The Collected Stories of Rumpole

by John Mortimer

  ‘A famous victory.’ She laughed in a cynical fashion. ‘For men!’

  ‘Man, woman or child, it doesn’t matter who the client is. We did our best and won.’

  ‘Because he was a man! Why shouldn’t he sit at the tap end? I’ve got to do something about it!’ She moved away purposefully. I called after her. ‘Mizz Probert! Where’re you going?’

  ‘To my branch of the women’s movement. The protest’s got to be organized on a national level. I’m sorry, Rumpole. The time for talking’s over.’

  And she was gone. I had no idea, then, of the full extent of the tide which was about to overwhelm poor old Guthrie Featherstone, but I had a shrewd suspicion that his Lordship was in serious trouble.

  The Featherstones’ two children were away at university, and Guthrie and Marigold occupied a flat which Lady Featherstone found handy for Harrods, her favourite shopping centre, and a country cottage near Newbury. Marigold Featherstone was a handsome woman who greatly enjoyed life as a Judge’s wife and was full of that strength of character and quickness of decision his Lordship so conspicuously lacked. They went to the Garden Party together with three or four hundred other pillars of the establishment: admirals, captains of industry, hospital matrons and drivers of the Royal Train. Picture them, if you will, safely back home with Marigold kicking off her shoes on the sofa and Guthrie going out to the hall to fetch that afternoon’s copy of the Evening Sentinel, which had just been delivered. You must, of course, understand that I was not present at the scene or other similar scenes which are necessary to this narrative. I can only do my best to reconstruct it from what I know of subsequent events and what the participants told me afterwards. Any gaps I have been able to fill in are thanks to the talent for fiction which I have acquired during a long career acting for the defence in criminal cases.

  ‘There might just be a picture of us arriving at the Palace.’ Guthrie brought back the Sentinel and then stood in horror, rooted to the spot by what he saw on the front page.

  ‘Well, then. Bring it in here.’ Marigold, no doubt, called from her reclining position.

  ‘Oh, there’s absolutely nothing to read in it. The usual nonsense. Nothing of the slightest interest. Well, I think I’ll go and have a bath and get changed.’ And he attempted to sidle out of the room, holding the newspaper close to his body in a manner which made the contents invisible to his wife.

  ‘Why’re you trying to hide that Evening Sentinel, Guthrie?’

  ‘Hide it? Of course I’m not trying to hide it. I just thought I’d take it to read in the bath.’

  ‘And make it all soggy? Let me have it, Guthrie.’

  ‘I told you …’

  ‘Guthrie. I want to see what’s in the paper.’ Marigold spoke in an authoritative manner and her husband had no alternative but to hand it over, murmuring the while, ‘It’s completely inaccurate, of course.’

  And so Lady Featherstone came to read, under a large photograph of his Lordship in a full-bottomed wig, the story which was being enjoyed by every member of the legal profession in the Greater London area. CARRY ON DROWNING screamed the banner headline. TAP END JUDGE’S AMAZING DECISION. And then came the full denunciation:

  Wives who share baths with their husbands will have to be careful where they sit in the future. Because 29-year-old April Timson of Bexley Heath made her husband Tony sit at the tap end the Judge dismissed a charge of attempted murder against him. ‘It seems you had a good deal to put up with,’ 55-year-old Mr Justice Featherstone told Timson, a 36-year-old window cleaner. ‘This is male chauvinism gone mad,’ said a spokesperson of the Islington Women’s Organization. ‘There will be protests up and down the country and questions asked in Parliament. No woman can sit safely in her bath while this Judge continues on the bench.’

  ‘It’s a travesty of what I said, Marigold. You know exactly what these Court reporters are. Head over heels in Guinness after lunch,’ Guthrie no doubt told his wife.

  ‘This must have been in the morning. We went to the Palace after lunch.’

  ‘Well, anyway. It’s a travesty.’

  ‘What do you mean, Guthrie? Didn’t you say all that about the tap end?’

  ‘Well, I may just have mentioned the tap end. Casually. In passing. Horace told me it was part of the evidence.’

  ‘Horace?’

  ‘Rumpole.’

  ‘I suppose he was defending.’

  ‘Well, yes …’

  ‘You’re clay in the hands of that little fellow, Guthrie. You’re a Red Judge and he’s only a junior, but he can twist you round his little finger,’ I rather hope she told him.

