CLINGING TO THE WRECKAGE

by John Mortimer

  Oliver Pensotti, my school friend, came to visit us and emerged from the kitchen wreathed in smiles.

  ‘What are you laughing at, Pensotti?’

  ‘Your grocer’s bills! They’re hanging on a hook beside the cooker. You must be feeding an army!’

  ‘It seems like that sometimes,’ I agreed.

  ‘Well, you made your bed, you must lie on it,’ Pensotti said. ‘Or not, as the case may quite possibly be. I mean, I know you had a lonely childhood but haven’t you over-reacted?’

  Sometimes I crossed Fleet Street to pawn a silver cigarette-case (a birthday gift from my father after a particular long ‘mental cruelty’). More often I went into the bank to cash small cheques and tried not to break into an undignified run if the cashier came across with the money. I was once at the counter when the manager (I remember rimless glasses on a rimless sort of a man) came up and said, ‘Drawing out are we today, or are we paying in?’

  ‘Drawing out actually,’ I admitted. ‘I mean, we’ve got to live.’

  ‘No “got to” about it,’ the manager said sharply. ‘In fact many people have to learn that living is quite unnecessary.’

  It gave me no satisfaction to hear that, the following week, my bank manager had fallen off the platform at Charing Cross and been killed instantly by an oncoming ‘Northern Line’. I don’t know if it was an accident, natural justice or even if he had been contemplating suicide when he spoke to me at the counter. All I have learnt is that it is very unsafe to prophesy other people’s deaths. I got to know a superstitious criminal lawyer who once consulted, at huge expense, a fashionable fortune-teller. After the usual opening pleasantries about dark women and financial advantages, the seer looked pained and embarrassed and, when pressed, said, ‘I’m sorry to have to tell you I can see nothing at all after the end of September. I’m afraid that the future is totally blank after that.’ My friend went away convinced that his imminent death had been horrifyingly foreseen and he made his Will and unhappily arranged his affairs. However, after my experience with my bank manager it came as no surprise to me to learn that on 1 October the fortune-teller died.

  Getting a start in the world of divorce seemed the more difficult in that the work was shared out among a small circle of lawyers who had thus consolidated their hold on matrimonial disharmony. My father was one of the leaders of this group, another was a senior member of our chambers called ‘Father William’. William Latey had two sons, one now a Judge and the other a distinguished broadcaster, who were big boys when I was a small child in the Temple. He was a small, fat, extremely clubbable man who wore pince-nez and had been, as a journalist on the Illustrated London News, posted to Russia in the days before the revolution. He would often describe to me nights when the troika was loaded with champagne and he was ‘off to the gypsies’. ‘Father William’ was extremely kind to me and took me to dinner at the Savage Club where he would explain that it was useless to hope for a brief in your first ten years at the bar. ‘We used to sit in chambers doing absolutely nothing. Then my wife would lend us balls of her wool and we would practise safe cricketing strokes with them in the corridor outside the clerk’s room, sending the knitting wool for six with our rolled umbrellas.’ Later ‘Father William’ developed this reminiscence into a speech which he would make annually at the chambers’ Christmas party, and describe the first lean years at the bar when ‘we had absolutely nothing to do but play with our balls’. It was clearly not a prospect which was going to help a growing family.

  The old divorce lawyers seemed to stretch back into history, almost to the Ecclesiastical Courts where they talked about ‘Vera Copula’ instead of complete intercourse and a ‘Divorce a Mensa et Thora’ (from bed and board) instead of Judicial Separation. One of my father’s friends was called Victor Russell who, as a child, had been frightened by Bismarck when his father was Ambassador to Berlin. Victor Russell had also met his grandfather, Lord John Russell, a Prime Minister who had, as a small boy, been held up to see Napoleon standing on board the Bellerophon before sailing from Portsmouth Harbour. I also knew a somewhat dissolute old solicitor who said that once at tea, Hilaire Belloc’s mother had told him that she hadn’t tasted cucumber sandwiches since Lady Byron died. These old lawyers, rooted in the past, seemed so firmly entrenched that it was difficult to know what I was going to do for a crust, as they say in Australia.

