Chapman's Odyssey (13 page)

— Thank you, Nurse Mullen, he said, as she lifted Puss from him and cradled her in her arms.

Jeoffrey’s ghost remained, washing his bony back with a vanished tongue and the bones that were once his fore-paws. His master, clothed again, beamed down on him.

— He is the cleanest of the quadrupeds. And the Good Samaritan is not yet come.

— I’ve met him. He exists. Or rather, she does.

So Harry Chapman told the by turns radiant and disconsolate Christopher Smart, former occupant of the madhouse at St Luke’s Hospital and latterly resident in Bedlam, that once, long ago, in his own deranged younger days, he had been rescued from a watery grave by a Good Samaritan named Eileen. It was very early on a winter’s morning when she saw him poised to leap from a parapet into the swirling Thames. She had advised him to wait a minute before making such a final decision and the calmness with which she proffered the suggestion caused him to turn and look at her. She had smiled. She had wondered, calmly, if his life was as bad as he believed or imagined. He’d replied that it was worse than bad, and she’d invited him to tell her how and why. He’d hesitated – of course, he’d wavered, and doubted, and paused – before he accepted her invitation by jumping down to the pavement.

The stranger, who now identified herself as Eileen Robb, said there was a café nearby that stayed open throughout the night. It specialised in extra strong tea and sandwiches of the kind known as doorsteps. Nothing fancy; nothing cordon bleu. But it was warm, and the husband and wife who ran the place were friendly.

The tea was indeed strong and the bacon sandwich mountainous. Eileen Robb watched him as he widened his mouth to its limits in order to eat. Between bites, he told her about his failed career as an actor, of the sense of inadequacy that afflicted him whenever he attempted to write. She listened and occasionally nodded. When he’d finished, she remarked that, as far as she could judge, his life wasn’t that bad, and far too precious, in her opinion, to sacrifice. Was he ill, she asked him, with an incurable disease? He had to answer no. Her advice to Harry, for such she knew him to be, was to persevere, to carry on, to regard every mistake and drawback as the bottom rungs on the ladder to success. Failure was often necessary to a person’s development. And besides, she reminded him, he was young, and the wide world was his to discover.

They parted at around four o’clock, the dawn still some hours away. She walked with him to a bus stop and waited with him until the bus arrived. He waved to her from his seat on the upper deck, and she waved back. On the way home, it occurred to him that he’d asked her no questions about herself, and he felt ashamed. He never saw Eileen Robb, his very good Samaritan, again. He hoped, as the years went by, that she would contact him. He was at his most hopeful when his first book was published. She would write to him, surely, he reasoned. But the letter he wanted to receive, signed Eileen Robb, did not reach him.

He stopped talking. Poor Kit Smart and his spectral Jeoffrey had gone. He hadn’t seen them leave.

— Just checking your blood pressure, Harry, said Marybeth Myslawchuk. — And your pulse.

— Thank you.

— No need to thank me. It’s my job, honey.

— Tell me something.

— I might if you could be more precise.

— There was a woman here earlier today visiting a man called Maurice.

— What do you want to know?

— Who she is. Who he is. Idle curiosity.

— I had the afternoon off, but I’ll try and find out for you. Maurice has been moved to another ward, that much I can reveal. He’s in a fragile state.

— I’m not surprised.

— Why is that, Harry? Are you cleverer than the doctors?

— I was being facetious. Maurice’s wife, or ex-wife, or lover has a bedside manner beyond compare. She brayed at the wretched Maurice from start to finish. I could almost picture him wilting under the onslaught.

— I’ll do some detective work on your behalf. If the information will make you a happier man.

— I doubt that it will. But it might just divert me for an hour or so.

Imagine a great green forest somewhere in Africa. Picture an elephant who has just been born. His doting mother gives him the name Babar. He is her first child and she loves him very much. She places him in a hammock strung between two palm trees and rocks him to sleep with her trunk, singing softly to him all the while.

