The Second Rumpole Omnibus

by John Mortimer

  ‘Where did you find those, Rumpole?’ my wife Hilda asked tersely. ‘Been raiding the cemetery?’

  ‘Is she still here?’ I hoped to see the cause of Hilda’s discontent, and entered the kitchen. The place was empty. The bird, whoever she might have been, had flown.

  ‘By she I suppose you mean your girl?’ Hilda followed me into the kitchen and tried to bring back life to the tulips with the help of a cut-glass vase.

  ‘She’s not “my girl”.’

  ‘She came to see you. Then she burst into tears suddenly and left.’

  ‘People who come to see me often burst into tears. It’s in the nature of the legal profession.’ I tried to sound reassuring. But I was distracted by a strange sound, a metallic clatter, as though someone were throwing beer cans up at our kitchen window.

  ‘Hilda,’ I put the question directly. ‘What on earth’s that?’ She took a look out and reported – as it turned out, quite accurately – what she saw. ‘There’s a small man in a loud suit throwing beer cans up at our window, Rumpole. Probably another of your friends!’ At which my wife made off in the direction of our living room with the vase of tulips, and I proceeded to the window to verify the information. What I saw was a small, cunning-looking old cove in a loud check suit, with a yellow stock round his neck. Beside him was a girl in ethnic attire, carrying a large, worn holdall, no doubt of Indian manufacture. The distant view I had of her only told me that she had red hair and looked a great deal too beautiful to have any business with the elderly lunatic who was shying beer cans up at our window. As I stuck my head out to protest, I was greeted by the old party with a loud hail of ‘Horace Rumpole! There you are at last!’

  ‘Who are you?’ I had no idea why this ancient person, who had the appearance of a superannuated racing tipster, should know my name.

  ‘Don’t you remember Blanco Basnet? Fellow you got off at Cambridge Assizes? Marvellous, you were. Just bloody marvellous! Hang on a jiff. Coming up!’ At which our visitors made off for the entrance of the building.

  The name ‘Blanco Basnet’ rang only the faintest of bells. I had a vague recollection of some hanger-on round Newmarket, but what had he been charged with? Embezzlement? Common assault? Overfamiliarity with a horse? My reverie was interrupted by a prolonged peal on the front door bell, and I opened up.

  ‘Are you Basnet?’ I asked the fellow as Hilda joined us, looking distinctly displeased.

  ‘Course not. I’m Brittling.’ He introduced himself. ‘Harold Brittling. I was a close chum of old Blanco’s, though. And when you got him off without a stain on his bloody character, we drank the night away, if you will recall the occasion, at the Old Plough at Stratford Parva. Time never called while the landlord had a customer. We swapped addresses, don’t you remember? I say, is this your girl?’ This last remark clearly and inappropriately referred to She Who Must Be Obeyed.

  ‘This is my wife Hilda,’ I said with as much dignity as I could muster.

  ‘This is my girl Pauline.’ Brittling introduced the beauty dressed in a rug at his side.

  ‘I’ve met her,’ Hilda said coldly. ‘Is she your daughter?’

  ‘No, she’s my girl.’ Brittling enlarged on the subject. ‘Don’t talk much, but strips down like an early Augustus John. Thighs that simply call out for an HB pencil. I say, Rumpole, your girl Hilda looks distinctly familiar to me. Met before, haven’t we?’

  ‘I think it’s hardly likely.’ Hilda did her best to freeze the little man with a glance. It was ineffective.

  ‘Round the Old Monmouth pub in Greek Street?’ Brittling suggested. ‘Didn’t you hang a bit round the Old Monmouth? Didn’t I have the pleasure of escorting you home once, Hilda, when the Guinness stout had been flowing rather too freely?’

  At which Brittling, with the girl in tow, moved off towards the sitting room, and I was left with the thought that either the little gnome was completely off his chump or there were hidden depths to She Who Must Be Obeyed.

  When we followed him into our room, Brittling furnished some further information.

  ‘You two girls have chummed up already,’ he said. ‘I sent Pauline to find you, Horace, as I was temporarily detained in the cooler.’

  It was with some relief that I began to realize that Brittling had not paid a merely social call. He brought business. He was a customer, a member of the criminal fraternity, and probably quite a respectable little dud-cheque merchant. However, legal etiquette demanded that I spoke to him sharply. ‘Look, Brittling,’ I said, ‘if you’ve come here for legal advice, you’ll have to approach me in the proper manner.’

