The First Rumpole Omnibus

by John Mortimer

  I soldiered on. ‘The Reverend Mordred Skinner need not trouble to move four yards from that dock to the witness-box unless the prosecution has produced evidence that he intended to steal - and not to pay in another department.’

  ‘Mr Rumpole.’ The earth tremor grew louder. I raised my voice a semitone.

  ‘Never let it be said that a man is forced to prove his innocence! Our fathers have defied kings for that principle, members of the jury. They forced King John to sign Magna Carta and sent King Charles to the scaffold and it has been handed down even to the Inner London Sessions, Newington Causeway.’

  ‘If you let me get a word in edgeways…’

  ‘And now it is in your trust!’

  I’m not, as this narrative may have made clear, a religious man; but what happened next made me realize how the Israelites felt when the waters divided, and understand the incredulous reaction of the disciples when an uninteresting glass of water flushed darkly and smelt of the grape. I can recall the exact words of the indubitable miracle. Bullingham said, ‘Mr Rum-pole. I entirely agree with everything you say. And,’ he added glowering threateningly at the Scout for the prosecution, ‘I shall direct the jury accordingly.’

  The natural malice of the Bull had been quelled by his instinctive respect for the law. He found there was no case to answer.

  I met my liberated client in the Gents, a place where his sister was unable to follow him. As we stood side by side at the porcelain I congratulated him.

  ‘I was quite reconciled to losing. I don’t think my sister would have stood by me somehow. The disgrace you see. I think,’ he looked almost wistful, ‘I think I should have been alone.’

  ‘You’d have been unfrocked.’

  ‘It might have been extremely restful. Not to have to pretend to any sort of sanctity. Not to pretend to be different. To be exactly the same as everybody else.’

  I looked at him standing there in the London Sessions loo, his mac over his arm, his thin neck half-strangled by a dog collar. He longed for the relaxed life of an ordinary sinner, but he had no right to it.

  ‘Don’t long for a life of crime, old darling,’ I told him. ‘You’ve obviously got no talent for it.’

  Upstairs we met Evelyn and Mr Morse. The sister gave me a flicker of something which might have been a smile of gratitude.

  ‘It was a miracle,’ I told her.

  ‘Really? I thought the judge was exceedingly fair. Come along, Mordred. He’s somewhere else you know, Mr Rumpole. He can’t even realize it’s all over.’ She attacked her brother again. ‘Better put your mac on, dear. It’s raining outside.’

  ‘Yes, Evelyn. Yes. I’ll put it on.’ He did so, obediently.

  ‘You must come to tea in the Rectory, Mr Rumpole.’ I had a final chilly smile from Evelyn.

  ‘Alas, dear lady. The pressure of work. These days I have so little time for pleasure.’

  ‘Say goodbye to Mr Rumpole, Mordred.’

  The cleric shook my hand, and gave me a confidential aside. ‘Goodbye, Mr Rumpole. You see it was entirely a family matter. There was no need for anyone to know anything about it.’

  And so he went, in his sister’s charge, back to the isolation of the Rectory.

  Will no one tell me what she sings?

  Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow

  For old, unhappy, far-off things

  And murders long ago.

  Had I, against all the odds, learned something from the Reverend? Was I now more conscious of the value of secrecy, of not dropping bombs of information which might cause ruin and havoc on the family front? It seems unlikely, but I do not know why else I was busily destroying the archive, pushing the photographs into the unused fireplace in my Chambers and applying a match, and dropping the durable articles, including the ostrich egg, into the waste-paper basket. As the flames licked across the paper and set Mrs Tempest the arsonist curling into ashy oblivion the door opened to admit Miss Trant.

  ‘Rumpole! What on earth are you doing?’

  I turned from the smoking relics.

  ‘You keep things, Miss Trant? Mementoes? Locks of hair? Old letters, tied up in ribbon? “Memories”,’ I started to sing tunelessly, ‘ “were made of this.”

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘I’ve got my first brief. From when I prosecuted you in Dock Street.’ This was the occasion when I tricked Miss Trant into boring the wretched Beak with a huge pile of law, and so defeated her.* It was not an incident of which I am particularly proud.

  ‘Destroy it. Forget the past, eh? Miss Trant. Look to the future!’

  ‘All right. Aren’t you coming up to Guthrie Featherstone’s room? We’re laying on a few drinks for George.’

  ‘George? Yes, of course. He’ll have a lot to celebrate.’

