The Collected Stories of Rumpole

by John Mortimer

  I knew Harold Brittling was going to be a bad witness by the enormously confident way that he marched into the box, held the Bible up aloft and promised to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. He was that dreadful sort of witness, the one who can’t wait to give evidence, and who has been longing, with unconcealed impatience, for his day in Court. He leant against the top of the box and surveyed us all with an expression of tolerant disdain, as though we had made a bit of a pig’s breakfast of his case up to that moment, and it was now up to him to put it right.

  I dug my hands as deeply as possible into my pockets, and asked what might prove to be the only really simple question.

  ‘Is your name Harold Reynolds Gainsborough Brittling?’

  ‘Yes, it is. You’ve got that perfectly right, Mr Rumpole.’

  I didn’t laugh; neither, I noticed, did the jury.

  ‘You came of an artistic family, Mr Brittling?’ It seemed a legitimate deduction.

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Brittling, and went on modestly, ‘I showed an extraordinary aptitude, my Lord, right from the start. At the Slade School, which I entered at the ripe old age of sixteen, I was twice a gold medallist and by far the most brilliant student of my year.’

  The jury appeared to be moderately nauseated by this glowing account of himself. I changed the subject. ‘Mr Brittling, did you know the late Septimus Cragg?’

  ‘I knew and loved him. There is a comradeship among artists, my Lord, and he was undoubtedly the finest painter of his generation. He came to a student exhibition and I think he recognized … well …’

  I was hoping he wouldn’t say ‘a fellow genius’; he did.

  ‘After that did you meet Cragg on a number of occasions?’

  ‘You could say that. I became one of the charmed circle at Rottingdean.’

  ‘Mr Brittling. Will you take in your hands Exhibit 1.’

  The usher lifted Nancy and carried her to the witness-box. Harold Brittling gave me a look of withering scorn.

  ‘This is a beautiful picture!’ he said. ‘Please don’t call it “Exhibit 1”, Mr Rumpole. “Exhibit 1” might be a blunt instrument or something.’

  The witness chuckled at this; no one else in Court smiled. I prayed to God that he’d leave the funnies to his learned Counsel.

  ‘Where did that picture come from, Mr Brittling?’

  ‘I really don’t remember very clearly.’ He looked airily round the Court as though it were a matter of supreme unimportance.

  ‘You don’t remember?’ The Judge didn’t seem able to believe what he was writing down.

  ‘No, my Lord. When one is leading the life of an artist, small details escape the memory. I suppose Septimus must have given it to me on one of my visits to him. Artists pay these little tributes to each other.’

  ‘Why did you take it to Miss Price and ask her to sell it?’ I asked as patiently as possible.

  ‘I suppose I thought that the dealers would have more faith in it if it came from that sort of source. And I rather wanted the old puss to get her little bit of commission.’

  One thing emerged clearly from that bit of evidence: the jury didn’t approve of Miss Price being called an ‘old puss’. In fact, Brittling was going down with them like a cup of cold cod liver oil.

  ‘Mr Brittling. What is your opinion of that picture?’ Of course I wanted him to say that it was a genuine Cragg. Instead he closed his eyes and breathed in deeply. ‘I think it is the work of the highest genius …’

  ‘Slowly please …’ The Judge was writing this art criticism down.

  ‘Just watch his Lordship’s pencil,’ I advised the witness.

  ‘I think it is a work of great beauty, my Lord … The painting of the curtains, and of the air in the room … Quite miraculous!’

  ‘Did Septimus Cragg paint it?’ I tried to bring Brittling’s attention back to the case.

  ‘It’s a lovely thing.’ And then the little man actually shrugged his shoulders. ‘What does it matter who painted it?’

  ‘For the purposes of this case, you can take it from me – it matters,’ I instructed him. ‘Now, have you any doubts that it is a genuine Cragg?’

  ‘Only one thing gives me the slightest doubt.’ Like all bad witnesses Brittling was incapable of a simple answer.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘It really seems to be too good for him. It exists beautifully on a height the old boy never reached before.’

  ‘Did you paint that picture, Mr Brittling?’ I tried to direct his attention to the charge he was facing.

