filling up with people but nobody was introduced. Around its edges were books on shelves, their bright new covers facing the wine drinkers who had gathered for this brief party. It was an eclectic publishing house. Power: How to Seize, Keep and Wield It sat oddly alongside Cockle the Emu. Fred picked up a new 600-page biography of a dead pop star.
‘The names are the same,’ said a man at his elbow. ‘Only the facts have been changed to make it more interesting.’
The young man who had urged Kate to maintain her productivity approached Fred to refill his glass. ‘There was a party like this once at Faber,’ he said in the convivial manner of a well-trained host. ‘T. S. Eliot used to be a director there, and one of the guests came back from the loo and said, “Was it Eliot’s toilet I saw?” and another chap said, “That’s a palindrome.” They’re like that at Faber.’
‘A man, a plan, a canal – Panama!’ said Fred.
The man looked at him. ‘Sorry?’
‘That’s another palindrome,’ said Fred. He picked from the shelf a book of a thousand facts and flicked through its pages. The world constipation record was 102 days.
The crowd had shifted now and seemed to be mostly around Kate. He realized that she was signing copies of her book. Was he about to marry a celebrity? She was wearing a yellow dress with a sort of collar that lay over both shoulders, and he knew that she would be the person who attracted attention even if she hadn’t done a book.
He hovered on the periphery of this adulation until she came over.
‘I think we ought to go soon,’ she told him. ‘I don’t want to outstay my welcome.’ But her eyes were gleaming at the compliments that she had received.
‘It’s your party and you can fly if you want to,’ he said. They were interrupted by one of the secretaries whose presence had restored the sexual balance during this wine drinking.
‘Miss Seymour, there’s a phone call for you,’ she said with a respect that Fred found fascinating.
‘How can there be?’ Kate asked, looking puzzled. ‘Nobody knows I’m here.’ She thought for a moment and then added, ‘Except my mother.’
‘It is your mother,’ said the girl. ‘I’m afraid she sounds upset.’
Fred was left on his own again and headed discreetly in the direction of the wine.
‘Another glass?’ said the young man who had spoken to him earlier. He filled Fred’s glass and said, ‘Straw? No, too stupid a fad. I put soot on warts. That’s another palindrome.’
‘I thought it might be,’ said Fred.
‘So you’re marrying Kate Seymour. Some people have all the luck.’
‘It’s better than studying palindromes, I must admit.’
‘She has a remarkable talent. Millions of people can draw but I’ve never seen anyone achieve her effect with line drawings. You want to keep her working. Don’t let her slacken – it would be a criminal waste of her gifts.’
‘I know what you mean, but I’m planning to be her husband, not her boss.’
‘In the old days the husband was the boss,’ said the young man, refilling his own glass.
‘Those were the old days,’ Fred told him.
Kate returned looking pale. ‘It’s the vicar,’ she said so that only Fred could hear her.
‘What about him?’
‘He’s been killed in the Clapham train crash.’
NINETEEN
In a lively Italian restaurant called the Verdi in Southampton Row Kate twisted green fettucini on to her fork and said, ‘Apparently he was attending some church conference at Lambeth Palace.’
‘I expect they’ll manage,’ said Fred. His inability to produce the conventional response to a death had left him feeling slightly numb. ‘How did your mother seem?’
‘Well, upset, naturally. What will happen to her? I suppose a vicarage is like a tied cottage and she’ll be out in the street.’
It had been Kate’s desire to rush home immediately but Fred had persuaded her to have a meal before the journey; they hadn’t eaten all day and he had the idea that pregnant women should not go hungry.
‘I promised to stay with her tonight,’ Kate said. ‘You’ll have to use the hotel you’re paying for.’
‘Who is going to kiss me when I wake up in the morning?’
‘That chambermaid with the moustache?’
Singing waiters whose laughter disguised their efficiency bustled round them as Fred thought how complicated life could become. Before they could have a wedding there would have to be a funeral. He wondered whether he would be expected to attend it.
‘Has your mother got any money?’ he asked.
The question seemed to depress Kate. ‘I dread to think. I know Dad left her some, as he left me some, but I don’t know how much. It’s not something we talk about.’
‘We can buy her a house if you want to, but it must be in your name.’
‘We?’
‘What’s mine’s thine, kid.’
She looked at him quizzically. ‘Fred, tell me something. Have you got a lot of money? I’ve never understood this tax-exile business.’
‘Quite a lot,’ he told her. ‘Enough to buy a few prams.’
‘Tell me how much. Wives aren’t kept in the dark any more. They’ve come out of the attic.’
‘More than a million.’
She stopped eating and looked to see whether this was a joke. Her smile, on realizing that it wasn’t, triumphantly combined dazed pleasure and shocked amazement, as if to possess so much money wasn’t entirely reputable.
‘I’m marrying a millionaire,’ she said. ‘I hadn’t realized.’