  ‘I shall approach you in the proper manner, bearing bubbly! Perhaps your girl will go and fetch a few beakers from the kitchen. Then we can start to celebrate!’

  At which he started to yank bottles of champagne out of Pauline’s holdall, with all the éclat of a conjurer producing rabbits from a hat.

  ‘Celebrate what?’ I was puzzled. Nothing good seemed to have happened.

  ‘The case in which I’m going to twist the tail of the con-o-sewers,’ Brittling almost shouted. ‘And you, my dear Horace, are going to twist the tail of the legal profession. Game for a bit of fun, aren’t you?’

  At this moment he released the wine, which began to bubble out over the elderly Persian-type floor covering. This, of course, didn’t add a lot to Hilda’s approval of the proceedings. ‘Do be careful,’ she said tartly, ‘that stuff is going all over the carpet.’

  ‘Then get the glasses, Hilda.’ Brittling was giving the orders. ‘It’s not like you, is it, to hold up a party?’

  ‘Rumpole!’ Hilda appealed to me with a look of desperation, but for the moment I couldn’t see the point of allowing all the champagne to be drunk up by the carpet. ‘No harm in taking a glass of champagne, Hilda,’ I said reasonably.

  ‘Or two.’ Brittling winked at her. To my amazement, she then went off to fetch the beakers. When Hilda was gone I pressed on with the interrogation of Brittling.

  ‘Who are you, exactly?’ I asked, as a starter. The question seemed to provoke considerable hilarity in the old buffer.

  ‘He asks who I am, Pauline!’ He turned to his companion incredulously. ‘Slade Gold Medal. Exhibited in the Salon in Paris. Hung in the Royal Academy. Executed in the Bond Street Galleries. And once, when I was very hungry, decorated the pavement outside the National Portrait Gallery. And the secret is – I can do it, Horace. So can you. We’re pros. Give me a box of Conté crayons and I can run you up a Degas ballet dancer that old Degas would have given his eye teeth to have drawn.’

  ‘His name’s Harold Brittling.’ The girl, Pauline, spoke at last, and as though that settled the matter. Brittling set off on a survey of the room as Hilda came back with four glasses.

  ‘Who is he?’ she asked anxiously as she handed me a glass.

  ‘An artist. Apparently. Hung in the Royal Academy.’ That was about all I was able to tell her.

  ‘Not over-pictured, are you? What’s this objet d’art?’ Brittling had fetched up in front of a particularly watery watercolour presented to Hilda by her bosom chum Dodo, an artwork which I wouldn’t give house room to were the choice mine, which of course it wasn’t.

  ‘Oh, that’s a study of Lamorna Cove, done by my old school friend, Dorothy Mackintosh. Dodo Perkins, as was. She lives in the West Country now.’

  ‘ “Dodo” keeps a tea-shop in St Ives.’ I filled in the gaps in Hilda’s narrative.

  ‘She has sent in to the Royal Academy. On several occasions. Do you like it, Mr…?’ She actually seemed to be waiting anxiously for the Brittling verdict.

  ‘Harold,’ he corrected her. And, looking at her with particularly clear blue eyes, he added, in a way I can only describe as gallant, ‘Do you like it, Hilda?’

  ‘Oh, I think it’s rather fine.’ It was She, the connoisseur, speaking. ‘Beautiful in fact. The way Dodo’s caught the shadow on the rocks, you know.’

  Brittling was sloshing the champagne around, smiling at Hilda
, and actually winking at Pauline as he said, ‘Then if you think it’s fine and beautiful, Hilda, that’s what it is to you. To you it’s worth a fortune. The mere fact that to me it looks like a rather colourless blob of budgerigar’s vomit is totally irrelevant. You pay for what you think is beautiful. That’s what our case is all about, isn’t it, Horace? What’s the difference between a Dodo and a Degas? Nothing but bloody talent which I can supply!’

  ‘Look here, Brittling…’ Although grateful for the glass full of nourishing bubbles, I thought the chap was putting the case against Dodo’s masterpiece a little strongly.

  ‘Harold,’ he suggested.

  ‘Brittling.’ I was sticking to the full formality. ‘My wife and I are grateful for this glass of…’

  ‘The Widow Cliquot. Non vintage, I’m afraid. But paid for with ready money.’

