The Collected Stories of Rumpole

by John Mortimer

  I have forgotten precisely what brand of MP old Guthrie was; he was either right-wing Labour or left-wing Conservative until, in the end, he gave up politics and joined the SDP He was dedicated to the middle of the road, and very keen on our Chambers ‘image’, which, on one occasion, he thought was being let down badly by my old hat. Finally, the Lord Chancellor, who was probably thinking of something else at the time, made Guthrie a Scarlet Judge, and the old darling went into a dreadful state of panic, fearing that there had been a premature announcement of this Great Event in the History of our Times.

  From that time, Sir Guthrie Featherstone was entitled to scarlet and ermine and other variously coloured dressing-gowns, to be worn at different seasons of the year, and sat regularly in the seat of Judgement, dividing the sheep from the goats with a good deal of indecision and anxiety. When his day’s work was done, he returned to the block of flats in Kensington, where he lived with his wife Marigold. The flats came equipped with a tennis court, and there the Judge and his good lady were accustomed to playing mixed doubles with their neighbours, the Addisons, during the long summer evenings. Mr Addison, I imagine, was excessively respectful of the sporting Guthrie and frequently called out ‘Nice one, Judge’, or ‘Oh, I say, Judge, what frightfully bad luck’, during the progress of the game.

  What I see, doing my best to reconstruct the occasion which gave rise to the following chapter of accidents, is Guthrie and Marigold diving for the same ball with cries of ‘Leave it, Marigold!’ and ‘Mine, Guthrie!’ These two rapidly moving bodies were set on a collision course and, when it happened, the Judge fell heavily to the asphalt, his wife stood over his recumbent figure and the anxious Addisons came round the net with cries of ‘Nothing broken I hope and trust?’ From then on, perhaps, it went something like this:

  ‘Nothing broken is there, Guthrie?’ from Marigold.

  ‘My elbow.’ The Judge sat up nursing the afflicted part.

  ‘Such terrible luck when it was going to be such a super shot!’ said the ever-sycophantic Addison.

  ‘Twiddle your fingers, Guthrie, and let’s see if anything is broken.’ When the Judge obeyed, Marigold was able to tell him: ‘There you are, nothing broken at all!’

  ‘There’s an extraordinary shooting pain. Ouch!’ Guthrie was clearly suffering.

  ‘Oh, you poor man, you are in the wars, aren’t you?’ Mr Addison was sympathetic. ‘It’ll wear off.’ Lady Featherstone was not.

  ‘It shows absolutely no sign of wearing off.’

  ‘Rub it then, Guthrie! And for heaven’s sake don’t be such a baby!’

  The next day I was at my business at the Old Bailey, making my usual final appeal on the subject of the burden of proof, that great presumption of innocence, which has been rightly called the golden thread which runs through British justice, when Mr Justice Featherstone, presiding over the trial, interrupted my flow to say, ‘Just a moment, Mr Rumpole. I am in considerable pain.’ He was, in fact, still rubbing his elbow. ‘I have suffered a serious accident.’

  ‘Did your Lordship say “pain”?’ I couldn’t, for the moment, see how his Lordship’s accident was relevant to the question of the burden of proof.

  ‘It’s not something one likes to comment about,’ the Judge commented nobly, ‘in the general course of events. I have, of course, had some experience of pain, even at a comparatively young age.’

  ‘Did you say comparatively young, my Lord?’ I thought he was knocking on a bit, for a youngster.

  ‘And if I was the only person concerned I should naturally soldier on regardless …’

  ‘Terribly brave, my Lord!’ Leaving him to soldier on, I turned back to the jury. ‘Members of the jury. The question you must ask about each one of these charges is “Are you certain sure?” ’

  ‘But I mustn’t only think of myself,’ the Judge interrupted me again. ‘The point is, am I in too much pain to give your speech the attention it deserves, Mr Rumpole?’

  ‘I don’t know. Are you?’ That was all the help I could give him.

  ‘Exercising the best judgement I have, I have come to the conclusion that I am not. I will adjourn now.’

  ‘At three o’clock?’ I must confess I was surprised. ‘Pain,’ his Lordship told me solemnly, ‘is no respecter of time. Till tomorrow morning, members of the jury.’

  ‘Would your Lordship wish us to send for matron?’ I was solicitous.

