I must confess that during this speech from the patron I found my attention straying. The other diners, as is the way with the English at the trough, were clearly straining their ears to catch every detail of the row while ostentatiously concentrating on their plates. The pale, bespectacled girl making up the bills behind the desk in the corner seemed to have no such inhibitions. She was staring across the room and looking at me, I thought, as though I had thoroughly deserved the O’Higgins rebuke. And then I saw two waiters approach Erskine-Brown’s table with domed dishes, which they laid on the table with due solemnity.
‘And let me tell you,’ Jean-Pierre’s oration continued, ‘I started my career with salads at La Grande Bouffe in Lyons under the great Ducasse. I was rôtisseur in Le Crillon, Boston. I have run this restaurant for twenty years and I have never, let me tell you, in my whole career, served up a mashed spud!’
The climax of his speech was dramatic but not nearly as startling as the events which took place at Erskine-Brown’s table. To the count of ‘Un, deux, trois!’ the waiters removed the silver covers and from under the one in front of Tricia Benbow sprang a small, alarmed brown mouse, perfectly visible by the light of a table candle, which had presumably been nibbling at the poésie. At this, the elegant lady solicitor uttered a piercing scream and leapt on to her chair. There she stood, with her skirt held down to as near her knees as possible, screaming in an ever-rising crescendo towards some ultimate climax. Meanwhile, the stricken Claude looked just as a man who’d planned to have a quiet dinner with a lady and wanted to attract no one’s attention would look under such circumstances.
‘Please, Tricia,’ I could hear his plaintive whisper, ‘don’t scream! People are noticing us.’
‘I say, old darling,’ I couldn’t help saying to that three-star man O’Higgins, ‘they had a mouse on that table. Is it the spécialité de la maison?’
A few days later, at breakfast in the mansion flat, glancing through the post (mainly bills and begging letters from Her Majesty, who seemed to be pushed for a couple of quid and would be greatly obliged if I’d let her have a little tax money on account), I saw a glossy brochure for a hotel in the Lake District. Although in the homeland of my favourite poet, Le Château Duddon, ‘Lakeland’s Paradise of Gracious Living’, didn’t sound like old Wordsworth’s cup of tea, despite the ‘king-sized four-poster in the Samuel Taylor Coleridge suite’.
‘Cousin Everard wants to take me up there for a break.’ Hilda, who was clearing away, removed a half-drunk cup of tea from my hand.
‘A break from what?’ I was mystified.
‘From you, Rumpole. Don’t you think I need it? After that disastrous evening at La Maison?’
‘Was it a disaster? I quite enjoyed it. England’s greatest chef laboured and gave birth to a ridiculous mouse. People’d pay good money to see a trick like that.’
‘You were the disaster, Rumpole,’ she said, as she consigned my last piece of toast to the tidy-bin. ‘You were unforgivable. Mashed spuds! Why ever did you use such a vulgar expression?’
‘Hilda,’ I protested, I thought, reasonably, ‘I have heard some fairly fruity language round the courts in the course of a long life of crime. But I’ve never heard it suggested that the words “mashed spuds” would bring a blush to the cheek of the tenderest virgin.’
‘Don’t try to be funny, Rumpole. You upset that brilliant chef, Mr O’Higgins. You deeply upset Cousin Everard!’
‘Well’ – I had to put the case for the defence – ‘Everard kept on suggesting I didn’t make enough to feed you properly. Typical commercial lawyer. Criminal law is about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Commercial law is about money. That’s what I think, anyway.’
Hilda looked at me, weighed up the evidence and summed up, not entirely in my favour. ‘I don’t think you made that terrible fuss because of what you thought about commercial law,’ she said. ‘You did it because you have to be a “character”, don’t you? Wherever you go. Well, I don’t know if I’m going to be able to put up with your “character” much longer.’
I don’t know why but what she said made me feel, quite suddenly and in a most unusual way, uncertain of myself. What was Hilda talking about exactly? I asked for further and better particulars.
‘You have to be one all the time, don’t you?’ She was clearly getting into her stride. ‘With your cigar ash and steak and kidney and Pommeroy’s Ordinary Red and your arguments. Always arguments! Why do you have to go on arguing, Rumpole?’
