Rumpole Rests His Case

by John Mortimer

  It was some while later that I made this final speech in a new hearing. I had spoken to Guthrie and the bookends exactly as if they were a Jury. And it worked.

  Shortly after that, the Boy Wonder left Chambers for a job in the Home Office. I had a spell of gout and extreme pain. I called on the real Doctor Nabi at his practice in the Clerkenwell Road and the stuff he gave me worked extremely well.

  Rumpole and the Camberwell Carrot

  ‘Absolutely right! I quite agree. That's the only way to treat them.’

  It was breakfast time in the mansion flat and She Who Must Be Obeyed was pleased to find herself in complete agreement with her Daily Beacon.

  The way to treat whom? I wondered. Husbands? Plumbers who make you wait at home all day on the off-chance that they might condescend to call? Supporters of the European common currency? I wondered which of Hilda's bêtes noires was in for it at the moment.

  ‘First-time drug users! Dope fiends in the making. We're too tolerant, Rumpole! We're soft on cannabis.’

  ‘You, Hilda? I didn't know you were soft on anything.’

  ‘We need more like him.’

  ‘Like who?’

  By way of answer Hilda passed me her paper. The centre pages were dominated by the photograph of a burly, square-shouldered man with a broken nose and bushy eyebrows. He was staring at the camera in a hostile and challenging manner and the article was headed ‘PUT FIRST-TIME DRUGGIES INSIDE, by Doctor Tom Gurnley MP, the voice of common sense!’

  ‘He could have any job he wants for the asking, if he weren't so wonderfully loyal! He prefers to speak his mind from the back-benches.’

  Dr Gurnley's views on the death penalty (strongly in favour), the European Union, erotic advertisements in the Underground, one-parent families and asylum seekers (strongly against) were trumpeted from every chat show on radio, television and most of the newspapers on a daily basis. If they weren't interviewing him or publishing his articles, they were reporting that there was a strong movement to make the Doctor leader of his Party after its forthcoming electoral defeat.

  ‘The thing about him is he's prepared to crack down on crime from the outset. He understands the nature of evil, which I sometimes think is more than you do, Rumpole.’

  ‘You may be right.’ Is evil a word used too frequently to explain the apparently inexplicable? Does it exist, not only in the dock but along the corridors of power, among the lawgivers as well as the cracked-down-on? I could have discussed King Lear's pertinent question: ‘Handy Dandy. Which is justice, which the thief?’ but breakfast wasn't the right time for such debates, nor would Hilda have enjoyed a closer exploration of this subject.

  ‘And he's such a handsome chap, isn't he, Rumpole? I mean, he looks a real man. Not like some of the variety we see around the House of Commons nowadays. He's got the look of a gladiator about him. Someone with a cause to fight for! Don't you agree, Rumpole?’

  ‘I suppose so.’ As I say, I wasn't in a gladiatorial mood that morning. ‘Although quite honestly I couldn't fancy him myself.’

  ‘Do try to be serious, Rumpole. I don't think you'd catch Tom Gurnley not being serious.’

  ‘No, I don't think you would.’ I had to agree with her at last.

  ‘Oh, what can ail thee, Erskine-Brown,’ I asked Claude, not for the first time, ‘alone and palely loitering?’

  The look he gave me was decidedly stricken. He had the appearance of a man who's just prosecuted a plea of guilty and lost the case.

  ‘Would you like to come to the first night of the Ring cycle with me, Rumpole? It's only five hours with intervals.’

  ‘Would that be Wagner?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I'd do a lot for you, Claude. I'd buy you a drink' (we had both resorted, after the day's work done, to Pommeroy's Wine Bar). ‘I see you're drinking the wine of the country. I'll take your children to the panto. I'd even get bail for you if you're thinking of committing a criminal offence. But I have to draw the line at five hours of Wagner.’

  ‘I knew that when I asked. I knew you wouldn't come with me. Not even for the sake of our old friendship.’

  ‘Not even for the sake of our old friendship,’ I agreed. ‘Not even for that.’ And then I looked at the poor fish with real concern. His condition seemed unsatisfactory, verging on the dangerous. Even the Chateau Fleet Street wasn't having its usual calming effect. ‘Do tell me, what are you suffering from, Claude?’

