The Second Rumpole Omnibus

by John Mortimer

  When the day’s work was done I called into the Taste-Ee-Bite again and retired behind the Standard with a pot of tea and a toasted bun. At the next table I heard the monotonous tones of Soapy Sam Bollard, Q.C., our Head of Chambers. ‘Your daughter’s really doing very well. She’s with Rumpole, a somewhat elderly member of our Chambers. Perhaps it’s mixing with the criminal classes, but Rumpole seems somewhat lacking in a sense of sin. A girl with your daughter’s background may well do him some good.’

  I could recognize the man he was talking to as Red Ron Probert, Labour Chairman of the South-East London Council. Ballard, who never watches the telly, was apparently unable to recognize Red Ron. Liz’s father, it seemed, had come to inquire as to his daughter’s progress and our Head of Chambers had invited him to tea.

  ‘I didn’t realize who you were at first,’ Ballard droned on. ‘Of course, you’re in mufti!’

  ‘What?’ Red Ron seemed surprised.

  ‘Your collar.’

  ‘What’s wrong with my collar?’

  ‘Nothing at all,’ Ballard hastened to reassure him. ‘I’m sure it’s very comfortable. I expect you want to look just like an ordinary bloke.’

  ‘Well, I am an ordinary bloke. And I represent thousands of ordinary blokes…’ Ron was about to deliver one of his well-loved speeches.

  ‘Of course you do! I must say, I’m a tremendous admirer of your work.’

  ‘Are you?’ Ron was surprised. ‘I thought you lawyers were always Right…’

  ‘Not always. Some of them are entirely wrong. But there are a few of us prepared to fight the good fight!’

  ‘On with the revolution!’ Ron slightly raised a clenched fist.

  ‘You think it needs that’ – Ballard was thoughtful – ‘to awaken a real sense of morality…?’

  ‘Don’t you?’

  ‘A revolution in our whole way of thinking? I fear so. I greatly fear so.’ Ballard shook his head wisely.

  ‘Fear not, Brother Ballard! We’re in this together!’ Red Ron rallied our Head of Chambers.

  ‘Of course.’ Ballard was puzzled. ‘Yes. Brother. Were you in some Anglican Monastic Order?’

  ‘Only the Clerical Workers’ Union.’ Red Ron laughed at what he took to be a Ballard witticism.

  ‘Clerical Workers? Yes, that, of course.’ Ballard joined in the joke. ‘Amusing way of putting it.’

  ‘And most of them weren’t exactly monastic!’

  ‘Oh dear, yes. There’s been a falling off, even among the clergy. I really must tell you…’

  ‘Yes, Brother.’ Red Ron was prepared to listen.

  ‘Brother! I can’t really… I should prefer to call you Father. It might be more appropriate.’

  ‘Have it your own way.’ Ron seemed to find the mode of address acceptable.

  ‘Father Probert,’ Ballard said, very sincerely, ‘you have been, for me at any rate, a source of great inspiration!’

  I folded my Standard then and crept away unnoticed. I felt no need to correct a misunderstanding which seemed to be so gratifying to both of them, and had had such a beneficial effect on Mizz Probert’s legal career.

  That night I carried home to Froxbury Court a not unusual treat, that is to say, a bottle of Pommeroy’s Château Thames Embankment. I was opening it with a feeling of modified satisfaction when Hilda said, ‘You look very full of yourself! I suppose you’ve won another case.’

  ‘I’m afraid so.’ I had the bottle open and was filling a couple of glasses: ‘Oh, for a draught of vintage! that hath been Cool’d a long age in the deep-delved earth,…’ And then I tasted the wine and didn’t spit. ‘A crude Bordeaux-type of mixed origins. On sale to the more poorly paid members of the legal profession.’ I couldn’t help laughing.

  ‘What’ve you got to laugh about, Rumpole?’

  ‘Bollard!’

  ‘Your Head of Chambers.’

  ‘He met Mizz Probert’s father. Red Ron. And he still thought he was some Anglican Divine. He went entirely by the name on the label…’ I lowered my nose once more to the glass. ‘ “Tasting of Flora and the country green…” ’ Isn’t it remarkably quiet around here? I don’t seem to hear the fluting tones of your old childhood chum, Dodo Mackintosh.’

  ‘Dodo’s gone home.’

  ‘Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth.’

