Rumpole and the Primrose Path

by John Mortimer

  ‘I was deeply impressed by your handling of Bob Durden’s case. He’s very grateful, by the way. So when our local paper got a writ from Sir Michael’s solicitors, I thought of you at once.’

  ‘And you couldn’t have thought of anyone better.’ I was determined to give a passable imitation of someone who had the law of breach of confidence and the European Convention on Human Rights at their fingertips. ‘These privacy cases can be tricky if not handled by someone experienced in that particular branch of the law.’

  It turned out that Sir Mike was a local power in Chivering, having bought a large house just where the suburban spread met an area of comfortable and well-cultivated countryside. There he grew hedges, reclaimed ponds, produced organic crops and was generally regarded as a model landlord. He also bought up a chain of local newspapers which dealt with local weddings, funerals and garden fêtes and advertised, in many brightly coloured supplements, the extraordinary comfort of Smedley Slumberwell beds.

  His one failure in the neighbourhood had been to buy the Chivering Argus, a paper edited by a member of the family that had founded it in the 1920S.

  ‘I don’t like him, Mr Rumpole. If you put me into the witness box I’ll have to admit that I don’t like Sir Mike at all. He’s always either threatening to kill my paper with his competition or trying to bribe me to sell it to him. But we’ve got a loyal readership. Not a huge one, but loyal. So it’s no use him trying to throw his weight about.’

  If it ever came to a physical encounter Mr Rankin, the editor, would have very little weight to throw. He was a small, bird-like man, with bright eyes and a head cocked to one side, who sat up very straight with his arms folded as though he had just fluttered down and alighted on the edge of my client’s chair. He had been brought to my room in Chambers by the ecclesiastical-looking Crozier, sniffed around the place in a mood of apparent excitement, asked for the history of the mementoes of old murder trials, and when I had satisfied his curiosity, started to talk about his case as though a hefty claim for damages was no more serious that a slight sniffle or an irritating draught.

  ‘That’s why we published the photograph. Just a bit of mischief. I’ll freely admit that. Our way of getting our own back, or what have you. Just so our readers could have a giggle at Sir High and Mighty Mike, the local celebrity who thinks everything’s for sale.’

  ‘You’re saying you published the photograph just to get a laugh?’ I was beginning to get the message. The editor was going to prove a highly unsatisfactory witness. Not only his sense of humour but his language seemed to have come out of some long-defunct boys’ comic. ‘Just a July jape, you see, Mr Rumpole. And then, ouch! We’re landed with this writ.’

  ‘You say your nephew took the photograph?’

  ‘Certainly. Young Jim. He’d gone to the Caribbean in his gap year, after school.’

  ‘And Sir Michael has a holiday home in St Lucia,’ Crozier reminded me.

  ‘Of course,’ I told him, ‘I‘d’ve expected nothing less.’

  ‘Jim was working in the Sugar and Spice Bar when the Great Big Cheese himself took the whole place over for a party with his chums.’

  ‘A private party, Mr Rumpole. And he made the management sign a contract - no photographs, no press, no divulging of the guest list ... They agreed to complete confidentiality.’ Crozier seemed to take some sort of gloomy delight in the difficulties of the case.

  ‘Of course, no one realized Jim knew all about Sir Mike, and that he had his camera with him.’

  ‘The young man was interested in taking pictures of wildlife on the island,’ Crozier filled in the details.

  ‘So he was all prepared to photograph wildlife in the Sugar and Spice Bar?’ I asked.

  ‘He thought it a great wheeze and managed very cleverly.’ Rankin seemed understandably proud of his nephew. ‘Of course, it was quite late and the party had been going on some time and they’d all had a skinful. And they’d fixed up a sort of swirling light over the dancers, so no one noticed the flash.’

  ‘And young Jim,’ I felt I had to ask the pertinent question, ‘apart from his talent for snapping local fauna, did he know that the management had signed a contract, no photographs allowed?’

  ‘Oh, he knew that.’ The editor was smiling happily. ‘But he did it as a prank. He knew how much his picture would delight his old uncle.’

  ‘And as a prank his old uncle published this picture in his paper?’

  ‘You’ve got it, Mr Rumpole.’ Rankin was delighted. ‘How could I resist the temptation?’

  ‘I really don’t know. But if you could have you might have saved yourself an action for breach of confidentiality, invasion of privacy and all the trimmings.’