Babar grows bigger, as elephants and humans do. He plays with the other little elephants, some of whom have friendly monkeys perched on their bodies. One day, when Babar is riding happily on his mother’s back, a wicked hunter, who has hidden himself behind a bush, shoots at them, killing Babar’s mother.

A monkey, who has been watching, scampers off and all the birds in the air disappear into the blue. The hunter – is he the wicked Maurice, whose impossibly positioned misadventures in Morocco are the talk of the Zoffany Ward? – runs up to capture the orphaned Babar. But the nimble Babar escapes being captured, and keeps on running for several days, until he comes to a town . . .

— How old are you, Harry Chapman?

— You know my age, Mother, if anyone does.

— How old are you?

— Oh, for God’s sake stop pestering me. I’m fifteen.

— If you’re fifteen, soon to be sixteen, what are you doing with a book about a baby elephant?

— It’s a present from Leo. He read it when he was very small. He said I’ve had a deprived childhood because there was no Babar to make me smile and be happy.

— Deprived? That’s a fine way for a boy to speak whose father is as rich as he is, I must say.

— Must you?

— Yes, I must. What time did we have for baby elephants? Especially French ones. It is in
parlez-vous
, isn’t it?

That was his father’s expression, that
parlez-vous
. It was virtually all he knew of the language, surrounded as he was in the trenches of Flanders by the English mates whose names he called out on the day of his dying.

— I never could get a handle on
parlez-vous
, he’d confided to his son on a walk back from the park in the long ago. — But you’ll be different, you clever little sod.

But here was Babar, out of breath and tired, arriving in the town and seeing hundreds of houses. As well as houses, there are broad streets known as boulevards, and motor cars and buses. He looks with particular interest at two men in conversation on a street corner and marvels at how well dressed they are. He would like some fine clothes, too, but has no idea how to acquire them. Luckily for him, a very rich Old Lady who has a fondness for little elephants understands that he is longing for a smart suit. The Old Lady, who is wearing a long red dress and a fur tippet, takes pity on Babar and hands him her purse . . .

— Whoever heard of an elephant going to a department store and buying a green suit, a derby hat and shoes with spats?

— It’s a fantasy, Mother. It’s make-believe.

— Make-believe never put bread and butter on the table.

Babar is so pleased with his first clothes, in which he looks very elegant, that he goes to a photographer to have his picture taken. Just imagine: an elephant posing in front of an old-fashioned tripod camera.

This being a book by a Frenchman, when Babar has dinner with his friend the Old Lady, he balances a glass of red wine – a vintage claret, perhaps – on the tip of his trunk. Only a few pages back, he was in the African wilderness, and now here he is, dressed up to the nines, eating soup and ham, and enjoying civilised discourse with a wealthy widow. Harry Chapman, at fifteen, assumed she was a widow, like his mother. Anyway, she lives alone, with only a tiny dog in tow.

Babar moves into the Old Lady’s house, and every morning he joins her as she exercises, doing press-ups, and afterwards has a satisfying soak in the bath . . .

— Can you really believe, clever-dick Harry Chapman, that an elephant – an elephant! – could plonk his bum on a seat made for men, women and children? You saw the one at the zoo, when your dad and me took you and Jessie for a treat, and he opened his backside – didn’t he? – and it was like a deluge what came out of him.

Deluge? Had she said ‘deluge’? Maybe she had. It was in her character to surprise her son occasionally with an unexpected word. The elephant at London Zoo in 1947 had indeed emitted a deluge of mud-coloured shit, which Harry and Jessie witnessed with giggling fascination.

— I wouldn’t like that keeper’s job. He’s ready and waiting with his shovel. How many times a day do you think he has to clear up after Jumbo?

— Why don’t you go and ask him, Frank, seeing as how you’re so interested?

Babar was too refined, too considerate a mammal to have behaved as that huge, ungainly beast behaved six decades past. He would have been discreet in his ablutions, this king-in-waiting, Harry Chapman informed his constantly down-to-earth mother slyly.

