by Paul Bailey
They left the park, where his elderly father – his impossibly elderly father – had been playing bowls with his ancient companions. They walked briskly against the wind, with Frank every so often consulting his pocket watch to ensure they would arrive home at the expected time.
— Ten minutes, Harry. Put a step on it. Ten minutes and we’re safe. Twelve or fifteen minutes and we’re done for.
They’d been done for in the past, with Alice complaining loudly about her husband’s lack of consideration.
— You’re teaching that son of yours your own bad habits.
— He’s your son, too, woman.
— Sit down and eat, the pair of you. Jessie and me have already partaken, as the posh folks say.
They sat and ate the lamb or the beef or the pork or – once or twice a year – the chicken. There were vegetables aplenty: peas and runner beans in summer; turnips and Brussels sprouts and parsnips in winter; potatoes in every season in various guises.
— That was the last meal I had with you and Jessie and your mummy, his father was saying, interrupting his reveries of Alice’s plain but satisfying cuisine.
— Was it, Dad?
— Yes, son. I started dying two days later, if you remember. Talking in my not-very-sleepy sleep.
— I came home from school at four in the afternoon. You were lying in the bed Mum shared with Jessie. Your face was covered in sweat. You were shouting at people I’d never heard of.
— They were my comrades in the trenches, Harry. My mates in Flanders. They’d all gone ahead of me. They were ghosts.
— As you are. As you must be.
There was no answer. Silence prevailed. He wanted to eat the unusual soup, a grilled lemon sole, a piece of cheese – Taleggio, perhaps, or Manchego – and drink a chilled Sancerre and then something robust from Sardinia. He longed to share this feast with one of his friends, with all his friends, with Graham, some day soon. He would be cook, however fragile his health, whatever fate the medics decided was in store for him.
— I love that chocolate mousse you make, Harry.
— I know you do, Jessie dear.
— It’s that flavour of rosemary I like so much. Do it for me the next time you ask me round to your house.
— How can I say no?
He could say no because she wasn’t alive any more. She’d died – when? – three years ago, very suddenly, in that London hospital most resembling a luxury hotel. She had asked him and Graham to let her know what happened in her favourite television soap opera that evening: would the mad Indian solicitor murder her shopkeeper lover, as she threatened to do in the previous instalment?
— We’ll record it for you, Jess, said Graham, taking her cold hand and kissing it.
— I haven’t missed an episode in twenty-five years.
— There’s devotion to duty.
As they were watching the solicitor rolling her lustrous eyeballs, the telephone rang. Graham received the news that Miss Chapman was gravely ill. She needed to see her brother desperately. Their journey back to the hospital tested Graham’s driving skills to the limit, for it was raining cats and dogs and elephants and rhinosceroses. The downpour was tropical in its intensity – they might have been in the Philippines, or India during the monsoon season, not south-west London. They arrived too late for a last goodbye.
The crazy Indian solicitor, he told his sister’s corpse, was still hatching a plot to trap the shopkeeper. It wasn’t quite clear what the vicious bitch had in mind, but if her manic eyes were any indication it was going to be a very nasty trap indeed.
— I’ll make the chocolate mousse in your memory, Jess. As soon as I get out of here.
That was a promise he might be able to keep, he hoped.
— Typical, typical, said his inescapable, malevolent mother. — You and your promises, Harry.
— Be quiet, he heard himself shout.
— Is something the matter, Mr Chapman? (It was the nurse called Mullen who was asking the question.) — Who are you bawling at?
— Oh, anyone and no one. The world, I assume. It must be due to the drug Dr Pereira gave me.
— I’ve come to take some blood from you, if I may.
— Be my bloody guest. I thought you took some yesterday when I first came in.
— We did. But we need some more.
— You ghouls.
The blood left his body. It looked almost black, unlike the bright red gore that seeped from the wounded in films. It was, he thought, the colour of decay.
— Cheer up, Mr Chapman.
Why the hell, why the fuck, should I? he refrained from saying.
— I shall try, Nurse Mullen.
