Chapman's Odyssey (6 page)

— Thank you. What are we going to do for poetry when you leave?

— A good question, Nancy.

‘Leave’ – he liked the idea of leaving the hospital; alive, of course. She’d used the word casually, as a matter of certain fact. She wasn’t implying that he’d leave in a box, ready for either earth or fire.

— I’m the only person of my acquaintance with a large repertoire of remembered poetry. But there must be other fanatics around.

— We’ll look out for them, Harry, said Marybeth Myslawchuk. — If they exist, we’ll track them down.

They returned him to the bed – his trap; his freshly laundered prison. He saw that Sister Driver was staring pointedly at the empty chair.

— You must have friends, Harry.

— Plenty.

— Give me their names and phone numbers.

— I would prefer not to, Sister Nancy. I don’t want them to see me like this.

— You don’t look so very terrible.

— And you are kind, Nurse.

— Think of their feelings, Harry.

— That’s precisely what I’m doing. Have you had word from Graham?

— Not yet.

— He, and nobody else, must be told I’m here.

— Well, Harry, your perverse wish is our command.

Harry Chapman had, in truth, many lovely friends, women mostly. One, especially, had been his bemused and amusing confidante for – oh God, how long was it? – fifty-three years. They had met when they were both training for the stage, and time hadn’t dimmed the qualities they had detected in one another almost at first meeting. Cynicism can be afforded warm and generous expression, and Pamela’s brand of world-weariness, on the lips of a twenty-year-old, sounded as wise to him then as it did now. Pamela had never abandoned acting, as he had, and appeared irregularly in television dramas, as benign or disgruntled grandmothers, elderly spinsters, dying or not dying in hospital wards where the staff were as much occupied with their rampant sexual cravings as they were with the welfare of their unfortunate patients. Pamela had died twice in the popular Saturday-evening medical saga – as Ernesta Abercrombie, a forthright lesbian novelist, famous for her wartime epic
Cry God for Harriet
, and Lady Sybil Clough-Bagshawe, a fox-hunting country gentlewoman with a son and daughter eager to learn of an inheritance the viewers know she has already bequeathed to an animal charity. To these ill-written roles, Pamela brought an understated dignity, a refusal to indulge in easy caricature that transcended the superficiality of the material.

— You’ve gone very silent, his Virgil observed. — Are you having second thoughts, Harry?

— No.

— You should have married that Pamela, chipped in the oracular Alice. — That’s what I advised you to do when you invited her over for Sunday dinner. She was sensible and practical, despite her being an actress. But did you take my advice?

The question, like most of her questions, was rhetorical.

— No, you didn’t, she continued. — You could have settled down with Pamela and raised a family, but you had to be different, as was your wont. Then you chose to have that Christopher rule your life.

— It was Christopher who nicknamed you Clytemnestra –

— Who’s she when she’s at home?

This Clytemnestra’s Argos was south London – the mean, poky streets between the gasworks and the candle factory – and her Agamemnon, her general-in-chief, with his lordly dust cart, was called Frank. If there was an Aegisthus in the district, her demon costermonger lover, he was a phantom, a figment of her constricted imagination, for no one ever saw him. It was safe to assume that Frank wasn’t murdered by Alice and the invisible Aegisthus, but had succumbed to pneumonia along with hundreds of others that bleak, fog-bound November. Harry, at the age of eleven, was no vengeful Orestes, regardless of the taunts from Alice that caused him to harbour murder in his innermost heart, and Jessie – mourn her beloved father though she did – was not cut out to be a scheming Electra. No, the top half of number 96 could not be accounted a house fit for the Atreus family, and Frank’s long-dead brother – a pretend Menelaus in the guise of Sidney, and an occasional burglar of magisterial incompetence – had left a widow named Mabel, whose puckered lips had sunk a thousand schooners of sweet sherry in the snug bar of the King’s Head and had fired the topless towers of Ilium with many a belch and a bibulous apology for her bad manners.

— Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss, he said now, picturing the obliging Mabel, her nylon blouse in disarray, on the last occasion he had seen her, cheerfully maudlin.