  I picked up the photograph and looked at it again, but it had got no better. Sir Michael Smedley, the great business tycoon, was a large, beefy-looking individual, with his hair brushed forward as though surrounding a monk’s tonsure. He was grinning happily and strutting in some sort of celebratory dance, clearly enjoying his private party. His dancing partner, whom I took to be a darkly beautiful local girl, was dancing with much finger-snapping and flashing of white teeth. She was naked from the waist up and her sizeable brassiere, in that golden moment immortalized by young Jim’s camera, was draped about Sir Michael Smedley’s ears.

  ‘Rumpole, I hear you’re doing an invasion of privacy case.’

  ‘Breach of confidence. Invasion of privacy. Outrageous infringement of human rights. Yes, Claude. That’s the sort of practice I carry on these days. I’ve left the petty larcenies and the public-bar affrays to Old Bailey hacks like you.’ I didn’t tell Erskine-Brown that I had been briefed by the Chivering Argus because the paper now faced bankruptcy as a result of Sir Mike’s charge and couldn’t afford a fashionable silk, or that, so far as I could see at the moment, there was little or no defence to the tycoon’s deadly writ.

  ‘I assume,’ Erskine-Brown had come into my room wearing what was, even for him, a peculiarly doleful expression, ‘that you know quite a bit by now of the law concerning the invasion of privacy?’

  ‘I have that at my fingertips,’ I assured him. ‘Is there anything wrong with your privacy, Claude?’

  ‘It has, I’m afraid, Rumpole, been seriously invaded.’ With which he sank into my client’s chair, no longer a reasonably confident QC, but a man like any other, in desperate need of reassuring legal advice. ‘I came to you as an expert in this class of case.’

  ‘Then you’ve come to the right man, Claude. So fire away. What’s the problem?’

  ‘The problem, Rumpole, is, I’m very much afraid, Mercy Grandison.’

  I considered the matter for a while, and then I asked what seemed to me to be an essential question. ‘Who the hell is Mercy Grandison?’

  ‘Rumpole, I can’t believe it!’

  ‘You can’t believe what?’

  ‘That you don’t know who Mercy Grandison is.’

  ‘I don’t.’

  ‘You’ve never watched Shopping Mall?’

  ‘Never.’

  ‘She’s the one who runs the Boutique at the end of the Mall. You know, the one who broke up her marriage with Barry from the Sock Shop and had such a ghastly time with Bertrand from the Bistro des Voyageurs.’

  ‘Enormously interesting, Claude. But how does any of that threaten your privacy?’

  ‘Shopping Mall doesn’t, but Mercy Grandison does.’

  ‘An actress?’

  ‘And author. That’s the terrible thing, Rumpole. She’s got a book coming out next month. It’s been advertised in the Telegraph.’

  ‘A history of shopping?’

  ‘Unfortunately not. It’s her life story - A Wandering Star. “How Mercy Grandison, born Mary Grimes, sixth daughter of a Wisbech plumber, rose to become Queen of the Soaps. In this touching memoir, Mercy reveals the heartbreaks behind the glitter of show business.”’ Erskine-Brown had pulled a crumpled cutting from his wallet and put it, I thought reverently, on my desk. I had to confess I stil
l didn’t see what the bothered QC was worrying about.

  ‘She reveals the heartbreaks, Rumpole.’

  ‘What’s that got to do with you?’

  There was a pause, during which a certain amount of wrestling for the soul of Erskine-Brown seemed to be taking place. When the struggle was over he allowed himself to speak. ‘I’d better confess to you, Rumpole.’

  ‘You probably should, if you want my advice.’

  ‘It was years ago. I’d gone up to Grimsby to do a lengthy fraud.’

  ‘That’s forgivable.’

  ‘And one evening I went to the threatre. The local Rep. I went to see Private Lives by Noel Coward. A young girl in a white dress came out on a moonlit balcony.’

  ‘In Grimsby?’

  ‘No, the South of France! I was just totally knocked out, Rumpole. Stunned, I suppose ... I made a complete fool of myself. I waited for her at the stage door. We went out for supper every night for the rest of the week. In the end, I asked her back to the Trusthouse. I’m telling you all this because I need your help desperately. She told me she thought I was “rather sweet”.’