  ‘But I certainly can’t do any case unless you go and consult a solicitor and he cares to instruct me.’

  ‘Oh I see.’ Brittling was recharging all our glasses. ‘Play it by the rules, eh?’

  ‘Exactly.’ I intended to get this prospective client under control.

  ‘Then it’s much more fun breaking them when the time comes,’ said the irresponsible Brittling.

  ‘I must make it quite clear that I don’t intend to break any rules for you, Brittling,’ I said. ‘Come and see me in Chambers with a solicitor.’

  ‘Oh, I walk along the Bois du Boulogne… With an independent air…’ Brittling began to sing in a way which apparently had nothing whatever to do with matters in question.

  ‘Oh come along, Harold.’ The girl Pauline took the old boy’s arm and seemed to be urging him towards the door. ‘He’s not going to take your case on.’

  ‘Why ever not?’ Brittling seemed puzzled.

  ‘She doesn’t like you. And I don’t think he likes you much either.’

  ‘You can hear them all declare, I must be a millionaire,’ Brittling sang and then looked at me intently. ‘Horace Rumpole may not like me,’ he said at last, ‘but he envies me.’

  ‘Why should he do that?’

  ‘Because of what he has to live with.’ Brittling’s magnificent gestures seemed to embrace the entire room. ‘Pissy watercolours!’

  And then they left us, as unexpectedly as they had come, abandoning the rest of the Veuve Cliquot, which we had with our poached eggs for supper. It wasn’t until much later, when we were lying at a discreet distance in the matrimonial bed, that I happened to say to Hilda, by way of encouragement, ‘I don’t suppose we’ll see either of them again.’

  ‘Oh yes you will,’ she announced, as I thought, tartly. ‘You’ll do the case. You won’t be able to resist it!’

  ‘I can resist Mr Harold Brittling extremely easily,’ I assured her.

  ‘But her. Can you resist her, Rumpole?’ And she went on in some disgust, ‘Those thighs that simply seem to be asking for an HB pencil. I don’t know when I’ve heard anything quite so revolting!’

  ‘All the same, old Brittling seems to enjoy life.’ I said it quietly, under my breath, but She almost heard me.

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I said I don’t suppose he’s got a wife.’

  ‘That’s what I thought you said.’ And Hilda, somewhat mortified, snapped off the light, having decided it was high time we lost consciousness together.

  To understand the extraordinary case of the Queen against Harold Brittling, it is necessary to ask if you have a nodding acquaintance with the work of the late Septimus Cragg, R.A. Before he turned up his toes, which I imagine must have been shortly before the last war, Septimus Cragg appeared to the public gaze as just what they expected of the most considerable British painter of his time. His beard, once a flaming red, later a nicotine-stained white, his long procession of English and European mistresses, his farmhouse in Sussex, his huge collection of good-looking children who suffered greatly from never being able to paint as well as their father, his public denunciations of most other living artists, and his frequently pronounced belief that Brighton Pavilion was a far finer manifestation of the human spirit than Chartres Cathedral – all these things brought him constantly to the attention of the gossip columnists, and perhaps made his work undervalued in his final years.

  Now, of course, as I discovered when I started to do a little preparation for the defence of Harold Brittling, there has been a considerable boom in Craggs. The generally held view is that he was by far the finest of the British Post-Impressionists, and had he had the luck to be born in Dieppe, a port where a good deal of his life and a great many of his love affairs were celebrated, he might be mentioned in the same breath as such noted Frog artists as Degas and Bonnard. By now the art world will pay a great deal of hard cash for a Cragg in mint condition, particularly if it’s a good nude. There’s nothing that has the art world reaching for its cheque book, so it seems, as quickly as a good nude.

  The rise in expert esteem of the paintings of Septimus Cragg was shown dramatically in the prices fetched in a recent sale at which Harold Brittling was seen to be behaving in a somewhat curious manner. The particular Cragg to come under the hammer was entitled ‘Nancy at the Hôtel du Vieux Port, Dieppe’, and it appeared to have an impeccable pedigree, having been put up for auction by a Miss Price, an elderly spinster lady who lived in Worthing and was none other than Septimus Cragg’s niece. As the bidding rose steadily from fifty to fifty-six thousand pounds, and as the picture was finally knocked down to a Mrs De Moyne of New Haven, Connecticut, for a cool sixty thousand, Harold Brittling, sitting beside a silent and undemonstrative Pauline in the audience, could be seen giggling helplessly. On his way out of the auction, the beaming Brittling was fingered by two officers of the Fine Art and Antiques Department at Scotland Yard and taken into custody. Pauline was sent to enlist the immediate help of Horace Rumpole, and so earned the suspicious disapproval of She Who Must Be Obeyed.

