The Collected Stories of Rumpole

by John Mortimer

  Now, of course, as I discovered when I started to do a little preparation for the defence of Harold Brittling, there has been a considerable boom in Craggs. The generally held view is that he was by far the finest of the British post-Impressionists, and had he had the luck to be born in Dieppe, a port where a good deal of his life and a great many of his love affairs were celebrated, he might be mentioned in the same breath as such noted Frog artists as Degas and Bonnard. By now the art world will pay a great deal of hard cash for a Cragg in mint condition, particularly if it’s a good nude. There’s nothing that has the art world reaching for its chequebook, so it seems, as quickly as a good nude.

  The rise in expert esteem of the paintings of Septimus Cragg was shown dramatically in the prices fetched in a recent sale at which Harold Brittling was seen to be behaving in a somewhat curious manner. The particular Cragg to come under the hammer was entitled Nancy at the Hôtel du Vieux Port, Dieppe, and it appeared to have an impeccable pedigree, having been put up for auction by a Miss Price, an elderly spinster lady who lived in Worthing and was none other than Septimus Cragg’s niece. As the bidding rose steadily from fifty to fifty-six thousand pounds, and as the picture was finally knocked down to a Mrs DeMoyne of New Haven, Connecticut, for a cool sixty thousand, Harold Brittling, sitting beside a silent and undemonstrative Pauline in the audience, could be seen giggling helplessly. On his way out of the auction, the beaming Brittling was fingered by two officers of the Fine Art and Antiques Department at Scotland Yard and taken into custody. Pauline was sent to enlist the immediate help of Horace Rumpole, and so earned the suspicious disapproval of She Who Must Be Obeyed.

  Nancy, whoever she may have been, was clearly a generously built, cheerful young lady, who brought out the best in Septimus Cragg. He had painted her naked, with a mane of copper-coloured hair, standing against the light of a hotel bedroom window, through which the masts and funnels of the old port were hazily visible. In the foreground there was a strip of purplish carpet, a china basin and jug on a washstand, and the end of a brass bed, over which a man’s trousers, fitted with a pair of braces, were dangling negligently. I was looking at a reproduction of the work in question in my Chambers. I hadn’t yet seen the glowing original; but even in a flat, coloured photograph, the picture gave off the feeling of a moment of happiness, caught for ever. I felt, looking at it, I must confess, a bit of a pang. There hadn’t, I had to face it, been many such mornings in hotel bedrooms in Dieppe in the long life and career of Horace Rumpole, barrister-at-law.

  ‘It’s only a reproduction,’ Brittling said. ‘Doesn’t do it a bit of justice.’

  And Mr Myers, old Myersy, the solicitor’s managing clerk, who has seen me through more tough spots down the Bailey than I’ve had hot dinners, who sat there with his overcoat pockets bulging with writs and summonses, puffed at his nauseating, bubbling old pipe and said, as though we were looking at a bit of bloodstained sweatshirt or a mortuary photograph, ‘That’s it, Mr Rumpole. Exhibit J. L. T. (1). That’s the evidence.’

  Brittling, it seemed, had at least partially come to his senses. He had decided to consult a solicitor and approach me in a more formal manner than the mere lobbing of beer cans at my kitchen window. He looked at the exhibit in question and smiled appreciatively.

  ‘It’s a corker, though, as a composition, isn’t it?’

  ‘How is it as a forgery? That’s what you’re charged with, you know,’ I reminded him, to bring the conversation down from the high aesthetic plane.

  ‘A smashing composition,’ Brittling went on as though he hadn’t heard. ‘And if you saw the texture of paint, and the way the curtains are moving in the wind from the harbour! There’s only one man who could ever paint the air behind a curtain like that.’

  ‘So it’s the genuine article!’ Myers assured me. ‘That’s what we’re saying, Mr Rumpole.’

  ‘Of course it’s genuine!’ Brittling called on the support of Keats: ‘A thing of beauty … is a joy for ever.’

  I helped him with the quotation,

  ‘Its loveliness increases; it will never

  Pass into nothingness; but still will keep

  A bower quiet for us, and a sleep

  Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing …

  ‘Quiet breathing in the nick,’ I reminded him somewhat brutally, ‘if we don’t keep our wits about us. Did you ever know Cragg?’

  ‘Septimus …?’

