John Mortimer - Rumpole A La Carte

by Rumpole A La Carte(lit)

  You can put it to him, as a matter of life and death. He's got to help a fellow member of the Bar.' 'No, Erskine-Brown.' I was shocked by the suggestion.

  'Absolutely and definitely no! I will not enter into conspiracy with an elderly and briefless barrister to pervert the course of justice.' 'Is that your last word on the subject?' Claude was deeply disappointed.

  'Absolutely my last word,' I assured him.

  'You expect me to plead guilty?' He seemed to have reached the end of the road.

  'Throw yourself on the mercy of the Court,' I advised him in as friendly a manner as possible.

  'Rumpole, I know you call her Portia, but my wife's forgotten all about the Quality of Mercy. I came to you for advice.' 'You came too late. The moment was when she asked you about those two programmes.' 'What should I have done?' 'Claimed the right not to answer any questions,' I told him.

  'Everyone else is doing it!' At last the day arrived, awaited with a certain amount of grim foreboding, when Mr and Mrs Soapy Sam Ballard, on pleasure "ent, arrived to dine with the Rumpoles in the Gloucester Road. Marguerite Ballard, the former Old Bailey matron, is a 95 substantial woman who seems to move with a crackle of starch and a rattle of cuffs, and it's still hard to picture her without a watch pinned to her ample bosom. Her hair, done up in what I believe is known as a 'beehive' coiffure, looks as though it were made of something brittle, like candy-floss. So far as weight and stamina are concerned, she is one of the few ladies who might be expected to go ten rounds with She Who Must Be Obeyed. 'The wonderful thing about marriage, Hilda,' the exMatey said as we reached the pudding without any major disaster, 'I'm sure you'd agree, is telling each other everything. I bet when old Horace climbs into bed with you at night...' 'You don't care for baked jam roll, Mrs Ballard?' Hilda discouraged further inquiry into the secrets of the Rumpole marriage bed. 'Baked jam roll is on my naughty list, I'm afraid.' Matron pouted with disappointment. 'We've all got to watch our tummies, haven't we?' 'Marguerite is very keen on keeping fit,' Ballard explained.

  'And I'm with her one hundred per cent. I've lost a good deal of weight, you know. You should see my trousers. They hang quite loose. Look!' At which point, he stood up and jerked his waistband in a distasteful demonstration.

  'I was saying to Hilda, Sam,' Mrs Ballard banged on regardless, 'I bet when Horace climbs into bed with her, he tells her all the events of the day. And about all the little cases he gets as a junior barrister.' 'The little murders in provincial universities,' I agreed.

  'I expect you'll be taking in a leader on the Gunster murder, won't you, Horace?' Ballard sounded hopeful.

  'I expect not. The client seems to think I'm the world's greatest expert on the right to silence.' I looked at Soapy Sam.

  'You're keen on that, aren't you? Silence?' 'When I was on duty down at the Old Bailey, ' Marguerite was off again, 'everyone used to confide in me. All the way from the Recorder of London to the lads down in the cells. I think they found me wonderfully easy to talk to. "Matey," the old Recorder said more times than I care to remember, "you're the only person I feel I can really take into my confidence on the subject of my feet." Everyone seems to be able to confide 96in me except my husband.' And she repeated, at increased volume to Ballard, the refrain, 'I said everyone seems able to confide in me except you, Sam.' 'So good of you to have us to dinner, Hilda.' Ballard was clearly anxious to change the subject. 'It's really a fun evening.

  We'll have to fix up a time to return your hospitality.' 'Oh, please, don't put yourself out,' I begged him, but my voice was drowned in Marguerite's continued harangue.

  'Sam's a new boy, of course. But we're old hands at marriage, aren't we, Hilda? When I was married to poor Henry Plumstead, who passed away, we told each other every little thing.

  We just knew all there was to know about each other. I'm sure old Horace would agree with that.' 'Old Horace isn't so sure.' And I gave them an example of the blessings of silence. 'You remember George Frobisher?

  Hopeless at cross-examination so they made him a circus judge. Before your time. Bollard. Anyway he wanted to marry this Mrs Tempest. Frightfully struck with her, George was. I happened to recognize her as an old client with a tendency to bum down hotels for the sake of the insurance money.'* 'The women he's known! Old Horace has been around, hasn't he?' Marguerite joked and was rewarded with a freezing look from Hilda.