  Guthrie Featherstone, Q.c, M.P., the suave and elegant Conselvative-Labour M.P. for somewhere or another who, when he is not passing the ‘Gas Mains Enabling Bill’ or losing politely at golf to various of Her Majesty’s judges, condescends to exercise his duties as Head of Chambers (a post to which I was due to succeed by order of seniority of barristers in practice, when I was pipped at the post by young Guthrie taking silk. Well, I didn’t want it anyway†); Guthrie Featherstone occupied the best room in Chambers (first floor, high windows, overlooking Temple Gardens) and he was engaged in making a speech to our assembled members. In a corner of the room I saw our clerk Henry and Dianne the typist in charge of a table decorated by several bottles of Jack Pommeroy’s cooking champagne. I made straight for the booze, and at first Featherstone’s speech seemed but a background noise, like Radio Four.

  ‘It’s well known among lawyers that the finest advocates never make the best judges. The glory of the advocate is to be opinionated, brash, fearless, partisan, hectoring, rude, cunning and unfair.’

  ‘Well done, Rumpole!’ This, of course, was Erskine-Brown.

  ‘Thank you very much, Claude.’ I raised my glass to him.

  ‘The ideal judge, however,’ Featherstone babbled on, ‘is detached, courteous, patient, painstaking and above all, quiet. These qualities are to be found personified in the latest addition to our Bench of Circuit Judges.’

  ‘ “Circus” Judges, Rumpole calls them,’ Uncle Tom said loudly, to no one in particular.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ the Q.C., M.P. concluded, ‘please raise your glasses to His Honour Judge George Frobisher.’

  Everyone was smiling and drinking. So the news had broken. George was a Circuit Judge. No doubt the crowds were dancing in Fleet Street. I moved to my old friend to add my word of congratulation.

  ‘Your health George. Coupled with the name of Mrs Ida Tempest?’

  ‘No, Rumpole. No.’ George shook his head, I thought sadly.

  ‘What do you mean, “No”? Mrs Tempest should be here. To share in your triumph. Celebrating back at the Royal Borough Hotel, is she? She’ll have the Moet on ice by the time you get back.’

  ‘Mrs Tempest left the Royal Borough last week, Rumpole. I have no means of knowing where to find her.’

  At which point we were rudely interrupted by Guthrie Featherstone calling on George to make a speech. Other members joined in and Henry filled up George’s glass in preparation for the great oration.

  ‘I’m totally unprepared to say anything on this occasion,’ George said, taking a bit of paper from his pocket to general laughter. Poor old George could never do anything off the cuff.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ George started. ‘I have long felt the need to retire from the hurly-burly of practice at the Bar.’

  ‘Comes as news to me that George Frobisher had a practice at the Bar,’ Uncle Tom said to no one much in a deafening whisper.

  ‘To escape from the benevolent despotism of Henry, now our senior clerk.’ George twinkled.

  ‘Can you do a Careless Driving at Croydon tomorrow, your Honour?’ Henry called out in the cheeky manner he had adopted since he was an office boy.

  Laughter. />
  ‘No, Henry, I can’t. So I have long considered applying for a Circuit Judgeship in a Rural Area…’

  ‘Where are you going to, George? Glorious Devon?’ Feather-stone interrupted.

  ‘I think they’re starting me off in Luton. And I hope, very soon, I’ll have the pleasure of you all appearing before me!’

  ‘Where did George say they were sending him?’ Uncle Tom asked.

  ‘I think he said Luton, Uncle Tom,’ I told him.

  ‘Luton, glorious Luton!’ Henry sometimes goes too far, for a clerk. I was glad to see that Dianne ssshed him firmly.

  ‘Naturally as a judge, as one, however humble, of Her Majesty’s judges, certain standards will be expected of me,’ George went on, I thought in a tone of some regret.

  ‘No more carousing in Pommeroy’s with Horace Rumpole!’ Uncle Tom was still barracking.

  ‘And I mean to try, to do my best, to live up to those standards. That’s really all I have to say. Thank you. Thank you all very much.’

  There was tumultuous applause, increased in volume by the cooking champagne, and George joined me in a corner of the room. Uncle Tom was induced to make his speech, traditional and always the same on all Chambers’ occasions, and George and I talked quietly together.

  ‘George. I’m sorry. About Mrs Tempest…’

  ‘It was your fault, Rumpole.’ George looked at me with an air of severe rebuke.