  As old as the lawyers and a great deal more alarming were the first divorce Judges I encountered. One thing to be said for spending a few years at the bar is that the Judges do get younger. In those days they exercised the old middle-class male prerogative of being permanently in a most filthy temper. One of them was a Catholic convert who seemed to be against divorce on principle, not a happy position for one whose crust earning consisted of handing out Decrees Nisi to anxious applicants. This Judge would rap on the desk with his fountain pen and announce, as was no doubt the fact, ‘We are a Court of Justice, we are not a stable!’ if anyone so much as stirred on an aching buttock during the administration of the oath.

  My father, of course, was more than a match for these old Judges, about whom I would dream and wake up screaming in the night. He once made my mother lead him banging out of the President’s Court in a gesture of entirely simulated rage. There was, as I now remember it, one Judge who never stopped talking, with barely suppressed fury, about the children of broken homes. ‘They are innocents,’ he would often say. ‘They have committed no matrimonial offence. Yet they are the ones that suffer.’ My father appeared before him when he was acting for a husband who had left his wife after years of misery and married again; the question was one of maintenance for the first family.

  ‘What I have to consider, Mr Mortimer,’ the Judge said bitterly, ‘are the innocent children! They are the sufferers. I suppose your client [heavy sarcasm] has some sort of concern for his blameless children. Has he?’

  ‘Let us assume,’ said my father, ‘that he has none. Suppose he absolutely loathes the little brats. Be so good as to act on the assumption that he can’t stand the sight of them and wishes to God they’d never been born. And then let us approach the practical question of how he’s going to keep two homes going on an agricultural wage of four pounds seven shillings a week.’ It was an effective gambit, but one I’ve never dared to imitate.

  Worst of all was a temporary Judge who ruined, for himself and everyone else, the divorce cases he tried, by becoming greatly over excited by the evidence. He was a tall, gaunt, bright-eyed person with the rusty black plumage and greedy expression of an ageing, but still amorous, vulture. A witness had only to touch lightly on what he called the ‘sexual allegations’ for him to quiver eagerly. ‘Did it look like that, madam?’ he would say and draw a hurried diagram of a hugely erect member which he would ask the usher to hand to the appalled Petitioner. In one of the makeshift Courts that were used for ‘undefendeds’ after the war, he once became so excited during the course of a nullity case that he stood up and his wig attached itself to a low lamp-bracket above his head. He sat down bald and breathing heavily to ask further questions about some long-past night of sexual débâcle. Needless to say he was soon put out to grass. With Judges as with advocates detachment is all; and what is to be aimed at is the state of lucid indifference.

  Chapter Thirteen

  In order to get solicitors to like the cut of your jib you had to meet some solicitors. This could only be done by appearing in Court, something that you wouldn’t be asked to do until you’d met a few solicitors who liked the cut of your jib. This was the sort of difficulty which could last a lifetime, as with some unfortunates it did. My father told me of one barrister so briefless that, when a pupil came and paid him £100 for six months’ instruction on the mysteries of the law, both the senior barrister and his clerk decamped with the money in the general direction of Boulogne and were never, either of them, seen again.

  Other less ruthless, but equally unsuccessful barristers would spend a lifetime, supported by small private incom
es, dutifully sitting in their chambers reading the Law Reports, having lunch in the Inns and discussing other people’s cases. They knew exactly who was going to ‘take silk’ or be appointed to the bench. They became obsessed by a world from which they were arbitrarily excluded, like social climbers who know all about the latest Hunt Ball, but only from reading the Tatler.

