Forever Rumpole

by John Mortimer

  ‘Working late, Mr Rumpole? I hope you can do better for us tomorrow,’ he greeted me with amused disapproval.

  ‘I hope so too. I’m looking for Miss Stella January.’

  ‘I told you, she’s not here any more. I think she went overseas.’

  ‘I think she’s here,’ I assured him. He was silent for a moment and then he looked at his deputy. ‘Ted, perhaps you’d better leave me to have a word with my learned counsel.’

  ‘I’ll be on the back bench.’ Spratling left for the desk on the floor which the editors occupied.

  When he had gone, Morry looked up at me and said quietly, ‘Now then, Mr Rumpole, sir. How can I help you?’

  ‘Stella certainly wasn’t a young woman, was she?’ I was sure about that.

  ‘She was only with us a short time. But she was young, yes,’ he said vaguely.

  ‘A quotation from her article that Amelia Nettleship “makes Mae West sound like Florence Nightingale”. No young woman today’s going to have heard of Mae West. Mae West’s as remote in history as Messalina and Helen of Troy. That article, I would hazard a guess, was written by a man well into his middle age.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘You.’

  There was another long silence and the editor did his best to smile. ‘Have you been drinking at all this evening?’

  I took a seat then on the edge of his desk and lit a small cigar. ‘Of course I’ve been drinking at all. You don’t imagine I have these brilliant flashes of deduction when I’m perfectly sober, do you?’

  ‘Then hadn’t you better go home to bed?’

  ‘So you wrote the article. No argument about that. It’s been found in the system with your word processor number on it. Careless, Mr Machin. You clearly have very little talent for crime. The puzzling thing is, why you should attack Miss Nettleship when she’s such a good friend of yours.’

  ‘Good friend?’ He did his best to laugh. ‘I told you. I’ve never even met the woman.’

  ‘It was a lie, like the rest of this pantomime lawsuit. Last night you were with her until past five in the morning. And she said goodbye to you with every sign of affection.’

  ‘What makes you say that?’

  ‘Were you in a hurry? Anyway, this was dropped by the side of your car.’ Then I pulled out the present Fig Newton had given me outside court that day and put it on the desk.

  ‘Anyone can buy the Beacon.’ Morry glanced at the mud-stained exhibit.

  ‘Not everyone gets the first edition, the one that fell on the editor’s desk at ten o’clock that evening. I would say that’s a bit of a rarity around Godalming.’

  ‘Is that all?’

  ‘No. You were watched.’

  ‘Who by?’

  ‘Someone I asked to find out the truth about Miss Nettleship. Now he’s turned up the truth about both of you.’

  Morry got up then and walked to the door which Ted Spratling had left half-open. He shut it carefully and then turned to me. ‘I went down to ask her to drop the case.’

  ‘To use a legal expression, pull the other one, it’s got bells on it.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re suggesting.’

  And then, as he stood looking at me, I moved round and sat in the editor’s chair. ‘Let me enlighten you.’ I was as patient as I could manage. ‘I’m suggesting a conspiracy to pervert the course of justice.’

  ‘What’s that mean?’

  ‘I told you I’m an old taxi, waiting on the rank, but I’m not prepared to be the get-away driver for a criminal conspiracy.’

  ‘You haven’t said anything? To anyone?’ He looked very frightened.

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘And you won’t.’ He tried to sound confident. ‘You’re my lawyer.’

  ‘Not any longer, Mr Machin. I don’t belong to you any more. I’m an ordinary citizen, about to report an attempted crime.’ It was then I reached for the telephone. ‘I don’t think there’s any limit on the sentence for conspiracy.’

  ‘What do you mean, “conspiracy”?’

  ‘You’re getting sacked by the Beacon; perhaps your handshake is a bit less than golden. Sales are down on historical virgins. So your steady girlfriend and you get together to make half a tax-free million.’

  ‘I wish I knew how.’ He was doing his best to smile.

  ‘Perfectly simple. You turn yourself into Stella January, the unknown girl reporter, for half an hour and libel Amelia. She sues the paper and collects. Then you both sail into the sunset and share the proceeds. There’s one thing I shan’t forgive you for.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘The plan called for an Old Bailey hack, a stranger to the civilized world of libel who wouldn’t settle, an old war-horse who’d attack La Nettleship and inflame the damages. So you used me, Mr Morry Machin!’

