19 KiB
Chapter Three: The First Visit
Gerald did not like to go to accountants' offices. This was not a formal policy. It was not written in the Inland Revenue manual, which was a thick, beige book that he kept on the shelf above his desk and which he consulted with the frequency and the reverence of a man who reads the Bible. The manual said, in Section 14, Paragraph 3, Subsection (b), that "visits to the premises of a taxpayer or their agent may be undertaken where the nature of the inquiry necessitates direct examination of records or documentation that cannot be obtained by correspondence." It did not say, "Gerald Firth, you must not go to accountants' offices because you dislike them." And yet there it was, the dislike, sitting in Gerald's chest like a small, warm stone, and it was, he was fairly certain, not a rational dislike. It was not that accountants were unpleasant people, or that their offices were inherently hostile environments. It was something more subtle than that. It was the smell. Accountants' offices, in Gerald's experience, had a smell, a particular, inescapable smell that was part paper, part toner, part the faintly sweet, faintly chemical odour of the specific brand of instant coffee that accountants drank in industrial quantities, and part something else, something that Gerald could not quite identify but which reminded him, inexplicably, of the inside of a church, not a pleasant church, not the kind with the stained glass and the flowers and the small, warm cats that slept on the pews, but a cold church, a bureaucratic church, a church in which the priest was a man in a grey suit who looked at you over the top of his reading glasses and said, "Can you tell me why you are here, Mr. Firth?" in a voice that was not unkind but was thoroughly, exhaustingly, irredeemably uninterested.
And yet he had to go. The file demanded it. Mrs. Underwood's return was, on its face, a small thing. A minor irregularity. The kind of thing that could be resolved by a letter, a gentle letter, a letter that said, in effect, "Dear Mrs. Underwood, we have noticed a small discrepancy in your return and we would be grateful if you could provide some additional information. Thank you, etc." But Gerald had looked at the file again, and he had looked at it a third time, and he had noticed something that the letter from the referral unit had not mentioned. Something small. Something in the way the three deductions were structured, the way they interlocked, the way they fit together like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that had, at some point, been deliberately separated and then re-assembled with a precision that suggested not a single pair of hands but a method, a system, a school of thought.
And he had noticed the name. Ashworth & Dale. He had typed it into the master file, which was a great, groaning, mechanical beast of a thing that occupied an entire room on the first floor and which had, at various times in its history, been described by the staff as "a filing cabinet," "a document," "a small, low-level act of God," and, on one memorable occasion, by Mr. Pemberton, as "a fucking filing cabinet," after a particularly unproductive twenty-minute search for a document that turned out to be in his own desk drawer. The master file had, under Ashworth & Dale, Croydon, a single entry: a reference, dated 1981, to a "minor query" regarding a client in Norbury, which had been resolved by correspondence and had not been pursued. A single entry. Three years of activity, and a single entry.
This was, Gerald thought, either a sign of a very good accountant, or a sign of a very good file. And he was not sure which one it was, and the uncertainty was, in its way, more unsettling than either certainty would have been.
He put on his coat. It was a brown coat, not beige, because beige was, as he had already established, the colour of his office, and he did not wish to become, in the course of a working day, a single, continuous beige organism. Under the coat he wore a grey suit, a white shirt, and a tie that was, in his wife's words, "the colour of a bruise that has almost healed but not quite." He put his leather notebook in his inside pocket. He put the manila envelope in his briefcase. He turned off the fluorescent tube, which made a small, sad clicking sound as it died, and he walked down the four flights of stairs to the ground floor and out into the March air, which was cold and grey and smelled, distantly, of the diesel from the buses that ran along Sutherland Road.
