Chapman's Odyssey

by Paul Bailey

  Wilf Granger’s ‘pioneering’ interpretation was lauded by the same critics who praised Hal Musgrave’s ‘revolutionary’ Hamlet, in which the gloomy Dane was portrayed as the crazed inheritor of congenital syphilis. Hal was Wilf’s keenest rival for a decade – each outwitting the other in their novel ‘exhumations’ (Hal’s word) of Shakespeare’s tragedies. Hal’s all-black Othello, with the Moor of Venice the solitary white presence on stage, was considered prophetic in 1969, and in a curious sense it was. The rivalry ended with Hal’s accidental death later that year, overdosing on heroin.

  Harry Chapman remembered, now, the joyous occasion when the First Witch or Monk asked the director why a devout Franciscan would shriek ‘I come, Graymalkin!’

  ‘Oh, Terence, you have such a restricted imagination. You say, not shriek, “Brother Graymalkin” or “Father Graymalkin” instead. And you, Andrew, will substitute “Brother Paddock calls”. Is that clear?’

  The Three Monks, stifling incipient hysteria, nodded.

  Wilfred Granger was another survivor. He had outlived four – or was it five? – tempestuous marriages. He had been a Roman Catholic, to please (and guarantee sexual contact with) his first wife; a sabre-rattling atheist; an insufferably smug Buddhist; an all-things-to-all-men agnostic; and latterly, and gloriously, a hypochondriac with a pathological interest in his own decay. He had abandoned the theatre in his fifties, and assumed the role of guru to younger directors and actors who considered his very short book, Merely Players, a fount of theatrical wisdom. It had attracted thousands of international worshippers to come and sit at his expensively shod feet. His unwavering self-love was the abiding reason why Harry Chapman was fond of him, knowing as Harry did that it’s the most inadequate love of all – Wilf’s insatiable need for it could never be satiated, never gratified.

  And, at seventy-six, he still wore his dusty grey hair tied in a ponytail.

  — Oh, Jessie, you haven’t had much of a life.

  — Who says so, Harry?

  They were standing on either side of Alice Chapman’s coffin. The undertaker had only just closed the lid on her, with her children’s permission.

  — This isn’t the time or the place to talk about me.

  — I suppose not.

  He broached the subject of Jessie’s ill-fated existence some weeks later and was startled by her response.

  — You have a nerve, Harry. I know you’ve travelled, which I haven’t; I know you’ve seen the world, which I haven’t, but does that give you the right to say my life’s been wasted? I don’t believe it does.

  He was too stunned to speak.

  — Don’t interrupt me, she said in the silence. — You think because you write books that you understand other people’s hearts and minds. But you don’t, believe me you don’t. ‘Oh, Jessie, you haven’t had much of a life,’ you said. How the hell – bless my Christian soul – would you know?

  He could have replied, but didn’t, that Jessie Chapman – as far as he was aware – had been at her mother’s demanding beck and call from her schooldays onwards. There had been one prospective lover, but he’d failed to meet with Alice Chapman’s approval, and her acidic judgement of his character had meant curtains for Stanley. No romance, no adventure, no real culture – such had been his sister’s miserable lot. Or so it seemed on the surface.

  — Jessie, I must apologise.

  — You don’t have to. Just keep your trap shut once in a while.

  It was, he conceded, good advice. He was in the literary business of delving beneath surfaces, and here he was judging his sister with the superficiality of a mere gossip. How dare he? How dare he belittle her? He wasn’t privy to her deepest feelings, whatever curious form they took. They were hers alone to express or to keep secret. That was the nub of it.

  He would often think to himself that Jessie might have had a better time on earth, but he never said so again. When she, too, was dead he remarked to Graham as they left the hospital that he was distressed beyond words for what Alice had done to her hapless daughter.

  — You’re being dramatic, Harry. Jessie was happy enough. She made few demands on people. And her last illness was mercifully quick. She’d be upset, and not a little angry, if she knew you were sad about her relationship with the remarkable Alice. Jessie coped. There’s much to be said in favour of those who cope.

