The Tax Exile, page 3
‘Sit down, Mr Carton,’ he said. ‘I was so sorry to hear about your mother. She’s been a client of mine since I don’t know when.’
He was a short, energetic man who gave the impression of a jack-in-the-box. He had a round, beaming face with big, round spectacles.
‘Have you notified the bank?’ he asked.
‘Not yet. I’m a little out of my depth.’
‘Leave it to me,’ said Mr Pringle. ‘I understand they hold the deeds. Now your mother made a will about five years ago and deposited it with me.’
He produced it immediately from one of his brown folders. ‘I can tell you that she left everything to you. Here we are.’ He handed an envelope to Fred, who pulled out his mother’s will.
‘I give and bequeath unto Frederick Carton all I possess,’ he read. The words before his name were printed on the form.
‘You’re the sole executor and the sole beneficiary,’ said Mr Pringle. ‘Leave it to me to get probate.’
‘Good God,’ said Fred. ‘There seems to be a lot of money about.’
‘Well, it’s yours,’ said Mr Pringle.
‘She had a sister and nieces in Australia and she was a great believer in charities. I thought most of it …’
‘Have you any idea how much it is? If there are any insurance policies I’ll need the documents.’
‘There’s a life policy for £50,000,’ Fred told him. ‘And she had about £25,000 in the bank. Then there’s the bungalow. I don’t know what that’s worth or whether there’s still a mortgage.’
‘Ninety thousand,’ said Mr Pringle as if his property valuations had never been questioned. ‘It’s worth £90,000 at the moment, although by next month it could be more. And the mortgage was paid off by insurance on your father’s death. Over £160,000, I make it, and then there’s the field.’
The very amount made Fred feel numb. He had once saved just over £1,000, the only time his bank account had reached four figures, a magical bench-mark it had seen very briefly.
‘It seems so sad that someone should benefit from another’s death,’ he said. ‘You don’t feel right.’
‘I can understand that you’re in no mood to celebrate,’ said Mr Pringle. ‘But the insurance is only paid at death, and she needed the house and the money while she was still alive.’
A brisk way with death. Fred could see why solicitor was just another job for which he was temperamentally unsuited.
Mr Pringle leaned over the desk towards him.
‘The field, Mr Carton,’ he said. ‘Do you know about the field?’
Fred stared back at Mr Pringle’s round face.
‘I know nothing about a field, Mr Pringle,’ he said.
‘It’s the field at the back of your mother’s bungalow. Two acres, I believe, or slightly over. She bought it when your father died in case anybody built there and spoilt her view. I think it’s in order to tell you what she said to me once. “Fred is hopeless at finding himself a career. The field will keep him in his old age.” It was a surprise present for you, I gathered.’
Fred struggled to absorb this new information. He had craved many things in his life and secretly imagined owning them, but a field was not on his list of coveted possessions.
‘What did she imagine I would do with it?’ he asked. ‘Grow potatoes?’
Mr Pringle’s eyes glinted behind their round spectacles.
‘Grow houses, Mr Carton,’ he said. ‘That land is ripe for planning permission, as your mother well knew. The Channel Tunnel is putting a lot of pressure on land around here. Sell the field to a developer and you’re a rich man.’
Fred stared evenly at Mr Pringle’s glasses.
‘How rich?’ he asked.
Mr Pringle pushed his folder to one side and produced a new, empty one.
‘Look, Mr Carton, would you like me to handle this for you in a professional capacity?’ he asked. His hand hovered above the folder, anxious to inscribe the name of a new client on the brown cover.
Fred nodded slowly. ‘I think you’d better,’ he said.
Reassured that his efforts would be rewarded, Mr Pringle produced a new large pad and a pocket calculator.
