The Second Rumpole Omnibus

by John Mortimer

  ‘Into the last fence now and it’s Number 13, Atlantic Hero, owned and ridden by the Honourable Jonathan Postern of the Tester Hunt in the pink and green colours,’ the loudspeaker, crackling out a rasping commentary, informed us.

  ‘Come on, Atlantic Hero! Don’t hang about, Atlantic Hero!’ Hilda was shouting lustily. For the first time in a long day it seemed that one of our party had backed a winner. What with the pounding of hooves and the shouts of the aficionados, I wasn’t sure that Hilda’s fancied animal could hear her. And then the last horse crashed through the brushwood, landed awkwardly, deposited its rider on the ground and galloped off as though happy to be out of the contest.

  ‘And there’s another one down,’ the loudspeaker crackled. ‘Number 11, Tricycle. Ridden by Maurice Fishbourne of the Tester Hunt.’

  Two St John Ambulancemen with a stretcher were pounding out to the fallen rider as the victory of Atlantic Hero was announced, and Hilda sent up a resounding cheer. I looked around and saw a handsome woman in her early thirties, dressed in the regulation headscarf and padded waistcoast, running towards the fallen rider. My attention was held, I suppose, because her face seemed vaguely familiar. Her mouth was open as she ran, as though in a silent scream. And then I saw the horseless rider sit up and stretch out his hand for a pair of gold-rimmed glasses. One lens had been shattered in his fall. He seemed a slight, unsportsmanlike character, who smiled a nervous apology at the ambulancemen and then stood, unsteadily, hooking on his glasses. At this the woman in the headscarf stopped running, her mouth closed, and she turned quickly and walked away in the general direction of the refreshment tent.

  ‘First, Number 13, Atlantic Hero. Second, Number 8, Flash point. Third, Number 4, Ironside…’ the loudspeaker told us.

  ‘Come along, Rumpole, for heaven’s sake! We’ve got to collect my winnings.’ Hilda was triumphant.

  ‘What did you have on it? One quid each way?’ I asked her. ‘We shall be able to retire to Biarritz.’

  So our group started to plod up the hill, where the increasing rain was producing yet more mud. As we made our way to the old and reliable firm where Hilda proudly collected the fruits of 50P each way, Uncle Tom and Henry were discussing form for the 3.30, the Barristers’ Handicap.

  ‘His clerk tells me that Mr Lorrimer’s not all that fit,’ Henry was saying. ‘He’s been overworking on his Revenue cases.’

  ‘Likely to fall at the first fence.’ Uncle Tom marked his race card and then asked, ‘Harley Waters, Q.C., in good condition, is he? Been taking his oats and all that?’

  ‘Rather too liberally, his clerk informs me, sir. The fancy is,’ Henry lowered his voice confidentially, ‘Mr E. Smith on Decree Absolute.’

  ‘Mr Smith in good form, is he?’ Uncle Tom sounded anxious.

  ‘Teetotal, according to his clerk.’ Henry had no doubts. ‘And he does press-ups in Chambers.’

  When bets had been laid on various members of the Bar, we went into the tent where Hilda was determined to fritter away her winnings on loose living and self-indulgence. I was bringing up the rearguard with Erskine-Brown, when I heard a dry and elderly voice calling, ‘There you are, Rumpole! Ah, Erskine-Brown…’ Claude immediately raised his hat and I turned to see the small, wrinkled, parchment-coloured face, inappropriately crowned by a jaunty bowler hat, of Mr Justice Twyburne, one of the old school of spine-chilling judges of the Queen’s Bench, a man so old that he had been appointed before the age for retirement was inflicted on the Judiciary, and who stayed on – to the terror of unwary criminals and barristers alike.

  ‘I haven’t had you before me lately,’ said this antique Judge. ‘I suppose you don’t get the serious crime nowadays.’

  ‘I have been engaged elsewhere,’ I said loftily and looked towards the bar as an avenue of escape. ‘I must join my wife. She’s spending the winnings.’

  ‘Been having a little flutter here, have you? I don’t see you as a gambling man, Rumpole?’ The tent was full of horsy girls in well-fitting jods, and convivial farmers. It was my fate to be stuck with this daunting old codger.

  ‘I suppose a person can’t spend a lifetime in Old Bailey trials without getting a bit of a taste for games of chance,’ I told him.

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ Mr Justice Twyburne clearly didn’t like the analogy.

  ‘Don’t you ever feel that forecasting the results of cases is rather like sticking a pin in the Sporting Life with your eyes shut?’ I asked him.

