Rumpole and the Reign of Terror

by John Mortimer

  So I sat silent. Whatever had happened to me, it certainly wasn't cricket.

  •

  'That Fred Sugden seems a fairly straightforward sort of fellow. Did you have to be so rude to him, Rumpole?' was Hilda's comment.

  Later Bonny Bernard rang up. 'A memorable performance on the telly,' he said, 'but I thought you'd planned to get round the Home Secretary. Weren't you going to charm him into giving Khan a jury trial?'

  I went to bed angry with both of them, but angriest with myself for doing my client no good at all. I dreamed that I had to write the rest of my memoirs on a computer and I couldn't get the hang of the instrument at all.

  20

  Extract from Hilda Rumpole's Memoirs

  IT'S SUMMER AT LAST. We've had some really hot weather, although not much sunshine in Froxbury Mansions, where Rumpole is still a bit under the weather. He says he's suffering from a medical condition known as absentia labori or the diminution of briefs and consequent drying up of the legal aid cheques. I think he's also a bit sore about his failure in the debate with the Home Secretary. 'Well, Rumpole,' I've told him, 'you're never going to be a hit on the box. You'll never be a television star.'

  This didn't seem to cheer Rumpole up at all. I don't think he had quite realized how old-fashioned he sounds talking about Magna Carta. As I have told him many times, if King John had had to contend with suicide bombers he might never have signed that thing on whatever island it was on the Thames that he did it. Also Rumpole doesn't realize how absurd it is to stick to writing with that old fountain pen of his that often leaks. Of course, still, he doesn't quite realize that I'm using this computer I bought from Dixons which I really love and on which my fingers are dancing as I write. It will come as a shock to Rumpole when he discovers that I've kept this machine for a long time locked away in the boxroom. I suppose he'll get even more of a shock when he reads these memoirs. There are a lot of things Rumpole doesn't quite understand.

  Well, I've been meeting Leonard Bullingham regularly at the bridge club and quite lately he told me the Old Bailey was on holiday and asked me whether I would join him for lunch at his club next Thursday. He said he'd thought of asking me before but had been too shy to suggest a definite date, and he ended up saying, 'Oh, do say yes, Hilda. It would give me such pleasure.' After that I felt it would be mean to decline his invitation, although I didn't tell Rumpole about it. I thought it would be one of the many things that Rumpole didn't quite understand.

  So, last Thursday, when Rumpole had gone off to chambers to do not very much at all, I took a tube down to the Sheridan. I know it's a famous club and when I ask Rumpole why he never joined he always says that he's not keen on the idea of watching judges eat lunch, which was possibly what I was going to do. Leonard, he asked me long ago to call him Leonard, was waiting for me by the porter's desk. I thought he looked nervous, far more nervous in fact than I felt, although I was in strange surroundings and he was, well, sort of at his home.

  'So good of you to come, Hilda,' he said. I should have mentioned the fact that he'd called me Hilda over the bridge club table for quite a while now, it was only 'Mrs Rumpole' when we first met. 'I can't take you to the bar,' he said, 'because women aren't allowed in there. So shall we go straight in?'

  I agreed of course and we went into a big dining room, where men were sitting together at various tables. There were a few men with women guests at the tables along one of the walls.

  'Our table's on the left-hand side of the dining room,' Leonard explained. 'That's because I'm with a woman guest. No women allowed at the tables over there.'

  'It seems there are a lot of places I'm not allowed to go,' I told him.

  'I just thought I'd explain the club rules to you, Hilda. I take you to be the sort of spirited lady that might protest and insist on being on the right-hand side of the dining room.'

  'Don't be afraid,' I said, 'I'm not going to embarrass you.'

  'I'm sure you wouldn't, Hilda. And the left side of the dining room's perfectly pleasant, isn't it?'

  'Perfectly pleasant.' He was very reassuring, which I found rather touching in a judge.

  'I can recommend the roast beef here.' Leonard seemed more relaxed now he'd explained the club rules to me. 'They do a very good Yorkshire pudding here too. And the club claret is excellent.'

  'That'll be a change,' I told him, 'from the stuff Rumpole brings home from that dreadful little wine bar of his.'

