by Paul Bailey
— I hadn’t much to say to anyone after what I’d seen in the trenches.
— Tell me what you saw.
— I can’t, my son.
— It’s ancient history.
— Then let it be.
— You won two medals, Dad. For bravery, was it?
— It wasn’t for sitting on my arse.
— You were in France for three years.
— Who told you?
— The Ministry of Defence. I wrote to them. In 1992.
— Why did you do that?
— Because you’re a mystery.
— I was just an ordinary man, going about his ordinary life. There’s no mystery where Frank Alfred Chapman’s concerned. I was Private Number 36319. That’s how important I was.
Harry Chapman had memorised the number his father was allotted after being enlisted into the Army Service Corps Regular Army on 8 December 1915. Why had he done so?
— Yes, why, Harry?
— To bring you closer, I suppose.
— What rubbish you come out with. Closer? I’ve been dead nigh on sixty years.
Harry begged 36319 Chapman not to be unkind to him, especially now they were reunited. They were walking on grass and surrounded by trees and bushes and the sun was warming them.
— Dad, I have to tell you something.
— You’ve left it late in the day.
He followed Frank’s cliché with another:
— Better late than never.
— Well, son, what is it?
— Dad, I’m gay.
— I’m pleased to hear it. I’m glad you’re still happy at the age you are. Seventy, isn’t it?
Ah, yes. ‘Gay’ in the 1940s, when last they talked, had not taken on its current, widely used meaning. And besides, Harry had not known he was different in the November of 1948 when Frank ran out of breath for ever.
— Let me explain, Dad, he began, but his explanation was not forthcoming, because here was his bright-eyed Virgil removing the tubes from him and saying:
— Harry, we are going to give you some real food. It’s not cordon bleu, so don’t get excited.
— Not curry, I hope. I don’t want a burning bum tomorrow.
— It will be light, I promise.
The meal could not have been lighter – a simple, undressed salad, with a few flecks of tuna. He ate it wolfishly. He ate it as an eremite would eat locusts.
— Was that good, Harry? asked Marybeth Myslawchuk.
— Good enough.
No Dijon mustard, no sherry vinegar, no virgin olive oil – but good enough for a starving man in a London hospital. Lettuce, tomato, cucumber and a couple of radishes. Heaven on earth, almost.
— Superb, in the circumstances.
He drank tea, as he liked it, of the weak kind described by his mother as ‘gnat’s piss’.
— It’s as fine as champagne when you have a thirst.
— I wouldn’t know, Harry. I’m a coffee fiend, me.
— What did Mr Russell find?
— You’ll hear in the morning.
— Promise?
— Yes, Harry dear, we promise.
‘Dear’? Where did that term of affection spring from?
— Marybeth, my dear, I have every faith in you.
— You’d better have, honey, she assured him, exaggerating her transatlantic accent. — And we all expect a poem when we come on duty. Get your brain ticking over, babe.
‘Dear’? ‘Babe’? He felt warm, he felt cared for suddenly, he felt strangely and temporarily at peace. He knew there were phantoms, demons, sarcastic tormentors in his midst, but at this moment, for this moment, he was as contented as any old survivor could possibly hope to be.
‘Dear’? ‘Babe’? Take away the question marks, and leave behind ‘dear’ and ‘babe’. Terms of affection. These were terms he’d heard on the lips of lovers – terms he was hearing now, like soothing balm, from a plump and kindly woman, of whose existence he’d been unaware on Saturday morning. She was saying them with something close, or close enough, to conviction.
Tuesday
Joy did not come in the morning to Harry Chapman, who awoke in darkness with the pain in his gut as unendurable as it had been on the afternoon of his admission to hospital. The Duchess of Bombay was still emulating Lear on the heath as the paramedics helped him into the ambulance. He’d wanted to tell them the story of her unusual life, but they had advised him to stop speaking.
— Mr Chapman? What’s the trouble?
The questioner was a nurse he hadn’t seen before.
— Pain.
— Whereabouts?
