Chapman's Odyssey (5 page)

— She’s not out of the woods yet, but we hope she soon will be. I can’t say more.

Did he want her to say more? Did he really wish to learn that Mrs Stubbs, she of the moaning and the Brünnhilde shriek, was in a much worse physical condition than Harry Chapman?

— Let me know what happens to her. Tell me if and when she gets out of the woods.

Was this the best sleep he was sleeping? It didn’t seem like it. He would complain to Maciek Nazwisko should he appear tomorrow with the obliging bottle. This was decidedly not the best sleep he had ever slept – in point of boring fact, it was actually one of the very worst. The dream he was currently dreaming was totally devoid of interest. He almost longed for a guest appearance by Alice Chapman in full, malignant flow. Where was the Duchess of Bombay when he really needed her? Not here, among so many shadows. Nobody lively was waiting on the dim horizon. He was asking himself if he were dead the second he awoke.

— Am I dead?

— Of course you aren’t, replied a voice he didn’t recognise from somewhere in the ward. — What a stupid thing to say.

He thanked the stranger for clarifying the matter with her prompt response.

— Don’t thank me for stating the obvious.

— Are you Mrs Stubbs, by any chance?

— No, I’m not. Why should I be?

— She was here earlier today, in a wretched state.

— Sorry, Mr Undecided-Whether-He’s-Living-Or-Dead, but I am not in a wretched state. For your information, I am only moderately unwell.

— You sound very chirpy.

— Chirpy? Me? Needs must, as they say. No point in being miserable, is there?

— No, I don’t suppose there is.

— What are you in for?

— I wish I knew.

— They haven’t told you anything?

— Not yet.

— Well, goodnight to you, anyway.

— Goodnight.

Oh my, the old Adam, the original sinner, was stirring down below.

— This is not the time or the place, he instructed his penis. — Stop misbehaving.

He couldn’t be in absolute physical decline, he assured himself. One part of him, at least, was in working order.

Monday

He played his first, and last, major Shakespearean role when he was fifteen. To Harry Chapman’s surprise and dismay, he had been cast as the King in
King Henry the Fourth, Part One
, a monarch who – on first acquaintance with the text – seemed to do little more than sit on his throne and give voice to his manifold dissatisfactions, chief of which was the unruly behaviour of his son and heir, Prince Hal. It was only in rehearsals that he realised that Henry’s justified melancholy spoke to his very soul. So impressed was the producer, Mr Oliver, by the broody power of young Chapman’s interpretation that he gave him an extra soliloquy to deliver – the sombre lines from
Part Two
in which the King, in his nightgown, laments his inability to sleep. His lowest, lowliest subjects in their ‘smoky cribs’, on their ‘uneasy pallets’, have the gift denied him in his perfumed chamber – the temporary forgetfulness which sleep affords.

In the course of his doleful ruminations, Henry summons up an image of a ship-boy on the ‘high and giddy mast’, sent up by the captain and crew to signal warning of storms or other dangers. Yet sleep, despite the prospect of rough winds and ‘ruffian billows’, could ‘seal up the ship-boy’s eyes’ unwittingly, even as it refuses to do so for his older and tired ones in the palace at Westminster. Harry Chapman was haunted instantly by the thought of the boy in the crow’s nest, and pictured him shinning up the pole to keep watch.

There he was – a grey wig covering his mousy locks; a grey beard stuck to his chin with glue; a vast gold robe filling out his skinny frame – looking as like a king as it was possible for a dustman’s son to look. Inside that robe, shorn of the wig and beard, he more resembled the ship-boy of his own imagining. He called his alter ego Jack, as befitted a sailor. The years passed and Harry Chapman put on weight, and his mousy locks became pepper-and-salt and then white, but Jack remained lithe and alert, his eyes – when not sealed up – ever more vigilant for the tempests to come. Jack had accompanied Harry to Italy, America, India, Egypt, Australia, in dreams and reveries and in those frequent moments when the lad’s imaginer felt trepidation about the future.

— Harry, I have fears for you.

— What fears, Jack?

— There are dark clouds looming over yonder.

— It is kind of you to warn me.

Those clouds, sighted by Jack, foretold the last illness of his companion of twenty years, his friend and enemy encased in the same flesh. No one had manifested the tyranny of love with such dedication to terrible duty as Christopher, who needed to be adored and hated, his relish for adoration and hatred being about equal.

— I love you, said Christopher to Harry, and Harry, who had never heard the three words spoken with such conviction, was in no doubt that he believed him.

— Thank you.

— I will say it again, Harry. I love you. Have I made my feelings clear?

— You have.

— So you’ve got the message?

— Yes, Christopher.

— You won’t get a better offer.

— Won’t I?

— Absolutely not. You can rely on me. I love you, Harry.

Christopher’s fiercely concentrated eyes, Harry noticed, were green. He could see them now, in the ward, separated from their owner, looking down on his helplessness.

— I loved you, Harry.

Love? What was love, in the gospel according to the unsaintly Christopher? It was all to do with possession, with the ownership of the green eyes; it was to do with Harry, the talented young author, whom he had to have for himself entirely, body and soul, soul and body, the two for ever indistinguishable. That was Christopher’s notion of love.

He caught himself weeping, as he so often did these days. The old weep. The old shed tears for unaccountable reasons, for scenes and circumstances buried somewhere inside them, for words said or unsaid, for the very fact of their being born.

— Oh, Harry dear, whatever’s the matter?

It was Nancy Driver asking the concerned question, gently as always.

— I’ve no idea, Sister Nancy. I’ve no idea at all.

— Don’t be afraid. Dr Pereira will be here shortly.

