In Court my one and only libel action ended in a sudden outburst of peace and goodwill, much to the frustration of Mr Justice Teasdale, who had clearly been preparing a summing-up which would encourage the jury to make Miss Nettleship rich beyond the dreams of avarice. All the allegations against her were dropped; she had no doubt been persuaded by her lover to ask for no damages at all and the Beacon’s editor accepted the bill for costs with extremely bad grace. This old legal taxi moved off to ply for hire elsewhere, glad to be shot of Mr Morry Machin. ‘Is there a little bit of burglary around, Henry?’ I asked our clerk, as I have recorded. ‘Couldn’t you get me a nice little gentle robbery? Something which shows human nature in a better light than civil law?’
‘Good heavens!’ Hilda exclaimed as we lay reading in the matrimonial bed in Froxbury mansions. I noticed that there had been a change in her reading matter and she was already well into On the Make by Suzy Hutchins. ‘This girl’s about to go to Paris with a man old enough to be her father.’
‘That must happen quite often.’
‘But it seems he is her father.’
‘Well, at least you’ve gone off the works of Amelia Nettleship.’
‘The way she dropped that libel action. The woman’s no better than she should be.’
‘Which of us is? Any chance of turning out the light?’ I asked She Who Must Be Obeyed, but she was too engrossed in the doings of her delinquent heroine to reply.
Rumpole and Portia
This is a story of family life, of parents and children, and, like many such stories, it began with a quarrel. There was I, ensconced one evening in a quiet corner of Pommeroy’s Wine Bar consuming a lonely glass of Château Thames Embankment at the end of a day’s labours, when the voices of a couple in dispute came drifting over from the other side of one of Jack Pommeroy’s high-backed pews which give such an ecclesiastical air to his distinguished legal watering-hole. The voices I heard were well known to me, being those of my learned friend, Claude Erskine-Brown, and of his spouse, Mrs Phillida Erskine-Brown, née Trant, the Portia of our Chambers, whom I befriended and advised when she was a white-wig, and who, no doubt taking advantage of that advice, rose to take silk and become a Queen’s Counsel when Claude was denied that honour, and thus had his nose put seriously out of joint. The union of Claude and Phillida has been blessed with a girl and a boy named, because of Claude’s almost masochistic addiction to the lengthier operas of Richard Wagner (and an opera isn’t by Richard Wagner if it’s not lengthy), Tristan and Isolde. It was the subject of young Tristan which was causing dissension between his parents that evening.
‘Tristan was still in bed at quarter to eight this morning,’ Claude was complaining. ‘He won’t be able to do that when he goes away to Bogstead.’
‘Please, Claude’ – Phillida sounded terminally bored – ‘don’t go on about it.’
‘You know when I was at Bogstead’ – no Englishman can possibly resist talking about his boarding school – ‘we used to be woken up at half past six for early class, and we had to break the ice in the dormy washbasins.’
‘You have told me that, Claude, quite often.’
‘We had to run three times round Tug’s Patch before early church on saints’ days.’
‘Did you enjoy that?’
‘Of course not! I absolutely hated it.’ Claude was looking back, apparently on golden memories.
‘Why do you imagine Tristan would enjoy it then?’
‘You don’t enjoy Bogstead,’ Claude was pointing out patiently. ‘You’re not meant to enjoy it. But if I hadn’t gone there I wouldn’t have got into Winchester and if I hadn’t got into Winchester I’d never have been to New College. And I’ll tell you something, Philly. If I hadn’t been to Bogstead, Winchester and New College, I’d never be what I am.’
‘Which might be just as well.’ Our Portia sounded cynical.
‘Whatever do you mean by that?’ Claude was nettled. I strained my ears to listen; things were obviously getting nasty.
‘It might be just as well if you weren’t the man you are,’ Claude’s wife told him. ‘If you hadn’t been at Bogstead you might not make such a terrible fuss about losing that gross indecency today. I mean, the way you carried on about that, you must still be in the fourth form at Boggers. I notice you don’t talk about sending Isolde to that dump.’
‘Bogstead is not a dump,’ Claude said proudly. ‘And you may not have noticed this, Philly, but Isolde is a girl. They don’t have girls there.’
‘Oh, I see. It’s a boy’s world, is it?’
