Chapman's Odyssey (16 page)

The room was as inviting as a coffin. Harry Chapman could not help but think of the lost souls who had taken refuge in its dinginess. Why was he here? Why was he here with his tormentor of decades past? Was he out of his mind?

— Christ, I’m pissed.

— So am I, Ralph.

He went into the bathroom. The bath was stained yellow and the porcelain chipped in places. There was a rusty shower connection and a plastic curtain.

He washed his face in cold water and dried himself with a rough towel.

His bully of yesteryear was undressing by the faint light of a bedside lamp with a pink shade. The body, Harry saw, was bulkier now, and the stomach had run to fat. Ralph was no classically perfect Adonis. His figure was less than Greek, was virtually misshapen, might even become gross with time.

What a small world it was and no mistake, what with him and clever Harry Chapman bumping into each other out of the blue and getting into the same bed together because they’d had a skinful, the pair of them, and what with their being the worse for wear and that was the truth of it in a nutshell . . .

Harry Chapman, naked, pulled back the bedspread and got between the sheets, which he doubted were totally clean. Soon Ralph Edmunds was lying alongside him in the darkness.

I am Ishmael, and he is Queequeg, the harpooneer, thought Harry Chapman, never at a loss for a connection between literature and life. Ralph doesn’t carry a tomahawk and there’s no trace of a scalp and he isn’t adorned with decorative tattoos, but he is primitive in his way. So primitive, in fact, that the once-taunted Skinny Boy, with the fake Jewish cock, felt afraid and apprehensive. He realised he was too frightened to give his fear expression.

Then he heard Ralph snoring and reasoned that he was safe. Even so, he heard Jack beg him to make a speedy escape. But it was too late. Ralph was bound to wake up and ask what he was doing.

He dozed off, and what caused him to regain consciousness was the agonising pain he was enduring. Ralph was taking him with a fierce determination.

— This is what you want, you clever queer.

The clever, queer Harry Chapman wanted to scream, but stayed silent and immobile.

— You’re a freak, Skinny Boy.

Ralph Edmunds let out what sounded like a cry of pleasure and bit his victim’s ear. This, thought the captive beneath, is a sign of affection, or the nearest thing to it.

He remained still as death while Ralph washed himself in the bathroom.

Two or so hours later, he neither struggled nor protested when Ralph silently insisted on a repeat performance. His attacker was less ferocious and more relaxed and Harry Chapman sensed that he and the feared Ralph were experiencing mutual enjoyment.

— That’s good, Harry whispered.

Towards morning, in the half-light, in the room with its patchy carpet and peeling flock wallpaper, Ralph set about his appointed task again when his unfondled, unkissed plaything returned to the bed after taking a lukewarm shower.

— God, was I drunk last night, said Ralph as he started to dress.

— Me too.

— There’s a first time for everything, they say.

— Yes.

They left the hotel separately, Ralph having made his goodbyes with another reference to the smallness of the world.

— Fancy me meeting clever old Skinny Boy of all people.

Harry saw that the sheets contained evidence of their sexual activity. The spilt semen had hardened and formed itself into what chambermaids call ‘little maps of Ireland’. He counted three of them, and noted that there were traces of blood and shit as well.

As he journeyed homewards that Sunday morning, he remembered he had given Ralph his phone number in the restaurant.

— Good evening, Harry, my love.

(Somehow, at some hour of the previous day unknown to him, Harry Chapman had regained the blessed ability to speak.)

— Your love? I am not your love. Stop being silly.

— Temper, temper. Who’s a grumpy Harry tonight? Your friend Jeanette is not going to take offence. She knows better than to do that.

— Does she really?

— She does, my love.

Why was this woman’s vapid banter, with its ludicrous claims to a joint affection, objectionable to him in a way that Nancy Driver’s trivial chit-chat wasn’t? It was a question of character, he supposed. Nancy struck him as genuinely, inherently good, while Nurse Dunckley was a pretend-saint in starched uniform, a beacon of kindness dependent upon a supply of rechargeable batteries. Oh, these suppositions from the sickbed were probably facile, but they seemed accurate to him, for the moment.

— I’m sorry if I sounded curt, Nurse.

— Of course you are, my love.

The funeral of Harry Chapman was being held, surprisingly, in a church. It wasn’t a Low Church either, but one that was undeniably, even ostentatiously, High. Was his send-off taking place, the dead man wondered, in a cathedral? And if so, which? A sudden glimpse of burnished gold prompted him to think it was St Mark’s in Venice.

Most of the mourners were already seated. Alice Chapman stood out from the others because she was dressed in red, a colour she never favoured for a host of reasons, chief of which was exemplified in the two words ‘scarlet woman’. Rose, weeping softly in the row behind her sister, had donned black for the occasion, in common with everyone else. The Duchess of Bombay had smartened herself up in his honour, which touched her deceased acquaintance. Prince Myshkin, in the thick, hooded traveller’s cloak he always wore in northern Italy, was at her side. They were talking earnestly, the Prince often nodding assent at her observations, and Harry strained to catch what they were saying. The Duchess’s witticisms, which seemed to be delighting the unhappy Prince, were lost on Harry Chapman, whose attention was now diverted by the arrival of Pamela, in a hat D’Artagnan and his faithful musketeers might have favoured, along with three friends he’d made when he was an actor, each kitted out as characters from the
commedia dell’arte
: Roberta, the comeliest Columbine ever; Gordon, the zaniest Punchinello imaginable; and Ian, a brooding, moody and menacing Harlequin.