— That’s the spirit.
Ah, yes, that’s the spirit. He smiled at the nurse, to indicate the spirit was in him and with him. It was the falsest of smiles, but she seemed not to notice its falsity.
— Be brave, she said, and vanished.
What a tiresome creature, what an unwanted pain in the arse, what a nasty piece of moralising work Nurse Mullen was turning out to be.
— You pious cunt, he muttered.
— Wash your mouth out, Harry Chapman, with carbolic soap and water. That is a word I never thought I’d hear on your clever lips. And I don’t wish to hear it again. That poor nurse is only doing her duty.
— She didn’t catch what I said.
— Whether she did or she didn’t isn’t the point, Harry Foulmouth Chapman. If I was there, I’d give you a slap across the chops harder than the one I gave you when you came out with that other word.
(Oh, yes. They were walking past the gasworks on a day in June. He was twelve, and innocent. ‘What does “fuck” mean, Mum?’ he’d asked, and within seconds his whole face was smarting.)
— Well, you aren’t here, except in my deluded imagination.
But not, he considered, out of her harm’s way. It was because he was here – trapped, and dependent upon nurses and doctors – that his restless mind was taken up with old slights, old scores, old barriers to his once longed-for liberty.
— Please cure me, Dr Pereira.
It wasn’t his curly-haired saviour who stood before him now. It was someone altogether more haggard, wearing a frock coat, a silk cravat, a discreet waistcoat, finely tapered trousers and boots with a shine that reflected the instruments at his, Harry Chapman’s, bedside. Here was a man from another age, yet a recognisable friend.
— Is that you, Pip?
— Yes, Harry.
— You didn’t marry her, did you?
— Estella? No. You ask me that same question every time we meet. Mr Dickens didn’t want me to, as you know. It was the idea of that sentimental scribbler Bulwer-Lytton. Sentimentalists thrive on happy endings. Estella broke my young heart, Harry. It’s still in need of repair. Marry her? No, no, no.
Harry Chapman recalled his first encounter with Philip Pirrip, he of the great expectations, a lifetime ago. Pip’s dilemma was to become his own, for he would be ashamed of his uneducated mother, his gauche and awkward sister, his country-bumpkin and cockneyfied London relations. He had discovered refinement in school – poetry; the music of Mozart and Beethoven; the thrilling idea of a life of the mind – and the drabness he came back to each evening in the terraced house in south London caused him to hate the values, if such they were, of his ancestors. How dare they, living in the world, settle for a poverty of spirit that exactly mirrored the poverty they were subjected to by an unjust society? He understood, at fourteen, that you can be rich in intellect, endlessly rich, while poor financially. Then he discovered Pip, the orphaned boy of humble means who is taken from his brother-in-law’s forge, where he is to be apprenticed as a blacksmith, and sent off to learn how to be a gentleman and function in polite society. The young Harry was held spellbound by Pip’s progress from ungainly Kentish yokel to debonair city butterfly, thanks to the mysterious benefactor whose identity is only revealed when the story moves on to a more exalted plane, with Pip’s red
emption through suffering, remorse and penitence.
— I haven’t gone away, Harry.
— I can’t expect you not to stir from my side, dear Pip.
In March 1994, in Calcutta, he’d had the only supernatural experience of his agnostic’s life. He had entered the Park Street cemetery in the full blaze of noon and found himself surrounded by the monuments for the illustrious British dead – judges, governors, architects, bridge builders, doctors, generals, colonels, majors; an entire galaxy of the once powerful – and saw that people were resting from the heat, or eating their meagre lunches, or sleeping soundly in the coolness of the mausoleums. A wizened, toothless old man who spoke nothing but Bengali handed him a crudely typed guide to the cemetery in even cruder English and kept his palm open until the visitor had filled it with small coins. The man clutched his sleeve and led him to the grave he had come to see – the most modest of modest graves and the easiest to pass by, for there was nothing remotely grand about it. It was like a tiny lozenge, of the kind sacred to the memory of Pip’s five unnamed brothers, those ‘exceedingly early’ travellers to nowhere. He had to bend low to read the inscription Walter’s father had written for his extravagant young son, Walter Landor Dickens. Walter had died on his way down from a hill station with a sudden gush of blood from his mouth. And that was the end of the youth known in his family as Young Skull because of his high cheekbones. Then, as Harry Chapman was peering at the faded letters on the gravestone, a curious thing happened. He was touched gently on the shoulder by what seemed to be a skeletal hand. He turned his head and saw the figure who was standing before him in the ward. He rose and faced the man in the frock coat, who said:
— Mr Dickens was kinder to me than he was to his sons. I am Philip Pirrip, alias Pip, by the way. And you, I assume, are Mr Harry Chapman?
