Rumpole and the Primrose Path by John Mortimer Page B

regardless of the facts? Is that what you’re saying?’
    ‘It’s no good at all you shouting at him, Rumpole.’ Hilda was painfully patient. ‘He can’t hear a word you’re saying.’ As usual, She Who Must Be Obeyed was maddeningly correct.
     
    A considerable amount of time passed, a great quantity of Château Thames Embankment flowed down parched legal throats in Pommeroy’s Wine Bar, a large number of custodial sentences were handed out to customers down the Bailey, and relatively few of those detained there went off laughing. Gradually, as the small shoots of promise appear when spring follows winter, my practice began to show signs of an eventual bloom. I progressed from petty thievery (in the case of the New Year’s Resolutions) to more complicated fraud, from actual to grievous bodily harm, and from an affray outside a bingo hall to a hard-fought manslaughter in a sauna. It was in the months before I managed to play my part in the richly rewarding case - in satisfaction rather than money - that I am about to record. I was sitting in my Chambers room enjoying an illicit small cigar (Soapy Sam Ballard was still in the business of banning minor pleasures) and leafing through The Oxford Book of English Verse in search of a suitable quotation to use in my final speech in a case of alleged gross indecency in Snaresbrook, when a brisk knock at the door was followed by the entrance of none other that Dame Phillida Erskine-Brown, once the much-admired Portia of our Chambers, now the appealing occupant of Judicial Benches from the Strand and Ludgate Circus to Manchester and Exeter Crown Court.
    ‘You’ll never guess what I’ve seen, Rumpole! Never in a million years!’ Her Ladyship was in what can only be described as a state of outrage, and whatever she had seen had clearly not been a pretty sight. ‘I just dropped in to tell Claude he’ll have to look after the children tonight because I’ve got a dinner with the Lord Chancellor and the babysitter’s got evening classes.’
    ‘All part of the wear and tear of married life?’
    ‘It’s not that. It’s what I saw in the clerk’s room. In front of Henry and Denise. Claude, flagrantly in the arms of another woman!’
    ‘When you say in the arms of -’ I merely asked for clarification. ‘What were they doing, exactly? I take it they weren’t kissing each other?’
    ‘Not that. No. They were hugging.’
    ‘Well, that’s all right then.’ I breathed a sigh of relief. ‘If they were only hugging.’
    ‘What do you mean, “That’s all right then”? I said “Am I disturbing something?” and walked straight out of the clerk’s room and came to see you, Rumpole. I must say I expected you to take this extraordinary conduct of Claude’s rather more seriously.’
    I couldn’t help remembering the time when Dame Phillida, once the nervous pupil whom I’d found in my room in tears, now a Judge of the Queen’s Bench, had herself tugged a little at the strict bonds of matrimony and conceived an inexplicable passion for a Doctor Tom Gurnley, a savagely punitive right-wing Tory MP who believed in mandatory prison sentences for the first whiff of cannabis, and whom I had had to defend in the case of the Camberwell Carrot. I suppose it wasn’t an exact parallel - the Learned Judge had not been discovered embracing the old hanger and flogger in our clerk’s room.
    Now that the Erskine-Browns’ marriage seemed to have sailed into calmer waters, I was unwilling to rock the boat. I offered an acceptable solution.
    ‘Exactly whom was your husband hugging?’
    ‘I couldn’t see much of her. She seemed to have blonde hair. Not entirely convincing, I thought.’
    ‘A black trouser suit? Shiny boots?’
    ‘I think so, now you mention it.’
    ‘Then that would be our new Director of Marketing and Administration.’
    ‘I believe Claude told me you have one of them. So that makes it perfectly all right, does it?’ I could see that the Judge was not entirely