  ‘The aim of an English criminal trial is to do justice,’ the Judge said coldly. ‘I don’t see how you can possibly compare it to a horse race. Good day, Erskine-Brown.’ He touched the rim of his bowler with a yellow-gloved hand, and went off to pass an adverse judgement on the animals in the saddling enclosure. When he had gone, Erskine-Brown looked at me as though I had failed to stand up during the National Anthem, or had been caught filling out my football pools while doing a case in the House of Lords.

  ‘Rumpole!’ he protested. ‘Twyburne’s our oldest Judge.’

  ‘I know,’ I answered him with some distaste. ‘One of the few survivors who’s ever passed a death sentence. They say he ordered muffins at his Club after those occasions.’

  And then the rider of Atlantic Hero and the author of Hilda’s good fortune came into the tent, recognizable to us by his green and pink silks and his white, mud-splattered riding breeches as well as the silver cup he was carrying. He was followed by a considerable retinue, including at least two pretty girls, a tall young man with longish hair and an amused expression and, bringing up the rear, the woman who had run with such distress towards the fallen rider.

  As the crackling loudspeaker had told us, the victor of the three o’clock (the Adjacent Hunts Challenge Cup) was Jonathan Postern. I was watching as the Hon. Jonathan slapped his silver trophy down on the bar and shouted to one of the fresh-faced waitresses who had just served drinks to Hilda.

  ‘Come on, sweetheart. Fill this jerry up with champers!’

  ‘A loving cup – Jonno, how excessively brill!’ one of the pretty girls chirruped as she held the arm of the winning rider. My attention was momentarily engaged by Hilda handing me a small rum. A bit of a disappointment, I thought. With her luck I expected her at least to fill my gum boots with champagne. As I sank my nose towards the rum, I heard the dulcet tones of Miss Fiona Allways greeting Hilda and the Erskine-Browns. She was dressed like most of the other girls in a padded waistcoat, green cord trousers, a sweater and the sort of man’s flat cap which charladies used to wear.

  ‘I see you’re in uniform too, Fiona,’ I greeted her. ‘All you khaki figures, slogging through the mud to the encampment, put me in distinct mind of the retreat from Mons.’

  ‘You were never at the retreat from Mons,’ Erskine-Brown told Fiona, unnecessarily, I thought. ‘Rumpole was in the R.A.F. Ground Staff. Weren’t you, Rumpole?’

  ‘All right. It puts me in mind of the Naafi at R.A.F. Dungeness after a heavy night,’ I was saying, when the woman I had seen rushing to the fallen rider came up to greet Fiona. Then I knew why I had thought there was a familiar look to her.

  ‘Hullo, Pimpsey,’ the woman said.

  ‘Oh, hi, Sprod,’ Fiona answered.

  ‘Disgusting to see you,’ said the woman, and I made the somewhat obvious comment, ‘You two obviously know each other.’

  ‘My big sister, Jennifer Postern. This is Rumpole, Mrs Rumpole,’ Fiona introduced us.

  ‘How riveting!’ Jennifer turned to me. ‘I’ve heard so much about you. Pimpsey says you got her into Chambers. By some miracle!’

  ‘Well, it was one of my trickier cases,’ I admitted.

  ‘Oh, but Pimpsey says you win them all, because you’re the most super barrister in the whole of England. Absolutely brill, thinks Pimpsey.’

  ‘Did you come on your own, Fiona?’ Claude had moved away from his wife and was asking Fiona a quiet and hopeful question.

  ‘No. With my boyfriend, Jeremy Jowling. He’s rather dull,
but he is a solicitor. He’s the one doing the serious drinking.’

  We looked across to the group by Jonathan Postern. Jeremy Jowling appeared to be the longish-haired, amused young man who had just received a dark brown whisky. Hilda recognized her favourite rider’s racing colours then and trumpeted loudly, ‘Oh look. That’s my gorgeous winner!’

  ‘I say, your wife. Is she really the one you call “She Who Must…” ’ Jennifer whispered to me.

  ‘No. She’s the one I call “Mrs Rumpole”,’ I answered. Hilda was, after all, almost within earshot, but her attention was still on the young man in racing silks.

  ‘Rumpole! That’s the chap who won for me. On Atlantic Hero,’ she told me once again. I looked at the winner and realized how remarkably handsome he was. He had close-cropped curly hair and a straight nose, putting me in mind of those Greek statues in which the eyelids are somehow heavy with exhaustion at maintaining the heroic pose. If Jonathan Postern looked like some minor antique deity, he was surrounded by his votive priestesses. As he drank from the huge silver cup, a number of girls kissed him, none of whom was his wife.

