The First Rumpole Omnibus

by John Mortimer

  ‘Then couldn’t she practise at home?’

  ‘We’re about the only Chambers without a woman, Mr Rum-pole. It’s not good for our image.’ He seemed determined, so I gave him a final thought on my way into the conference. ‘Our old clerk Albert never wanted a woman in Chambers. He said there wasn’t the lavatory accommodation.’

  So there I was at the desk having a conference in a divorce case with Miss Phillida Trant ‘sitting in’, Mr Perfect the solicitor looking grave, and the client, Mrs Thripp, leaning forward and regarding me with gentle trusting eyes. As I say, she seemed an extremely nice and respectable woman, and I wasn’t to know that she was to cause me more trouble than all the murderers I have ever defended.

  ‘As soon as you came into the room I felt safe somehow, Mr Rumpole. I knew Norman and I would be safe with you.’

  ‘Norman?’

  ‘The child of the family.’ Miss Trant supplied the information.

  ‘Thank you, Miss Trant. The little aviator in the clerk’s room. Quite. But if I’m to help you, you’ll have to do your best to help me too.’

  ‘Anything! What is it you want exactly?’ Mrs Thripp seemed entirely co-operative.

  ‘Well, dear lady, a couple of black eyes would come in extremely handy,’ I said hopefully. Mrs Thripp looked at Miss Trant, puzzled.

  ‘Mr Rumpole means, has your husband ever used physical violence?’ Miss Trant explained.

  ‘Well, no… Not actual violence.’

  ‘Pity.’ I commiserated with her. ‘Mr Thripp doesn’t show a very helpful attitude. You see, if we’re going to prove “cruelty”…’

  ‘We don’t have to, do we?’ I noticed then that Miss Trant was sitting in front of a pile of legal text books. ‘Intolerable conduct. Since the Divorce Law Reform Act 1969.’

  I thought then that it’s not the frivolity that makes women intolerable, it’s the ghastly enthusiasm, the mustard keeness to get into the lacrosse team, the relentless drive to learn the Divorce Law Reform Act by heart: that and the French perfume. I could have managed that conference quite nicely without Miss Trant. I said to her, however, as politely as possible, ‘The Divorce Law Reform Act, which year did you say?’

  ‘1969.’

  ‘Yes,’ I smiled at Mrs Thripp. ‘Well, you know how it is. Go down the Old Bailey five minutes and you’ve found they’ve passed another Divorce Reform Act. Thank you, Miss Trant, for reminding me. Now then what’s this intolerable conduct, exactly?’

  ‘He doesn’t speak,’ Mrs Thripp told me.

  ‘Well, a little silence can come as something of a relief. In the wear and tear of married life.’

  ‘I don’t think you understand,’ Mrs Thripp smiled patiently. ‘He hasn’t spoken a word to me for three years.’

  ‘Three years? Good God! How does he communicate?’ The instructing solicitor laid a number of little bits of paper on my desk.

  ‘By means of notes.’

  I then discovered that the man Thripp, who I was not in the least surprised to learn was a chartered accountant, used his matrimonial home as a sort of Post Office. When he wished to communicate with his wife he typed out brusque and businesslike notes, documents which threw a blinding light, in my opinion, on the man’s character.

  ‘To my so-called wife,’ one note read, ‘if you and your so-called son want to swim in hot water you can go to the Public Baths. From your so-called husband.’ This was fixed, it seemed, to a padlocked geyser. Another billet doux was found in the biscuit tin in the larder, ‘To my so-called wife. I have removed what you left of the assorted tea biscuits to the office for safe keeping. Are you determined to eat me into bankruptcy? Your so-called husband.’ ‘To my so-called wife. I’m going out to my Masonic Ladies’ Night tomorrow (Wednesday). It’s a pity I haven’t got a lady to take with me. Don’t bother to wait up for me. Your so-called husband, F. Thripp.’

  I made two observations about this correspondence, one was that it revealed a depth of human misery which no reasonable woman would tolerate, and the other was that all the accountant Thripp’s notes were written on an Italian portable, about ten years old.

  ‘My husband’s got an old Olivetti. He can’t really type,’ Mrs Thripp told me.

  Many years ago I scored a notable victory in the ‘Great Brighton Benefit Club Forgery’ case, and it was during those proceedings I acquired my vast knowledge of typewriters. Having solved the question of the type, however, got me no nearer the heart of the mystery.

