A Rumpole Christmas

by John Mortimer

  I opened the door which separated me from the cry of delight. I was in a room with a gas fire, a candlewick bedspread, the smell of cheap scent and a small, lit-up Christmas tree. Maureen and Mr X were kneeling on each side of Edmund, like a picture of the Christmas Family. On the floor, squawking and flashing, was the pterodactyl Mr X had no doubt given Edmund early, because he wouldn’t be able to get away to visit them on Christmas Day.

  It was then I realized that I hadn’t forced admissions out of Mr X with the brilliance of my cross-examination at the trial. Mr X had simply given his case away for Christmas.

  Rumpole and the Old Familiar Faces

  In the varied ups and downs, the thrills and spills in the life of an Old Bailey hack, one thing stands as stone. Your ex-customers will never want to see you again. Even if you’ve steered them through the rocks of the prosecution case and brought them out to the calm waters of a not guilty verdict, they won’t plan further meetings, host reunion dinners, or even send you a card on your birthday. If they catch a glimpse of you on the Underground, or across a crowded wine bar, they will bury their faces in their newspapers or look studiously in the opposite direction. This is understandable. Days in court probably represent a period of time they’d rather forget and, as a rule, I’m not especially keen to renew an old acquaintance when a face I once saw in the Old Bailey dock reappears at a “Scales of Justice” dinner or at the Inns of Court garden party. Reminiscences of the past are best avoided, and what is required is a quick look and a quiet turn away. There have been times, however, when recognizing a face seen in trouble has greatly assisted me in the solution of some legal problem and carried me to triumph in a difficult case. Such occasions have been rare but, like number thirteen buses, two of them turned up in short order around a Christmas which I remember as being one of the oddest, but certainly the most rewarding, I ever spent.

  “A traditional British pantomime. There’s nothing to beat it!”

  “You go to the pantomime, Rumpole?” Claude asked with unexpected interest.

  “I did when I was a boy. It made a lasting impression on me.”

  “Pantomime?” The American judge who was our fellow guest around the Erskine-Brown dinner table was clearly a stranger to such delights. “Is that some kind of mime show? Lots of feeling imaginary walls and no one saying anything?”

  “Not at all. You take some good old story, like Robin Hood . . .”

  “Robin Hood’s the star?”

  “Well, yes. He’s played by some strapping girl who slaps her thighs and says lines like, ‘Cheer up, Babes in the Wood, Robin’s not far away.’ ”

  “You mean there’s cross-dressing?” The American visitor was puzzled.

  “Well, if you want to call it that. And Robin’s mother is played by a red-nosed comic.”

  “A female comic?”

  “No. A male one.”

  “That sounds interesting,” he said in a tone that suggested he had the wrong idea. “We have clubs for that sort of thing in Pittsburgh.”

  “It’s not what you’re thinking,” I assured him. “The dame’s a comic character who gets the audience singing.”

  “Singing?”

  “The words come down on a sort of giant song sheet,” I explained, “and she, who is really a he, gets the audience to sing along.”

  Emboldened by Erskine-Brown’s claret (smoother on the tongue but with less of a kick than Château Thames Embankment), I broke into a stanza of the song I was introduced to by Robin Hood’s masculine mother.

  I may be just a nipper,

  But I’ve always loved a kipper ...

  And so does my loving wife.

  If you’ve got a girl, just slip her

  A loving golden kipper

  And she’ll be yours for life.

  “Is that all?” The transatlantic judge still seemed puzzled.

  “All I can remember.”

  “I think you’re wrong, Mr Rumpole.”

  “What?”

  “I think you’re wrong and those lines do indeed have some significance along the lines I suggested.” And the judge fell silent, contemplating the unusual acts suggested.

  “I see they’re doing Aladdin at the Tufnell Park Empire. Do you think the twins might enjoy it, Rumpole?”

  The speaker was Mrs Justice Erskine-Brown (Phillida Trant as she was in happier days when I called her the Portia of our chambers), still possessed of a beauty that would break the hearts of the toughest prosecutors and make old lags swoon with lust even as she passed a stiff custodial sentence. The twins she spoke of were Tristan and Isolde, so named by her opera-loving husband Claude, who was now bending Hilda’s ear on the subject of Covent Garden’s latest Ring cycle.

