Chapman's Odyssey (17 page)
— I’ll try my best.
— That’s our Harry. I’ll leave you in peace now. Goodbye for the present.
He had survived for a whole week – was it, in fact, as long as that? – without a book or books. All he had read was the newspaper Pamela had given him, with the obituary of Leo, the kindest and most cultivated of his friends. Nothing else. He must be getting well again for what he craved now was the printed word.
It was the same craving he’d had in childhood. During his long silent convalescence, the nurses had brought him comics to look at.
One of them – her name was lost to memory, but her face would reassemble itself whenever he willed it – pointed at, and spoke, the funny words in the bubbles coming out of the mouths of Desperate Dan or Dennis the Menace. Back in the house near the gasworks and the candle factory, he gabbled their exclamations in his childish treble on the precious afternoons when his sister Jessie, returning from school, handed him the garishly coloured copies of the
Dandy
and the
Beano
, his first means of escape into the imagination.
— Take your head out of that rubbish. Your dinner’s on the table.
— Just a minute, Mum.
— Enough of your minutes. That’s how days and months and years go by with nothing done. Minutes add up, Harry Chapman.
Oh, the blessed days, months and years when Harry Chapman did nothing more adventurous than reading and wondering, the two in harmony with the old enemy Time out of sight and of no immediate concern to his giddily occupied mind.
The last hotel in which Ralph and Harry passed a night together was neither cheap nor dismal.
— You gone mad, Harry? This place is the lap of bloody luxury.
— Are you complaining?
— Can’t say I am.
They breakfasted on scrambled eggs, toast, coffee, orange juice and champagne, brought to them in room 535 by a knowing Filipino, who winked at Harry when he signed the bill.
Ralph had never mentioned that he had a sister called Beryl. Harry Chapman heard of her existence when she phoned him some weeks after the assignation in luxurious surroundings. She had news for him, she announced ominously. He invited her to his home that evening.
— What a beautiful house you have, Mr Chapman.
— Thank you.
He led her into his study and brought her the glass of sherry she asked for. It was her one and only tipple, she confessed.
— What is your news, Beryl?
— I had to tell you face to face.
He waited.
— We’re face to face.
— Ralph’s dead. He did himself in. He did away with himself.
He wanted to know how and why, but was restrained from questioning her by embarrassment or tact – he couldn’t decide which.
— He was very cut up, Beryl continued. — He found out his daughter Christine – she was the world to him – was in London, but she didn’t wish to see him. That was the final straw, Mr Chapman –
— Harry, please –
— As I say, the final straw. The little cow, if you’ll pardon my French, told him she hated his guts. I blame that cast-iron bitch of a wife of his. Mum and me warned Ralph that he was heading for trouble in spades if he went to the altar with Denise, but he wouldn’t listen to us. ‘Denise is the bee’s knees,’ he liked to joke. I haven’t told her and Christine that he’s gone. Let them find out for themselves if they’re interested, which I bet they’re not.
— Have you had the funeral?
— Yes, we have. Very quiet. Very private.
— I am so sorry, Beryl. I am so very sorry. What I don’t understand is what you’re doing here, why you’ve come to see me –
— It was his wish, Harry. It was in the note he left. He had a high regard for you. He said he was over the moon when he met you again after thirty years and what a small world it was that you were both in the same chemist’s at the same time.
— You are kind, Beryl. I am touched by your kindness.
Beryl produced a sealed envelope from her handbag.
— This is for you, Harry, from Ralph. You open it when I leave. Ralph told me and Mum that you had more brains than were good for you when you were schoolboys.
— Did he, really?
— He really did.
Then Beryl said that Norman, her husband, would be in a tizzy because his supper wasn’t on the table, and Terry, their bone-idle son, would be staring at the oven as if it was a spaceship from Mars. Typical men.
Harry Chapman kissed Beryl on both cheeks and she responded in kind.
— I’m afraid he hanged himself, Harry. In the stairwell of those awful bloody lodgings he ended up in. My lovely Ralph.
It was late in the evening when he opened the envelope. On a scrap of lined paper, Ralph had written:
Dear Harry
Words and myself dont get along but here goes. We got along fine we did with me doing something that took yours truly by surprise. I thank God it is a small world we live in. Here is a token of my esteem for you Harry and wear it to remember me. Your gas fitter mate and chum is getting out of it all.
Ralph
Underneath his signature, Ralph had added a solitary ‘x’. An afterthought, perhaps? No, it was an expression of genuine affection.
Ralph’s ‘x’, set down
in extremis
, denoted the kiss he had never conferred upon Harry; the kiss the clandestine lovers had been too wary or too frightened to share.
The token of Ralph’s esteem was a ring that was too large for even the thickest of Harry’s fingers.
— Well, you’re a survivor, Harry Chapman. I’ll say that much for you. Not like your father, who gave up the ghost between two blinks of an eye.
— That’s a monstrous thing to say. Dad was worn out, and with good reason. He fought in the Flanders trenches, Mother, in case you’ve forgotten. Private 36319. I’m still here thanks to the advances in medicine that have been made in the sixty years since his death.
— I didn’t ask for a lecture.
— You’re getting one just the same. If Dad were alive now, and ill, and in this hospital, the chances are that he would be lying where I am, listening to you telling him that he’s a survivor –
He opened his eyes and within minutes was aware that he had been transported – somehow, at some time unknown to him – back to the Zoffany Ward. It was almost like being home.
— I’m the welcoming committee, Harry, said Marybeth Myslawchuk. — Your other friends have the day off.
— Which day is it?
— Sunday. And a pretty wet and chilly one at that.
— I think I need something to read.
— I can get you a paper.
— I’d prefer a book.
— I’ll see what I can find.
The beds on either side of him were unoccupied. He felt strangely sad not to have the company of the infirm at close hand.
