Forever Rumpole

by John Mortimer

  You may be fortunate enough never to have read an allegedly ‘historical’ novel by that much-publicized authoress Miss Amelia Nettleship. Her books contain virginal heroines and gallant and gentlemanly heroes and thus present an extremely misleading account of our rough island story. She is frequently photographed wearing cotton print dresses, with large spectacles on her still pretty nose, dictating to a secretary and a couple of long-suffering cats in a wisteria-clad Tudor cottage somewhere outside Godalming. In the interviews she gives, Miss Nettleship invariably refers to the evils of the permissive society and the consequences of sex before marriage. I have never, speaking for myself, felt the slightest urge to join the permissive society; the only thing which would tempt me to such a course is hearing Amelia Nettleship denounce it.

  Why, you may well ask, should I, whose bedtime reading is usually confined to The Oxford Book of English Verse (the Quiller-Couch edition), Archbold’s Criminal Law and Professor Ackerman’s Causes of Death, become so intimately acquainted with Amelia Nettleship? Alas, she shares my bed, not in person but in book form, propped up on the bosom of She Who Must Be Obeyed, alias my wife, Hilda, who insists on reading her far into the night. While engrossed in Lord Stingo’s Fancy, I distinctly heard her sniff, and asked if she had a cold coming on. ‘No, Rumpole,’ she told me. ‘Touching!’

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry.’ I moved further down the bed.

  ‘Don’t be silly. The book’s touching. Very touching. We all thought Lord Stingo was a bit of a rake but he’s turned out quite differently.’

  ‘Sounds a sad disappointment.’

  ‘Nonsense! It’s ending happily. He swore he’d never marry, but Lady Sophia has made him swallow his words.’

  ‘And if they were written by Amelia Nettleship I’m sure he found them extremely indigestible. Any chance of turning out the light?’

  ‘Not yet. I’ve got another three chapters to go.’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake! Can’t Lord Stingo get on with it?’ As I rolled over, I had no idea that I was soon to become legally involved with the authoress who was robbing me of my sleep.

  My story starts in Pommeroy’s Wine Bar to which I had hurried for medical treatment (my alcohol content had fallen to a dangerous low) at the end of a day’s work. As I sipped my large dose of Château Thames Embankment, I saw my learned friend Erskine-Brown, member of our chambers at Equity Court, alone and palely loitering. ‘What can ail you, Claude?’ I asked, and he told me it was his practice.

  ‘Still practising?’ I raised an eyebrow. ‘I thought you might have got the hang of it by now.’

  ‘I used to do a decent class of work,’ he told me sadly. ‘I once had a brief in a libel action. You were never in a libel, Rumpole?’

  ‘Who cares about the bubble reputation? Give me a decent murder and a few well-placed bloodstains.’

  ‘Now, guess what I’ve got coming up?’ The man was wan with care.

  ‘Another large claret for me, I sincerely hope.’

  ‘Actual bodily harm and affray in the Kitten-A-Go-Go Club, Soho.’ Claude is married to the Portia of our chambers, the handsome Phillida Erskine-Brown, QC, and they are blessed with issue rejoicing in the names of Tristan and Isolde. He is, you understand, far more at home in the Royal Opera House than in any Soho Striperama. ‘Two unsavoury characters in leather jackets were duelling with broken Coca-Cola bottles.’

  ‘Sounds like my line of country,’ I told him.

  ‘Exactly! I’m scraping the bottom of your barrel, Rumpole. I mean, you’ve got a reputation for sordid cases. I’ll have to ask you for a few tips.’

  ‘Visit the locus in quo,’ was my expert advice. ‘Go to the scene of the crime. Inspect the geography of the place.’

  ‘The geography of the Kitten-A-Go-Go? Do I have to?’

  ‘Of course. Then you can suggest it was too dark to identify anyone, or the witness couldn’t see round a pillar, or …’

  But at that point we were interrupted by an eager, bespectacled fellow of about Erskine-Brown’s age who introduced himself as Ted Spratling from the Daily Beacon. ‘I was just having an argument with my editor over there, Mr Rumpole,’ he said. ‘You do libel cases, don’t you?’

  ‘Good heavens, yes!’ I lied with instant enthusiasm, sniffing a brief. ‘The law of defamation is mother’s milk to me. I cut my teeth on hatred, ridicule and contempt.’ As I was speaking, I saw Claude Erskine-Brown eyeing the journalist like a long-lost brother.

