The Doors Open by Michael Gilbert Read Free Book Online

there’s a sort of tribunal you can go to. Or wrongful dismissal. That’s it! Let’s issue a writ against the firm. Think how old Barrows would hate it.”
    “Look here,” said Paddy. “This working in a solicitor’s office isn’t doing you any good. It’s putting ideas into your head. All the same,” he added thoughtfully, “I think you may have something. How shall we set about it?”
    “I’ll ask our Mr Rumbold,” said Jenny. “He’s certain to be helpful. He’s a sweet thing, and rather keen on me.”
    “If I catch young Nap casting so much as a fatherly eye at you, let alone a brotherly one,” said Paddy, “I’ll wring his neck.”
    “Hurry up and finish your coffee,” said Jenny, “and we’ll be in time for the last house at the Dominion.”
     
     
    3
     
    The gentleman referred to by Jenny as “our Mr Rumbold” and by Paddy as “young Nap”, Mr Noel Anthony Pontarlier Rumbold, was sitting in his office. He was the very latest thing in junior partners in his father’s firm, Messrs Markby, Wragg and Rumbold, Solicitors, of Coleman Street.
    He listened carefully to what his father’s secretary had to say and then remarked: “I’ll think it out, Jenny. On the face of it I don’t think there’s much we can do. You see, when Paddy went away he was an articled clerk. Mr Barrowbridge was under an obligation to take him back as that, of course, quite apart from the war. But once he was qualified the obligations would be at an end. At least, I think so. I’ll ask the old man. He’s had a lot of reinstatement cases lately. Look here, why don’t you bring him round to my place for dinner tonight? It’s years since I saw him last–”
    It was not every young bachelor, in that year of grace, who could ask people round to “his place” for dinner. And Nap owed it to his father’s foresight that he possessed a set of chambers in Brick Court, in the Middle Temple. A priceless set of rooms which had last been “renovated” in the year of Dr Johnson’s birth and had received a lick of paint and a new door knocker when Dickens was a Parliamentary reporter.
    Jenny, though scandalized by some of Nap’s housekeeping arrangements, was deeply in love with the apple-green Queen Anne panelling and after dinner that night she said, without malice, “I expect Patricia is really marrying you for your chambers, Nap.”
    “Fine set of rooms,” agreed Paddy, from the depths of a leather armchair. He was in the comfortable process of settling down to an after-dinner glass of port, the remains of twelve dozen which Mr Rumbold senior had optimistically hoped might cheer his own declining years. “Built for undersized chaps like you, though. I should always be knocking my head on your twiddly little doorways.”
    “It’s divine,” said Jenny. “And I think it’s got the most beautiful and complicated lavatory in London – if I may mention such a thing in front of a couple of young unmarried men.”
    Nap lit himself a cigarette and looked at his two guests speculatively. With his absurdly boyish face, light hair and candid blue eyes he looked, as Paddy had once said, “nineteen and devoid of all guile”. In fact he was twenty-six and a far from simple soul.
    Some of which complication may have resulted from the fact that five-sixteenths of his breeding was French. As to one-sixteenth from his great-grandfather, the Jacobin attorney, Rimbault, who had crossed the Channel with speed and discretion on learning the result of the Battle of Waterloo, and as to the remaining quarter from his grandmother, a Malmaison from Besançon (eighty-one but still hearty).
    “All present,” he said, “are thanked for their kind remarks on the subject of my apartments. We will now proceed to business. First item on the agenda, possible reprisals against Mr Barrowbridge. I’m afraid you’re on a sticky wicket there. What I told you, Jenny, this morning is confirmed by my father.”
    “I’m not even sure,”