  ‘Did you know him?’ I asked, and Brittling embarked on a fragment of autobiography.

  ‘I was the rising star of the Slade School,’ he said. ‘Cragg was the old lion, the king of the pack. He was always kind to me. Had me down to the farmhouse at Rottingdean. Full of his children by various mothers, and society beauties, waiting to have their portraits painted. There was such a lot of laughter in that house, and so many young people …’

  ‘Nancy at Dieppe.’ I picked up the reproduction. The features were blurred against the light, but didn’t there seem to be something vaguely familiar about the girl in the hotel bedroom? ‘Do you recognize the model at all?’

  ‘Cragg had so many.’ Brittling shrugged.

  ‘Models or girlfriends?’

  ‘It was usually the same thing.’

  ‘Was it really? And this one?’

  ‘Seems vaguely familiar.’ Brittling echoed my thoughts. I gave him my searching look, reserved for difficult clients. ‘The sort of thighs,’ I asked him, ‘which simply call out for an HB pencil, would you say?’

  Brittling didn’t seem to resent my suggestion. In fact he turned to me and gave a small but deliberate wink. I didn’t like that. Clients who wink at you when you as good as tell them that you think they’re guilty can be most unsettling.

  I was still unsettled as I undressed in the matrimonial bedroom in Froxbury Court. Hilda, in hairnet and bedjacket, was propped up on the pillows doing the Daily Telegraph crossword puzzle. As I hung up the striped trousers I thought that it was a scene which would never have been painted by Septimus Cragg. I was reflecting on the difference between my life and that of the rip-roaring old RA and I said, thoughtfully, ‘It all depends, I suppose, on where your talents lie.’

  ‘What does?’ Hilda asked in a disinterested sort of way.

  ‘I mean, if my talents hadn’t been for bloodstains, and cross-examining coppers on their notebooks, and addressing juries on the burden of proof … If I’d had an unusual aptitude for jotting down a pair of thighs in a hotel bedroom …’

  ‘You’ve seen her again, haven’t you?’ Hilda was no longer sounding disinterested.

  ‘I might have been living in a farmhouse in Sussex with eight pool-eyed children with eight different mothers, all devoted to me, and duchesses knocking on my door to have their portraits painted. My work might have meant trips to Venice and Aix-en-Provence instead of London Sessions and the Uxbridge Magistrates’ Court! No, I didn’t see her. She didn’t come to the conference.’

  ‘You want to concentrate on what you can do, Rumpole. Fine chance I ever have of getting invited to the Palace.’

  ‘No need for the black jacket and pinstripes. Throw away the collar like a blunt execution. All you need is an old tweed suit and a young woman who’s kind enough to wear nothing but a soulful expression. What’s all that about the Palace?’

  ‘They’re making Guthrie Featherstone a judge, you know,’ Hilda said, as though it were all, in some obscure way, my fault.

  ‘Whoever told you that?’

  I felt suddenly sorry for the old QC, MP, and worried that the chump’s chances might be blown by a lot of careless talk. For Hilda told me that she had met Marigold Featherstone somewhere near Harrods, and that whilst she had been looking for bargains, the future Lady Marigold had told her that she had acquired a suitable outfit with the ‘Princess Di’ look for a visit to the Palace on the occasion of our not very learned Head of Chambers being awarded a handle to his name. When Hilda, not a little mystified, had asked her what sort of handle they had in
mind, Marigold had rushed off in the direction of Sloane Street, urging Hilda to forget every word she had said, forgetting, of course, that She Who Must Be Obeyed never forgets.

  ‘You didn’t tell anyone else this, did you?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, no one except Phillida Erskine-Brown. I happened to run into her going into Sainsbury’s.’

  ‘You did what?’

  ‘And Phillida explained it all to me. If you get made a judge you’re knighted as a matter of course, and have to go to Buck House and all that sort of thing. So that was why Marigold was buying a new outfit.’

  I was appalled, quite frankly. Phillida Erskine-Brown is a formidable lady advocate, the Portia of our Chambers. As for her husband, as I explained to Hilda, ‘Claude Erskine-Brown gossips about the judiciary in the way teenagers gossip about film actors. Star-struck is our Claude. Practically goes down on his knees to anything in ermine! And he pops into Pommeroy’s whenever he gets a legal aid cheque. Let’s just hope he doesn’t get paid until poor old Featherstone’s got his bottom safely on the Bench.’

