John Mortimer - Rumpole A La Carte

by Rumpole A La Carte(lit)

  'That's very kind, but not at the moment. Look, Lord Chancellor', Guthrie embarked on his long-prepared explanation, 'all that business about striking...' 'That's why I wanted to see you, Guthrie.' Lord Fairmile abandoned his usual pastime of fitting a large number of Paper clips into a sort of daisy-chain and stood up, whether vsm:.

  * See 'Rumpole and the Tap End' in Rumpole and the Age of Miracles, Penguin Books, 1988.

  75 Featherstone wanted it or not, to open a bottle of beer. 'I mean, we just fined the drain-clearance operatives a quarter of a million for not taking a ballot. Do you have that sort of money in your trousers? Do change your mind and take a small light ale?' The Chancellor smiled and his ready hospitality gave Guthrie courage. 'Well,' he said and took the proffered glass, 'I think the Judges pretty well agree. Lord Chancellor, that if it came to a ballot, they might well take action.' 'Oh, dear. Oh, my ears and whiskers. I don't think the Cabinet's going to like that. The idea of all the Judges on a picket line with the local elections coming up. I don't think the Cabinet's going to be attracted by that. Got a cloth cap, have you?' Lord Fairmile gave himself a light ale.

  'Well, Lord Chancellor, as a matter of fact I have,' Guthrie admitted.

  'A little something to eat?' 'Beer and sandwiches? The way they settled disputes in the Labour Government.' Guthrie smiled as he took a sandwich which he found to be filled with Civil Service Class C hospitality fish-paste.

  'Sometimes the old-fashioned ways are the best,' the Lord Chancellor admitted. 'Look here. I have no wish to quarrel with you fellows. And I don't really know why these solicitor chaps want to be judges anyway.' 'Quite agree.' Guthrie was further encouraged. 'They can make much more money sitting in their offices selling houses.' 'Or whatever it is they do.' The Lord Chancellor's voice was slightly muffled by a sandwich.

  'Well, exactly!' 'In fact I don't know why anyone wants to be a judge.

  Unless their practice is a bit rocky. That your trouble, was it?' 'Certainly not!' Guthrie was hurt. 'I felt a call for public duty.' 'Well, I suppose your wife likes it. But no more talk about going on strike, eh? What do you say we leave the whole question t, of solicitors joining the Judges as one for the Judges to decide?' 'Absolutely super!' Mr Justice Featherstone's reaction was enthusiastic.

  'I'm thinking along those lines,' the Head of the Judiciary told him. 'Good to talk to you, Guthrie.' 'Thank you. Lord Chancellor. It's been a most successful negotiation. May I tell my committee... I mean, my brother judges?' 'Of course! We'll probably put something rather vague through Parliament. Ought to keep everybody quiet. Now, then. Why don't you try the cheese and tomato?' 'It's all ended happily.' Guthrie was smiling with joy as he took the penultimate sandwich. 'I can't wait to tell Marigold!' Not long afterwards we legal hacks in Equity Court met again round Ballard's boardroom table. Erskine-Brown, who was toying with a small, silver snuff-box which he tapped occasionally, interrupted Ballard's tedious speech about streamlining our Chambers business-wise, to increase productivity and market share, with the following, unexpected contribution.

  'With all due respect to you, Ballard,' he said, 'aren't we in danger of throwing the baby out with the bathwater? We mustn't lose our freedom. Our eccentricity.' He looked at Liz.

  'That's what makes us, us barristers', he smiled modestly, 'so attractive. Ever since the Middle Ages we have been the great freelancers! The independent radicals! The champions of freedom and against tyranny and oppression wheresoe'er it might be! We must preserve, at all costs, the great, old British tradition!' 'Erskine-Brown', Soapy Sam looked as though he had just sat down on a favourite armchair which had gone missing 'am I to understand I can no longer count on your support, in getting Chambers efficient, business-wise?' 'No, Ballard,' Claude told him frankly. 'I'm afraid you no longer have my support on this one.' 'Does that mean we're not getting a new coffee machine?' Uncle Tom asked hopefully.

