Rumpole and the Primrose Path (6 page)

‘Look now,’ I gave Dotty an urgent instruction. ‘Look at the entrances.’

She turned and I turned with her. High above us, at the top of the raked seats, there were three doorways. He was standing in the middle one. He must have just moved to where he could see his son, far below him, get his degree. He stood there, a small, broad-shouldered, square figure with a broken nose. It was a moment of pride he had not been able to resist and, as a great chancer, why shouldn’t he have taken this risk to see Gavin get what he had never had - a university degree? Gavin shook hands with the waste-disposal magnate and went off with his scroll. Freddy Fairweather turned away, meaning to disappear again into the world of the dead. But he was stopped by Fig Newton and DS Thorndike, who had been waiting for him at my suggestion.

 

So the case of the Primrose Path never got me a brief. Neither Sister Sheila nor Doctor Sydney Lucas, when arraigned for their various offences, thought of employing Rumpole to defend them. Freddy Fairweather ended up in an open prison, from which he may expect an early release owing to the unexpected onset of Alzheimer’s disease. Gavin has taken Holy Orders and returned to Leeds. I still meet Dotty, from time to time, for tea in the Waldorf Hotel, where we sing, quietly but with pleasure, the old standards together.

The day after Freddy Fairweather was arrested, Henry brought a brief into my room. ‘Good news at last, Mr Rumpole,’ he said. ‘R. v.
Denis Timson.
Receiving stolen DVDs. It should be interesting. You won’t get cases like that from our so-called Marketing Director.’ But I have to say, it was to the Marketing Director I owed my greatest debt of gratitude when I came back to the land of the living and solved the mystery of the Primrose Path Home.

‘Offer her your seat, Rumpole.’ These were the instructions of my wife Hilda, known to me only as She Who Must Be Obeyed. ‘Have you forgotten your New Year’s resolution?’

‘It’s only New Year’s Eve,’ I complained. We were on a crowded tube train on our way south of the river. ‘The resolutions don’t come into force until tomorrow.’ I was rather fond of my seat. Seats were in short supply and I had laid claim to mine as soon as we got on.

‘You’d better start now and get into practice. Go over and offer that woman your seat.’

The woman in question seemed to be surrounded by as many children as the one who lived in a shoe. There were perhaps a dozen or more, scattered about the carriage, laughing, shouting, quarrelling, reluctantly sharing sweets, bombarding her for more as she hung to a strap. They were of assorted sexes and colours, mainly in the ten-to-thirteen-year-old bracket. I thought she might have been a schoolteacher taking them to some improving play or concert. But as I approached her I got a whiff of a perfume that seemed, even to my untutored nose, an expensive luxury for a schoolteacher. Another noticeable thing about her was a white lock, a straight line like a dove’s feather across black hair. She was also, and I thought this unusual, wearing gloves of a colour to match her suit.

‘Excuse me.’ The train had picked up speed and gave a sudden lurch which, although I had my feet planted firmly apart, almost toppled me. I put out a hand and grabbed an arm clothed in soft velvet.

The woman was engaged in urgent conversation with a small boy, who, while asking her whether they were getting out at the next station, seemed to be offering her something, perhaps some sort of note or message, which she took from him with a smile. Then she turned to me with an expression of amused concern. ‘I say,’ she said, ‘are you all right?’

‘I’m not doing badly,’ I reassured her, ‘but I just wanted to make sure you were all right.’

‘Yes, of course I am. But shouldn’t you sit down?’

‘No, no.’ I felt the situation sliding out of control. ‘Shouldn’t you sit down?’ Her smile was about to turn into laughter. ‘I’ve come to offer you my seat.’

‘Please don’t! Why don’t you go back and sit on it? Your need is obviously far greater than mine. Anyway, we’re all getting out at the Oval.’

It was an embarrassing moment. I knew how Saint George might have felt if, when he was about to release the beautiful princess, she’d told him to go home and that she was far happier tied up to a tree with the dragon.

‘Your first gentlemanly act, Rumpole,’ Hilda was unforgiving when I returned to my seat, ‘and you couldn’t pull it off.’

 

We climbed up from the bowels of the earth into the moderately fresh air of fashionable Kennington. The street was full on New Year’s Eve, crowded with faces lit by the strip lights in front of betting shops and pizza parlours. Collars were turned up and hands deep in pockets on a cold end to the year during which I had undergone a near-death experience. This had led to my return to Chambers and solving - a certain sign that a full complement of marbles had been returned to me - the complicated mystery of the Primrose Path.

