Chapman's Odyssey

by Paul Bailey

  — I wish I had your luck, Harry. I may look healthy, but I’m really very ill. First of all, my heart. Second, my diabetes. Third, my prostate. Fourth, my ingrowing toenail. And you never had to endure cataracts, did you?

  — I’m so sorry for you, Wilf.

  — I wish other people were. It’s a cruel, uncaring world we live in. Oh, the indignity of getting old.

  An exasperated Alice Chapman had no sympathy for the whining individual who was saying goodbye to her son.

  — Push off, misery guts. What kind of man are you? Moan, moan, moan. Is that what Harry wants to hear at a time like this? No, it bloody well isn’t.

  Actually, it bloody well was what he wanted to hear because Wilf’s limitless self-concern and self-pity amused Harry Chapman. He couldn’t explain to his mother – who was no longer there, anyhow – why this was so. She had always found his sense of humour peculiar.

  The NIL BY MOUTH sign was in place once more.

  — How’s the pain, Harry?

  — It seems to have gone away for the moment. Is that you, Marybeth?

  — One and the same.

  — Is it morning, afternoon or evening?

  — The latter.

  — I shan’t be leaving here this week, shall I?

  — That’s not for me to say. Try not to worry about it too much. I know that’s easier said than done, but try, honey.

  ‘Honey’ would try his best to be stoical. He managed to mutter Edgar’s wonderful – to Harry Chapman wonderful – lines in King Lear:

  — The worst is not,

  So long as we can say ‘This is the worst.’

  — That bears a lot to think about and mull over, said Marybeth Myslawchuk, blowing him a kiss as she left him alone in his bed near the main entrance to, and exit from, the Zoffany Ward.

  Tuesday – Wednesday – Thursday – Friday

  — There isn’t much to shave down here, Mr Chapman, said Maciek Nazwisko. — Just a few days’ growth.

  — Can you count the hairs?

  — Four and a half. The half is just a tiny – how you say? – sprout.

  — In five days? That’s a miracle.

  Where had he read, in his youth, that human hair and nails have an independent life? You die, and if you’re not cremated but buried, the hairs on your head, if you’re not totally bald, and your body, if you are hirsute, and the nails on your fingers and toes keep growing while the rest of you rots.

  — You’re ready for theatre now, Mr Chapman.

  — Thank you, Maciek.

  He was placed on a gurney and taken along the same corridors and wheeled into the same capacious lift which plunged downwards. A new someone commented on his paleness to a new another, who responded that she’d seen more colour in an uncooked fillet of cod.

  If I ever get out of here, I shall use that remark one day, the novelist in him thought.

  — We meet again, said Dr Helen Burgess, the anaesthetist. — You know the procedure.

  — Yes.

  She examined him thoroughly, and told him she still felt confident to go ahead.

  He heard her wish him good luck before the anaesthetic took Harry Chapman away from every sight and sound.

  These men were doctors – that much was clear – because they had stethoscopes draped down their white coats. One of them was saying:

  — Gentlemen, what we have here is a most interesting specimen. This human object we are examining has eaten nothing but peas for the past three months. Fresh garden peas, tinned peas, frozen peas, and haricot beans for variation. Observe the effects, gentlemen. Examine him, examine him, if you please. If the body emits natural gas, then the peas have served our purpose. The patient’s pulse is irregular, is it not?

  — It is, Doctor, says a lone voice.

  — And his eyes, see how dead they are. They lack all lustre, gentlemen. It must be our immediate purpose to restore their sparkle. How do we achieve that end?

  — No more peas, Doctor. Change his diet.

  — Excellent thinking. Let us move to the next bed, gentlemen, where we will find another fascinating case. What we have here is a throwback to the beasts of the field. That is why he is kept in chains. He has been fed nothing but dried bread and water for six months. Approach him at your peril, gentlemen.

  — Harry?

  — Is that you, Dad?

  — Who else could it be, my son? What are you doing here with me? How the hell did you get through the German lines?

