‘I’m astonished,’ I gave Guthrie a little comfort, ‘that my learned friend Mr Hearthrug should think it could possibly last so long.’
‘Hearthstoke,’ young Charlie corrected me.
‘Have it your own way. With a bit of common sense we could finish this in half an hour.’
‘Thereby saving public time and money.’ Hope sprang eternal in the judge’s breast.
‘Exactly!’ I cheered him up. ‘As you know, it is an article of my religion never to plead guilty. But, bearing in mind all the facts in this case, I’m prepared to advise Timson to put his hands up to common assault. He’ll agree to be bound over to keep the peace.’
‘Common assault?’ Hearthstoke was furious. ‘Binding over? Hold on a minute. He tried to drown her!’
‘Judge.’ I put the record straight. ‘He was seated at the tap end of the bath. His wife, lying back comfortably in the depths, passed an extremely wounding remark about my client’s virility.’
It was then I saw Mr Justice Featherstone looking at me, apparently shaken to the core. ‘The tap end,’ he gasped. ‘Did you say he was seated at the tap end, Horace?’
‘I’m afraid so, Judge.’ I confirmed the information sorrowfully.
‘This troubles me.’ Indeed the judge looked extremely troubled. ‘How does it come about that he was seated at the tap end?’
‘His wife insisted on it.’ I had to tell him the full horror of the situation.
‘This woman insisted that her husband sat with his back squashed up against the taps?’ The judge’s voice rose in incredulous outrage.
‘She made him sit in that position so he could rinse off her hair.’
‘At the tap end?’ Guthrie still couldn’t quite believe it.
‘Exactly so.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘There can be no doubt about it.’
‘Hearthrug … I mean, stoke. Is this one of the facts agreed by the prosecution?’
‘I can’t see that it makes the slightest difference.’ The prosecution was not pleased with the course its case was taking.
‘You can’t see! Horace, was this conduct in any way typical of this woman’s attitude to her husband?’
‘I regret to say, entirely typical.’
‘Rumpole …’ Liz Probert, appalled by the chauvinist chatter around her, seemed about to burst, and I calmed her with a quiet ‘Shut up, Mizz.’
‘So you are telling me that this husband deeply resented the position in which he found himself.’ Guthrie was spelling out the implications exactly as I had hoped he would.
‘What married man wouldn’t, Judge?’ I asked mournfully.
‘And his natural resentment led to a purely domestic dispute?’
‘Such as might occur, Judge, in the best bathrooms.’
‘And you are content to be bound over to keep the peace?’ His Lordship looked at me with awful solemnity.
‘Reluctantly, Judge,’ I said after a suitable pause for contemplation, ‘I would agree to that restriction on my client’s liberty.’
‘Liberty to drown his wife!’ Mizz Probert had to be ‘shushed’ again.
‘Hearthstoke.’ The judge spoke with great authority. ‘My compliments to those instructing you and in my opinion it would be a gross waste of public funds to continue with this charge of attempted murder. We should be finished by half past eleven.’ He looked at his watch with the deep satisfaction of a man who was sure that he would be among those present at the royal garden party, after the ritual visit to Moss Bros to hire the grey topper and all the trimmings. As we left the sanctum, I stood aside to let Mizz Probert out of the door. ‘Oh, no, Rumpole, you’re a man,’ she whispered with her fury barely contained. ‘Men always go first, don’t they?’
So we all went into court to polish off R. v. Timson and to make sure that Her Majesty had the pleasure of Guthrie’s presence over the tea and strawberries. I made a token speech in mitigation, something of a formality as I knew that I was pushing at an open door. While I was speaking, I was aware of the fact that the judge wasn’t giving me his full attention. That was reserved for a new young shorthand writer, later to become known to me as a Miss (not, I’m sure in her case, a Mizz) Lorraine Frinton. Lorraine was what I believe used to be known as ‘a bit of an eyeful’, being young, doe-eyed and clearly surrounded by her own special fragrance. When I sat down, Guthrie thanked me absent-mindedly and reluctantly gave up the careful perusal of Miss Frinton’s beauty. He then proceeded to pass sentence on Tony Timson in a number of peculiarly ill-chosen words.
