Chapman's Odyssey

by Paul Bailey

  — Our kitchen window will stare after me as I go,

  the washing in the balcony will wave to see me off.

  I have been happier here than you can ever imagine.

  Friends, I wish you all a long and happy life.

  — Is that it, Harry?

  — Yes. That’s it.

  — It’s not as – how shall I call it? – it’s not as melodious as the others you’ve recited.

  — I suppose it isn’t. But I love the washing waving farewell to him, and the pigeon leaving the perennial message on his brow. I find the poem curiously serene.

  — You’re the expert, Harry.

  The expert? He was no such sterile thing. He was an enthusiast, a hero-worshipper of those who use words or notes or brushstrokes to convey something of the mystery and wonder of human existence. Oh, that sounded so high-minded, so elitist, too precious by half to explain to Nancy, Marybeth and Philip. Yet it was what he was, and what he believed, and what he would die believing – today, tomorrow, this year, next year, or in the immediate or not too distant future.

  — Perhaps it’s because it’s in a foreign language.

  — Don’t worry. I’ve plenty more in my English poetry kitty.

  Then Harry Chapman was unexpectedly sick, and the simple meal he’d been given the evening before gushed out of him. The gushing went on and on, as if he’d consumed an entire feast instead of a single plate of tuna and salad. Bowls were brought for him and borne away, and the bedclothes he’d stained removed and replaced.

  — Where’s it all coming from?

  — That’s a constant mystery, Nancy Driver assured him. — You’ll feel so much better when it’s over.

  — When? When?

  — Any minute now. Try and stay calm.

  — At least the shit’s coming out from somewhere.

  The message NIL BY MOUTH appeared above his bed again, and the drip was attached to him – or he to the drip – once more. He saw the red blotches on his arms and knew they would increase in number as long as the pain persisted. His wounds, courtesy of Dr Pereira, the reliever of his physical suffering. His arrows.

  — What day is it?

  — Tuesday, Harry.

  — And is that lunch being served, or dinner?

  — Lunch.

  — It doesn’t smell enticing. Not even to a hungry soul like me.

  — You’re picky, honey. That’s what I love about you.

  Marybeth Myslawchuk kissed Harry Chapman’s forehead, and he wondered on the instant if her kiss signalled his demise. Was there infinite pity in her show of affection?

  — Take kindness when it’s offered you.

  — Yes, Auntie.

  — She’ll try to keep you alive, if anyone will.

  — You may be right.

  — Trust me.

  Harry Chapman had invariably trusted her, there was no denying that, but hadn’t he often been cynical about her eternal optimism? Alice’s nickname for her contented sibling was ‘Rosy Glow’.

  — You’d think, listening to Rosy Glow, that life is a bowl of bloody cherries from start to finish. No misery, no worrying where the next penny’s coming from, no aches and pains, no working till you drop, nothing but bleeding sunshine and happiness.

  — Malice and myself were as different as chalk and cheese, Harry’s aunt intervened. — I saw no good reason for making people more unhappy with their lot than they were already, whereas she had to twist the knife in the wound, no matter whose it was. She enjoyed preening herself at funerals, trying hard to conceal her delight that it wasn’t her turn yet.

  — She didn’t preen herself when Dad was buried.

  — No, not then, Harry dear. Not then she didn’t. Just that once. She was too upset on that occasion, I grant you.

  — You never married, did you, Rosy Glow? You were frightened to tie the knot. You had it easy.

  — What do you know of my life, Malice?

  Were they having an argument in his presence? Had Harry Chapman ever heard them quarrel? He couldn’t remember. Aunt Rose’s carapace, her impregnable shell of serenity, was never allowed to crack in public.

  — I often fall to wondering if I chose the wrong sister, Frank Chapman said to his son as they walked briskly over the grass.

  — Then you wouldn’t have Jessie for a daughter and me for a son.

  — That’s true. But I might have had a quieter time of it with Rose. She’s a stranger to moodiness.

