Chapman's Odyssey (18 page)

— Would you care for a bite to eat?

— Yes, I think I would, he replied to the stranger with a trolley.

— Fried plaice or chicken curry?

— I’ll try the plaice.

— It’s as good as anything we have.

There was apple crumble and ice cream to follow, and coffee or tea.

— I like my tea very weak. Is that possible?

— I’d say not.

— Coffee, then.

He ate the fish and peas and dessert and drank the tasteless coffee. He lay back in the bed and cursed Rick Jewell and everyone who wrote badly for enormous gain and wished – how he wished – that Graham was by his side.

— Tell me about my grandfather, Dad.

— I wish I could, son. I was barely four when he died. All I remember of him is that he stammered. Or is it stuttered? He called me F-F-F-F-Frank whenever he spoke to me. He was known as Stammering or Stuttering Sammy. He was a carpenter by trade.

— Hello, H-H-H-H-Harry.

— Hello, Grandad.

— N-N-N-Nice to m-m-m-meet you at l-l-last.

Harry Chapman, opening his eyes, looked for the long-dead stammerer and saw Nancy Driver beaming at him.

— Marybeth tells me you’ve been reading.

— Reading? No, I was looking at words. For an entire, wasted hour.

— Such ingratitude, joked Marybeth, who made a request for a Shakespeare sonnet to charm her ears before she went off duty, if that wasn’t too tall an order.

— Give me a moment or two. Let me set my tired old brain in motion. Do you have a favourite?

Marybeth answered that it was so far back in time that she’d studied the glorious Bard, as her teachers in Winnipeg nicknamed him, that she couldn’t rightly remember ever having a favourite. She was happy for the amazing Harry Chapman to decide.

Why – he asked himself once he was in full flow – had he chosen this particular one of the one hundred and fifty-four sonnets he had committed to memory in his late youth and early manhood? Had he come at last to the belief that the earth is sinful? Was his own body, harbouring his own poor soul, nothing more than a fading mansion fit only for worms to inherit? Yet he could say ‘Within be fed, without be rich no more’ with a conviction that was lacking in the man of twenty.

—
And death once dead, there’s no more dying then.

— If that came true, we’d all be out of a job, Nancy Driver observed with a wry smile. — We’d have to find something else to occupy our time, wouldn’t we, Marybeth?

— I don’t think we have the looks or the figures to make the transition from on-call girls to call girls, do you?

Maciek Nazwisko interrupted them to say that one of the two vacant beds would soon be occupied by an elderly gentleman called Mr Breeze.

— He’ll be company for you, Harry. Or shall we hide you behind the curtain?

— I’ll tell you later, Nancy.

Perhaps Mr Breeze had been released, or perhaps he had died somewhere downstairs, for there was no sign of the elderly gentleman when Harry Chapman awoke from an undisturbed sleep.

— You seem flustered.

— I was expecting to see someone in the next bed.

— You’ll have to wait. There’s been a delay. He has to take another test.

It was only after she had left that he realised he’d been talking to Veronica. He had momentarily forgotten her name.

— Veronica, Veronica, he whispered to himself.

This sudden, brief lapse of memory reminded him of the last time he saw Aunt Rose alive. She was as happy as she’d ever been, but now her glowing optimism was set on a future that had been the past for nearly a century. She burbled to him about the other naughty girls in the village-school playground and the only name he recognised was that of his mother, Alice. Of Gertie, who was especially mischievous, he knew nothing, and Eliza, Martha and Rhoda were merely shadows. She spoke of, and to, her vanished Bartrip relations, most of whom had shuffled off their mortal coils long before Harry Chapman had become entrapped in his. She smiled at a point beyond her nephew as they sat on the little terrace outside her room in the Eventide Home. He might have been, and indeed was, anyone but the Harry she had loved and encouraged. They drank tea and nibbled on ginger biscuits, and he commanded himself not to weep as she went on smiling at something or someone it was impossible for him to see.

— Gertie, Gertie, Mrs Clarke is going to smack you for getting your hands and face so grubby.

He found himself unable to respond. Should he try to communicate with the invisible Gertie? The question was answered as he was forming it. He stayed silent.

The ‘stranger to moodiness’, as her brother-in-law had deemed her, continued to smile and nod. She hummed a snatch of a song once, which vaguely resembled ‘Alexander’s Ragtime Band’. She let out a fusillade of farts, and neither acknowledged nor apologised for the noise and the foul odour.

He rose slowly from the wicker chair.

— Auntie, I must catch my train back to London.

— And now it’s Eliza, would you believe, who’s making mischief.

He waited to learn the precise nature of Eliza’s mischievousness, but Aunt Rose was not ready to divulge it.

He took her hands and kissed them. He said goodbye. He tried to stare into her eyes. Whatever they were seeing did not include him.

He left her with Gertie, Eliza, Martha, Rhoda and the child Alice; with the Bartrips of long ago; with the staff of the Eventide Home, who brought her food and drink and helped to wash and dress her.

He left her without her nephew Harry Chapman and, it occurred to him, her niece Jessie. He walked towards the small country station in a haze of tears.

The bed on his right-hand side was occupied by a snoring man who was bald except for a single tuft of reddish hair that stood up from his scalp like a question mark. He assumed him to be the Mr Breeze Maciek had mentioned earlier.

— Is that Mr Breeze? he asked Veronica, who was tending to the new patient.

— It is indeed.

— I think I’ve seen him somewhere before.

— In a pub, more than likely. I’m sorry, Harry, I didn’t say that. I was speaking out of turn.

— I didn’t hear you.

Mr Breeze’s snores came to an abrupt close. He seemed to have the gift of being able to open one eye at a time. It was a solitary eye that stared at Harry Chapman.

— Who? Where?

— Mr Breeze?