  'What a mistake!' Leonard shook his head. 'Only the best is good enough for Hilda. I have to say, Hilda,' he went on, 'I've been looking forward to this little lunch together for some time.'

  'I've been looking forward to it too,' I told him. 'I'm interested in seeing your club from a woman's point of view.'

  'That's right, of course. So glad you said that. My wife – well, she's no longer, we're divorced of course – she didn't visit the club at all. She was a woman who couldn't join in.'

  'Well, I don't suppose she could join in at the bar.'

  'Oh, that's sharp of you. Very sharp!' Leonard was kind enough to say, and he went on, 'If the day ever comes when they allow women members in this club, which would be over my dead body, you, Hilda, are the first person I'd put up as a female member.'

  I didn't ask Leonard how he could put me up as the first female member if the rules had been changed over his dead body. In any event, he clearly meant to be extremely complimentary. However, he was now occupied in placing our order with an elderly waiter who looked at me as though he didn't approve of women in the club, even if we were confined to the left-hand side of the dining room.

  'We're having your roast beef,' Leonard was saying, 'and we want a lot of it. I like a lot. And a bottle of the club's excellent St Emilion. Starters? Smoked salmon for starters. You'd agree with that, wouldn't you, Hilda?'

  'Yes, of course.' Rumpole hardly ever makes decisions for me. It was a relief to be with a man who did.

  We had gone through the roast beef and Leonard had instructed me to choose the profiteroles from the sweet trolley, when he said, 'Rumpole's not an easy man in court. I get the feeling he's not an easy man at home. Would I be right?'

  'Quite right,' I agreed with him, my mouth full of profiterole.

  'After a divorce, of course, one does get lonely in the evenings …'

  At this point he was interrupted by a tall, grey-haired member who stopped at our table and said in a loud voice, 'How are you, Judge? I'll never forget what a good time we had with that buggery in the Euston Super Loo.'

  I thought for a long time before writing down that conversation in my memoirs but this is what he really said and Leonard replied, 'Oh yes, that was a fun case, wasn't it? Hitchins, I want you to meet Hilda Rumpole. Rumpole's wife.'

  'You're Rumpole's wife?' This Hitchins seemed incredulous.

  'Yes, I am.'

  'I never thought of Rumpole as having a wife. He seems such a one-off. Delighted to meet you, of course. I'd better be making tracks. I'm lunching the chairman of the Law Society.' And Hitchins wandered off to his table on the right-hand side of the dining room.

  Leonard finished the last of his profiteroles and leaned back in his chair. 'It's in the evenings,' he repeated, 'that you feel the lack of such a thing as a wife. I can come down to this club, of course. I can share a table with Hitchins, but it's a wife you feel most in need of as the evenings draw in.'

  I told Leonard I could understand what he meant and he asked me if I'd ever thought of what he'd been through, that was to say 'divorce'.

  'Oh, plenty of times,' I was laughing when I said it. 'You can't live through as many years of Rumpole as I have without thinking of divorce at some of his most irritating moments.'

  'Plenty of times!' Leonard looked delighted. 'Well, that's encouraging. All I can say is that Rumpole's a lucky man to have you to come home to, Hilda. And the next time you think of divorce, I'm sure you'll remember this lunch we had together. And now, may I refill your glass with the club's exclusive claret?'

>   There was no more talk about divorce after that, and following lunch Leonard showed me the club's interesting collection of porcelain and numerous portraits of old judges. Then he put me in a cab (he had an account with this taxi firm). I went straight into the boxroom and added this account of our lunch to my memoirs. I didn't tell Rumpole that I had received what amounted to a proposal of marriage from Judge Bullingham. I didn't mention that fact to Rumpole. I don't think he would quite understand.

  In any event, we're off on holiday next week so this is not a time to be rocking the boat.

  21

  I MUST SAY, I have always liked Brighton. It has a slightly raffish air about it, a little tarnished, jovial but not quite respectable, descriptions which have, I regret to say, been applied to Rumpole.