  ‘She’s disgusted with you, Rumpole. As a matter of fact, I told her she’d better go.’

  ‘You told Dodo that?’ She Who Must Be Obeyed was usually clay in Miss Mackintosh’s hands.

  ‘She said she’d seen you making up to some girl, in a tea-room.’

  ‘That’s what she said?’

  ‘I told her it was absolutely ridiculous. I really couldn’t imagine a young girl wanting to be made up to by you, Rumpole!’

  ‘Well. Thank you very much.’ I refilled the glass which had mysteriously emptied:

  ‘O for a beaker full of the warm South,

  Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,

  With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,

  And purple-stained mouth…’

  ‘She said you were in some sort of embrace. I told her she was seeing things.’

  ‘That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,

  And with thee fade away into the forest dim:

  Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget

  What thou among the leaves hast never known,

  The weariness, the fever and the fret…’

  I must say the words struck me as somewhat comical. At the idea of my good self and She dancing away into the mysterious recesses of some wood, the mind, as they say, boggled.

  Rumpole and the Old, Old Story

  Those of you who may have followed these memoirs which I have scribbled down from time to time (in the privacy of my Chambers during temporary lulls in business – I would not wish She Who Must Be Obeyed to have a sight of them and she studiously avoids any knowledge of their publication) will know that from time to time there is a bit of an East wind blowing around our homestead in Froxbury Court. Sometimes, in fact, the icy winds of Hilda’s discontent could best be described as a blizzard, and then, if I can’t organize a case in a distant town, I leave almost at dawn to breakfast in the Taste-Ee-Bite in Fleet Street and return as late as possible after a spot of bottled courage in Jack Pommeroy’s Wine Bar, although this last expedient never seems to do much to warm up the domestic hearth.

  Usually these moments of high drama subside. She Who Must Be Obeyed gives a few brief words of command, all hands snap to it, and the Rumpole marriage sails for a while into somewhat calmer waters. There was a time, however, and not too long ago at that, when the old tramp-steamer, with its heavy load of memories of my various delinquencies and its salt-stained smokestack, seemed to be heading for the rocks. My wife Hilda and I actually came, on one occasion, to the parting of the ways. I cannot decide whether to look back at that dramatic period of my life with nostalgia or regret. I can tell you that it came when I was most intellectually stretched, grappling as I was with one of my most important cases: the curious affair of the alleged attempted murder of Captain Arnold Gleason at the Woodland Folk Garden Centre. And, lest the readers should suspect the presence of some ‘other’ woman in the case, let me say at once that I have no reputation as a Lothario, that Mizz Liz Probert, about whom my wife’s best friend, Dodo Mackintosh, nursed some unworthy suspicions, had not yet appeared at our Chambers, and neither of the two ladies for whom I have in the past entertained some tender feelings, that is to say, Bobby O’Keefe, once of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, and a young woman named Kathy Trelawny, whom I defended on a drugs charge, had anything to do with the case.* Hilda and I, in fact, severed relations as the direct result of a joke.

  We are not great diners-out. By the time I get home from Pommeroy’s and remove the winged collar and put on the carpet slippers, preparatory to an evening’s work on robbery or sudden death, a scrambled egg or, at best, a grilled chop, is about all we run t
o. On the night in question, however, Marigold Featherstone, wife of our old Head of Chambers, Sir Guthrie Featherstone, now translated to the Bench – an ermine – and scarlet-clad figure who had everything it takes to be a justice of the Queen’s Bench Division except for the slightest talent for making up his mind – had given us a couple of tickets they couldn’t use for the Scales of Justice annual dinner at the Savoy. Gatherings of lawyers at the trough are usually to be avoided like the plague, but Hilda was dead set on being among those present on this occasion and, in view of the opportunity offered of hacking away at the Savoy Hotel claret, I didn’t oppose her wishes too strenuously. So she got my old soup and fish out of mothballs, cleaned the stains off the jacket with some pungent chemical, renewed a few essential buttons on the dress trousers, and we found ourselves ensconced at a table presided over by another scarlet judge, this time of a somewhat malign and Welsh variety, known as Mr Justice Huw Gwent-Evans, together with his spouse, Lady Gwent-Evans; Claude Erskine-Brown and his better half, Phillida Erskine-Brown, née Trant, the Portia of our Chambers; mixed with an assortment of younger barristers with their wives or live-in companions.