  “I think the twins would adore it. Just the thing to cure the Wagnerian death wish and bring them into a world of sanity.”

  “Sanity?” The visiting judge sounded doubtful. “With old guys dressed up as mothers?”

  “I promise you, they’ll love every minute of it.” And then I made another promise that sounded rash even as I spoke the words. “I know I would. I’ll take them myself.”

  “Thank you, Rumpole.” Phillida spoke in her gentlest judicial voice, but I knew my fate was sealed. “We’ll keep you to that.”

  “It’ll have to be after Christmas,” Hilda said. “We’ve been invited up to Norfolk for the holiday.”

  “As she said the word ‘Norfolk’ a cold, sweeping wind seemed to cut through the central heating of the Erskine-Browns’ Islington dining room and I felt a warning shiver.

  I have no rooted objection to Christmas Day, but I must say it’s an occasion when time tends to hang particularly heavily on the hands. From the early morning alarm call of carols piping on Radio Four to the closing headlines and a restless, liverish sleep, the day can seem as long as a fraud on the Post Office tried before Mr Injustice Graves.

  It takes less than no time for me to unwrap the tie which I will seldom wear, and for Hilda to receive the annual bottle of lavender water which she lays down rather than puts to immediate use. The highlights after that are the Queen’s speech, when I lay bets with myself as to whether Hilda will stand to attention when the television plays the National Anthem, and the thawed-out Safeway bird followed by port (an annual gift from my faithful solicitor Bonny Bernard) and pudding. I suppose what I have against Christmas Day is that the courts are all shut and no one is being tried for anything.

  That Christmas, Hilda had decided on a complete change of routine. She announced it in a circuitous fashion by saying, one late November evening, “I was at school with Poppy Longstaff.”

  “What’s that got to do with it?” I knew the answer to this question, of course. Hilda’s old school has this in common with polar expeditions, natural disasters and the last war; those who have lived through it are bound together for life and can always call on each other for mutual assistance.

  “Poppy’s Eric is Rector of Coldsands. And for some reason or other he seems to want to meet you, Rumpole.”

  “Meet me?”

  “That’s what she said.”

  “So does that mean I have to spend Christmas in the Arctic Circle and miss our festivities?”

  “It’s not the Arctic Circle. It’s Norfolk, Rumpole. And our festivities aren’t all that festive. So, yes. You have to go.” It was a judgement for which there was no possible appeal.

  My first impression of Coldsands was a gaunt church tower, presumably of great age, pointing an accusing finger to heaven from a cluster of houses on the edge of a sullen, gun-metal sea. My second was one of intense cold. As soon as we got out of the taxi, we were slapped around the face by a wind which must have started in freezing Siberia and gained nothing in the way of warmth on its journey across the plains of Europe.

  “In the bleak midwinter / Frosty winds made moan . . .” wrote that sad old darling Christina Rossetti. Frosty winds made considerable moan round the rectory at Coldsands, owing to the doors that stopped about an inch short
of the stone floors and the windows which never shut properly, causing the curtains to billow like the sails of a ship at sea.

  We were greeted cheerfully by Poppy. Hilda’s friend had one of those round, childishly pretty faces often seen on seriously fat women. She seemed to keep going on incessant cups of hot, sweet tea and a number of cardigans. If she moved like an enormous tent, her husband Eric was a slender wraith of a man with a high aquiline nose, two flapping wings of grey hair on each side of his face and a vague air of perpetual anxiety broken, now and then, by high and unexpected laughter. He made cruciform gestures, as though remembering the rubric “spectacles, testicles, wallet and watch” and forgetting where these important articles were kept.

  “Eric,” his wife explained, “is having terrible trouble with the church tower.”

  “Oh, dear.” Hilda shot me a look of stern disapproval, which I knew meant that it would be more polite if I abandoned my overcoat while tea was being served. “How worrying for you, Eric.”