  ‘One thing is quite certain, Rumpole,’ said Hilda, filling in a clue. ‘There’s no earthly chance of your ever getting a handle.’

  A few weeks later I had slipped into Pommeroy’s Wine Bar for a glass of luncheon when Guthrie Featherstone came up to me and, having looked nervously over his shoulder like a man who expects to be joined at any moment by the Hound of Heaven, said, ‘Horace! I came in here to buy a small sherry …’

  ‘No harm in that, Guthrie.’ I tried to sound reassuring.

  ‘And Jack Pommeroy, you know what Jack Pommeroy called me?’ His voice sank to a horrified whisper. ‘He called me “Judge”!’

  ‘Well, you’ll have to get used to it.’ I couldn’t be bothered to whisper.

  Featherstone looked round, appalled. ‘Horace, for God’s sake! Don’t you see what this means? It means someone’s been talking.’

  And then his glance fell on a table where Claude Erskine-Brown was knocking back the Beaujolais Villages with assorted barristers. Featherstone’s cup of unhappiness was full when Erskine-Brown raised his glass, as though in congratulation.

  ‘Look! Claude Erskine-Brown, raising his glass at me!’ Featherstone pointed it out, rather unnecessarily, I thought.

  ‘Just a friendly gesture,’ I assured him.

  ‘You remember poor old Moreton Colefax, not made a judge because he couldn’t keep his mouth shut.’ The QC, MP, looked near to tears. ‘It’s all round the Temple.’

  ‘Of course it’s not. Don’t worry.’

  ‘Then why is Erskine-Brown drinking to me?’

  ‘He thinks you look like a judge. Beauty, after all, Guthrie my old darling, is entirely in the eye of the beholder.’ Curiously enough, when I said that, Guthrie Featherstone didn’t look particularly cheered up.

  In the course of time, however, Guthrie Featherstone, QC, MP, did cheer up, considerably. He fulfilled his destiny, and took on that role which led him to be appointed head boy of his prep school and a prefect at Marlborough, because, quite simply, he never got up anyone’s nose and there were no other likely candidates available.

  At long last Guthrie’s cheerfulness round the Sheridan Club and his dedication to losing golf matches against senior judges earned him his just reward. A man who had spent most of his life in an agony of indecision, who spent months debating such questions as whether we should have a coffee machine in the clerk’s room, or did the downstairs loo need redecorating; a fellow who found it so hard to choose between left and right that he became a Social Democrat; a barrister who agonized for hours about whether it would be acceptable to wear a light-grey tie in Chambers in April, or whether such jollifications should be confined to the summer months, was appointed one of Her Majesty’s Judges, and charged to decide great issues of life and liberty.

  Arise, Sir Guthrie! From now on barristers, men far older than you, will bow before you. Men and women will be taken off to prison at your decree. You will have made a Lady out of Marigold, and your old mother is no doubt extremely proud of you. There is only one reason, one very good reason, for that smile of amiable bewilderment to fade from the Featherstone features. You may make the most awful pig’s breakfast of the case you’re trying, and they’ll pour scorn on you from a great height in the Court of Appeal.

  So Guthrie Featherstone, in the full panoply of a Red Judge at the Old Bailey, was sitting paying polite and somewhat anxious attention to a piece of high comedy entitled R. v. Brittling, starring Claude Erskine-Brown for the prosecution, and Horace Rumpole for the defence. As the curtain rose on the second day of the hearing the limelight fell on a Mr Edward Gandolphini, an extremely expensive-looking art expert and connoisseur, with a suit from Savile Row, iron-grey hair and a tan fresh from a short break in the Bahamas. In the audience Pauline was sitting with her embroidered holdall, listening with fierce concentration, and in the dock, the prisoner at the Bar was unconcernedly drawing a devastating portrait of the learned Judge.

  ‘Mr Gandolphini.’ Erskine-Brown was examining the witness with all the humble care of a gynaecologist approaching a duchess who had graciously consented to lie down on his couch. ‘You are the author of Cragg and the British Impressionists and the leading expert on this particular painter?’

  ‘It has been said, my Lord.’ The witness flashed his teeth at the learned Judge, who flashed his back.