— You could always picture me, spewing up blood.
— No, Christopher. Please rest in peace.
— Not while you’re alive I won’t. I’m here to gnaw at your guilty conscience.
— My guilty conscience? You were hell-bent on self-destruction.
— And you were the ideal accomplice. You more than aided me in my mission to wipe Christopher Riley off the face of the earth.
This was a patent untruth, since it was the pitying Harry Chapman who had nursed the ungrateful Christopher during his final, gin-free illness. He had wanted the man who had declared and delivered his obsessive love for him twenty-two years earlier to go on living, and to be well enough, what’s more, to go on living alone, with his victim Harry safely stowed elsewhere.
— You left it too late to show you cared a fig for me.
Christopher had died in the spring of 1986. His face, in death, was as serene as any saint’s. A stranger, looking down at him, would have marvelled at his composure, for there was no indication that this was a man who had been consumed with loathing for most of the people he’d encountered in his forty-eight years. There was no hint, either, of the self-hatred that had borne him, inexorably, to the morgue.
Harry Chapman gave his becalmed tormentor a last kiss on the forehead and, days later, organised a grand secular funeral for him. The crematorium chapel was crowded with those of his friends and acquaintances who had endured and survived his displeasure. They recalled his wit, his early promise of success as a theatrical designer, as they listened to the snatches of Mozart that replaced the expected hymns and lessons. Harry read from Jane Austen – Mr Collins informing Elizabeth Bennet that he would honour her with his hand in marriage, and Captain Wentworth writing a hasty, desperate letter to Anne Elliot, the woman he had loved and lost, and was to love again, for ever more: ‘I must speak to you by such means as are within my reach. You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Tell me not that I am too late, that such precious feelings are gone for ever. I offer myself to you again with a heart even more your own than when you broke it, eight and a half years ago . . .’
The following week Harry Chapman handed over the casket containing the ashes of the man who had loved him with an unbearable intensity to Christopher’s brother Martin, who was happily married and the father of three well-adjusted children.
— I’ll have our mother’s grave opened and Chris and she can be reunited. He was the apple of her eye, not me.
Martin spoke without bitterness. Susan Riley’s devotion to her firstborn was a fact, and as such had to be acknowledged.
— I called him The Fuse when we were kids. He was always blowing up and going into a long silent sulk if you didn’t respond. I have to confess to you, Harry, that seeing him twice a year was once too often for me. Perhaps Mum was right to be so attentive to him. I honestly believe that he came into the world unhappy and couldn’t wait to get out of it. What amazes me is that he managed to take so long to achieve his ambition.
Harry Chapman thought, but didn’t say, that Christopher gave those closest to him the gift of his misery. He had been a recipient, as were those whom Christopher had chosen before him – the very same escapees who turned up at Mortlake to lament his passing.
— Be completely free now, Harry. Come and see us soon.
— I will, Martin.
Twenty and more years afterwards, Harry Chapman would like to boast that he was completely free of the late Christopher Riley. But of course he wasn’t, and could never be. In that first decade of his freedom, he would often wake in the night with the sound of Christopher’s taunts and recriminations echoing in his brain. He was usually abject as a consequence, pleading with his bloated accuser to be really and truly dead.
— Die, die, die, he’d moan, hearing the anguish in his heart and mind.
There were no relics of Christopher in the house – his clothes had been deposited with a Third World charity; each and every photograph of him had been cut into tiny shreds; his designs had gone to a museum where they were seldom put on display. All physical reminders of his malign presence were scattered elsewhere. Yet something of him – his spirit, was it? – remained.
— You tried to eliminate me, you piece of shit, but you didn’t succeed.
— I’m afraid I didn’t.
— May you rot in hell.
— Is that your home these days?
— I’m not telling you. That’s my secret. You’ll be able to answer the question yourself very soon now.
Oh God, if You exist, spare me Christopher Riley’s company in heaven or hell or purgatory, Harry Chapman, who was unaccustomed to praying, prayed. He repeated the prayer, silently as before, in his desperation.
— There was the Brahms afternoon, Pamela reminded him. — I was with you, Harry. We had the merriest lunch, my dear. And then we went shopping. And you suddenly said you were in the mood for Brahms, Brahms and more Brahms. So we went to one of the big record stores and you bought –
— I bought the four symphonies, the two piano concertos, the violin concerto, the double concerto, the clarinet quintet, the
German Requiem
, the string sextets, the Intermezzi Opus 117, violin sonatas and lieder galore. I took them home and feasted on them for weeks on end. Christopher had hated Brahms’s music for a reason or reasons he disdained to vouchsafe. It was enough that he hated it. Brahms was ‘heavy’; close of argument.
In April 1986, the ban on Brahms was lifted and the house in Hammersmith resonated with the sounds Harry Chapman had only been able to enjoy in concert halls or in his apartment in Sorg, Minnesota. While Christopher lived, Mozart prevailed, though Harry was permitted to listen to his beloved Schubert if Christopher was in a lenient or forgiving mood.
— You’re welcome here, Johannes.
— Who’s that, Harry?
— I was meandering, Marybeth.
— I’ve brought you a well-thumbed paperback. It won’t be up to your exalted standards, I fear.
— Don’t worry. Any trash will do.
But any trash wouldn’t do, as he discovered after reading thirty pages of
Operation Midas
, a crime novel by someone called Rick Jewell. Its principal character, an international fraudster working under the archly comic sobriquet Cambio Wechsel, is scheming and dealing in Milan, Las Palmas, Geneva and the City of London within the course of a single paragraph. Cambio is a Robin Hood for our time, it is implied, robbing and even killing the rich to aid the poor. He has an assistant, the nubile Melissa, who tempts corrupt and priapic financiers into her bed, and then . . . and then . . .