‘Arguing! It’s been my life, Hilda,’ I tried to explain.
‘Well, it’s not mine! Not any more. Cousin Everard doesn’t argue in public. He is quiet and polite.’
‘If you like that sort of thing.’ The subject of Cousin Everard was starting to pall on me.
‘Yes, Rumpole. Yes, I do. That’s why I agreed to go on this trip.’
‘Trip?’
‘Everard and I are going to tour all the restaurants in England with stars. We’re going to Bath and York and Devizes. And you can stay here and eat all the mashed spuds you want.’
‘What?’ I hadn’t up till then taken Le Château Duddon entirely seriously. ‘You really mean it?’
‘Oh, yes. I think so. The living is hardly gracious here, is it?’
On the way to my place of work I spent an uncomfortable quarter of an hour thinking over what She Who Must Be Obeyed had said about me having to be a ‘character’. It seemed an unfair charge. I drink Château Thames Embankment because it’s all I can afford. It keeps me regular and blots out certain painful memories, such as a bad day in court in front of Judge Graves, an old darling who undoubtedly passes iced water every time he goes to the gents. I enjoy the fragrance of a small cigar. I relish an argument. This is the way of life I have chosen. I don’t have to do any of these things in order to be a character. Do I?
I was jerked out of this unaccustomed introspection on my arrival in the clerk’s room at chambers. Henry, our clerk, was striking bargains with solicitors over the telephone while Dianne sat in front of her typewriter, her head bowed over a lengthy and elaborate manicure. Uncle Tom, our oldest inhabitant, who hasn’t had a brief in court since anyone can remember, was working hard at improving his putting skills with an old mashie-niblick and a clutch of golf balls, the hole being represented by the waste-paper basket laid on its side. Almost as soon as I got into this familiar environment I was comforted by the sight of a man who seemed to be in far deeper trouble than I was. Claude Erskine-Brown came up to me in a manner that I can only describe as furtive.
‘Rumpole,’ he said, ‘as you may know, Philly is away in Cardiff doing a long fraud.’
‘Your wife,’ I congratulated the man, ‘goes from strength to strength.’
‘What I mean is, Rumpole’ – Claude’s voice sank below the level of Henry’s telephone calls – ‘you may have noticed me the other night. In La Maison Jean-Pierre.’
‘Noticed you, Claude? Of course not! You were only in the company of a lady who stood on a chair and screamed like a banshee with toothache. No one could have possibly noticed you.’ I did my best to comfort the man.
‘It was purely a business arrangement,’ he reassured me.
‘Pretty rum way of conducting business.’
‘The lady was Miss Tricia Benbow. My instructing solicitor in the VAT case,’ he told me, as though that explained everything.
‘Claude, I have had some experience of the law and it’s a good plan, when entertaining solicitors in order to tout for briefs, not to introduce mice into their plats du jour.’
The telephone by Dianne’s typewriter rang. She blew on her nail lacquer and answered it, as Claude’s voice rose in anguished protest. ‘Good heavens. You don’t think I did that, do you, Rumpole? The whole thing was a disaster! An absolute tragedy! Which may have appalling consequences …’
‘Your wife on the phone, Mr Erskine-Brown,’ Dianne interrupted him and Claude went to answer the call with all the eager cheerfulness of a
French aristocrat who is told the tumbrel is at the door. As he was telling his wife he hoped things were going splendidly in Cardiff, and that he rarely went out in the evenings, in fact usually settled down to a scrambled egg in front of the telly, there was a sound of rushing water without and our head of chambers joined us.
‘Something extremely serious has happened.’ Sam Ballard, QC made the announcement as though war had broken out. He is a pallid sort of person who usually looks as though he has just bitten into a sour apple. His hair, I have to tell you, seems to be slicked down with some kind of pomade.
‘Someone nicked the nail-brush in the chambers loo?’ I suggested helpfully.
‘How did you guess?’ He turned on me, amazed, as though I had the gift of second sight.
‘It corresponds to your idea of something serious. Also I notice such things.’
‘Odd that you should know immediately what I was talking about, Rumpole.’ By now Ballard’s amazement had turned to deep suspicion.
