Rumpole Rests His Case by John Mortimer Page B

jokes.’
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    â€˜A drink in the Sheridan Club with the Honourable Archie Prosser and the star of the Home Office, Rumpole? Of course you’ve got to go. And remind him about coming here on the fourteenth of the month after next. It seems Archie is tied up for dinner till then.’
    â€˜Tied up for dinner.’ I thought about it as Archie raised a glass of champagne to his lips. Was he frequently tied up, trussed, roasted to a pleasant, light brown and served, perhaps with an orange in his mouth, on a silver platter? My dream was interrupted by a throaty female voice calling, ‘Cheers, Mr Rumpole.’ She drank and, without hesitation, I followed her example.
    I had come, at Hilda’s express order, to the Sheridan Club, hidden in the purlieus of Whitehall. The room we sat in was large and gloomy, lit by a single chandelier, with chocolate-brown walls and furnished with armchairs flattened by long use in the seating department and shiny, like jackets worn at the elbows. The temperature in the room was a good four degrees lower than the outside air, so chilling the champagne seemed unnecessary.
    This was the institution to which women had, after a long campaign against a determined opposition, gained access, an event greeted by the papers as though it were as great an historical moment as entry to the House of Commons or the priesthood. Some of these ‘girls’ were dotted about the room. Grey-haired, darkly clothed, bespectacled, they were hard to distinguish from the elderly, pink-cheeked, high-voiced old men they were entertaining or being entertained by.
    Bunty Heygate was an exception. She might well, with some justification, still have been called a ‘girl’. Her blonde hair was cut in a fashionable page-boy manner. Her face was fresh and her eyes appealing. She wore a red coat and skirt with darker velvet at the collar and cuffs, and heels just this side of a fetishist’s delight. Her voice had that note of command learned as part of the curriculum in girls’ boarding schools.
    â€˜We so admire the way you stand up in Court, Mr Rumpole, fighting for human rights,’ Bunty told me.
    â€˜Do you really?’ This, from a member of the Government, was something of a revelation.
    â€˜I want you to believe we’re right behind you.’
    â€˜So far behind that you’re practically out of sight. Judging from what your Home Secretary said.’
    â€˜Mr Rumpole,’ she interrupted me with a tolerant smile, ‘we politicians have to live in the real world. I’ve got constituents in the North of England, men who gather in pubs and discuss hanging and flogging first-time offenders — that’s after they’ve castrated them, of course. Now, when we make statements about our policy, those are the people we have to think about.’
    â€˜You mean the men in pubs?’
    â€˜Exactly! But we do respect what you said in Court about Jury trials...’
    â€˜Members of the Jury, you are the lamp that shows the light of freedom burns.’ I had said that in a case at Snaresbrook concerning sending indecent magazines through the post. It got reported in the Guardian as a saying of the week, but the Jury convicted me. I was grateful to Bunty for remembering it. Then I asked, ‘Why are you cutting down on Jury trials?’
    â€˜Mr Rumpole,’ Bunty was smiling gently. ‘Get real. Have you ever been north of Watford?’
    â€˜Very often. Have you?’
    â€˜I do try to go. But since I became a member here, it’s so tempting to stay in London.’ There was a pause as she looked round the room with apparent affection, at the dark walls, the wheezing chairs and the members’ guests who were looking with awe at the central table set out with back numbers of The Field and Country Life and the portrait of Richard Brinsley Sheridan. He was looking down in some disapproval at the club which bore his name and yet seemed