  ‘A trial separation.’

  ‘You mean an order for separate trials?’ I was at a loss.

  ‘It's not a case in Court, you idiot! It's life. Real life! Phillida and I are having a trial separation.’

  ‘She's left you?’ It was surprising but not incomprehensible. Life with Claude might become something like a constantly repeated Ring cycle. No doubt the Portia of our Chambers, now elevated to a High Court Judgeship, would welcome an interval.

  ‘What've you done, Claude?’ I looked at the chap, recognizing human frailty, and, in particular, the frailty of Erskine-Brown. ‘Was it the au pair or Hoskins' new pupil?’ I doubted if Claude would have had the enterprise to stray further afield.

  ‘It's not me, Rumpole.’ Claude seemed stung enough to put a certain amount of energy in his denial. ‘I've been a perfect husband for… oh well, for a considerable length of time. It's Philly. She's taken it into her head we should live apart, at least for a trial period.’

  ‘So you've got to look after the twins, cook them burgers, et cetera?’

  ‘Oh no, Philly's at home. She's made me move out.’ Well of course, a High Court Judge, like my own Hilda, I thought, is someone who has to be obeyed.

  ‘She's made me stay at the Sheridan Club.’ Claude's voice rose in misery.

  My heart went out to him. I searched for consolation. ‘Well at least they have girls in there now.’

  ‘I'm not interested in girls, Rumpole,’ Claude lied. ‘Any-way they're all Heads of Colleges and Governors of the BBC, those girls at the Sheridan. They're as old as my aunts and I can't keep up with their conversation. Quite honestly, I just miss Philly terribly. What can I do, Rumpole?’

  ‘Wait and see, old chap. Time cures everything. She'll be back. I'm sure she's getting lonely.’

  ‘She's not, Rumpole! Trevor Lowe from number five Equity Court went to a birthday dinner at the Ivy and there she was, at a table in the middle surrounded by what he called her ‘groupies’. They were all laughing and having a thoroughly good time.’

  ‘Inside her,’ tried to cheer him up, ‘perhaps the heart was breaking.’

  ‘I don't think so, Rumpole. I hardly think so. Oh, what can I do?’ If ever I heard a cry for help, Claude bleated one now, causing assorted barristers in Pommeroy's to turn and stare at him as though he were a nasty accident.

  ‘Claude,’ I said, ‘after a lifetime's knocking around some frequently unsympathetic Courts I've learnt a little of the art of persuasion. Would you like me to have a word with her?’

  He looked at me then, his eyes bright with gratitude. ‘Oh, Rumpole,’ he blurted, ‘would you?’

  ‘Rumpole! This is a surprise. I hope you haven't come to ask me to give some axe murderer community service.’

  ‘I have come,’ I said, ignoring the slur on my reputation, ‘to ask you for an even greater act of clemency.’

  My clerk, Henry, had had words with Mrs Justice Erskine-Brown's clerk on the telephone. This led me into a discreet entrance of the Great Chateau de Justice, the Victorian Gothic Law Courts in the Strand, where I was escorted down passages and up stairs to Phillida's room. ‘The Judge is just finishing in Court,’ I was told. ‘She'll be here directly.’ But it was nearly half an hour before she appeared, liberated as a young girl released from school, pulled off her wig, flung it on the desk, struggled out of her black, civil case gown and, crossing to the mirror, started to assess her face critically. My line about an act of clemency was carefully ignored.

  ‘I don't look too bad, do I? For someone in sight of f
ifty.’ She looked, I thought, almost better than when she had appeared, all those years ago, a nervous pupil about to brighten up Equity Court.

  ‘You look,’ I said, ‘of course, the most desirable member of the judiciary. Perhaps that's why he's missing you so much.’

  ‘Oh yes?’ She flicked at her hair with a finger, and sounded unconvinced.

  ‘I am here,’ I told her, ‘on behalf of Claude Erskine-Brown QC. A man of good character with no previous convictions.’

  ‘No convictions?’ Phillida gave her reflection a small, mocking smile. ‘It wasn't for want of trying.’

