Chapman's Odyssey (19 page)

— Well, have you?

— I met you at seven, Blanche. Is that correct?

— It is. I gave you an envelope, if you recall.

— Yes, Blanche, I do.

— What did it contain?

— You know what. Money. A temporary loan. To tide me over, yes?

— To pay your overdue rent.

— That, too.

— Tell me what happened to you after I left.

— After you left?

— After I left.

— I stayed on for another drink, didn’t I?

— And another, and another, I should imagine. You were found in the street with your face in the gutter.

— That can’t be true. Was I?

— It is true and you were.

— I had my valise with me, didn’t I?

— Yes, Randolph. It’s safe and sound. I can see it from here.

— Face in the gutter, Blanche?

— Some decent soul, some Good Samaritan, called for an ambulance. That’s why you’re in hospital.

In the silence that followed this revelation, Harry Chapman hoped that Breezy and the unseen Blanche would entertain him further.

— Blanche, have you heard of Harry Chapman?

— The novelist? Yes, of course I have. I’ve read at least three of his books. Why do you ask?

— He’s in the next bed. Asleep, I think. Imagine meeting him in a public ward.

— Have you talked to him?

— Oh, yes. We’ve more than talked. He’s a soulmate, Blanche. He’s made me an offer for my most treasured possession.

— Are you joking? The false teeth?

— He recognises them for what they are – a unique relic of literary history. He’s prepared to pay me five hundred smackers.

— Then he’s a bloody fool.

— It means I’ll be able to pay back your loan.

Harry Chapman, enraptured by the conversation, added to the entertainment by moaning softly. The acting skills he’d acquired in his youth were reaping a peculiar benefit now.

— He’s waking up, said Randolph. — We’d best be careful what we say.

— Why is that? Because you were lying? As usual.

The curtains were parted abruptly and a pink-faced, white-haired woman appeared at the foot of Harry Chapman’s bed.

— Mr Chapman?

— Yes, he responded, weakly.

— Are you interested in buying T. S. Eliot’s teeth from that old rascal Randolph Breeze?

Harry stared back at the woman.

— Leave him alone, Blanche, shouted Randolph. — Stop pestering him, can’t you? Can’t you see he’s a very sick man?

— Is it true, Mr Chapman?

— What day is it, Nurse? I’ve lost all sense of time.

— I’m sorry, Mr Chapman. Go back to sleep. I enjoyed your novels.

She drew the curtain and he was cocooned again.

— May God forgive you, Blanche Westermere, for I never shall.

— God? What do you know of God? And as for God’s forgiveness, I’ll need it, Randolph Breeze, after all the years I’ve spent trying to rescue you from the bottomless bloody pit you keep digging for yourself.

— I didn’t mean it, Blanche. It just came out. Please, Blanche.

But Blanche had stormed off, and Harry was pleased that the farce had come to such a satisfactory end.

‘Some lose the day with longing for the night, and the night in waiting for the day’: how Harry Chapman wished that he’d heeded Jeremy Taylor’s wise observation more conscientiously, more often. He vowed to himself that if, and when, he was released from this timeless place, he would occupy each waking hour with fruitful activity. He had made this vow before and had failed to keep it. Those hours ahead of him were precious now because he could envisage an end to them.

Jack, the ship-boy, lithe and alert as ever, called down from the crow’s nest:

— You have work to finish, Harry.

— I know I have.

— I will keep a close watch for you.

Harry Chapman – forcing his own skinny body out of King Henry’s vast gold robe; pulling off Henry’s Plantagenet wig; easing Henry’s beard from his face; and stepping out of Henry’s shoes after the final performance – saw the ageless Jack in his cotton clothes and knew he had a friend for all his life, however short, however long, it was to be.

— You are the first character I can remember inventing. You were Shakespeare’s to begin with, but then I made you my own. I gave you flesh and blood.

— You did what, Harry Chapman? Who are you boasting to? If I recall aright, it was me who gave you flesh and blood and no one else.

— You’re quite right, Mother. Thank you.

— Don’t you forget.

The friendlier voice of Sister Nancy Driver asked him how he was feeling, as she felt his pulse and checked his blood pressure.

— The better for seeing you. A cliché, I know, but I mean it.

— Mr Breeze left while you were sleeping. I expect you’re relieved, aren’t you?

— I suppose I am.

— He was a bit tetchy. He wanted to say goodbye to you. He said he had some important business of a special nature to do with you.

Harry Chapman laughed.

— What’s so funny?

— Mr Randolph Breeze – known to his friends as Breezy, but certainly not Randy – had plans to sell me T. S. Eliot’s teeth.

— Your own teeth are perfectly good.

So Harry Chapman recounted to the slightly confused Nancy Driver the story of how Mr Breeze became the illegal owner of a major poet’s dentures.

— He offered to sell them to me, but I refused politely.

— I’m afraid Mr Breeze is a typical example of the kind of patients we get in here at weekends. Let’s hope his lady friend Blanche leads him away from the bottle for a while. What she sees in him is a mystery.

A mystery, Harry Chapman did not say, which he’d attempted to unravel throughout his writing life. The ludicrous Randolph and the hapless Blanche were a part of that unsolvable enigma.

He could hear two voices – one sharp and abrasive, the other refined to the point of haughtiness. Both speakers were women. They were somewhere in the ward. That much was clear to him.

— I have no time to waste on the tittle-tattle of servants.

— What’s ‘tittle-tattle’ when it’s at home? Struggling to keep body and soul together isn’t tittle-tattle in my book.

— Which book is that, may one ask? Does it contain words, perchance?

— Perchance it does, perchance.

The caustic voice belonged to Alice Chapman, but who was the snooty, condescending woman who was reluctant to converse with her?

— Is there no escaping the mongrels in one’s midst?