  As dinner drew to an end, I discovered that my glass had been refilled at such regular intervals that I was seeing the whole proceedings lit by a kind of golden glow. I also saw, somewhat to my surprise, that She Who Must Be Obeyed was in animated conversation with the Welsh Judge who was regarding her with admiration, his small eyes bright with enjoyment at her lengthy reminiscences of life in the distant days when her Daddy, C. H. Wystan, ruled our Chambers at Equity Court. At long last the proceedings wound to an end and Mr Justice Gwent-Evans pulled out his gold repeater and said, with every appearance of disappointment, ‘Good heavens, is that the time? I hate to break up such an extraordinarily enjoyable evening but…’

  ‘The learned Judge is looking at the time.’ My voice sounded, from where I sat, pleasantly resonant. I had the cue for one of my best stories, one which has never failed, in my long experience, to set the table on a roar.

  ‘I well remember when old Judge Quentin Starkie at Inner-London Sessions looked at the time. It was during an indecent assault, sort of thing that always went on in the cinemas round Bethnal Green. This girl was giving evidence…’ I was conscious of not playing to a particularly good audience. Indeed, Lady Gwent-Evans appeared to dread the outcome of the anecdote. Erskine-Brown stifled a yawn. Phillida looked at me tolerantly, although I knew that the outcome of the story would be no surprise to her. Hilda was stony-faced and the Judge cleared his throat in a warning manner. In spite of all discouragement I carried on, giving my well-known imitation of the witness’s fluting tones: ‘ “So he put his hand up my skirt, my Lord. This bloke sitting beside me in the one and nines.” ’ Now I mimicked old Judge Starkie’s low growl: ‘ “Put his hand up your skirt, did he?” ’ And then his Honour looks at the clock and finds it’s dead on lunchtime. ‘ “Put his hand up your skirt? Well, I suggest we leave it there until ten past two!” ’

  One of the wives laughed loudly, the other young barristers seemed more moderately amused. Phillida did her best, and there was a weary titter from Claude, but no smiles from the Judge’s wife or Hilda. The Welsh wizard looked as though he had just witnessed an act of adultery in Chapel. Erskine-Brown broke the ensuing silence with a somewhat pointless remark: ‘They don’t have them nowadays.’

  ‘Indecent assaults in flick houses? Of course they do. Why, only the other day at Uxbridge…’

  ‘No. I mean one and ninepennies…’

  ‘Perhaps you’re right. Let’s say it’s a joke from my distant past. Not a bad story, though, whenever it happened.’

  The Judge rose to his feet in determined manner and asked his wife if she were ready to go; she told him that she’d been ready for some time. ‘Delighted to meet you, Mrs Rumpole. Quite delightful,’ the Judge said before he left us. ‘I do hope we meet you again soon.’ I noticed that I was not included in his eager anticipation of any future get-together.

  ‘Telling that disgusting story about the girl in the Odeon!’ Hilda sat in the taxi travelling down the Mall, leaving as much unoccupied seat between us as possible. The temperature had dropped to a point at which your fingers would fall off if you stayed out in it too long.

  ‘It wasn’t the Odeon,’ I ventured to correct her. ‘It was the Regal Cinema, Bethnal Green.’

  ‘And you told it for the hundredth time! You must be getting senile.’

  ‘Old jokes are always welcome. Like old poetry, old wine, old…’ But she interrupted my speech. ‘The Judge didn’t know where to look.’

  ‘Mr Justice Gwent-Evans bores for Wales,’ I told her. ‘A man with about as many laughs in him as a post-mortem.’

  ‘He was a perfect gentleman, which is more than can be said for you, Rumpole. Fancy telling a blue joke with the Judge’s wife sitting right beside you!’

  ‘It was the Savoy Hotel, Hilda, not the Chapel in the valley.’ At this point our taxi rattled to a halt by a traffic light.

  ‘Wherever it was you made a fine fool of yourself tonight, Rumpole!’

  And then, I suppose, something snapped, and the habit of years was broken. I knew it as I opened the taxi door and felt, as I stepped out into the night, like the Count of Monte Cristo when he made his final and perilous escape from the Château D’If. I had at last found freedom. The world was in front of me; behind was Hilda’s voice saying, ‘What on earth are you doing, Rumpole?’

