Rumpole and the Primrose Path (23 page)

But Hilda had lost her unusual interest in my work and she was smiling at some other thought. ‘I’m afraid I’ll be out again this evening.’

‘Let me guess. Young Tom needs a babysitter?’

‘He’s so clever. He calls me Mrs Rumpy!’

Is that a sign of high intellectual attainment, I wondered? But of course I didn’t say it. I said, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll be perfectly all right.’

‘You won’t make that joke about lap dancing again, will you, Rumpole?’

‘No, Hilda. Never again.’

My lap-dancing days were over, and I tried to keep any note of regret from my voice.

After the long legal process ahead, Neville Skeate was liberated,but I never heard that he returned to the Candy Crocodile.I believe his voice was still heard from time to time at various other sinks of iniquity, condemning London to destruction by fire and brimstone. But his abuse had become quieter, his fellow Elamites had drifted away, and life in our city of the plain went on unrepentant.

‘By the way, Rumpole, have you been keeping up with your exercises at the Lysander Club?’ The cross-examination started, as the best do, in a quiet and casual manner; but I sniffed danger.

‘Of course,’ I answered boldly and then, to cover myself, added, ‘whenever I get the chance.’

‘So what is it that stops you going regularly?’

‘Pressure of work.’ I kept it vague, but hoped that would settle the matter.

‘Oh yes?’ Hilda sounded unconvinced. ‘I thought I heard you complain about the shortage of work lately, the rare appearance of briefs. And yet Dermot Fletcher tells me he never sees you on the bicycle!’

I quietly cursed the grey-haired sports commentator whose small boy had become Hilda’s favourite person. Weren’t there football matches, had cricket been abandoned so that this man could spend his life noticing my absence from the stationary bicycle?

‘I get round to the Lysander whenever I can.’ It was time to call my best evidence. ‘If you look at the book you’ll see I’m signed in.’

‘I have looked at the book. And I’ve seen you signed in by Luci Gribble. Perhaps you’d be good enough to tell me how many times you went to the club with Luci?’

‘Off and on. Look, I’d better be getting down to Chambers. See what’s around. I believe Henry’s got me a dangerous driving.’

‘Don’t prevaricate, Rumpole.’ It was a word Hilda’s father had liked to use in Court; I suppose he sometimes took it home with him. At least she didn’t say ‘Don’t fence with me!’ ‘I have spoken to Luci Gribble.’

That was it, then. I stood and watched my defence collapse like a tent in a tornado.

‘I have spoken to Luci Gribble,’ Hilda repeated, ‘and she had to admit that on most of the occasions when you asked her to sign you in, you didn’t join her. You were notably absent, Rumpole, but no doubt shortening your life overdosing on red wine in that favourite wine bar of yours.’

‘Can I change my plea?’ I took a quick legal decision. ‘Guilty.’

‘Of course you are. What can we do about you, Rumpole?’ she sighed heavily. My case was clearly hopeless.

‘I can only say,’ I started to mitigate, ‘I do find bicycling nowhere to Caribbean music, even with an occasional word from your friend the sports commentator, deeply boring.’

‘Boring? Oh, I’m so sorry.’ Hilda had now adopted the retort contemptuous. ‘I’m sorry I can’t provide a few murders, or a bank robbery, or a nice long fraud to keep you entertained, Rumpole. You can’t live entirely for pleasure. You’ve got to put up with a bit of boredom occasionally, if you want to keep yourself alive. So it’s entirely up to you. I can no longer take any responsibility for you.’

At which she left the kitchen where breakfast, together with much else, was over. Shortly after that I heard the sound of angry hoovering from the sitting-room. My case of non-compliance with exercise requirements was clearly lost and I was free to go.

Aware that a chill wind of disapproval would be blowing round Froxbury Mansions that evening, I delayed my homeward journey by a brief visit to the wine bar Hilda had condemned in her judgement. I wandered into Pommeroy’s as lonely as a cloud, and was accompanied only by a single glass of Château Fleet Street when I heard a brisk, upper-crust voice at my elbow. ‘Rumpole! I want to invite you to lunch.’