No, no, it couldn’t be. It was Virginia Woolf who used the term ‘mongrel’ to describe working men and women. Other writers of her class and period referred to the ‘lower orders’ or ‘hoi polloi’, but ‘mongrel’ was, as far as he knew, her coinage.

— I’ve been called some names by the likes of the la-di-da but nobody’s ever said I was a mongrel. A mongrel’s a dog that’s a bit of this and a bit of that, and I don’t see how it applies to yours truly Alice Chapman, Bartrip that was.

— You are being excessively tiresome. I must insist that you return to your quarters, or wherever it is you belong.

— You can insist as much as you want, Mrs Woolf, but I’m staying exactly where I am. I’m not stirring from my Harry’s side just to suit your convenience. The boy needs me.

— Oh, how you creatures breed, sighed the famous novelist. — Another ragamuffin to swell your already overcrowded ranks.

He could hear his mother seething before she responded:

— My friend Nellie Boxall warned me about you. She said you could be a high-and-mighty cow when you had the mood to be. Well, don’t expect me to empty your chamber pot, milady. We creatures, as you call us, have our dignity and there are limits as to what you can tell us to do. You may think your shit’s superior to ours, but it stinks just the same.

— The coarseness. The vulgarity.

‘The humanity’, Harry Chapman wanted to intervene, but kept his counsel. Was it possible that his mother had once worked in a menial capacity for Mr and Mrs Woolf? If so, she had never talked of the experience to her children Jessie and Harry. But here she was, standing up for the rights she didn’t possess, arguing with the author who had bleached the English novel of all the vibrant colours her predecessors had imbued it with.

— Come on, Ma. Teach her a lesson.

— Speak when you’re spoken to, Harry Chapman. I brought you up to have good manners. I won’t have you disgracing me.

— I’m sorry I interrupted.

— You should be. Now, where was I? Ah yes, my duties. Washing, cleaning and cooking. Was there anything else Your Ladyship required?

— Yes, there is. I require you to be silent in your endeavours.

— In my what?

— Your tasks. The trivial chit-chat of underlings distracts me from my work.

— You’re not much of a listener, are you? I mean to say, Charles Dickens never stopped listening.

This was a surprise to Harry Chapman – not just the accuracy of his mother’s literary criticism, but the discovery that at some point in her life she had read one, at least, of the Inimitable’s novels. It had been her custom in his youth to remark ad infinitum that reading books gave people the wrong sort of ideas and caused them to go blind in later life.

— We have haddock and sausage meat for dinner. Have them ready for the table at seven o’clock sharp, if you please.

— Haddock and sausage meat? You toffs have some funny tastes, I must say. Haddock and sausage meat – I never heard the like. What a combination.

— Your views on our culinary predilections are neither apposite nor welcome. To the kitchen with you, Chapman. Forthwith.

— Do I steam the haddock and fry the sausage meat, Mrs Hoity-Toity? Or do I shove the bleeders in a stewpot?

— You are worse than the Person from Porlock with your inane opinions and ridiculous questions.

To judge by the silence that followed, it would seem that the writer had had the last word. Having the last word was an art form that Alice Chapman had mastered after several decades of practice. It was unlike her to be cowed into abject submission.

— You’ll be in for a fine surprise when you see what I’ve done with your haddock and sausage meat. The kitchen is out of bounds to you while Alice Chapman, Bartrip that was, is cooking in it. I’ll do my work and you’ll do yours and that’s the last word on the subject.

His mother had triumphed, as he knew and hoped she would. She slammed the door shut in celebration. The slamming of doors was her other artistic feat. No one ever slammed a door with such deadly conviction.

Someone must have opened a window because a chill wind swept through the ward. Harry Chapman wrapped the blanket tight about him, but the cold persisted.

A woman was speaking in a quiet, grieving voice. A man, not far from her, was weeping inconsolably.

— We were reading the story of Lancelot and Guinevere together. So moved were we by their love – their forbidden love – that we found ourselves embracing each other and kissing. Love was commanding us to kiss, to enjoy ourselves. Oh, Harry, it was the happiest afternoon of my life and now I recall it in misery.

The man’s cries of pain heightened in intensity.

Harry Chapman tried to console Francesca by saying that he already knew what happened later that radiant afternoon. The man who was sharing those ardent kisses with her was the handsome Paolo, the younger brother of her husband Gianciotto Malatesta. Francesca had a daughter and Paolo was the father of two boys, but now they were in the throes of a passion beyond language or sense. They were still in a state of timeless bliss when Gianciotto surprised them. Drawing his sword, he rushed to kill his brother, but Francesca intervened and was stabbed through the heart. She died as Gianciotto dispatched her lover in his fury.

— Love brought us to our death.

Was it Sister Nancy or Marybeth Myslawchuk who was ordering the unhappy Paolo to stop sobbing? There were very sick people here who were on the brink of dying and they needed rest and quiet at this crucial time in their lives. They had their sorrows, too.

In the middle of the night – for such he imagined it was – Harry Chapman lay awake and thought of the maverick American composer Charles Ives. He tried to picture him in his home in New England, seated at his piano one day in 1926. He had just completed a song called ‘Sunrise’, but that title was too hopeful, too optimistic, because Ives had just reached a conclusion that was bitter to him. He closed the lid of the piano in the knowledge that his gift was gone.

He left his music room and went downstairs to join his wife. (Was Harry Chapman right in thinking that her name was Harmony?) She asked him why he was crying, and when he had recovered sufficiently he told her the grim news.

He was fifty-two when he announced, correctly, that his ability to compose had vanished. He was to live another twenty-eight years – almost as long as the life of Schubert – with no new sounds in his head. He often marvelled that Beethoven, in his deafness, could do what he was unable to do, with wondrous results.