— Who’s Helen? asked Marybeth Myslawchuk. — Do you want her to visit you?

— Her phone’s been disconnected, he replied. — If you dial Ilium 1234, you’ll get no sound at all.

— He’s up to his mischief, Marybeth. ‘Ilium 1234’ – what nonsense he’s coming out with.

— You don’t need to remind me, Sister. I swear he was coming out with nonsense the moment he learned to talk.

That was another of Alice Chapman’s beliefs – that her son, enslaved by the power of his imagination, lived in a ridiculous universe that defied sense and credibility. Harry was destined to stay on Planet Make-Believe all his born days, despite her best efforts to bring him down to earth.

— Harry dear, take no notice of my sister.

— Auntie Rose.

— Yes, my sweetheart, I’m in the vicinity. God knows quite where, but I’m in the building, far away enough from Malice for comfort.

Rose, his beauteous aunt, the impossible optimist, the detector of goodness in those who hid it from everyone, including themselves, was at hand at last, after a long absence from his thoughts.

— It’s wonderful to hear from you.

— I fancy you’d begun to forget me, Harry.

— Never, Auntie. It’s just that –

— It’s just that your mother has to have her say. Isn’t that so?

— Yes.

— The last word has to be hers. Even when it’s the wrong one, as it usually is. But she has her good side, Harry, though she doesn’t often care to show it. You’re a writer, as I shouldn’t have to remind you. She needs your understanding, especially now.

— Is that Helen you’re talking to, Harry?

— No, Nancy. I’m just muttering to myself.

— They say that’s the first sign of madness, ventured Philip Warren, smiling.

—
They
say a lot of things, Master Philip Warren. They seldom stop saying things.
They
have been commenting on human nature since time immemorial. Their tongues will wag until the end of the world.

— Don’t mock the boy, Harry.

— Oh, I’m not mocking him. I’ve been mad for aeons, Nancy. The first sign came long, long before Philip was born.

His unspoken wish to be alone was soon granted. He was to be examined later in the day – Dr Pereira hadn’t revealed exactly when – and must stay calm and hopeful. He wasn’t quite sure why he had to do so, but calmness and hopefulness seemed a better proposition than anxiety.

— What’s looming, Jack? he enquired of the ship-boy.

Jack cleared his perpetually young throat, as if to suggest that words of either warning or comfort were presently beyond his powers.

Harry Chapman, you really are mad, he thought to himself, and then Jack, high up on his mast, responded:

— Be of good cheer, Captain. The shore’s in sight.

What could the boy, the skinny urchin, mean?

And the image of skinniness, of being pigeon-chested, of having a body already weakened by a near-fatal illness in infancy, came to the seventy-year-old Harry Chapman, lying powerless in his hospital bed. He was twelve again, and attempting to learn to swim, and horribly conscious of his meagre physique. His instructor, Mr Sampson, pushed him into the pool at the deep end and dared him not to drown by using his arms and legs as Nature dictated. Nature took a few frightening minutes to dictate to Harry his best means of survival, but survive he did, finding himself at last in the shallow end, where he stood up, gasping and gasping for breath.

The baths had been built in the declining years of the nineteenth century, and were designed in the Gothic mode. He looked down at the tiled floor of the pool and saw that, in his fear, he had yellowed the water. Then, climbing the four or five steps that led to safety, he had to cover his eyes to protect them from the glare of the fierce sunlight reflected in the high window. On that May afternoon in 1949, he might have been in a cathedral instead of the public baths with a swimming pool that reeked of chlorine. Temporarily blinded by sun and glass, he turned and was blinded a second time by a sight that would never leave him. He was dazzled, nothing less than dazzled, by a blond youth standing nonchalantly, hand on hip, in the doorway of a cubicle. The eighteen-year-old, who was soon to leave the school and join the army, was called David Cooke. The vision of David Cooke, in his blue trunks, excited and depressed the silent worshipper who was Harry Chapman. David’s teeth were wonderfully even and white, like a film star’s, and that in itself was a miracle in England in the 1940s, when dentistry was a practice that terrified rich and poor alike. His perfectly shaped body was bronzed, whereas Harry’s was ghostly pale. Almost two decades later, in the Accademia in Florence, Harry Chapman, now the author of a successful, prize-winning novel, stood before the David of Michelangelo and thought of the David brought into radiant being by Mr and Mrs Cooke in a smart London suburb in 1931. Had he retained, at thirty-eight, his glowing youthfulness? Or had military service, marriage and fatherhood aged him? Was he indistinguishable these days from the other middle-class men setting off each morning to earn steady wages in order to support their wives and children? Was his body still in proportion, or did he have a well-fed Englishman’s pot belly?