  ‘My fault!’ I stood amazed. ‘But I said nothing. Not a word. You know me, George. Discretion is Rumpole’s middle name. I was silent. As the tomb.’

  ‘When I brought her to dinner with you and Hilda. She recognized you at once.’

  ‘She didn’t show it!’

  ‘She’s a remarkable woman.’

  ‘I was junior Counsel, for her former husband. I’m sure he led her on. She made an excellent impression. In the witness-box.’ I tried to sound comforting.

  ‘She made an excellent impression on me, Rumpole. She thought you’d be bound to tell me.’

  ‘She thought that?’

  ‘So she decided to tell me first.’

  I stood looking at George, feeling unreasonably guilty. Somewhere in the distance Uncle Tom was going through the usual form of words.

  ‘As the oldest member of Chambers, I can remember this set before C. H. Wystan, Rumpole’s revered father-in-law, took over. It was in old Barnaby Hawks’ time and the young men were myself, Everett Longbarrow, and old Willoughby Grime, who became Lord Chief Justice of Basutoland… He went on Circuit, I understand, wearing a battered opera hat and dispensed rough justice…’

  The other barristers joined in the well-known chorus ‘Under a Bong Tree’.

  ‘As I remember, Ida Tempest got three years.’

  ‘Yes,’ said George.

  ‘Her former husband got seven.’ I was trying to cheer him up. ‘I don’t believe Ida actually applied the match.’

  ‘All the same, it was a risk I didn’t feel able to take.’

  ‘You didn’t notice the smell of burning, George? Any night in the Royal Borough Hotel…?’

  ‘Of course not! But the Lord Chancellor’s secretary had just told me of my appointment. It doesn’t do for a judge’s wife to have done three years, even with full remission.’

  I looked at George. Was the sacrifice, I wondered, really necessary? ‘Did you have to be a judge, George?’

  ‘I thought of that, of course. But I had the appointment. You know, at my age, Rumpole, it’s difficult to learn any new sort of trade.’

  ‘We had no work in those days,’ Uncle Tom continued his trip down memory lane. ‘We had no briefs of any kind. We spent our days practising chip shots, trying to get an old golf ball into the waste-paper basket with…’

  ‘A mashie niblick!’ the other barristers sang.

  ‘Well, that was as good as training as any for life at the Bar,’ Uncle Tom told them.

  I filled George’s glass. ‘Drink up, George. There may be other ladies… turning up at the Royal Borough Hotel.’

  ‘I very much doubt it. Every night when I sit at the table for one, I shall think –if only I’d never taken her to dinner at Rumpole’s! Then I might never have known, don’t you see? We could have been perfectly happy together.’

  ‘Of course. C. H. Wystan never ever took silk. But now we have a Q.C., M.P. and dear old George Frobisher, a Circus, beg his pardon, a Circuit Judge!’ Uncle Tom was raising his glass to George, his hand was trembling and he was spilling a good deal on his cuff.

  ‘Sometimes I feel it will be difficult to forgive you, Rumpole,’ George said, very quietly.

  ‘But I do recall when dear old Willoughby Grime was appointed to Basutoland, we celebrated the matter in song.’

  ‘George, what did I do?’ I protested. ‘I didn’t say anything.’ But it wasn’t true. My mere existence had been enough to deny George his happiness.

  At which point the other barristers raised their glasses to George and started to sing ‘For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow’. I left them, and went out into the silence of the Temple, where I could still hear them singing.

  Next Saturday morning I was acting the part of the native bearer with the Vim basket, following She Who Must Be Obeyed on our ritual shopping expedition.

  ‘They’ve never made George Frobisher a judge!’ My wife seemed to feel it an occasion for ridicule and contempt.

  ‘In my view an excellent appointment. I shall expect to have a good record of acquittals. In the Luton Crown Court.’

  ‘When are they going to make you a judge, Rumpole?’

  ‘Don’t ask silly questions… I’d start every Sentence with, “There but for the Grace of God goes Horace Rumpole”.’

  ‘I can imagine what she’s feeling like.’ Hilda sniffed.

  ‘She…?’

  ‘The cat-that-swallowed-the-cream! Her Honour Mrs Judge. Mrs Ida Tempest’ll think she’s quite the thing, I’ll be bound.’

  ‘No. She’s gone.’

  ‘Gone, Rumpole? What did George say about that?’

