The First Rumpole Omnibus

by John Mortimer

  I lit a small cigar and read on in my instructions, and, as I read, the wonder grew that an Honourable Member, with a wife and family and a house in Hampstead Garden Suburb, should put it all at risk for a moment of unwelcomed pleasure on the floor of his committee room by night. I had heard of political suicide, but this was ridiculous, and I believed that any jury would find it incredible too. Of course at that time I hadn’t had the pleasure of meeting Mrs Kenneth Aspen.

  ‘So Bumble Whitelock, when they made him Chief Justice of the Seaward Isles, I don’t know, some God-forsaken hole, had this man in the dock before him, found guilty of living on immoral earnings, and he was puzzled about the sentence. So he sent a runner down to the Docks where the old Chief Justice was boarding a P. 8c O. steamer home with the urgent message, “How much do you give a ponce?” Look, I’ll do this…’

  It was my practice to retire with my old clerk Albert to Pommeroy’s Wine Bar in Fleet Street at the end of a day’s work to strengthen myself with a glass or two of claret before braving the tube and She Who Must Be Obeyed. During such sessions I seek to divert Albert with a joke or two, usually of a legal nature. I was in full swing when one of the girls who works at Pommeroy’s interrupted us with the full glasses of Chateau Fleet Street. Albert had his wallet out and was paying for the treat.

  ‘No, sir. Quite honestly.’ I happened to see the note as Albert handed it over. It was marked with a small red cross in the corner.

  ‘All right. My turn next. “So the message was,” I returned to my story, “How much do you give a ponce?” and the answer came back immediately from the old Chief Justice by very fast rickshaw - “Never more than two and six!” Cheers.’

  I don’t know why but that story always makes me laugh. Albert was laughing politely also.

  ‘Never more than two and six! You like that one, do you Albert?’

  ‘I’ve always liked it, sir.’

  ‘It’s like a bloody marriage, Albert. We’ve got to know each other’s anecdotes.’

  ‘Perhaps you’d like a divorce, sir. Let young Henry do your clerking for you?’

  I looked over to the bar. Erskine-Brown was having a drink with Henry and Dianne, they were drinking Vermouth and Henry seemed to be showing some photographs.

  ‘Henry? We’d sit in here over a Cinzano Bianco, and he’d show me the colour snaps of his holiday in Majorca… No, Albert. We’ll rub along for a few more years. Who got me this brief, for instance?’

  ‘The solicitors, sir. They like the cut of your jib.’

  I ventured to contradict my old clerk. ‘Privately paid rapes don’t fall from the sky, like apples in a high wind - however my jib is cut.’

  Then Albert told me how the job had been done, proving once again his true value as a clerk. ‘I have the odd drink in here, with Mr Myers of your instructing solicitors. Their managing clerk. Remember old Myersy, he grows prize tomatoes? Likes to be asked about them, sir. If I may suggest it.’

  ‘Fellow with glasses. Overcoat pockets stuffed with writs. Smokes a mixture of old bed socks?’ I remember Myersy.

  ‘That’s him, Mr Rumpole. He thinks our only chance is to crucify the girl.’

  ‘Seems a bit extreme.’

  Now Albert started to reminisce, recalling my old triumphs.

  ‘I remember you, sir. When you cross-examined the complainant in that indecent assault in the old Kilburn Alhambra. You brought out as he’d touched her up during the Movietone News.’

  ‘And she admitted she’d sat through the whole of Rosemarie and a half-hour documentary about wild life on the River Dee before she complained to the manager!’

  ‘As I recollect, she fainted during your questioning.’

  ‘Got her on the wing around the tenth question.’ It was true. The witness had plummeted like a partridge. Right out of the witness box!

  ‘I told old Myersy that,’ said Albert proudly.’ “Will Rumpole be afraid of attacking her?” he said. I told him, “There’s not a woman in the world my Mr Rumpole’s afraid of.”’

  I was, I suppose, a little late in returning to the mansion flat in Gloucester Road. As I hung up the coat and hat I was greeted by a great cry from the kitchen of ‘Rumpole!’ It was my wife Hilda, She Who Must Be Obeyed, and I moved towards the source of the shout, muttering, ‘Being your slave, what should I do but tend, Upon the hours and times of your desire?’

  In the kitchen, Mrs Rumpole was to be seen dimly as through a mist of feathers. She was plucking a bird.