‘A very wise precaution these days, Kate. Of course if I don’t hurry back to Monte Carlo after the wedding, there will be a lot less. I have to stay there until May and then we can return to England in June to have the baby and buy a house.’
‘I shall have to turn your apartment into a studio.’
‘I’ll wait patiently in the King’s Head so as not to disturb you.’
‘I think,’ she said, giving him a thoughtful frown, ‘that we will have to find some work for you.’
‘That’s a task that has defied employment agencies for more than a decade,’ he told her, and then he thought that he should tell her something else. He had been listening to Trader Ryan for long enough to be familiar with some of matrimony’s hazards.
‘Trying to change their husband is the mistake that every woman makes. I just thought I should tell you that. If they didn’t like him as he was, they shouldn’t have married him in the first place.’
‘I thought that you might get bored.’
‘Only boring people get bored.’
‘My, we are feeling confident these days.’
The rail chaos that had followed the crash meant that taxis were hard to find and, when they were, the drivers exhibited a traditional reluctance to venture far from the capital. But after some kerbside haggling, a fee was agreed and the two of them were cuddling in the back of an old cab, its floor covered with green bags from Harrods, as they chugged none too quickly through the falling dusk towards a part of the country where not all the ground was covered in cement.
Nestling in the crook of his arm, Kate said: ‘I suppose it’s solved one problem. Avoiding a church wedding.’
‘He had already agreed,’ Fred told her. ‘I went to see him.’
‘You went to see who?’
‘The Reverend Alexander Cattermole.’
‘I didn’t know that. When was this?’
‘A couple of days ago.’
‘What did you think of him?’
‘De mortuis nil nisi bonum.’
‘That’s right, he was a sod. What did he say?’
‘He that repeateth a matter separateth very friends. He said it was from Proverbs.’
‘He could find a quotation in that book to support genocide if he had to. So you told him you knew?’
‘I sorted him out, Kate. I left him a chastened man. It’s amazing what money does to you. I seem to be able to handle anybody these days. It’s the confidence you mentioned just now.’
She kissed him. ‘I want you to be confident. An insecure millionaire would be a bit of an oddity. I’m glad you went to see him. Was my mother there?’
‘Not in the room. She thought we were discussing marriage arrangements.’
‘Well,’ she said, ‘his God has punished him now.’
‘Pity he had to kill thirty other people at the same time.’
When their taxi pulled up outside the vicarage Mrs Cattermole was already standing at the door. It was so peaceful here that she had probably heard their laboured approach when they were half a mile away. Fred gathered up the shopping bags while Kate rushed to hug her mother.
‘Are you all right?’ she kept asking. ‘Are you all right?’
‘I’m fine, darling,’ said Mrs Cattermole with surprising cheerfulness. ‘Good evening, Fred.’ She offered her cheek and he kissed it.
Inside he was led to an old armchair beside the wood-burning stove and left to himself while Kate and her mother went to make some coffee. It was a dreary room that he could never have lived in. A surprisingly colourless painting of what looked like the Lake District hung on one wall and an old-fashioned bookcase at the end of the room was filled with identical brown books, presumably a set of encyclopedias. It was a house that, despite the stove, lacked warmth but even worse it was a home where the sound of laughter would somehow seem out of place.
Mrs Cattermole returned with a tray of coffee. Fred tried to see a vestige of Kate in her but the only similarity was that they both had pretty eyes.
‘I don’t want this to interfere with your wedding plans, Fred,’ she said.
He thought it would be impolite to reassure her too strenuously that her fears on this subject were quite unnecessary.
Kate came in and sat next to her mother on an old covered sofa. Her yellow dress was the brightest thing in the dull room. She linked her arm through her mother’s, determined to rescue her from this fresh misfortune.
‘I don’t think Fred should come to the funeral,’ she said.
Fred looked at her gratefully, but Mrs Cattermole had taken over. ‘Of course not. There’s no question of that.’ She turned to her daughter, who seemed surprised by this immediate agreement. ‘I know about it, Kate. I listened at the door.’
‘Oh,’ said Kate.
‘Why didn’t you tell me at the time?’
‘I didn’t want to upset you. I thought it might ruin your marriage.’
Mrs Cattermole shook her head. ‘I couldn’t believe what I was hearing in there. I had it out with him afterwards and he admitted everything and begged my forgiveness. It was awful.’
‘It must have been,’ said Fred.
‘But in a way it has made it easier to bear today’s news,’ she said briskly. ‘Except, of course, that I shall have nowhere to live.’
‘I’m going to buy you a house,’ Kate told her.
‘You are?’
‘Well, we. My husband and I.’
Fred sat on his hotel bed writing Christmas cards. The ones that he had bought were in aid of the British Retinitis Pigmentosa Society, and he wondered what it was.
Somewhere out in the country shocked parishioners had been saying goodbye to the vicar who had been taken from them so unexpectedly. Widow and step-daughter had stood expressionlessly at the graveside in the December gloom, wondering, no doubt, how actresses could produce tears to order when tears were what the occasion demanded.
