‘Have you any idea, Ballard’ – I looked suitably mystified – ‘what he meant?’
‘I have now. He was talking about my wife, Marguerite.’
‘Marguerite, who once held the responsible position of matron at the Old Bailey?’
‘That is exactly whom he meant.’
‘Who was known, even to the Red Judges, as ‘Matey’?
‘Marguerite got on very well with the judiciary. She treated many of them.’
‘Can I believe my ears? Vincent Blewitt called your Marguerite a ham sandwich?’ I was incredulous.
‘I can’t imagine what she would have to say if she ever got wind of it.’
‘All hell would break loose?’
‘Indeed it would!’ Ballard nodded sadly and went on, ‘He said we’d all have more fun if I left her at home. And the same applied to your Hilda.’
‘Ballard, I can see why you’re concerned.’ I sounded most reasonable. ‘It was a serious error of judgement on Blewitt’s part, but if that was the only thing …’
‘It was not the only thing, Rumpole.’
‘You mean there’s worse to come?’
‘Considerably worse!’ Ballard looked around nervously to make sure he wasn’t overheard. ‘He suggested that the party should start … I don’t know how to tell you this, Rumpole.’
‘Just take it slowly. I understand that it must be distressing.’
‘It is, Rumpole. It certainly is. He thought the party should start …’ Soapy Sam paused and then the words came tumbling out. ‘… By the male members of chambers and the girl guests blowing up balloons inside each other’s underclothes. Rumpole, can you imagine what Marguerite would have said to that?’
‘I thought Marguerite was to be left at home.’
‘There is that, of course. But he wanted Mrs Justice Erskine-Brown to come. What would she have said if Blewitt had approached her with a balloon?’
‘She’d have jailed him for contempt.’
‘Quite right too! And then to top it all …’
‘He topped that?’
‘He said he knew I liked a good story, and wasn’t that a great joke about the sleeveless woman?’
‘What on earth was he talking about?’ I looked suitably mystified.
‘I have no idea. Do you know any story about a sleeveless woman?’
‘Certainly not!’ I replied with absolute truth.
‘So then he told me about a legless nun. It was clearly obscene but I’m afraid, Rumpole, the point escaped me.’
‘Probably just as well.’
‘I’m afraid I shall have to tell chambers. I’m informing you first as a senior member. We shall not be employing Vincent Blewitt or indeed any legal administrator in the foreseeable future.’
‘It will be a disappointment, perhaps. But I’m sure we’ll all understand.’
‘Henry may have had his faults, Rumpole. But he calls me sir and not Sam. And I don’t believe he knows any jokes at all.’
‘Of course not. No, indeed.’
The case of R. v. Ireton had not, so far as I was concerned, ended happily. Rumpole v. Blewitt, on the other hand, was an undoubted victory. Win a few, lose a few. That is all you can say about life at the Bar.
Henry decided, in his considerable relief, that he should have a chambers party to celebrate his not leaving. All the wives came. Hilda’s old schoolfriend Dodo Mackintosh provided the cheesy bits and, perhaps because he had a vague idea of what I had been able to do for him, our clerk laid on a couple of dozen of the Château Thames Embankment of which I drank fairly deep. The day after this jamboree, I was detained in bed with a ferocious headache and a distinct unsteadiness in the leg department.
In a brief period of troubled sleep about midday, I heard voices from the living-room and then the door opened quietly and the Angel of Death was at my bedside. ‘Mr Rumpole,’ she smiled and her glasses twinkled, ‘I hear you’re not feeling very well this morning.’
‘Really?’ I muttered with sudden alarm. ‘Whatever gave you that idea? I’m feeling on top of the world, in absolutely’ – and here I winced at a sudden stabbing pain across the temples – ‘tiptop condition.’
‘And Hilda tells me the dear old mind’s not what it was?’ Dr Betty smiled understandingly. ‘The butter knife in the top pocket, is that what she told me? Dear Mr Rumpole, do remember I’m here to help you. There’s no need for you to suffer. The way out is always open, and I can steer you gently and quite painlessly towards it.’
‘I’m afraid I must ask you to leave now,’ I told the Angel of Death. ‘Got to get up. Late for work already. As I told you, I never felt better. Full of beans, Dr Betty, and raring to go.’
God knows how I ever managed to climb into the striped trousers, or button the collar, but when I was decently clad I hotfooted it for the Temple. There, I sat in my room suffering, my head in my hands, determined at all costs to keep myself alive.
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 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 13 buses, two of them turned up in short order round 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 Erskine-Brown 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 round the Erskine-Brown dinner table was clearly a stranger to such delights. ‘Is that some kind of mime show? Lot 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.’
‘It sounds sexually interesting. We have clubs for that sort of thing in Pittsburgh.’
‘There’s nothing sexual about it,’ 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 sl
ip 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 sexual significance.’ 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, sneeping 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’s 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 judgment from which there was no possible appeal.
My first impression of Coldsands was of 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 mid-winter / Frosty winds made moan …’ wrote that sad old darling, Christina Rossetti. Frosty winds had 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, and 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 the sides 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 Rev. Eric went into a long, excited and high-pitched speech. The gist of this 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 for the appeal outside the church, was stuck at a low hundred and twenty, the result of 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, but 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 in 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 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 his 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 also 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 and behind you?’ Eric, in full canonicals, standing on the steps in front of the altar, made the suggestion as though he had just thought of the idea. I stood reluctantly. I had found myself a place in church near to 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 at Christmas. He had soft brown eyes which looked, almost at once, away from me as, with a touch of his 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 the 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’s instruction to sell all and give it to the poor should ever be taken literally.
Forever Rumpole Page 41