  Resolved to participate in the legal world, I started doing ‘Poor Persons’ Divorces’ and going to a Free Legal Aid Centre in the East End of London. Neither of these sources could be relied on to produce what my father called ‘money briefs’; but they might yield appearances in Court and introductions to solicitors. So I sat in the Legal Aid Centre in the evenings longing for a murderer to come rushing in with a dripping knife, begging me to conduct his defence. All I got was a succession of bewildered old ladies in trouble with their pensions and their rents, ushered in by a tireless, chain-smoking, underpaid and uncomplaining Administrator who only really cheered up when she could produce a husband accused of outrageous cruelty, or a young fairground boxer faced with ten paternity summonses. ‘He’s certainly innocent,’ she muttered persuasively past a strong Capstan and a haze of smoke. ‘He was in strict training at the time.’ Never an expert on rents or pensions, I was of limited use to my clients at the Free Legal Aid Centre, but they taught me never to show surprise at instructions, however unlikely. One completely credible and highly respectable lady sought a divorce, but had to admit that her son, a young Post Office worker whom she brought with her, was not her husband’s child although he had been born during the marriage. It took a good many visits and some close questioning before she admitted that she had been impregnated by the spirit of the late Ramsay MacDonald who came at her over the wireless waves as she was passing Bush House. In the end, I remember, she got her divorce and proved, on all other subjects, a most sensible and reliable witness.

  So, by the way of the ‘Poor Persons’ and Free Legal Aid and by courtesy of a few ‘undefendeds’ which fell from my father’s table on the days when he was in a Probate action or ‘laid up with a cold’ or had wisely chosen to stay at home, wearing his straw hat and pricking out antirrhinums, as a preferred alternative to slogging up to London in the train for one short act of adultery, I got into Court and managed, in the course of time, to meet that great source of money briefs, the Solicitors’ Managing Clerk.

  Managing clerks of the old school were, it seemed to me, the main prop and buttress of the legal system. When qualified solicitors were too busy conveying office blocks or attending funerals to bother with the daily grind of the High Court of Justice, their unqualified managing clerks, equipped with an old raincoat whose pockets were stuffed with writs and summonses, a cunning way of getting round the Clerk of the Lists and an experience of life which started by being an office-boy at the age of fourteen, escorted mink-coated actresses through the Divorce Courts and cajoled greedy beneficiaries into accepting settlements in Will cases. I remember particularly Mr Wyvern, with a plume of grey hair over a bald pate, spectacles as thick as the bottoms of beer mugs and a head worn always tilted to one side, who would pull the essential, and disgraceful, facts out of a divorce case with the delicate enthusiasm of a bird extracting a juicy worm from a dry garden. There was also Mr Bertram, small and very fat, with a purple nose and a hat turned up all round, which made him look like a north-country comic, a deceptive appearance because he was both legally astute and deeply puritanical, believing that all women in divorce cases were reincarnations of ‘La Dame aux Camélias’ and destined for a tragic death if they didn’t reform. ‘You seem a decent enough woman at heart,’ Mr Bertram would say to some twittering actress with a ‘discretion statement’ which ran into several pages. ‘Why can’t you give up your horrible way of life and try and turn out a reasonable Yorkshire pudding?’ We once joined in divorcing a distinguished lady novelist to whom he said, ‘Why don’t you give up writing that pornographic filth. Your books are an embarrassment to open up in the Tube. If you can’t write decent stuff you’d be far better off spending the time with your kids.’ Curiously enough both the actress and the lady novelist seemed to find Mr Bertram entirely reassuring and they would go off to buy him a Guinness in the Cock Tavern feeling that with the forces of morality so strongly on their side they had little to fear from the most censorious Judge.

  Finally there was Mr Evelyn, with his drooping moustache, stiff collar and dangling watch-chain. He was a man who spoke in a soft voice of incurable sadness, whose marriage to a brutal hospital matron was so wretchedly unhappy that he could only find some sort of peace of mind during his day’s work in the Divorce Court. He was gentle with his clients and suffered deeply if they weren’t able to obtain their freedom. Mr Evelyn lived life at second hand, enjoying nothing more than the knell of Decrees Nisi tolling to terminate other people’s marriages.

  Mr Wyvern, Mr Bertram and Mr Evelyn and others like them were the men whom I had to get to like the cut of my jib, and I proceeded to woo them with a grosser flattery and more assiduous courtship than I have ever used on a lady. I drank endless cups of coffee with them in the crypt under the Law Courts. I paced up and down the corridor outside the summons room with them, waiting to do a spot of custody, or I travelled with them on the Tube to doomed confrontations before the Uxbridge Magistrates. I enquired endlessly after Mr Wyvern’s tomato plants and the health of his begonias. I asked for daily bulletins on Mr Bertram’s daughter’s progress in the small but cut-throat world of Croydon figure-skating, and I discovered unhappily just how many years it had been since Mrs Evelyn had agreed to accompany her husband on an evening at the pictures. When Mr Wyvern asked if I and my good lady would care to be his guests at one of his Masonic occasions I lacked the courage to refuse immediately. So much Farex, so many knicker-linings depended, I knew, on the likeability of my jib.

