It was the sudden appearance of the powerful Sister Sheila, with or without her pet, that Nurse Dotty Albright feared as we stood chatting in the corridor.
‘Get back into your room, Mr Rumpole,’ Dotty swallowed a sob and wiped an eye on the back of her hand, ‘before Sister spots you.’
‘Never mind about Sister Sheila.’ I had grown impervious to the icy disapproval of the Head Girl. ‘Tell me what’s the matter.’
‘A terrible night, Mr Rumpole. It’s been the most ghastly night ever at the Primrose Path.’
‘Tell me what happened.’
‘Poor Mr Fairweather … He passed away during the night. They took him away. It was my night off and they took him away without even telling me.’
I had caught a glimpse of Fairweather – Freddy, Dotty often called him – a short, beady-eyed, bald-headed, broad-shouldered man in a dressing-gown being pushed in a wheelchair to his room down the corridor. He was recovering, Dotty told me, from a massive heart attack, but she brought him roots and herbal remedies and he made jokes and flirtatious suggestions. Freddy and I, she assured me, were her two favourite patients.
‘Can you imagine that?’ Dotty said as she took out a crumpled handkerchief and blew her nose gently. ‘Sister let them take him without even a chance of saying goodbye. Freddy would have hated that. He was full of rude suggestions, of course he was. He was a bit of a jack the lad, we know that, even in his condition of health. But underneath all that, he had the most perfect manners. Even if he’d gone, even if it was too late, he’d have liked me to be there to hold his hand and say goodbye before he passed away. But she wouldn’t have that. She has to know best, always.’
As Dotty went on talking, it appeared that the sad death of Freddy Fairweather wasn’t the only disaster of that long, eventful night. A certain Michael Masklyn, high up on the list of unpopular patients, had, in Dotty’s words, ‘done a runner’ and strayed from the Primrose Path under the cover of darkness. Masklyn was an unknown quantity; he seemed to have few friends and no visitors except an older woman who had visited him once and, as their voices were raised in a quarrel, was heard to vow never to come near him again. He’d been transferred from a hospital which had, as might be expected, run out of beds, and found a place in the Primrose Path under some sort of government scheme. He had, Dotty assured me, a vile temper, was thankful for nothing and had once thrown a glass containing his urine sample at the head of a trainee nurse who would do no harm to anybody.
‘I never thought he was well enough to get out of here.’ Dotty had stopped crying now and her voice was full of anger. ‘Sister’s security’s just hopeless. His clothes were in his room, just as yours are, and Gavin was fast asleep at his desk downstairs. So Mr Masklyn just walked off and left us. I hate to say this to you, Mr Rumpole, but there’s just no organization in this place. No organization at all. It’s all rules and no practice. Not the place for either of us really, is it?’
Strangely enough, after that sad and eventful evening, the Primrose Path became, in some elusive and quiet way, more interesting. I tried to discuss the break-out of Michael Masklyn with Sister Sheila, but was met with pursed lips and the shortest of possible answers.
‘He was an impossible patient,’ Sheila Bradwell told me. ‘In one way we were glad to get rid of him. But of course we had our duty of care. You can’t keep an eye on everyone twenty-four hours a day.’
‘Do the police know he’s gone missing?’ I felt a stirring of the old need to cross-examine the witness.
‘We reported it, naturally, Mr Rumpole, if you’re so interested. There was no sign of him at his last known address.’
‘Did he have a family?’
‘Someone he said was his sister came once. No one’s been able to track her down either.’
‘My friend Dotty says his door was locked in the morning when she came on duty.’
‘Your friend Nurse Albright says a lot of things we don’t have to take too much notice of. Of course the door wasn’t locked at night. We locked it in the morning, until the police came to see if there were any clues to where he’d gone. You don’t want the evidence disturbed. You know all about that, don’t you, Mr Rumpole?’
‘I suppose I do. All the same, it must have been a terrible night for you. I was sorry to hear about Mr Fairweather.’
