The Collected Stories of Rumpole

by John Mortimer

  ‘What do you mean?’ But I’d already guessed, with a sort of dread, what she was driving at.

  ‘If you can’t consort with all those criminals, I’ll have you at home all day! There’s so many little jobs for you to do. Repaper the kitchen, get the parquet in the hallway polished. You’d be able to help me with the shopping every day. And we’d have my friends round to tea; Dodo Mackintosh complains she sees nothing of you.’ There was considerably more in this vein, but Hilda had already said enough to make up my mind. When my Judges were back, refreshed with coffee, biscuits and, in certain cases, a quick drag on a Silk Cut, Sam Ballard announced that I wished to make a statement, the die was cast and I tottered to my feet and spoke to the following effect. ‘If your Lordship, and the members of the Tribunal, please. I have, I hope, some knowledge of the human race in general and the judicial race in particular. I do realize that some of those elevated to the Bench are more vulnerable, more easily offended than others. Over my years at the Old Bailey, before your Lordship and his brother Judges, I have had to grow a skin like a rhinoceros. Mr Justice Oliphant, I acknowledge, is a more retiring, shy and sensitive plant, and if anything I have said may have wounded him, I do most humbly, most sincerely apologize.’ At this I bowed and whispered to Mizz Liz Probert, ‘Will that do?’

  What went on behind closed doors between my Judges I can’t say. Were some of them, was even the sea-green incorruptible Graves, a little tired of Ollie’s down-to-earth North Country common sense; had they been sufficiently bored by him over port and walnuts to wish to deflate, just a little, that great self-satisfied balloon? Or did they stop short of depriving the Old Bailey monument of its few moments of worthwhile drama? Would they really have wanted to take all the fun out of the criminal law? I don’t know the answer to these questions but in one rather athletic bound Rumpole was free, still to be audible in the Ludgate Circus Palais de Justice.

  The next events of importance occurred at an ambitious Chambers party held as a delayed celebration of the fact that Mrs Phillida Erskine-Brown, our Portia, was now elegantly perched on the High Court Bench and her husband Claude had received the lesser honour of being swathed in silk. This beano took place in Ballard’s room and all the characters in Equity Court were there, together with their partners, as Mizz Liz would call them, and I had taken the opportunity of issuing a few further invitations on my own account.

  One of the most dramatic events on this occasion was an encounter, by a table loaded with bottles and various delicacies, between Dot and a pleasant-looking woman in her forties who, between rapid inroads into a plate of tuna-fish sandwiches, said that she was Henry’s wife Eileen, and wasn’t Dot the new typist, because ‘Henry’s been telling me all about you’?

  ‘I don’t know why he does that. He has no call, really.’ Dot was confused and embarrassed. ‘Look, I’m sorry about what he told you.’

  ‘Oh, don’t be,’ Eileen reassured her. ‘It’s a great relief to me. I was on this horrible slimming diet because I thought that’s how Henry liked me, but now he says you want to make your life together. So, could you just whirl those cocktail sausages in my direction?’

  ‘We’re not going to make a life together and I don’t know where he got the idea from at all. I mean, I like Henry. I think he’s very sweet and serious, but in a boyfriend, I’d prefer something more muscular. Know what I mean?’

  ‘You’re not going to take him on?’ Henry’s wife sounded disappointed.

  ‘I couldn’t entertain the idea, with all due respect to your husband.’

  ‘He’ll have to stay where he is then.’ Eileen lifted another small sausage on its toothpick. ‘But I’m not going back on that horrible cottage cheese. Not for him, not for anyone.’

  By now the party was starting to fill up and among the first to come was old Gravestone, to whom, I thought, I owed a very small debt of gratitude. I heard him tell Ballard how surprised he was that I’d invited him and he congratulated my so-called defender (and not my wife, who deserved all the credit) on having got me to apologize. Ballard lied outrageously and said, ‘As Head of these Chambers, of course, I do have a little influence on Rumpole.’

  Shortly after this, another of my invitees came puffing up the stairs and Ballard, apparently in a state of shock, stammered, ‘Judge! You’re here!’ to Mr Justice Oliphant.