The walk to 14 Wellington Road was not far. Perhaps five minutes, at Gerald's pace, which was a pace that Doreen described as "the walk of a man who is not so much walking as advancing with great caution, as though he suspects the ground may be a metaphor." Gerald did not suspect the ground was a metaphor. He simply walked at a speed that allowed him to observe things. The specific pattern of the paving slabs. The way the two roses in the front garden of 14 Wellington Road were, in fact, not roses at all but a species of Rosa that the greengrocer's had sold him as "roses" but which were, in fact, a type of Rosa canina, a wild dog rose, which was not, strictly, a rose in the way that the word was commonly understood, but was, botanically, in the genus of roses, and Gerald thought: this is a small thing, but it is a true small thing, and it is the sort of thing that I notice, and the noticing is not a flaw, it is a function, the way that the eye is a function of the head, and I would not be me *without it.
He arrived at 14 Wellington Road at 11:47 a.m. The door was a dark green, with a brass knocker in the shape of a lion's head, which was, Gerald thought, an odd choice for an accountants' office, and a small brass plaque beside the handle that read: ASHWORTH & DALE, CHARTERED ACCOUNTANTS, EST. 1962. PLEASE RING AND WAIT TO BE ADMIITED.
He rang the bell. He waited. He did not ring the bell again. He was not a man who rang bells twice.
The door was opened by a woman in a purple skirt suit.
"Good morning," said Gerald. "My name is Gerald Firth. I'm with the Inland Revenue, Croydon. I'm here regarding a matter of correspondence with Mrs. Patricia Underwood, of 63 High Street. I believe you act for her?"
The woman looked at him. She looked at him for a long time. Not in an unpleasant way. In a measuring way. As though she were holding him up to a ruler and trying to work out, from the length of his shadow, the time of day.
"Yes," she said. "I do. I'm Vivienne Ashworth."
"Thank you, Mrs. Ashworth. I'm afraid I need to look at Mrs. Underwood's records for the 1982/83 year. There's a query on the return. A small one, I think, but I need to go through the figures."
Vivienne looked at him again. She looked at his brown coat. She looked at his grey suit. She looked at his tie, which was, in fact, not the colour of a bruise that had almost healed but the colour of a bruise that had fully healed, which was a sort of pale, yellowish green, and which Vivienne thought was, in a way, a braver colour than the bruise-that-hadn't-healed, because it meant the injury was over, that the body had moved on, that the skin had repaired itself.
"Come in," she said.
She led him through the front hall, which smelled of the cold church, the paper and the toner and the faintly sweet chemical coffee, and past a small sitting room in which a television was on, playing the BBC news, and into the office at the back of the ground floor, which was, Gerald noted, not beige. It was a sort of institutional cream, which was, he admitted to himself, only slightly different from beige, but the difference was, in this context, enough.
Vivienne showed him to a chair. It was a wooden chair, not a leather one, and it was slightly wobbly, and Gerald sat down on it and felt it wobble and thought: this is a wobbly chair, and I am sitting on a wobbly chair, and the wobbliness is not a metaphor, it is a chair.
"Tea?" Vivienne asked.
"No, thank you. You're quite right."
"Right about what?"
"The chair. The wobble. I'm managing."
Vivienne looked at him again. This time the looking was different. Less measuring. More curious. She went to a filing cabinet, which was not beige but a sort of institutional grey, and she pulled out a file. She brought it to the small desk at the centre of the office and sat down on the other side of it.
"Mrs. Underwood," she said. "A very pleasant woman. Retired head teacher. She comes in twice a year, usually in January, usually on a Tuesday, usually at ten o'clock, and she brings a handbag with her that is, I believe, the colour of a very old plum, and she asks for a biscuit, and I give her a digestive, and she eats it while she waits, and she asks me about my husband, and I tell her he's not here, and she says, 'That's a pity, Gerald,' and I say, 'Yes, it is,' and she says, 'He's a nice man, I'm sure,' and I say, 'Yes, he is,' and then we get on with the work. It's a very pleasant arrangement."
Gerald blinked. "You call your husband Gerald?"
"I call myself Gerald?"
"No. Mrs. Underwood. She calls you Gerald."
Vivienne paused. She looked at the file in front of her. She looked at Gerald.