  'Yes, Uncle Tom. I rather think it does,' I told him.

  'Oh, good!' 'Let's stop trying to be a lot ofwhizz-kids,' Claude addressed 77 the meeting. 'Talking about "slimming down" and "productivity targets". It makes us sound like awful little middle managers in suits. Yuk!' At this point he took a large pinch of snuff and broke down in hopeless, helpless sneezing, waving a large silk handkerchief, 'I say, you've got the most terrible cold!' Uncle Tom seemed deeply concerned.

  I was looking at Liz, who was holding hands with Dave Inchcape under the table, something poor old Claude didn't see. Not for the first time I felt a distinct pang of sympathy for the chap.

  That night I went home with a plastic bag, on which was written theodorakis takeaway kebabs, which contained what I feared was going to be my dinner. But in the hallway I smelt a magic perfume, a distinct whiff of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. When I pushed open the kitchen door, there was Hilda preparing these delicacies, together with cabbage, baked potatoes, an apple tart with cream. The whole was to be washed down, I was delighted to see, with a bottle of Pommeroy's Extraordinary Troisieme Cru.

  'Has peace,' I asked, 'broken out?' 'Well, poor Marigold Featherstone! She was so upset when Guthrie went on strike. Do you know what she bought him? A cloth cap! Rather funny, really. But there are certain people at the top who just shouldn't strike. In the public interest. Judges and generals and well, and...' 'Decision-makers of all kinds?' I looked respectfully at Hilda.

  'Well, I felt that going on strike was really not on.' 'Distinctly orf?' 'It's just not a thing that people like me and Guthrie should do.' She looked at me, I thought nervously. 'You wouldn't buy me a cloth cap, would you, Rumpole?' 'Perish the thought!' '('So, I thought to myself, it's a long time since you had Yorkshire pudding.' 'Thank you, Hilda.' I was truly grateful. 'Thank you very much.', 78 'You don't want it to get cold, do you? After I've been to all this trouble. Sit down, Rumpole, and have your dinner.' What could I do then but obey?

  What distresses me most about our times is the cheerful manner in which we seem prepared to chuck away those blessed freedoms we have fought for, bled for and got banged up in chokey for down the centuries. We went to aall that trouble with King John to get trial by our peers, and now a lot of lawyers with the minds of business consultants want to abolish juries. We struggled to get the presumption of innocence, that golden thread that runs through British justice, an'd no one seems to give a toss for it any more. What must we do, I wonder. Go back to Runnymede every so often to get another Magna Carta and cut off King Charles's head at regular intervals to ensure our constitutional rights? Speaking entirely for myself, and at my time of life, I really don't feel like going through all that again.

  The hard-won privilege most under attack at the moment is a suspect's right to silence. Those upon whom the Old Bill looks with disfavour are, it is suggested, duty-bound to entertain the nick with a flood of reminiscence, which will make the job of convicting them of serious crimes a push-over. Now if I were to be arrested, a thought which lurks constantly in, the back of my mind, and found myself, an innocent Old Bailey hack, confronted by Detective Chief Inspector Brush and his merry men, I should say nothing, saving my eloquence for a jury of common-sense citizens. And those accused of malpractices may have other reasons for silence apart from a natural shyness in the presence of the law. On the other hand, of course, they may be guilty as charged. These were the questions which confronted me during the Gunster murder case, when a pall of silence hung not only over my client but over some of those dearest; or at least nearest, to me.

  Gunster University stands in a somewhat grim Northern landscape, far from the dreaming spires of Oxford or the leafy Cambridge backs. It seems to have been built in the worst age of concrete brutalism and looked, as Hilda and I approached it in a taxi from the station, like an industrial estate or an exceptionally uninviting airport. We had gone there to see young Audrey Wystan graduate in English. Readers of these reminiscences will know that, when it comes to breeding, the Wystans are up there with the rabbits and She Who Must Be Obeyed has relatives scattered all over the world.
Were I to be shipwrecked and cast upon some Pacific island, I should not be in the least surprised to find that the fellow in charge of banana production was one of her long-lost cousins. 'Audrey is Dickie's daughter,' She had told me, and, when I looked blank, had explained, 'Dickie was Daddy's brother Maurice's oldest. Her mother was inclined to be flighty, but Audrey was always a clever girl. She has Daddy's blood, you see. And now she's got first-class honours in English. You never got firstclass honours in anything, did you, Rumpole?' From all this you will gather that Hilda has a strong sense of family loyalty, and when she heard of young Audrey's success she felt she had to be in at the prizegiving, and, as crime appeared to be a little thin on the ground at that time of the year, I was brought along to swell the applause.

