by Paul Bailey
— There was no ‘if’, was there?
— If, if I wasn’t here now, listening to you again. If I’d been ‘gathered’, as you were fond of saying. If, if, if, Mother mine.
— Get back in your pram, Harry Chapman.
That taunt for all his childhood; that lethal combination of five short words intended to diminish him; oh, the terrible inference that he would never grow into the kind of manhood she might approve of – here it was, harshly expressed, unsettling him, angering him, in this hospital ward, in a changed London, on the eve of his seventieth birthday.
— I’m seventy, Mum.
— Seventy? Seven, seventeen or seventy, you’re still the same useless object I brought into the world.
— It’s good to have your support.
He reminded himself that Alice Chapman had been dead for twenty-two years. To his and Jessie’s amazement, she had left instructions that she wished to be cremated. The urn containing her ashes had been buried in St Peter’s churchyard in the small country town where she had been born and raised. Yet here she was, in some form or another, goading him with the familiar words of long ago.
— Mr Chapman? Mr Chapman?
He came out of his gruesome reverie and saw Dr Pereira.
— Nurse Mullen tells me you were sick this morning.
— I was.
— Immediately after breakfast. Is that correct?
— Yes.
— You will be given no more solid food for the time being. You will be fed intravenously.
— I understand.
— Until we discover exactly what is wrong with you.
— Why the delay?
— We have to be absolutely certain, Mr Chapman.
A saline drip was duly attached to him later that morning and a card with the instruction NIL BY MOUTH placed above his head.
— I feel trapped.
— Don’t talk silly, said a nurse called Marybeth Myslawchuk, as her name tag informed him. — This is for your benefit. You’re not trapped one teensy bit.
— You sound American.
— I sound Canadian, if that’s all right by you. I sound Canadian because that’s what I am.
— I do apologise.
— No need to. Since you are so curious, my family hails originally from Ukraine.
— I was in Lvov once. A pretty place, with some interesting Italianate architecture.
— Never been there, and I can’t say I want to go. My grandpa and grandma were happy to get out, and I am more than happy to be in jolly old England, where it’s never too hot or too cold. That’s me in a nutshell, Mr Harry Chapman.
— No one can be contained in a nutshell, Marybeth Myslawchuk. Oh, I do hope I pronounced that second name even half correctly.
— Nine out of ten for trying, Mr C. More emphasis on the ‘mys’ and you’d be perfect. The word’s going round the ward that you know a whole lot of poetry.
— I do.
— Say some for me, then. That’s a polite request.
It was the easiest poem to remember. It was in his bloodstream, had been there since he was a skinny boy of twelve, when love – with its delights and sadnesses – was still on the horizon, but the beauty of his inherited language had already established itself in his mind and heart, the two indistinguishable. So he serenaded the plump, middle-aged Canadian by enquiring if he should compare her to a summer’s day, and assuring her in thirteen more lines of his undying affection, surviving beyond the grave.
They were both silent when he had finished. He was slightly embarrassed, as if the feelings he had expressed were his very own and their object the stately Nurse Marybeth. It was almost as if he had been wooing her.
— Well, Mr Chapman, you’re a Shakespearean son of a gun, if I ever heard one. That was a treat. I thank you.
He thanked her for thanking him, so touched was he by her response.
— That’s enough thank-yous for today, thank you very much. And no more silly talk of being trapped.
Silly talk or not, he did feel trapped now, waiting here for his friend Graham to arrive from Sri Lanka, where he had gone to take stock of his life so far and to contemplate his future. Graham was in the jungle somewhere, dressed only in a sarong, in a hut by the side of a lake, cut off from all contact with the West. No electricity, no telephone, nothing. Oh, the luxury, Harry Chapman thought, of going native for the purpose of self-improvement, thousands of miles from civilisation and its discontents.