  ‘Me? Is someone suggesting I did it?’ Brittling seemed flattered and delighted.

  ‘Yes, Mr Brittling. Someone is.’

  ‘Well, in all modesty, it really takes my breath away. You are suggesting that I could produce a masterpiece like that!’ And Mr Brittling smiled triumphantly round the Court.

  ‘I take it, Mr Rumpole, that the answer means “no”.’ The Judge was looking understandably confused.

  ‘Yes, of course. If your Lordship pleases.’

  Featherstone, J, had interpreted Brittling’s answer as a denial of forgery. I thought that no further questions could possibly improve the matter, and I sat down. Erskine-Brown rose to cross-examine with the confident air of a hunter who sees his prey snoozing gently at a range of about two feet.

  ‘Mr Brittling,’ he began quietly. ‘Did you say you “laundered” the picture through Miss Price?’

  ‘He did what, Mr Erskine-Brown?’ The Judge was not quite with him.

  ‘Sold the picture through Miss Price, my Lord, because it seemed such an unimpeachable source.’

  ‘Yes.’ The witness didn’t bother to deny it.

  ‘Does that mean that the picture isn’t entirely innocent?’

  ‘Mr Erskine-Brown, all great art is innocent.’ Brittling was outraged. It seemed that all we had left was the John Keats defence:

  ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’ – that is all

  Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

  ‘Then why this elaborate performance of selling the picture through Miss Price?’ Erskine-Brown raised his voice a little.

  ‘Just to tease them a bit. Pull their legs …’ The worst was happening. Brittling was chuckling again.

  ‘Pull whose legs, Mr Brittling?’

  ‘The art experts! The con-o-sewers. People like Teddy Gandolphini. I just wanted to twist their tails a little.’

  ‘So we have all been brought here, to this Court, for a sort of a joke?’ Erskine-Brown acted extreme amazement.

  ‘Oh no. Not just a joke. Something very serious is at stake.’ I didn’t know what else Brittling was going to say, but I suspected it would be nothing helpful.

  ‘What?’ Erskine-Brown asked.

  ‘My reputation.’

  ‘Your reputation as an honest man, Mr Brittling?’

  ‘Oh no. Far more important than that. My reputation as an artist! You see, if I did paint that picture, I must be a genius, mustn’t I?’

  Brittling beamed round the Court, but once again no one else was smiling. At the end of the day the Judge withdrew the defendant’s bail, a bad sign in any case. Harold Brittling, however, seemed to feel he had had a triumph in the witness-box, and departed, with only a moderate show of irritation, for the nick.

  When I left Court – a little late, as we had the argument about bail after the jury had departed – I saw a lonely figure on a bench in the marble hall outside Number 1 Court. It was Pauline, shivering slightly, wrapped in her ethnic clothing, clutching her holdall, and her undoubtedly beautiful face was, I saw when she turned it in my direction, wet with tears. Checking a desire to suggest that the temporary absence of the appalling Brittling might come as something of a relief to his nearest and dearest, I tried to put a cheerful interpretation on recent events.

  ‘Don’t worry.’ I sat down beside her and groped for a small cigar. ‘Bail’s quite often stopped, once a defendant’s given his evidence. The jury won’t know
about it. Personally, I think the Judge was just showing off. Well, he’s young, and a bit wet round the judicial ears.’ There was a silence. Young Pauline didn’t seem to be at all cheered up. Then she said, very quietly, ‘They’ll find Harold guilty, won’t they?’ She was too bright to be deceived and I exploded in irritation. ‘What the hell’s the matter with old Harold? He’s making his evidence as weak as possible. Does he want to lose this case?’

  And then she said something I hadn’t expected: ‘You know he does, don’t you?’ She put her hand on my arm in a way I found distinctly appealing.

  ‘Please,’ she said, ‘will you take me for a drink? I really need one. I’d love it if you would.’

  In all the circumstances it seemed a most reasonable request. ‘All right,’ I said. ‘We’ll go to Pommeroy’s Wine Bar. It’s only just over the road.’

  ‘No we won’t,’ Pauline decided. ‘We’ll go to the Old Monmouth in Greek Street. I want you to meet somebody.’

