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.
There was never an actual break-up with the Llansannan side of the family. David had provided some of the money to buy the Anglesey house in 1960, for instance. Naturally he was entitled to stay there himself, though as time went by Dad began to suspect him of offering use of the house (far from luxurious, but right on the beach) as a sweetener in some of the business relationships that seemed to him so deeply suspect.
It didn’t help that David was a mason. Their father had been strongly opposed to freemasonry, and Dad saw his joining a lodge as an opportunistic move and a betrayal of family principle. David for his part thought that Dad didn’t know how business was done in the country. He wasn’t necessarily wrong about that, to judge by the expert-auditor-from-London fiasco. Perhaps David felt that a self-righteous insistence on going it alone had done their father harm. If the old boy had chosen to be on the square himself, then he could have come through his financial difficulties more smoothly. Freemasonry wasn’t a nest of devils but a harmless social network, no more sinister than the Garrick Club.
Even now I don’t feel comfortable aligning membership of the Garrick with freemasonry, even though it’s perfectly obvious that Dad felt at least as much for the poached-salmon-and-avocado stripes of the club tie as any mason feels for the apron and compasses, or the mystic pressure that blossoms inside a routine handshake.
There were little rituals remaining between the brothers and their families. A turkey or goose raised on one of David’s farms would be put on the train from Denbigh as a Red Star parcel, to arrive at Euston in time for Christmas or Easter. Then one year the parcel turned out to be a bit whiffy, and after that the custom lapsed, having lost its justification (immaculate bird) and its ability to regulate family tension.
The first-born seems to have all the advantages, but it doesn’t need to be so. There was a Jenny Mars some generations back in the family tree, and David had been given ‘Mars’ as his middle name. In his case it was natural and organic rather than something surgically implanted by deed poll, even if it wasn’t technically part of his surname. There was no reason why David shouldn’t add it in hyphenated form to the name of the family firm. It certainly lent a bit of class and memorability to the side of a lorry.
Still, when in the 1980s David’s daughter Jenny was getting married, the printed invitations included the hyphen for the whole Llansannan branch of the family. Dad wouldn’t have minded that, except that the invitation sent to the London branch omitted ours. This gave the impression of a calculated snub, since family names are so deeply rooted in the brain, not subject to the ordinary erosions. But why would David want to snub him, at the same time as asking him to make a speech at the reception? Sheila advised him to hold his horses and say nothing. With an effort, he did.
His speech at the reception, held at the Hotel Seventy Degrees, Colwyn Bay, went down well. Of course public speaking is what barristers and judges do for a living, and it’s no more surprising that they should perform satisfactorily in social space than it is for the schoolchild’s dad who happens to be a professional cricketer to make a creditable showing at the Fathers’ Day match. Dad’s approach to the art of the after-dinner speech was an odd combination of the slapdash and the scrupulous. He would often not know what he was going to say when the meal began, and would make notes on the menu as it progressed, but after the event he would make a record of what jokes he had told on what occasion, so as to avoid repeating himself if he was asked back after a great success.
I studied his method of preparation for Jenny’s wedding. Five minutes riffling through the entries on Love and Marriage in his dictionary of quotations became a robust quarter-hour of jovial showmanship. Any hyphen-based tension between the brothers melted away in the glow of his performance.
It wasn’t long before David’s second daughter, Eleri, got married in her turn. Again Dad was asked to speak, and again the invitation suppressed our rightful hyphen and paraded the impostor. This time there would be no holding of horses, and Dad would not be reined in. I remember Sheila hovering in the background while he made the phone call to his brother, willing him to a moderate statement of grievance. He didn’t do badly, saying he would be happy to speak at Eleri’s wedding reception, but only if a new invitation was issued with his name correctly spelled. David tried some conciliation of an inflammatory sort by saying, ‘It’s a very small thing to get so worked up about, Bill,’ and Dad said, ‘Then you will oblige me in this small matter.’
A hyphen is indeed a small thing, but if David had really thought so his usage would have been less consistent. He was certainly making a point of some sort. Hyphens weren’t rationed. There was no originary hyphen, primal platinum ingot of nominal linkage, kept in a vault somewhere (like the ur-kilogram), protected by the sort of double-key protocol devised for keeping nuclear weapons in safe hands.