— Who wants to know? Are you a tax collector? My landlord? A detective?

— No. My name’s Harry Chapman. I write books.

— Have I heard of you?

— Perhaps. Or perhaps not.

— I gave up on reading when I reached fifty, didn’t I?

Mr Breeze’s other eye leapt open as he spoke.

— Did you?

— I did. That’s when I opted for the Book of Life instead, wasn’t it?

— Was it?

— It was. What’s your name again?

— Harry Chapman.

— Harry Chapman, eh? Harry Chapman? Did you write a novel about old age when you were very young?

— Yes.

— I was on the literary scene myself, economically speaking you might say, some while back, in the whirling mists of time.

— Tell me more, Mr Breeze.

— Randolph Breeze is my name, isn’t it? I’m ‘Breezy’ for short, but ‘Randy’ I simply will not countenance, under any circumstances. Is that understood? I’ve been known to one and all as ‘Breezy’ since I was a boy, haven’t I?

— You said you were on the literary scene.

— I was, indeed. I trained as an accountant, like my father before me, and his before him. I worked in the accounts department of a famous publishing house. If I say, as I shall, that the great poet Thomas Stearns, alias T. S., Eliot was on the board of directors, you will guess which house I mean. Yes?

— Yes.

— I stayed in that job for five years or more. Happy at my post, wasn’t I?

— Were you?

— I was. But then, disaster struck.

The man who liked to be known as Breezy paused for dramatic effect. Harry Chapman was delighted to feed him his cue:

— Disaster?

— Too strong a word, you would be right in thinking. It wasn’t an earthquake, a flood or any other accident of God. No, I was fired, Mr Chapman. Sacked. On the spot. Told to pick up my things and go.

— For what reason?

— Insobriety. I was prone to partake of what are known in the trade as ‘liquid lunches’. On the disastrous afternoon in question, I returned to the office several half-seas over. I was monumentally arseholed. Could I defend my behaviour? No, I couldn’t. But Dame Fortune was on my side, as she has been so often in the past. She led me to the men’s washroom.

— Did she?

— She certainly did. I was ridding myself of some of the vast quantity of stout and whisky chasers I’d imbibed, when who should come through the door but T. S. Eliot himself. He wished me good day and disappeared into a cubicle. But not before depositing his teeth in a mug by the washbasin. You can imagine, can’t you, how my heart leapt at the sight of the genius’s dentures? I hadn’t a moment to lose. I removed those pearly white beauties from the mug, wrapped them in my none-too-clean handkerchief and fled 24 Russell Square as fast as my shaky pins could carry me.

— Are you saying, Mr Breeze, that you stole T. S. Eliot’s teeth?

— I am saying precisely that. You see that small case, that valise, poking out from my locker? They’re inside. I keep them in tip-top condition by polishing them with a couple of squirts of bleach once a week.

— You never thought of returning them to him?

— The idea crossed my mind and went on walking. A man who has been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature could surely afford a second, or third, pair of gnashers. Would you like to buy them off me? I’ve no one to leave them to.

— I don’t think I have need of them, thank you very much, Mr Breeze.

— I’m offering them to you at a knock-down price. Five hundred?

— No, no.

— I can accept four, maybe? At a pinch?

— Not from Harry Chapman, I’m afraid.

— I could have sold them a thousand times, but I didn’t, did I?

— That was very noble of you.

When Veronica next appeared, Harry asked her for protection. He needed the curtain between himself and the loquacious Mr Breeze.

— I understand. I understand very well.

Harry Chapman arrived at the party breathless. He had climbed an interminable marble staircase in order to reach the festivities, which were now in full sway. This last was the appropriate word, since most of those who had been invited were swaying. A white-jacketed waiter, who looked not unlike Dr Pereira, handed him a glass of flat champagne with the words:

— The bubbles made their excuses and left.

He decided to mingle with the crowd. Everyone present had a sizeable name tag fixed to their lapels, so it was easy to identify the various guests. A weasel-faced man with a lock of black hair stuck to his forehead and watery dark eyes was Herr Joseph Roth, who described himself as a depressed wandering Jew who had a mad wife somewhere, wrote books for a pittance and died of liver failure. Beside him was the bespectacled, mustachioed Senhor Fernando Pessoa, who also cared to be known as Alvaro de Campos, a naval engineer educated in Glasgow, Ricardo Reis, a classical pagan, and the rustic intellectual Alberto Caeiro. ‘I have never loved anyone, not even my three other selves’ his card proclaimed. He, too, had a liver that failed him.

He noticed, in passing, a stocky middle-aged man by the name of Mr Malcolm Lowry. ‘I killed myself when I was forty-eight, but my body had already died on me’ was the message he conveyed to the other partygoers, such as James Joyce and a shyly smiling man in a dinner suit who said that he had posed as a successful business entrepreneur who sold lavatory bowls and brewery equipment but his real work, the work that killed him, was writing. He was in this haunted ballroom for the same reason as Herr Roth, Senhor Pessoa, Messrs Lowry and Joyce – the drink, the demon drink.

— It’s the Mexican day of the dead today, drawled Mr Lowry. — Strike up the band.

And a band struck up with an eerie funeral dance. A host of skeletal dancers came into view, led by Mr Randolph Breeze, who held T. S. Eliot’s upper and lower dentures in his right hand, playing them as if they were half of a pair of castanets.

He saw that he was still curtained off. It was just as well, for it seemed that Mr Breeze had a visitor.

— You haven’t come to nag me, have you, Blanche?

— No, Randolph, I haven’t. I will say this, though. A man of your age and chronic state of health shouldn’t be drinking himself into a stupor. Do you have any recollection of what you got up to last night?

The ever-curious Harry Chapman waited long minutes for Randolph’s reply.