  ‘You think Horace Rumpole led me up the garden?’

  ‘Of course he did! He got his chap off and he encouraged you to say something monumentally stupid about tap ends. Not, I suppose, that you needed much encouragement.’

  ‘This gives an entirely false impression. I’ll put it right, Marigold. I promise you. I’ll see it’s put right.’

  ‘I think you’d better, Guthrie.’ The Judge’s wife, I knew, was not a woman to mince her words. ‘And for heaven’s sake try not to put your foot in it again.’

  So Guthrie went off to soothe his troubles up to the neck in bathwater and Marigold lay brooding on the sofa until, so she told Hilda later, she was telephoned by the Tom Creevey Diary Column on the Sentinel with an inquiry as to which end of the bath she occupied when she and her husband were at their ablutions. Famous couples all over London, she was assured, were being asked the same question. Marigold put down the instrument without supplying any information, merely murmuring to herself, ‘Guthrie! What have you done to us now?’

  Marigold Featherstone wasn’t the only wife appalled by the Judge’s indiscretions. As I let myself into our mansion flat in the Gloucester Road, Hilda, as was her wont, called to me from the living room, ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘I am thy father’s spirit,’ I told her in sepulchral tones.

  ‘Doomed for a certain term to walk the night,

  And for the day confined to fast in fires,

  Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature

  Are burnt and purged away.’

  ‘I suppose you think it’s perfectly all right.’ She was, I noticed, reading the Evening Sentinel.

  ‘What’s perfectly all right?’

  ‘Drowning wives!’ She said in the unfriendliest of tones. ‘Like puppies. I suppose you think that’s all perfectly understandable. Well, Rumpole, all I can say is, you’d better not try anything like that with me!’

  ‘Hilda! It’s never crossed my mind. Anyway, Tony Timson didn’t drown her. He didn’t come anywhere near drowning her. It was just a matrimonial tiff in the bathroom.’

  ‘Why should she have to sit at the tap end?’

  ‘Why indeed?’ I made for the sideboard and a new bottle of Pommeroy’s plonk. ‘If she had, and if she’d tried to drown him because of it, I’d have defended her with equal skill and success. There you are, you see. Absolutely no prejudice when it comes to accepting a brief.’

  ‘You think men and women are entirely equal?’

  ‘Everyone is equal in the dock.’

  ‘And in the home?’

  ‘Well, yes, Hilda. Of course. Naturally. Although I suppose some are born to command.’ I smiled at her in what I hoped was a soothing manner, well designed to unruffle her feathers, and took my glass of claret to my habitual seat by the gas-fire. ‘Trust me, Hilda,’ I told her. ‘I shall always be a staunch defender of Women’s Rights.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear that.’

  ‘I’m glad you’re glad.’

  ‘That means you can do the weekly shop for us at Safeway.’

  ‘Well, I’d really love that, Hilda,’ I said eagerly. ‘I should regard that as the most tremendous fun. Unfortunately I have to earn the boring stuff that pays for our weekly shop. I have to be at the service of my masters.’

  ‘Husbands who try to drown their wives?’ she asked unpleasantly.

  �
��And vice versa.’

  ‘They have late-night shopping on Thursdays, Rumpole. It won’t cut into your work time at all. Only into your drinking time in Pommeroy’s Wine Bar. Besides which I shall be far too busy for shopping from now on.’

  ‘Why, Hilda? What on earth are you planning to do?’ I asked innocently. And when the answer came I knew the sexual revolution had hit Froxbury mansions at last.

  ‘Someone has to stand up for Women’s Rights,’ Hilda told me, ‘against the likes of you and Guthrie Featherstone. I shall read for the Bar.’

  Such was the impact of the decision in R. v. Timson on life in the Rumpole home. When Tony Timson was sprung from custody he was not taken lovingly back into the bosom of his family. April took her baths alone and frequently left the house tricked out in her skin-tight, wet-look trousers and the exotic halterneck. When Tony made so bold as to ask where she was going, she told him to mind his own business. Vincent, the young hopeful, also treated his father with scant respect and, when asked where he was off to on his frequent departures from the front door, also told his father to mind his own business.