  ‘Slimey Spratling!’ he hallooed at last.

  ‘Collywobbles Erskine-Brown!’ The hack seemed equally amazed. There was no need to tell me that they were at school together.

  ‘Look, would you join my editor for a glass of Bolly?’ Spratling invited me.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Bollinger.’

  ‘I’d love to!’ Erskine-Brown was visibly cheered.

  ‘Oh, you too, Colly. Come on, then.’

  ‘Golly, Colly!’ I said as we crossed the bar towards a table in the corner. ‘Bolly!’

  So I was introduced to Mr Maurice – known as ‘Morry’ – Machin, a large silver-haired person with distant traces of a Scots accent, a blue silk suit and a thick gold ring in which a single diamond winked sullenly. He was surrounded with empty Bolly bottles and a masterful-looking woman whom he introduced as Connie Coughlin, the features editor. Morry himself had, I knew, been for many years at the helm of the tabloid Daily Beacon, and had blasted many precious reputations with well-aimed scandal stories and reverberating ‘revelations’.

  ‘They say you’re a fighter, Mr Rumpole, that you’re a terrier, sir, after a legal rabbit,’ he started, as Ted Spratling performed the deputy editor’s duty of pouring the bubbly.

  ‘I do my best. This is my learned friend, Claude Erskine-Brown, who specializes in affray.’

  ‘I’ll remember you, sir, if I get into a scrap.’ But the editor’s real business was with me. ‘Mr Rumpole, we are thinking of briefing you. We’re in a spot of bother over a libel.’

  ‘Tell him,’ Claude muttered to me, ‘you can’t do libel.’

  ‘I never turn down a brief in a libel action.’ I spoke with confidence, although Claude continued to mutter, ‘You’ve never been offered a brief in a libel action.’

  ‘I don’t care,’ I said, ‘for little scraps in Soho. Sordid stuff. Give me a libel action, when a reputation is at stake.’

  ‘You think that’s important?’ Morry looked at me seriously, so I treated him to a taste of Othello. ‘ “Good name in man or woman, dear my lord” ’ (I was at my most impressive),

  ‘Is the immediate jewel of their souls.

  Who steals my purse, steals trash; ’tis something, nothing;

  ’Twas 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.’

  Everyone, except Erskine-Brown, was listening reverently. After I had finished there was a solemn pause. Then Morry clapped three times.

  ‘Is that one of your speeches, Mr Rumpole?’

  ‘Shakespeare’s.’

  ‘Ah, yes …’

  ‘Your good name, Mr Machin, is something I shall be prepared to defend to the death,’ I said.

  ‘Our paper goes in for a certain amount of fearless exposure,’ the Beacon editor explained.

  ‘The “Beacon Beauties”.’ Erskine-Brown was smiling. ‘I catch sight of it occasionally in the clerk’s room.’

  ‘Not that sort of exposure, Collywobbles!’ Spratling rebuked his old schoolfriend. ‘We tell the truth about people in the public eye.’

  ‘Who’s bonking who and who pays,’ Connie from Features explained. ‘Our readers love it.’

  ‘I take exception to that, Connie. I really do,’ Morry said piously. ‘I don’t want Mr Rumpole to get the idea that we’re running any sort of a cheap scandal-sheet.’

  ‘Scandal-sheet? Perish the thought!’ I was working ha
rd for my brief.

  ‘You wouldn’t have any hesitation in acting for the Beacon, would you?’ the editor asked me.

  ‘A barrister is an old taxi plying for hire. That’s the fine tradition of our trade,’ I explained carefully. ‘So it’s my sacred duty, Mr Morry Machin, to take on anyone in trouble. However repellent I may happen to find them.’

  ‘Thank you, Mr Rumpole.’ Morry was genuinely grateful.

  ‘Think nothing of it.’

  ‘We are dedicated to exposing hypocrisy in our society. Wherever it exists. High or low.’ The editor was looking noble. ‘So when we find this female pretending to be such a force for purity and parading her morality before the Great British Public …’

  ‘Being all for saving your cherry till the honeymoon,’ Connie Coughlin translated gruffly.

  ‘Thank you, Connie. Or, as I would put it, denouncing premarital sex,’ Morry said.

  ‘She’s even against the normal stuff!’ Spratling was bewildered.