  ‘I understand that, in recent years anyway, his conduct has been beyond reproach.’

  ‘Perhaps that's what's wrong with him.’ Her voice seemed to indicate that, for the present at least, clemency was off the menu. ‘There's not much fun to be had from someone who is beyond reproach.’ From this I gathered that, faithful or unfaithful, Claude was on a loser.

  ‘He's missing you terribly. The chap is merely a shadow of his former self.’

  ‘He could do with losing weight.’ The Judge was merciless. ‘Anyway, I've met someone.’

  What did that mean? I'd met a lot of people, from safe-blowers to Lords of Appeal in Ordinary. So, in his quiet way, had Claude. ‘I suppose you mean you've met someone special.’

  ‘You wouldn't approve of him, Rumpole.’

  ‘Wouldn't I?’

  ‘You wouldn't approve of his politics.’

  She moved away from the mirror and at last, in a more friendly mood now we had got on to discussing her special person, poured me a glass of sherry from the judicial decanter.

  ‘Some young white wig who belongs to the Workers Revolutionary Party?’

  ‘Hardly! This one's more than a little to the right of Genghis Khan. Capital punishment, corporal punishment, Britain's for the British – you name it, he's all for it.’

  ‘Sounds ghastly to me.’

  ‘It isn't really. Underneath all that he's just a simple, rather innocent boy at heart. Anyway,’ she sat in one of her leathery, masculine armchairs and nursed her sherry, ‘you know there's something rather exciting about someone you disagree with. Claude and I never really argued with each other. I fell in love with my present chap during a quarrel about whether or not President George W. Bush is a total dickhead.’

  Would I ever have dreamt, when I did my first case before some terrifying old monster at London Sessions, that I would ever sit discussing the erotic effect of an argument about the American President on a High Court Judge?

  ‘Does your present chap enjoy the opera?’ I wondered.

  ‘Not in the least. He thought Rheingold was some sort of South African currency.’

  ‘Do I know him? He's not a member of the Criminal Bar?’

  ‘Not at all.’

  ‘Or of the Commercial? Tax? Family Division?’ I asked, although I thought the last was improbable.

  ‘None of that. He's a Member of Parliament.’

  ‘Anyone I've heard of?’

  ‘Probably. He's called Tom Gurnley.’ And then her phone rang. Before I could express my amazement she was smiling, one hand on her hip, chirping happily into the instrument. ‘Wonderful, darling. The Ivy at eight? No worries. I've got a babysitter. Yes… Love you too!’

  She put a hand over the mouthpiece and, in a penetrating whisper, said, ‘Good to see you, Rumpole. So glad you're going out with Claude. Try and keep him out of trouble, won't you?’ and then she turned away from me, back to the voice of her improbable lover. ‘See you there then, our usual table.’ And she blew a kiss at the mouthpiece.

  ‘It's absolutely disgusting!’

  Hilda, with an outburst of disapproval so violent that she actually hurled her Daily Beacon, usually a much-cherished possession, to the ground, said, ‘He's let us down terribly.’

  ‘Nothing I've done then, Hilda?’

  ‘He was a man who seemed to have convictions, Rumpole!’

  ‘Well, most of my clients have got them.’

  ‘Do be serious! That was the point about him. He genuinely believed in good and evil. You don't believe in things like that, do you, Rumpole?’

  ‘Good and evil? Of course I do. I just don't believe they often get taken straight. Sometimes they come mixed. Like a sort of cocktail.’

  ‘Cocktail? Do you think of nothing but alcohol, Rumpole? Well, this doesn't come mixed at all. This is pure evil. And to think how we all respected him!’

  At which she scooped her newspaper off the floor and gave me a view of the front page, which was decorated with the face of Mrs Justice Erskine-Brown's favourite politician. ‘ANTI-DRUG MP CHARGED WITH POSSESSION' screamed the headline, followed, in only slightly smaller type, by ‘“Gurnley lights up a spliff”, by our reporter on the spot, Angela Illsley.’

  I hoped my face, as I read the story, expressed serious concern at the fact that Hilda's idol had, apparently, feet of cannabis resin. I'm afraid that all I could feel, at that particular moment, was quiet amusement.