Almost the last person he had seen before the unbearable pain had sent him phoning for an ambulance was the woman known to the cognoscenti as the Duchess of Bombay. She was standing outside his house in her customary makeshift clothing – a tattered Napoleonic overcoat, a faded cotton dress, brown stockings rolled down below her knees and those improvised shoes composed of scraps of newspaper and plastic bags – and shouting abuse at the world. Her adversary had to be the entire universe for there was nobody else in view. The Duchess, in her remote youth, had trained to be a concert pianist. As Anya Lipschitz (born Anne Lipton) she had played Grieg’s Piano Concerto with an orchestra made up of former students of London’s music colleges, and had given two well-received solo recitals, the last at Wigmore Hall in 1959. On that memorable evening, she performed an eclectic repertoire: a Chopin polonaise; a fantasia by Liszt; some early pieces of Alban Berg; five of Brahms’s intermezzi and Beethoven’s ‘Les Adieux’ sonata. There were several encores.
That was the beginning, and the end, of her fame. Two things destroyed her potentially brilliant career – the sudden death of her parents in an air crash in France, and the arrival of a young man from Istanbul with whom she became captivated and then infatuated. She was now very rich, thanks to her father’s bequest, and for the next three years she lived solely for Acil, in a large house in west London she leased. It was her love nest in that quiet, tree-lined street whenever Acil was there with her, and her desolate moated grange when he was inexplicably absent. Each time he returned she attempted to be calm and reasonable, trying and failing to conquer the jealousy that possessed her. To console him, because he was always the injured party, she bought him tailored suits, handmade shirts and shoes, expensive – and, to her eyes, rather vulgar – items of jewellery. He liked to remind her that she was lucky to have such a handsome and virile lover, and then she thanked him for bestowing upon her the favours most women could only dream of – yes, yes, she assured him, she knew just how lucky she was.
All this she had recounted to Harry Chapman, in snatches of conversation over two decades, on fine or clouded afternoons, in the course of chance encounters. Her need to reveal her past to him depended entirely on the mood she was in, for sometimes she was vindictive and laconic, her eyes blazing with anger, her mouth pursed contemptuously. Her narrative, given the deranged state of her mind, was surprisingly continuous: it was not until she had dealt with Acil’s final departure that she ventured to talk of her afterlife, as she referred to it. He heard of her descent into depression, her eviction from the house, her bankruptcy, and her overpowering reliance on the temporary comfort afforded by Bombay Sapphire, her favoured gin. For a terrible while, she was the leading lady in a troupe of public guzzlers who gathered together, existence permitting, on a forlorn strip of grass, intended as a communal garden, near a busy roundabout. One of their number, a perpetually defeated Irishman called Colum, had honoured her with the title of Duchess of Bombay – in respect of her refined way of speaking, her briefly flickering intelligence and her obvious hauteur (a word, she explained to a bemused Harry Chapman, decidedly not in Colum’s vocabulary). She was the brightest star in a belching, hiccuping, incoherent firmament, and she played her appointed role with, she told him, a regrettable relish. She was a somebody – she’d had a wonder-filled past as Anya Lipschitz – among an assortment of nobodies. The troupe disbanded, courtesy of the Grim Reaper, who took Sean and Seamus and Muriel and Betsy and Eamon and who-knows-whom-else in his icy clasp. She found herself an isolated sur
vivor who no longer craved company. She had arrived at a state of almost complete solitariness. Almost, yes, but not quite, because she still cared to convey her sorrows to a man she did not know as Harry Chapman. He was her appreciative port in a seemingly lasting storm. He listened to her every word.
He was in the library one morning when he saw her chosen name on the spine of a very slim book. It was a study of the life and music of Anton von Webern, and he could tell immediately that it was written with graceful lucidity. Could it be possible there was another Anya Lipschitz, an authority on the twelve-tone technique Webern had pioneered? This Anya was fluent in German, to judge by her translations of the composer’s writings, as well as being a skilled explicator of his intricate works. No, he decided, this was a different Anya, a scholar unlikely to be deceived and abased by a Turkish gigolo. She was, surely, too wise to have surrendered herself to such an obviously professional charmer.