  ‘I think not, Mr Rumpole. I’m afraid in this particular instance matters have gone rather beyond matron.’ Norman, the tall, bald usher, called on us all to be upstanding. Guthrie rose, and nursing his elbow, and faintly murmuring ‘Ouch’, left us.

  Norman the usher was well known to me as a man of the world, well used to judicial foibles and surprisingly accurate in forecasting the results of cases. He was a man who took pleasure in supplying the needs of others, often coming up to me during lulls in cases to say he knew where to lay his hands on some rubber-backed carpeting or a load of bathroom tiles. Although I felt no need of any of Norman’s contacts, he was able, on this occasion, to put Mr Justice Featherstone in touch with a cure. Long after his retirement Norman returned to the Bailey to look up a few old friends and over a couple of pints of Guinness in the pub opposite he eventually told me of his part in the affair of the Judge’s elbow. ‘Muscular is it, your Lordship’s affliction?’ Norman asked when he had led Guthrie out of Court into the Judge’s room, a leather and panelled sanctum furnished with law reports and silver-framed photographs of the children.

  ‘Muscular, Norman,’ the Judge admitted. ‘One does not complain.’

  ‘Only one thing for muscular pain, my Lord.’

  ‘Aspirins?’ The Judge winced as he started to unbutton his Court coat.

  ‘Throw away the aspirins. It’s a deep massage. That’s what your Lordship needs. Here. Let me slip that off for you.’ He removed Guthrie’s coat delicately. ‘Of course, your Lordship needs a massoose with strong fingers. One who can manipulate the fibres in depth.’ At which point the usher grasped the Judge’s elbow with strong fingers, causing another stab of pain, heroically borne. ‘I can feel that the fibres are in need of deep, deep manipulation. If your Lordship would allow me. I know just the massoose as’d get to your fibres and release the tension!’

  ‘You know someone, Norman?’ The Judge sounded hopeful.

  ‘The wife’s sister’s daughter, Elsie. Thoroughly respectable, and fingers on her like the grab of a crane …’

  ‘A talented girl?’

  ‘Precisely what the doctor ordered. Our Elsie has brought relief to thousands of sufferers.’

  ‘Where … does she carry on her practice?’ The Judge started tentative inquiries, rather as some fellow in classical times might have said, ‘Who’s got the key to Pandora’s Box?’

  ‘In a very hygienic health centre, my Lord. Only a stone’s throw down the Tottenham Court Road, your Lordship.’

  ‘Tottenham Court Road?’ Guthrie was, at first, fearful. ‘Not oriental in any way, this place, is it?’

  ‘Bless you, no, my Lord. They’re thoroughly reliable girls. Mostly drawn from the Croydon area. All medically trained, of course.’ Norman had hung up the Court coat and was restoring the Judge to mufti.

  ‘Medically trained? That’s reassuring.’

  ‘They have made a thorough study, my Lord, of the human anatomy. In all its aspects. Seeing as you’ve got no relief through the usual channels …’

  ‘My doctor’s absolutely useless!’ The Chelsea GP had merely referred the Judge to time, the great healer. Guthrie lifted a brush and comb to his hair, and was again reminded of his plight. ‘You’re right, Norman. Why not try a little alternative medicine?’

  ‘You wait, my Lord,’ Norman told him. ‘Just let our Elsie get her fingers on you.’

  The address which Norman gave the Judge was situated in a small street running eastward from Tottenham Court Road. After a few days’ more pain, Guthrie took a taxi there, got out and paid off the driver, wincing
as he felt for his money. ‘Had a bit of trouble with my elbow,’ he said, as though to explain his visit to the Good Life Health Centre, Sauna and Massage. At which point, the cabby drove away, no doubt thinking it was none of his business, and Guthrie entered the establishment in some trepidation. He was reassured to some extent by the cleanliness of the interior. There was a good deal of light and panelling, photographs of fit-looking young blond persons of both sexes, and a kindly receptionist behind a desk, filing her nails.

  ‘I rang for an appointment,’ Guthrie told her. ‘The name’s Featherstone.’ ‘Elsie,’ the receptionist called out, ‘your gentleman’s here. You can go right in, dear’ – she nodded towards a bead curtain – ‘and take off your things.’ Later, after a brief spell in an airless and apparently red-hot wooden cupboard, the Judge was stretched out on a table, clad in nothing but a towel, whilst Elsie, a muscular, but personable, young lady, who might have captained a hockey team, manipulated his elbow, and asked him if he was going anywhere nice for his holiday.