  So far as entertainment value went, the degree ceremony at Gunster University ranked a little below a boy scout jamboree in the Albert Hall and a notch or two above a Methodist service in a civic centre. Its main fault was a certain monotony.

  When you have watched one young person doff a mortar board, shake hands and accept a scroll you have seen them all and you still have about a thousand more to get through.

  When it was the turn of the English students to file across the Platform, their names were called by Professor Clive Clymplon, tall, more powerfully built than your usual academic, with gingery hair, an aggressive beard and a resonant voice. When Hed, the students presented themselves in front of the Chancellor, Sir Dennis Tolson, Chairman of the Tolson's Tasty Foods chain, and the University's main source of finance 81 in these days of decreasing government support. Sir Dennis was a small, plump, round-shouldered man with drooping eyes and a turned-down mouth who looked like a frog in some children's story-book who'd got dressed up in a mortar board and a black-and-gold embroidered velvet gown. Standing next to him, and dressed in similar academic robes, was Hayden Charles, Vice-Chancellor. Charles, apparently a distinguished economist, was slight, grey-haired and good-looking in a dapper sort of way. His smile seemed somewhat patronizing, as though the idea that these honours would help their recipients land a decent job in a merchant bank was really rather quaint.

  When the ceremony was over young Audrey told us we were invited to the Vice-ChancelIor's house, a handsome Georgian mansion, which stood on the edge of the campus like a good deed in a concrete world. Tea and sandwiches were being served in the big, marble-paved entrance hall, from which a staircase with a wooden balustrade curled up to the higher floors and a painted dome. Nibbling and sipping academics and their families packed out the place, and the party was being ably supervised by a grey-haired, competent-looking woman whom I later discovered to be Mrs O'Leary, the Vicechancellor's housekeeper.

  'They're destroying the universities! The Government's condemning us to death by a thousand cuts.' Clive Clympton, the English Professor, was haranguing our group which consisted of my good self, Hilda, Audrey and a vaguely anxious-looking person with a purple gown continually slipping off his shoulders.

  He had introduced himself as Martin Wayfield, Head of Classics.

  'You should see what they're doing to the law. Professor,' I said to Clympton, adding my pennyworth of gloom to the party.

  'We're going to have nothing but computer courses and business studies. Our masters don't want literature,' the Professor told us.

  'Or jury trials. Or freelance barristers. Or the right to silence.' I joined in the litany and earned a rebuke from Hilda, 'Ssh, Rumpole. You're not down the Old Bailey now.' 82'The right to what?' The Professor seemed puzzled, so I explaid, 'Silence. If you're accused, you can keep quiet and make the Prosecution prove its case. That's what they want to abolish. Bang goes freedom! Nowadays the law's supposed to work with business efficiency like a bank!' 'Most of the people reading English are going into banks.' Audrey, who seemed a bright and reasonably attractive young lady, despite her Wystan ancestry, joined in. And Professor Clympton's mouth curved in a mirthless sort of way over his beard as he said, 'What can you expect, Audrey, with a Vice-Chancellor like Hayden Charles who writes books about money?' He was looking across the hall to Charles, who was talking to Sir Dennis Tolson. Beside him was a well-turnedout, well-groomed female, who looked as though she might have featured on the cover of Vogue ten or fifteen years before.

  Audrey had told us that this was Mercy Charles, the ViceChancellor's wife.