Sister Sheila Bradwell stood looking at me, a straight-backed, straight-haired woman, born to command. I thought I saw in her eyes not sorrow for the passing of another patient, but a faint amusement at the fact that I had bothered to raise the subject.
‘These things happen, Mr Rumpole, at a place like this. They’re very sad, but they happen all the time. We’ve got used to it, of course. And we deal with it as kindly as possible, whatever your friend Nurse Albright may say about the matter.’
‘She said she was very fond of Mr Fairweather. He was kind to her, and she enjoyed looking after him.’
‘And did your friend tell you that dear old Mr Fairweather had also said he’d left her money in his will?’ Sister Bradwell was smiling as she said that, and it came as something of a shock. After being clearly disapproved of for asking impertinent questions, it suddenly seemed as though I was being drawn into an argument from which, for the moment, I retreated.
‘She never said anything like that. Only that she was upset because he died so suddenly.’
‘Well, it’s nothing for you to worry about, Mr Rumpole, is it? You can concentrate on getting a good rest. Shall I switch your telly on for you?’
‘Please don’t.’
‘Very well then, Mr Rumpole. And if you take my advice, you’ll steer very clear of your friend’s herbal remedies. Some of them may have unfortunate results.’
In the days that followed, Dotty seemed unusually busy, but late one afternoon, as I woke from a light doze, I found her sitting by my bed with a surprise present. It was half a bottle of claret she had managed to get opened in an off-licence and smuggled in under her mac. We shared a toothglassful of a wine in the same humble class as Château Thames Embankment, but nonetheless welcome to a palate starved of alcohol. So the old friendly Dotty was back, but quieter and sadder, and I didn’t dare suggest even a muted rendition of ‘Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered’.
‘They don’t want me to go to the funeral,’ she said.
‘Who doesn’t want you to? The family?’
‘No, Sister Sheila. And Freddy’s special doctor. Freddy wouldn’t see anyone else.’
The common run of patients, myself included, were attended to by one of the local GPs. However, the Primrose Path was visited almost daily by a tall, elegantly dressed man in a well-cut suit who moved down the corridor in a deafening smell of aftershave, always escorted by Sister Sheila and referred to by the staff, in tones of considerable awe, as Doctor Lucas.
‘I’ve never got on with that Lucas. Well, they won’t even tell me where the funeral’s going to be.’
‘They won’t?’
‘They said it was Freddy’s special wish. He hated funerals …’
‘Well, none of us like them. Particularly our own.’
‘So he didn’t want anyone to be there. That was his last wish, they told me. And, of course, he wanted to be cremated.’
‘ “The primrose way” ’, I thought, ‘ “to the everlasting bonfire”.’
‘You know what happened? Doctor Lucas and Sister Sheila were with him when he died. They rang the undertaker, they said, and they had him taken away at once. During the night. As though … Freddy was something to be ashamed of.’
‘You miss him, don’t you?’
‘Poor old darling. Sometimes he said he was in love.’ She put a hand into the pocket of her uniform and pulled out a photograph, a bald-headed, suntanned, bright-eyed elderly man with a nose which looked as though it had, at some distant time in his life, been broken in hostility or sport. He was sitting up in bed, smiling, with his arm round Nurse Dotty. It had been taken, Dotty told me, by trainee Nurse Jones, and they had
all been laughing a good deal at the time.
‘Sister Sheila said something.’ I hesitated before I asked the question. ‘Was he going to leave you money in his will?’
‘Oh, he told everyone that.’ She was smiling now. ‘Not that I ever really expected anything, of course. But it just showed how well we got on. He said he didn’t have much of a family left to provide for.’
We talked a little more, and she told me that Freddy had a business somewhere in the North of England and he ‘wasn’t short of a bob or two’, and then she asked for my legal advice, adding, ‘Do you mind if I pay you with this glass of wine?’
‘That makes it as profitable as a conference on legal aid,’ I told her.
‘I’m going to find out about Freddy’s funeral. When I’ve found out, I’m going to it. I don’t care what Sister Sheila has to say about it. I’m entitled to do that, aren’t I?’