  ‘Cried, and the world cried too, “Our’s the Treasure”. Suddenly, as rare things will, she vanished.’

  We climbed on a bus, heavily laden, back to Casa Rumpole.

  ‘George is well out of it, if he wants my opinion.’

  ‘I don’t think he does.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Want your opinion.’

  Later, in our kitchen, as she stored the Vim away under the sink and I prepared our Saturday morning G and T, a thought occurred to me. ‘Do you know? I’m not sure I should’ve taken up as a lawyer.’

  ‘Whatever do you mean?’

  ‘Perhaps I should have taken up as a vicar.’

  ‘Rumpole. Have you been getting at the gin already?’

  ‘Faith not facts, is what we need, do you think?’

  Hilda was busy unpacking the saucepan scourers. Perhaps she didn’t quite get my drift.

  ‘George Frobisher has always been a bad influence, keeping you out drinking,’ she said. ‘Let’s hope I’ll be seeing more of you, now he’s been made a judge.’

  ‘I’d never have to know all these facts about people if I hadn’t set up as a lawyer.’

  ‘Of course you should have been a lawyer, Rumpole!’

  ‘Why exactly?’

  ‘If you hadn’t set up as a lawyer, if you hadn’t gone into Daddy’s Chambers, you’d never have met me, Rumpole!’

  I looked at her, suddenly seeing great vistas of what my life might have been.

  ‘That’s true,’ I said. ‘Dammit, that’s very true.’

  ‘Put the Gumption away for me, will you, Rumpole?’

  She Who Must Be Obeyed. Of course I did.

  Rumpole and the Showfolk

  I have written elsewhere of my old clerk Albert Handyside who served me very well for a long term of years, being adept at flattering solicitors’ clerks, buying them glasses of Guinness and inquiring tenderly after their tomato plants, with the result that the old
darlings were inclined to come across with the odd Dangerous and Careless, Indecent Assault, or Take and Drive A.way which Albert was inclined to slip in Rumpole’s direction. All this led to higher things such as Robbery, Unlawful Wounding and even Murder; and in general for that body of assorted crimes on which my reputation is founded. I first knew Albert when he was a nervous office boy in the Chambers of C. H. Wystan, my learned father-in-law; and when he grew to be a head clerk of magisterial dimensions we remained firm friends and often had a jar together in Pommeroy’s Wine Bar in the evenings, on which relaxed occasions I would tell Albert my celebrated anecdotes of Bench and Bar and, unlike She Who Must Be Obeyed, he was always kind enough to laugh no matter how often he had heard them before.

  Dear old Albert had one slight failing, a weakness which occurs among the healthiest of constitutions. He was apt to get into a terrible flurry over the petty cash. I never inquired into his book-keeping system; but I believe it might have been improved by the invention of the Abacus, or a monthly check-up by a Primary School child well versed in simple addition. It is also indubitably true that you can’t pour drink down the throats of solicitors’ managing clerks without some form of subsidy, and I’m sure Albert dipped liberally into the petty cash for this purpose as well as to keep himself in the large Bells and sodas, two or three of which sufficed for his simple lunch. Personally I never begrudged Albert any of this grant in aid, but ugly words such as embezzlement were uttered by Erskine-Brown and others, and, spurred on by our second clerk Harry who clearly thirsted for promotion, my learned friends were induced to part with Albert Handyside. I missed him very much. Our new clerk Henry goes to Pommeroy’s with our typist Dianne, and tells her about his exploits when on holiday with the Club Mediterranée in Corfu. I do not think either of them would laugh at my legal anecdotes.

  After he left us Albert shook the dust of London from his shoes and went up North, to some God-lost place called Grimble, and there joined a firm of solicitors as managing clerk. No doubt Northerly barristers’ clerks bought him Guinness and either he had no control of the petty cash or the matter was not subjected to too close an inspection. From time to time he sent me a Christmas card on which was inscribed among the bells and holly ‘Compliments of the Season, Mr Rumpole, sir. And I’m going to bring you up here for a nice little murder just as soon as I get the opportunity. Yours respectfully, A. Handyside.’ At long last a brief did arrive. Mr Rumpole was asked to appear at the Grimble Assizes, to be held before Mr Justice Skelton in the Law Courts, Grimble: the title of the piece being the Queen (she does keep enormously busy prosecuting people) versus Margaret Hartley. The only item on the programme was ‘Wilful Murder’.