‘I didn’t say that.’
‘Poor old Isolde. She’s going to miss all the fun of breaking the ice at 6.30 in the morning and running three times round Tug’s Patch on saints’ days. Poor deprived child. She might even grow up to be a Queen’s Counsel.’
‘Come on, Philly. Isn’t that a bit … ?’
‘A bit what?’ I had taught Phillida to be dead sharp on her cross-examination.
‘Well, not quite the thing to say. Of course I’m terrifically glad you’ve been made a QC. I think you’ve done jolly well.’
‘For a woman!’ A short, somewhat bitter laugh from Mrs Erskine-Brown emphasized her point.
‘But it’s just not “the thing” to crow about it.’ Erskine-Brown spoke with the full moral authority of his prep school and Winchester.
‘Sorry, Claude! I don’t know what “the thing” is. Such a pity I never went to Boggers. Anyway, I don’t see the point of having children if you’re going to send them away to boarding school.’
At that point, and much to my regret, the somewhat grey and tedious barrister named Hoskins of our Chambers, a man weighed down with the responsibility of four daughters, sat down at my table in order to complain about the extortionate price of coffee in our clerk’s room, and I lost the rest of the Erskine-Brown family dispute. However, I have given you enough of it to show the nature of their disagreement and Phillida’s reluctance to part with her young hopeful. These were matters which were to assume great importance in the defence of Stanley Culp on a charge of illicit arms dealing, for Stanley was a father who would have found our Portia’s views entirely sympathetic.
In most other respects, the home life of the Culps and the Erskine-Browns was as different as chalk and cheese. Stanley Culp was a plump, remorselessly cheerful, disorganized dealer in second-hand furniture – bits of junk and dubious antiques – in a jumbled shop near Notting Hill Gate. Unlike the Erskine-Browns, the Culps were a one-parent family, for Stanley was in sole charge of his son, Matthew, a scholarly, bespectacled little boy of about Tristan’s age. Some three and a half years before, Mrs Culp, so Stanley informed me when we met in Brixton Prison, had told her husband that he had ‘nothing romantic in his nature whatever’. ‘So she took off with the manager of Tesco, twenty years older than me if he was a day. Can you understand that, Mr Rumpole?’
I have long given up trying to understand the inscrutable ways of women in love, but I did come to understand Stanley Culp’s attachment to his son. My son Nicky and I enjoyed a similar rapport when we used to walk in the park together and I would tell him the Sherlock Holmes stories in the days before he took up the mysterious study of sociology and went to teach in Florida. It was for young Matthew’s sake, Stanley Culp told me, that he preferred to work at home in his antique business. ‘We are good companions, Mr Rumpole. And I have to be there when he comes home from school. I don’t approve of these latchkey children, left alone to do their homework until Mum and Dad come back from the office.’
The events which drew me and Stanley Culp together took place early one morning, not long before I heard the Erskine-Browns arguing in Pommeroy’s. Young Matthew, a better cook and housekeeper than his father, was making the breakfast in the kitchen upstairs whilst Stanley was engaged in some business with an early caller in the shop below. Matthew put bread in the antique electric toaster, heard a car door slam, and then looked out of the window. What he saw was an unmarked car which
in fact contained three officers of the Special Branch in plain clothes. A fourth man, wearing slightly tinted gold-rimmed glasses, who will have some importance in this account, was walking away from the car and paused to look up at the shop. Then the toast popped up and Matthew transferred it to a tarnished ‘Georgian’ rack and went to the top of the staircase which led down to the shop to call his father up for breakfast.
From his viewpoint at the top of the stairs Matthew saw the familiar jumble of piled tables, chairs and other furniture, and he saw Stanley talking to a thick-set, ginger-haired man who was carrying a briefcase. Matthew said, ‘Breakfast, Dad!’, at which moment the shop door was kicked open and two of the men from the car, Superintendent Rodney and Detective Inspector Blake, were among the junk and informing Stanley that they were officers of the Special Branch who had come to arrest him. As they said this, the thick-set, ginger-haired man, whose name turned out to be MacRobert, made a bolt for the back door and was out in the untidy patch of walled garden behind the building. He was there pursued by a third officer from the car, Detective Sergeant Trump, and shot dead in what Trump took to be the act of pulling out a gun. MacRobert, it transpired at the trial, was an important figure in a Protestant paramilitary group dedicated to open warfare in Northern Ireland.