  ‘Hope so. I’m tired out with sitting,’ Guthrie told her.

  ‘Are you really?’ Elsie, no doubt, had heard all sorts of complaints in her time.

  ‘In fact I’ve been sitting almost continuously this year.’

  ‘Fancy!’

  ‘It gets tiring.’

  ‘I’m sure it does.’

  ‘Not how I did my elbow in, though. Tennis. When I’m not sitting, my wife and I play a bit of tennis.’

  ‘Well, it makes a change, dear. Doesn’t it?’

  When Elsie had finished her manipulations, Guthrie got dressed and came back into the reception area. Being a little short of cash, and seeing the American Express sign on the counter, he decided to pay with his credit card. ‘It feels better already,’ he told her, as he signed without an ‘ouch’. The receptionist banged the paperwork into her machine. ‘There you are then.’ She tore off his part of the slip and handed it and the credit card back to Guthrie, who thanked her again, and put the card and the slip carefully into his wallet. After he had left, Elsie came out from behind her curtain. ‘He says he’s tired out, done a lot of sitting,’ she told the receptionist, who smiled and said, ‘Poor bloke.’

  I was not, of course, among those present when Mr Justice Featherstone had his treatment, and I have had to invent, or attempt to reconstruct, the above dialogue. I may have got it wrong, but of one thing I am certain, the Judge’s massage was given in strict accordance with the Queensberry rules, and there was nothing below the belt.

  Whilst Guthrie had undergone this satisfactory cure and almost forgotten his old tennis injury, much had changed in our old Chambers at 3 Equity Court. I had been away for a week or two, doing a long firm fraud in Cardiff, a case which had absolutely no bloodstains and a great deal of adding up. I returned from exile to find our tattered old clerk’s room, with its dusty files, abandoned briefs, out-of-date textbooks and faded photograph of C. H. Wystan over the fireplace, had been greatly smartened up. Someone had had it painted white, given Henry a new desk and Dianne a new typewriter, hung the sort of coloured prints on the walls which they buy by the yard for ‘modernized’ hotels and introduced a large number of potted plants, at which Dianne was, even as I arrived one morning in my old hat and mac, squirting with a green plastic spray.

  ‘Through the jungle very softly flits a shadow and a sigh—’: the shadow was Dianne, and the sigh came from Henry when I asked if this was indeed our old clerk’s room or the tropical house at Kew.

  ‘It’s Mr Hearthstoke.’ Henry pronounced the name as though it were some recently discovered malignant disease.

  ‘Some old gardener?’ I asked, clutching three weeks’ accumulation of bills.

  ‘The new young gentleman in Chambers. He reckons an office space needs a more contemporary look.’

  ‘And I’ve been ticked off for putting.’ Uncle Tom was in the corner as usual, trickling a golf ball across the carpet.

  ‘Uncle Tom has been ticked off.’ Dianne confirmed the seriousness of the situation.

  ‘I’ve been asked to do it upstairs, but it isn’t the same.’ Uncle Tom sounded reasonable. ‘Down here, you can see the world passing by.’

  ‘Carry on putting, Uncle Tom,’ I told him. ‘Imagine you’re on the fourth green at Kuala Lumpur.’

  I forced my way through the undergrowth and went out into the passage; there I found that our clerk had followed me, and was whispering urgently, ‘Could I have a word in confidence?’

  ‘In the passage?’

  ‘It’s not only my clerk’s room Mr Hearthstoke reckons should have a more contemporary look.’ Henry started to outline his grievances. ‘He says we could do with a smarter typist. Well, as you know, Mr Rumpole, Dianne has always been extremely popular with the legal executives.’

  ‘A fine-looking girl, Dianne. A fine, sturdy girl. I always thought so.’ I had the feeling that Henry felt a certain tendresse for our tireless typist, although I didn’t think it right to inquire into such matters too deeply.

  ‘Worse than that, Mr Rumpole, he wants to privatize the clerking.’

  ‘To what?’

  ‘Mr Hearthstoke’s not over-enamoured, sir, with my ten per cent.’