  ‘I have no precious time at all to spend, Nor services to do till you require…”

  ‘I was watching the clock,’ Hilda told me, ignoring Shakespeare.

  ‘I’ve been watching it since half past six!’

  ‘Something blew up. A rape. I bought a bottle of plonk.’ I put my peace-offering down on the table. Hilda told me that wouldn’t be enough for the feast planned for the morrow, for which she was denuding a guinea-fowl. Our son Nick, back from his year at an American university, was bringing his intended, a Miss Erica Freyburg, to dinner with the family.

  ‘If he’s bringing Erica,’ I said, ‘I’ll slip down to the health food centre and get a magnum of carrot juice.’ I had already met my potential daughter-in-law, a young lady with strong views on dietary matters, and indeed on every other subject under the sun, whom Nick had met in Baltimore.

  ‘Sometimes I think you’re just jealous of Erica.’

  ‘Jealous? About Nicky?’ I had got the bottle of plonk open and was sitting at the kitchen table, the snow of feathers settling gently.

  ‘You want your son to be happy, don’t you?’

  ‘Of course. Of course I want him to be happy.’ Then I put my problem to Hilda. ‘Can you understand why an M.P., an Honourable Member, with a wife and a couple of kids should suddenly take it into his head to rape anyone?’

  ‘An M.P.? What side’s he on?’

  ‘Labour.’

  ‘Oh well then.’ Hilda had no doubt about it. ‘It doesn’t surprise me in the least.’

  The next day the Honourable Member, Ken Aspen, was sitting in my Chambers, flanked by his solicitor’s clerk Myers and a calm, competent, handsome woman who was introduced to me as his wife, Anna. I suggested that she might find it less embarrassing to slip out while we discussed the intimate details, perhaps to buy a hat. Well, some judges still like hats on women in Court, but Mrs Aspen, Anna, told me that she intended to stay with her husband every moment that she could. A dutiful wife, you see, and the loyalty shone out of her.

  Aspen spoke in a slightly modified public-school accent, and I thought the ‘Ken’ and the just flattened vowels were a concession to the workers, like a cloth cap on a Labour Member. Being a politician, he started off by looking for a compromise, couldn’t I perhaps have a word with Miss Bridget Evans? No, I couldn’t, nor could I form a coalition with the judge to defeat her on a vote of no confidence. I received ‘Ken’s’ permission to call him ‘Mr Aspen’ and then I asked him to tell his story.

  It seemed that it was late at night in the committee room and both Janice Crowshott, the secretary, and Paul Etherington, the agent, had gone home. Bridget Evans asked Aspen into her office, saying the duplicating machine was stuck. When he got in she closed the door, and started to talk about politics.

  ‘You’re going to tell me that the door of the duplicating room was locked so you could have a good old chat about Home Rule for Wales?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Or that it was during a few strong words about the export figures that her clothes got torn?’

  ‘She started to accuse me of being unfaithful.’

  ‘To her?’ I was puzzled.

  ‘To my principles.’

  ‘Oh. Those.’ I wanted to hear his defence, not his platitudes.

  ‘She said I’d betrayed her, and all the Party workers. I’d betrayed Socialism.’

  ‘Well, you were used to hearing that,’ I supposed. ‘That must be part of the wear and tear of life in the dear old Labo
ur Party.’

  ‘Then she started talking about Anna.’

  ‘She wanted Ken to leave me.’ Mrs Aspen was leaning forward, half smiling at me.

  ‘It was the whole set-up she objected to. The house in Hampstead Garden Suburb. The kids’ schools.’

  ‘Where do they go exactly?’

  ‘Sarah’s at the convent and Edward’s down for Westminster.’

  ‘And the loyal voters are down for the Comprehensive.’ I couldn’t resist it, but it earned me a distinctly unfriendly look from Mrs Aspen.

  ‘I think after that, she started screaming at me. All sorts of abuse. Obscenities. I can’t remember. Righteous indignation! And then she started clawing at me. Telling me I didn’t even have the courage to…’

  ‘The courage. To what?’

  ‘To make love to her. That’s what Ken believed,’ Mrs Aspen supplied the answer. She’d have made an excellent witness, and I began to regret she wasn’t on trial.

  ‘Thank you. Is that true?’