— In my stomach.
Which he clutched now, as if to emphasise the location.
— I’ll be back in a minute.
Her minute seemed like an hour.
— I’ve spoken to Dr Pereira, she said. — He was a bit grumpy because he was fast asleep when I phoned him. He gave me precise instructions about what to give you.
Ah, the magic potion, the beautiful doctor’s secret wonder drug.
— What’s your name?
— Veronica.
— Put me out, Veronica. Put me out of this.
— I will, Mr Chapman. I promise.
She kept her promise, as he could see and feel, and soon he was in a place where pain was not even contemplated. The joyless morning was now serene afternoon or evening, it really didn’t matter which. He sighed with satisfaction – the long, easeful release of breath that grants expression to deep contentment. He was at rest, at last.
— Ah, poor dear, bemoaned a fat old woman with a husky voice and a moist eye, which had a remarkable power of turning up, only showing the white of it. She was wearing a very rusty black gown, stained with snuff, and a shawl and bonnet to match. Yet she looked pleased to see him.
— He’ll make a lovely corpse, she remarked to another black figure in the shadows, whom she addressed as Betsey. — He’ll look lovely laid out, with a penny on each eye, afore he goes off to his long home.
The gin on her breath caused Harry Chapman to think of Christopher, who in his last years consumed it every waking hour.
— He’s wandering, Betsey Prig. They all wander at the end.
— Are you Mrs Gamp? Mrs Sairey Gamp?
— You’re familiar, aren’t you? I am that same kindly widow woman, if it’s any business of yours. The sooner you die, the sooner Mrs Prig and myself will be renumerated for our services. So hurry up, won’t you?
— Don’t you mean ‘remunerated’?
— I mean what I say and I say what I mean and you just shut up and get ready to meet your Maker.
Jack, the ship-boy, Harry Chapman’s own creation, his skin-and-bone Cassandra, jumped into view and said:
— The winds are fair for you, Master Harry. You can still set sail on the ocean of life.
— Oh, thank you, thank you, Jack.
— And come to a safe harbour.
Harry saw the child of his imagining aglow with optimism. He’d come down from the high and giddy mast, and here he was chastising the hags who wanted Harry Chapman extinct.
— You will live, Master Harry. I have no fears for you. There are no black clouds looming.
Then the skinny lad said ‘Shoo’ and the drunken guardians of the about-to-be-born and the soon-to-be-dead vanished, leaving the cloying perfume of raw gin behind them.
— Back to work, Master Harry. It’s up the mast again for me.
— Goodbye, Jack. For the present.
After Jack had climbed out of sight, Harry Chapman tried to sleep, although he seemed to be asleep already. He certainly wasn’t awake, for there were no nurses at hand and no equipment in the vicinity. Veronica’s promised temporary oblivion was not to be his, it seemed.
— No rest for the wicked, sneered Alice Chapman, predictable as ever.
— I wish you would use words correctly – dead, burnt and buried as you are. I am not wicked, though I have been cruel on occa
sions, in common with most of the human race.
— It was only a manner of speaking, Mr Clever-Dick, Mr Know-It-All.
— And your manner of speaking was always, always dismissive of hope and promise.
His hope; his promise. These were things she’d been intent on dashing. Oh, why was he bothering with her taunts? Why was he allowing himself to remember them?
— Leave the boy alone, he heard Aunt Rose tell her sister. — Just leave him be to get on with his life.
Then there was silence, which was the one thing he craved. He listened to it, as one sometimes listens to perfect quiet, marvelling at its power to comfort. He wanted to listen into eternity, to have no further distraction. Yes, that was definitely what he wanted.
A phone rang somewhere, on and on. The ringing ceased, only to be resumed a moment later.
— Hello?
The person who picked up the receiver sounded strangely like himself.
— Are you feeling better, Harry?
— Yes, I think I am.
— That is good to hear.
— Who are you?
The caller hesitated, coughed, and answered:
— It isn’t of any importance who I am.
— Why?