‘I’m sure,’ I gave her my best legal opinion, ‘you’re entitled to go to any funeral you choose. I’d even invite you to mine.’
‘Don’t be silly.’ She smiled and, for an unexpected moment of delight, held my hand. ‘That’s not going to happen. And we’re not going to stay here much longer, are we? Either of us. The Primrose Path’s really just not our sort of place.’
‘Not our sort of place.’ Dotty’s words, together with her account of the ease with which the awkward customer Masklyn had escaped from the Primrose Path, fired my enthusiasm. I waited for a night when Dotty was not only off duty but had gone to stay with her sister in Haywards Heath. I made sure that she couldn’t be blamed by the Obergruppenführer for my having gone missing from the list of inmates. And I wanted to avoid any lengthy argument with the Primrose Path (whose bill had been paid to the end of this month) or my wife Hilda, which might prolong my term of imprisonment.
The clothes I was wearing when my ticker overreacted so dramatically to the strain put upon it by an appearance before the raging Judge Bullingham had come with me to hospital and from there to the Primrose Path. They were hanging in a cupboard in my room, so I was able to change the pyjamas for my regulation uniform of black jacket and waistcoat, a pair of striped trousers supported by braces, a white shirt with detachable collar, and dark socks with, by this time, dusty and unpolished black shoes. I had kept charge of my wallet, which had four ten-pound notes and a travel pass in it, so I was soon prepared for the dash to freedom. I paused only to scribble a note for Dotty, which contained simply my four-line version of an old song:
The way you feel my pulse
The way you test my pee
The memory of much else
They can’t take that away from me.
I wasn’t particularly proud of rhyming ‘pulse’ with ‘else’, but time was pressing and I had a journey to make. I signed the message ‘Love Rumpole’, put the dressing-gown back on over my clothes and moved out stealthily towards the staircase.
The gods who look after the elderly trying to escape the clutches of the medical profession were on my side. That night a poll was being taken on television to decide the Sexiest Footballer of the Year, an event which had aroused far more interest than any recent election. So the television sets were humming in the rooms, and the nurses had withdrawn to their staffroom to watch. The desk in the hallway was, more often than not, manned by Gavin, a quiet and serious young man to whom a shaven head and an overlarge brown jumper gave a curiously monkish appearance. He was studying somewhere, but turned up for nights at the Primrose Path, where he read until dawn. His attendance was irregular, and, as on the night that Michael Masklyn walked free, he was away from his desk. I slid back bolts, undid chains and passed out into the night.
Somewhere in the backstreets of the town I discarded the dressing-gown, tossing it over a hedge into somebody’s front garden as a surprise present. I found a spotted bow tie in a jacket pocket and fixed it under my collar. Accoutred as though for the Old Bailey, I presented myself at the railway station, where the last train to Victoria was, happily, half an hour late.
My first call in London was to Equity Court. Our Chambers were silent and empty, the clerk’s room was fuller than ever of screens and other mechanical devices and I searched in vain for briefs directed to me. I went into my room, which seemed on first glance to be depressingly tidy. However, the eagle eyes of the tidier-up had missed a half-full packet of small cigars at the back of a drawer. I lit one, puffed out a perfect smoke ring, and then I noticed a glossy little folder, which looked like the advertisement for a country hotel or a tour of the Lake District, except that the cover bore the words ‘Equity Court Chambers’ with the truncated address ‘bestofthebar.com’. There was an unappealing photograph captioned ‘Samuel Ballard, QC, Chair and Head of Chambers’ standing in the doorway as though to tempt in passing trade.
Inside, on the first page, was a list of our Chambers’ members. My eye was immediately drawn to one entry, ‘Horace Rumpole, BA Oxon’, against which someone had written with a felt-tip pen, ‘Deceased?’ I immediately lifted the telephone and called my home in Froxbury mansions.
‘Rumpole, is that you?’ Hilda sounded as though I had woken her from a deep sleep.
‘Yes. It’s me, Rumpole. And not Rumpole deceased either. It’s Rumpole alive and kicking.’