  ‘Of course it’s true. Ken made love to her. As she wanted. On the floor.’ Again Mrs Aspen provided the answer.

  ‘You believed that was what she wanted?’

  At last my client spoke up for himself. ‘Yes. Yes. That’s what I believed.’

  I lit a small cigar, and began to get a sniff of a defence. The House of Lords has decided it’s a man’s belief that matters in a rape case; there are very few women among the judges of the House of Lords. Meanwhile the Honourable Member carried on with the good work.

  ‘She was goading me. Shouting and screaming. And then, when I saw what she’d done to my face on the poster!’

  I found the election poster, scored over with a pen and torn.

  ‘You saw that then?’

  ‘Yes. Yes. I think so.’

  ‘You’d better be sure about this. You saw this poster scrawled on before anything happened?’

  ‘Yes. I’m almost sure.’

  ‘Not almost sure, Mr Aspen. Quite, quite sure?’

  ‘Well. Yes.’

  ‘She didn’t do it when you were there?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So she must have done it before she called you into the room?’

  ‘That would seem to follow,’ Mr Myers took his pipe out of his mouth for the first time.

  ‘Oh yes, Mr Myers. You see the point?’ I congratulated him.

  ‘Is it important?’ the Member asked innocently.

  ‘Oh, no. A triviality. It only means she hated your guts before anyone suggests you might have raped her. You know, Mr Aspen, if you’re applying the same degree of thought to the economy as you are to this case, no wonder the pound’s dickie.’ I have been politer to clients, but Aspen took it very well. He stood up, smiling, and said,

  ‘You’re right. The case is yours, Mr Rumpole. I’ll go back to worrying about the pound.’

  Mrs Aspen also stood and looked at me as though I was a regrettable necessity in their important lives, like drains.

  I said nothing cheering, ‘Case?’ I told them. ‘We haven’t got a case. Yet. Because at the moment, Mr Myers doesn’t know a damn thing about Miss Bridget Evans.’

  That evening the fatted guinea-fowl was consumed. I brought home three very decent bottles of claret from Pommeroy’s and we entertained Nick and his intended. It was always a treat to have Nick at home with us, even though he’d given up reading Sherlock Holmes and taken to sociology, a subject which might, for me, be entirely written in the hieroglyphics of some remote civilization. I can think of no social theory which could possibly account for such sports as Rumpole and She Who Must Be Obeyed, and I honestly don’t believe we’re exceptions, being surrounded by a sea of most peculiar, and unclassifiable individuals.

  Dinner was over, but we still sat round the table and I was giving the company one of my blue-chip legal anecdotes, guaranteed to raise a laugh. It was the one about the retiring Chief Justice of the Seaward Isles.

  ‘How much do you give a ponce!’ I was laughing myself now, in joyful anticipation of the punch line, ‘And the answer came back by very fast rickshaw, “Never more than two and six.”‘ Nick joined me in a burst of hilarity.

  Hilda said, ‘Well! Thank goodness that’s over,’ and Erica looked totally mystified. Then she told us that Nick had been offered a vacancy in the department of social studies in the University of Baltimore, which came as something of a surprise to us as we both thought Nick had settled on the job he’d been offered at Warwick.

  ‘So it’s not decided,’ Hilda said, voicing the general anxiety.

  ‘From our point of view I suppose Warwick would have certain advantages over Baltimore,’ I told Nick.

  ‘I doubt the academic standards are any higher,’ Erica was defensive.

  ‘No. But it is a great deal nearer Gloucester Road. Another glass of water?’ I rose and poured for Erica. She was a good-looking girl and seemed healthy enough, although I regretted her habit of drinking water, as I told her. ‘Scientific research has conclusively proved that water causes the hair to drop out, fallen arches and ingrowing toe nails. They should pass a law against it.’ At this point Erica did her best to raise the level of the conversation, by saying, ‘Nicky’s told me all about your work. I think it’s just great the way you stand up in Court for the underprivileged!’

  ‘I will stand up in Court for absolutely any underprivileged person in the world. Provided they’ve got Legal Aid!’

  ‘What’s your motivation - in taking on these sort of cases?’ Erica asked me seriously, and I told her, ‘My motivation is the money.’

  ‘I think you’re just rationalizing.’

  ‘He does it because he can’t resist the sound of his own voice,’ Nick, who knows most about me, told her; but I would allow no illusions.