  For all the reasons I have gone into so far in these memoirs, we were going through a period of financial restraint, briefs being a little thin on the ground since I had fallen out with the Timson family and, so it was apparently thought among instructing solicitors, failed to shine in my debate with the Home Secretary. All the same, She Who Must insisted that we should, after some years, return to Brighton for a holiday to be chalked up on the overdraft. 'I need to get away from London for a bit to straighten out my thoughts,' Hilda told me, without giving me the slightest hint as to what these thoughts were or why they should need straightening out. So we booked our usual two weeks at the Xanadu and I found myself looking forward to it.

  The Xanadu is by no means a stately pleasure dome. It's a small private hotel just behind the seafront on the way to Hove. They did you a perfectly adequate breakfast at the Xanadu and we usually had lunch out, perhaps at a pub somewhere up on the Downs. The sun shone with unusual reliability that summer and we sat in deckchairs reading and listening to the band on the pier. Hilda insisted we explore the Lanes in search of expensive bric-à-brac. After a bit of hard bargaining she bought a small cut-glass decanter for £20.

  'But we've got a decanter,' I reminded her.

  'I know we have, Rumpole. But this is a present for a friend.'

  'You mean it's for Dodo Mackintosh? I doubt if she'd keep anything in there long. Not judging by the speed at which she downs our sherry.' Her hostility to me and my client, the unfortunate Dr Khan, had left me with no particularly kindly feelings towards Hilda's old schoolfriend.

  'No, Rumpole. It's not for Dodo.'

  'Well, who then?'

  'Oh, just a friend. I do have friends, you know, Rumpole.'

  'Yes, of course.' I thought of the numerous old schoolfriends who had visited our spare bedroom in Froxbury Mansions. 'At least,' I said, 'you're not intending to keep that nauseating fluid you used to pressure me to drink in it, are you? It's not for the Omni Vite, is it?'

  This was a somewhat challenging remark and I expected a brisk and dismissive reply from She Who Must. In fact Hilda only smiled vaguely and said, 'It's your life, Rumpole, and you must make your own decisions. You lead your life and I'll lead mine. That'll be best, don't you think, from now on.' She was walking along, clutching the wrapped-up decanter in what seemed almost a loving sort of way.

  Among the guests at the Xanadu Hotel, the families with well-behaved children, the middle-aged sons with their elderly mother, the two friendly vicars and so on, there was a couple who seemed to take a particular interest in me. He was tall, straight-backed, probably in his fifties, with black hair going grey and clear blue eyes. She looked ten years younger than her partner and talked and laughed a good deal, a plump and cheerful woman who had eyes only for him, but he turned and looked occasionally, and I thought nervously, in my direction.

  One morning, Hilda said she wanted to stay in the hotel and write letters. Accordingly I took myself off to the front. I went down the steps to the stony, overcrowded beach and made my way past families and loving, embracing couples, people wriggling into swimsuits behind the cover of towels, others sleeping in deckchairs out of the wind. I crunched my way across the loose pebbles to the edge of the sea.

  In my time between Gloucester Road, the Temple and the Old Bailey I thought I lived too far away from the sea, but now there it was, grey and timeless, advancing up the pebbles in a flurry of white foam. I picked up a small, flat stone and tried to send it skimming, bouncing across the water as I had done when I was a boy on holiday, but it was swallowed up by a passing wave and I abandoned the game. I rented a deckchair and sat at the end of a breakwater, watching distant ships on the far horizon, and wondered if I really wanted to go back to putting on a wig to appear before unfriendly judges in stuffy law courts when I could sit in unusual sunshine and contemplate the sea.

  After a while, a considerable while, I went up to the pier, which had been almost entirely rebuilt since our last visit. There was still a fortune-teller's booth, which I avoided, having no wish to be told bad news about my future, and a small massage parlour, which I also avoided. Then came a vast amusement arcade. The theatre at the end of the pier had been replaced by a roller-coaster in which screaming people took a sickening journey up and down a railway. I was about to reconcile myself to this sad fact when I saw a poster advertising a theatre in the town where the show sounded promising.

  'SEASIDE SENSATIONS,' it read, 'in BRIGHTON for two weeks only with HARRY TURRMAN, a song, a joke and a piano, and the LIDO LOVELIES.' Again I remembered seaside holidays when I was a boy and the shows on the end of the pier, the girls in frilly skirts and pointed pierrot hats with bobbles on them, the whey-faced harlequin who did amazing contortions and the comic who got us all to sing 'Underneath the Arches', my feeling of excitement spiced with terror at the thought of being called up on to the stage.