  The Revd Eric went into a long, excited and high-pitched speech. The gist of it was that the tower, although of rare beauty, had not been much restored since the Saxons built it and the Normans added the finishing touches. Fifty thousand pounds was needed for essential repairs, and the thermometer, erected outside the church for the appeal, was stuck at one hundred and twenty pounds—the proceeds from an emergency jumble sale.

  “You particularly wanted Horace to come this Christmas?” Hilda asked the Man of God with the air of someone anxious to solve a baffling mystery. “I wonder why that was?”

  “Yes. I wonder!” Eric looked startled. “I wonder why on earth I wanted to ask Horace. I don’t believe he’s got fifty thousand smackers in his back pocket!” At this, he shook with laughter.

  “There,” I told him, “your lack of faith is entirely justified.” I wasn’t exactly enjoying Coldsands Rectory, so I was a little miffed that the Reverend couldn’t remember why he’d asked me there in the first place.

  “We had hoped that Donald Compton would help us out,” Poppy told us. “I mean, he wouldn’t notice fifty thousand. But he took exception to what Eric said at the Remembrance Day service.”

  “Armistice Day in the village.” Eric’s grey wings of hair trembled as he nodded in delighted affirmation. “And I prayed for dead German soldiers. It seemed only fair.”

  “Fair perhaps, darling. But hardly tactful,” his wife told him. “Donald Compton thought it was distinctly unpatriotic. He’s bought the Old Manor House,” she explained to Hilda. From then on the conversation turned exclusively to this Compton and was carried on in the tones of awe and muted wonder with which people always talk about the very rich. Compton, it seemed, after a difficult start in England, had gone to Canada where, during a ten-year stay, he had laid the foundations of his fortune. His much younger wife was quite charming, probably Canadian, and not in the least stand-offish. He had built the village hall, the cricket pavilion, and a tennis court for the school. Only Eric’s unfortunate sympathy for the German dead had caused Compton’s bounty to stop short at the church tower.

  “I’ve done hours of hard knee-work,” the rector told us, “begging the Lord to soften Mr Compton’s heart towards our tower. No result so far, I fear.”

  Apart from this one lapse, the charming Donald Compton seemed to be the perfect English squire and country gent. I would see him in church on Christmas morning, and we had also been invited for drinks before lunch at the manor. The Reverend Eric and the smiling Poppy made it sound as though the Pope and the Archbishop of Canterbury would be out with the carol singers and we’d been invited to drop in for high tea at Windsor Castle. I prayed for a yule log blazing at the manor so that I could, in the true spirit of Christmas, thaw out gradually.

  “Now, as a sign of Christmas fellowship, will you all stand and shake hands with those in front of and behind you?” Eric, in full canonicals, standing on the steps in front of the altar, made this suggestion as though he had just thought of the idea. I stood reluctantly. I had found myself a place in the church near a huge, friendly, gently humming, occasionally belching radiator and I was clinging to it and stroking it as though it were a newfound mistress (not that I have much experience of new- or even old-found mistresses). The man who turned to me from the front row seemed to be equally reluctant. He was, as Hilda had pointed out excitedly, the great Donald Compton in person—a man of middle height with silver hair, dressed in a tweed suit, and with a tan which it must have been expensive to preserve during winter. He had soft brown eyes which looked away from me almost at once as, with a touch of dry fingers, he was gone and I was left, for the rest of the service, with no more than a well-tailored back and the sound of an uncertain tenor voice joining in the hymns.

  I turned to the row behind to shake hands with an elderly woman who had madness in her eyes and whispered conspiratorially to me, “You cold, dear? Like to borrow my gloves? We’re used to a bit of chill weather round these parts.” I declined politely and went back to hugging the radiator, and as I did so a sort of happiness stole over me. To start with, the church was beautiful, with a high timbered roof and walls of weathered stone, peppered with marble tributes to dead inhabitants of the manor. It was decorated with holly and mistletoe. A tree glowed and there were candles over a crib. I thought how many generations of Coldsands villagers, their eyes bright and faces flushed with the wind, had belted out these hymns. I also thought how depressed the great Donald Compton—who had put on little gold half-glasses to read the prophecy from Isaiah: “For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful”—would feel if Jesus’ instruction to sell all and give it to the poor should ever be taken literally.