  — I followed my nose, I suppose, the very young Harry Chapman replied, and giggled. — I’m a poet who doesn’t know it.

  — Listen, Harry boy, this is no place for you. If I die at the hands of the Hun, you stand no chance of ever being born. Go back to your mother, whoever she is.

  — Her name’s Alice.

  — Alice Bartrip? So I marry Alice, the pretty girl with the sharp tongue, do I? Well, well, wonders will never cease. Her sister Rose has a kinder nature, but it’s Alice who gives me wet dreams. Don’t you dare tell her I said that.

  It was good to be with his father again. They had been apart for sixty years. Frank looked like the shy young man in uniform in the sepia photograph Jessie had discovered in Alice’s ‘secret drawer’ after their mother’s death. And Harry, of course, couldn’t see himself, but he could hear his own treble, childish voice, burbling happily against the steady noise of guns and bombs.

  — Now you’re here, you’d best make yourself comfortable. Keep your head down for Christ’s sake, Harry. We don’t want you connecting with a stray bullet.

  He sat down in the dark, damp trench. Frank’s fellow soldiers were no more than shadows.

  Then the sky turned red and white by turns, and the frightened little boy huddled in the warmth and safety of his daddy’s arms.

  This was music of a kind new to his ears. It was like nothing he had heard before and had never anticipated hearing.

  — This is my country, said Antal, Harry’s friend of an hour. — This is the soul of my country.

  Harry listened, even as he revelled in Antal’s beauty.

  — He, too, was in exile at the end. As I am now, pretty Harry. I can’t believe I shall ever see Budapest again.

  It was the summer of 1959. Three years earlier, there had been a failed uprising in Hungary. Soviet tanks had stormed through the capital. Antal’s father – Antal told his very new friend – had faced a firing squad. You don’t face a firing squad and live.

  Antal poured more whisky into Harry’s slightly chipped glass.

  — You care for my beloved Bartók, Harry?

  — Yes, I do. I do very much.

  — He is, as I say, our soul.

  Harry had heard Mikrokosmos hundreds of times since that June evening in Antal’s furnished room in a house near Knightsbridge, and on each occasion the face of the Hungarian actor had appeared to him just as he’d seen it when Antal told him the pianist was Geza Anda, a name that would stay in his memory.

  — Geza Anda was born to play Bartók, Harry.

  What an educative sexual encounter that turned out to be. Harry had not expected to discover a composer or to learn of a family’s tragic fate when he stopped to look in a shop window in order to speak to the man who was following him. Their eyes had met, they’d smiled, and Harry had accepted the stranger’s offer to go back for a coffee.

  In March that year, Harry had played his first and last substantial role on the professional stage, as a cockney waif in a verse play by Marigold Jeavons. It was called The Game of Chance and no one in the cast of six understood what it was about. It was a ritualistic piece, with everyone speaking in unison at key moments in the drama. The audiences throughout the two-week run had either cheered or booed at the final curtain, and Harry and the other five members of the East End gang had assumed stoical expressions as their supporters and denigrators turned the auditorium into a battlefield. Only Marigold was delighted with the response, likening it to that which greeted the first performance of Stravin
sky’s The Rite of Spring, or Le Sacre du printemps, as she unfailingly referred to it. ‘It’s my Sacre,’ she would tell her ‘brave darling ones’, adding ‘and yours too, my loves’.

  — I did not see it, Harry.

  — Thank God you didn’t, Antal. I wouldn’t be lying here with you if you’d witnessed me playing the fool for over two hours.

  Antal continued acting long after his lover of three blissful months became a novelist. He never lost his thick, beguiling accent, which he used to sinister effect in a number of horror movies. Harry liked to think that when Antal plunged a stake through an evil Russian colonel’s heart, he had – perhaps – his own father’s murder in mind.

  — God did a good day’s work when He invented the sardine, said Alice Chapman as she opened the tin with her customary dexterity.

  Oh, those tins, and the keys that came with them. Harry was all fingers and thumbs, and then more fingers and thumbs, whenever he had to manipulate the hated key, which always refused to function for him. It would get halfway across the lid and stop and remain immovable.