"She does that," she said. "Every year. I don't know why. I've asked her. She said, 'Well, you have the air of a Gerald, Mrs. Ashworth.' I said, 'I'm sorry, I'm Vivienne.' She said, 'Of course you are, dear, but you have the air of a Gerald.' And then she ate her digestive and we did the accounts. I haven't thought about it since."
Gerald felt the small stone in his chest shift. "That's... rather odd."
"Yes," said Vivienne. "It is. But it's her little thing. I don't mind. It's not unpleasant."
They looked at each other. The television in the next room was still on. The newsreader was talking about something involving the miners' strike, and the sound of his voice filtered through the wall in a low, muffled murmur, like a radio in another room that you cannot quite turn off.
"All right," Gerald said. "The query. Mrs. Underwood's return declares a taxable income of nil. But the file shows a Teachers' Superannuation pension of £487.50, a building society interest income of approximately £34.12, and ownership of a property in Epsom. The pension alone, at the current rate, should produce a liability of approximately £47. The interest is below the threshold, which is fine. But the structure of the return, the way the pension is reclassified, the way the interest is categorised as 'exempt' on the grounds of 'incidental personal investment'—that's not standard. That's not the way the practice normally files a retired person's return."
Vivienne was quiet for a moment. She was quiet in a way that was not evasive. It was the quiet of a person who is choosing a sentence, who is holding several sentences in her mind and testing them, like a musician holding several notes in the air and deciding which one to play.
"The structure is correct," she said, eventually. "The pension is reclassified as non-earned income, which is accurate. She's not earning it. She received it, in the way that one receives a letter. The interest is classified as exempt under Section 322 of the ICTA 1970, which is a valid reading of the statute. The property in Epsom is her primary residence, which is exempt from Capital Gains Tax under the private residence allowance. None of this is unusual. None of this is wrong."
"It's not wrong," Gerald agreed. "It's unusual. The combination. The three of them together. It's as though someone took a standard retired person's return and rebuilt it, piece by piece, to make the income disappear. Not to hide it. To restructure it. Which is, I suppose, what you do. Tax planning."
Vivienne nodded. She picked up a pencil from the desk. She turned it over in her fingers. She did not write anything.
"We plan," she said. "That's the word I use. We plan. We look at the numbers, and we look at the shape of the numbers, and we ask: is there a better shape? A shape that is truer? A shape that the legislation intends but that the form doesn't quite capture? And if there is, we make the change. We don't hide the income. We relocate it. We put it in the place where it belongs, according to the statute. Not the place where the form says it belongs. The form is a simplification. The statute is the reality. And the reality is, in this case, that Mrs. Underwood's pension is not earned income, and her interest is not assessable income, and her house is not a capital asset, and the form says yes, it is, it is, it is, and I say no, it isn't, it isn't, it isn't, and the no is not a lie, it is a correction."
Gerald was quiet. He was thinking about cabbages. Specifically, he was thinking about the way a cabbage, in the dark, in the cold, builds itself, layer by layer, and how the layers are not hidden but structured, and how the structure is not a concealment but a form, and how the form is not a lie but a truth, a particular truth, the truth of this cabbage, in this dark, in this cold.
"That's a very... particular... way of looking at it," he said.
"It's the only way of looking at it," Vivienne said. "If you look at it any other way, you're just filling in a form. And I don't fill in forms. I read them. There's a difference."
Gerald stood up. The wobbly chair wobbled. He put the file back in the cabinet.
"Thank you, Mrs. Ashworth. I'll take a look at the figures and I'll be in touch. If the query is resolved, there's no further action. If it isn't, I'll need to look at the underlying records. The actual bank statements, the pension paperwork, that sort of thing."
"Of course," Vivienne said. "You can have those. I'll send them over. But I would say, gently, that the return is correct. And I would say that if you have a query about the structure of a return, the query is with the form, not with the client. Mrs. Underwood is a retired head teacher who makes a very good apple crumble. She is not a tax evader. She is not a tax dodger. She is a woman who has been planned by a competent accountant, and the planning is lawful, and the planning is tidy, and the planning is, in the language of the statute, correct."