  ‘Saying goodbye,’ I told her, as I walked on across St James’s Park and never, for one moment, turned back.

  The reader will be no doubt relieved to turn from the painful and somewhat sordid world of married life to the more salubrious atmosphere of crime and criminals. Captain Arnold Gleason, ex-soldier and ex-golf club secretary, had become a partner in the Woodland Folk Garden Centre, just outside the large country town of Worsfield, some fifty miles to the West of London. Although he was a man in his sixties, with a prominent stomach and little hair, Captain Gleason must have had some charm for he had married Amanda Gleason, a red-haired beauty some thirty years his junior. He also had a partner, a handsome and youngish member of the Council for the Preservation of Rural England, the Friends of the Earth and such-like organizations dedicated to the saving of hedgerows and the protection of the badger, with a name like the hero of a Victorian novelette, Hugo Lutterworth. When I tell you that, from time to time, Mr Lutterworth and Mrs Gleason were seen kissing in the greenhouses, you will readily understand that the scene at the Woodland Folk Garden Centre was set for a triangular drama and a nasty accident.

  The accident came about when Captain Gleason got into his Volvo Estate car to leave the Garden Centre. He drove carefully, as was apparently his practice, out of the Garden gates and started down a steepish hill which led to a junction with the main road to Worsfield. As the car descended, it became out of control as the braking system had clearly failed. With considerable presence of mind, the Captain steered into an area half-way down the hill used by the Garden Centre for assorted statues. He crashed into a sundial, ricocheted off a couple of heavy cherubs and finally came to rest among the gnomes. Captain Gleason mercifully escaped with nothing more than a mild concussion, a cut forehead, a number of bruises and a considerably battered Volvo Estate. Subsequent inquiries by the industrious Detective Inspector Rolph of the Worsfield force led to the arrest of young Hugo Lutterworth on a charge of attempted murder.

  Lutterworth had one small piece of luck. His solicitor, a grey-haired and generally harmless Mr Dennis Driscoll, knew absolutely nothing about crime. He had however met Mr Bernard, one of my regular customers, and the long-time representative of the Timson family, over a matter of conveyancing. They struck up a friendship, and when Mr Driscoll happened to mention that he had an attempted murder on his hands, Bernard wisely replied, ‘Then Rumpole’s your man,’ or uttered words to the like effect. I suppose if Captain Gleason had crashed into a lorry on the main road and thereby met his end, there
would have been talk of taking in some querulous Q.C., some artificial silk to lead me (and this, despite the success I scored, some years ago now, in the Penge Bungalow Murders, alone and without a leader). As it was such a peculiarly unsuccessful attempt, I was allowed to handle the matter on my own.

  The first time I saw Hugo Lutterworth was in a cell in Worsfield Gaol, a small Victorian prison with no proper interviewing facilities. He was a fine-featured young man with an aureole of fair hair, so that he looked like Sir Galahad, or Lancelot or any of the rather over-sensitive chaps from the Table Round in a Pre-Raphaelite painting. Mr Driscoll asked me what I thought the chances of a conviction were, bearing in mind that the evidence clearly showed that the brakes in Captain Gleason’s Volvo Estate had been tampered with. What I thought was that, even if the Prosecution were conducted by a first-year law student with a serious speech impediment, we were likely to be defeated. What I said was, ‘I think we face… certain difficulties. You and Captain Gleason,’ I asked Lutterworth, ‘were partners in the Garden Centre business?’

  ‘I drew up the partnership agreement’ – Driscoll was fumbling among his papers, happy to be back in a branch of the law he understood – ‘I think I’ve got it here.’

  ‘Never mind about that now, Mr Driscoll,’ I turned to Hugo to ask him the four-thousand-dollar question: ‘And you were clearly having a bit of a walk-out with Gleason’s wife?’

  ‘I don’t want Amanda’s name mentioned.’ The man was clearly keen on a place in a stained-glass window.

  ‘You may not, old darling, but the Prosecution are going to mention it every ten minutes. Listen! Someone surely drained the fluid from the brakes in Gleason’s car. There’s no dispute about that.’

  ‘No dispute at all,’ Driscoll agreed.

  ‘Well, what we want to know is, was that someone you?’ It was clearly a tactless question. Hugo turned from me to ask Mr Driscoll if Amanda Gleason was all right.