  — The stupid bloody thing.

  — Are you talking about yourself?

  — No, I’m not, Mother, and you know it.

  — I know that you’re useless with your hands. And I don’t know why you are. Your father was the best handyman in the world.

  — Well, I’m not, and I never will be, as you are thrilled to remind your hopeless son.

  She cut off a large knob of butter and mashed the sardines into it. Within minutes, she had made a delicious paste to spread on toast. This was one of his favourite meals, and he could savour it now, wherever he was.

  Wherever he was, it wasn’t the kitchen in the house near the gasworks and the candle factory. It was a brighter, sunnier place, with high ceilings and as much space as he had ever craved. He munched his sardine-butter toast until a youthful waiter guided him to a table by the window.

  The waiter opened a folded napkin with a flourish after he had seen Harry Chapman sitting comfortably in an expansive chair.

  There was no menu to be consulted. The chef knew exactly what Signor Chapman wanted to eat, as well as the wines he favoured.

  — Buon appetito.

  And so the feast began. He looked about him to see if there were any other diners – but no, he was alone; he was splendidly alone. Yes, he sat in splendour while the exquisite food was set before him – soup and fish as a prelude, then lamb done in the Roman style, then calf’s liver, then roast beef with Yorkshire pudding, then pheasant and partridge and venison. The white wine was a Pinot from Friuli and the red a rich Barolo. Cheeses came next – Taleggio, accompanied by a ripe pear; Stilton, with a glass of port; and a hunk of mature Cheddar, resting in state beside a tantalising dollop of chutney. A chocolate mousse, flavoured subtly with a hint of rosemary, was brought to the hungry guest, who licked his spoon when the bowl was empty.

  Why, after this surfeit of food, these dishes of a lifetime, was Harry Chapman still famished? His stomach was growling. He should have felt bloated, incapable of movement, but he clicked his fingers and when the waiter reappeared, an old man now instead of the youth who had welcomed him – he had aged almost imperceptibly with each course while the meal was in progress – the solitary diner asked if he could go back to the soup and fish and eat everything, every single delicious thing, all over again. The waiter shed fifty years and bowed.

  It was with the arrival of the venison, surrounded by juniper berries, that the newly ancient waiter collapsed and died in the room that was neither bright nor sunny. Harry Chapman, starved of sustenance, banged his knife and fork on the table and wept in frustration that this basic need was being denied him.

  — Here’s God’s best invention, Harry. Fill your face with toast and sardine butter, my son.

  — Harry.

  — Is that you? Is that you, Graham?

  — It is.

  — Who is this Graham person, Harry?

  — He’s the dear, kind man I live with. You’d been dead four years when I met him.

  — I hope, for your sake, he’s sensible.

  — He is.

  — He needs to be, with a dreamer like you. If Harry Chapman’s feet were ever on the ground, I can’t say as how I noticed.

  Hadn’t she noticed that her son wished to escape from the refined but desperate poverty into which he was born? Hadn’t she heard him lament that there has to be something more beautiful to contemplate than the view of the gasworks and the candle factory? Obviously not, for if she had she would have understood why he was a dreamer. That was why his feet, itching to be gone, were seldom on the ground.

  — That Christopher was sensible until he went mad.

  — I think you can say that about a lot of people, Mother.

  — Do you still see him?

  — I try not to, but he finds a way of inveigling –

  — ‘In’ what?

  — He finds a way of contacting me, even though he’s dead. As you do.

  — I only have your welfare in mind.

  — Thank you. Can I ask you a question?

  — You can, for all the good it will do you.

  — Did you really work for Virginia and Leonard Woolf?

  There was no immediate reply. He waited for her to speak. He was on the point of saying that of course she didn’t when Alice Chapman, cackling to herself, answered:

  — That would be telling, wouldn’t it? Those two were worse than royalty in regard to confidences. They were frightened we’d spill the beans, us mongrels, about their funny habits.