‘The land that your mother bought for a couple of thousand twelve years ago will be worth a million and a half with planning permission,’ he said. ‘Let’s work it out.’ He began to punch his pocket calculator and cover the first page of his pad with figures. ‘It’s a little over two acres and at eighteen homes an acre they’ll build forty, which they’ll sell for around £100,000. That’s £4 million. Yes, they’ll pay a million and a half. It will cost them around £30,000 to build each house – that’s, let’s see, £1.2 million. Profit: £1.3 million. That’s about how they cost it.’
Fred listened to these figures with mounting bewilderment.
‘Why did whoever it was sell the land to my mother so cheaply?’ was his first question. ‘It doesn’t make sense.’
‘He was eighty and he wanted to retire to Cornwall. He knew that there would be no planning permission for some years and he was too old to wait. Also, he was a great friend of your mother. Next question?’
Now that he was dealing with a paying client Mr Pringle had assumed a veneer of super-efficiency.
‘Isn’t there something called death duties that will take most of this away?’
Mr Pringle picked up his calculator again. ‘I’ll work it out for you,’ he said. ‘There is something we call inheritance tax these days, but for that the land will be worth £3,000. After all, that is what it’s worth at the moment. The tax starts at £110,000 and is 40 per cent, so on the £165,000 you’ll pay £22,000. Of course there is capital gains tax of 40 per cent on the land sale – say £600,000, but that will leave you with £900,000, which, together with your mother’s will, gives you just over a million. You’ll be a millionaire, tax paid.’
Mr Pringle’s dark eyebrows pushed high, leaving his spectacles behind: he looked like a man who had plucked a large rabbit from a very small hat, but his audience was a disappointment.
Yesterday evening Fred had sat in his mother’s bungalow wondering how he could pay for her funeral. Nothing had stayed ahead of inflation like the cost of a funeral and undertakers did not carry labels in their windows welcoming the use of credit cards.
Today the world had turned once and he was discussing £600,000 tax bills. The transformation in his situation was too colossal for him to digest. He sat and looked at Mr Pringle as if he were indeed a conjuror and would presently set about entertaining his visitor with a spot of levitation or a deck of cards. There was nothing left that could surprise him this morning.
Mr Pringle looked at him thoughtfully. ‘I suppose this is all something of a shock?’
‘Quite a shock, Mr Pringle,’ said Fred, wishing that he could reach a drink. ‘I’ve never had any money, you see. I saw some in a bank once. My present concern is paying for the funeral.’
He was wondering why his mother had never spent her money on some fun. She couldn’t sell the field because she didn’t want a housing estate at the bottom of her garden, but she had enough money in the bank to pay for the sea cruise she had always wanted. But she had hung on to it, not knowing how much she was going to need, not knowing how long she was going to live. It filled him with a sadness that showed on his face and quite distracted the busy solicitor.
‘I’ll advance you £1,000 and deduct it later on,’ he said, producing a cheque book. ‘The money in your mother’s bank account will be transferred to yours quite quickly. Let me take down a few details about you, Mr Carton. Address, bank, phone number – that sort of thing. And then how about lunch? There’s a rather good restaurant just down the street.’
‘Do they take credit cards?’
Mr Pringle held up both hands. ‘It’s on me, Mr Carton. Once you get money you find that you no longer need it.’
THREE
On a stool in the crowded Cellar Bar Dermot Ryan compiled a list of the options that seemed to him to be available.
1
Emigration
2
Divorce
3
Suicide
4
Suicide (faked)
5
Murder
6
Submission
The prospect of none of these restored the feelings of enjoyment and anticipation that he usually brought to his daily routine, and some of them he found deeply distasteful. He picked up his drink and looked round at the other people in the bar. The drink was a new lager, a heavy, sleep-inducing product of Australia that seemed to take you from alertness to somnolence without any intervening period of unbridled jollity. The mid-week customers were mostly the walking wounded, the unemployed or unemployable, all of whom he knew by name and none of whom he encouraged to share his company. Life was difficult enough without embarking on one of the conversational quagmires that lay around him here. On a stool at the corner of the bar was a man in his late twenties called George, who today was wearing a bright red hat that he evidently hoped might add a shimmer of interest to a personality which had hitherto encouraged eyelids to droop and jaws to sag. A roll-up cigarette was stuck to his upper lip and although it never went out, it never seemed to grow shorter either. His companion was one of the town’s trouble-makers who moved from bar to bar as he was banned from each; he was now in the process of getting himself banned from this one by refusing to pay the full amount for his drink. If intolerance of authority is the first sign of a creative mind, this yobbo is going to write the sequel to Ulysses, thought Dermot Ryan returning to his list.