  ‘I thought you’d be accustomed to that.’ He stood over me, suddenly looking older. ‘Anyway, they told me in Pommeroy’s that you never prosecute.’

  ‘No, I don’t, do I? But on this occasion, I must say, I’m sorely tempted.’ I thought about it and finally pushed away the telephone. ‘Since it’s a libel action I’ll offer you terms of settlement.’

  ‘What sort of terms?’

  ‘The fair Amelia to drop her case. You pay the costs, including the fees of Fig Newton, who’s caught a bad cold in the course of these proceedings. Oh, and in the matter of my learned friend Claude Erskine-Brown …’

  ‘What’s he got to do with it?’

  ‘… Print a full and grovelling apology on the front page of the Beacon. And get them to pay him a substantial sum by way of damages. And that’s my last word on the subject.’ I stood up then and moved to the door.

  ‘What’s it going to cost me?’ was all he could think of saying.

  ‘I have no idea, but I know what it’s going to cost me. Two weeks at five hundred a day. A provision for my old age.’ I opened the glass door and let in the hum and clatter which were the birth-pangs of the Daily Beacon. ‘Goodnight, Stella,’ I said to Mr Morry Machin. And then I left him.

  So it came about that next morning’s Beacon printed a grovelling apology to ‘the distinguished barrister Mr Claude Erskine-Brown’ which accepted that he went to the Kitten-A-Go-Go Club purely in the interests of legal research and announced that my learned friend’s hurt feelings would be soothed by the application of substantial, and tax-free, damages. As a consequence of this, Mrs Phillida Erskine-Brown rang chambers, spoke words of forgiveness and love to her husband, and he arranged, in his new-found wealth, to take her to dinner at Le Gavroche. The cuckoo flew from our nest, Hilda and I were left alone in the Gloucester Road, and we never found out how Die Meistersinger ended.

  In court my one and only libel action ended in a sudden outburst of peace and goodwill, much to the frustration of Mr Justice Teasdale, who had clearly been preparing a summing-up which would encourage the jury to make Miss Nettleship rich beyond the dreams of avarice. All the allegations against her were dropped; she had no doubt been persuaded by her lover to ask for no damages at all and the Beacon’s editor accepted the bill for costs with extremely bad grace. This old legal taxi moved off to ply for hire elsewhere, glad to be shot of Mr Morry Machin.

  ‘Is there a little bit of burglary around, Henry?’ I asked our clerk, as I have recorded. ‘Couldn’t you get me a nice little gentle robbery? Something which shows human nature in a better light than civil law?’

  ‘Good heavens!’ Hilda exclaimed as we lay reading in the matrimonial bed in Froxbury Mansions. I noticed that there had been a change in her reading matter and she was already well into On the Make by Suzy Hutchins. ‘This girl’s about to go to Paris with a man old enough to be her father.’

  ‘That must happen quite often.’

  ‘But it seems he is her father.’

  ‘Well, at least you’ve gone off the works of Amelia Nettleship.’

  ‘The way she dropped that libel action. The woman’s no better than she should be.’

 
‘Which of us is? Any chance of turning out the light?’ I asked She Who Must Be Obeyed, but she was too engrossed in the doings of her delinquent heroine to reply.

  Rumpole à la Carte

  I suppose, when I have time to think about it, which is not often during the long day’s trudge round the Bailey and more downmarket venues such as the Uxbridge Magistrates’ Court, the law represents some attempt, however fumbling, to impose order on a chaotic universe. Chaos, in the form of human waywardness and uncontrollable passion, is ever bubbling away just beneath the surface and its sporadic outbreaks are what provide me with my daily crust, and even a glass or two of Pommeroy’s plonk to go with it. I have often noticed, in the accounts of the many crimes with which I have been concerned, that some small sign of disorder – an unusual number of milk bottles on a doorstep, a car parked on a double yellow line by a normally law-abiding citizen, even, in the Penge Bungalow Murders, someone else’s mackintosh taken from an office peg – has been the first indication of anarchy taking over. The clue that such dark forces were at work in La Maison Jean-Pierre, one of the few London eateries to have achieved three Michelin stars and to charge more for a bite of dinner for two than I get for a legal aid theft, was very small indeed.

