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smiling in a blinding fashion, Nick Davenant shook his head. ‘I don’t pay her a thing. She does it for the sake of friendship.’
    â€˜Friendship with you, of course?’
    â€˜Friendship with me, yes. I think Liz is really a nice girl. And I don’t see anything wrong with her bum.’
    â€˜Wrong with what?’
    â€˜Her bum.’
    â€˜That’s what I thought you said.’
    â€˜Do you think there’s anything wrong with it, Rumpole?’ A dreamy look had come over young Davenant’s face.
    â€˜I hadn’t really thought about it very much. But I suppose not.’
    â€˜I don’t know why she has to go through all that performance about it, really.’
    â€˜Performance?’
    â€˜At Monte’s beauty parlour, she told me. In Ken High Street. Takes hours, she told me. While she has to sit there and read Hello! magazine.’
    â€˜You don’t mean that she reads this – whatever publication you mentioned – while changing the shape of her body for the sake of pleasing men?’
    â€˜I suppose,’ Davenant had to admit reluctantly, ‘it’s in a good cause.’
    â€˜Have the other half of this black Liffey water, why don’t you?’ I felt nothing but affection for Counsel for the Prosecution, for suddenly, at long last, I saw a chink of daylight at the end of poor old Claude’s long, black tunnel. ‘And tell me all you know about Monte’s beauty parlour.’
    The day’s work done, I was walking back from Ludgate Circus and the well-known Palais de Justice, when I saw, alone and palely loitering, the woman of the match, Wendy Crump. I hailed her gladly, caught her up and she turned to me a face on which gloom was written large. I couldn’t even swear that her spectacles hadn’t become misted with tears.
    â€˜You don’t look particularly cheered up,’ I told her, ‘after your day of triumph.’
    â€˜No. As a matter of fact I feel tremendously depressed.’
    â€˜What about?’
    â€˜About Claude. I’ve been thinking about it so much and it’s made me sad.’
    â€˜Someone told you?’ I was sorry for her.
    â€˜Told me what?’
    â€˜Well’ – I thought, of course, that the damage had been done by the sisterhood over the lunch adjournment – ‘what Claude had said about you that caused all the trouble.’
    â€˜All what trouble?’
    â€˜Being blackballed, blacklisted, outlawed, outcast, dismissed from the human race. Why Liz Probert and the gender-aware radical lawyers have decided to hound him.’
    â€˜Because of what he said about me?’
    â€˜They haven’t told you?’
    â€˜Not a word. But you know what it was?’
    â€˜Perhaps.’ I was playing for time.
    â€˜Then tell me, for God’s sake.’
    â€˜Quite honestly, I’d rather not.’
    â€˜What on earth’s the matter?’
    â€˜I’d really rather not say it.’
    â€˜Why?’
    â€˜You’d probably find it offensive.’
    â€˜Rumpole, I’m going to be a barrister. I’ll have to sit through rape, indecent assault, sex and sodomy. Just spit it out.’
    â€˜He was probably joking.’
    â€˜He doesn’t joke much.’
    â€˜Well, then. He called you, and I don’t suppose he meant it, fat.’
    She looked at me and, in a magical moment, the gloom lifted. I thought there was even the possibility of a laugh. And then it came, a light giggle, just as we passed Pommeroy’s.
    â€˜Of course I’m fat. Fatty Crump, that set me apart from all the other anorexic little darlings at school. That and the fact that I usually got an A-plus. It was my trademark. Well, I never thought Claude looked at me long enough to notice.’
    When this had sunk in, I asked her why, if she hadn’t heard from Liz Probert and her Amazonians, she was so shaken and wan with care.
    â€˜Because’ –