‘Timson,’ his Lordship began harmlessly enough. ‘I have heard about you and your wife’s habit of taking a bath together. It is not for this court to say that communal bathing, in time of peace when it is not in the national interest to save water, is appropriate conduct in married life. Chacun à son goût, as a wise Frenchman once said.’ Miss Frinton, the shorthand writer, looked hopelessly confused by the words of the wise Frenchman. ‘What throws a flood of light on this case,’ the judge went on, ‘is that you, Timson, habitually sat at the tap end of the bath. It seems you had a great deal to put up with. And your wife, she, it appears from the evidence, washed her hair in the more placid waters of the other end. I accept that this was a purely domestic dispute. For the common assault to which you have pleaded guilty you will be bound over to keep the peace …’ And the judge added the terrible words, ‘… in the sum of fifty pounds.’
So Tony Timson was at liberty, the case was over and a furious Mizz Liz Probert banged out of court before Guthrie was halfway out of the door. Catching up with her, I rebuked my learned junior. ‘It’s not in the best traditions of the Bar to slam out before the judge in any circumstances. When we’ve just had a famous victory it’s quite ridiculous.’
‘A famous victory.’ She laughed in a cynical fashion. ‘For men!’
‘Man, woman or child, it doesn’t matter who the client is. We did our best and won.’
‘Because he was a man! Why shouldn’t he sit at the tap end? I’ve got to do something about it!’ She moved away purposefully.
I called after her. ‘Mizz Probert! Where’re you going?’
‘To my branch of the women’s movement. The protest’s got to be organized on a national level. I’m sorry, Rumpole. The time for talking’s over.’
And she was gone. I had no idea, then, of the full extent of the tide which was about to overwhelm poor old Guthrie Featherstone, but I had a shrewd suspicion that his Lordship was in serious trouble.
The Featherstones’ two children were away at university, and Guthrie and Marigold occupied a flat which Lady Featherstone found handy for Harrods, her favourite shopping centre, and a country cottage near Newbury. Marigold Featherstone was a handsome woman who greatly enjoyed life as a judge’s wife and was full of that strength of character and quickness of decision his Lordship so conspicuously lacked. They went to the garden party together with three or four hundred other pillars of the establishment: admirals, captains of industry, hospital matrons and drivers of the royal train. Picture them, if you will, safely back home with Marigold kicking off her shoes on the sofa and Guthrie going out to the hall to fetch that afternoon’s copy of the Evening Sentinel, which had just been delivered. You must, of course, understand that I was not present at the scene or other similar scenes which are necessary to this narrative. I can only do my best to reconstruct it from what I know of subsequent events and what the participants told me afterwards. Any gaps I have been able to fill in are thanks to the talent for fiction which I have acquired during a long career acting for the defence in criminal cases.
‘There might just be a picture of us arriving at the Palace.’ Guthrie brought back the Sentinel and then stood in horror, rooted to the spot by what he saw on the front page.
‘Well, then. Bring it in here,’ Marigold, no doubt, called from her reclining position.
‘Oh, there’s absolutely nothing to read in it. The usual nonsense. Nothing of the slightest in
terest. Well, I think I’ll go and have a bath and get changed.’ And he attempted to sidle out of the room, holding the newspaper close to his body in a manner which made the contents invisible to his wife.
‘Why’re you trying to hide that Evening Sentinel, Guthrie?’
‘Hide it? Of course I’m not trying to hide it. I just thought I’d take it to read in the bath.’
‘And make it all soggy? Let me have it, Guthrie.’
‘I told you …’
‘Guthrie. I want to see what’s in the paper.’ Marigold spoke in an authoritative manner and her husband had no alternative but to hand it over, murmuring the while, ‘It’s completely inaccurate, of course.’