‘Not guilty, my Lord,’ I assured him. ‘Didn’t you have a meeting of your God-bothering society here last week?’
‘The Lawyers As Christians committee. We met here. What of it?’
‘ “Cleanliness is next to godliness.” Isn’t that their motto? The devout are notable nail-brush nickers.’ As I said this, I watched Erskine-Brown lay the telephone to rest and leave the room with the air of a man who has merely postponed the evil hour. Ballard was still on the subject of serious crime in the facilities.
‘It’s of vital importance in any place of work, Henry,’ he batted on, ‘that the highest standards of hygiene are maintained! Now I’ve been instructed by the City Health Authority in an important case, it would be extremely embarrassing to me personally if my chambers were found wanting in the matter of a nail-brush.’
‘Well, don’t look at me, Mr Ballard.’ Henry was not taking this lecture well.
‘I am accusing nobody.’ Ballard sounded unconvincing. ‘But look to it, Henry. Please, look to it.’
Then our head of chambers left us. Feeling my usual reluctance to start work, I asked Uncle Tom, as something of an expert in these matters, if it would be fair to call me a ‘character’.
‘A what, Rumpole?’
‘A “character”, Uncle Tom.’
‘Oh, they had one of those in old Sniffy Greengrass’s chambers in Lamb Court,’ Uncle Tom remembered. ‘Fellow called Dalrymple. Lived in an absolutely filthy flat over a chemist’s shop in Chancery Lane and used to lead a cat round the Temple on a long piece of pink tape. “Old Dalrymple’s a character,” they used to say, and the other fellows in chambers were rather proud of him.’
‘I don’t do anything like that, do I?’ I asked for reassurance.
‘I hope not,’ Uncle Tom was kind enough to say. ‘This Dalrymple finally went across the road to do an undefended divorce. In his pyjamas! I believe they had to lock him up. I wouldn’t say you were a “character”, Rumpole. Not yet, anyway.’
‘Thank you, Uncle Tom. Perhaps you could mention that to She Who Must?’
And then the day took a distinct turn for the better. Henry put down his phone after yet another call and my heart leapt up when I heard that Mr Bernard, my favourite instructing solicitor (because he keeps quiet, does what he’s told and hardly ever tells me about his bad back), was coming over and was anxious to instruct me in a new case which was ‘not on the legal aid’. As I left the room to go about this business, I had one final question for Uncle Tom. ‘That fellow Dalrymple. He didn’t play golf in the clerk’s room did he?’
‘Good heavens, no.’ Uncle Tom seemed amused at my ignorance of the world. ‘He was a character, do you see? He’d hardly do anything normal.’
Mr Bernard, balding, pin striped, with a greying moustache and a kindly eye, through all our triumphs and disasters remained imperturbable. No confession made by any client, however bizarre, seemed to surprise him, nor had any revelation of evil shocked him. He lived through our days of murder, mayhem and fraud as though he were listening to Gardeners’ Question Time. He was interested in growing roses and in his daughter’s nursing career. He spent his holidays in remote spots like Bangkok and the Seychelles. He always went away, he told me, ‘on a package’ and returned with considerable relief. I was always pleased to see Mr Bernard, but that day he seemed to have brought me something far from my usual line of country.
‘My client, Mr Rumpole, first consulted me because his marriage was on the rocks, not to put too fine a point on it.’
‘It happens, Mr Bernard. Many marriages are seldom off them.’
‘Particularly so if, as in this case, the wife’s of foreign extraction. It’s long been my experience, Mr Rumpole, that you can’t beat foreign wives for being vengeful. In this case, extremely vengeful.’
‘Hell hath no fury, Mr Bernard?’ I suggested.
‘Exactly, Mr Rumpole. You’ve put your finger on the nub of the case. As you would say yourself.’
‘I haven’t done a matrimonial for years. My divorce may be a little rusty,’ I told him modestly.
‘Oh, we’re not asking you to do the divorce. We’re sending that to Mr Tite-Smith in Crown Office Row.’
Oh, well, I thought, with only a slight pang of disappointment, good luck to little Tite-Smith.
‘The matrimonial is not my client’s only problem,’ Mr Bernard told me.
‘ “When sorrows come,” Mr Bernard, “they come not single spies, But in battalions!” Your chap got something else on his plate, has he?’