Gerald nodded. He walked to the door. He put his hand on the handle. He turned back.
"Mrs. Ashworth. The roses in the front garden. They're not roses, are they?"
Vivienne looked at him.
"They're Rosa canina," she said. "Dog roses. The greengrocer's sold them to me as roses. I've had them for four years. I don't mind. They're in the genus."
"Yes," Gerald said. "Exactly. In the genus."
He left. The door closed. The lion's-head knocker caught the pale March light and threw a small, golden shadow on the step.
Vivienne stood in the office for a long time. She looked at the empty chair. She looked at the wobbly leg. She picked up the pencil and, on the back of Mrs. Underwood's file, she wrote, in small, neat handwriting: He's not a bad one. He notices the cabbages. God help him, he notices the cabbages.
She put the pencil down. She went to the kitchen. She took the Savoy cabbage out of the fridge. She set it on the counter. She looked at it.
The outer leaves are a sort of pale, almost angry green, she thought. As though the vegetable is holding a grudge against the sun.
She laughed. It was a small, strange laugh, the kind of laugh that a person makes when they are alone and they have just said something that was, in some small, private way, true, and the truth was so small and so specific that it could not be shared, and so it was ejected, in the form of a laugh, into the empty kitchen, where it bounced off the tiles and the counter and the fridge and disappeared.
She put the cabbage back in the fridge. She went back to the office. She picked up the telephone. She dialled Reginald Dale at home.
"Reg. It was the Inland Revenue this morning. A man named Firth. He's looking at the Underwood file."
A pause. The sound of a teacup being set down.
"Firth," Reginald said. "Is that the one in Croydon?"
"That's the one in Croydon."
"Right. Well. The Underwood file is clean, Viv. I checked it three times. The reclassification is standard. The interest exemption is a valid reading. The property is primary residence. There's nothing to worry about."
"I know it's clean, Reg. I made it clean. I want to know if Firth is going to be a problem. He looked at me for a long time when I told him about the pension reclassification. He didn't argue. He just... looked."
Another pause. Longer this time. The sound of Reginald Dale breathing, in the particular, slightly whistling way that Reginald Dale breathed, which was, Vivienne had once told him, "like a man trying to blow out a candle that was very far away."
"He's not a problem, Viv," Reginald said. "He's a beige man. You can tell by the way he talked. He's a beige man. Beige men don't argue. They file. They put the number in the drawer and they move on. The Underwood file will go in the drawer. It'll be in the drawer for six months. And then it'll be gone. You don't need to worry."
Vivienne hung up. She sat down at her desk. She opened the Mrs. Underwood file again. She looked at the three small changes she had made. The reclassification. The deduction. The adjustment. Three small changes. Three small, almost invisible moves, like three stones in a stream, and the water went around them and over them and under them, and the stream was the same stream, and the water was the same water, but the shape was different, and the shape was the point, and the shape was true.
She closed the file. She made a cup of tea. She drank it standing up, at the small kitchen table, and she watched the Savoy cabbage through the fridge door, and she thought: he noticed the cabbages. He noticed the cabbages, and he said in the genus, and he left, and the door closed, and the lion's head caught the light.
She did not know why it mattered. She did not know why the small, specific, cabbage details of the conversation had lodged in her mind like a splinter, like a small, bright, true thing that could not be ignored. She did not know that, in a beige office a quarter of a mile to the east, a man in a grey suit was sitting at a beige desk, in a beige room, in a beige building, and was writing, in a small leather notebook, in his careful, precise hand: Savoy. The outer leaves are pale. The inner leaves are tight. The heart is white. There is a quality to the heart of a Savoy that I cannot quite name. It is the quality of a question that has not yet been asked.
He closed the notebook. He made a fresh pot of tea. He went back to his desk. He opened the file on Ashworth & Dale. He began, methodically, to read.