‘My wife won’t talk to me,’ he told the barmaid when she came his way. The barmaid was too young to have heard this before and too inexperienced to know that if she stayed in the job long enough she would hear it many times again. ‘Why’s that?’ she asked.
‘I forget. I’m not sure I ever knew. But the silence is deafening and she has moved into the next room. What sort of marriage is that?’
The barmaid slid away to respond to the demands of other customers. The staff turnover was so fast here that he didn’t even know her name. She was attractive, though, with bright eyes that looked as though they had seen things. If he could forgive her for yawning without covering her mouth, which he probably couldn’t, romance loomed. When his glass was empty he called her back.
‘Buy her a present,’ she suggested as she filled his glass with the narcotic fluid.
‘I bought her a saucepan for her birthday and for my birthday she hit me with it. I should have bought her a scold’s bridle.’
‘I meant jewellery.’
The idea horrified him. Expensive presents, humbly offered, were an admission of guilt. They were liniment on a wound but the wound was still there when the liniment had gone and, by that time, the money had gone too.
‘I do buy jewellery occasionally,’ he said. ‘And then I sell it at a profit.’
‘What about your children? Are they talking to you?’
‘We don’t have any children. We had an ectopic pregnancy a few years ago but twenty years of marriage have produced no contribution at all to the population explosion.’ He sipped his new pint and thought about it. ‘In a zoo they tell whether the animals are happy or not by whether they’re breeding, don’t they?’
But she had gone again, summoned this time by a recently unfrocked traffic warden who had been unduly selective with his tickets.
Lena Ryan was forty, a dangerous age for a woman. It was an age when reality had crept up on dreams. Wild possibilities, romantic and professional, the thought of which had sustained them during the hopeful years, began to fade and die, and the dwindling future took on a bare look and became a depressingly barren landscape. The future grew shorter and tempers grew shorter with it.
Her husband was aware of this and he knew that the possibilities remained alive longer for a man. But being aware of it didn’t make it any easier to live with, now that the little indiscretions and occasional infidelities that were once greeted with a sigh were met by a wall of silence, hostility and violence.
He ran through his list again and felt a hand on his shoulder.
‘Cardboard Fred,’ he said, turning on his stool. ‘Where the hell have you been?’
‘Touring the town. Looking for you. The Rose and Crown and Golden Star are dead.’
‘It sounds like a Tom Stoppard play I saw once. Blokes tossing coins. I meant where have you been for the last two weeks?’
Fred Carton somehow looked different. He wore new cavalry twill trousers, new brown shoes, a new yellow sweater. He had a new haircut. He didn’t seem his normal indecisive self.
‘I’ve been to Dover,’ he said, sitting on the next stool. ‘My mother died.’
Trader Ryan studied his friend thoughtfully. ‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ he said.
‘I was fairly sorry myself,’ Fred told him. He waved a hand at the vanishing barmaid. ‘I found that the death of a loved one is quite hard to take if you’re an atheist.’
‘Of course. That’s why man invented religion. To cope with death.’
Fred pondered this as he ordered a pint. He could see how it happened. He delved into his back trouser pocket to get his wallet. He paid for their drinks and then peeled off eight £50 pound notes, which he placed on the bar.
‘I owe you £400,’ he said. ‘At least, I used to.’
Trader Ryan trousered the money without thinking about it.