— I am, was his stupefied answer.
— Mr Dickens was upset by the news of Walter’s death, but not exactly overcome with grief.
He was too astonished to reply.
— There is a chop house not far from here. Would you care to join me for luncheon?
— I should be delighted.
But the delights of a lamb chop washed down with wine or beer were soon denied him, for the phantasmal Pip evaporated the very moment they were outside the cemetery. Harry Chapman was left alone with the memory of the illusion. It was, he reasoned, the heat’s doing.
Pip had vanished from the hospital, too, leaving silence and darkness behind him.
He awoke to the sound of a woman moaning. She was a newcomer to the ward, for he could hear Sister Driver attempting to calm her, as she had calmed him.
— You’re in safe hands, Mrs Stubbs. I’ll give you something to ease the pain. There, there.
— Help me. Help me.
— Of course we’ll help you. That’s what we’re here for.
Please keep her quiet, divine Sister Nancy, he nearly said aloud. Give her a shot of Dr Pereira’s magic potion. Anything to stop that terrible noise.
Mrs Stubbs let out a shriek of Wagnerian intensity, piercing enough to quell any dragon or demon.
— She has to be taken to theatre straight away, said a voice, not Dr Pereira’s. — We must operate within the hour.
— Yes, Professor.
— Otherwise – well, you know what I mean by ‘otherwise’.
A mild commotion ensued. Harry Chapman listened as the newly arrived Mrs Stubbs was newly removed from his proximity. He reminded himself to ask Sister Nancy what, precisely, was wrong with the unseen, unknown woman.
— Curiosity killed the cat, remarked his mother, the deflating cliché at her imperious command. — Trust you to want to find out the worst.
The worst, he had once tried to explain to her, during his tormented adolescence – the worst time in life to explain anything of seriousness to anyone – is what being human is finally about. How arrogant and unfeeling he was then, in true Philip Pirrip fashion, in his assumption that Alice Chapman was indifferent to suffering. He had tried, in the year of her death, to make it clear to her that he appreciated the love for him she had never been able to express in simple terms. Her meals, he reasoned, offered sufficient evidence of the unspoken affection she felt for her children.
— Love? Affection? Meals? What on earth are you saying?
What on earth, indeed. Why had he bothered? He remembered, now, that she had always scoffed at love scenes in films and television dramas.
— Look at the fools, she’d sneer. — Just look at them.
— They’re only acting, Mum, Jessie would remind her. — They’re pretending.
— They’re bloody idiots, whatever they’re doing.
What kind of courtship did Frank Chapman and Alice Bartrip have? The question was still pertinent, given his mother’s lasting contempt for even fictional displays of affection. Had he whispered sweet nothings in her ear? Had they gazed longingly into each other’s eyes? Had they invented, as lovers do, their own private terms of endearment? Had he bought her, on his meagre earnings, chocolates and flowers? It was hard for him to imagine them ever enjoying a sweet romance, for when he, Harry Chapman, was just a small boy his parents were exhibiting crabbiness whenever they were together, finding excuses to be at one another’s throats.
— The little you know, Harry, of what your father felt for me.