And so Lady Featherstone came to read, under a large photograph of his Lordship in a full-bottomed wig, the story which was being enjoyed by every member of the legal profession in the Greater London area. CARRY ON DROWNING screamed the banner headline. TAP END JUDGE’S AMAZING DECISION. And then came the full denunciation:
Wives who share baths with their husbands will have to be careful where they sit in the future. Because 29-year-old April Timson of Bexley Heath made her husband Tony sit at the tap end the judge dismissed a charge of attempted murder against him. ‘It seems you had a good deal to put up with,’ 55-year-old Mr Justice Featherstone told Timson, a 36-year-old window cleaner. ‘This is male chauvinism gone mad,’ said a spokesperson of the Islington Women’s Organization. ‘There will be protests up and down the country and questions asked in Parliament. No woman can sit safely in her bath while this judge continues on the Bench.’
‘It’s a travesty of what I said, Marigold. You know exactly what these court reporters are. Head over heels in Guinness after lunch,’ Guthrie no doubt told his wife.
‘This must have been in the morning. We went to the Palace after lunch.’
‘Well, anyway. It’s a travesty.’
‘What do you mean, Guthrie? Didn’t you say all that about the tap end?’
‘Well, I may just have mentioned the tap end. Casually. In passing. Horace told me it was part of the evidence.’
‘Horace?’
‘Rumpole.’
‘I suppose he was defending.’
‘Well, yes …’
‘You’re clay in the hands of that little fellow, Guthrie. You’re a Red Judge and he’s only a junior, but he can twist you round his little finger,’ I rather hope she told him.
‘You think Horace Rumpole led me up the garden?’
‘Of course he did! He got his chap off and he encouraged you to say something monumentally stupid about tap ends. Not, I suppose, that you needed much encouragement.’
‘This gives an entirely false impression. I’ll put it right, Marigold. I promise you. I’ll see it’s put right.’
‘I think you’d better, Guthrie.’ The judge’s wife, I knew, was not a woman to mince her words. ‘And for heaven’s sake try not to put your foot in it again.’
So Guthrie went off to soothe his troubles up to the neck in bathwater and Marigold lay brooding on the sofa until, so she told Hilda later, she was telephoned by the Tom Creevey Diary Column on the Sentinel with an enquiry as to which end of the bath she occupied when she and her husband were at their ablutions. Famous couples all over London, she was assured, were being asked the same question. Marigold put down the instrument without supplying any information, merely murmuring to herself, ‘Guthrie! What have you done to us now?’
Marigold Featherstone wasn’t the only wife appalled by the judge’s indiscretions. As I let myself into our mansion flat in the Gloucester Road, Hilda, as was her wont, called to me from the living-room, ‘Who’s that?’
‘I am thy father’s spirit,’ I told her in sepulchral tones.
‘Doomed for a certain term to walk the night,
And for the day confined to fast in fires,
Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature
Are burnt and purged away.’
‘I suppose you think it’s perfectly all right.’ She was, I noticed, reading the Evening Sentinel.
‘What’s perfectly all right?’
‘Drowning wives!’ she said in the unfriendliest of tones. ‘Like puppies. I suppose you think that’s all perfectly understandable. Well, Rumpole, all I can say is, you’d better not try anything like that with me!’
‘Hilda! It’s never crossed my mind. Anyway, Tony Timson didn’t drown her. He didn’t come anywhere near drowning her. It was just a matrimonial tiff in the bathroom.’
‘Why should she have to sit at the tap end?’
‘Why indeed?’ I made for the sideboard and a new bottle of Pommeroy’s plonk. ‘If she had, and if she’d tried to drown him because of it, I’d have defended her with equal skill and success. There you are, you see. Absolutely no prejudice when it comes to accepting a brief.’
‘You think men and women are entirely equal?’
‘Everyone is equal in the dock.’
‘And in the home?’
‘Well, yes, Hilda. Of course. Naturally. Although I suppose some are born to command.’ I smiled at her in what I hoped was a soothing manner, well designed to unruffle her feathers, and took my glass of claret to my habitual seat by the gasfire. ‘Trust me, Hilda,’ I told her. ‘I shall always be a staunch defender of women’s rights.’
‘I’m glad to hear that.’
‘I’m glad you’re glad.’
‘That means you can do the weekly shop for us at Safeway’s.’