  'I took it on myself to let old George know about Mrs Tempest's past,' I told them. 'He never forgave me. I don't think I've ever forgiven myself. They'd probably have been quite happily married, provided he didn't leave the matches lying around. When it comes to a nearest and dearest, a profound ignorance is usually best.' I could tell by the way Hilda stood up and cleared away the plates that she wasn't best pleased by my conclusion. She then retired into the kitchen to wash up and Matey insisted on coming with her to dry. I was left with our Head of Chambers who, no doubt still hoping for a brief, re-opened the subject of Gunster. 'Funnily enough, I had an old uncle who lived there.' i' See 'Rumpole and the Man of God' in The Trials of Rumpole, enguin Books, 1979.

  97 I didn't find the fact especially amusing, but he went on, 'Used to be an estate agent, but he had to give it up. He said you couldn't get anywhere in Gunster unless you were an Ostler. They practically run the show.' 'A what?' 'Ancient Order of Ostlers. Rather like the Freemasons, only more so. My uncle didn't hold with it, so they squeezed him out.' 'Did he say what they did, these Ostlers, or whatever they called themselves?' I felt a faint stirring of interest. 'Oh, all sorts of secret ceremonies, I believe,' Ballard told me.

  'Mumbo-jumbo, Uncle Marcus said. And they had a peculiar handshake.' 'Like that?' I asked. I remembered something and extended my hand with two fingers stretched out and the others bent back.

  'Yes, I rather think it was. Look, wouldn't you like my assistance as a leader in that case?' 'No, thanks,' I hastened to assure him. 'You've been a great help to me already. Ah, Hilda. Is that the coffee?' She Who Must Be Obeyed had come back with Marguerite and a tray. Her face was set grimly, with the look of a jury returning with a guilty verdict, as she ignored me totally and merely asked Marguerite if she took sugar.

  'I'm going up to Gunster tomorrow,' I told my wife, and, when she still ignored me, I repeated the news. 'Gunster, dear.

  It's in the North of England. I'll probably be taking my junior, Mizz Probert, with me. You won't mind that, will you, Hilda?' In the normal course of events this information would have set off an avalanche of protest from Hilda. Now she simply handed Ballard coffee and asked him, 'Are you still keeping busy in Daddy's old Chambers?' 'So I'll probably be away tomorrow night,' I intruded firmly into the conversation. 'You won't be lonely, will you?' My wife looked at me but said nothing at all. So far as Rumpole •f, was concerned the rest was silence.

  It was not until long afterwards that I discovered what had transpired in the kitchen. 'Sam is up to tricks,' Mrs Ballard 98 &,•,had confidy in Plda, 'and your Horace is encouraging him.' When askq for further and better particulars. Matey referred to the myskrious zipper-bag which Sam left in his Chambers and was aareity ashamed to bring home. When asked about its Cintent by his wife he had replied, 'Old Rumpole takes the 'jg tl1 married people are entitled to a little privacy. Rimpol savs we a ave the right to silence, even in married lit' '§0 you see,' Marguerite summed the situation up, 'it seerig your Horace takes sides with husbands who get up to tricls/ Titis information was, of course, more than enough to ause S Who Must Be Obeyed to sever diplomatic relations w my good self.

  Once agair } ws at Gunster and in the Vice-Chancellor's house. I st,od o(i the stairway, by the broken banister, and shouted at ig top of my voice, 'You spend your life licking the Chancellors boot8!' Then the kitchen door opened and Liz Probert caig out? followed shortly by Mr Beazley. We had been able t mak tnls experiment by kind permission of the local force iayden Charles's widow. 'You heard that?' I asked Liz.

  'Clearly!' 'You cou(d ten it was me?' 'Oh, it Wag yoll? all right. Just the
sort of thing you would say!' 'Let's try n agi11, This time I'll come down the stairs after I've shoute 3 run across the hall.' 'Did you ggy "fun", Rumpole?' Liz was incredulous.