— King, did you say?

— I did.

He showed Alice Chapman the illustration of King Babar and Queen Céleste in their bridal-cum-coronation robes, brought from the nearest town by an obliging dromedary, who arrives in the nick of time. The previous king, he explained to her, had died as the result of eating a bad mushroom. He had turned green from top to toe.

— Hoof. Hooves, she corrected him. — Elephants have hooves.

— Yes, Mother. You could be right. But I think they’re called feet as well.

— It just so happens I bought a quarter-pound of mushrooms today. I hope there’s not a bad one among them. I don’t fancy the idea of you and your sister going green.

He saw those mushrooms now, lightly peppered and salted, fried gently in a dab of butter.

Suddenly, as if from nowhere, he caught the sound of a man singing. The voice and the tune and the words were familiar to him. He listened intently as the debonair singer referred to feeling awfully low in a world turned cold. But there was hope. All he had to do was picture his beloved and immediately he felt aglow with love and happiness at the way she would be looking tonight.

This isn’t any man, this is Fred Astaire, in white tie and tails, wearing a top hat set at a jaunty angle. His hands are elegantly gloved and he is carrying a cane. He is dressed, as always, for a special occasion.

— Your Majesties, he says, bowing deeply.

— I believe, Mr Astaire, that you wish to dance with my beloved consort, Queen Céleste.

— That is true, Your Majesty. It would be the greatest honour for me to lead Her Majesty on to the floor.

— I, too, should be honoured, says Queen Céleste, in a surprisingly squeaky voice for such a very large lady. — It has long been my dream – if you will forgive me, my dearest husband – to hoof it with the unparalleled Mr Fred Astaire.

King Babar instructs the band (the motliest crew of two monkeys, three ostriches, a leopard, a tiger, a camel, a snake, a zebra and an antelope) to strike up.

— Take it away, he commands.

And there it is again, the blissful song by Jerome Kern, first heard by Harry Chapman coming out of the eccentric wireless in the apology for a kitchen where Alice slaved over a thousand meals.

— He’s got a lovely voice, remarked his usually malevolent mother. – And he’s not a bad dancer, come to that.

Queen Céleste alights from her throne and offers her front legs to Fred Astaire, who takes them in his outstretched hands. Soon they are in a decorous embrace, and Fred – his cane and top hat discarded – leads her effortlessly in what he tells his glowing partner is a foxtrot. Her ball gown billows in the spring breeze.

— You are very light on your feet, Your Majesty.

— Back hooves, Mr Astaire, she corrects him, sounding for an instant like Alice Chapman.

— I beg your pardon, Your Majesty. May I observe that you have a finer feel for the music, for the rhythm, than has Miss Ginger Rogers?

— You may, responds Céleste, reverting to her regal squeak. — I am flattered. It is the highest compliment I have been paid since my cousin Babar asked for my hand in marriage.

Mr Astaire hears himself singing about the laugh that wrinkles the regal nose and instantly corrects himself:

— I’m so sorry, Your Majesty,
trunk.

— Apology accepted, Mr Astaire.

—
And that laugh that wrinkles your trunk,
sings Fred, seeming to mean every word as he tells the elephantine queen that his foolish heart is touched by the very sound of her laughter and the sight of her puckering trunk

— That serpent is a remarkable clarinettist, Your Majesty.

— Isn’t he? Funny what a fang can do, don’t you think? Snakes have not been looked upon favourably since that regrettable business in the Garden of Eden, but Oscar – bless his cobra’s chilly cotton socks – is a very loyal courtier in addition to being, as you perceive so cogently, a talented musician.

— He’s the equal of Benny Goodman.

— We, King Babar and myself, will convey your appreciation of his playing to him.

— You are most gracious, Your Majesty.

— All in the day’s work, Mr Astaire. If a queen cannot be gracious, what is a queen for?