  ‘A stranger to moodiness’ – here he was, sixty-one years later, revelling in a heartfelt phrase his laconic father had come out with on one of their Sunday walks. Harry Chapman’s ears had been attuned, as long ago as 1946, to the blessed gift that even the unlettered possess of saying something peculiarly memorable. His Aunt Rose wasn’t simply happy to be alive. No, no: she was ‘a stranger to moodiness’.

  As they neared home, and the prospect of Alice’s anger at their being ten minutes late, Harry had pictured Moodiness, garbed in red and black, approaching his beloved auntie with the greeting:

  — Hello, Rose Bartrip. I’m Moodiness.

  — Go away. I don’t wish to know you. I don’t speak to strangers.

  — Why are you smiling, son?

  — Nothing, Dad.

  — You’re a funny little fellow, and no mistake.

  And then Frank Chapman, in a rare display of affection, had ruffled Harry’s hair.

  It was a day of such intense heat that Harry Chapman, alone and palely loitering in what appeared to be a limitless desert, was desperate for the soothing comfort, however tepid it might be, of some shade. There were no trees, no bushes, to be seen. He pressed on, sweat flowing from him, his cotton shirt and trousers sticking to his tired flesh. Where was he heading? Did he have a destination? He couldn’t say, in truth.

  But then the questions were answered for him, with echoing voices talking excitedly of Abydos. The wind from the sea cooled Harry Chapman as he approached a throne of white marble, overlooking the city and the shore, on which was seated a bearded man he took to be no less than Xerxes, the presently triumphant king of the Persians.

  — I can see the whole of my army and my navy from here, he pronounced with evident pride. — The Hellespont is hidden by my ships, and the beaches and plains of Abydos are filled with my men, and I am happy. Yes, I am happy.

  Barely a moment passed before the happy king was weeping.

  His uncle, Artabanus, was by his side.

  — My Lord, surely there is a strange contradiction in what you do now and what you did a moment ago. Then you called yourself a happy man – and now you weep.

  — I was thinking, Xerxes replied — and it came into my mind how pitifully short human life is – for of all these thousands of men not one will be alive in a hundred years’ time.

  Harry Chapman, in that same white cotton shirt, those same white cotton trousers, was reading the Histories of Herodotus in London’s Hyde Park in the summer of 1955. His young heart galloped as he followed Xerxes’ progress from Sardis (page 432) to Lydia, and thence, passing Mount Ida, entered Trojan territory (page 433), where he reviewed his forces. Reviewing them, he wept (page 433, again), and the eighteen-year-old reader was tempted to weep with him as he lifted his eyes from the glorious book and saw the numerous sunbathers basking in the unexpected heat. How many of them, he wondered, were concerned with the shortness of their earthly existence? It occurred to him that one or two, perhaps, had fatal diseases and were sunning themselves in sheer defiance of the inevitable – making hay, so to speak. These brave souls were indistinguishable from the boys and girls exposing their winter-white skin to the sun’s warming rays. He returned to Herodotus, but soon he was sleepy. He took off his shirt and made a pillow of it. He awoke in the early evening with a great thirst, which he quenched in a pub near Marble Arch. He drank lager and lime, a mixture that was very popular with youngsters like him.

  — Harry?

  — Who is it?

  — Only your oldest
friend.

  — Pamela?

  — Yes, you sly elderly sod.

  — Am I imagining you? Are you real?

  — No, you aren’t, and yes, I am.

  — I didn’t want anyone to know I was here.

  — I rang your home, I rang your mobile, and then I rang the police, and after that I rang this hospital. I talked to Sister Nancy Driver, who said you were in the Zoffany Ward.

  — Is that where I am? The Zoffany Ward? A second-rate portraitist who lived in a grand house in Chiswick.

  — Yes, my dear old duck, that’s where you are.

  Pamela kissed his forehead and sat down at his bedside.

  — Where’s Graham, Harry?

  — Lost in the jungle somewhere in Sri Lanka.

  — Am I your first visitor then?

  — Apart from a Catholic priest and a few heroes and villains from literature, yes. I presume Sister Nancy has told you what’s the matter with me.

  — Yes. As much as she knows.

  — Cheer me up, Pam. Are you working?