‘Well, I’d really love that, Hilda,’ I said eagerly. ‘I should regard that as the most tremendous fun. Unfortunately I have to earn the boring stuff that pays for our weekly shop. I have to be at the service of my masters.’
‘Husbands who try to drown their wives?’ she asked unpleasantly.
‘And vice versa.’
‘They have late-night shopping on Thursdays, Rumpole. It won’t cut into your worktime at all. Only into your drinking time in Pommeroy’s Wine Bar. Besides which I shall be far too busy for shopping from now on.’
‘Why, Hilda? What on earth are you planning to do?’ I asked innocently. And when the answer came I knew the sexual revolution had hit Froxbury Mansions at last.
‘Someone has to stand up for women’s rights,’ Hilda told me, ‘against the likes of you and Guthrie Featherstone. I shall read for the Bar.’
Such was the impact of the decision in R. v. Timson on life in the Rumpole home. When Tony Timson was sprung from custody he was not taken lovingly back into the bosom of his family. April took her baths alone and frequently left the house tricked out in her skin-tight, wet-look trousers and the exotic halter-neck. When Tony made so bold as to ask where she was going, she told him to mind his own business. Vincent, the young hopeful, also treated his father with scant respect and, when asked where he was off to on his frequent departures from the front door, also told his father to mind his own business.
When she was off on the spree, April Timson, it later transpired, called round to an off-licence in neighbouring Dalton Avenue. There she met the notorious Peanuts Molloy, also dressed in alluring leather, who was stocking up from Ruby, the large black lady who ran the ‘offey’, with raspberry crush, Champanella, crème de cacao and three-star cognac as his contribution to some party or other. He and April would embrace openly and then go off partying together. On occasion Peanuts would ask her how ‘that wally of a husband’ was getting on, and express his outrage at the lightness of the sentence inflicted on him. ‘Someone ought to give that Tony of yours a bit of justice,’ was what he was heard to say.
Peanuts Molloy wasn’t alone in feeling that being bound over in the sum of fifty pounds wasn’t an adequate punishment for the attempted drowning of a wife. This view was held by most of the newspapers, a large section of the public, and all the members of the North Islington Women’s Organization (Chair, Mizz Liz Probert). When Guthrie arrived for business at the judges’ entrance of the Old Bailey, he was met by a vociferous posse of women, bearing banners with
the following legend: WOMEN OF ENGLAND, KEEP YOUR HEADS ABOVE WATER, GET JUSTICE FEATHERSTONE SACKED. As the friendly police officers kept these angry ladies at bay, Guthrie took what comfort he might from the thought that a High Court judge can only be dismissed by a bill passed through both houses of Parliament.
Something, he decided, would have to be done to answer his many critics. So Guthrie called Miss Lorraine Frinton, the doe-eyed shorthand writer, into his room and did his best to correct the record of his ill-considered judgment. Miss Frinton, breathtakingly decorative as ever, sat with her long legs neatly crossed in the judge’s armchair and tried to grasp his intentions with regard to her shorthand note. I reconstruct this conversation thanks to Miss Frinton’s later recollection. She was, she admits, very nervous at the time because she thought that the judge had sent for her because she had, in some way, failed in her duties. ‘I’ve been living in dread of someone pulling me up about my shorthand,’ she confessed. ‘It’s not my strongest suit, quite honestly.’
‘Don’t worry, Miss Frinton,’ Guthrie did his best to reassure her. ‘You’re in no sort of trouble at all. But you are a shorthand writer, of course you are, and if we could just get to the point when I passed sentence. Could you read it out?’
The beautiful Lorraine looked despairingly at her notebook and spelled out, with great difficulty, ‘Mr Hearthstoke has quite wisely …’
‘A bit further on.’
‘Jackie a saw goo … a wise Frenchman …’ Miss Frinton was decoding.
‘Chacun à son goût!’
‘I’m sorry, my Lord. I didn’t quite get the name.’
‘Ça ne fait rien.’
‘How are you spelling that?’ She was now lost.
‘Never mind.’ The judge was at his most patient. ‘A little further on, Miss Frinton. Lorraine. I’m sure you and I can come to an agreement. About a full stop.’
Forever Rumpole Page 11