  When I got back to the Xanadu Hotel I found Hilda sitting in the glassed-in veranda, deep in conversation with the plump wife, while the greying husband sat a little apart from them, looking nervously on. Hilda had clearly formed a new and instant friendship with someone she wasn't even at school with, and she introduced me to Myra Antrim and her husband, Ian. It was their first visit to the hotel and Hilda had been giving them tips on the best pubs when walking on the Downs and the cheapest junk shops in the Lanes. When I said I'd got two tickets for the Seaside Sensations show, She Who Must instructed me to get two more so we could have a theatre-going party with the Antrims. This jollification was agreed to in spite of what seemed to me to be the obvious reluctance of Ian Antrim to spend an evening out with the Rumpoles.

  •

  Like most things, the seaside show didn't seem quite as good as such shows when I was a boy. There wasn't a white-faced harlequin tying his body into knots, there was no red-nosed comic to make us sing 'Underneath the Arches'. There were constant references to television and the jokes were more slyly sexual than openly vulgar. However, as entertainment it beat sitting in court and losing a case before the mad Judge Bullingham. The first half ended with an energetic song-and-dance number by the Lido Lovelies and then I found myself alone at the bar with Ian Antrim, Hilda having taken Myra off to 'powder their noses'.

  As we sipped draught Guinness, Ian looked at me and said, hardly louder than a whisper, 'You won't tell Myra, will you, Mr Rumpole?'

  'Tell her what?'

  'The Scarlet Band, of course. Myra knows nothing whatever about it.'

  'I'm not quite sure what you mean,' I told him.

  'We can't talk here. Later, when the girls have gone to bed.' Ian Antrim was looking nervously at our respective wives, who were approaching across the bar, the nose-powdering operation apparently completed. 'All right,' I told him. 'We'll talk later.'

  I'm afraid my mind wasn't on the second half of the show. I kept saying 'The Scarlet Band', 'The Scarlet Band' to myself, and then, quite slowly, fragments of memory returned. The title had nothing to do with the Sherlock Holmes story. That was 'The Speckled Band' and it was a snake. This was an organization of would-be revolutionary mates at university. Was it Reading? Perhaps: I couldn't quite remember. Their band was scarlet in the exaggerated way in which the 'Workers' Flag',
so the song goes, 'is stained with blood'. They were scarlet, I supposed, because they claimed to be at the reddest, more revolutionary end of Trotskyism, and their occupation seemed to be, when not engaged in lectures or games, protesting.

  They found a good deal to protest about at that time – it must have been the late sixties. There was the war in Vietnam, there was apartheid in South Africa, there was the treatment of blacks in the southern states of America and there was Harold Wilson, a British prime minister whom they thought humiliatingly subservient to our transatlantic allies.

  To make their feelings felt on all these issues, the Scarlet Band planned a number of outrages on institutions of what they regarded as guilty countries. They didn't attack embassies, these were far too well protected, but they managed to break into a few cultural centres and leave messages of protest and dark threats of sterner measures, including the use of high explosives if the American or South African governments didn't repent. Their activities ended, as I now remembered, when the band set out to attack an American reading room somewhere down the King's Road. They were armed with posters and the threat of 'Arguing the case with bombs'.

  The attack was frustrated, however. The police had been warned and before they could reach their objective the band members were arrested. And now I remembered the three Trotskyites who pleaded guilty and for whom I had the unhappy task of appearing when they were charged with conspiracy to commit criminal damage. With their similar offences taken into consideration, they each got two years and ended their revolutionary lives.

  And then, as a long musical number drew to a close, I remembered a tall, nervous figure in the dock, his black curly hair not yet tinged with grey but his eyes even more frightened than they were when he begged me not to say anything to his wife.

  •

  It was the end of a long evening. The 'girls', as Ian Antrim called them, had gone to bed. He and I sat in the empty lounge of the Xanadu Hotel, drinking the brandy and soda he'd ordered, perhaps to give himself courage for our conversation.