  'Well, m()ve fairly rapidly.' They wef off to the kitchen again and I was left alone to repeat my fQ-ffiance and cross the hall. Then the front door was openeq 3 Mercy Charles came into the house. 'You were kind enough?' I thanked her, 'to say we could inspect the scene of the crime.' 'It's rather a long inspection.' She still looked beautiful but the creases corners of her eyes, which had looked like the signs oflaughte,-, it seemed the marks of tiredness or age. 'I know,' I sympathized with her, 'crimes take such a short time 99 to commit and so terribly long to investigate. Do you think Professor Clympton killed your husband?' She looked at me and, instead of answering, asked another question. 'Do you think you'll get him off?' 'The Professor won't tell me where he was on the night in question,' I told her. 'He's not being much help to me at the moment, imitating the oyster.' 'What do you want me to do about it?' 'He might just be keeping quiet to protect a lady's reputation,' I suggested. 'Rather an old-fashioned idea, I suppose.

  But it's possible, isn't it?' 'That Clive was in bed with me and he doesn't want to tell anyone? Is that what you'd like me to say? Then of course I will, if it'll be a help.' 'Is it true?' I had to ask her.

  'What's it matter to you if it's true or not? You're a lawyer, aren't you? It's your job to get Clive off.' She was looking at me, smiling, when Liz and Mr Beazley came out of the kitchen to join us. I asked then if they'd heard my footsteps going to the door and they said they had. 'You know Mrs Charles, of course?' And I instructed our solicitor, 'Please, Beazley. On no account take a statement from her.' We left the house then and Mercy was still standing in the hall, looking lonely and mystified, a woman who, as far as I was concerned, had just disqualified herself from giving evidence.

  'What was all that about Mrs Charles and her statement?' Liz asked me as we crossed the Gunster University quadrangle, an area which looked like a barrack square for some bleak army of the future.

  'It wouldn't have been the slightest use to us,' I told her.

  'She'd have been torn apart in cross-examination. Silence may not always be golden, but it's worth more than lies. Lots of people need to learn that lesson including Claude ErskineBrown.' 'Claude?

  What's he done?' 'Sssh! Don't say a word. I suppose it was my fault, really. I 100 Rumpole and the Right to Siler got him into it.* Here we are at the library. At least books ha. we to give up their secrets.' The library was another concrete block. We went up in a I to a floor which hummed with word processors and cof~ puters and even had shelves of books available. The presiding librarian was seated at his desk, a small, worried man, w"10 seemed nervous of the machinery which surrounded him a1 was likely to take over his job.

  'Sir,' I addressed him with due formality, 'I am engaged n a history of the fair city of Gunster. I wonder if you h, anything on the Ancient Order of Ostlers?' 'Order of what?' The librarian frowned as though he did'1 understand me.

  'Ostlers. Men who look after horses, although I don't thi there's many grooms among them now. I would say there re more chairmen of committees, planners, property developed' chief constables, even, dare it be said, heads of universiti, Important people in the long history of Gunster.' 'I'm quite sure we haven't got anything like that.' The nt-311 was almost too positive. I managed to sound amazed. 'Ycf library is silent on this important subject?' 'Nothing about it at all. In fact I've never heard of th grooms or whatever it is you're talking about.' 'Mr Rumpole?' I heard a gentle voice beside us. 'You asking about the Ostlers?' I turned to see Martin Wayfiff' the Classics Professor, who had stolen up on us, his fing1"8 still keeping his place in some dusty volume of textual criticis111, 'It's all a lot of nonsense but I can tell you a bit about the"1", I was once coming out of the gents in the Gunster Ar'fns hotel...' 'Professor Wayfield! Silence, please!' the Librarian int1"rupted him in a panic-stricken whisper. 'You know the rule ° the library.' 'Oh, all right. Come over to my room. We don't want to wake up the students, do we?' Wayfield's room, a bleak modern office mercifully buried in * See 'Rumpole and the Summer of Discontent'.

  fOI books, piles of papers, files, reproductions of busts from the British Museum, fading photographs of other antiquities and posters for cruises round Greece and Turkey, seemed a haven of civilization in the grim Gunster desert. When we had settled there, he encouraged Mizz Probert to boil a kettle and make tea, filled an old pipe, lit it and said, 'What were we talking about?' 'Something that interested me strangely,' I reminded him.

  'You were just coming out of the Gunster Arms gents...' 'Ah, yes.' He took up his story again. 'And there was one of these fellows, wearing a leather apron and gauntlets, with a bloody great gilded horseshoe hung round his neck, just about to slink into the private dining-room to swear some terrible oath of secrecy and offer to have his throat cut if he ever let on what they were up to. They do that, apparently. Well, I recognized him as a chap who used to be', here he started to laugh, 'the University Registrar. So I called out, "Hullo, Simkins! Your old lady cast a shoe, has she?" And he bolted like a rabbit!' I laughed with him and then became serious. 'Hayden Charles, the late Vice-Chancellor,' I asked, 'was he one of the brotherhood?' 'Hayden always laughed about them. No. I'm sure he wasn't.