  When she was off on the spree, April Timson, it later transpired, called round to an off-licence in neighbouring Morrison Avenue. There she met the notorious Peanuts Molloy, also dressed in alluring leather, who was stocking up from Ruby, the large black lady who ran the ‘offey’, with raspberry crush, Champanella, crème de cacao and three-star cognac as his contribution to some party or other. He and April would embrace openly and then go off partying together. On occasion Peanuts would ask her how ‘that wally of a husband’ was getting on, and express his outrage at the lightness of the sentence inflicted on him. ‘Someone ought to give that Tony of yours a bit of justice,’ was what he was heard to say.

  Peanuts Molloy wasn’t alone in feeling that being bound over in the sum of fifty pounds wasn’t an adequate punishment for the attempted drowning of a wife. This view was held by most of the newspapers, a large section of the public and all the members of the North Islington Women’s Movement (Chair, Mizz Liz Probert). When Guthrie arrived for business at the judges’ entrance of the Old Bailey, he was met by a vociferous posse of women, bearing banners with the following legend: WOMEN OF ENGLAND, KEEP YOUR HEADS ABOVE WATER. GET JUSTICE FEATHERSTONE SACKED. As the friendly police officers kept these angry ladies at bay, Guthrie took what comfort he might from the thought that a High Court Judge can only be dismissed by a Bill passed through both Houses of Parliament.

  Something, he decided, would have to be done to answer his many critics. So Guthrie called Miss Lorraine Frinton, the doe-eyed shorthand writer, into his room and did his best to correct the record of his ill-considered judgement. Miss Frinton, breathtakingly decorative as ever, sat with her long legs neatly crossed in the Judge’s armchair and tried to grasp his intentions with regard to her shorthand note. I reconstruct this conversation thanks to Miss Frinton’s later recollection. She was, she admits, very nervous at the time because she thought that the Judge had sent for her because she had, in some way, failed in her duties. ‘I’ve been living in dread of someone pulling me up about my shorthand,’ she confessed. ‘It’s not my strongest suit, quite honestly.’

  ‘Don’t worry, Miss Frinton,’ Guthrie did his best to reassure her. ‘You’re in no sort of trouble at all. But you are a shorthand writer, of course you are, and if we could just get to the point when I passed sentence. Could you read it out?’

  The beautiful Lorraine looked despairingly at her notebook and spelled out, with great difficulty, ‘Mr Hearthstoke has quite wisely …’

  ‘A bit further on.’

  ‘Jackie a saw goo … a wise Frenchman …’ Miss Frinton was decoding.

  ‘Chacun à son goût!’

  ‘I’m sorry, my Lord. I didn’t quite get the name.’

  ‘Ça ne fait rien.’

  ‘How are you spelling that?’ She was now lost.

  ‘Never mind.’ The Judge was at his most patient. ‘A little further on, Miss Frinton. Lorraine. I’m sure you and I can come to an agreement. About a full stop.’

  After much hard work, his Lordship had his way with Miss Frinton’s shorthand note, and Counsel and solicitors engaged in the case were assembled in Court to hear, in the presence of the gentlemen of the Press, his latest version of his unfortunate judgement.

  ‘I have had my attention drawn to the report of the case in The Times,’ he started with some confidence, ‘in which I am quoted as saying to Timson, “It seems you had a great deal to put up with. And your wife, she, it appears from the evidence, washed her hair in the more placid waters” etc. It’s the full stop that has been misplaced. I have checked this carefully with the learned shorthand writer and she agrees with me. I see her nodding her head.’ He looked down at Lorraine who nodded energetically, and the Judge smiled at her. ‘Very well, yes. The sentence in my judgement in fact read, “It seems you had a great deal to put up with, and your wife.” Full stop! What I intended to convey, and I should like the press to take note of this, was that both Mr and Mrs Timson had a good deal to put up with. At different ends of the bath, of course. Six of one and half a dozen of the other. I hope that’s clear?’ It was, as I whispered to Mizz Probert sitting beside me, as clear as mud.

  The Judge continued. ‘I certainly never said that I regarded being seated at the tap end as legal provocation to attempted murder. I would have said it was one of the facts that the jury might have taken into consideration. It might have thrown some light on this wife’s attitude to her husband.’

  ‘What’s he trying to do?’ sotto voce Hearthstoke asked me.

  ‘Trying to get himself out of hot water,’ I suggested.

  ‘But the attempted murder charge was dropped,’ Guthrie went on.