  — Yes, darling, I am. I am essaying the role of the final victim of a serial killer who rapes, strangles and otherwise disembowels ladies d’un certain âge. The piece is called – would you believe? – Fire in the Groin.

  — The fiery groin belongs to the rapist-stroke-killer, n’est-ce pas?

  — Mais oui, mon cher. This will amuse you, Harry. The script requires the actor who plays Colin, he of the blazing genitals, to be quite spectacularly underdeveloped downstairs. It’s taken the director several months to find someone courageous enough to waggle his tiny tackle in front of the cameras. It transpires that his grandmother laughed when she saw young Colin’s penis and her mockery turned him into a murderer.

  — Does he show you the offending weapon, and do you laugh?

  — He does, and I don’t. So I’m not his final victim, after all. He spares me. I leave the room and call the criminal psychiatrist who has been on Colin’s trail and the wretch is found guilty and carted off to prison. Fire in the Groin will be transmitted at ten in the evening, when it is assumed that the nation’s kiddies will be tucked up in bed dreaming the sweet dreams of the blissfully innocent. Heigh-ho!

  — Do you have many lines to learn?

  — A few, most of them risible. To think that I was trained to act in Shakespeare, Ibsen and Chekhov – not to mention Greek tragedy – and here I am in my dotage looking at a distraught assassin’s apology for a willy with sympathetic understanding. Beggars belief, doesn’t it?

  — I’m too cynical to be surprised any more.

  Much as he loved Pamela, Harry Chapman wished she would leave him. He wanted to be with her in normal, healthy circumstances, not in this dismal place, this anteroom of nowhere.

  — You seem very tired, he heard her say, with relief.

  — I am.

  — I’ll be off then, to perfect my performance. Have you the strength to read today’s paper?

  — I think I have.

  — It contains the usual stuff – suicide bombings, starving millions in Africa, Aids on the increase. Just the kind of news to put a smile on your lovely old face.

  They kissed goodbye, awkwardly, Continental fashion, and Harry Chapman had cause to wonder if this was to be their very last shared moment. She blew him another kiss as she left what he now knew to be the Zoffany Ward. He closed his eyes and slept.

  On waking, the first thing he noticed was the crumpled newspaper Pamela had left behind for him.

  — I need reading glasses, he said to Sister, or Nurse, Veronica, who was passing by.

  — Why’s that?

  — I’m blind to words in the evening. It is evening, isn’t it?

  — Yes, Mr Chapman. It is.

  — I want to read this paper my dear friend left for me.

  — I’ll see what we have in the treasure trove.

  The ‘treasure trove’? What the hell was she talking about? She had disappeared before he could ask for an explanation.

  — I think these will do the trick, she said on her return. Veronica handed him a pair of glasses framed in tortoiseshell.

  — From the ‘treasure trove’?

  — Exactly.

  — And what is that, Veronica?

  — It’s odds and ends. Recent acquisitions from our patients. Neither they nor their relatives have bothered to reclaim them yet. There are spectacles and a couple of rings and a gold necklace and one of those old-fashioned watches men used to carry in their top pocket.

  The kind, he did not say, his father depended upon when he was running late on long-ago Sundays.

  — Try them on, Mr Chapman.

  — Pass me the paper, would you, Veronica?

  She did so, and to his sudden, immeasurable delight he found the print positively leaping out at him.

  — Oh my, oh my, he heard himself exclaim.

  — Enjoy your reading.

  — I shall.

  It had been his habit, for at least a decade, to turn to the obituary pages first. He needed to know who was in and who was out. Those who were out today were a siren of silent movies – a dipsomaniac with a vampiric sexual appetite – whose struggle with booze and gigolos kept her alive for 106 years, and a Spitfire pilot from the Second World War who had been captured by the Japanese and forced to endure indignities, both physical and mental, that his cheerful equilibrium prevented him from revealing to his wife and children. And then, and there, was a name he recognised, alongside a blurred snapshot of a bald man in what could just be discerned as a velvet suit.

  — No, Leo, no.