  You know, he got appointed because he was well in with the Ministry at that time. It almost seemed a condition of our grant to have Hayden. Some of the dedicated Ostlers were furious about it.' Then he became serious also. 'So you're defending Clive Clympton. Think you'll get him off?' 'Everyone's asking that. I don't know. Do you think he pushed the Vice-chancellor over the staircase?' 'Who can tell what anyone'll do? When they're in a temper.' Wayfield was opening a battered carton of milk to add to our tea. It looked sour, so I said I'd have mine black and then I asked if my client was popular around the University.

  "•The leftie students love him and there are plenty of those,' Wayfield told us.

  'And the old dons must hate him?' Liz Probert suggested.

  'Not really. He's pretty universally respected. Even by Sir 102Dennis Tolson, although they're chalk and cheese, politically.' He relit his pipe which never kept going for very long.

  'You've probably heard stories about his private life?' 'You think they're true?' I knew what he was talking about, of course.

  'Why not? Mercy Charles is a very attractive woman.' 'Everyone says that. And she finds the Professor a very attractive man?' '"Sed mulier cupido quod dicit amanti. In vento et rapida scribere oportet aqua",' Wayfield replied unhelpfully. 'Not everyone says that.' And I had to ask him, 'What does it mean?' '"But a woman's sayings to her lusting lover should be written in wind and running water." It's all there. In the Latin. But it's going to be forgotten when they abolish the Classics. I ought to get back to my Catullus.' He looked longingly at the book he had brought with him from the library. So I stood up and thanked him, rather glad to be dismissed before we had experienced his tea. Then I held out my hand, two fingers extended, the rest folded into my palm. Wayfield looked sympathetic.

  'You've hurt your hand?' he asked.

  'Not at all.' I opened my hand. 'Nothing wrong with it at all.' And the head of the Classics Department gave me a firm, strong, but quite normal, handshake.

  Back in London, Uncle Tom was, as usual, practising putts with an old mashie niblick into the clerk's room wastepaper basket, when Claude Erskine-Brown approached him in a conspiratorial fashion. My account of the conversation that follows is derived from Uncle Tom's memory of it, so I cannot vouch for its total accuracy. However, it went somewhat along these lines. Claude opened the bowling by saying, 'Uncle Tom, I've got something very important to tell you. I'd be glad of your full attention.' 'Not offering me a brief, are you?' Uncle Tom asked nervously.

  'I'm not sure I remember what to do with a brief.' 'No, Uncle Tom. I want you to understand this perfectly clearly. You see, I wanted to take you to the Opera.' 'No, you didn't!' The old golfer was cl
ear about that. 'I did,' 103 1 Claude assured him, 'on your birthday. I met you in the street and I wanted to ask you.' 'And if you had, I wouldn't have gone! I don't care for opera. Now if it'd been a musical comedy, it might have been different.' 'Well, this was a sort of musical comedy', Claude smiled as though to a child, 'called Tristan and Isolde.' 'I remember old Sneaky Purbright used to be in these Chambers...' Uncle Tom helped out a difficult conversation with a reminiscence. 'Before your time. Sneaky had tickets for a musical comedy. They were reviving The Bing Boys. It was a most delightful evening.' And here he broke into song, '"If you were the only girl in the world. And I was the only boy..."' 'Well, I wanted to give you a most delightful evening,' Claude assured him. 'But I couldn't because I was taking someone else.' 'Sneaky wanted to take someone else too, but his wife wouldn't have liked it. So he took me. To The Bing Boys.' 'Well, that's just it! I wanted to take someone else to Covent Garden and I did. But my wife wouldn't have liked it. So I told her I took you.' Uncle Tom thought this over carefully and came out with 'Funny thing to say. When you didn't.' 'Well, I know. But, please. Uncle Tom. If anyone asks you particularly if anyone called Phillida Erskine-Brown asks you, if you went to the Opera House with me, I beg you to say yes.' 'Oh, I see.' Somewhere deep within Uncle Tom a penny dropped. 'I see exactly what's going on!' 'Thank God for that!' Claude seemed greatly relieved.