‘Then invite, old darling.’

I gave Archie Prosser full permission to feed me, regardless of expense. The newest arrival in our Chambers in Equity Court, Prosser was a distant relative of Lord someone or other, an obscure link which predisposed She Who Must Be Obeyed slightly in his favour. Soapy Sam Ballard had introduced him into Chambers as a sparkling wit, one likely to set Pommeroy’s Wine Bar in a roar, but I hadn’t yet heard him utter any line, or produce any thought worth including in a slim volume to be entitled
The Wit and Wisdom of Archie Prosser.
He was, however, an inoffensive soul who had been cooperative when he prosecuted me in the case of the female Fagin of the Underground. He was also, as he was continuously reminding me, a member of the Sheridan Club, a somewhat gloomy and ill-lit institution which does, as Archie was fond of telling us all, an excellent liver and bacon, which, if preceded by nine oysters in the half shell and followed by a summer pudding well covered with cream, the whole to be washed down. with some rare vintage never even heard of in Pommeroy’s, might make Archie seem an agreeable companion for lunch and the smoking of an unusually large cigar. In return, I could reward him with a few of my jokes which had, like the wine, improved with age.

‘Delighted,’ I told him. ‘Any time next week would suit me. I think I may have what Luci Gribble would call a window of opportunity. There’s been a rise in the law-abiding rate. I think it’s hitting everybody.’

Not much of a joke, I agree, and Archie took it without a smile. Instead he gave me a look of deep and maddening concern. ‘I bet you’re glad of the rest, aren’t you, Rumpole?’

At this my patience snapped. ‘No,’ I told him. ‘I’m not in the least glad of the rest. I’m bored to tears by the rest. I’ve had quite enough rest to last until my final day on earth, which I intend to spend wearing a wig and arguing. I just wanted to point out that, as luck would have it, I’ve got one of Luci’s windows next week and I’d be delighted to fill it with a lengthy lunch at your club.’

‘You mean the Sheridan?’

‘Of course I mean the Sheridan.’

‘Talking of which,’ Archie told me, ‘I’m going to put Bernard up for membership. I think he’d appreciate that, don’t you?’

‘Bonny Bernard? You’re speaking of my favourite solicitor.

I feel sure he would. And I’m equally sure I’d enjoy lunch with you there. Very kind of you, Archie.’

‘I’m afraid I wasn’t thinking exactly in terms of the Sheridan.’

‘All right, if you insist. Where were you thinking in terms of?’ I imagined Archie Prosser’s ideas had gone upmarket.

‘The Ritz?’

‘Not exactly, Rumpole.’ The unpredictable Archie seemed to be shaking with some particular private joke. ‘I was thinking more in terms of Worsfield Prison.’

 

We lived in a time when the Government was cracking down on everything. Every week, it seemed, brought a new list of things which were to be cracked down on: single mothers who didn’t make sure their children went into school, noisy neighbours, graffiti artists and mobile-phone stealers were to be cracked down on with particular severity. What was noticeable was that very little was cracked up. There was a total absence of Government announcements offering a free glass of Guinness on the National Health and wishing everyone a good time. The cracking down had become so universal that I didn’t know when I would wake up to discover that Château Thames Embankment, small cigars and legal jokes more than three years old were being cracked down on, and that I was on my way to Worsfield and not just for lunch.

Another dearly held belief of the puritan masters of what claimed to be a deeply caring political party was that prison was a universal panacea. Like a magic potion which could relieve headaches, tonsillitis, yellow fever and broken legs, prison could do you nothing but good. The result of all this cracking down and locking up was that the prison population had risen to record levels, the nicks were bursting at the seams, the mad and bad were packed in with the merely muddled. In the face of this wave of overcrowding the Bunyan Society (named after a devout and imprisoned author) stood like Canute. It published facts and figures, protesting at the incarceration of fifteen-year-olds, the absence of education, the failure to stop reoffending and the sad story of a women’s prison without a visitors’ lavatory, where friends and relatives were instructed to pee in the car-park hedge. Ministers received these reports politely, perhaps even read them, and continued to crack down as before. The Bunyan Society’s reply was to arrange, so Archie Prosser told me, a lunch in Worsfield Prison, outside London, where the great and the good could show their solidarity with those of my customers whom even the Rumpole magic touch couldn’t save from custody.