  ‘Of course I’m here,’ Ollie rebuked him. ‘Use your common sense. Made Rumpole squirm, having to apologize, did it? Good, very good. That was all I needed.’ Later Mr Justice Featherstone arrived with Marigold and among all these judicial stars Eileen, the ex-Mayor, had the briefest of heart to hearts with her husband. ‘She doesn’t want you, Henry,’ she told him.

  ‘Please!’ Our clerk looked nervously round for earwiggers. ‘How on earth can you say that?’

  ‘Oh, she told me. No doubt about it. She goes for something more muscular, and I know exactly what she means.’

  Oblivious of this domestic drama, the party surged on around them. Ballard told Mr Justice Featherstone that it had been a most worrying case and Guthrie said things might be even more worrying now that I’d won, and Claude asked me why I hadn’t told him that I was talking to my dentist.

  ‘Your suggestion was beneath contempt, Erskine-Brown. Besides which I rather fancied being disbarred at the time.’

  ‘Rumpole!’ The man was shocked. ‘Why ever should you want that?’

  ‘For the sword outwears its sheath,’ I explained, ‘And the soul wears out the breast,/And the heart must pause to breathe. – But not yet, Claude. Not quite yet.’

  At last Henry managed to corner Dot, while Claude set off in a bee-line for the personable Eileen. The first thing Henry did was to apologize. ‘I never wanted her to come, Dot, but she insisted. It must have been terribly embarrassing for you.’

  ‘She’s ever so nice, isn’t she? You’re a very lucky bloke, Henry.’

  ‘Having you, you mean?’ He still nursed a flicker of hope.

  ‘No’ – she blew out the flame – ‘having a wife who’s prepared to eat cottage cheese for you.’

  Marigold said to Hilda, ‘I hear Rumpole’s not sitting as a judge. In fact I heard he was nearly made to sit at home permanently.’ Marguerite Ballard, ex-matron down at the Old Bailey, told Mr Justice Oliphant that ‘his naughty tummy was rather running away with him’. I told Liz that she had been utterly ruthless in pursuit of victory and she asked if I had forgiven her for saving my legal life.

  ‘I think so. But who fed Hilda that line about having me at home all day?’

  ‘What are you talking about, Rumpole?’ She Who Must joined us.

  ‘Oh, I was just saying to Liz, of course it’d be very nice if we could spend all day together, Hilda. I mean, that wasn’t what led me to apologize.’

  ‘That’s the trouble with barristers.’ She gave me one of her piercing looks. ‘You can’t believe a word they say.’

  Before I could think of any convincing defence to Hilda’s indictment, the last of my personally invited guests arrived. This was Fred Timson, wearing a dark suit with a striped tie and looking more than ever like a senior member of the old Serious Crimes Squad. I found him a drink, put it into his hand and told him how glad I was he could find time for us.

  ‘What a do, eh?’ He looked round appreciatively. ‘Judges and sparkling wine! Here’s to your very good health, Mr Rumpole.’

  ‘No, Fred,’ I told him, ‘I’m going to drink to yours.’ Whereupon I banged a glass against the table, called for silence and proposed a toast. ‘Listen, everybody. I want to introduce you to Fred Timson, head of a noted family of South London villains, minor thieves and receivers of stolen property. No violence in his record. That right, Fred?’

  ‘Quite right, Mr Rumpole.’ Fred confirmed the absence of violence and then I made public what had long been my secret thoughts on the relationship between the Timsons and the law. ‘This should appeal to you, my Lords, Ladies and gentlemen. Fred lives his life on strict monetarist principles. H
e doesn’t believe in the closed shop; he thinks that shops should be open all night, preferably by jemmy. He believes firmly in the marketplace, because that’s where you can dispose of articles that dropped off the back of a lorry. But without Fred and his like, we should all be out of work. There would be no Judges, none of Her Majesty’s Counsel, learned in the law, no coppers and no humble Old Bailey Hacks. So charge your glasses, fill us up, Henry, and I would ask you to drink to Fred Timson and the criminals of England!’

  I raised my glass but the faces around me registered varying degrees of disapproval and concern. Ballard bleated, ‘Rumpole!’, Hilda gave out a censorious, ‘Really, Rumpole!’, Featherstone, J, said, ‘He’s off again,’ and Mr Justice Oliphant decided that if this wasn’t unprofessional conduct he didn’t know what was. Only Liz, flushed with her success in Court and a few quick glasses of the Mèthode Champenoise, raised a fist and called out, ‘Up the workers!’

