Kid Gloves (25 page)

The main text is rather more seductive. ‘Tax
havens are like beautiful women …' purrs a passage headed ‘Is Campione your cup of tea?'.
‘Each one has different charms. Unfortunately, as with the ladies, they often offer a negative
characteristic or two as some sort of price in return for enjoying their favours. The charms of
Campione are many, the price is low, and the negative aspects are few …'

It certainly sounds lovely.

The artificial-sand beach with real palm trees,
maintained beautifully at public expense, looks like a set from a Hawaiian travelogue. The
churches and schools are absolutely gorgeous, and kept up like no others in Europe. Garbage is
picked up free. Unfortunately, the locals still have to pay something for water, gas, electric
and telephone. But these services are subsidised …

There's no VAT, and
foreigners pay no income tax. Visitors can renew their tourist status indefinitely, by walking
across the street every three months, into another country, and will never be asked to register
with the authorities.

Subsidized Shangri-la! VAT-free Brigadoon
innocent of garbage! Where is this haven? Well, Campione turns out to be a rocky little enclave
of Italy entirely inside Switzerland, a square mile huddled round a municipal casino – whose
takings are what subsidizes local services. Population (in 1989) 3,000. Historically a place
where monks trained local boys to become master masons and stone-cutters, and not exactly a
haven, just a place where no-one can be bothered to collect tax, certainly not from foreigners.
Campione offers all the benefits of Switzerland, including efficient communications and
neutrality in wartime, and none of the disadvantages, such as military service (two months of
active duty every summer, for life).

The philosophy advanced by Dr Hill is Permanent
Tourism, though I wonder if Dad was tempted by any of his other publications. Permanent Tourism
sounds like anything but fun. Wasn't the Flying Dutchman a permanent tourist?

He didn't consult me about money matters, and to
be sure I would have had no economic knowledge to contribute, but there are other paths to
prudence. I would have warned him against any financial scheme seemingly inspired by
Passport to Pimlico
.

The book's intended effect of privileged
information, oligarchic insiderdom, is immediately undone by the choice of material used for the
cover. As Dad's fingertips stroked this ‘leather-bound' book of dreams, for which he had paid
£50 – more than a pound a page! – didn't he notice they were in fact meeting a texture
reminiscent of the notebooks that were always offered as prizes by the
Reader's Digest
,
those abject booklets bound in ‘luxurious' Kidron or Skivertex?
This is a
dream that crumbles at first touch. It dies under the fingers.

In real life Dad's financial dealings were
unsteady. After Black Monday in 1987 he asked if I could lend him some money. He had come
unstuck with futures – now futures had come home to roost and were sharpening their claws on the
present. He seemed only slightly embarrassed about it. No more than if he had run out of stamps,
and needed to catch the post.

In fact it was a good time for him to ask for
money, probably the only time in my life I could have helped, since I had a regular income from
the
Independent
without yet having saddled myself with a mortgage. Even so it felt more
like a test of loyalty (would I pass him by on the other side?) than a case of real need on his
part. How could my few thousand stave off bankruptcy? – which was what he seemed to be saying.
But I stumped up and he got his affairs in order, paying me back inside a year.

We had a family joke about Dad and his reverse
financial acumen, wondering what would happen if he ever invested in Krugerrands. Would his
fellow benchers be making panicky calls to their brokers from the Senior Combination Room,
falling over each other in their rush to get out of what had for so long been a watchword for
safe investment, now that it was clearly marked for destruction?

When I say ‘family' joke, I mean only the surly
confederacy of sons. We didn't include Sheila in jokes about Dad's reliable unreliability in
money matters. She had to manage its consequences in earnest. Her judgement was better than his,
just as her purely intellectual powers were greater, but without the confidence required to
impose these advantages on others they go for nothing.

Only on the humble level of the chromosome did
she have
the power to overrule the man she had married, in the one small
department of life where he could accurately be described as recessive. Her crisp brown-eye
instruction overruled his tentative blue-eyed suggestion, so that there were no blue-eyed boys
in the family, just the blue-eyed man.