  ‘Whereas her own private life is extremely steamy. We feel it our duty to tell our public. Show Mr Rumpole the article in question, Ted.’

  I don’t know if they had expected to meet me in Pommeroy’s but the top brass of the Daily Beacon had a cutting of the alleged libel at the ready. THE PRIVATE LIFE OF AMELIA NETTLESHIP BY BEACON GIRL ON THE SPOT, STELLA JANUARY I read, and then glanced at the story that followed. ‘This wouldn’t be the Amelia Nettleship?’ I was beginning to warm to my first libel action. ‘The expert bottler of pure historical bilge-water?’

  ‘The lady novelist and hypocrite,’ Morry told me. ‘Of course I’ve never met the woman.’

  ‘She robs me of my sleep. I know nothing of her morality, but her prose style depraves and corrupts the English language. We shall need a statement from this Stella January.’ I got down to business.

  ‘Oh, Stella left us a couple of months ago,’ the editor told me.

  ‘And went where?’

  ‘God knows. Overseas, perhaps. You know what these girls are.’

  ‘We’ve got to find her,’ I insisted and then cheered him up with ‘We shall fight, Mr Machin – Morry. And we shall conquer! Remember, I never plead guilty.’

  ‘There speaks a man who knows damn all about libel.’ Claude Erskine-Brown had a final mutter.

  It might be as well if I quoted here the words in Miss Stella January’s article which were the subject of legal proceedings. They ran as follows:

  Miss Amelia Nettleship is a bit of a puzzle. The girls in her historical novels always keep their legs crossed until they’ve got a ring on their fingers. But her private life is rather different. Whatever lucky young man leads the 43-year-old Amelia to the altar will inherit a torrid past which makes Mae West sound like Florence Nightingale. Her home, Hollyhock Cottage, near Godalming, has been the scene of one-night stands and longer liaisons so numerous that the neighbours have given up counting. There is considerably more in her jacuzzi than bath salts. Her latest Casanova, so far unnamed, is said to be a married man who’s been seen leaving in the wee small hours.

  From the style of this piece of prose you may come to the conclusion that Stella January and Amelia Nettleship deserved each other.

  One thing you can say for my learned friend Claude Erskine-Brown is that he takes advice. Having been pointed in the direction of the Kitten-A-Go-Go, he set off obediently to find a cul-de-sac off Wardour Street with his instructing solicitor. He wasn’t to know, and it was entirely his bad luck, that Connie Coughlin had dreamt up a feature on London’s Square Mile of Sin for the Daily Beacon and ordered an ace photographer to comb the sinful purlieus between Oxford Street and Shaftesbury Avenue in search of nefarious goings-on.

  Erskine-Brown and a Mr Thrower, his sedate solicitor, found the Kitten-A-Go-Go, paid a sinister-looking myrmidon at the door ten quid each by way of membership and descended to a damp and darkened basement where two young ladies were chewing gum and removing their clothes with as much enthusiasm as they might bring to the task of licking envelopes. Claude took a seat in the front row and tried to commit the geography of the place to memory. It must be said, however, that his eyes were fixed on the plumpest of the disrobing performers when a sudden and unexpected flash preserved his face and more of the stripper for the five million readers of the Daily Beacon to enjoy with their breakfast. Not being a particularly observant barrister, Claude left the strip joint with no idea of the ill luck that had befallen him.

  While Erskine-Brown was thus exploring the underworld, I was closeted in the chambers of that elegant Old Etonian civil lawyer Robin Peppiatt, QC, who, assisted by his junior, Dick Garsington, represented the proprietors of the Beacon. I was entering the lists in the defence of Morry Machin, and our joint solicitor was an anxious little man called Cuxham, who seemed ready to pay almost any amount of someone else’s money to be shot of the whole business. Quite early in our meeting, almost as soon, in fact, as Peppiatt had poured Earl Grey into thin china cups and handed round the petits beurres, it became clear that everyone wanted to do a deal with the other side except my good self and my client, the editor.

  ‘We should work as a team,’ Peppiatt started. ‘Of which, as leading counsel, I am, I suppose, the captain.’

  ‘Are we playing cricket, old chap?’ I ventured to ask him.

  ‘If we were it would be an extremely expensive game for the Beacon.’ The QC gave me a tolerant smile. ‘The proprietors have contracted to indemnify the editor against any libel damages.’