At the corner of the street, where Luci Gribble, the Chambers’ new Director of Marketing and Administration, was giving the New Year’s Eve party to which we had been invited, I saw, in a dark doorway, somebody sleeping. This in itself was no surprise. In enough London doorways tattered sleeping bags were being unrolled, newspapers folded in for extra cover, as the occupying army of the homeless camped for the night. But in this particular doorway a large dog was curled up and, embracing it, as though for warmth, was a pale-faced boy, about twelve years old.

Of course I stopped, of course I told Hilda we should do something. But, again of course, like all the passers-by on that cold New Year’s evening, we did nothing.

‘We don’t know the full story, Rumpole.’ She Who Must was happily free from doubt. ‘He’s probably with someone. Perhaps they’re coming back for him.’

‘Coming back from where?’ I asked her.

‘I’m sure I don’t know. How can we know the whole history of everyone who’s sheltering in a doorway? Now, are we going to this party we’ve come all this way for, or aren’t we?’

I don’t blame Hilda in the least for this. I blame myself for going on, down the dark street of small, Victorian houses, to Luci’s party, while the picture of the pale boy sleeping curled round a stray dog was left hanging in my mind.

It was still there when I stood leaning against the wall in Luci Gribble’s flat, trying to balance a glass of Carafino red on a plate of cold cuts and potato salad and doing my best to eat and drink. I was in a room from which most of the
seating had been removed, to be replaced by as many of our Marketing and Administration Director’s close personal friends as might have filled up the Black Hole of Calcutta.

‘I was just looking for a seat,’ I appealed to Luci as she loomed up from the throng. She came resplendent in some sort of luminous jacket, and her surprisingly deep voice was cut across, as always, by the fresh breeze of a Yorkshire accent.

‘I don’t want people sitting down, Rumpole,’ she told me. ‘I want them standing up, so they can meet each other, form new relationships and network. I asked our Chair,’ she looked round at the sea of chattering, chomping and eagerly swilling faces, ‘but he hasn’t come.’ By ‘Chair’ I suspected she meant our Head of Chambers, Soapy Sam Ballard. ‘I don’t expect his wife wanted to let him out, even though it is New Year’s Eve.’

Soapy Sam had married the matron at the Old Bailey, a determined woman who, after long years of handing out Elastoplasts to defendants who had bumped their heads against cell walls and Aspirin tablets to barristers with piercing headaches brought about by acute anxiety and too many bottles of Pommeroy’s plonk, had retired from the dispensary.

‘You brought
your
wife, didn’t you, Horace? I expect she’s more tolerant and broad-minded than Sam’s, isn’t she?’.

I was still doing my best to apply the adjectives ‘tolerant’ and ‘broad-minded’ to She Who Must Be Obeyed when Luci gave me another culture shock.

‘No doubt Sam’s wife keeps him on a pretty short lead. After all, he is extremely attractive physically, isn’t he?’

Luci might be, I thought, a wizard at Marketing and Administration, but her powers of observation seemed, in this instance, somewhat flawed. ‘You’re speaking, are you,’ I checked carefully, ‘of Samuel Ballard, QC, leading light of the Lawyers as Christians Society? The man who is seriously concerned at the number of teaspoons of instant coffee our junior clerk uses per cup?’

‘It’s that little-boy look, Horace. It makes you want to hug him, doesn’t it?’

I was about to tell Luci that I had never, at any time, felt the slightest temptation to hug Soapy Sam Ballard, when a grey-haired man with a gentle voice didn’t so much approach us as was washed up against us by the moving tide of Luci’s guests.

‘I want you to meet Derek Ridgley, Director of UA. He so much wants to meet you, Horace,’ Luci introduced.

‘Luci’s told me you have a store of legal anecdotes, Mr Rumpole. Have you?’

What was I expected to do, balance my supper and glass of wine while reciting golden oldies from the life of an Old Bailey hack? ‘I might have a few,’ I told the man cautiously.

‘I wondered if you’d speak to us at a fund-raising dinner for UA. Urchins Anonymous, Mr Rumpole. We’re concerned about homeless children in London.’ As he spoke, I seemed to see again the boy asleep in the doorway, hugging a dog for warmth. ‘You wouldn’t believe how many children are still sleeping on the streets. Ignorance and Want. You remember the children Dickens wrote about? It’s changed far less than you might think. Only last night we found a ten-year-old girl who’d been sleeping for a month on the steps of a church. Luci used to help us with our PR. She suggested you might speak at our dinner.’