  ‘Such a nice-looking young man. Do you know him?’ Hilda said admiringly to Jennifer, who answered, ‘He’s my husband.’

  ‘Oh, really? I do feel I should thank him personally.’

  ‘Come on then. Why don’t we whizz over?’

  So our group moved over towards Jonathan Postern’s celebration.

  Hilda, flushed with her winnings and a small rum, engaged the hero in conversation at once.

  ‘I just had to say “Well done”. It does make a day at the races so much more thrilling when you’re on a winner!’

  ‘Were you? I can’t say I saw you,’ Jonathan answered, and then said, in a loud aside to one of the attendant maidens, ‘Who are these amazing old wrinklies?’

  ‘This is Mr and Mrs Rumpole, Jonno. And Mr Claude Erskine-Brown.’ Fiona looked at him disapprovingly.

  ‘Mr Rumpole’s a tremendous legal eagle,’ Jennifer Postern explained to her husband.

  ‘My God! You’re not one of the galloping barristers?’ the Hon. Jonathan asked me.

  ‘Hardly.’

  ‘None of your lot got placed. Terribly bad luck.’ He raised the chalice ‘Care for a swig?’

  ‘Thank you.’

  I might have saved my thanks, for I never got a drink. At that moment the rider who fell, the man whose name the loudspeaker had given as Maurice Fishbourne, muddy and with his glasses broken, came into the tent and was peering round with a look of shortsighted amiability. Jonathan raised the cup and had a long refreshing drink, ignoring me.

  ‘Thank you very much,’ I muttered.

  Jonathan lowered the cup and, still holding it, looked across at Fishbourne and called, ‘Fishface!’

  ‘He’s cutting us dead!’ one of the maidens said.

  ‘He’s being frightfully grand,’ said another.

  ‘Come on, Fish. Don’t be weedy!’ a red-haired girl in a hacking jacket shouted.

  Fishbourne came towards them smiling in a hopelessly ingratiating way. Hilda, who was in a mood to greet anyone, greeted him. ‘Good afternoon.’

  ‘Oh, this is Maurice Fishbourne. He lives next to Jennifer and Jonno.’ Fiona was keeping her head admirably in a difficult social situation.

  ‘D… delighted to meet you.’ Fishbourne came towards us grinning weakly. His stammer seemed as much part of his character as his broken spectacles.

  ‘How did you manage to stick on till the last fence, Fishy? Superglue?’ Jonathan bayed at him, and the entourage laughed.

  ‘He was hanging on to the mane. I saw him!’ It was Jennifer Postern, joining in.

  ‘C… congratulations, Jonathan.’ The man Fishbourne seemed to be perfectly civil.

  ‘Oh, aren’t you a lovely loser! If you want to ride something in the next race, why not try a bicycle?’

  Once again the claque laughed at Jonathan Postern’s sally, and once again Jennifer joined in.

  ‘I’m not r… riding in the next race.’ Fishbourne smiled round at the laughing faces.

  ‘Is Mummy taking you home to tea?’ Again, to my surprise, it was Jennifer who asked the question. It didn’t sound kindly meant.

  ‘I’m driving Mother home, yes, Jennifer.’ Fishbourne looked at her through his broken lens.

  ‘Come on, Fishy. Have a slug of champers!’ Jonathan Postern invited him.

  ‘Oh… Th… thanks.’ Fishbourne took the chalice.

  ‘It’s quite all right, only got all our germs in it,’ one of the girls said.

  Fishbourne smiled and started to drink. Jonathan knocked the bottom of the cup sending a wave of champagne over Fishbourne’s face and down his neck. He emerged wet and still grinning to look round at his tormentors as though delighted to afford them all a little harmless fun.

  At the next memorable breakfast we shared at Froxbury Court I noticed, in a state of considerable shock, that Hilda was reading Country Life. Not only did she read it to herself, she gave me a nugget from this strange periodical.

  “Lodge for sale on gentleman’s estate, in wooded country near Tester.” ’

  ‘Why are you reading that, Hilda?’ I asked her. ‘Were there no Daily Telegraphs?’

  ‘ “Three bedrooms, two receps, with access to good, rough shooting”,’ she went on. ‘Doesn’t that sound attractive, Rumpole?’