Yes, the little he knew was precious little: that they’d held hands at the pictures; that they’d spent Sunday afternoons in summer lolling in deckchairs and listening to the brass band in Hyde Park; that they’d gone out to eat jellied eels and mashed potatoes each Friday night. That was as much as he knew of their wooing.
— Mr Chapman?
He was being addressed by a male nurse, whose name he deciphered, in the muted light, as Maciek Nazwisko.
— You wish pass water, sir?
— Why not?
— Sir?
— Yes, I wish to pass water.
So he passed water, filling to within overflowing the bottle Nurse Nazwisko held for him.
— You had need, Mr Chapman.
— Yes, I did.
— You will OK be till morning?
— I hope I will.
— I take away.
— Thank you.
— Sleep your best sleep.
Was that, he wondered, a Polish saying in a literal translation, or simply Maciek Nazwisko’s own peculiar expression? Either way, the notion of a best sleep pleased him.
He was drifting off when a young woman, dressed in the high-waisted style of the French Empire, appeared.
— I have a bone to pick with you, Mr Chapman.
— Who the hell are you?
— Your language is intemperate. I am Emma Woodhouse, whom you had the temerity to impersonate fifty-six years ago in an impossibly inadequate – not to say, lamentable – adaptation of the novel mostly concerned, and quite properly, with myself. You were a boy of fourteen in that school performance. What could you have ascertained of my character, a child such as you were from an impoverished background? Not a great amount, I wager. Such presumption.
— I did my best for you. The older members of the audience were most appreciative. They were shocked when I – I mean you – was and were patronisingly rude to poor verbose Miss Bates.
— Tell that bossy cow where to get off, said Alice Chapman, interrupting the conversation with her usual acerbity.
— Who is that vulgar, shrewish creature, Mr Chapman?
— My mother. My cockney Clytemnestra.
— I recollect that your Harriet Smith had a common accent also.
— Bobby? I’ve forgotten the sound of his voice.
— I have not, Mr Chapman. I have decidedly not forgotten his coarse vowels.
He was debating whether to ask if she were still married to the priggish Mr Knightley when Nancy Driver arrived to wish him goodnight.
— Are you comfortable, Harry?
— You know I’m not. How could I be, Sister?
> — Don’t fret. Dr Pereira’s on your case. He’ll make a decision tomorrow, I’m sure.
— I hate being unwell.
— Everyone does.
— There you’re wrong, Nancy. Just think of Emma Woodhouse’s father.
— Who?
— I’m sorry. He’s in a book, but he’s all too real. He’s a professional invalid, you might say.
— Oh, yes. I’ve dealt with some of those.
— How is Mrs Stubbs?
— Mrs Stubbs, Harry?
— The woman who was here a short while ago. She was screaming with pain.
— She’s not out of the woods yet, but we hope she soon will be. I can’t say more.
Did he want her to say more? Did he really wish to learn that Mrs Stubbs, she of the moaning and the Brünnhilde shriek, was in a much worse physical condition than Harry Chapman?
— Let me know what happens to her. Tell me if and when she gets out of the woods.
Was this the best sleep he was sleeping? It didn’t seem like it. He would complain to Maciek Nazwisko should he appear tomorrow with the obliging bottle. This was decidedly not the best sleep he had ever slept – in point of boring fact, it was actually one of the very worst. The dream he was currently dreaming was totally devoid of interest. He almost longed for a guest appearance by Alice Chapman in full, malignant flow. Where was the Duchess of Bombay when he really needed her? Not here, among so many shadows. Nobody lively was waiting on the dim horizon. He was asking himself if he were dead the second he awoke.
— Am I dead?
— Of course you aren’t, replied a voice he didn’t recognise from somewhere in the ward. — What a stupid thing to say.
He thanked the stranger for clarifying the matter with her prompt response.
— Don’t thank me for stating the obvious.
— Are you Mrs Stubbs, by any chance?
— No, I’m not. Why should I be?
— She was here earlier today, in a wretched state.
— Sorry, Mr Undecided-Whether-He’s-Living-Or-Dead, but I am not in a wretched state. For your information, I am only moderately unwell.