I’d left a child asleep on the street and all I could do about it was to tell jokes at a charity do. Speaking at a dinner seemed an inadequate reaction, but, I supposed, better than nothing. ‘Of course I will.’

‘Good man! It’s a great organization, UA. I’ve worked for it since I came out of the navy. We rely so much on voluntary helpers.’

And then the chimes of midnight rang out from the telly in a comer of the room. I crossed my arms and my hands were grasped by Luci and the man from Urchins Anonymous and we swayed to the tune of Auld Lang Syne.

It was New Year’s Day when Hilda and I emerged into the street. The boy and the dog had disappeared from the doorway to be replaced by a man in a bobble hat, wrapped in a grey blanket. He lit a cigarette as we passed and I saw his face. He was smiling at me as though he was unexpectedly happy or very drunk.

 

New Year’s Day dawned bright and frosty over the Gloucester Road. Remembering Hilda’s icy disapproval when I turn up late for breakfast, I pulled on my warm dressing-gown, ran a comb through what was left of my hair, blew my nose and presented myself in the kitchen full of apologies.

‘Must have overslept,’ I told Hilda. ‘Don’t know how it could’ve happened.’

To my amazement, what I was looking at was a sympathetic smile on the face of She Who Must Be Obeyed. Instead of the sharp wind of a rebuke from my life partner, she was purring, like a cat who has just been handed a saucer full of cream.

‘It’s good for you to sleep, Rumpole. You need the rest. You work so hard. I’m amazed at how you keep going.’

Not half as amazed as I was by this extraordinary change of character, was what I didn’t say.

‘Now what would you like for breakfast?’

‘Just a cup of coffee. If you’ve got one made.’

I should point out that Hilda, apparently anxious about the Rumpole girth (a fact of nature that has never troubled me in the least), had insisted lately that I take nothing but a plate of muesli (even though I dislike the taste of dried cardboard) and carrot juice for breakfast - a meal which caused me to rush off to the Tastee Bite, a greasy spoon in Fleet Street, for an emergency cholesterol replacement.

Now she made a surprising offer. ‘What can I cook you? Bacon? A couple of sausages? Two eggs sunny side up on a fried slice? We might have some potatoes...’

By now I was getting anxious. ‘Hilda, are you feeling quite well?’

‘Not altogether well, Rumpole. Hurt. Deeply hurt.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘I’ve had a letter from Dodo Mackintosh.’ The hand with which she lifted the sheet of notepaper from the table was, I thought, trembling. Dodo was one of her oldest friends, both having survived the tough experience of Saint Elfreda’s Boarding School for Girls. ‘You don’t think I’m bossy, do you, Rumpole?’

For once in my long life at the Bar, I was stuck for a reply. I could only mutter, ‘Bossy? Of course not! Perish the thought!’

‘Dodo tells me I am.’

I gave, I thought, a convincing imitation of a man who has just been told that the world is, contrary to all previously held beliefs, flat. ‘Why ever should your old friend Dodo Mackintosh say such a thing?’

‘I really don’t know,’ Hilda sighed. ‘I merely wrote and told her I thought her new living-room curtains were a horrible mistake, and that she should really find a more interesting subject for her watercolours than Lamorna Cove in the rain. Oh, and I probably reminded her that to go shopping in a T-shirt and jeans, topped with a baseball hat, at her age was simply to invite ridicule.’

‘Might you,’ I hazarded a guess, ‘have added something about mutton dressed as lamb?’

‘I possibly said something to that effect. But, Rumpole,’ she looked at me in what I took to be an appealing fashion, ‘I have made a New Year’s resolution.’ At this point, Hilda stood and spoke as though she were swearing an oath of allegiance to some great cause. ‘I shall never be bossy again. I shall do my very best,’ I couldn’t believe my ears, but she said this, ‘to respect the wishes of others. Including you.’

She then cooked my fry-up and a great change seemed to have come over the world.

 

Hilda’s resolution survived, and the change was decidedly marked, as the year stretched, yawned, staggered to its feet and began to set off on the same old search for briefs and moments of relaxation after Court in Pommeroy’s. Soapy Sam Ballard was full of his own importance, being widely reported in the tabloids for the prosecution of a stalker who had bombarded Jenny Turnbull, the famous television interviewer and newsreader, with e-mails, telephone calls and other pathetically obscene communications. The stalker’s story was that Miss Turnbull had invited these attentions, a defence which even Soapy was having little difficulty in tearing apart.