  Nancy, whoever she may have been, was clearly a generously built, cheerful young lady, who brought out the best in Septimus Cragg. He had painted her naked, with a mane of copper-coloured hair, standing against the light of a hotel bedroom window, through which the masts and funnels of the old port were hazily visible. In the foreground there was a strip of purplish carpet, a china basin and jug on a wash stand, and the end of a brass bed, over which a man’s trousers, fitted with a pair of braces, were dangling negligently. I was looking at a reproduction of the work in question in my Chambers. I hadn’t yet seen the glowing original; but even in a flat, coloured photograph, the picture gave off the feeling of a moment of happiness, caught for ever. I felt, looking at it, I must confess, a bit of a pang. There hadn’t, I had to face it, been many such mornings in hotel bedrooms in Dieppe in the long life and career of Horace Rumpole, barrister-at-law.

  ‘It’s only a reproduction,’ Brittling said. ‘Doesn’t do it a bit of justice.’

  And Mr Myers, old Myersy, the solicitor’s managing clerk, who has seen me through more tough spots down the Bailey than I’ve had hot dinners, who sat there with his overcoat pockets bulging with writs and summonses, puffed at his nauseating, bubbling old pipe and said, as though we were looking at a bit of bloodstained sweatshirt or a mortuary photograph, ‘That’s it, Mr Rumpole. Exhibit J. L. T. (One). That’s the evidence.’

  Brittling, it seemed, had at least partially come to his senses. He had decided to consult a solicitor and approach me in a more formal manner than the mere lobbing of beer cans at my kitchen window. He looked at the exhibit in question and smiled appreciatively.

  ‘It’s a corker, though, as a composition, isn’t it?’

  ‘How is it as a forgery? That’s what you’re charged with, you know,’ I reminded him, to bring the conversation down from the high aesthetic plane.

  ‘A smashing composition,’ Brittling went on as though he hadn’t heard. ‘And if you saw the texture of paint, and the way the curtains are moving in the wind from the harbour! There’s only one man who could ever paint the air behind a
curtain like that.’

  ‘So it’s the genuine article!’ Myers assured me. ‘That’s what we’re saying, Mr Rumpole.’

  ‘Of course it’s genuine!’ Brittling called on the support of Keats: ‘ “A thing of beauty… is a joy for ever:” ’

  I helped him with the quotation,

  ‘Its loveliness increases; it will never

  Pass into nothingness; but still will keep

  A bower quiet for us, and a sleep

  Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing…

  Quiet breathing in the Nick,’ I reminded him somewhat brutally, ‘if we don’t keep our wits about us. Did you ever know Cragg?’

  ‘Septimus…?’

  ‘Did you know him?’ I asked, and Brittling embarked on a fragment of autobiography.

  ‘I was the rising star of the Slade School,’ he said. ‘Cragg was the old lion, the king of the pack. He was always kind to me. Had me down to the farmhouse at Rottingdean. Full of his children by various mothers, and society beauties, waiting to have their portraits painted. There was such a lot of laughter in that house, and so many young people…’

  ‘ “Nancy at Dieppe”.’ I picked up the reproduction. The features were blurred against the light, but didn’t there seem to be something vaguely familiar about the girl in the hotel bedroom? ‘Do you recognize the model at all?’

  ‘Cragg had so many.’ Brittling shrugged.

  ‘Models or girlfriends?’

  ‘It was usually the same thing.’

  ‘Was it really? And this one?’

  ‘Seems vaguely familiar.’ Brittling echoed my thoughts. I gave him my searching look, reserved for difficult clients. ‘The sort of thighs,’ I asked him, ‘which simply call out for an HB pencil, would you say?’

  Brittling didn’t seem to resent my suggestion. In fact he turned to me and gave a small but deliberate wink. I didn’t like that. Clients who wink at you when you as good as tell them that you think they’re guilty can be most unsettling.