  The Old Monmouth, to which we travelled by taxi at Pauline’s suggestion, turned out to be a large, rather gloomy pub with a past which was considerably more interesting than its present. Behind the bar there were signed photographs, and even sketches by a number of notable artists who drank there before the war and in the forties and fifties. There were also photographs of boxers, dancers and music-hall performers, and many caricatures of ‘Old Harry’, the former proprietor, with a huge handlebar moustache, whose son, ‘Young Harry’, with a smaller moustache, still appeared occasionally behind the bar.

  The habits of artists have changed. Perhaps they now spend their evenings sitting at home in Islington or Kew, drinking rare Burgundy and listening to Vivaldi on the music centre. The days when a painter started the evening with a couple of pints of Guinness and ended stumbling out into Soho with a bottle of whisky in his pocket and an art school model, wearing scarlet lipstick and a beret, on his arm have no doubt gone for ever. At the Old Monmouth pale young men with orange quiffs were engaged in computerized battles on various machines. There were some eager executives in three-piece suits buying drinks for their secretaries, and half-a-dozen large men loudly discussing the virtues of their motor cars. No one looked in the least like an artist.

  ‘They all used to come here,’ Pauline said, nostalgic for a past she never knew. ‘Augustus John, Sickert, Septimus Cragg. And their women. All their women …’

  ‘Wonder they found room for them all.’ I handed her the rum she had requested, and took a gulp of a glass of red wine which made the taste of Pommeroy’s plonk seem like Château Lafite. I couldn’t quite imagine what I was doing, drinking in a Soho pub with an extraordinarily personable young woman, and I was thankful for the thought that the least likely person to come through the door was She Who Must Be Obeyed.

  So I tossed back the rest of the appalling Spanish-style vin ordinaire with the sort of gesture which I imagine Septimus Cragg might have used on a similar occasion.

  ‘It’s changed a bit now,’ Pauline said, looking round the bar regretfully. ‘Space Invaders!’ She gave a small smile, and then her smile faded. ‘Horace … Can I call you Horace?’

  ‘Please.’

  She put a hand on my arm. I didn’t avoid it.

  ‘You’ve been very kind to me. You and Hilda. But it’s time you knew the truth.’

  I moved a little away from her, somewhat nervously, I must confess. When someone offers to tell you the truth in the middle of a difficult criminal trial it’s rarely good news.

  ‘No,’ I said firmly.

  ‘What?’ She looked up at me, puzzled.

  ‘The time for me to know the truth is when this case is over. Too much of the truth now and I’d have to give up defending that off beat little individual you go around with. Anyway,’ I pulled out my watch, ‘I’ve got to get back to Gloucester Road.’

  ‘Please! Please don’t leave me!’ Her hand was on my arm again, and her words came pouring out, as though she were afraid I’d go before she’d finished. ‘Harold said he loved Septimus Cragg. He didn’t. He hated him. You see, Septimus had everything Harold wanted – fame, money, women and a style of his own. Harold can paint brilliantly, but always like other people. So he wanted to get his own back on Septimus, to get his revenge.’

  ‘Look. If you’re trying to prove to me my client’s guilty …’ I was doing my best to break off this dangerous dialogue, but she held my arm now and wouldn’t stop talking.

  ‘Don’t go. If you’ll wait here, just a little while, I’ll show you how to prove Harold’s completely innocent.’

  ‘Do you really think I care that much?’ I asked her.

  ‘Of course you do!’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Patients and nurses. Septimus said that’s how the world is divided. We’re the nurses, aren’t we, you and I? We’ve got to care, that’s our business. Please!’

  I looked at her. Her eyes were full of tears again. I cursed her for having said something true, about both of us.

  ‘All right,’ I said. ‘But this time I’ll join you in a rum. No more Château Castanets. Oh, and I’d better make a telephone call.’

  I rang Hilda from a phone on the wall near the Space Invader machine. Although there was a good deal of noise in the vicinity, the voice of She Who Must Be Obeyed came over loud and clear.

  ‘Well, Rumpole,’ she said, ‘I suppose you’re going to tell me you were kept late working in Chambers.’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘I’m not going to tell you that.’

  ‘Well, what are you going to tell me?’