  'You know Sir Dennis, our Chancellor, is head of that great cultural institution, Tolson's Tasty Foods? And poor old Hayden has to spend most of his time licking the Chancellor's boots.' As Clympton said this, the housekeeper had drawn up beside him and was offering him a plate of what, I deduced from pursed lips, she might have hoped were cyanide sandwiches.

  'But Professor Clympton', Hilda was fair-minded as always, 'they do quite good frozen curries at Tolson's in the Gloucester Road.' 'Don't remind me!' I shuddered at the memory of an occasional evening when Hilda hadn't felt like cooking, and the gangling Martin Wayfield came into the conversation with a fluting protest. 'Perhaps they do, Mrs Rumpole. But they don't do Latin. Nothing's been said yet but I may be the last Professor of Classics the University ofGunster will have.' 'Amo, amas, amat. Wordsworth. The right to silence.' I joined in the lament. 'The bloom is gone, and with the bloom go I!' '"Eheufugaces, Postume, Postume",' Wayfield quoted.

  83 'Onus probandi, inflagrante delicto,' I told him.

  'What did you say?' The classical scholar seemed puzzled by my Classics.

  'Sorry. That's about all the Latin I know,' I explained. 'But I do know Wordsworth.' And I recited, in what I thought was a very moving manner, some lines from the old sheep of the Lake District: 'Waters on a starry night Are beautiful and fair, The sunshine is a glorious birth: But yet I know, where'er I go, That there hath passed away a glory from the earth' Far from being touched by this, Clympton looked at me as though I had made a joke in poorish taste. 'Wordsworth,' he barked with disapproval, 'ended up a Tory!' 'Perhaps,' I told him, 'but he can still bring tears to the old eyes.' 'The purpose of literature', Clympton seemed to be conducting a seminar, 'is not to produce tears, but social change.

  Your precious Wordsworth betrayed the French Revolution.' Then he stopped lecturing me and sought other company.

  Mercy Charles was now standing alone, a still beautiful woman with long, soft hair and a smart dark-blue suit with golden buttons. The English Professor excused himself and went over to her, and Audrey said, 'Clive Clympton's a wonderful teacher. What do you think of him. Uncle Horace?' At which point I claimed the right to silence.

  Later we were introduced to Hayden Charles, who spoke highly of Audrey's attainments and talked about the fellowship she was being offered. Hilda pointed out that she came from the sort of family to which brains had been handed out with the greatest generosity. I was also introduced to the head of Tolson's Tasty Foods, who held out his hand to me in a * somewhat curious manner, with the first two fingers extended and the others tucked into his palm. I paid little attention to this at the time as I was watching Professor Clympton, all 84aggression drained away, talking to Mrs Charles in a gentle voice and with smiling eyes.

  'Mercy Charles is pretty, don't you think?' Audrey said as we were leaving. 'Did you know she used to be quite a famous model?' Hilda frowned at me when I asked if that meant she was a model wife, or merely a model model.

  Such were the characters in the drama which was played out on the evening of the graduation ceremony, in the ViceChancellor's home. After dinner, Mrs O'Leary was in the kitchen, engaged in polishing some of Charles's silver, the care of which was her particular pride. The kitchen door was a little open and it gave on to the paved entrance hall, which had been the scene of our tea party, so she was able to hear the sound of upraised male voices from the doorway of the ViceChancellor's study on the first floor. She distinguished the words 'licking the Chancellor's boots' and she was afterwards able to swear that they were shouted in Professor Clympton's voice. Then she heard Charles shout, 'You've gone mad!

  Totally mad!' and footstep
s on the staircase, followed by the words she couldn't altogether make out in Clympton's voice.

  However, she was sure she heard an 'oh!' and then 'temporary' and finally 'more is'. This was followed by further incomprehensible shouting, a noise like wood breaking and a crash.

  There were then footsteps running across the marble, and the sound of the front door opening and banging shut.

  When she got out into the hall, she first noticed that part of the wooden banister of the staircase was broken. And then beneath it she saw the slight, elegant figure of Hay den Charles lying on the blood-stained floor. She knelt beside him, held his wrist and called his name but he was past hearing her.