Stanley was removed in the car and a subsequent search revealed, in a large storeroom behind his shop, a number of packing cases filled with repeating rifles of a forbidden category. Matthew didn’t go to school that day, but a woman police constable and a social worker arrived for him and he was taken into the care of the local council. His fate was that which Phillida feared for young Tristan; he was sent away from home to be brought up by strangers.
Unhappiness, you see, was getting in everywhere, not only à côté de Chez Erskine-Brown, but also among the Culps. And things had also taken an unfortunate turn in the Rumpole household. I came back one evening to the mansion flat in the Gloucester Road, and, as I unlocked the front door, I heard the usual cry of ‘Is that you, Rumpole?’
‘Good heavens, no!’ I called back. ‘It’s the Lord High Chancellor of England just dropped in to read the meter. What’re you talking about, Hilda?’
‘Ssh, Rumpole,’ Hilda said mysteriously. ‘It’s Boxey!’
‘Is it? Just a little fresh, I noticed, coming out of the Underground.’
‘No. It’s Boxey Horne. You must have heard me speak of my second cousin. Cousin Nancy’s youngest.’ We had spent many hours discussing the complexities of Hilda’s family tree, but I couldn’t immediately recollect the name. ‘We were so close when we were youngsters but Boxey felt the call of Africa. He rang up this afternoon from Paddington Station.’
A masculine voice called through the open sitting-room door, ‘Is that old Horace, back from the treadmill?’
‘Boxey?’ I was perplexed. ‘Yes, of course.’ And Hilda warned me, ‘You try and behave yourself, won’t you, Rumpole?’
With that she led me into our sitting room where a skinny, elderly and, I thought, cunning-looking cove was sitting in my chair nursing a glass of my Château Fleet Street and smiling at me in the slightly lopsided manner which I was to know as characteristic of Mr Boxey Horne. He wore a travel-stained tropical suiting, scuffed suede shoes and an MCC tie which had seen better days. When Hilda introduced me, he rose and gripped me quite painfully by the hand. ‘Good old Horace,’ he said. ‘Back from the office same time every evening. I bet you can set your watch by the old fellow, can’t you, Hilda?’
‘Well. Not exactly,’ Hilda told him.
‘Your wife gave me some of this plonk of yours, Horace.’ Boxey raised his glass to me. ‘We’d have been glad of this back on the farm in Kenya. We might have run a couple of tractors on it!’
‘Get Boxey a whisky, Rumpole,’ Hilda instructed me. ‘I expect you’d like a nice strong one, wouldn’t you? Boxey couldn’t get into the Travellers’ Club.’
‘Blackballed?’ I asked on my way to the sideboard.
‘Full up.’ Boxey grinned cheerfully. ‘Hilda was good enough to say I might camp here for a couple of weeks.’ It seemed an infinity. I poured a very small whisky, hoping the bottle would last him out, and drowned it in soda.
‘I’ve been knocking around the world, Horace,’ Boxey told me. ‘While you were off on your nine to five in a lawyers’ office.’
‘Not office,’ I corrected him as I handed him his pale drink, ‘Chambers.’
‘That sort of life would never have suited old Boxey,’ he told me, and I wondered if his name might be short for anything. ‘Oh no,’ Hilda laughed at my ignorance. ‘We called him that because of the beautiful brass-bound box he had when he set off to Darkest Africa.’
‘Always been a rover, Horace.’ Boxey was in a reminiscing mood. ‘All my worldly goods were in that old box. Tropical kit. Mosquito net. Dinner jacket to impress the natives. Family photographs, including one of Cousin Hilda looking young and alluring.’ He drank and looked suitably disappointed, but Hilda, clearly entranced, said, ‘You took me to Kenya? In your box?’
‘Many a time I’ve sat alone,’ he assured her, ‘listening to the strange sounds of an African night and gazing at your photograph. You have been looking after Cousin Hilda, haven’t you, Horace?’
‘Looking after her?’ I poured myself a bracing Pommeroy’s plonk and confessed myself puzzled. ‘Hilda’s in charge.’