  ‘I’m sure it has, Mr Gandolphini,’ said Featherstone, J.

  ‘And are you also,’ Erskine-Brown asked most respectfully, ‘the author of many works on twentieth-century painting and adviser to private collectors and galleries throughout the world?’

  ‘I am.’ Gandolphini admitted it.

  ‘And have you examined this alleged “Septimus Cragg”?’ Erskine-Brown gestured towards the picture which, propped on a chair in front of the jury, revealed a world of secret delight miles away from the Central Criminal Court.

  ‘I have, my Lord.’ Mr Gandolphini again addressed himself to the learned Judge. ‘I may say it isn’t included in any existing catalogue of the artist’s works. Of course, at one time, I believe, it was thought it came from a genuine source, the artist’s niece in Worthing.’

  ‘Now we know that to be untrue,’ said Erskine-Brown with a meaningful look at the jury, and thereby caused me to stagger, filled with extremely righteous indignation, to my feet.

  ‘My Lord!’ I trumpeted. ‘We know nothing of the sort – until that has been found as a fact by the twelve sensible people who sit in that jury-box and no one else!’

  ‘Very well,’ said his Lordship, trying to placate everybody. ‘Very well, Mr Rumpole. Perhaps he suspected it to be untrue. Is that the situation, Mr Gandolphini?’

  Guthrie turned to the witness, smiling, but I wasn’t letting him off quite so easily. ‘My Lord, how can what this witness suspected possibly be evidence?’

  ‘Mr Rumpole. I know you don’t want to be difficult.’ As usual Featherstone exhibited his limited understanding of the case. I considered it my duty to be as difficult as possible.

  ‘May I assist, my Lord?’ said Erskine-Brown.

  ‘I would be grateful if you would, Mr Erskine-Brown. Mr Rumpole, perhaps we can allow Mr Erskine-Brown to assist us?’

  I subsided. I had no desire to take part in this vicarage tea-party, with everyone assisting each other to cucumber sandwiches. I thought that after one day on the Bench Guthrie had learnt the habit of getting cosy with the prosecution.

  ‘Mr Gandolphini,’ Erskine-Brown positively purred at the witness, ‘if you had known that this picture did not in fact come from Miss Price’s collection, would you have had some doubts about its authenticity?’

  ‘That question is entirely speculative.’ I was on my feet again.

  ‘Mr Rumpole.’ Featherstone was being extremely patient. ‘Do you want me to rule on the propriety of Mr Erskine-Brown’s question?’

  ‘I think the time may have come to make up the judicial mind, yes.’

/>   ‘Then I rule that Mr Erskine-Brown may ask his question.’ Guthrie then smiled at me in the nicest possible way and said, ‘Sorry, Mr Rumpole.’ The old darling looked broken-hearted.

  ‘Well, Mr Gandolphini?’ Erskine-Brown was still waiting for his answer.

  ‘I had a certain doubt about the picture from the start,’ Gandolphini said carefully.

  ‘From the start … you had a doubt …’ Featherstone didn’t seem to be able to stop talking while he wrote a note.

  ‘Take it slowly now. Just follow his Lordship’s pencil,’ Erskine-Brown advised the witness and, in the ensuing pause, I happened to whisper to Myersy, ‘And you may be sure his pencil’s not drawing thighs in Dieppe.’

  ‘Did you say something, Mr Rumpole?’ his Lordship asked, worried.

  ‘Nothing, my Lord, of the slightest consequence,’ I rose to explain.

  ‘I say that because I have extremely acute hearing.’ Featherstone smiled at the jury, and I could think of nothing better to say than, ‘Congratulations.’

  ‘I thought the painting very fine.’ Gandolphini returned to the matter in hand. ‘And certainly in the manner of Septimus Cragg. It is a beautiful piece of work, but I don’t think I ever saw a Cragg where the shadows had so much colour in them.’

  ‘Colour? In the shadows? Could I have a look?’ The Judge tapped his pencil on the Bench and called, ‘Usher.’ Obediently the usher carried the artwork up to his Lordship on the Bench, and his Lordship got out his magnifying glass and submitted Nancy’s warm flesh tints and flowing curves to a careful, legal examination.

  ‘There’s a good deal of green, and even purple in the shadows on the naked body, my Lord,’ Gandolphini explained.