  And then I wondered why it was that, as he had touched my fingers and turned away, I had felt that I had lived through that precise moment before.

  There was, as it turned out, a huge log fire crackling at the manor, throwing a dancing light on the marble floor of the circular entrance hall with its great staircase leading up into private shadows. The cream of Coldsands was being entertained with champagne and canapés by the new Lord of the Manor. The decibels rose as the champagne went down and the little group began to sound like an army of tourists in the Sistine Chapel—noisy, excited and wonderstruck.

  “They must all be his ancestors.” Hilda was looking at the pictures on the walls and, in particular, at a general in a scarlet coat, on a horse prancing at the front of some distant battle.

  My mouth was full of cream cheese enveloped in smoked salmon. I swallowed it and said, “Oh, I shouldn’t think so. After all, he only bought the house recently.”

  “But I expect he brought his family portraits here from somewhere else.”

  “You mean, he had them under the bed in his old bachelor flat in Wimbledon and now he’s hung them round an acre or two of walls?”

  “Do try and be serious, Rumpole. You’re not nearly as funny as you think you are. Just look at the family resemblance. I’m absolutely certain that all of these are old Comp tons.” And it was when she said this that I remembered everything perfectly clearly.

  He was with his wife. She was wearing a black velvet dress and had long, golden hair that sparkled in the firelight. They were talking to a bald, pink-faced man and his short and dumpy wife, and they were all laughing. Compton’s laughter stopped as he saw me coming towards him. He said, “I don’t think we’ve met.”

  “Yes,” I replied. “We shook hands briefly in church this morning. My name’s Rumpole and I’m staying with the Longstaffs. But didn’t we meet somewhere else?”

  “Good old Eric! We have our differences, of course, but he’s a saintly man. This is my wife Lorelei, and Colonel and Maudy Jacobs. I expect you’d like to see the library, wouldn’t you, Rumpole? I’m sure you’re interested in ancient history. Will you all excuse us?”

  It was two words from Hilda that had done it—“old” and “Compton.” I knew th
en what I should have remembered when we had touched hands in the pews, that Old Compton is a street in Soho, and that this was perhaps why Riccardo (known as Dicko) Perducci had adopted the name. I had received that very same handshake—a slight touch and a quick turn away—when I had said goodbye to him in the cells under the Old Bailey and left him to start seven years for blackmail. The trial had ended, I now remembered, just before a long-distant Christmas.

  The Perducci territory had been, in those days, not rolling Norfolk acres but a number of Soho strip clubs and clip joints. Girls would stand in front of these last-named resorts and lure the lonely, the desperate and the unwary in. Sometimes they would escape after paying twenty pounds for a watery cocktail. Unlucky, affluent and important customers might get even more, carefully recorded by microphones and cameras to produce material which was used for systematic and highly profitable blackmail. The victim in Dicko’s case was an obscure and not much loved circuit judge, so it was regarded as particularly serious by the prosecuting authority.

  When I mitigated for Dicko, I stressed the lack of direct evidence against him. He was a shadowy figure who kept himself well in the background and was known as a legend rather than a familiar face around Soho. “That only shows what a big wheel he is,” Judge Bullingham, who was unfortunately trying the case, bellowed unsympathetically. In desperation I tried the Christmas approach on him. “Crimes forgiven, sins remitted, mercy triumphant, such was the message of the story that began in Bethlehem,” I told the court, at which the Mad Bull snorted that, as far as he could remember, that story had ended in a criminal trial and a stiff sentence for at least one thief.

  “I suppose something like this was going to happen sooner or later.” We were standing in the library in front of a comforting fire, among leather-bound books which I strongly suspected had been bought by the yard. The new, like the old, Dicko was soft-eyed, quietly spoken, almost unnaturally calm—the perfect man behind the scenes of a blackmailing operation or a country estate.