  ‘There’s no accounting for tastes’ is what I might have said, but I didn’t. Instead I asked, ‘So what happened exactly?’

  ‘It happened.’

  ‘It?’

  ‘Yes, it. I have to tell you, Rumpole, it was one of the most important things in my life! The next morning we said goodbye on Grimsby Station. But I still think about it. When there’s nothing in Court, and Philly’s away on circuit, or when life seems completely uneventful, I think about her, Rumpole. I get a great deal of quiet pleasure from thinking about Mercy. And I’m very sure you’d do the same.’

  ‘I take it you met her from time to time, after your night in the Trusthouse?’

  ‘Never again, Rumpole. Not ever.’ The fellow had returned to his memories as though he had left me to take a bath. He was luxuriating in the warm water of his past, and I only got snatches of it, reminiscences through the bathroom door.

  ‘So it was a last goodbye?’

  ‘I’ll never forget it. On Grimsby Station. You see, I had just got married to Philly. It was a long time ago, of course, before we had the children ...’

  ‘And the learned Judge knows nothing about it?’

  ‘Nothing, Rumpole. But she’s going to find out when Mercy’s book is serialized in the Daily Post, which Philly demolishes at breakfast.’

  ‘And you don’t think she’ll be best pleased?’

  ‘So soon after we were married? She’ll bring it up every time we have an argument. She’ll tell me she can never trust me again. She’ll ...’ Here his small store of language seemed to have run out. ‘She’ll never let me forget it, Rumpole.’

  ‘Even though she had a walk-out with that appalling MP?’

  ‘That’ll be my fault too, if she finds out. What can I do, Rumpole? It’s my private life. How can I protect myself?’

  ‘Well, of course, when you parted on Grimsby Station ...’

  ‘Yes, yes, tell me!’ The drowning man clutched eagerly at a straw. ‘Give me your opinion.’

  ‘... You obviously asked her to sign a solemn undertaking promising never verbally, or in writing, or by any form of technical communication which might be invented in the future, to divulge to anyone, or to any device, the events which had occurred between you and the soap star in the Trusthouse Forte hotel. No doubt you had such a document prepared. Did you get her to sign it in front of witnesses?’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Rumpole. Of course I didn’t.’

  ‘Then I’m afraid your legal position is distinctly dicey. Not to put too fine a point on it, Claude, I would say you were up shit creek and deprived of a paddle. No case of breach of confidence. Look here, are you sure she’s written about it? Have you read it?’

  ‘It’s not out yet. I told you. But of course she’s written about Grimsby. It was one of the greatest moments of our lives. Do you think I’d be right to tell Philly? Should I warn her?’

  ‘Don’t jump,’ I reminded him of an old legal maxim, ‘before you get to the stile. The world is full of nervous husbands leaping about in level fields thinking they’ve got to clear obstructions which aren’t there. I suppose it might be possible to keep the story in question out of Dame Phillida’s paper.’

  ‘Oh, Rumpole, would you do this for me? As my legal adviser would you try? They’ll listen to you, now you’re briefed in the great Sir Michael’s privacy case.’

  Good name in man and woman, dear my lord, Is the immediate jewel of their souls: Who steals my purse steals trash; ‘tis something, nothing; T’was mine, ’tis his, and has been slave to thousands: But he that filches from me my good name Robs me of that which not enriches him, And makes me poor indeed.

  These words, spoken by him whom Mr Justice Graves called ‘The man Iago’, ran through my mind as I took the short walk from Equity Court to Pommeroy’s Wine Bar. Fleet Street was crowded with people leaving work, waiting in bus queues or hurrying to the tube station. There were secretaries laughing together, last-minute shoppers, men taking arms to steer each other into the pub opposite the Law Courts. Soft, misty rain was falling, so the newspaper seller under the archway into the Temple was covering up his male-interest magazines with plastic sheets. I looked into so many faces and wondered what secrets lay hidden, what private acts or memories called out for protection. Unwise love affairs, probably, small dishonesties, perhaps, minor betrayals, without a doubt, but I didn’t imagine many private lives featured murder, treason or other serious crimes. And then I wondered how many of the men scurrying for the train, or back-slapping their way into saloon bars, would be seriously upset by the publication of a photograph of themselves with a bra around their ears. There would, after all, be nothing much they could do about it. Breach of confidence cases for the protection of privacy are a luxury reserved for the rich. You’d have to be as well heeled as Sir Mike before you could bring a case.