  ‘I insisted on that when I took the job,’ Morry told us with considerable satisfaction.

  ‘Very sensible of your client, no doubt, Rumpole. Now, you may not be used to this type of case as you’re one of the criminal boys …’

  ‘Oh, I know’ – I admitted the charge – ‘I’m just a juvenile delinquent.’

  ‘But it’s obvious to me that we mustn’t attempt to justify these serious charges against Miss Nettleship’s honour.’ The captain of the team gave his orders and I made bold to ask, ‘Wouldn’t that be cricket?’

  ‘If we try to prove she’s a sort of amateur tart the jury might bump the damages up to two or three hundred grand,’ Peppiatt explained as patiently as he could.

  ‘Or four.’ Dick Garsington shook his head sadly. ‘Or perhaps half a million.’ Mr Cuxham’s mind boggled.

  ‘But you’ve filed a defence alleging that the article’s a true bill.’ I failed to follow the drift of these faint-hearts.

  ‘That’s our bargaining counter.’ Peppiatt spoke to me very slowly, as though to a child of limited intelligence.

  ‘Our what?’

  ‘Something to give away. As part of the deal.’

  ‘When we agree terms with the other side we’ll abandon all our allegations. Gracefully,’ Garsington added.

  ‘We put up our hands?’ I contemptuously tipped ash from my small cigar on to Peppiatt’s Axminster. Dick Garsington was sent off to get ‘an ashtray for Rumpole’.

  ‘Peregrine Landseer’s agin us.’ Peppiatt seemed to be bringing glad tidings of great joy to all of us. ‘I’m lunching with Perry at the Sheridan Club to discuss another matter. I’ll just whisper the thought of a quiet little settlement into his ear.’

  ‘Whisper sweet nothings!’ I told him. ‘I’ll not be party to any settlement. I’m determined to defend the good name of my client Mr Maurice Machin as a responsible editor.’

  ‘At our expense?’ Peppiatt looked displeased.

  ‘If necessary. Yes! He wouldn’t have published that story unless there was some truth in it. Would you?’ I asked Morry, assailed by some doubt.

  ‘Certainly not’ – my client assured me – ‘as a fair and responsible journalist.’

  ‘The trouble is that there’s no evidence that Miss Nettleship has done any of these things.’ Clearly Mr Cuxham had long since thrown in the towel.

  ‘Then we must find some! Isn’t that what solicitors are for?’ I asked, but didn’t expect an answer. ‘I’m quite unable to believe that a
nyone who writes so badly hasn’t got some other vices.’

  A few days later I entered the clerk’s room of our chambers in Equity Court to see our clerk, Henry, seated at his desk looking at the centre pages of the Daily Beacon, which Dianne, our fearless but somewhat hit-and-miss typist, was showing him. As I approached, Dianne folded the paper, retreated to her desk and began to type furiously. They both straightened their faces and the smiles of astonishment I had noticed when I came in were replaced by looks of legal seriousness. In fact Henry spoke with almost religious awe when he handed me my brief in Nettleship v. The Daily Beacon and anor. Not only was a highly satisfactory fee marked on the front but refreshers, that is the sum required to keep a barrister on his feet and talking, had been agreed at no less than five hundred pounds a day.

  ‘You can make the case last, can’t you, Mr Rumpole?’ Henry asked with understandable concern.

  ‘Make it last?’ I reassured him. ‘I can make it stretch on till the trump of doom! We have serious and lengthy allegations, Henry. Allegations that will take days and days, with any luck. For the first time in a long career at the Bar I begin to see …’

  ‘See what, Mr Rumpole?’

  ‘A way of providing for my old age.’

  The door then opened to admit Claude Erskine-Brown. Dianne and Henry regarded him with solemn pity, as though he’d had a death in his family.

  ‘Here comes the poor old criminal lawyer,’ I greeted him. ‘Any more problems with your affray, Claude?’

  ‘All under control, Rumpole. Thank you very much. Morning, Dianne. Morning, Henry.’ Our clerk and secretary returned his greeting in mournful voices. At that point, Erskine-Brown noticed Dianne’s copy of the Beacon, wondered who the ‘Beauty’ of that day might be, and picked it up before she could stop him.

  ‘What’ve you got there? The Beacon! A fine crusading paper. Tells the truth without fear or favour.’ My refreshers had put me in a remarkably good mood. ‘Are you feeling quite well, Claude?’