  In the late 1940s, Sir William Lilliburn’s charity school – its motto was ‘Better Deathe than Deceite’ – opened its doors to boys who had not been awarded a scholarship to study in its hallowed halls. Harry was the honoured possessor of a bursary, and Leo Duggan’s father was rich enough to pay for his son’s education, but the likes of Ralph Edmunds and his cronies lacked the academic skills required of generations of Lilliburnians from 1700 onwards. They were good at games, but little else.

  Harry Chapman wondered, now, what Leo Duggan, the friend who had introduced him to Mendelssohn and Babar the Elephant, would have thought of his liaison with Leo’s tormentor, so cavalier with words of abuse such as ‘Yid’ and ‘kike’.

  — The Ralph Edmundses of this world are best ignored. Leave them to stew in their own filthy juice.

  He had dined, and attended concerts, with Leo and Eleanor during the years of his Queequeg and Ishmael assignations. Once, the conversation had drifted onto the subject of anti-Semitism in post-war Britain and Leo had remembered the first occasion on which Ralph and his braying followers had pointed to his circumcised cock and joked about the size and shape of his nose – or ‘conk’, as they called it. Two nights before, Harry had lain with Ralph in a Bloomsbury hotel after being squeezed breathless in the shower.

  — Poor brainless Ralph, said the gentle Leo. I hope he made something of himself. He came from a rough background.

  — I hope so, too, the secretive Harry Chapman concurred. – I really hope so.

  What was this music he was hearing?

  — It’s a song by Brahms, the sixteen-year-old Leo tells him. — ‘Gestillte Sehnsucht’, or ‘Satisfied Longing’. It’s Ma’s particular favourite. She becomes very weepy every time she hears it. Once a week, Harry, to be precise.

  — And who is that singing?

  — You don’t know? You poor Babar-starved Harry. That’s Kathleen Ferrier, no less. Ma, Pa and I think she has the loveliest voice in the world.

  When the song is over, Leo explains its meaning. The unhappy singer, in the golden glow of evening, hears the soft voices of birds and prepares herself for sleep. But this sleep, Leo says with a smile, is obviously the final one – the last sleep that eradicates every pain, every earthly longing, leaving only peace.

  — That’s morbid, Leo.

  — No, it’s not. I can’t say why, but it’s not morbid at all when the music is very beautiful.

  Harry Chapman, thinking of the Queequeg and Ishmael of Melville’s imagination, recalled his previous stay in hospital, twenty-seven years earlier. He’d had an abscess on his upper gums which his dentist – a cheery New Zealander with permanent bad breath – had been unable and unwilling to remove. The specialist at Roehampton had noticed that he was holding a copy of Moby-Dick and had asked him if he was mad.

  — Don’t misunderstand me, Mr Chapman. By ‘mad’ I don’t mean certifiably insane, I just mean mad enough to read a book as long and rambling as that. It’s about a whale, isn’t it?

  — Partly.

  — I like suspense myself.

  — You don’t have a sufficiency in your work?

  — If I answered ‘yes’, you wouldn’t let me perform the operation. There will be no suspense tomorrow, I can promise.

  So the madman sat on a bench in the hospital grounds that warm summer afternoon and opened the much-loved book and scanned the familiar pages. There was a ‘damp, drizzly November’ in his own soul as he attempted, and failed, to read on. He had learned recently of the unexpected death of an actor of his own age whom he’d shared a scene with in a television cops series. Victor had looked the fittest of the fi
t, treating his body as if it were a temple. And then, on the third of July, 1980, running around his local park with his teenage son keeping pace with him, Victor stopped to take what would be his final breath. He opened his mouth, made to clutch his heart, and fell to earth for ever.

  Melville’s words swam in front of him. He felt then as he’d felt as a boy, standing in the graveyard of St Mary’s Church, reading the names and dates and pious tributes on the blackened tombstones. Those Joshuas, Elizas, Alexanders and Lydias had been a long time mouldering, with generation upon generation of worms taking sustenance from their remains. This was man’s fate – a progress from nothing into nothingness.