  The words of Iago and accompanying thoughts had brought me to the door of Pommeroy‘s, and as I stepped up to it there was a small flash of light in the surrounding dampness and I saw a girl with red hair, wearing a blue anorak, point a camera at me. Was I to be snapped like a starlet arriving at a film premiere? Was tomorrow’s headline going to be ‘Horace Rumpole arrives at Pommeroy’s Wine Bar’? It was all extremely puzzling, but as the girl closed her camera and hurried away, and as I moved rapidly towards my first glass of Château Thames Embankment, I thought no more about it.

  I had taken my bottle of just tolerable claret to a table in a corner of Pommeroy‘s, and was flicking through the Evening Standard, which seemed short of any article entitled ‘Horace Rumpole: is he the Greatest Living Defender?’, when I saw Liz Probert downing a vodka in the company of Mervyn Lock-ward, Queer Customer, a tall, languid, human-rights barrister, who occupied alternative Chambers in the Euston Road and refused, on principle, to appear for landlords, police officers and employers or any male person accused of a sexual offence. He seemed, as usual, delighted to find himself in his own company and was looking down his nose at Liz with the sort of patronizing smile which he wore, sometimes with fatal results, when addressing juries. In the course of time, he gave her a light kiss on the forehead and glided off, no doubt to enjoy the vegetarian alternative at a dinner of the anti-globalization society, where he would be booked to make a speech.

  When he had gone, Liz joined me with a heavy sigh. ‘Isn’t Mervyn a wonderful barrister?’

  ‘If that’s your idea of being a barrister.’ I was, I have to confess, less than enthusiastic. ‘He’s not an old taxi cab like me. More like a hired car only available to travel on certain routes for a certain class of person.’ I saw her face fall a couple of inches so, by way of causing a diversion, I asked, ‘Do you have any secrets you want to keep hidden, Liz?’

  The look of vague disappointment turned to nothing less than panic. ‘Rumpole!’ Her voice had sunk to a whisper. ‘You’ve found out!’

>   ‘Found out what?’

  ‘You promise you won’t tell Mervyn?’

  ‘Of course not, if you don’t want me to ... It’s just that I was wondering - I mean, hasn’t everyone?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Something they want to keep private.’

  ‘With good reason!’

  ‘Probably. But as for you, Liz, I can’t believe ...’

  ‘Don’t you think I’m ashamed of it, Rumpole? Horribly ashamed.’

  ‘I’m sure there’s no need.’

  ‘Yes, there is a need. You know very well there’s a need. All I can say is, I was very young and silly at the time.’

  ‘Then I’m sure it was nothing serious.’

  ‘Of course it was serious! I’m not saying it wasn’t serious. It’s just that, well, I had these Old Labour parents. They went on Ban the Bomb marches. They spent nights outside the South African Embassy singing “We shall overcome”. It’s natural to revolt when you’re young. You must have felt that too, Rumpole.’

  ‘I think I’ve felt like revolting all my life.’

  ‘There you are then, you see? But mine was a one-off. An act of immature defiance. I’m ashamed of it, I really am.’

  ‘What was it you’re ashamed of? Just remind me.’ By now my curiosity was thoroughly aroused.

  ‘It was my first term at Uni.’

  ‘Yes, of course ...’

  I waited for a fascinating revelation from the Probert past. All I got was, ‘I joined the Conservative Association!’

  ‘Oh dear!’ I did my best to look suitably shocked.

  ‘It was only for a term. Then I came to my senses. Oh, Rumpole! Give me your solemn promise you won’t tell Mervyn.’

  ‘I promise, solemnly.’

  ‘Thank you, Rumpole.’ Enormously relieved, so it seemed, Liz planted a kiss, which landed slightly to the left of my nose. Looking up from this experience, I saw the red-headed girl in the anorak standing at the bar and looking across at us with considerable interest.

  A week later, I was surprised to get, in Chambers, a telephone call from someone called Gervase Johnson. He invited me, most unexpectedly, to the fashionable Myrtle restaurant in Long Acre for ‘a chat over a few glasses of bubbles’. He was, I was delighted to learn, working on a profile of ‘Horace Rumpole, Counsel for the Defence’ for the Daily Fortress.