  Now my wife, Hilda, is a good plain cook. In saying that, I’m not referring to She Who Must Be Obeyed’s moral values or passing any judgement on her personal appearance. What I can tell you is that she cooks without flights of fancy. She is not, in any way, a woman who lacks imagination. Indeed some of the things she imagines Rumpole gets up to when out of her sight are colourful in the extreme, but she doesn’t apply such gifts to a chop or a potato, being quite content to grill the one and boil the other. She can also boil a cabbage into submission and fry fish. The nearest her cooking comes to the poetic is, perhaps, in her baked jam roll, which I have always found to be an emotion best recollected in tranquillity. From all this, you will gather that Hilda’s honest cooking is sufficient but not exotic, and that happily the terrible curse of nouvelle cuisine has not infected Froxbury Mansions in the Gloucester Road.

  So it is not often that I am confronted with the sort of fare photographed in the Sunday supplements. I scarcely ever sit down to an octagonal plate on which a sliver of monkfish is arranged in a composition of pastel shades, which also features a brush stroke of pink sauce, a single peeled prawn and a sprig of dill. Such gluttony is, happily, beyond my means. It wasn’t, however, beyond the means of Hilda’s cousin Everard, who was visiting us from Canada, where he carried on a thriving trade as a company lawyer. He told us that he felt we stood in dire need of what he called ‘a taste of gracious living’ and booked a table for three at La Maison Jean-Pierre.

  So we found ourselves in an elegantly appointed room with subdued lighting and even more subdued conversation, where the waiters padded around like priests and the customers behaved as though they were in church. The climax of the ritual came when the dishes were set on the table under silvery domes, which were lifted to the whispered command of ‘Un, deux, trois!’ to reveal the somewhat mingy portions on offer. Cousin Everard was a grey-haired man in a pale grey suiting who talked about his legal experiences in greyish tones. He entertained us with a long account of a takeover bid for the Winnipeg Soap Company which had cleared four million dollars for his clients, the Great Elk Bank of Canada.

  Hearing this, Hilda said accusingly, ‘You’ve never cleared four million dollars for a client, have you, Rumpole? You should be a company lawyer like Everard.’

  ‘Oh, I think I’ll stick to crime,’ I told them. ‘At least it’s a more honest type of robbery.’

  ‘Nonsense. Robbery has never got us a dinner at La Maison Jean-Pierre. We’d never be here if Cousin Everard hadn’t come all the way from Saskatchewan to visit us.’

  ‘Yes, indeed. From the town of Saskatoon, Hilda.’ Everard gave her a greyish smile.

  ‘You see, Hilda. Saskatoon as in spittoon.’

  ‘Crime doesn’t pay, Horace,’ the man from the land of the igloos told me. ‘You should know that by now. Of course, we have several fine dining restaurants in Saskatoon these days, but nothing to touch this.’ He continued his inspection of the menu. ‘Hilda, may I make so bold as to ask, what is your pleasure?’

  During the ensuing discussion my attention strayed. Staring idly round the consecrated area I was startled to see, in the gloaming, a distinct sign of human passion in revolt against the forces of law and order. At a table for two I recognized Claude Erskine-Brown, opera buff, hopeless cross-examiner and long-time member of our chambers in Equity Court. But was he dining tête-à-tête with his wife, the handsome and successful QC, Mrs Phillida Erskine-Brown, the Portia of our group, as law and order demanded? The answer to that was no. He was entertaining a young and decorative lady solicitor named Patricia (known to herself as Tricia) Benbow. Her long golden hair (which often provoked whistles from the cruder junior clerks round the Old Bailey) hung over her slim and suntanned shoulders and one generously ringed hand rested on Claude’s as she gazed, in her usual appealing way, up into his eyes. She couldn’t gaze into them for long as Claude, no doubt becoming uneasily aware of the unexpected presence of a couple of Rumpoles in the room, hid his face behind a hefty wine list.

  At that moment an extremely superior brand of French head waiter manifested himself beside our table, announced his presence with a discreet cough, and led off with, ‘Madame, messieurs. Tonight Jean-Pierre recommends, for the main course, la poésie de la poitrine du canard aux céleris et épinards crus.’

  ‘Poésie …’ Hilda sounded delighted and kindly explained, ‘That’s poetry, Rumpole. Tastes a good deal better than that old Wordsworth of yours, I shouldn’t be surprised.’

  ‘Tell us about it, Georges.’ Everard smiled at the waiter. ‘Whet our appetites.’

  ‘This is just a few wafer-thin slices of breast of duck, marinated in a drop or two of Armagnac, delicately grilled and served with a celery rémoulade and some leaves of spinach lightly steamed …’

  ‘And mash … ?’ I interrupted the man to ask.