  Later that evening, in the ward, he joined a group of male patients who were watching a television documentary about Laurel and Hardy. Stan Laurel’s face reminded him of his father’s, and his sense of futility deepened, if that were possible. He smiled, of course, as the incomparable pair tried to carry a piano up a flight of steps, just as he’d smiled as a small boy at the very same sequence in his local cinema, the Super Palace. It was known as a fleapit, and the auditorium always smelled of an especially lethal disinfectant. That smell returned to him briefly as he watched the dead comics, immortalised on celluloid.

  The programme ended, and someone switched off the set. The men started talking. A man in his twenties was the immediate focus of their attention. They demanded to hear more stories of his sexual exploits. The blond cockney Lothario, whose right leg was in plaster, was happy to regale his eager audience with the adventures that had brought him to this pretty pass of broken bones and torn ligaments.

  Lothario, alias Brian, had jumped from a balcony to avoid a confrontation with an angry husband who had returned to the second-floor flat he shared with his wife, ‘an old woman pushing forty’. Brian, hearing a key turning in the front door, had slipped out of Mrs Paterson with greater speed than he had slipped into her, and – clutching his trousers, shirt and underpants – he’d climbed over the railing and leapt to freedom, leaving the naked Mrs P and his second-best pair of moccasins behind. He’d hobbled away from the scene of the crime in only his cotton socks, ‘in complete bleeding agony’, and got his clothes back on in an alley, and now he was an invalid, thanks to a few minutes of fun and games with a sex-mad ratbag.

  Brian had a fiancée, Harry learned, and the lucky girl’s lovely mother very much approved of the match. Whenever the daughter was off on her travels – she had a job with a perfume company, with branches outside London – Mummy gave her future son-in-law a thorough workout in the master bedroom.

  It was generally agreed among the listeners that his marriage, if it ever happened, would end in tears. Everyone asked for an invitation to the wedding – which had been postponed because of his accident – when it was rescheduled. They would come to the church laden with tons of confetti to throw at the bride, who would be a vision in white, and the groom, in his top hat and tails. If there was any left over, they’d sprinkle Brian’s in-laws with it, as a token of respect for the mother in particular, who had managed to keep a straight face throughout the ceremony.

  Harry Chapman reckoned that Brian, if he hadn’t been murdered by a cuckolded husband or by one of his discarded lovers, would be in his late forties now. He pictured him as a portly raconteur, with hundreds of personal anecdotes at his command, inspiring new and younger Lotharios to feats of recklessness. Perhaps his wife had borne him a son, the identical model of his devious dad, who was leaping off balconies, hiding in wardrobes, sticking on false moustaches and presently re-enacting all the dear, familiar clichés of theatrical adultery, while Harry – no longer subscribing to the idea of the futility of human existence – clung on to his life, what little there was left of it, in the Zoffany Ward.

  Young Harry Chapman was alone in the Chapmans’ half of the house that afternoon. He turned on the radio, or the ‘wireless’ as everybody called it in those days, and was soon compelled to listen intently. A man was describing the progress of a tennis match, and Harry had to make sense of unfamiliar words such as ‘forehand’, ‘backhand’, ‘volley’ and ‘lob’. ‘Love’, which up till now he had associated with affection, suddenly meant ‘nothing’ or ‘nothing on the scoreboard’. Harry had never seen anyone play tennis, because there were no courts at school. Football and cricket were the games on the curriculum, and Harry hated both, especially the latter. The boys in his class had laughed at him when he’d gone in to bat, closing his eyes in fear as the hard ball was bowled in his direction. He was declared to be a coward at the wicket, and was happy to be relegated to the rank of bored spectator.

  He was intrigued by what he was hearing. One of the players, Jaroslav Drobny, a Czech who claimed Egyptian nationality, seemed to be the crowd’s favourite, judging by the loud applause that greeted every winning shot. His opponent, an American with the very American name Budge Patty, was making it a fierce, closely fought contest.

  For years afterwards, whenever he attended the championships at Wimbledon, Harry Chapman would marvel that he had been bewitched by tennis long before he had ever seen a ball served and put into play. He saw himself, now, in the poky kitchen, his ears attuned to Max Robertson’s vivid commentary, deciding on the instant that if there was a single sport in the world he might possibly enjoy it could only be tennis.