  ‘Let me understand,’ I said to Mrs Thripp. ‘Are you interested in someone else?’

  ‘Someone else?’ Mrs Thripp looked pained.

  ‘You’re clearly an intelligent, obviously still a reasonably attractive woman.’

  ‘Thank you, Mr Rumpole,’ Mrs Thripp smiled modestly.

  ‘Are there not other fish in your particular sea?’

  ‘One man’s quite enough for me, thank you.’

  ‘I see. Apparently you’re still living with your husband.’

  ‘Living with him? Of course I’m living with him. The flat’s in our joint names.’ Mrs Thripp said this as though it explained everything. I was still bewildered.

  ‘Wouldn’t you, and the young hopeful outside, be better off somewhere else? Anywhere else?’

  ‘There’s your mother in Ruislip.’ Mr Perfect supplied the information.

  ‘Thank you Mr Perfect.’ I turned back to Mrs Thripp. ‘As your solicitor points out. Anyone’s mother in Ruislip must surely be better than life with a chartered accountant who locks up the geyser! And removes the tea biscuits to his office.’

  ‘I move out?’ Apparently the thought had never occurred to her.

  ‘Unless you’re a glutton for punishment.’

  ‘Move out? And let him get away with it?’

  I rose to my feet, and tried to put the point more clearly. ‘Your flat in Muswell Hill, scene of historic events though it may well be, is not the field of Waterloo, Mrs Thripp, if you withdraw to happier pastures there would be no defeat, no national disaster.’

  ‘Mrs Thripp is anxious about the furniture,’ Mr Perfect offered an explanation.

  ‘The furniture?’

  ‘She’s afraid her husband would dispose of the lounge suite if she left the flat.’

  ‘How much human suffering can be extracted by a lounge suite?’ I asked the rhetorical question. ‘I can’t believe it’s the furniture.’

  There was a brief silence and then Mrs Thripp asked quietly, ‘Won’t you take me on, Mr Rumpole?’

  I thought of the rent and the enormous amounts of money Sho Who Must Be Obeyed spends on luxuries like Vim. I also remembered the fact that crime seemed remarkably thin on the ground and said I, ‘Of course, dear lady. Of course I’ll take you on! That’s what I’m here for. Like an old taxi cab waiting in the rank. Been waiting quite a little time, if you want to know the truth. You snap your fingers and I’ll drive you almost anywhere you want to go. Only it’d be a help if we knew exactly what destination you had in mind.’

  ‘I’ve told Mr Perfect what I want.’

  ‘You want a divorce. Those are my instructions,’ Mr Perfect told me, but his client put it a little differently.

  ‘I want my husband taken to Court. Those are my instructions, Mr Rumpole.’

  I have spoken in these reminiscences of my old friend George Frobisher. George is a bachelor who has lived in an hotel in Kensington since his sister died. He is a gentle soul, unfitted by temperament for a knock-about career at the Bar, but he is a pleasant companion for a drink at Pommeroy’s after the heat and labour of the day. That evening I bought the first round, two large clarets, flushed with the remunerative collapse of the Thripp marriage.

  ‘Things are looking up, George,’ I raised my glass to my old friend and he, in turn, toasted me.

  ‘A little.’

  ‘There’s light at the end of the tunnel. Today I got a hundred and fifty pound brief. For a divorce.’

  ‘That’s funny. So did I.’ George soun
ded puzzled.

  ‘Sure to last at least six days. Six refreshers at fifty pounds a day. Think of that, George! Well, there’s that much to be said. For the institution of marriage?’

  ‘I never felt the need of marriage somehow,’ George told me.

  ‘With one chained friend, perhaps a jealous deadly foe, The longest and the dreariest journey go.’ I gave George a snatch of Shelley and a refill.

  ‘I’ve had a bit of an insight into marriage. Since reading that divorce brief.’ George was in a thoughtful mood.

  ‘If we were married we couldn’t sit pleasantly together,’ I told him. ‘You’d be worrying what time I got home. And when I did get home you wouldn’t be pleased to see me!’

  ‘I really can’t see why a person puts up with marriage,’ George went on. ‘When a woman starts conversing with her husband by means of little notes!’

  I looked at him curiously. ‘Got one of those, have you?’ There seemed to be an epidemic of matrimonial note-leaving.

  ‘And she cut the ends off his trousers.’ George seemed deeply shocked.

  ‘Sounds a sordid sort of case. Cheers!’ We refreshed ourselves with Pommeroy’s claret and George went on to tell me about his divorce.

