The accompanying photograph, it is fair to say, showed Julia to some advantage, though emphasising, to an extent that Ragwort would have frowned on, the décolletage previously mentioned. It showed Roland Devereux, on the other hand, at one of those moments when even the most photogenic of actors can hardly appear at his best, that is to say when a military gentleman of advanced years is emptying a plate of spaghetti over him.
“Do you think I can sue them,” said Julia, “for calling me nubile?”
“I fear not,” I said. “As you know, it means merely that you are of marriageable age, though no doubt the readers of the Scuttle believe it to have some more stimulating significance. Never mind, Julia, there can be few such people among your acquaintance — one never meets anyone who actually reads the Scuttle.”
“I know,” said Julia despondently, “but everyone always knows what’s in it. Extraordinary, isn’t it?”
There was nothing I could say to persuade the poor creature that she would ever again be able to show her face in Guido’s, or in any other restaurant in London, or in any place frequented by the theatrical profession, or indeed anywhere within fifty miles of any newsagent selling copies of the Scuttle. She began to reflect on the possibility of emigrating to the British Virgin Islands.
I had been glancing from time to time towards the increasing throng of men in pinstriped suits gathered round the registration desk, where pretty girls in uniforms were issuing identity badges and bound copies of the lecture notes. I could discern no one, however, who seemed to correspond to the impression I had formed of Gideon Darkside.
The only one who at all attracted my notice was a man who looked to be of a very different sort from the un-charismatic accountant. Though no less soberly dressed than the others, he was somehow of a more carefree and lighthearted demeanour than was generally characteristic of the participants in the seminar. He had twice seemed to be disposed to move in our direction, but then to think better of it and turn away. Finally, however, he appeared to make up his mind to approach.
On observing him, Julia blushed and spilt her coffee over her lecture notes.
I had not at first glance supposed him the sort of man to whom Julia would be susceptible. Tawny-haired and amber-eyed, like a slightly dilapidated pet lion, he had passed by some twenty years the perfection — as Julia esteems it — of the quarter century, and was of a build rather muscular than slender; but he had not had the carelessness to lose his figure or the misfortune to lose his hair, and his manner of dress, though at first sight suggesting the casual, revealed to a more attentive gaze the fastidious elegance which Julia always finds so attractive in others. He looked, moreover, like a man who would laugh at her jokes.
He greeted her with the slight apprehensiveness often to be observed in men when they meet after some lapse of time a woman last encountered in conditions of erotic intimacy; but his voice was singularly pleasing, echoing the charming cadences of Dublin.
“Hello, Patrick,” said Julia, making a vague and entirely useless gesture towards her inadequately combed hair, “what a nice surprise. I didn’t see your name on the list.”
“Surely to God, Julia,” said the Irishman, “you don’t think I’d come to a thing like this under my own name, do you, with spies from the Revenue lurking in every corner? I have colleagues who’d go to much greater lengths than simply travelling under a false name. They’d think it was insanely reckless of me to come to the U.K. without even putting on a false beard.”
It was clear — though Julia, having evidently forgotten my presence and perhaps also my name, was plainly incapable of performing an introduction — that the Irishman was Patrick Ardmore. There was no prospect, however, of her leading the conversation into channels useful to my enquiry: I judged it discreet to melt, as it were, into the background, leaving her to her blushings and burblings until the announcement of the first lecture.
To the actual or prospective owner of any considerable fortune, the morning’s proceedings would doubtless have been of absorbing interest. Such a person would have listened spellbound, I daresay, while Julia and her fellow speakers debated the schemes and stratagems by which income or capital may be protected from the grasping fingers of the Inland Revenue, comparing the merits of Panamanian private companies, Liechtenstein anstalts, and Cayman Island trusts, and earnestly drawing attention to the fascinating opportunities offered by the double taxation treaty with Ireland.
The rewards of Scholarship, however, are not of a material nature, and I fear that my attention wandered. Still, the management of the Godolphin Hotel had provided me with a comfortable chair, an abundance of iced water, and a handsomely bound notepad to scribble on. If I was wasting my time, it was at least in conditions of greater luxury than are to be found in the lecture halls of Oxford.
The time came for questions. From a few rows behind me a voice originating in that part of the Midlands where everyone seems to suffer permanently from a slight cold in the head addressed the platform in a tone of some resentment. We had heard a lot, said the voice, about domicile and residence and suchlike technicalities, and the lady lawyer had talked as if there was a big difference between tax that wasn’t payable and tax that the Revenue couldn’t recover. These technical distinctions might be very interesting, said the voice, to highly paid lawyers sitting in Lincoln’s Inn, but quite frankly they weren’t much help to a simple hardworking accountant trying to give practical advice to real-life clients. What the voice had to tell its clients was whether they’d have to pay tax or not, and if they didn’t, then the voice quite frankly didn’t give a row of beans whether that was because it wasn’t payable or because it wasn’t recoverable.
With the composure of a young man not easily shocked, the chairman invited Julia to reply.
“It really rather depends,” said Julia, “on how much one minds about going to prison. Let us suppose, for example, that you advise a client to remove all his assets from this country in order to avoid tax on his death. If your client is domiciled outside the United Kingdom, then the result of his taking your advice will be that there is no tax liability. So your advice is perfectly proper, and if you failed to give it you would probably be liable for professional negligence. On the other hand, if your client were domiciled in the United Kingdom, the result would be that there was still a liability but the Revenue couldn’t enforce it. In these circumstances you would probably be guilty of criminal conspiracy, and you could be sent to prison for it. But I agree, of course, that if you don’t mind about that, then the distinction’s of very trifling importance.”
“In steering the difficult course between the Scylla of negligence and the Charybdis of conspiracy,” said the chairman, “it is always prudent to obtain the advice of Counsel. I think we’d all agree about that.” The speakers, all members of the Revenue Bar, nodded their approval of this satisfactory conclusion. “I hope that answers your question, Mr. — Mr. Darkside, isn’t it?”
I looked round in time to identify the questioner, who was shaking his head in manifest dissatisfaction. Cantrip had not wronged Gideon Darkside in suggesting that he was of cadaverous aspect, for the paucity of the flesh covering his long bones had little in common with the muscular leanness of health; his thinning black hair lay lank across his skull, and his skin had the pallor of a fish which has been dead too long to make wholesome eating.