  The pain in his gut returned with renewed force.

  — Oh, God. Oh, dear God.

  Nancy Driver was soon at his side.

  — Harry? What’s up, my sweet?

  — It’s back. I’d hoped it had gone away, but no such luck.

  — I’ll see if I can find Dr Pereira.

  — Please. Please.

  Jack, the ever-present, ever-reliable ship-boy, advised him to be calm. Harry had no cause to panic.

  No, perhaps not. Perhaps this was, at last, the end. So be it, he thought, while wishing it were otherwise. So bloody be it.

  — At least you’re in a clean hospital bed, son, not in a stinking filthy, Flanders trench like me.

  — Yes, Dad.

  — With the rats coming out at night to see if I’m fodder yet.

  — Yes, Dad, I’m lucky.

  He was aware that Dr Pereira was looking down at him.

  — Harry, I need to put a little pressure on your stomach. I’ll be as gentle as possible.

  Gentle as the doctor was, he wasn’t gentle enough for Harry Chapman, who cried out in agony.

  — I’m going to give you a sedative, Harry. I want to make the next few hours easy for you.

  Ah, the magic potion again, administered by the curly-haired fruitseller, in his white hospital coat.

  — There, Harry. I’ll be back tomorrow morning. You’ll be able to rest now.

  — Harry Chapman, I’m not going to call you a third time. If you don’t get out of bed this instant, you’ll be late for school.

  What was the point of leaving the warmth of the blankets and sheets for the chill of a December morning? His father, who had slept alongside him for the last six months, was dead and only recently buried and the pointlessness of rising, washing and dressing for a new day was uppermost in his eleven-year-old mind. Yet rise he did, at the behest of his sister Jessie, when she admonished him gently for not respecting their daddy’s memory.

  — He wanted you to have the education he never had.

  This was a truth he could neither ignore nor deny. He studied French – the inexplicable language Frank called ‘parlee-vous’ – with special application that Wednesday. He would bring honour to the Chapman name, he thought as he mastered the present tense of the verbs être and avoir. He would make that his mission in life.

  — Education’s all very well, but too much of it can bring you trouble, said his mother, dispensing the wisdom she imparted to him throughout his schooldays and beyond.

  He shrugged by way of reply.

  — You’ll mark the truth of my words one day.

  — Leave the boy be, Alice.

  — You always take his sid
e, Rosy Glow.

  She takes everyone’s side, the young Harry Chapman heard his older self explain to the dead woman who had brought him into being, because she understands what few of us are granted to understand – that we all merit, whatever our failings, some acknowledgement of our worth. Aunt Rose had acknowledged her nephew’s worthiness from his infancy.

  — You lovely boy.

  He had been ‘lovely’ for once or twice in the year, when Rose had come to visit. Jessie had been designated ‘lovely’, too. Aunt Rose had brought them fruit and sweets and chocolates and little pictures of St Francis of Assisi, who, she said, for all that he was a Catholic, was someone in touch with birds and animals and plants and the wonders of the universe. He was her hero of heroes, and she’d happened upon him by chance, through nursing a dying Jesuit, back in her early days of tending the sick.

  — You were a nurse, Auntie Rose?

  — Of course I was, forgetful Harry.

  Yes, yes, he remembered, now, his sweet-natured aunt had cared for the elderly at a home in the seaside town Broadstairs. She had gone there in her late twenties and remained in situ until she was sixty, when she decided to live ‘like a lady of leisure’ on her pension. So the kind soul who would end her days in the Eventide Home, talking to the mischievous, invisible Gertie, had cared for hundreds of people who had their own unseen friends and acquaintances.

  How many funerals can a man have? And just how many times can he die?

  These were the questions nagging Harry Chapman as he lay in an open coffin waiting for the service to begin. There wasn’t even a hint of gold, which led him to believe that this repeat performance was taking place in somewhere other than St Mark’s.

  — Hello and goodbye, said a grinning Christopher. — I’m here to make sure you’ve gone.

  — Very kind of you. As thoughtful as ever.

  — It was the least I could do.

  Then it was Wilfred Granger’s turn to pay his last respects.