  ‘He twisted my arm to drop it,’ Hearthstoke was muttering.

  ‘And the entire tap end question was really academic,’ Guthrie told us, ‘as Timson pleaded guilty to common assault. Do you agree, Mr Rumpole?’

  ‘Certainly, my Lord.’ I rose in my most servile manner. ‘You gave him a very stiff binding over.’

  ‘Have you anything to add, Mr Hearthstoke?’

  ‘No, my Lord.’ Hearthstoke couldn’t very well say anything else, but when the Judge had left us he warned me that Tony Timson had better watch his step in future as Detective Inspector Brush was quite ready to throw the book at him.

  Guthrie Featherstone left Court well pleased with himself and instructed his aged and extremely disloyal clerk Wilfred to send a bunch of flowers, or, even better, a handsome pot plant to Miss Lorraine Frinton in recognition of her loyal services. So Wilfred told me he went off to telephone Interflora and Guthrie passed his day happily trying a perfectly straightforward robbery. On rising he retired to his room for a cup of weak Lapsang and a glance at the Evening Sentinel. This glance was enough to show him that he had achieved very little more, by his statement in open Court, than inserting his foot into the mud to an even greater depth.

  BATHTUB JUDGE SAYS IT AGAIN screamed the headline. Putting her husband at the tap end may be a factor to excuse the attempted murder of a wife. ‘Did I say that?’ the appalled Guthrie asked old Wilfred who was busy pouring out the tea.

  ‘To the best of my recollection, my Lord. Yes.’

  There was no comfort for Guthrie when the telephone rang. It was old Keith from the Chancellor’s office saying that the Lord Chancellor, as Head of the Judiciary, would like to see Mr Justice Featherstone at the earliest available opportunity.

  ‘A Bill through the Houses of Parliament.’ A stricken Guthrie put down the telephone. ‘Would they do it to me, Wilfred?’ he asked, but answer came there none.

  ‘You do look, my clerk, in a moved sort, as if you were dismayed.’ In fact, Henry, when I encountered him in the clerk’s room, seemed distinctly rattled. ‘Too right, sir. I am dismayed. I’ve just had Mrs Rumpole on the telephone.’

  ‘Ah. She Who Must wanted to speak to me?’

  ‘No, Mr Rumpole. She w
anted to speak to me. She said I’d be clerking for her in the fullness of time.’

  ‘Henry,’ I tried to reassure the man, ‘there’s no immediate cause for concern.’

  ‘She said as she was reading for the Bar, Mr Rumpole, to make sure women get a bit of justice in the future.’

  ‘Your missus coming into Chambers, Rumpole?’ Uncle Tom, our oldest and quite briefless inhabitant, was pursuing his usual hobby of making approach shots to the waste-paper basket with an old putter.

  ‘Don’t worry, Uncle Tom.’ I sounded as confident as I could. ‘Not in the foreseeable future.’

  ‘My motto as a barrister’s clerk, sir, is anything for a quiet life,’ Henry outlined his philosophy. ‘I have to say that my definition of a quiet life does not include clerking for Mrs Hilda Rumpole.’

  ‘Old Sneaky MacFarlane in Crown Office Row had a missus who came into his Chambers.’ Uncle Tom was off down Memory Lane. ‘She didn’t come in to practice, you understand. She came in to watch Sneaky. She used to sit in the corner of his room and knit during all his conferences. It seems she was dead scared he was going to get off with one of his female divorce petitioners.’

  ‘Mrs Rumpole, Henry, has only just written off for a legal course in the Open University. She can’t yet tell provocation from self-defence or define manslaughter.’ I went off to collect things from my tray and Uncle Tom missed a putt and went on with his story. ‘And you know what? In the end Mrs MacFarlane went off with a co-respondent she’d met at one of these conferences. Some awful fellow, apparently, in black and white shoes! Left poor old Sneaky high and dry. So, you see, it doesn’t do to have wives in Chambers.’

  ‘Oh, I meant to ask you, Henry. Have you seen my Ackerman on The Causes of Death?’ One of my best-loved books had gone missing.

  ‘I think Mr Ballard’s borrowed it, sir.’ And then Henry asked, still anxious, ‘How long do they take then, those courses at the Open University?’

  ‘Years, Henry,’ I told him. ‘It’s unlikely to finish during our lifetime.’