I meditated for what seemed an eternity on the strange surroundings, the state of my bank balance and whether there was a chance of a decent criminal defence brief in the New Year. My reverie was broken by Oriana’s command to hug. The middle aged, fairly thin, balding man next to me took me in his arms.
“Welcome to Minchingham, Rumpole. Graham Banks. You may remember I instructed you long ago in a dangerous driving case.”
It was the first time in my life that I’d been hugged by a solicitor. As it was happening, Oriana started to hum and the whole company joined in, making a noise like a swarm of bees. There may have been some sort of signal, but I didn’t see it, and we processed as one in what I hoped was the direction of the dining room. I was relieved to find that I was right. Perhaps things were looking up.
The dining room at Minchingham Hall was nowhere near the size of the Great Hall but it was still imposing. There was a minstrels’ gallery where portraits hung of male and female members of the Minchingham family, who had inhabited the Hall, it seemed, for generations before the place had been given over to the treatment industry.
Before the meal I was introduced to the present Lord Minchingham, a tall, softly spoken man in a tweed suit who might have been in his late fifties. His long nose, heavy eyelids and cynical expression were echoed in the portraits on the walls.
“All my ancestors – the past inhabitants of Minchingham Hall,” he explained and seemed to be dismissing them with a wave of his hand. Then he pointed to a bronze angel with its wings spread over a map of the world as it was known in the seventeenth century. “This is a small item that might amuse you, Mr Rumpole. You see, my ancestors were great travellers and they used this to plan in which direction they would take their next journey,” and he showed me how the angel could be swivelled round over the map. “At the moment I’ve got her pointing upwards as they may well be in heaven. At least some of them.”
When we sat down to dinner Hilda and I found ourselves at a table with Graham Banks (the solicitor who had taken me in his arms earlier) and his wife. Banks told us that he was Oriana’s solicitor and he was at pains to let me know that he now had little to do with the criminal law.
“Don’t you find it very sordid, Rumpole?” he asked me.
“As sordid and sometimes as surprising as life itself,” I told him, but he didn’t seem impressed.
Lord Minchingham also came to sit at our table, together with the corpulent man I had last seen sweating in the steam room, who gave us his name as Fred Airlie.
Dinner was hardly a gastronomic treat. The aperitif consisted of a strange, pale yellowish drink, known as “yak’s milk”. We were told it is very popular with the mountain tribes of Tibet. It may have tasted fine there, but it didn’t, as they say of some of the finest wines, travel well. In fact it tasted so horrible that as I drank it I closed my eyes and dreamt of Pommeroy’s Very Ordinary.
The main course, indeed the only course, was a small portion of steamed spinach and a little diced carrot, enough, perhaps, to satisfy a small rodent but quite inadequate for a human.
It was while I was trying to turn this dish, in my imagination, into a decent helping of steak and kidney pie with all the trimmings that I was hailed by a hearty voice from across the table.
“How are you getting on, Rumpole? Your first time here I take it?” Fred Airlie asked me.
I wanted to say “the first and I hope the last” but I restrained myself. “I’m not quite sure I need treatments,” was what I said.
“The treatments are what we all come here for,” Airlie boomed at me. “As I always say to Oriana, your treatments are our treats!”
“But fortunately I’m not ill.”
“What’s that got to do with it?”
“Well, I mean it’s bad enough being treated when you’re ill. But to be treated when you’re not ill…”
“It’s fun, Rumpole. This place’ll give you the greatest time in the world. Anyway, you look as though you could lose half a stone. I’ve lost almost that much.”
“Ah! Is that so?” I tried to feign interest.
“You’ve come at a fortuitous moment,” Airlie said. “Oriana is going to give us a special Christmas dinner.”
“You mean turkey?”
“Turkey meat is quite low in calories,” Airlie assured me.
“And bread sauce? Sprouts? Roast potatoes?”
“I think she’d allow a sprout. So cheer up, Rumpole.”
“And Christmas pud?”
“She’s found a special low calorie one. She’s very pleased about that.”
“Wine?” I sipped my glass of water hopefully.
“Of course not. You can’t get low calorie wine.”
“So the traditional Christmas cheer is ‘Bah Humbug’.”
“Excuse me?” Airlie looked puzzled.
“A touch of the Scrooge about the health farm manageress, is there?” It was no doubt rude of me to say it, and I wouldn’t, probably, have uttered such a sacrilegious thought in those sanctified precincts if Oriana had been near.
For a moment or two Airlie sat back in his chair, regarding me with something like horror, but another voice came to my support.
“Looking round at my ancestors on these walls,” Lord Minchingham murmured, as though he was talking to himself, “it occurs to me that they won several wars, indulged in complicated love affairs and ruled distant territories without ever counting the calories they consumed.”
“But that was long ago,” Airlie protested.
“It was indeed. Very, very long ago.”
“You can’t say Oriana lacks the Christmas spirit. She’s decorated the dining room.”
There were indeed, both in the dining room and the Great Hall, odd streamers placed here and there and some sprigs of holly under some of the pictures. These signs had given me some hopes for a Christmas dinner, hopes that had been somewhat dashed by my talk with Airlie.
“In my great-grandfather’s day,” Minchingham’s voice was quiet but persistent, “a whole ox was roasted on a spit in the Great Hall. The whole village was invited.”
“I think we’ve rather grown out of the spit-roasting period, haven’t we?” Airlie was smiling tolerantly. “And we take a more enlightened view of what we put in our mouths. Whatever you say about it, I think Oriana’s done a wonderful job here. Quite honestly, I look on this place as my home. I haven’t had much of a family life, not since I parted company with the third Mrs Airlie. This has become my home and Oriana and all her helpers are my family. So, Mr Rumpole, you’re welcome to join us.” Airlie raised his glass and took a swig of yak’s milk, which seemed to give him the same good cheer and feeling of being at one with the world as I got from a bottle of Chateau Thames Embankment.
“And let me tell you this.” He leant forward and lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “When I go all I’ve got will go to Oriana, so she can build the Remedial Wing she’s so keen on. I’ve told her that.”
“That’s very good of you.” Minchingham seemed genuinely impressed. “My old father was very impressed with Oriana when he did the deal with her. But he wasn’t as generous as you.”
“I’m not generous at all. It’s just a fair reward for all the good this place has done me.”
He sat back with an extremely satisfied smile. I’ve always found people who talk about their wills in public deeply embarrassing, as though they were admitting to inappropriate love affairs or strange sexual behaviour. And then I thought of his lost half stone and decided it must have had enormous value to bring such a rich reward to the health farm.
Thomas Minchingham left us early. When he had gone, Airlie told us, “Tom Minchingham rates Oriana as highly as we all do. And, as he told us, his father did before him.”
Whether it was hunger or being in a strange and, to me, curiously alien environment, I felt tired and went to bed early. My wife Hilda opted for a discussion in the Great Hall on the “art of repose”, led by two young men who had become Buddhist monks. I had fallen asleep some hours before she got back and, as a consequence, I woke up early.