‘On his plate!’ The phrase seemed to cause my solicitor some amusement. ‘That’s very apt, that is. And apter than you know, Mr Rumpole.’
‘Don’t keep me in suspense! Who is this mysterious client?’
‘I wasn’t to divulge the name, Mr Rumpole, in case you should refuse to act for him. He thought you might’ve taken against him, so he’s coming to appeal to you in person. I asked Henry if he’d show him up as soon as he arrived.’
And, dead on cue, Dianne knocked on my door, threw it open and announced, ‘Mr O’Higgins.’ The large man, dressed now in a deafening checked tweed jacket and a green turtle-necked sweater, looking less like a chef than an Irish horse coper, advanced on me with a broad grin and his hand extended in a greeting, which was in strong contrast to our last encounter.
‘I rely on you to save me, Mr Rumpole,’ he boomed. ‘You’re the man to do it, sir. The great criminal defender!’
‘Oh? I thought I was the criminal in your restaurant,’ I reminded him.
‘I have to tell you, Mr Rumpole, your courage took my breath away! Do you know what he did, Mr Bernard? Do you know what this little fellow here had the pluck to do?’ He seemed determined to impress my solicitor with an account of my daring in the face of adversity. ‘He only ordered mashed spuds in La Maison Jean-Pierre. A risk no one else has taken in all the time I’ve been maître de cuisine.’
‘It didn’t seem to be particularly heroic,’ I told Bernard, but O’Higgins would have none of that.
‘I tell you, Mr Bernard’ – he moved very close to my solicitor and towered over him – ‘a man who could do that to Jean-Pierre couldn’t be intimidated by all the judges of the Queen’s Bench. What do you say then, Mr Horace Rumpole? Will you take me on?’
I didn’t answer him immediately but sat at my desk, lit a small cigar and looked at him critically. ‘I don’t know yet.’
‘Is it my personality that puts you off?’ My prospective client folded himself into my armchair, with one leg draped over an arm. He grinned even more broadly, displaying a judiciously placed gold tooth. ‘Do you find me objectionable?’
‘Mr O’Higgins.’ I decided to give judgement at length. ‘I think your restaurant pretentious and your portions skimpy. Your customers eat in a dim, religious atmosphere which seems to be more like evensong than a good night out. You appear to be a self-opinionated and self-satisfied bully. I have known many murderers who could teach you a lesson in courtesy. However,
Mr Bernard tells me that you are prepared to pay my fee and, in accordance with the great traditions of the Bar, I am on hire to even the most unattractive customer.’
There was a silence and I wondered if the inflammable restaurateur were about to rise and hit me. But he turned to Bernard with even greater enthusiasm. ‘Just listen to that! How’s that for eloquence? We picked the right one here, Mr Bernard!’
‘Well, now. I gather you’re in some sort of trouble. Apart from your marriage, that is.’ I unscrewed my pen and prepared to take a note.
‘This has nothing to do with my marriage.’ But then he frowned unhappily. ‘Anyway, I don’t think it has.’
‘You haven’t done away with this vengeful wife of yours?’ Was I to be presented with a murder?
‘I should have, long ago,’ Jean-Pierre admitted. ‘But no. Simone is still alive and suing. Isn’t that right, Mr Bernard?’
‘It is, Mr O’Higgins,’ Bernard assured him gloomily. ‘It is indeed. But this is something quite different. My client, Mr Rumpole, is being charged under the Food and Hygiene Regulations 1970 for offences relating to dirty and dangerous practices at La Maison. I have received a telephone call from the environmental health officer.’
It was then, I’m afraid, that I started to laugh. I named the guilty party. ‘The mouse!’
‘Got it in one.’ Jean-Pierre didn’t seem inclined to join in the joke.
‘The “wee, sleekit, cow’rin, tim’rous beastie”,’ I quoted at him. ‘How delightful! We’ll elect for trial before a jury. If we can’t get you off, Mr O’Higgins, at least we’ll give them a little harmless entertainment.’
Of course it wasn’t really funny. A mouse in the wrong place, like too many milk bottles on a doorstep, might be a sign of passions stretched beyond control.
Forever Rumpole Page 19