I looked at her with admiration. No doubt it was an impossible task to persuade a bunch of adolescents that a choral work in a strange language was more interesting than picking the odd pocket. I felt a sudden affinity with Harriet. Both of us spent our lives trying to win impossible cases. My thoughts on this subject were interrupted by a twangy-voiced, prematurely balding, eager man who had arrived in front of our table.
‘Henry Dyson’ – he announced his name as though confident I would know all about him – ‘of Dyson Furbelow, local solicitors. I’ll be sending you a brief. I hope you may be able to fit us into your busy practice.’
Flattery will get you anywhere, and I couldn’t help warming to the strange solicitor.
‘A murder perhaps?’ I shouldn’t have expected anything so sensational.
‘I’m afraid not. I’ve got some important clients. You’ll have heard of Lord Winsome, big house and estate up on the way to Kidlington? His boy, young Charlie, is being done for “dangerous”. I told him you were the only man for the job. You are the only brief I have ever seen getting a client off a dangerous driving. You came down to the magistrates’ court here in Oxford. I was waiting to come on in the next case and I was astonished at the way you did it.’
‘That’s very kind of you.’ I took a gulp of Guinness and tried not to look too flattered. ‘I’ll do my best.’ I couldn’t resist a smile of satisfaction as I savoured my drink. Not only had my wallet been saved but it was apparently due for a refill.
2
Extract from the Memoir of Hilda Rumpole
You can say what you like about Rumpole’s attainments, but I have to admit that he lacks a spiritual side to his nature. Everything has to be tested, carefully labelled and filed away in Rumpole’s mind as valuable evidence. Sometimes I’ve had to ask myself whether Rumpole is really in touch with life’s deeper mysteries and I have had to come reluctantly to the conclusion that he is not. All this became clearer to me when I met a new friend, Eustace Peveril, who guided me into deeper understanding of life’s mysteries. I have written before about my friend Marsha’s bridge club. It was there that I met Judge Bullingham, who, in the end, let me down and has transferred his affections to Phillida, now ridiculously known as Mrs Justice Erskine-Brown. As someone who lives life on the surface I have no doubt she is a very suitable companion to the judge, who I am sure has no experience of the inner life. A door was opened on to the secrets of existence when I played a successful hand of four no trumps with the man I shall always feel privileged to call Eustace. By a happy chance I had drawn him as a partner, and to say we got on well is an understatement. Eustace has suggested that we might have been brother and sister in some previous existence and I can’t help feeling that he has hit the nail quite truthfully on the head.
Eustace might not be thought by everyone as handsome but he has the irresistible quality of someone who lives life on a higher plane. He is always impeccably well dressed and he laughingly tells me that he has to keep up appearances for the sake of his work, which I believe is something to do with mail-order tailoring.
When I’d taken the final trick in our no trumps victory, he looked at me with what I can only call amazement.
‘Your aura, Hilda – I may call you Hilda, mayn’t I? It’s glistening so brightly I can hardly look at it.’
‘Is it really?’
‘Of course it is. It can only be seen in moments of triumph and by people who understand such things. Will you allow me to polish it a little? I’ve rarely seen anything quite so spectacular.’
With that he took a silk handkerchief out of his breast pocket and gently seemed to caress an area round my forehead. I began to feel some sort of vibration in the air around me. I saw Marsha looking at me in a curious sort of way but I took no notice of her. After a while Eustace folded his handkerchief, restored it to his pocket and left the bridge table in quest of Marsha’s sandwiches. When he did so I felt a curious emptiness, an indescribable feeling of loss.
‘You’re an extraordinary woman,’ he told me as he brought me back a plate. ‘You live very near the secret heart of existence. Are you aware of that?’
‘Not really,’ I told him, ‘not until we played that last hand together.’
‘Then you must have got the feeling of a door opening. A door into an inner world. You must have felt that before.’
‘I think so, when Rumpole’s been particularly irritating.’
‘Don’t fight against it, Hilda. You have been picked out to be one of the chosen.’
‘Chosen? For what?’
‘The deeper understanding. There are a few of us who meet in my studio. They’d be terrifically honoured if you could join us for an evening of deeper living. Would you consider it?’
‘I don’t see why not.’
‘We do our best to live through the trivialities of existence and get to the deeper understanding, then we go off to a little place in Chelsea for a light meal. Do you think your husband would understand it?’
‘Not at all, but that won’t stop me joining you.’
‘They will be enormously grateful. They’ve never met anyone who lived so near the Great Truth as you seem to do. We’ll make a date, Mrs Rumpole. You must shed your light in as many dark holes as possible.’
3
The Rumpole practice in those days could be described as ‘jogging along’. The mantelpiece wasn’t entirely empty of briefs but they were of an unexciting and predictable variety. There was the case of Harry Timson, whose usually peaceful course of breaking and entering had become revealed to the authorities. This was owing to information, he strongly suspected, that was supplied by his cousin Percy, when he’d found himself in trouble over a quantity of stolen fish dinners. Such disloyalty was rare among the Timsons and Harry was pained by his cousin’s behaviour.
While I was thinking these matters over at dinner in the kitchen in Froxbury Mansions (a couple of chops and boiled potatoes), I noticed Hilda looking at me in a strange and thoughtful manner. After a while she got up with a tea towel in her hand and made polishing motions in the air around my head.
‘What on earth?’
‘It’s your aura.’ She Who Must was speaking entirely seriously. ‘I have to keep your aura clean. You want your aura polished, don’t you?’
‘I might do if I knew what on earth you were talking about.’
‘I’m sorry for you Rumpole, you have such a lot to learn about life.’
With that she sat down, apparently having got the aura satisfactorily dusted, and I wondered how far I could adjust myself to a world which was becoming more and more difficult to understand.
Acknowledgements
‘Rumpole and the Younger Generation’ first appeared in Rumpole of the Bailey, 1978. ‘Rumpole and the Showfolk’ first appeared in The Trials of Rumpole, 1979. ‘Rumpole and the Tap End’ and ‘Rumpole and the Bubble Reputation’ first appeared in Rumpole and the Age of Miracles, 1988. ‘Rumpole à la Carte’ first appeared in Rumpole à la Carte, 1990. ‘Rumpole and the Children of the Devil’ and ‘Rumpole on Trial’ first appeared in Rumpole on Trial, 1992. ‘Rumpole and the Way through the Woods’ and ‘Rumpole and the Angel of Death’ first appeared in Rumpole and the Angel of Death, 1995. ‘Rumpole and the Old Familiar Faces’ and ‘Rumpole Rests His Case’ first appeared in Rumpole Rests His Case, 2001. ‘Rumpole and the Primrose Path’ and ‘Rumpole Redeemed’ first appeared in Rumpole and the Primrose Path, 2002. ‘Rumpole and the Christmas Break’ first appeared in The Strand Magazine and Woman’s Weekly in 2004, and was republished in Rumpole at Christmas, 2009. ‘Rumpole and the Brave New World’ first appeared in the Guardian, 24 January 2009. All the books were first published by Penguin or Viking Penguin; and all the stories are copyright © Advanpress Ltd.
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