  It was often said that a life at the Divorce Bar leads to cynicism, disillusion and despair at the frailty of human nature, and yet the cases I did with the tireless managing clerks showed, as often as not, men and women trying to behave decently against appalling odds. They also showed the respect that most people have for the institution of marriage, indeed they only got divorced in order to marry again immediately, usually to a partner who bore an extraordinary likeness to the spouse they had been at such trouble and expense to abandon.

  I also discovered that husbands and wives don’t rush into divorce. They will put up with the most appalling home conditions rather than apply for the order of release. I discovered couples who hadn’t spoken for years and who communicated solely by means of laconic and unfriendly notes left on the boiler, or on the kitchen table with a plate of congealed stew. ‘Let her down at the office heat this up for you, she seems to do everything else’ or ‘Your conduct last night with the hall light just about beat the band! I take it you’re now going all out for my financial ruin’ were common phrases in this sort of correspondence. I heard of a General who used to address letters to the furniture his wife’s family provided, leaving on the articles concerned notes like, ‘You are a very vulgar little sideboard. Go back to Whiteleys where you came from’ or ‘Gentlemen’s homes have rugs over polished boards. You are a nasty common fitted carpet and your presence here is no longer required.’ The wonder was not that this sort of conduct led to the Divorce Court but that it was tolerated for so long without complaint.

  This toleration is no doubt due to a reluctance to admit defeat. It also comes, I’m sure, from a terror of loneliness. Any human relationship, however painful and absurd, even if it is reduced to a trickle of abusive little notes in a desert of silence, can seem preferable to the uncharted desert of divorce. Better, perhaps, a life of choked-back fury and a companion to hate than the loneliness of the bedsitter and the silence of a book in the corner of a holiday hotel.

  These were the sort of discoveries I was making during the years when I first worked as a barrister, facts vital to a writer which I neglected then and didn’t use. In the absurd world of the old
-style Divorce Court I was treating life in the law with peculiar seriousness, enjoying the hunt for briefs and a practice. I behaved more like a lawyer than I have done since, and bought a bowler hat, an umbrella and a pair of striped trousers. Clad in these I met Henry Winter for lunch in El Vino and allowed him the privilege of watching me do a ‘separation order’ down at Tower Bridge. When we came away from the case, which I had lost, I saw him staring at me with amusement.

  ‘What’re you looking at?’

  ‘Your barrister’s set.’

  ‘My what?’

  ‘It’s like those cards with bits of costume stuck on them that children used to get for Christmas. A “Ticket-collector’s set” and a “Nurse’s set” and a “Red Indian set”. They just have the hat and the main essentials like the ticket-punch or the thermometer. Your’s is the barrister’s set.’

  ‘You mean you don’t think I’m really a barrister?’

  ‘I don’t know. Do you?’

  I suppose I did. When success can be clearly imagined it is easy to succeed. If your ambition is to have as many ‘undefendeds’ as possible that can be achieved simply by persistence, a reasonable amount of good luck and sufficient strength to stand on your feet and ask for Decrees Nisi at regular intervals. I continued to flatter Mr Wyvern and Mr Bertram and Mr Evelyn and, as my father spent more and more days in the country, I found myself taking over more of his practice. Members of the Forces and their wives became able to get divorced under a scheme which meant that the barrister got paid a guinea for an ‘undefended’ and if you were lucky you got them in batches of five or even ten. In my struggle to provide a satisfactorily affirmative answer to Winter’s question Penelope gave me every support. She used the machine on which she had written her first novel to type my divorce petitions, tapping out paragraphs of wilful refusal to consummate, or desertion without cause, or particulars of deep humiliation and distress, the long litany of broken homes which I had learnt at my father’s knee.