  ‘Money! If it wasn’t for the Legal Aid cheque, I tell you, Rumpole would be silent as the tomb! The Old Bailey would no longer echo with my pleas for acquittal and the voice of the Rumpole would not be heard in the Strand. But, as it is, the poor and the underprivileged can rely on me.’

  ‘I’m sure they can,’ Erica sounded consoling.

  ‘And the Legal Aid brings us a quite drinkable claret.’ I refilled my glass. ‘From Jack Pommeroy’s Wine Bar. As a matter of fact I get privately paid sometimes. Sometimes I get a plum!’

  ‘Erica wants to come and hear you in Court,’ Nick told me and she smiled.

  ‘How could I miss it?’

  ‘Well, I’m not exactly a tourist attraction.’

  ‘If I’m going to live in England I want to know all I can about your mores,’ Erica explained. Well, if she wanted to see the natives at their primitive crafts who was I to stop her?

  ‘Come next week. Down the Bailey. Nick’ll bring you for lunch. We’ll have steak and kidney pud. Like the old days. Nick used to drop in at the Bailey when he came back from school. He enjoyed the occasional murder, didn’t you Nick? That’s settled then. We’ll have a bit of fun!’

  ‘Fun? What sort of fun?’ Erica sounded doubtful, and I told her, ‘Rape.’

  Mr Myers, of my instructing solicitors, went to the Honourable Member’s constituency and discovered gold. Miss Bridget Evans was not greatly liked in the local party, being held to be a left-wing activist, and a bloody nuisance. More important than her adherence to the late Leon Trotsky was her affair with Paul Etherington, the Labour Party agent. I was gloating over this, and other and more glorious goodies provided by the industrious Myers, when there was a knock on my door in Chambers and in filtered Erskine-Brown, glowing with some mysterious triumph.

  ‘Rumpole. One doesn’t want to bother the Head of Chambers…’

  ‘Why not bother him? He’s got very little on his mind, except settling a nice fat planning case and losing at golf to the Lord Chancellor. Guthrie Featherstone, Q.c, old sweetheart, is ripe for bothering!’ I turned my attention back to the past of Miss Bridget Evans.

  ‘It’s our head clerk,’ Erskine-Brown went on mysteriously.

 
‘Albert? You want to go and bother him?’

  Erskine-Brown could restrain himself no longer. ‘He’s a criminal! Our head clerk is a criminal, Rumpole.’

  I looked at the man with considerable disapproval. ‘As an ornament of the civil side, don’t you find that sort of word a little distasteful?’

  ‘I have proof.’ And Erskine-Brown fished a pound note out of his pocket. I examined it curiously.

  ‘Looks like a fairly conventional portrait of Her Majesty.’

  ‘There’s a red cross in the corner,’ he announced proudly. ‘I put it there. I marked the money in the petty cash!’

  I looked at my fellow barrister in astonishment.

  ‘I’ve suspected Albert for a long time. Well, I saw him in Pommeroy’s Wine Bar and I got the note he’d paid with off one of the girls. Perhaps it’s difficult for you to believe.’

  ‘Extremely!’ I stood up and fixed him with an unfriendly gaze. ‘A private eye. Taking up the Bar as a profession!’

  ‘What do you mean, Rumpole?’

  ‘I mean, in my day they used to be nasty little men in macs, sniffing round the registers in cheap hotels. They used to spy into bedrooms with field-glasses, in the ever-present hope of seeing male and female clothing scattered around. It’s the first time I ever heard of a private Dick being called to the Bar, and becoming an expert on the law of contract.’

  I handed the marked pound back to Erskine-Brown, the well-known Dick. He looked displeased.

  ‘It’s obvious that I will have to go straight to the Head of Chambers.’ As he made for the door I stopped him.

  ‘Why not?’ I said. ‘Oh just one thing that may have escaped your attention, my dear Watson.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Yesterday afternoon, I borrowed five pound notes from petty cash - no doubt notes decorated by you. And I paid for all of Albert’s drinks in Pommeroys.’

  ‘Rumpole. Are you sure?’ I could see he felt his case crumbling.

  ‘I would really advise you, Erskine-Brown, as a learned friend, not to go round Chambers making these sort of wild allegations against our clerk. A man who’s been here, old darling, since you were in nappies!’