‘A sweet, sweet girl, Cousin Hilda. I always thought she needed looking after but I suppose I had itchy feet and couldn’t resist the call of Africa.’ He propelled himself to the sideboard then, and with his back towards us, poured himself a straight whisky and then made a slight hissing noise imitating a siphon.
‘What were you doing in Africa?’ I asked him. ‘Something like discovering the source of the Zambesi?’
‘Well, not exactly. I was in coffee.’
‘All your life?’
‘Most of it.’ Boxey returned to my chair to enjoy his drink.
‘Working for the same firm?’
‘Well, one has certain loyalties. You’ve never seen dawn over Kilimanjaro, Horry? Pink light on the snow. Zebra stampeding.’
‘What time did you start work?’ I was pursuing my own line of cross-examination.
‘Well,’ Boxey remembered, ‘after my boy had got my bacon and eggs, coffee and Oxford marmalade … then I’d ride round the plantation.’
‘Starting at nine o’clock?’
‘About then, I suppose.’
‘And knocking off?’
‘Around sundown. Get a chair on the verandah and shout for a whisky.’
‘At about five o’clock?’
‘Why do you ask?’
‘The old routine!’ I muttered and the defence rested.
‘What was that?’
‘What a rover you’ve been,’ I said without envy.
‘Well, I had itchy feet.’ Boxey slapped my knee. ‘But thank God for chaps like you who’re prepared to slog it out in the old country, and look after girls like Hilda.’ Then he leant back in his chair, took a sizeable swig and prepared to give us another chapter of his memories. ‘Ever been tiger-shooting, Horace?’
‘Not unless you could call my frequent appearances before Judge Bullingham tiger-shooting,’ I assured him.
‘Best sport in the world! Tie an old goat to a tree and lie doggo. Your loader says, “Bwana. Tiger coming.” There she is, eyes glittering through the undergrowth. She starts to eat the goat and …’ – he raised an imaginary rifle – ‘aim just above the shoulder. Pow!’
‘What do you think of that, Rumpole?’ Hilda was starry-eyed.
‘I think it sounds bad luck on the goat.’ We had a short silence while Boxey renewed his whisky. Then he said, ‘I suppose it’s another long day in Court for you tomorrow.’
‘Oh, yes,’ I agreed, ‘dusty old law.’
‘I don’t know how you put up with it!’
‘Tedious case about an Ulster terrorist shot by the police in Notting Hill,’ I told him
– by then I had received the brief for the defence in R. v. Culp – ‘an inefficient gunrunner who acts as mother and father to his twelve-year-old son, and the curious activities of the Special Branch. Not nearly so exciting as nine to five on the old coffee plantation.’
That night, Hilda lay for a long time with the light on, when I was in dire need of sleep, staring into space. She was also in a reminiscing mood. ‘I remember when we used to go to dances at Uncle Jacko’s,’ she said. ‘Boxey was quite young, then. He brought his dancing pumps along in a paper bag. He was simply marvellous at the veleta.’
‘It’s a wonder he didn’t join the Royal Ballet.’
‘Rumpole. You are jealous!’
‘I just thought he might’ve found Casse Noisette a good deal more interesting than coffee.’
‘In those days I got the feeling that Boxey had taken a bit of a shine to me.’ It wasn’t, I thought, much to boast about, but Hilda seemed delighted. ‘A definite shine! How different my life might have been if I’d married Boxey and gone to Africa!’
‘My life would have been a bit different too,’ I told her. ‘With no one to make sure I didn’t linger too long in Pommeroy’s after work. No one to make sure I didn’t take a second helping of mashed potatoes. And,’ I added, sotto voce, ‘magical!’
‘What did you say, Rumpole?’
‘Tragical, of course. Is there any chance of turning out the light?’
Mr Bernard, my favourite instructing solicitor, had briefed me in the Culp case, and we went together to Brixton, where, in the cheerfully painted interview room with its pot plants and reasonably tolerant screws, I made the acquaintance of Stanley. His first request was to get him out of confinement so that he could be with his son, to which I made not very encouraging noises, reminding him that he’d been charged with delivering automatic rifles to a known Irish terrorist and that my name was Rumpole and not Houdini.
The Collected Stories of Rumpole Page 53