— Because it isn’t, Harry.
— I can’t put a face to you.
— You have no need to do so.
— You’re not English, are you?
— No. But you have read my story in English, since you do not speak Russian. Or perhaps you are acquainted with me in French? I was a popular figure in Parisian intellectual circles in the 1890s.
— You must be my dear friend Prince Lyov Nikolayevitch Myshkin.
— Yes, Harry, I am he.
— Your voice is as I imagined it – quiet and reasonable and endlessly concerned and kind.
— I do not wish to be flattered.
— I have loved you since I first encountered you – on the train from Warsaw to Petersburg – when I was seventeen. I took you everywhere with me, on London trains and buses, in parks, in the lavatory, at home, on visits to friends – yes, yes, Prince Myshkin, anywhere and everywhere. When I first left you at the end of July 1954, you were back in Dr Schneider’s clinic in Switzerland with a ‘permanent derangement of the intellect’ brought on by Rogozhin’s murder of Nastasya Filippovna. The second time I met you, five years later, I hoped and prayed that your life would take a different course.
— That was sweetly silly of you, Harry.
There was a clicking sound on the line, then silence. Harry Chapman wondered how Myshkin, even in Dr Schneider’s expensive and celebrated clinic, had access to the telephone. When was it invented? The 1870s, wasn’t it? And when was The Idiot written? Think, think. The 1860s, he supposed.
— When did The Idiot appear? he asked Sister Nancy, who was waking him gently.
— The idiot, Harry? There’s an idiot born every day, in my experience. Idiots appear wherever you look. Which particular idiot do you have in mind?
His Virgil was failing him, and he smiled at the thought.
— No matter, Nancy.
— How are you feeling?
— I was in pain earlier this morning, very bad pain. I can’t feel anything now.
— We should have some news for you today.
— Good? Bad?
— It’s not for me to say. Dr Pereira and Mr Russell will be able to tell you. I’m hoping good, if that’s any consolation.
— Thank you.
— I’ll leave you to decide which poem you’re going to give us, Harry.
— Poem? Oh, yes. I’ll rack what Dr Pereira’s drugs have left of my brain. I will think of something. Something appropriate, perhaps, to my condition.
And what condition, precisely, was that? It could be terminal, couldn’t it? He looked about him at the little he had to see in his contained surroundings. There wasn’t much to stir the soul, but the will to go on living, to move again in the wide world, suddenly possessed him. He was elated. Yes, that’s what he was.
— That’s my lovely nephew, Aunt Rose whispered. — I lived to be ninety-seven thinking the way you’re thinking. Keep going.
Could he bear the idea – yes, even the idea – of reaching ninety-seven? He doubted it. All he wanted now was to be at home with Graham, writing a book that might or might not be his last. He had never imagined attaining seventy, let alone ninety plus. Besides, poor Rose was gaga at the end, with only memories of her earliest infancy to sustain her, if that’s what they did. After his final visit to her, at the Eventide Home in a tiny Sussex village, he had vowed to do what he had often contemplated doing in his tortured adolescence and beyond, should his faculties declare themselves redundant.
— I won’t hear of it, Harry. Suicide’s the coward’s way out. Your time will come when it’s good and proper and not before.
— You’re going to tell me to look on the bright side, aren’t you?
— I could give you worse advice.
— No, not you. That’s your sister’s province.
— Leave her to heaven, Harry.
— Yes, I will.
He had to leave her to heaven, along with Hamlet’s mother Gertrude, if that’s where she was. If, if: the afterlife was replete with ‘ifs’. He knew, as sure as God made little apples, that she would appear to him again during his ordeal. She’d relished drama, and that relish was her terrible gift to him. How often he had tried to resist the allure of the last, coruscating word, the dramatic exit line. He could resist it now, surely, with infinity confronting him. Here was the exit of exits, and he would pass through it calmly. He found himself determined to do so.
He waited to hear her contradicting him, but for once she was blessedly silent.