  ‘I honestly think I have enough troubles in my life without you taking up rough shooting.’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I said it might be more peaceful in Tooting. Or in Gloucester Road. Or round the Inner London Sessions, or the Old Bailey. I mean, there you can go out for a walk without being in imminent danger of a charge of buckshot or whatever it is.’

  ‘Nonsense, Rumpole!’ Hilda was flicking over glossy pages full of Georgian manor houses and sporting prints. ‘That day at the Bar Races made me realize what we’re missing.’

  ‘Mud?’ I suggested.

  ‘The countryside, Rumpole! Now, if we sold our lease here…’

  ‘We could buy a deer park, and a Palladian mansion. Fancy having your Country Life ironed by the butler?’

  ‘Daddy always said that what a barrister needed was a place in the country,’ Hilda said with quiet dignity.

  ‘13 Acacia Road, Horsham. Wasn’t that your Daddy’s stately home?’ I asked as I folded up The Times, preparing for my journey to the Temple.

  ‘Can’t you see us, Rumpole?’ Hilda began to look distinctly dreamy. ‘Sitting by a log fire, taking a glass of sherry, perhaps, as the sun sets over the home wood…’

  ‘I see us with the boiler out, and all trains to London cancelled, and mud up to your elbows.’ I stood up, gulping coffee. ‘And out in the home wood there’s bound to be someone killing something.’

  Not long after that an elderly man called Figgis, who lived in a cottage in the woods on Jonathan Postern’s Tester estate heard a shot and a woman’s cry. He ran out of his overgrown garden and, just outside his tangled hedge, propped up against a fallen tree, he saw the dead body of the rider and owner of Atlantic Hero. Standing not a dozen yards away from him and holding a shotgun was Fiona’s sister, Jennifer. Figgis asked her what had happened and her answer was one that was going to prove a serious problem to her defending counsel. ‘I did it,’ she said, and added, somewhat lamely, ‘It was an accident.’

  ‘Sprod wants you to defend her,’ Fiona said.

  ‘That’s because you’ve been giving your sister a quite exaggerated view of my abilities in matters of shotgun wounds, murder and sudden death,’ I told her.

  ‘Is it really possible to exaggerate your abilities?’

  ‘Perhaps not,’ I said modestly.

  ‘Why shouldn’t my sister have the best counsel available?’

  She sat down in my client’s chair. I lit a small cigar and looked at her. She had rushed back from Court to see me when she heard the news. Still in her stiff white collar and bands, she looked absurdly young, lik
e a distressed choirboy.

  ‘Friends,’ I said.

  ‘What?’ She frowned, puzzled.

  ‘One rule at the Bar, Fiona. Never appear for friends. Your judgement gets blurred. You care too much. You can’t see the weaknesses in your own case. And if you lose, of course, they never, ever forgive you.’

  ‘My sister’s not your friend. Quite honestly, you hardly know her.’

  ‘But I know you, Fiona.’ I hoped I sounded gentle.

  ‘Of course, but…’

  ‘All the trouble I had to get you in here! I did it by some pretty ruthless manoeuvring, if you want to know the truth. And then to have to spend the rest of my life avoiding your eye in the clerk’s room, ducking over to the other side of the road when I saw you walking back from the Bailey, and never feeling safe to pop into Pommeroy’s for a strengthener in case I found you staring at me more in sorrow than in anger because I lost your sister’s case. Life would be intolerable!’

  ‘I do understand that,’ she admitted. ‘But…’

  ‘But me no buts, Fiona,’ I said firmly.

  ‘I was only going to say, “But you’re not going to lose it, are you?” ’

  So, in the course of time, and much against my better judgement, I found myself sitting in the corner of a railway carriage, studying a brief which contained a bundle of not uninteresting mortuary photographs. I was on my way to Tester Crown Court, to play my part in the case of the Queen against Jennifer Postern.

  In London you hardly ever see death, I thought, as I looked from the photograph of the wounded body of Jonathan Postern to the fields and woodlands, the streams and bridges, the grey-stone houses and farm buildings of the Cotswold countryside. Once or twice in a lifetime, you may see an old age pensioner, perhaps, collapsed on a cold night in the tube, or a shape under a blanket and a small crowd as you drive past an accident.

  In that peaceful landscape they saw death every day. They watched hounds tearing foxes to pieces or coursing hares. They hung up magpies and jays in the woods as a warning to others. No doubt at the end of the garden I saw from the passing train there was some retired naval man tearfully putting down his dog. Death is a routine event in the country. Well, I asked myself, what’s a husband more or less in the shooting season?