  ‘He was going to an evening at his Lodge. You know what this Jezebel did? Only snipped off the ends of his evening trousers. With nail scissors.’

  ‘Intolerable conduct that, you know. Under the 1969 Act.’ I kept George abreast of the law.

  ‘Moss Bros was closed. The wretched fellow had to turn up at the Cafe Royal with bags that looked as if they’d been gnawed by rats. Well! That’s marriage for you. Thank God I live by myself, in the Royal Borough Hotel.’

  ‘Snug as a bug in there, are you George?’

  ‘We have television in the Residents’ Lounge now. Coloured television. Look here, you must dine with me there one night, Rumpole. Bring Hilda if you’d care to.’

  ‘We’d like to George. Coloured television? Well, I say. That’ll be a treat.’

  ‘Quiet life, of course. But the point of it is. A man can keep his trousers more or less safe from destruction in the Royal Borough Hotel.’

  I must admit that George Frobisher and I loitered a little in Pommeroy’s that night and, when I got home, Hilda had apparently gone up to bed; she often had an early night with a glass of milk and a library book. I went into the kitchen and switched on the light. All was quiet on the Western front, but I saw it on the table - a note from my lady wife.

  ‘If you condescend to come home, your dinner’s in the oven.’ I took the hint and was removing a red-hot plate of congealed stew from the bowels of our ancient cooker when the telephone rang in the living-room. I went to answer it and heard a woman’s voice.

  ‘I just had to ring you. I feel so alone in the world, so terribly lonely.’

  ‘Look it’s not terribly convenient. Just now.’ It was my client in the case of Thripp v. Thripp.

  ‘Don’t say that! It’s my life. How can you say it’s not convenient?’

  ‘All right. A quick word.’ I supposed the ancient stew could wait a little longer.

  ‘He’s going to say the most terrible things about me. I’ve got to see you.’

  ‘Shall we say tomorrow, four o’clock. But not here!’ I told her firmly.

  ‘I don’t know how I can wait.’

  ‘You’ve waited for three years haven’t you? Look forward to seeing you then. Goodnight now, beloved lady.’ I said that, I suppose, to cheer up Mrs Thripp and to soften the blow as I put down the receiver. Just before I did so I heard a little click, and remembered that Hilda had insisted on an extension in our bedroom.

  The next day our clerk’s room was buzzing. Henry was on the telephone dispatching barristers to far-flung Magistrates Courts. That smooth young barrister, Erskine-Brown, was opening his post and collecting papers, and Uncle Tom, old T. C. Rowley, was starting his day of leisure in Chambers by standing by the mantelpiece and greeting the workers. The ops room was even graced by the presence of our Head of Chambers, Guthrie Featherstone, Q.c, m.p., who was taking time off from such vital affairs of state as the Poultry Marketing Act to supervise Dianne who was beating out one of his learned opinions on our old standard Imperial.

  Henry told me that my divorce conference was waiting in my room, and Erskine-Brown gave his most condescending smile. ‘Divorcing now, Rumpole?’ he asked me. I told him I was and asked him if he was still foreclosing on mortgages. ‘I’m all for a bit of divorce in Chambers,’ Featherstone smiled tolerantly. ‘Widens our repertoire. You were getting into a bit of a rut with all that crime, Horace.’

  ‘Crime! It seems a better world. A cleaner world. Down at the Old Bailey,’ I told him.

  ‘Don’t you find criminal clients a little - depressing?’

  ‘Criminal clients? They behave so well.’

  ‘Really Rumpole?’ Erskine-Brown sounded quite shocked.

  ‘What do they do?’ I asked him. ‘Knock people on the head, rob banks, cause, at the worst, a temporary inconvenience. They don’t converse by means of notes. They don’t lock up the geyser. They don’t indulge in three years silence to celebrate the passage of love.’

  ‘Love? Have you become an expert on that, Rumpole?’ Erskine-Brown seemed amused. ‘Rumpole in Love. Should sell a bomb at the Solicitors’ Law Stationers.’

  ‘And I’ll tell you another great advantage of criminal customers.’ I went on. ‘They’re locked up, mostly, pending trial! They can’t ring you up at all hours of the day and night. Now you get involved in a divorce and your life’s taken over!’

  ‘We used to have all the facts of divorce cases printed out in detail in The Times,’ Uncle Tom remembered.

  ‘Oh, hello, Uncle Tom.’