Was she, or was she not, the scholarly Anya? The question remained unanswered for several months, because the Duchess of Bombay and the battered car in which she had made her home had vanished from the district. The vehicle, he learned, had been pronounced a threat to health, the Duchess’s cavalier way with discarded food greatly attracting the local rodent population, thus causing it to be removed on the instructions of the borough council. It was scrap by the time he went to visit her. Then he assumed she was dead, gone where her inebriated courtiers had gone, and he was too occupied with the novel he was struggling to write to bother about identifying the author of Anton von Webern: A Life in Music. The Duchess was relegated to the back of his mind.
On a chilly November day he heard her call out to him.
— You. You. Come over here, you.
She was sitting on a doorstep, rubbing butter onto her legs.
— Taking precautions for the winter. Nothing like butter to keep the cold out.
— How are you? Where have you been?
— You can see how I am. I’ve been nowhere.
He asked her if she knew anything about the Austrian composer Webern. She replied by humming a fragment of his youthful passacaglia.
— Did you write a book about him?
— Perhaps I did, and perhaps I didn’t.
That was answer enough. He decided not to pursue the subject. Besides, he had no alternative, for now she dismissed him with a curt ‘Go away’.
— Goodbye, he said, and left.
And then there she was, on Saturday, yards from his house, howling like Lear on the heath although it was a balmy September afternoon, the light gently autumnal. As he watched her from a first-floor window, the pain in his stomach assumed an agonising new dimension. He picked up the phone and dialled 999 and asked for A & E. He waited, crouched on the carpet, for the ambulance to arrive. When it did, he could only mumble that he had been constipated for a week and he didn’t know why. He was usually regular. The paramedics, a young man and younger woman, advised him not to speak any more, to take it easy, to try not to worry. They would be at the hospital in double-quick time. The local football team was playing away in the north of England and the roads, for once, were free of excess traffic.
— Harry?
— Is that you, Sister Nancy?
— None other.
— Is it night already?
— No, no. I came in early. I have masses of paperwork to get through.
— I envy you.
— What on earth do you mean?
— My work’s paperwork, Nancy. I should like to be at my desk, mulling over the next sentence. That’s why I’m envious. My hands are useless in here.
— Try not to fret too much.
Nancy Driver’s voice, he thought with a smile, is ever soft, gentle and low, an excellent thing in woman.
— I’ll try.
— That’s my Harry. What’s that old saying? ‘Smile and the world smiles with you, weep and you weep alone.’ Is that how it goes?
— I’m afraid so.
— You have that mischievous twinkle in your eye.
— My eye’s the best place for it.
The nurse named Marybeth had joined Sister Nancy at his bedside.
— Has he recited a poem for you, Sister?
— You’ve lost me, Marybeth.
— Mr Chapman is a living and breathing anthology. He serenaded me with a Shakespeare sonnet this morning. He was word-perfect.
— Well, well. We’ve never had a patient who entertained us with poetry. The odd singer, yes. There was that fat Welshman who burst into song if you so much as glanced at him.
— Oh my God, what a caterwauler he was. I’d have cheerfully strangled him, had I been given the opportunity.
— I nearly had, and I nearly did, said Sister Nancy. The two women laughed at the revelation of their shared guilty secret. Or so Harry Chapman supposed.
— Now then, Mr Chapman, Sister Driver is waiting to hear your dulcet tones.
— Is she?
— I am, Harry. If you would be so kind. Something short and sweet.
He asked them to wait. He had to think. He needed to conjure up a poem that suited the sister’s requirements. There was a host he could choose from.
— This should do the trick.
How old was he when he committed the little beauty to memory? His teacher, Mr Robertson, had copied it out for him from a yellowing book in his collection. Yes, he was thirteen, and precociously addicted to Elizabethan poetry, and Mr Robertson, knowing his taste, had picked out this gem for him. He had learned it on a late afternoon in early spring, making it his own as he strolled alongside the Thames at Chelsea.