  *

  ‘Serves him jolly well right,’ said merciless Mizz Liz Probert.

  ‘Cracking down on cannabis! The law's ridiculous. What does that ghastly, right-wing, out-of-date old dinosaur think he's talking about? Just make it legal. That would solve all our problems.’

  ‘Solve his problem too, apparently.’

  ‘Why can't we be like Amsterdam?’

  I tried to think of an answer to this question. Because we didn't have little canals all over the place, and very few Dutch people. I gave up and asked, ‘So you don't disapprove of cannabis smokers?’

  ‘Get a life, Rumpole. Everyone does it.’

  ‘Not everyone. I have yet to see She Who Must Be Obeyed with an enormous spliff, or Mr Injustice Graves giggling helplessly. I mean, do you think it's really good for you?’

  ‘You should talk!’ Mizz Probert began dismissively.

  ‘Well, yes. I usually do.’

  ‘You should talk about doing things that are bad for you. When you're wrecking your liver with Pommeroy's plonk and your lungs with small cigars.’

  ‘Let's get this entirely clear! You're against a law stopping people smoking dope, but all for a law stopping me smoking small cigars?’ This was a twist in the ethics of political correctness which surprised even me.

  ‘We didn't actually make a law, Rumpole. We didn't put it through Parliament.’

  ‘But you enforced it all the same.’ I breathed in the disappointingly fresh air of my room in Chambers. ‘You and the other members of the smoke police. Soapy Sam Ballard and Claude Erskine-Brown.’

  ‘Claude Erskine-Brown.’ Liz Probert's manner changed. No longer the confident legislator of modern times, the girl whose life had already been securely got, she sounded uncertain and vaguely troubled. ‘I'm worried about him.’

  ‘The fellow,’ I explained as best I could, ‘is going through a bad patch.’

  ‘He hangs round me,’ Liz complained. ‘He comes into my room and sits down. Then he talks for a long time about nothing very much. Is something wrong with his home life?’

  ‘Practically everything. He's moved into a dusty old gentlemen's club in Whitehall which has now admitted Claude and an assortment of clubbable ladies. He's suffering Phillida deprivation.’

  ‘Where's she gone?’

  ‘Nowhere. They're having a trial separation. It's a terrible trial for Claude, so anything you can do…’

  ‘He asked me to go to the opera with him.’

  ‘He asked me too.’

  ‘You didn't go?’

  ‘Pressure of work.’ I now felt guilty and hoped that Mizz Liz would show the poor fish more generosity. ‘You'll enjoy that.’

  ‘Will I? Apparently it's one called Twilight of the Gods. It's not one of the long ones, is it?’

  ‘I believe it does take a certain amount of time for the sun to set.’

  ‘I just hope Claude doesn't start getting ideas. That's all.’

  ‘Having see
n Claude conduct his cases over the years, I can assure you that he hardly ever gets ideas.’ I did my best to encourage her.

  ‘He needs help, Rumpole. That's what I've always admired about you. Your heart goes out to people who need help.’

  ‘My heart's finding it a little difficult to go out to Doctor Gurnley.’

  ‘It's gone out to some pretty doubtful characters in the past.’

  ‘Perhaps.’ I had to recognize the force of Mrs Justice Erskine-Brown's argument. ‘But not to anyone who wanted to abolish Juries or reintroduce death by judicial strangulation.’

  ‘The Judge wants to see you again as a matter of urgency, Mr Rumpole. She seems a bit keen on your company, Sir,’ was what my clerk had said when he brought me the message. So I'd crossed the road again and threaded my way to Phillida's room in the Palais de Justice. She was out of her wig and gown now, a distraught woman asking me to do her an unlikely favour.

  ‘You're a taxicab, Rumpole! You're committed to giving a ride to anyone who hails you. You don't have to like them, Rumpole. You know as well as I do you can probably do their cases better if you don't like them particularly. Then you can see all the dangerous points against them. For God's sake, we've known each other for so long, have you ever turned down a client because you didn't agree with his politics?’

  ‘Well, no… But…’