He suddenly remembered Mrs Stubbs and her Wagnerian screaming, and wondered if she was out of the woods.

— She’s doing fine. She’ll survive.

— There was another woman here, late last evening. She had a very cheerful voice. She said she was moderately unwell. Is she still in the ward?

— No, Harry. You are an intelligent man, so let me tell you the truth. She died in the night, while you were asleep.

— Did she?

— She wasn’t moderately unwell, and bless her for saying she was. She was quite beyond help.

— What was her name?

— Why do you wish to know?

— Curiosity. We had a conversation. I’d have liked to talk to her again.

— Iris Gibson. Mrs Iris Gibson. A widow.

— My son’s a typical nosy parker, Alice Chapman declared from her movable nowhere.

— How old was she, Nancy?

— A bit older than you.

— You’ll be next, my so-called son. You mark my words.

— Seventy-three, to be precise.

Mrs Gibson had spoken to him eight times, if he remembered correctly. Was this loss he was feeling now? Hardly, for he hadn’t seen her and was ignorant of her past. Yet a certain quality in her tone of voice – caustic, but sanely so, and not to be compared to his mother’s cruel sarcasm – lingered with him. She’d assured him, jokingly, that he wasn’t dead a mere hour or two before she’d joined the ever-increasing majority. He hadn’t thanked her sufficiently for that assurance.

— You’ve stopped crying.

Yes, he had. He smiled faintly at Sister Nancy, who was beaming down on him.

— Your blood pressure’s normal, Harry. No problems there.

Ah, good, good, he thought. That’s something to celebrate.

— I can see mischief in your eyes.

— You’re shrewd, Nancy Driver.

The mad idea came to him that if he had to stay long in this hell then Sister Driver could be the Virgil to his Dante, his guide to the lost souls and enfeebled bodies trapped, or imprisoned, inside. He was grinning now.

— Share the joke with me, Harry.

Would his new-found Virgil, clearly not an expert on the rudiments of farming and a very unlikely chronicler of the Trojan Wars, appreciate the role he had allotted her?

— I have silly ideas from time to time, Nancy.

— You need a sense of humour in this place. That’s the one thing that’s always very welcome.

— I would echo that sentiment, said Dr Pereira, who had appeared behind her. — I seem to be interrupting a happy conversation.

Harry looked at the man he already accounted his curly-headed saviour and marvelled at his beauty. Oh, to be young again and healthy; to function in a society that contained this Spanish Scot, this Scottish Spaniard.

— I’m afraid I must strike a serious note, Mr Chapman.

— Must you?

— Yes. Your recent blood test shows that you haven’t been taking proper care of yourself. Your liver, in particular, has received an unnecessary amount of damage.

— I only drink superior wines.

— To excess, sometimes, perhaps?

— Sometimes.

Unlike Christopher, he might have said, who drank gin round the clock in his last years. There was the aubade gin, the breakfast gin, the elevenses gin, the lunchtime glug, the teatime pickup, the dinner of clear liquid and a mouthful of meat or salad, and then the nightcap, the tranquilliser that ensured the terror, for Harry, of vicious reproaches, which would be unacknowledged (‘I never, never said that’) as dawn declared itself.

— I know, Dr Pereira, that – compared with some – I am a moderate drinker.

— Not moderate enough, Mr Chapman.

— I should very much like you to call me Harry.

— I think I can oblige you on that score.

— Please do.

— Have you ever had an endoscopy, Mr Chapman? I’m sorry. Harry.

— No, I haven’t.

— You will have one this afternoon. You are aware of what’s involved?

— Yes.

— It’s a routine affair, really.

And with that reassurance, if such it was, the doctor departed. His suburban Virgil was joined now by Marybeth Myslawchuk and an owlish student nurse who was introduced to him as Philip Warren.

— We’re going to change your bedlinen, Harry. Perhaps you’d care to entertain us with a poem while we labour on your behalf.

— You should have given me notice, Marybeth.

— No excuses.

The three of them lifted him up carefully and placed him in the armchair that had yet to accommodate Harry Chapman’s first visitor.

— What’s it to be about? Love?

— Love will do just fine.

— Is love fine for you, Philip Warren?

The youth blushed and nodded and giggled.

— Then love it is.

But whose love, and when, and where? Ah yes, the young cleric, the future Reverend Giles Fletcher, that all-too-brief celebrator of boundless lust – yes, the otherwise pious Giles had the right words for his attentive trio.

— This is a Wooing Song, ladies and gentleman, also known as ‘The Enchantress’s Song’. It comes from a longer work,
Christ’s Victorie and Triumph
, dating from 1610, when the poet would have been twenty-three or twenty-four. Here goes, amigos.

Love is the blossom where there blows

Every thing that lives or grows:

Love doth make the Heav’ns to move,

And the Sun doth burn in love;

Love the strong and weak doth yoke,

And makes the ivy climb the oak,

Under whose shadows lions wild,

Soften’d by love, grow tame and mild . . .

He stopped and remarked that the best was about to come. But he stayed silent.

— Have you forgotten the words, Harry?

— God forbid. Of course I haven’t.

— It would be understandable, given your –

— Given my what, Marybeth? My illness? My age? Keep listening.

Love no med’cine can appease,

He burns the fishes in the seas:

Not all the skill his wounds can stench,

Not all the sea his fire can quench . . .

— Is that it, Harry?

— There’s a bit more, but I think you’ve heard enough. Giles lived a further thirteen years, dying of malaria in his Suffolk parish. His wife, who may or may not be the enchantress, quickly remarried. Her second husband was also a clergyman, but he didn’t write poems. Here endeth today’s lesson.