Would it come back to him now? Was it still there in its brief entirety? He took a breath, and began.
— The lowest trees have tops, the ant her gall,
The fly her spleen, the little spark his heat;
Hairs cast their shadows, though they be but small,
And bees have stings, although they be not great.
Seas have their source, and so have shallow springs,
And love is love, in beggars and in kings.
He paused, looked at his rapt (he hoped) listeners, and continued.
— The ermine hath the fairest skin on earth,
Yet does she choose the Weasel for her peer;
The panther hath a sweet perfumed breath,
Yet doth she suffer apes to draw her near.
No flower more fresh than is the damask rose,
Yet next her side the nettle often grows.
He stopped once more, and signalled to the nurse and the sister that there was one last stanza.
— Where waters smoothest run, deep’st are the fords,
The dial stirs, though none perceive it move;
The fairest faith is in the sweetest words,
The turtles sing not love, and yet they love.
True hearts have eyes and ears, no tongues to speak,
They hear and see, and sigh, and then they break.
— That’s it, ladies.
— It’s deep, that’s for certain.
— I liked the beggars and kings.
— I should explain, he said, enjoying his pedantry —that the hairs that ‘cast their shadows’ are the hairs on one’s body, not the hares you eat jugged.
— Is that by Shakespeare, too?
— No, Nurse Myslawchuk.
— Tell us who wrote it, Harry.
— I can’t. The poet’s name is lost in history. It might be his only poem for all I know. He’s one of hundreds, perhaps thousands, grouped under the title Anonymous. You could say, if you were fanciful, that his soul lives on whenever someone reads him. That’s what I like to believe.
Was he sounding pompous? Impossibly high-minded? What did it matter?
— I can be very serious, Nancy, when the mood hits me.
— You don’t need to apologise. It’s been lovely listening to you. Hasn’t it, Marybeth?
— Surely.
— We’ll be your captive aud
ience again tomorrow, Harry.
After they had gone, he felt a momentary glow of satisfaction. He hadn’t spoken, or spouted, ‘The Lowest Trees Have Tops’, in – oh, what – twenty, thirty years? – and yet, minutes past, he had rejoiced in each of its sweet cadences, precisely recalled and thoughtfully delivered.
— Don’t get too pleased with yourself. Your head’s big enough as it is.
There she was again, the perpetual dampener of every prideful feeling, her bottomless bucket of ice-cold water perpetually at hand.
— Leave me alone, can’t you?
— I can’t and I won’t. You didn’t leave me alone when you put me in a book.
— I tried to understand you.
— Is that what you were doing?
— Yes, it was.
— Well, you didn’t succeed.
— How would you know? You couldn’t read it. You never read my books when you were alive, and this one was written after you were dead.
— Playing safe, were you? Thought I wouldn’t notice?
He willed himself to be sensible. It was his own idiotic conscience that was summoning up her rasping tones; that, and his inability, even at this late stage in life, to shake off the mockery she had inflicted on him and Jessie after her husband’s sudden death that faraway November. She’d hated Frank for dying once her grief had subsided and her taunts had been fuelled by the anger she felt at being abandoned. He and his sister could only guess at the cause of her malevolence and then learn to endure it until, for him, it became unendurable.
He wasn’t hungry – the drip was supplying him with the necessary vitamins – but his thoughts were now of food. It was dinner time in the ward and the smells of curry and cabbage and something his nostrils couldn’t identify were reminding him, achingly, of meals he’d prepared or savoured. He recalled, as he lay there helpless, a soup of fennel and fava beans he had consumed on a chilly December night in Palermo. He had ordered a second bowl of it, so entranced was he by its subtle taste, its heavenly aroma. Closing his eyes, he pictured once again its warming, welcoming greenness.
— Come on, Harry, our lives won’t be worth living if we’re late for Sunday dinner. Your mother’s been cooking all morning, getting herself in a terrible sweat, like she does.