She also threw her short sight into the mix. Dad
was long-sighted and in later life wore half-moon spectacles of the sort that seem so perfectly
designed for incorporation into judicial body language, particularly the sceptical upward glance
at counsel over the rims, that no-one would be shocked to learn that they were worn by judges
whose vision needed no correcting.

Another easy target for our jokes was Dad's
collection of busted bonds – highly decorative certificates conferring rights in abandoned
ventures, such as mines and railways, that might in theory be revived and yield a return. (I
would love to pretend that one of them was for the New Sombrero Phosphate Co.) In the meantime,
framed up, they were attractive examples of nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century engraving.
Financial dealings often have an erotic tinge, as witness those sultry, pouting tax havens, and
so we decided that ‘busted bonds' was as close as Dad would allow himself to get to busty
blondes.

After his retirement Dad decided to sell the
portfolio of busted bonds he had built up over a decade or more. The bonds tended to be large in
format, unmanageable as objects, so he asked my help in taking them to market. He phoned for a
taxi and we travelled in high spirits to the address in Regent Street of the dealers who had
sold them to him. I think he was expecting grand premises rather than a small office on an upper
floor near Hamleys, which turned out to be our destination.

I don't quite know why Dad was expecting a hero's
welcome and a large cheque, except for this being the script his temperament always wrote for
him. In the end he settled for about
a third of what he had paid in the
first place. He was crestfallen, naturally, perhaps more about having lost face in front of me
than because of the setback itself. Even so he had resilience, and bounced blithely back in a
matter of minutes.

If there was pathos in the dreams of wealth of a
man who by most standards had done well for himself, it was part of a wider pattern of
dissatisfaction in the family. Dad and his brother David didn't exactly feel cheated by each
other, but separately they felt that life had cheated them in terms of the distribution of its
rewards. The tension between them never came to a rolling boil, hardly even a simmer, but that
didn't mean it was inactive. One cooking method described in Jane Grigson's book on fish is to
heat a whole salmon in a simple stock (the technical term is court-bouillon) until you see the
first bubble, then turn off the flame. There is by then more than enough heat in the fish-kettle
to penetrate every fibre, until the flesh is ready to fall off the bones. It was in this fashion
that the brothers slowly poached in the court-bouillon of sibling rivalry.

Dad, the older brother, struck out on his own. He
went to university, served in the Navy during the War, moved to London and ended up with a
title. David wasn't academic and was expected to stay out of uniform, farming being a reserved
occupation. There was no need for him to reinvent himself, and the lilt that Dad had scrubbed
from his voice was alive in David's.

When their father died, the brothers inherited as
many liabilities as assets. My grandfather hadn't troubled the Inland Revenue with paperwork for
many years, and the family firm (farming and distributing farm feeds) was in disarray.

David's instinct was to follow the farmer's code
(let the Revenue smoke us out if they can) while Dad's decision was to come clean and arrange
some sort of repayment plan. This
was both morally sound and practical. Dad
could claim to have saved the business, but not long afterwards he endangered it all over again.
Dad had no real knowledge of farming-related business, but he brought down an expert from London
with him to give the enterprise a sort of audit. Perhaps it was a way of exerting some
older-brotherly authority.

The firm was earning an annual profit of 5 per
cent. The expert observed that it should be making 10. In fact 2 per cent was a respectable
figure in that sector and that decade, the 1950s. Dad, though, was impressed by the expert's
verdict, and decided he should sell his share of what he was persuaded was a struggling
business. His money would do better elsewhere.

David had the choice of buying his brother out,
which would dangerously stretch his resources, or to lose control of the company. There was
another person with a stake in the business, Eddy Batty, originally a refugee from Liverpool,
and between them David and Eddy kept the business afloat.

Not only did the family firm keep its head above
water, with one less family member on board, but it prospered remarkably. Soon David was a
wealthy man. From then on there was a mild underlying resentment between the brothers,
expressing itself in little jibes about status and money. If Dad mentioned going to a royal
garden party, David might say, ‘Bill, your car's looking a bit shabby. Should I buy you a new
one?'