  Yes, it was Leo Duggan, the dapper Leo, his first of many Jewish friends. Leo had died in Holland, his wife of twenty-seven years beside him, the willing party to an assisted suicide. The obituarist recorded that Leo contracted motor neurone disease in his early sixties and had steadily wasted away. It was a skeletal figure, a shadow of the once substantial Leo who took his last flight to Amsterdam. Leo’s long career in classical music was celebrated, in particular his generosity towards young composers. Eleanor Duggan, Harry read, faced the possibility of being charged with murder.

  He would write her a letter of condolence and support as soon as he was free again.

  — What are you doing this Sunday, Harry?

  — Nothing special.

  — My ma and pa (Leo, uniquely, called his parents Ma and Pa, whereas the other boys at school referred to Mum and Dad) would like my best friend to join us for lunch.

  — Thanks, Leo.

  — Pa says he’ll pick you up at noon. I’ll give him your address.

  Leo and his parents lived in a district named Golders Green, which Harry Chapman had never visited in any of his long walks around London.

  — Golders Green, eh? Little Israel, you mean, remarked his mother. — His family won’t be short of a penny or two, if that’s where he lives.

  Leo’s father’s car drew up outside the Chapman residence shortly before twelve. Harry couldn’t remember what make it was, but it was the grandest motor the street had ever seen. It was a gleaming dark blue.

  — Allow me to introduce myself, Mrs Chapman. I am Bernard Duggan, Leo’s father.

  — I’m pleased to meet you.

  — The pleasure’s mutual.

  — I hope my son behaves himself and watches his table manners.

  — I’m sure he will. I’ve no worries on that score. You must be very proud of him. Such a fine actor at such a young age.

  Alice Chapman smiled and nodded by way of reply. She watched as Bernard Duggan drove off with her son beside him on the front seat. She waved as the car glided smoothly along and turned right at the corner.

  — Charming woman, your mother, Harry.

  — Yes.

  — I believe you have a sister.

  — She’s called Jessie, Mr Duggan.

  — Is she as clever as you?

  — To be honest, no.

  Ashamed at this response, he added:

 
— But then, she doesn’t pretend to be.

  He was fifteen, soon to be sixteen, now, and Jack, the ship-boy, had entered the world of his imagination. Jack hadn’t alerted Harry to the moral trap he had fallen in – the trap of pride, of arrogance.

  — I didn’t intend to sound arrogant, Mr Duggan.

  — Don’t worry. You were speaking the truth. Leo tells me you love music as much as he does.

  — I do.

  — In that case, I have a wonderful surprise for you. I am not exaggerating. I think you will be impressed. Let’s wait and see.

  Harry waited, and saw, and heard, and marvelled, after previously marvelling at the palatial house the Duggans occupied – room upon spacious room, with ceilings as high up, he fancied, as the sky. He thought of his own poky home and was sick with envy.

  — Your eyes are out on stalks, said Leo’s mother, Sarah.

  — This place is fabulous, Mrs Duggan. It’s enormous. I could easily get lost in it.

  — You sweet boy. We’re privileged, that’s all. Leo assures me you are rich where it really matters. In your soul, Harry.

  Then, to his consternation, the red-headed Sarah Duggan kissed him.

  — Stay rich in spirit, Harry Chapman dear. Regardless.

  That word ‘regardless’, what did she mean by it? Regardless of any dire human circumstance – was that, in 1952, what she was implying?

  — Come and eat. Boys, in my experience, are always hungry.

  Harry Chapman was accustomed to eating his meals at the wobbly table in the tiny kitchen where his mother slaved – her expression – at the gas cooker. On special occasions, such as Christmas, the front-room door was unlocked, and lunch or dinner was served at the dining table bequeathed to Alice Bartrip by one of her aristocratic employers. That circular table was in Harry’s possession still, with a memento of Christopher’s worst drunken rage running across it. He had scarred the wood with a freshly sharpened carving knife, saying as he did so:

  — This is meant for you, Harry Chapman, you piece of shit.

  Twenty years of polishing with beeswax had made the mark less obvious, more integrated with the stains and smears bestowed upon it for nearly two centuries.