  ‘Guthrie Featherstone put Brittling back in the cooler and I’m with the girlfriend Pauline. Remember her? We’re drinking rum together in a bar in Soho and I really have no idea when I’ll be back, so don’t wait up for me.’

  ‘Don’t talk rubbish, Rumpole! You know I don’t believe a word of it!’ and my wife slammed down the receiver. If such were the price of establishing my client’s innocence, I supposed it would have to be paid. I returned to the bar, where Pauline had already lined up a couple of large rums and was in the act of paying for them.

  ‘What did you tell your wife?’ she asked, having some feminine instinct, apparently, which told her the nature of my call.

  ‘The truth.’

  ‘I don’t suppose she believed it.’

  ‘No. Here, let me do that.’ I felt for my wallet.

  ‘It’s the least I can do.’ She was scooping up the change. ‘You were splendid in Court. You were, honestly. The way you handled that awful Gandolphini, and the Judge. You’ve got what Harold always wanted.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘A voice of your own.’ We both drank and she swivelled round on her bar stool to survey the scene in the Old Monmouth pub, and smiled. ‘Look,’ she said. ‘It’s here.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘All you need to prove Harold’s innocent.’

  I looked to a corner of the bar, to where she was looking. An old woman, a shapeless bundle of clothes with a few bright cheap beads, had come in and was sitting at a table in the corner. She started to search in a chaotic handbag with the air of someone who has no real confidence that anything will be found. Pauline had slid off her stool and I followed her across to the new arrival. She didn’t seem to notice our existence until Pauline said, quite gently, ‘Hullo, Nancy.’ Then the woman looked up at me. She seemed enormously old, her face was as covered with lines as a map of the railways. Her grey hair was tousled and untidy, her hands, searching in her handbag, were not clean. But there was still a sort of brightness in her eye as she smiled at me and said, in a voice pickled during long years in the Old Monmouth pub, ‘Hullo, young man. I’ll have a large port and lemon.’

  It is, of course, quite improper for a barrister to talk to a potential witness, so I will draw a veil over the rest of the evening. It’s not so difficult to draw the aforesaid veil, as my recollection of events is somewhat hazy. I know that I paid for a good many rums and ports with lemon, and that I learnt
more than I can now remember about the lives and loves of many British painters. I can remember walking with two ladies, one old and fragile, one young and beautiful, in the uncertain direction of Leicester Square tube station, and it may be that we linked arms and sang a chorus of the ‘Roses of Picardy’ together. I can’t swear that we didn’t.

  I had certainly left my companions when I got back to Gloucester Road, and then discovered that the bedroom door was obstructed by some sort of device, probably a lock.

  ‘Is that you, Rumpole?’ I heard a voice from within. ‘If you find her so fascinating, I wonder you bothered to come home at all.’

  ‘Hilda!’ I called, rattling at the handle. ‘Where on earth am I expected to sleep?’

  ‘I put your pyjamas on the sofa, Rumpole. Why don’t you join them?’

  Before I fell asleep in our sitting room, however, I made a telephone call to his home number and woke up our learned prosecutor, Claude Erskine-Brown, and chattered to him, remarkably brightly, along the following lines: ‘Oh, Erskine-Brown. Hope I haven’t woken you up. I have? Well, isn’t it time to feed the baby anyway? Oh, the baby’s four now. How time flies. Look. Check something for me, will you? That Mrs DeMoyne. Yes. The purchaser. I don’t want to drag her back to Court but could your officer ask if the man who rang her was called Blanco Basnet? Yes. “Blanco”. It means white, you see. Sweet dreams, Erskine-Brown.’

  After which, I stretched out, dressed as I was, on the sofa and dreamed a vivid dream in which I was appearing before Mr Justice Featherstone wearing pyjamas, waving a paintbrush and singing the ‘Roses of Picardy’ until he sent me to cool off in the cells.

  ‘You look tired, Rumpole.’ Erskine-Brown and I were sitting side by side in Court awaiting the arrival of Blind Justice in the shape of Featherstone, J. The sledgehammer inside my head was quietening a little, but I still had a remarkably dry mouth and a good deal of stiffness in the limbs after having slept rough in Froxbury Court.