  For the benefit of such of my readers as may never have shared in the splendours and miseries of life at the Bar, I should explain that the senior clerk in a set of Chambers is usually paid ten per cent of the earnings of his stable of legal hacks. This system is frequently criticized by those who wish to modernize our profession, but I do not share their views. ‘Good God!’ I said, ‘if barristers’ clerks didn’t get their ten per cent we’d have no one left to envy.’

  ‘And he’s got his criticism of you too, Mr Rumpole. That’s why I thought, sir, we might be in the same boat on this one. Even if we’d had our differences in the past.’

  ‘Of me?’ I was surprised, and a little pained to hear it. ‘What has this “Johnny Come Lately” got to criticize about me?’

  ‘He’s not enamoured of your old Burberry.’

  Unreasonable I thought. My mac may not have been hand-tailored in Savile Row, but it has kept out the rain on journeys to some pretty unsympathetic Courts over the years. And then I looked at our clerk and saw a man apparently in the terminal stage of melancholia.

  ‘Henry!’ I asked him. ‘Why this hangdog look? What on earth’s the need for this stricken whisper? If, whatever his name is, has only been here a few weeks …’

  ‘Voted in when you were in Cardiff, Mr Rumpole …’

  ‘Why does our learned Head of Chambers take a blind bit of notice?’

  ‘Quite frankly, it seems to Dianne and me, Mr Ballard thinks, with great respect, that the sun shines out of Mr Hearthstoke’s—’ Perhaps it was just as well that he was prevented from finishing this sentence by our learned Head of Chambers, Soapy Sam Ballard, who popped out of his door and instructed Henry to rally the chaps for a Chambers meeting. He didn’t seem exactly overjoyed to see me back.

  Charles Hearthstoke turned out to be a young man in his early thirties, dark, slender and surprisingly good-looking; he reminded me at once of Steerforth in the illustrations to David Copperfield. Despite his appearance of a romantic hero, he was one of those persons who took the view, one fashionable with our masters in government, that we were all set in this world to make money. He might have made an excellent accountant or merchant banker; he wasn’t, in my view, cut out for work at the Criminal Bar. He had been at some Chambers where he hadn’t hit it off with the clerk (a fact which didn’t surprise me in the least) and now he sat at the right hand of Ballard and was clearly the apple of the eye of our pure-minded Head of Chambers.

  ‘I’ve asked Hearthstoke to carry out an efficiency study into the working of Number 3 Equity Court, and I must say he’s done a superb job!’ My heart sank as Ballard told us this. ‘Quite superb. Charles, would you speak to this paper?’

  ‘He may speak to it,’ I grumbled, ‘but would it answer back?’

  ‘What
’s that, Rumpole?’

  ‘Oh, nothing, Ballard. Nothing at all …’

  But Uncle Tom insisted on telling them. ‘That was rather a good one! You heard what Rumpole said, Hoskins? Would it answer back?’

  ‘Leave it, Uncle Tom,’ I restrained him. Hearthstoke was now holding up some sort of document.

  ‘In the first section of the report I deal with obvious reforms to the system. It’s quite clear that our fees need to be computerized and I’ve made inquiries about the necessary software.’

  ‘Oh, I’m all in favour of that.’

  ‘Yes, Rumpole?’ Ballard allowed my interruption with a sigh.

  ‘Soft wear! Far too many stiff collars in the legal profession. Makes your neck feel it’s undergoing a blunt execution.’

  ‘Has Rumpole done another joke …?’ Uncle Tom didn’t seem to be sure about it.

  ‘Do please carry on, Charles.’ Ballard apologized to Hearthstoke for the crasser element in Chambers.

  ‘I’m also doing a feasibility study in putting our clerking out to private tender,’ Hearthstoke told the meeting. ‘I’m sure we can find a young up-thrusting group of chartered accountants who’d take on the job at considerably less than Henry’s ten per cent.’

  ‘Brilliant!’ I told him.

  ‘So glad you agree, Rumpole.’

  ‘Wonderful thing, privatization. Why not privatize the judges while you’re about it? I mean, they’re grossly inefficient. Only give out about a hundred years’ imprisonment a month, on the average. Why not sell them off to the Americans and step up production?’

  ‘That, if I may say so,’ – Hearthstoke gave a small, wintry smile – ‘is the dying voice of what may well become a dying profession.’

  ‘We’ve got to move with the times, Rumpole, as Charles has pointed out.’ Ballard was clearly exercising a great self-control in dealing with the critics.