  ‘Oh, really!’ Graves turned wearily to our Head of Chambers. ‘Will Rumpole never learn?’

  ‘I’m afraid never,’ Ballard told him.

  I was back at work again and life would continue much as ever at 3 Equity Court.

  Rumpole and the Model Prisoner

  Quintus Blake, OBE and the staff cordially invite

  Horace Rumpole Esq.

  to a performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream by

  William Shakespeare

  15th September at 7 p.m. sharp.

  Entry by invitation only. Proof of identity will be required.

  RSVP

  The Governor’s Office

  Worsfield Prison

  Worsfield, Berks.

  I had been to Worsfield gaol regularly over the years and never without breathing a sigh of relief, and gulping in all the fresh air available, after the last screw had turned the last lock and released me from custody. I never thought of going there to explore the magical charm of a wood near Athens.

  ‘Hilda,’ I said, taking a swig of rapidly cooling coffee and lining myself up for a quick dash to the Underground, ‘can you prove your identity?’

  ‘Is that meant to be funny, Rumpole?’ Hilda was deep in the Daily Telegraph and unamused.

  ‘I mean, if you can satisfy the authorities you’re really She – I mean (here I corrected myself hastily) that you’re my wife, I’ll try for another ticket and we can go to the theatre together.’

  ‘What’s come over you, Rumpole? We haven’t been to the theatre together for three years – or whenever Claude last dragged you to the opera.’

  ‘Then it’s about time,’ I said, ‘we went to the Dream.’

  ‘Which dream?’

  ‘The Midsummer Night’s one.’

  ‘Where is it?’ Hilda seemed prepared to put her toe in the water. ‘The Royal Shakespeare?’

  ‘Not exactly. It’s in Her Majesty’s Prison, Worsfield. Fifteenth September. 7 p.m. sharp.’

  ‘You mean you want to take me to Shakespeare done by criminals?’

  ‘Done, but not done in, I hope.’

  ‘Anyway’ – She Who Must Be Obeyed found a cast-iron alibi – ‘that’s my evening at the bridge school with Marigold Featherstone.’

  Hilda, I thought, like most of the non-criminal classes, likes to think that those sentenced simply disappear off the face of the earth. Very few of us wonder about their wasted lives, or worry about the slums in which they are confined, or, indeed, remember them at all.

  ‘You’ll have to go on your own, Rumpole,’ she said. ‘I’m sure you’ll have lots of friends there, and they’ll all be delighted to see you.’

  ‘Plenty of your mates in here, eh, Mr Rumpole? They’ll all be glad to see you, I don’t doubt.’ I thought it remarkable that both She Who Must Be Obeyed and the screw who was slowly and carefully going over my body with some form of metal detector should have the same heavy-handed and not particularly diverting sense of humour.

  ‘I have come for William Shakespeare,’ I said with all the dignity I could muster. ‘I don’t believe he’s an inmate here. Nor have I ever been called upon to defend him.’

  Worsfield gaol was built in the 1850s for far fewer than the number of prisoners it now contains. What the Victorian forces of law and order required was a granite-faced castle of despair whose outer appearance was thought likely to deter the passers-by from any thoughts of evil-doing. Inside, five large cellular blocks formed the prison for men, with a smaller block set aside for the few women prisoners. In its early days all within was secrecy and silence, with prisoners, forbidden to speak to each other, plodding round the exercise yard and the treadmill – the cat-o’-nine-tails and the rope for ever lurking in the shadows. When it was built it was on the outskirts of a small industrial town, a place to be pointed out as a warning to shuddering children being brought back home late on winter evenings from school. Now the town has spread over the green fields of the countryside and the prison is almost part of the city centre. This, I thought, as my taxi passed it on the way from the station, looked in itself, with its concrete office blocks, grim shopping malls and multi-storey car parks, as if it were built like the headquarters of a secret police force or a group of houses of correction.

  Inside the prison there were some attempts at cheerfulness. Walls were painted lime green and buttercup yellow. There was a dusty rubber plant, and posters for seaside holidays, in the office by the gate where I filled in a visitor’s form and did my best to establish my identity. But the scented disinfectant was fighting a losing battle with the prevailing smell of stale air, unemptied chamber pots and greasy cooking.