Fred had used the opportunity to do his Christmas shopping: a compact-disc player for Trader Ryan, a portable TV for Mrs Cattermole. Kate’s present was to be new clothes but he needed her to be there when he bought them.
He turned on the television with the remote control at his bedside. In the year of so many accidents the news should have come as no surprise but he still gaped incredulously at the screen. A Pan Am jumbo jet flying from London to New York had crashed in Lockerbie in the south of Scotland, killing more than 250 passengers and another dozen people on the ground. Television cameras had got there quickly but it was already dark; the full horror and damage would only be revealed at dawn. He stared at the murky floodlit scene wondering whether it was safe any longer to get out of bed, and then inferred from the staccato recital of horrifying facts that some of the victims on the ground were already in bed when death arrived.
Subdued, he went out and posted his Christmas cards – to Philip Hunt and Lena Ryan, Mrs Fotheringay and the Pringle brothers, and one to his mother’s friend in Dover, Mrs Stroud.
Carol singers were gathered round a twenty-foot Christmas tree which had been erected near the site of Trader Ryan’s stall. At its foot was a brightly lit crib. Fred wondered how painful to people like Alexander Cattermole was the irrefutable fact that Jesus had been born in a pub. The choir that had gathered to join this carol singing did not seem, from their lack of familiarity with the words, to be regular church-goers. The search here was for the Christmas spirit rather than salvation. Girls in jeans tucked into high-heeled, knee-length boots, which instead of producing the desired sexiness caused only an ungainly wobble, were accompanied by pale-faced young men in motor-cycle gear. Young parents with babies in prams, old folks with walking sticks, the lonely single and the entwined couples all stood smiling at the music that filled the street.
Through this festive crowd came a laconic, cheroot-chewing figure in a ten-gallon hat. It was Trader Ryan.
‘You look ludicrous,’ Fred told him.
‘As good as that?’
Fred had wondered earlier what sort of Christmas Trader Ryan would have now that he lived alone, but then he remembered that the holiday had never posed a problem for him whether he had a wife or not. Many years ago he had disappeared into a public house on Christmas Eve with £150 in his pocket and emerged on New Year’s Day without a penny.
‘You’re going to a fancy-dress party,’ said Fred. ‘Either that or you’ve got a slate loose.’
‘I’m going as Clint Eastwood. What do you think?’
‘He doesn’t wear that sort of hat.’
Trader Ryan shrugged at the pettiness of this objection. ‘Where is the future Mrs Carton?’ he asked.
‘She’s been to the funeral and won’t be out tonight.’
‘Funerals, weddings, divorces.’
‘Births,’ said Fred.
‘The tuning-fork of history. The social maelstrom.’
‘I think we need a drink.’
‘I think that as well. I know a place not a rod, pole or perch from here where you can exchange loot for hooch.’
‘Show me this place.’
They walked along to the Cellar Bar. A man was playing carols on a xylophone outside the hotel.
‘Scientists are struggling to discover intelligent life in space. I’m still trying to find any sign of it on earth,’ said Trader Ryan, looking round the bar. He puffed on his cheroot and winked at Lorna the barmaid. ‘Who are you going as tonight?’
‘Nell Gwyn,’ she said. ‘I always go as Nell Gwyn.’
When they had their drinks, Fred asked, ‘Have you had a Christmas card from Mrs Ryan?’
‘As it happens, no. But I’m sending her an interesting little present that should keep her happy. A plastic motorized penis.’
‘Philip Hunt will like that. He’ll be able to get on with his book.’
Trader Ryan puffed vainly on his cheroot which had now gone out. He picked up some matches from the bar.
‘I’ve had a new money-making idea,’ he said. ‘This one is mega. It’s so big that you are going to be the poor friend.’
‘Good. I’d feel easier in that role. It’s what I’m used to.’
‘I’m working on the idea with a little mechanical genius I know. In fact I shall have to take him on as a junior partner. His brains and my capital.’
‘You don’t have any capital. What you have is called a debt.’
‘I’m coming to that. This idea is a device which you fix to the carburettor on a car to halve the petrol consumption. Cars are going to do seventy or eighty miles to the gallon and I am going to be filthy rich.’
‘You know what will happen? You’ll be bought out by the petrol companies.’
‘They’ll need a lot of money.’
‘I understand they have it.’
‘In the meantime I need capital.’
Fred drank some lager. ‘I catch your drift,’ he said. ‘As you repaid me so quickly last time, how can I refuse? How much do you need?’
‘A bit more than last time, actually. Twenty-five grand would get the thing into production and then profits from sales would finance it.’
‘Your Messianic visions are getting a bit pricey.’
‘This is the big one, Fred. This is the one that puts me into a Roller. My bank manager is going to call me sir. In fact, if it comes off, the Queen will call me sir.’
‘The apotheosis of Trader Ryan – Sir Dermot. For services to transport.’
‘You realize the government will go bust from lack of revenue from the filling stations?’
