evening at the casino there. “Come along for the jolly, if you like.”
“Sure,” I said. “Thanks.” I had always enjoyed the mixture of adrenaline and despair which goes with trying to Pelmanizeyour number to come up; it had been years since I had sat up till dawn at Monte Carlo or the Venice Lido listening to the rattlesnake
tick-tickety-tick
of an ivory ball bouncing from compartment to compartment of a roulette wheel. The prospect of doing so in Douglas, Isle of Man, made the gale warnings on the wireless easier to bear.
We took to the road, where I was intrigued by the sparse traffic. Elderly Ford Populars, like black sedan chairs, were still going here, at a breakneck twenty-five miles an hour. There were Morris Minors, their paintwork waxed and polished down almost to bare metal, of the model that I remembered district nurses driving in England in my childhood. Every so often a new gray Daimler or Mercedes, far too big for these narrow lanes, came stalking through the greenery. As we squeezed past, window to window with the gleaming fatties, our nearside wheels deep in a hedge, my companion remarked on the obvious.
“Tax exile,” he said, in a voice that was oddly censorious for a man who went in for useful dodges of his own.
“What’s your company called?” I asked.
“My company? Oh … Stepma Securities Offshore (I.O.M.) Ltd.,” he said, trying to throw the name away fast. But it wasn’t a name that took kindly to being thrown away.
“Whose stepmother? Yours?”
“
Stepmar
. With an
r
.” Rabbits scarpered away from us up the lane ahead in cowardly contrast to the impudent bunny ears of Stepmar’s Playboy Club tie. “Stephen and Margaret. My ex. Had to buy her out, of course, after the divorce. Cost a bomb. You married?”
“I was once.”
We stopped at a level crossing and waited for a bright green train to go by on the miniature railway, its heavy rolls of steam flattened by the building wind.
“Anyone can land an idea on the beach,” said the offshore company. “The problem is to get it off.”
“What?”
“Sorry. Just thinking.”
The landscape was full of things that I couldn’t rememberseeing since my childhood—steam trains, old cars, squads of butterflies, deep tangled hedgerows full of wildflowers. Beatrix Potter rabbits. We turned a corner into a darkening woody dell and crossed a small stone bridge.
“Hello, Fairies!” Stepmar said, then looked considerably embarrassed. “Fairy Bridge. You’re supposed to—ah—always say hello to the fairies. They’re all superstitious as hell round here. By the way. Important tip. Never mention r-a-t-s. That can cause real trouble. Always call them “long-tails” if you have to.”
“Are there a lot of ra—”
“Shh!” He accelerated away from the spot where I’d said the word. “Rented cars. They’ve always got their systems clogged. You’ve got to give them a good blow-through with the gas. Yes, actually. Place is swarming with long-tails. They’re bigger than the cats.”
The country we were passing through was doing something funny to my sense of time and space. Each village was separated from the next by wild tracts of moorland and mountains; but a whole Dartmoor or Peak District would come and go within sixty seconds or so, and the mountains, impressively rocky and barren, were just a few hundred feet high, no more than hummocks, really. They made the sheep that grazed on them look as big as shire horses, and modest, private peat diggings at the sides of the road had the air of major industrial excavations. The villages themselves had the same stunted and foreshortened quality: cinder-block bungalows mucked in with squat stone cottages roofed in slate. Little houses, little gardens, little farms, little mountains, little towns … everything looked squashed and Lilliputian. Then, just occasionally, something genuinely huge would happen: a transplanted Tuscan villa with shabby palms showing over its
“Sure,” I said. “Thanks.” I had always enjoyed the mixture of adrenaline and despair which goes with trying to Pelmanizeyour number to come up; it had been years since I had sat up till dawn at Monte Carlo or the Venice Lido listening to the rattlesnake
tick-tickety-tick
of an ivory ball bouncing from compartment to compartment of a roulette wheel. The prospect of doing so in Douglas, Isle of Man, made the gale warnings on the wireless easier to bear.
We took to the road, where I was intrigued by the sparse traffic. Elderly Ford Populars, like black sedan chairs, were still going here, at a breakneck twenty-five miles an hour. There were Morris Minors, their paintwork waxed and polished down almost to bare metal, of the model that I remembered district nurses driving in England in my childhood. Every so often a new gray Daimler or Mercedes, far too big for these narrow lanes, came stalking through the greenery. As we squeezed past, window to window with the gleaming fatties, our nearside wheels deep in a hedge, my companion remarked on the obvious.
“Tax exile,” he said, in a voice that was oddly censorious for a man who went in for useful dodges of his own.
“What’s your company called?” I asked.
“My company? Oh … Stepma Securities Offshore (I.O.M.) Ltd.,” he said, trying to throw the name away fast. But it wasn’t a name that took kindly to being thrown away.
“Whose stepmother? Yours?”
“
Stepmar
. With an
r
.” Rabbits scarpered away from us up the lane ahead in cowardly contrast to the impudent bunny ears of Stepmar’s Playboy Club tie. “Stephen and Margaret. My ex. Had to buy her out, of course, after the divorce. Cost a bomb. You married?”
“I was once.”
We stopped at a level crossing and waited for a bright green train to go by on the miniature railway, its heavy rolls of steam flattened by the building wind.
“Anyone can land an idea on the beach,” said the offshore company. “The problem is to get it off.”
“What?”
“Sorry. Just thinking.”
The landscape was full of things that I couldn’t rememberseeing since my childhood—steam trains, old cars, squads of butterflies, deep tangled hedgerows full of wildflowers. Beatrix Potter rabbits. We turned a corner into a darkening woody dell and crossed a small stone bridge.
“Hello, Fairies!” Stepmar said, then looked considerably embarrassed. “Fairy Bridge. You’re supposed to—ah—always say hello to the fairies. They’re all superstitious as hell round here. By the way. Important tip. Never mention r-a-t-s. That can cause real trouble. Always call them “long-tails” if you have to.”
“Are there a lot of ra—”
“Shh!” He accelerated away from the spot where I’d said the word. “Rented cars. They’ve always got their systems clogged. You’ve got to give them a good blow-through with the gas. Yes, actually. Place is swarming with long-tails. They’re bigger than the cats.”
The country we were passing through was doing something funny to my sense of time and space. Each village was separated from the next by wild tracts of moorland and mountains; but a whole Dartmoor or Peak District would come and go within sixty seconds or so, and the mountains, impressively rocky and barren, were just a few hundred feet high, no more than hummocks, really. They made the sheep that grazed on them look as big as shire horses, and modest, private peat diggings at the sides of the road had the air of major industrial excavations. The villages themselves had the same stunted and foreshortened quality: cinder-block bungalows mucked in with squat stone cottages roofed in slate. Little houses, little gardens, little farms, little mountains, little towns … everything looked squashed and Lilliputian. Then, just occasionally, something genuinely huge would happen: a transplanted Tuscan villa with shabby palms showing over its
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