‘Now I’m on the Committee of the Bunyan Society.’ Archie Prosser announced the fact with some satisfaction, feeling no doubt that he’d joined the great and the good. ‘I suggested we should have a representative of the old-fashioned criminal defender present at our prison lunch. You’ll be at home, Rumpole. I’m sure you’ll know lots of the people there.’

‘Yes,’ I agreed and there was, I’m afraid, a mournful note in my voice, ‘I most probably will.’

 

‘This way! Would you mind looking this way?’

‘Over here. Over on your right for the
Daily Post.’

‘Look at me now. No - me, not him. All right. That’s lovely!’

These were voices behind flashes of light as I approached, in drizzling rain, the castellated mini towers that flanked the gates of Worsfield Prison. When the flashes were no longer blinding me I saw, among the men with cameras, the shadowy figure of Luci Gribble, our Chambers Director of Marketing, wearing a white belted mackintosh and a smile of achievement.

‘Well done, Horace! That’s a great photo opportunity!’

I was about to say ‘Opportunity for what?’ when one of the photographers asked her, ‘Who the hell was he?’

‘Counsel for the defence,’ Luci told him. ‘Just an ordinary, everyday criminal barrister. An old workhorse paying a visit to his clients. Not a leader, perhaps, but one of the trusted foot soldiers of our Chambers at Equity Court. No, not Rumbold. Rumpole. R-U-M ...’

Times have changed. When I joined our Chambers, in Hilda’s father’s time, you would have been threatened with dismissal and heavily fined if you’d allowed your photograph to appear in a newspaper. Now we were being packaged and advertised like Cornflakes. There was no chance of arguing about it with Luci. It was lunchtime and the old workhorse was in search of its nosebag. I rang a bell set into the stonework and a screw appeared with a bunch of jangling keys attached. ‘Name please?’ he said, consulting a list. I had never felt more anonymous.

The menu featured grey mince, watery mashed potatoes, digestive biscuits and a blue plastic mug of tepid water. The tables were set out in a main assembly area, and at each one, a member of the great and the good shared the feast with representatives of the small and the iffy. I sat between two thieves, one about to be set loose once more on the fallible locks and vulnerable window fastenings of the outside world. The other, once of the same persuasion, was so redeemed that he now worked for the Bunyan Society, gave lectures to gatherings of sociologists, students of criminology and interested police officers, and had sold his autobiography,
Set a Thief,
to a publisher. His name, proudly announced on the Bunyan Society label pinned to his jacket, was Brian Skidmore. He was a pale-faced fellow, probably in his early forties, with a high, aquiline nose which gave him the inappropriate look of a medieval cleric, and a case of premature baldness which added to the monkish nature of his appearance. He introduced the soon-to-be-released prisoner. ‘This is Chirpy Molloy. I don’t know if you’ve ever bumped into him round the Courts, Mr Rumpole.’ Brian sounded like a schoolteacher introducing the most hopeless but likeable member of the class.

‘You were never my brief, were you, Mr Rumpole?’ I could see why he was called Chirpy. He was small, round-faced, plump, and his smile, half challenging, half defensive, must have stayed with him since he was a bright-eyed, tousle-headed child always responsible for the broken window, the fight in the playground or the missing contribution for the school outing.

‘I never had that pleasure.’ I bit into a digestive biscuit; it went badly with the mince.

‘Me being a Molloy, and you always appearing on behalf of the Timsons.’

He was speaking of one of the great divides. The Montagues and the Capulets were friendly neighbours compared to the Timsons and the Molloys. This particular Molloy, however, was held even by the Timsons to be a perfectly straightforward and strictly non-violent villain, who appeared to his pub acquaintances and to the juries who were called on to try him to be a cheerful Cockney chappie who could take the rough with the smooth, the benefit of the doubt with the guilty verdict, and the big blow-outs in a Marbella holiday hotel with the grey mince and biscuits in Worsfield.