— You were just as lovely once, he told the real David while seeming to address Michelangelo’s eternal, uncircumcised second King of the Hebrews.

Unanswerable questions then; unanswerable questions now. What was certain in 1949, and as certain in 1968, was that David Cooke, a king of sorts to be regarded with awe and admiration, was not available, either as friend or lover, to the Harry Chapmans who considered themselves blessed if His Majesty honoured them with a smile or a nod acknowledging their inadequate existence. The ridiculous truth was that Harry’s reverence for David Cooke and his kind never progressed to lust or desire – and the lasting evidence of that truth was demonstrated on a university campus in a desolate part of America when Harry Chapman was approached by a freshman named Duane, of pure Nordic stock, whose gift for English did not begin to equal his lauded talent for basketball. Duane was not the brightest of Dr Chapman’s students, but he seemed amiably gauche and caused no problems in class. His grades were low, as were those of his fellow jocks, whose interests didn’t extend beyond sport, girls, TV and beer.

The preoccupied Dr Chapman was walking slowly back to his apartment on a muggy April evening – summer had followed winter, not spring, as it sometimes did in the north-west – when a car drew up alongside him, and a voice said:

— Hi, Dr Chapman. Can I drop you off some place?

— Oh, hello, Duane. That’s very kind of you.

So Duane – at the wheel of his dad’s vast Chevrolet – drove his teacher to the neat apartment he shared with a woman of Italian origin who was visiting relatives in Boston.

— Would you like to come in? I’m going to cook pasta, and you’re welcome to join me.

Duane accepted the invitation unhesitatingly.

— You’ll have to be patient while I prepare my special bolognese sauce.

— Sounds good.

Harry Chapman offered Duane a glass of Chianti, but the youth said he’d be happier with a Michelob, if Dr Chapman had one. Yes, Dr Chapman could oblige, and brought out a can from the refrigerator.

Duane settled himself in the dining area.

— Cheers, Dr C. You English guys say ‘Cheers’, yeah?

— That’s right. Cheers, Duane.

— You’re a great guy, you know that?

— I don’t know that, but thank you for the compliment.

Harry Chapman, to his considerable amazement, was pleased to have Duane’s company. They wouldn’t be discussing Shakespeare or Melville or Dickens, or any literature at all, and that didn’t bother him in the least. He listened contentedly as Duane informed him that some were born to be sportsmen and others, no disrespecting Dr Chapman, were better in the brain department.

— And I belong in the brain department. Is that correct, Duane?

— You sure do.

— I’ve been there too long, Duane. The brain department, that is.

— Well, that’s how the cookie crumbles, wouldn’t you say?

— I would. Definitely. I would.

They sat down to eat
tagliatelle alla bolognese
and a crisp green salad.

— This looks so good, Dr Chapman.

— Call me Harry, Duane. Just for tonight.

— If that’s OK, Dr Chapman.

— Of course it is.

Harry Chapman felt no desire for the beautiful specimen sitting opposite him, whose resemblance to the David Cooke of thirty years past became more pronounced with each sip of wine. Duane explained the rules of basketball to him, passing on the information as though to a child, and Harry revelled in the young man’s earnestness. Duane consumed four cans of beer during dinner, and another two as they sat in front of the television watching the national and local news bulletins. Harry opened a second bottle, and Duane winked at him roguishly as he pulled out the cork and sniffed it.