— You certainly put up a fight, Harry. There, I called you Harry, said Dr Pereira. — You had to be sedated. Mr Russell didn’t want to force the equipment down your throat. You fought like a demon.
— Did I? I’ve no memory of it.
— We discovered a lump in your stomach. It might be harmless. We shall do further exploratory tests before we decide whether or not to operate.
Harry Chapman, nodding, imagined Dr Pereira as Caravaggio’s gorgeous young Fruttaiolo in the Borghese Gallery in Rome. The curly-haired vendor, with his exposed shoulder, is holding a basket containing black grapes, green grapes, shiny red apples, redcurrants, a blushing pear or two and a plum tomato – the whole luscious ensemble decorated with vine leaves. Gone were the doctor’s white overall, his stethoscope, his doctorly demeanour, and in their glowing stead was the immortal youth with his imperishable wares.
— I like your attitude, Harry. It’s good to see you smiling. I really admire your spirit.
— My spirit?
— A lesser man would have turned his face to the wall and given up hope. Stay cheerful, Harry.
And with that Dr Pereira left his spirited patient’s bedside. The fruitseller lingered on for a moment or two and then followed his double out of the ward.
He was joined, soon enough, by the regular trio.
— Have you a poem for us, Harry?
— I have, Marybeth, and I haven’t.
— And what exactly is that supposed to mean, honey?
— Well, there is a poem and then again there isn’t.
— He’s at his mischief, said Harry Chapman’s Virgil. — He enjoys his puzzles, she added with what her cockney Dante acknowledged as uncommon shrewdness.
— I shall need a little time to explain.
They gave him that precious time – Nancy Driver, Marybeth and the quizzical Philip Warren – as they changed his linen, took his temperature, checked his blood pressure and rearranged him in the bed.
He had to apologise, but this late poem of Nazim Hikmet was still working its way around his brain. It was a joyous meditation on death. He wanted to convey its message to his good friends in his own English, although it had been written in Turkish. He would tell them of the poet’s life, brief
ly, if they had the patience to listen to him.
— We’re listening, Harry.
— Where to begin?
— We can’t answer that for you.
— All I need to say is that Hikmet was a devout Marxist who offended the secular state he had helped bring into being. He spent eighteen years in prison, where he wrote love letters in verse to his wife. He smoked too many cigarettes. He died, at the age of sixty-one, in Moscow, where he had lived for more than a decade. I’m going to give you Harry Chapman’s version of ‘My Funeral’, which he wrote in April 1963.
He paused; he had to, to collect his thoughts.
— This isn’t something morbid, is it, Harry?
— No, no, no. Quite the reverse. Listen. The poem begins with two questions. Will Hikmet’s funeral start in the courtyard below his tiny apartment? And how will the bearers bring the coffin down three floors? The lift is too small; the stairs too narrow.
He paused a second time. Was he making any sense?
— What happens next?
— I’m coming to that, Master Philip. Laboriously, I admit. Give me a moment more.
They gave it to him, and he continued.
— Perhaps the courtyard will be knee-deep in sunlight and pigeons –
— ‘Knee-deep’, that’s good, said Marybeth, sounding like Polonius.
— perhaps there will be snow and children’s cries mingling in the air
or the asphalt glistening with rain
and the dustbins littering the place as usual . . .
— Dustbins? In a poem?
— Oh, Nancy, you disappoint me. He almost called her Virgil, the consummate chronicler of the damned. — Dustbins are a necessity of urban life, and poetry has to address itself (Oh, he sounded so professorial) to muck, to waste, to –
— Spare us the details, Harry.
He went on.
— If in keeping with the custom here I am to go, face open to the skies,
on the hearse, a pigeon might drop something on my brow, for luck.
Whether a band turns up or no, children will come near me, children like funerals.
He stopped once more, recalling the many funerals of his childhood: the distant relations, whose virtues were lauded by bored and dishonest clergymen; the stillborn; the ancients whose existence he had to take on trust, thanks to Alice Chapman’s approval or disapprobation.