‘Isn’t it way past bedtime in the Primrose Path?’
‘I don’t care what bedtime is in the Primrose Path. I’m not in the Primrose Path any more. I’ve put the Primrose Path far behind me. I’m in Chambers.’
‘You’re in Chambers? Whatever are you doing in Chambers? Go back to the nursing home at once!’ Hilda’s orders were clear and to be disobeyed at my peril. I took the risk.
‘Certainly not. I’m coming home to Gloucester Road. And I don’t need nursing any more.’
It would be untrue to say that there was – at first, anyway – a hero’s welcome for the returning Rumpole. There were no flowers, cheers or celebratory bottles opened. There was the expected denunciation of the defendant Rumpole as selfish, ungrateful, irresponsible, opinionated, wilful and, not to put too fine a point upon it, a pain in the neck to all who had to deal with him. But behind these stiff sentences, I got the strange and unusual feeling that Hilda was fairly pleased to see me alive and kicking and to discover that I had, so far as could be seen, passed out of the Valley of the Shadow of Death and had come back home, no doubt to give trouble, probably to fail to co-operate with her best-laid schemes, but at least not gone for ever.
I have to admit that our married life has not been altogether plain sailing. There have been many occasions when the icy winds of Hilda’s disapproval have blown round Froxbury mansions. There have been moments when the journey home from the Temple felt like a trip up to the front line during a war which seemed to have no discernible ending. But, in all fairness, I have to say that her behaviour in the matter of the Rumpole Memorial Service was beyond reproach. She told me of the impending visit of the two QCs, and when Ballard let her know, over the telephone, that they planned a ‘fitting tribute to Rumpole’s life’, she guessed what they were after and even suffered, she admitted with apparent surprise, a curious feeling of loss. She had telephoned the Primrose Path and spoken to Sister Sheila, who was able to tell her, much to her relief, that ‘Mr Rumpole was being as awkward as ever!’ Now that I appeared to be back in the land of the living, she was prepared to fall in with my master plan and enable me to eavesdrop, as the two leading pomposities of our Chambers unfolded their plans to mark the end of Rumpole’s life on earth.
Accordingly, I was shut away in the kitchen when Ballard and Erskine-Brown arrived. Hilda left the sitting-room door ajar, and I moved into the hall to enjoy the conversation recorded here.
‘We’re sure you would like to join us in offering up thanks for the gift of Rumpole’s life, Mrs Rumpole,’ Soapy Sam started in hushed and respectful tones.
‘A gift?’ She Who Must Be Obeyed sounded doubtful. ‘Not a free gift, certainly. It had to be paid for with a certain amount of irrita
tion.’
‘That,’ Ballard had to concede, ‘is strictly true. But one has to admit that Horace achieved a noticeable position in the Courts. Notwithstanding the fact that he remained a member of the Junior Bar.’
‘Albeit a rather elderly member of the Junior Bar,’ Claude had to remind Hilda.
‘It’s true that he never took a silk gown or joined us in the front row. The Lord Chancellor never made him a QC,’ Ballard admitted.
‘His face didn’t fit,’ Claude put it somewhat brutally, I thought, ‘with the establishment.’
‘All the same, many of the cases he did brought him—’ Ballard hesitated and Claude supplied the word:
‘Notoriety.’
‘So we want to arrange a Memorial Service. In the Temple Church.’
It was at this point that She Who Must Be Obeyed offered a short, incredulous laugh. ‘You mean a Memorial Service for Rumpole?’
‘That, Mrs Rumpole, Hilda if I may,’ Ballard seemed relieved that the conversation had, at last, achieved a certain clarity, ‘is exactly what we mean.’
‘We’re sure that you, of course, Hilda, and Rumpole’s family and friends would wish to join us in this act of celebration.’
‘Friends?’ Hilda sounded doubtful and added, I thought unkindly, ‘Rumpole has friends?’
‘Some friends, surely. From all sections of society.’
The Collected Stories of Rumpole Page 73