  ‘It used to make amusing reading! Better than all this rubbish they print now, about the Common Market. Far more entertaining.’

  Erskine-Brown left to go about his business, not before I had told him that divorce, for all its drawbacks, was a great deal less sordid than foreclosing on mortgages and then Henry presented me with another brief, a mere twenty-five guineas this time, to be heard by old Archie McFee, the Dock Street magistrate.

  ‘You’re an old girl called Mrs Wainscott, sir,’ Henry told me. ‘Charged with keeping a disorderly house.’

  ‘An old Pro? Is this what I’ve sunk to now, Henry? Plodding the pavements! Flogging my aged charms round the Dock Street Magistrates Court!’ I checked the figure on the front of the brief. ‘Twenty-five smackers! Not bad, I suppose. For a short time in Dock Street. Makes you wonder what I could earn round the West End.’

  I left Henry then; he seemed not to be amused.

  *

  The other side, that is to say Mr F. Thripp and his legal advisers, had supplied his wife, married in some far-off and rash moment in a haze of champagne and orange blossom, with the evidence to be used against her. I was somewhat dismayed when I discovered that this evidence included an equal number of notes, typed on the same old Olivetti as that used by the husband, but travelling in the opposite direction. I picked out at random, ‘To my so-called husband. If you want your shirts washed, take them down to the office and let her do them. She does everything else for you doesn’t she? Your so-called wife.’

  ‘Oh dear, Mrs Thripp. I wish you hadn’t written this.’ I put down the note which I had been viewing through a magnifying glass to check the type. ‘By the way, whom did you suspect of doing his washing for him?’

  I looked at the client, so did Miss Trant who was ‘sitting in’ in pursuit of knowledge of Rumpole’s methods, so did Mr Perfect. Master Norman Thripp, who had joined us, sat in a corner pointing a toy sub-machine gun at me in a way I did my best to ignore.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘We had him watched Mr Rumpole,’ Mr Perfect told me.

  ‘He has an elderly secretary. Apparently she’s a grandmother. There doesn’t seem to.be anyone else.’

  ‘There doesn’t seem to be anyone else for either of you.’ I p
icked up the husband’s answer. ‘He alleges you assaulted his trousers.’

  ‘No. No I didn’t do that, Mr Rumpole.’

  ‘His evening trousers were damaged apparently.’

  ‘Probably at the cleaners. You remember, he refused to take me to his Ladies’ Night – he went on his own, so his trousers can’t have been all that bad can they?’

  ‘Did you mind him going?’ I was finding the Thripp marriage more and more mysterious.

  ‘Mind? Of course I minded.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I wanted to go with him, of course.’

  ‘You wanted to go with the man who hasn’t spoken to you for three years, who communicates by wretched little notes, who locked up your bath water?’

  At this point Mrs Thripp brought out a small lace handkerchief and started to sob.

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t know why I wanted to go with him.’

  The sobs increased in volume. I looked at Mrs Thripp with deep approval.

  ‘All right, Mrs Thripp. I’m simply asking the questions your husband’s barrister will ask unless we’re extremely lucky.’

  ‘You think my case is hopeless?’ Mrs Thripp was mopping up noisily.

  ‘Mr Rumpole’s afraid you may not make a good witness.’ It was Miss Phillida Trant, giving her learned opinion uninvited.

  ‘Miss Trant!’ I’m afraid I was somewhat sharp with her. ‘You may know all about Divorce Law Reform Acts. But I know all about witnesses. Mrs Thripp will be excellent in the box.’ I patted the still slightly heaving Thripp shoulder. ‘Well done, Mrs Thripp! You broke down at exactly the right stage of the cross-examination.’

  I picked up the first of the wretched chartered accountant’s notes; I was by now looking forward to blasting him out of the witness box, and saw, ‘I am going to my Masonic Ladies’ Night. It’s a pity I haven’t got a lady to take with me.’ ‘There’s not a man sitting as a judge in the Family Division,’ I promised her, ‘who won’t find that note from your husband absolutely intolerable.’

  When the Thripps, mère et fils, had been shepherded out by their solicitor, Perfect, Miss Trant loitered and said she wanted my advice. I expressed some surprise that she didn’t know it all; but I lit a small cigar and, in the best tradition of the Bar, prepared to have my brains picked. It seemed that Miss Trant had been entrusted with a brief for the prosecution, before that great tribunal, old Archibald McFee at the Dock Street Magistrates Court.