‘My wife isn’t talking to me,’ he said, ‘or sleeping with me. The breakdown of communication which is such a feature of modern marriage has, in our case, produced a silence so exquisite that you could almost orchestrate it.’
‘Not a word need be spoken in your language of hate. What happened?’
‘A girl rang her up to ask her why I hadn’t been in touch. The malignant little cow did it deliberately. I got home howling pissed and Lena threw the microwave at me.’
‘It’s not exactly Mills & Boon,’ Fred said, picking up his pint. ‘Who was the girl?’
‘Someone I met at an antiques fair in Brighton. We went out a couple of times but I had to give her the elbow. She said something rather strange to me and I did a runner. “I know it’s not very fashionable at the moment,” she said, “but I’m into masochism.” Well, I could see myself ending up in a flat in Chelsea, caked in sweat and frenziedly lashing her buttocks with a cane when the pubs were open.’
‘Not your scene at all, I should imagine.’
‘Too right, as it happens. The sad thing was that if I was giving marks out of ten, I’d have given her fifteen.’
‘I always thought Lena was remarkably tolerant about your little escapades.’
‘Not any more. She’s been reading some book by that woman who looks like an undertrained quarter-back. Go For His Gonads it’s called, or perhaps I dreamt that bit. The gist of it is that men have been an unpleasant irrelevance for some time, but poor abused women have been too brainwashed to notice.’ He scratched the side of his head as he considered the implications of this venomous theory. ‘Men are callous, grubby and selfish. I didn’t know that, did you?’
Fred shook his head. ‘Nobody told me.’
‘They’ve done research,’ said Trader Ryan darkly, ‘and it’s put the tin hat on my marriage. It’s all come as a blinding revelation to my old woman, who had spent all these years thinking I was all right.’
He finished his drink and called the barmaid for more. She took their glasses without speaking.
Trader Ryan looked at Fred and shook his head. ‘The game’s up. Sluggish arteries, stained lungs, no wife. There’s nothing for it but to sit here among this bunch of hand-jobs and wait for death. Not that I give a damn about death, it’s dying I don’t fancy much. I’m banking on a bit of thermo-nuclear vaporization. Everybody’s scared of it but it’s much better than the death that’s waiting for them.’
He put his hand in his pocket to pay for the drinks and pulled out £400.
‘Where did this come from?’ he asked.
‘I gave it to you just now.’
‘You couldn’t have done. You never have money. You’re like Prince Charles.’
Fred pulled a wallet from the back pocket of his new trousers and opened it to reveal many more £50 notes, all of them new and only recently folded. It made him feel guilty and he shut the wallet and returned it to his pocket.
‘I could be seriously rich in a minute,’ he said. ‘I’ve inherited some land from my mother.’
Trader Ryan’s eyebrows dropped until his eyes almost disappeared. ‘I never knew your mother owned any land,’ he said.
‘Nor did I. It’s only a couple of acres but with permission to build houses it could be worth –’
‘A million.’
‘Something like that.’
Trader Ryan drank some lager and took Fred’s arm.
‘You’re obviously the person to hear about my new money-making idea,’ he said. ‘All I need is capital. The options market. I’m getting quite sophisticated, aren’t I?’
‘What is it?’
‘It’s called the traded options market. You don’t buy the share, you buy an option to buy the share. If it goes up, you can take up the option and buy it at the old cheap price and sell it immediately at the new expensive price. Or you can sell the option back at a profit without ever actually owning the share. What do you think?’
‘I think it’s a privilege to sit here garnering the fruit of your intellect. Kindly burble on.’
‘The advantage is that it costs only a fraction of the actual share price. All I need is capital. Remember me when you’re rich.’
Fred looked round the bar and wondered how many other people in here had ideas that they couldn’t afford, schemes that would stay permanently grounded through lack of funds.
‘What are you going to do about Lena?’ he asked.
Trader Ryan shrugged. ‘It’s over. Separate bedrooms, separate lives. I think it’s now just a question of whether I kill her or she kills me.’