  The screw who escorted me down the blindingly lit passages, with his keys jangling at his hip, told me he’d been a schoolteacher but became a prison warder for the sake of more pay and free membership of the local golf club. He was a tall, ginger-haired man, running to fat, with that prison pallor which can best be described as halfway between sliced bread and underdone potato chips. On one of his pale cheeks I noticed a recent scar.

  The ex-teacher led me across a yard, a dark concrete area lined with borders of black earth in which a few meagre plants didn’t seem to be doing well. A small crowd of visitors from the outer world – youngish people whom I took to be social workers and probation officers with their partners, grey-haired governors of other prisons with their wives, enlightened magistrates and a well-known professor of criminology – was waiting. Their voices were muted, serious and respectful, as though, instead of having been invited to a comedy, they were expecting a cremation. They stood in front of the chapel, a gaunt Gothic building no doubt intended to put us all in mind of the terrible severity of the Last Judgement. There, convicted murderers had prayed while their few days of life ticked away towards the last breakfast. ‘Puts the wretch that lies in woe/In remembrance of the shroud’ – I remembered the lines at the end of the play we were about to see. Then the locked doors of the chapel opened and we were shepherded in to the entertainment.

  ‘ “I have a device to make all well. Write me a prologue; and let the prologue seem to say, we will do no harm with our swords, and that Pyramus is not kill’d indeed; and for the more better assurance, tell them that I Pyramus, am not Pyramus but Bottom the weaver. This will put them out of fear!” ’ The odd thing was – I had discovered by a glance at my programme before the chapel lights dimmed and the cold, marble-paved area in front of the altar was bathed in sunlight and became an enchanted forest – the prisoner playing Nick Bottom was called Bob Weaver. What he was in for I had no idea, but this weaver seemed to be less of a natural actor than a natural Bottom. There was no hint of an actor playing a part. The simple pomposity, the huge self-satisfaction and the like-ability of the man were entirely real. When the audience laughed, and they laughed a good deal, the prisoner didn’t seem pleased, as an actor would be, but as hurt, puzzled and resentful as bully Bottom mocked. And, when he came to the play scene, he acted Pyramus with intense seriousness which, of course, made it funnier than ever.

  We were a se
gregated audience, divided by the aisle. On one side, like friends of the groom, sat the inmates in grey prison clothes and striped shirts – and trainers (which I used to call sandshoes when I was a boy) were apparently allowed. On the other side, the friends of the bride were the great and the good, the professional carers and concerned operators of a curious and notoriously unsuccessful system. Of the two sides, it was the friends of the groom who coughed and fidgeted less, laughed more loudly and seemed more deeply involved in the magic that unfolded before them:

  ‘But we are spirits of another sort.

  I with the morning’s love have oft made sport,

  And like a forester the groves may tread

  Even till the eastern gate, all fiery red,

  Opening on Neptune with fair blessèd beams

  Turns into yellow gold his salt green streams.’

  I hadn’t realized how handsome Tony Timson would look without his glasses. His association, however peripheral, with an armed robbery (not the sort of thing the Timson family had any experience of, nor indeed talent for) had led him to be ruler of a fairy kingdom. Puck, small, energetic and Irish, I remembered from a far more serious case as a junior member of the clan Molloy. All too soon, for me anyway, he was alone on the stage, smiling a farewell:

  ‘If we shadows have offended,

  Think but this, and all is mended:

  That you have but slumbered here,

  While these visions did appear …’

  Then the house lights went up and I remembered that all the lovers, fairies and Rude Mechanicals (with the exception of the actresses) were robbers, housebreakers, manslaughterers and murderers, there because of their crimes and somebody’s – perhaps my – unsuccessful defence.

  ‘I think you’ll all agree that that was a pretty good effort.’ The Governor was on the stage, a man with a ramrod back, cropped grey hair and pink cheeks, who spoke like some commanding officer congratulating his men after a particularly dangerous foray into enemy territory. ‘We owe a great deal to those splendid performers and all those who helped with the costumes. I suggest we might give a hand to our director who is mainly responsible for getting these awkward fellows acting.’