His mismanaged exit from the family business
formed no part of Dad's story about himself, and he would certainly have had a version of his
own. Presumably David felt that the older brother had been disloyal, risking family prosperity
by selling his own stake. Dad had his own reservations about David's success, suspecting that
sharp practice had played a part in it.

In particular he seethed when in the 1970s David
bought some farms from their aunts Bessie and Minnie for much less than they were worth.
According to Dad, Bessie and Minnie
had told him, ‘David said it would save
us trouble if we let his people do the valuation. Always so thoughtful!' He almost choked on his
‘whisky sour'. The case of
O'Sullivan and Another v. Management Agency and Music Ltd and
Others
was in the future, but his objections were as obvious as if they had been spelled
out as a headnote from a reported legal judgment:
Undue Influence – Fiduciary relationship –
Sharp Practice within the family clearly constituting Constructive Fraud – Aunts were ‘sitting
ducks'
.

Bessie and Minnie, by the time I knew them, lived
in Colwyn Bay in no great style. They were cultivated, with their piano stool containing the
inevitable ‘Rustle of Spring' and an arrangement of Delius's ‘Cuckoo', but not dazzlingly
sophisticated. They had never married and in late life didn't seem anything but strait-laced,
but had perhaps been a little friskier in their youth. They had owned the first Hispano-Suiza in
North Wales, and took the car to Paris when they travelled there in the 1920s. They were worldly
enough to know that as women of means they might be targeted on this expedition by venal and
unscrupulous men, and came up with a novel method of keeping out of harm's way. They spoke only
Welsh during their visit, reasoning that it was safe to ignore the risk of there being a
Welsh-speaking gigolo on the prowl in Paris.

No doubt David was a shrewd businessman and at
times even a sharp one, but Dad's mistrust of his brother's probity had a slightly mad side to
it. He seemed to think that any cash transaction was suspicious in itself, including the gifts
David made to his nephews at Christmas and other occasions – as if a farmer's failure to use a
chequebook for every piece of business was proof positive of dishonesty. Uncle David's wallet
fell open very easily, and he was always trying to ply us with cigarettes (John Player Specials,
not just in packets of twenty but drums of fifty) and Castella cigars. Not being a smoker was
regarded as a poor basis for refusal. Dad always considered
David's
open-handedness suspicious, though it was a trait the brothers shared. We who benefited from
that incontinent wallet didn't see it as defective in any way.

Whatever Dad did with the money from selling his
share of the family business, it was unlikely to have prospered. He wasn't good with money, and
if this is a heritable characteristic, then he certainly passed it on to me. Money is a cat that
will never curl up in my lap, however devotedly I make kissy sounds to attract it.

I have no other technique. In my case, lack of
financial sense is straightforward, almost one-dimensional. Dad's was more complex, since he had
delusions of flair. He thought that wealth was a dog that would come running if he blew the
right whistle, and even if he couldn't hear the summoning blast himself he was confident it
would get an answer sooner or later, and then he'd be hard put to keep the muddy paws of riches
off his suit. Judges are not poorly paid, but it's a free country and anyone is allowed to flirt
with debt.

Dad reminisced mistily about the far-off days
when judges were paid huge sums as a matter of public policy. The idea was to defend justice by
making its administrators so wealthy that no-one could afford to bribe them.

Dad would never have thought of himself as a
gambler, and everyone agrees ‘speculator' has a rather nicer sound. In fact he did gamble in a
homely way, putting moderate sums on horses and feeding one-armed bandits in the hope of making
them sick. It was only with the horses that he had any sort of form, racking up some decent wins
and no significant losses. When we sons were below drinking age he would treat us, on an
Anglesey Saturday, to a trip to the Plas Club, where there was a slot machine. He would stake us
to a few sixpences, but though a jackpot would have transformed our finances rather more than
his the gambling fever didn't take with us. Dad was
the one who always
wanted one more pull, and his ears would strain as we were driving off to catch the crash of the
jackpot that was rightfully his. A club was also the only place he could legally get a drink on
a Sunday in a dry county, but I don't think that was the strongest attraction.