I was unable to argue with the doctor’s diagnosis, as it was undoubtedly true, and what’s more, I had a clinical thermometer stuck between my jaws. I could only grunt a protest when Hilda, with quite unnecessary hospitality, said, “You will take a glass of sherry, won’t you, Doctor? So good of you to come.”
I mean to say, when I do my job of work, the judge doesn’t start proceedings with, “So nice of you to drop in Rumpole, do help yourself to my personal store of St. Emilion.” I was going to say something along these lines when the gloomy Scots medico removed the thermometer, but he interrupted me with, “His temperature’s up. I’m afraid it’s a day or two in bed for the old warrior.”
“A day or two in bed? You’ll have to tell him, Doctor, he’s got to be sensible.”
“Oh, I doubt very much if he’ll feel like being anything else.”
I began to wish they’d stop talking as if I’d already passed on, and so I intruded into the conversation.
“Bed? I can’t possibly stay in bed—”
“You’re no chicken, Rumpole. Doctor MacClintock warned you.”
I noticed that the thirsty quack had downed one glass of Pommeroy’s pale Spanish-style and was getting a generous refill from the family.
“You warned me? What did you warn me about?”
“You’re not getting any younger, Rumpole.”
“Well, it hardly needs five years’ ruthless training in the Edinburgh medical school and thirty years in general practice to diagnose that!”
“He’s becoming crotchety,” Hilda said, with satisfaction. “He’s always crotchety when he’s feeling ill.”
“Yes, but what are you warning me about? Pneumonia, botulism, Parkinson’s disease?”
“There is an even more serious condition, Rumpole,” the doctor said. “I mean there’s no reason why you shouldn’t go on for a good few years, provided you take proper precautions.”
“You’re trying to warn me about death!”
“Well, death is rather a strong way of putting it.”
The representative of the medical profession looked distressed, as though he realized that if Rumpole dropped off the twig there might be no more free sherry.
“Odd thing about the dead, Doctor.” I decided to let him into a secret. “You may not know this. They may not have lectured you on this at your teaching hospital, but I can tell you on the best possible authority, the dead are tremendously keen on litigation. Give me a drink, Hilda. No, not that jaundiced and medicated fluid. Give me a beaker full of the warm south, full of the true, the blushful Château Pommeroy’s ordinary claret! Dr. MacClintock, you can’t scare me with death. I’ve got a far more gloomy experience ahead of me.”
“I doubt that, Rumpole,” said the Scot, sipping industriously. “But what exactly do you mean?”
“I mean,” I said, “I’ve got to appear in the Chancery Division.”
The Chancery Division is not to be found, as I must make clear to those who have no particular legal experience, in any of my ordinary stamping grounds like the Old Bailey or Snaresbrook. It is light years away from the Uxbridge Magistrates’ Court. The Chancery Division is considered by many, my learned Head of Chambers in particular, to be an extremely up-market Court. There cases are pleaded by lawyers who spring from old county families in a leisurely and courteous manner. It is a tribunal, in fact, which bears the same sort of relation to Inner London Sessions as the restaurant at Claridges does to your average transport café.
The Chancery Division is in the Law Courts, and the Law Courts, which prefer to be known as the Royal Courts of Justice, occupy a stately position in the Strand, not a wig’s throw from my Chambers at Equity Court in the Temple. The Victorian building looks like the monstrous and overgrown result of a misalliance between a French château and a Gothic cathedral. The vast central hall is floored with a mosaic which is constantly under repair. There are many church-shaped windows and the ancient urinals have a distinctly ecclesiastical appearance. I passed into this muted splendour and found myself temporary accommodation in a robing room where there was, such is the luxurious nature of five-star litigation, an attendant in uniform to help me on with the fancy dress. Once suitably attired, I asked the way to the Chancery Division.
I knew that Chancery was a rum sort of Division, full of dusty old men breaking trusts and elegant young men winding up companies. They speak a different language entirely from us Criminals, and their will cases are full of “dependent relative revocation” and “testamentary capacity,” and the nice construction of the word “money.” As I rose to my hind legs in the Court of Chancery, I felt like some rustic reveller who has blundered into a convocation of bishops engaged in silent prayer. Nevertheless, I had a duty to perform, which was to open the case of “In the Estate of Colonel Roderick Ollard, deceased. Beasley v. Ollard and ors.” The judge, I noticed, was a sort of pale and learned youth, probably twenty years my junior, who had looked middle-aged ever since he got his double first at Balliol, and who kept his lips tightly pursed when he wasn’t uttering some thinly veiled criticism of the Rumpole case. This chilly character was known, as I discovered from the usher, as Mr. Justice Venables.
“May it please you, my Lord,” I fished up a voice from the murky depths of my influenza and put it on display, “in this case, I appear for the plaintiff, Miss Rosemary Beasley, who is putting forward the true last will of a fine old soldier, Colonel Roderick Ollard. The defendants, Mr. and Mrs. Percival Ollard and Master Peter Ollard, are represented by my learned friends, Mr. Guthrie Featherstone, Q.C...”
It was true. The smooth-talking and diplomatic Head of our Chambers had collared the brief against Rumpole. Never at home in the rough and tumble of a nice murder, the Chancery Division, as I have said, was just the place for Guthrie Featherstone.
“...and Mr...” I made a whispered inquiry and said, “Mr. Loxley-Parish.”
Guthrie had got himself, as a Chancery Junior, an ancient who’d no doubt proved more wills than I’d had bottles of Pommeroy’s plonk. I turned, as usual, to the jury box and got in the meat of my oration.
“My client, Miss Beasley, is the matron and presiding angel of a small nursing home known as Sunnyside, on the Sussex coast. There she devotedly nursed this retired warrior, Colonel Ollard, and was the comfort and cheer of his declining years.”
Mr. Justice Venables was giving a chill stare over the top of his half glasses, and clearing his throat in an unpleasant manner. Here was a judge who appeared to be distinctly unmoved by the Rumpole oratory. I carried on, of course, regardless.
“Declining years, during which his only brother, Percival, and Percival’s wife, Marcia, never troubled to cross the door of Sunnyside to give five minutes of cheer to the old gentleman, and Master Peter Ollard was far too busy cashing the postal orders the colonel sent him to send a Christmas card to his elderly uncle.”
It was time, I thought, that the Chancery Court heard a little Shakespeare.
At which point the judicial throat-clearing took on the sound of words.
“Mr. Rumpole,” the judge said. “I think perhaps you need reminding. That jury box is empty.”
I looked at it. His Lordship was perfectly right. The twelve puzzled and honest citizens, picked off the street at random, were conspicuous by their absence. Juries are not welcome in the Chancery Division. This was one of the occasions, strange to Rumpole, of a trial by judge alone...
“It is therefore, Mr. Rumpole, not an occasion for emotional appeals.” The judge continued his lesson. “Perhaps it would be more useful if you gave me some relevant dates and a comparison of the two wills.”