  ‘Excusez-moi?’ The fellow seemed unable to believe his ears.

  ‘Mashed spuds come with it, do they?’

  ‘Ssh, Rumpole!’ Hilda was displeased with me, but turned all her charms on Georges. ‘I will have the poésie. It sounds delicious.’

  ‘A culinary experience, Hilda. Yes. Poésie for me too, please.’ Everard fell into line.

  ‘I would like a poésie of steak and kidney pudding, not pie, with mashed potatoes and a big scoop of boiled cabbage. English mustard, if you have it.’ It seemed a reasonable enough request.

  ‘Rumpole!’ Hilda’s whisper was menacing. ‘Behave yourself!’

  ‘This … “pudding” ’ – Georges was puzzled – ‘is not on our menu.’

  ‘ “Your pleasure is our delight.” It says that on your menu. Couldn’t you ask Cookie if she could delight me? Along those lines.’

  ‘ “Cookie”? I do not know who M’sieur means by “Cookie”. Our maître de cuisine is Jean-Pierre O’Higgins himself. He is in the kitchen now.’

  ‘How very convenient. Have a word in his shell-like, why don’t you?’

  For a tense moment it seemed as though the looming, priestly figure of Georges was about to excommunicate me, drive me out of the temple, or at least curse me by bell, book and candle. However, after muttering, ‘Si vous le voulez. Excusez-moi,’ he went off in search of higher authority. Hilda apologized for my behaviour and told Cousin Everard that she supposed I thought I was being funny. I assured her that there was nothing particularly funny about a steak and kidney pudding.

  Then I was aware of a huge presence at my elbow. A tall, fat, red-faced man in a chef’s costume was standing with his hands on his hips and asking, ‘Is there someone here wants to lodge a complaint?’

  Jean-Pierre O’Higgins, I was later to discover, was the product of an Irish father and a French mother. He spoke in the tones of those Irishmen who come up in a m
enacing manner and stand far too close to you in pubs. He was well known, I had already heard it rumoured, for dominating both his kitchen and his customers; his phenomenal rudeness to his guests seemed to be regarded as one of the attractions of his establishment. The gourmets of London didn’t feel that their dinners had been entirely satisfactory unless they were served up, by way of a savoury, with a couple of insults from Jean-Pierre O’Higgins.

  ‘Well, yes,’ I said. ‘There is someone.’

  ‘Oh, yes?’ O’Higgins had clearly never heard of the old adage about the customer always being right. ‘And are you the joker that requested mash?’

  ‘Am I to understand you to be saying,’ I enquired as politely as I knew how, ‘that there are to be no mashed spuds for my delight?’

  ‘Look here, my friend. I don’t know who you are …’ Jean-Pierre went on in an unfriendly fashion and Everard did his best to introduce me.

  ‘Oh, this is Horace Rumpole, Jean-Pierre. The criminal lawyer.’

  ‘Criminal lawyer, eh?’ Jean-Pierre was unappeased. ‘Well, don’t commit your crimes in my restaurant. If you want “mashed spuds”, I suggest you move down to the working-men’s caff at the end of the street.’

  ‘That’s a very helpful suggestion.’ I was, as you see, trying to be as pleasant as possible.

  ‘You might get a few bangers while you’re about it. And a bottle of OK sauce. That suit your delicate palate, would it?’

  ‘Very well indeed! I’m not a great one for wafer-thin slices of anything.’

  ‘You don’t look it. Now, let’s get this straight. People who come into my restaurant damn well eat as I tell them to!’

  ‘And I’m sure you win them all over with your irresistible charm.’ I gave him the retort courteous. As the chef seemed about to explode, Hilda weighed in with a well-meaning ‘I’m sure my husband doesn’t mean to be rude. It’s just, well, we don’t dine out very often. And this is such a delightful room, isn’t it?’

  ‘Your husband?’ Jean-Pierre looked at She Who Must Be Obeyed with deep pity. ‘You have all my sympathy, you unfortunate woman. Let me tell you, Mr Rumpole, this is La Maison Jean-Pierre. I have three stars in the Michelin. I have thrown out an Arabian king because he ordered filet mignon well cooked. I have sent film stars away in tears because they dared to mention Thousand Island dressing. I am Jean-Pierre O’Higgins, the greatest culinary genius now working in England!’