Leo, looking plumply healthy, joined the throng, hand in hand with Eleanor, his proud and loyal wife of four decades and more. Philip Pirrip had journeyed from Calcutta for this sad gathering, and so from the wilds of Africa had King Babar and the veiled Queen Céleste, who placed themselves discreetly in a pew that also contained Jeoffrey, the immortal cat, who had licked his fur with such dedication to feline duty that it glowed like jet or some brilliant black diamond.

— I would prefer not to be present.

Harry Chapman, hearing the sepulchral voice, looked about him for its owner. Bartleby was nowhere to be seen.

— Where are you, Bartleby?

— I would prefer to be absent from these proceedings.

— So should I, my lonely friend. So should I.

Suddenly, wonderfully, there was music. An unseen orchestra was playing – in St Mark’s? for Harry Chapman’s funeral? – Webern’s orchestration of the fugue (
ricercata
) from Bach’s
The Musical Offering
.

— I chose this, the Duchess of Bombay confided in Prince Myshkin. — This was my choice. Listen, listen. Every note is like a jewel.

But Alice Chapman was of a different opinion, as she soon made stridently clear to the man next to her.

— What a bloody racket.

Oscar Wilde, whose tainted name she had invoked so many times in her son’s childhood and youth, did not respond. He inclined his head to sniff the green carnation in his lapel and smiled to himself.

— You need to visit a barber.

The advice was unheeded and Alice Chapman muttered:

— I told Harry Chapman he would be late for his own funeral one day, and here we are, sure enough, waiting and waiting. He’s making fun of us from beyond the grave, if that’s where he is, though I have to say I have my doubts.

The glorious fugue stopped as suddenly as it had begun, and an eerie silence descended on the congregation as they faded from Harry Chapman’s view.

He was convinced that Ralph would never contact him again. The scrap of paper on which he had written his phone number had been thrown out with the rubbish or screwed up into a ball and dropped into the gutter.

— There’s someone calling you, Christopher shouted up the stairs. — Pick up the extension. He sounds like a moron.

Harry Chapman waited for the click that came when Christopher replaced the receiver before saying:

— Hello.

— Is that you, Harry?

— Yes.

— It’s Ralph.

— You’ve taken a long time to call me. It must be over a year since we met by accident that afternoon.

— Do you want to see me again?

Jack, high up in the crow’s nest, was silent.

— Yes.

— Same place? Saturday?

— Saturday’s fine. Six o’clock at Green Park station. Is that convenient?

— Yes, Skinny Boy. That suits me.

They met. They went to a pub where the lavatories were designated Gentlemen and Ladies and talked inconsequentially. Ralph was still working as a gas fitter and Harry was still writing the same book he had been slaving over a year ago.

— I can miss my last train home if you want.

— Yes, I do.

— Let me remind you I’m a man, Harry, and don’t you ever forget it.

— As if I would.

— Just in case you’ve got other ideas.

— Not at all.

— That’s sorted then.

They ate and drank in a Lebanese restaurant, where Ralph was slightly disconcerted by the hot and cold
meze
Harry ordered. The food, he pronounced, was ‘fiddly’. After the meal, they checked into another one-night cheap hotel. This establishment had pretensions to grandeur. It was cleaner than its grubby predecessor. The soap in the bathroom was scented with lavender, the favoured smell of his beloved Aunt Rose.

Ralph did not feign sleep and there was no declaration of drunkenness to excuse and account for his unnatural behaviour.

He surprised Harry in the shower, clutching Skinny Boy close to him and squeezing the breath out of his once-puny body. Ralph was asserting his brutish authority, but without his long-gone cronies to impress. The two of them were as they were on the day of the race in March 1950, but the game didn’t end with Harry’s being cast roughly aside. No, it had to continue now, take its logical course, as Harry had wanted it to and – Harry was quick to realise – as Ralph had hoped it would as well. The taunting of Leo Duggan, the jokes about circumcised cocks, the whooping and cheering of Ralph’s followers, were camouflage for Ralph’s real purpose – to dominate the school swot in the only way he knew and relished.

The game, the ritual, was to be replayed a dozen or more times during the next few years. Some of the one-night cheap hotels were cheaper than others, though none of them was as suicide-inducing as the very first setting for their late-flowering rapture. If Ralph was ever tempted to kiss his plaything, he kept the temptation in check, but fondling became acceptable to the man whose essential manhood Harry was forbidden to forget.

Harry Chapman looked forward to their liaisons, packing a small suitcase in advance with a change of socks and underwear, a fresh shirt perhaps, and his washbag, in case he felt like shaving in the morning. Ralph did the same. Their luggage was evidence of the overpowering passion they shared and gratified in anonymous rooms and suites on stolen Saturday nights.

One element, and one alone, was missing from these entanglements, Harry Chapman was shocked to acknowledge. The fear that had possessed him and, to be truthful, excited him when Queequeg had switched off the pink light and the tremulous Ishmael had lain expectantly beside him in the darkness was never to be replicated. Jack’s warning whispers had been silenced. The anticipation of immediate pleasure was undiminished, but the terror – yes, he had felt terror in that seedy, flock-wallpapered room on the third floor – belonged now and for ever to the past.

— Good morning, Sunshine.

— Good morning to you, Doctor.

— Have you had a comfortable night?

— As far as I know, which isn’t very much.

— You’re on the mend, I’m happy to tell you.

Mr Russell and his team walked on, and Harry Chapman dreaded the imminent appearance of the ghoulish Nurse Dunckley. To his surprised relief, it was Nancy Driver who came to comfort him.

— Hello, Harry.

— Oh, Nancy, am I glad to see you.

— The feeling’s mutual.

— What are you doing in here?

— You and your questions. I’m here, Mr Chapman, to give you the good news – good for us, that is – that you will be returning to the Zoffany Ward later today.

— Thank God.

— We’ll expect a poem or two in exchange for our services.