  — So you did work for them?

  — As I say, that would be telling, wouldn’t it?

  Here we go round Alice Chapman’s ever-blossoming mulberry bush, he thought. She loved her riddles, her teasing little games with her children, her husband, and the world at large. They added a touch of mystery to her humdrum everyday life.

  — Oh, Mother, you could tell me now.

  — I could, if I had a mind to. But perhaps I haven’t.

  He took a sudden vow of silence. Why should he waste precious words? The Trappists know that silence is the virtue of virtues, and the time had come to emulate them, as he had failed to do in the past.

  — Aren’t you going to say anything?

  He was tempted to answer no, but this was one temptation he was pleased to resist.

  — This must be the first time the cat has got your tongue.

  Was it? He’d been monkish in the face of Christopher’s insults, to his tormenting lover’s annoyance. The proverbial cat had captured and eaten his tongue on those terrible nights.

  — I haven’t upset you, have I?

  No, she hadn’t upset him. But was he upsetting her, by refusing to respond? He surprised himself by hoping he wasn’t. Harry, the Trappist he ought to have been, wanted nothing but peace between them.

  — I know, I know to my cost, Harry, what differences we’ve had, but can’t you just say a kind word back to me?

  One kind word would lead to another, and another, and no kind word in the dictionary would be kind enough to placate the unassuageable soul of Alice Chapman.

  — You can kill with kindness, Prince Myshkin (entrapped in permanent isolation) reminded his friend Harry.

  He heeded the Prince’s wise caution without acknowledging it. His mother, her ears cocked for every utterance, would assume he was addressing her.

  — He prefers not to speak to you, pronounced Bartleby, coming to Harry’s rescue, and that seemed to settle the matter, for Alice left in a huff, slamming decades of doors behind her. This was the huff of all huffs, outhuffing – if there was such a term – the huffs she had created, engineered, manoeuvred, fallen victim to, in the years of her marriage and motherhood.

  Now that she had vanished, Harry Chapman felt the need to speak to her.

  — Graham?

  — I’m here.

  Wasn’t it agreed, on God only knows what scant evidence, that when you are
dying, your whole life flashes before you? Your whole life? Well, the Grim Reaper wasn’t ready for him yet, because nothing like his whole life – with those innumerable moments of boredom; those days of blank despair – was in his sights.

  — Harry?

  — Aunt Rose. Oh, it’s lovely to see you.

  — Likewise, as those Yanks say.

  It was Harry and Jessie’s first Christmas without their father, and here was their aunt bringing tidings of comfort and great joy to the bereaved family. Dear Frank, she told her unhappy and angry sister, would want everyone to be as happy as possible, under the circumstances.

  — You can make yourself useful, Rose, by getting out of my kitchen. I’ll allow you to lay the table, and then you can park your fanny in the one comfortable armchair.

  — Must you be so vulgar, Alice?

  — If I’m being vulgar, why are you smiling?

  — Because I just heard the old Alice, the Alice I grew up with. The sister with the fighting spirit.

  That there was love between Malice and Rosy Glow, demonstrated in frowns as much as smiles, their son and nephew did not doubt.

  Perhaps Rose envied her sibling’s gift of acerbity, and perhaps Alice sometimes thought that her own path through life might have been less bumpy if she hadn’t judged others so harshly, Harry, the consummate supposer – if there was such a term – supposed.

  — Roast chicken, Alice? What a wonderful surprise.

  — The children expect it. I cook chicken on their birthdays and at Easter and Christmas. It’s our family luxury.

  She stifled a sob on the word ‘luxury’.

  — Oh, Alice, my dear –

  — Frank always made the same awful joke, year after year. ‘Not chicken again, woman,’ he’d say. And I’d pretend to be cross with him.

  Jessie looked at her brother, who smiled back.

  There were four sixpenny pieces hidden in the Christmas pudding, and by some miracle Jessie found two in her portion and Harry two in his.

  — I shall know where to come if I ever need to borrow money, said Aunt Rose, beaming at her niece and nephew.