— You speak wisely, ma’am.
— A monarch must have wisdom.
— I wish every monarch had been as wise as you. Then history would have a prettier tale to tell.
The dance comes to a triumphant end. King Babar leads the applause.
— Bravo, brava, the animals cry.
—
Le jour de gloire est arrivé
, shouts the Old Lady, an ardent royalist where elephants are concerned, but otherwise something of a revolutionary, it occurs to Harry Chapman, who – by the sound of it – is alone in the Zoffany Ward.
— Your friend Maurice is back with us. He’s sleeping peacefully.
— That’s good, Marybeth.
— The woman who came to see him today mothered three of his fourteen children. Her name is Patience.
— Patience? That is wonderful. Is, or was, the impatient Patience his wife?
— He doesn’t agree with the institution of marriage. He is an advocate of free love.
— Ah, that would account for the impossible positions.
— What on earth are you talking about, Harry?
He explained to Marybeth what the woman called Patience had trumpeted to the somnolent Maurice. The trip to Morocco in ’89, and the things he got up to in Tangier that would have brought a blush to Casanova’s cheeks, the plethora of copper bottoms and those
impossible
positions that even an Olympic gold medallist would have lacked the courage to attempt – all this he recounted to the bemused Canadian, whose smile broadened with each revelation.
— My, my. He looks washed out right now. I shall be surprised if he regains the energy to continue on with his former pursuits.
— Does he have a career outside that of a free lover? Or is that his full-time occupation?
— I didn’t enquire, Harry. If he’s compos mentis in the morning, I’ll ask him.
— I’d be obliged. What’s the time?
— Late. Eleven thirty. Or twenty-three thirty, if you prefer.
— Tomorrow’s my big day, I believe.
— It’ll be a doddle, Harry. You’re not to worry. Trust me, honey.
Yes, he supposed he trusted her, just as he trusted Nancy Driver. He was in their proverbial good hands.
— Trust them, Harry, advised his Aunt Rose. — They want to make you well again.
— In body, Auntie. I think my soul’s beyond repair. What’s left of it.
— This is meant for you, Harry Chapman, you selfish piece of shit, Christopher shrieked as he scarred the table bequeathed to Alice Bartrip by a grateful aristocratic employer. — This knife is meant for your heart.
— You’re drunk.
— Oh, you and your writer’s insight. Of course I’m fucking drunk. You’d make a Mother Superior hit the bottle.
— Go away, Christopher. Go away, he begged the swaying bloated man he had loved for all too brief, and all too long, a time.
Three Christophers had been with him: Christopher Marlowe, stabbed to death in a Deptford tavern; Christopher Smart, shoved in and out of asylums, abandoning his family, calling out to God for salvation; and Christopher Riley, who had declared his love for Harry Chapman with an intense conviction that could not be denied or doubted.
— Have I made my feelings clear?
— You have.
— So you’ve got the message?
— Yes, I have.
— You won’t get a better offer.
Christopher Riley, the seriously lapsed Catholic, had spoken the absolute truth in 1964. Harry Chapman, then, could not foresee ever getting a better offer. He was fated, doomed, to accept it.
The thought of that love, that stifling, suffocating love, from which he was unable to extricate himself, however much he tried to, chilled Harry Chapman, whose only immediate hope of warmth was to be wafted into dreamless sleep.
Maciek Nazwisko had shaved the stubble from Harry Chapman’s face and the hairs on his stomach and around his cock and balls. He had performed his duty with considerate expertise.
— Do not move, Mr Chapman. I am trying not to cut you.
And now Veronica was washing him, preparing his body for the ongoing slaughter or investigation or whatever Dr Pereira cared to call it.
— There, there, she murmured, as if to a fearful child.
Was he frightened? His brain wasn’t telling him so, but could it be that Veronica was seeing signs of abject terror in his eyes, in the face she was sponging with such delicate attentiveness?
— Where are you from, Veronica?
— You asked me that question the other day and I gave you the answer. Have you forgotten?
— I must have. Mea culpa.
— The answer’s still the same, Mr Chapman. My family hails from Odessa, but I was born in Bristol.
— I shan’t forget a second time.
— You must have more important matters on your mind.
Yes, indeed. Yes, Veronica, I am thinking of being alive at this moment and, perhaps, not being alive when the medics have finished with me. And if I could tell you, which I don’t wish to, that I am not afraid, for reasons far beyond logic, you in your infinite kindness would probably not believe me.
— There, there, she said again. — You’re immaculate, Mr Chapman.
— I hope the surgeon is appreciative.
— He will be.
— Good evening, Harry, said Nancy Driver. — I’ve come to get your autograph. Who is your next of kin?
— Kin? I may have a cousin or two somewhere on the planet, but my nearest and dearest are all dead. I’m a sad old orphan.
— We need a name.
— Graham. Graham Weaver.
— Is he the friend who’s in Sri Lanka?
— He is. Have you made contact with him yet?
— We’ve sent messages. There’s been no reply from him in person. What’s his London address?
— The same as mine.
She handed him the form, which was attached to a clipboard, and he signed and dated it.
— My final words, perhaps.
— No, Harry. Absolutely not.
— You cheer me, Sister Nancy.
— It shouldn’t be very long before we take you down to theatre.
Theatre? The magic word of his adolescence. Harry Chapman, destined to be Hamlet, Richard the Second, Romeo and then Macbeth and Lear. The lights going down in the auditorium, the curtain rising, the two hours’ traffic commencing – how exciting he had found it all then, sitting in the gallery, the cheapest, most distant part of the house, with Pamela sometimes beside him. However tragic the events onstage – the stabbings; the poisonings; the slayings; the suicides – they seemed to happen in a world unencumbered with gasworks and candle factories, a world bewitchingly elsewhere.
Today’s theatre, which Nancy had assured him he would soon be visiting, was not such a place of enchantment. He would not be a hero this evening, thanks to the anaesthetist, but rather a passive victim, a body on a slab, while the heroics, the big dramatic gestures, would be played out by Dr Pereira and Mr Russell and – perhaps – the mysterious, authoritative Professor. Today he would be almost no one, a purely physical object to be dissected, a Harry Chapman known solely for the lump near his pancreas, a Harry Chapman in name only, on the tag identifying him, not the imaginative, creative Harry Chapman, the Harry Chapman he had willed and made himself to be, outside the common herd who were the constant, prevailing subject of his writings.
‘The common herd’: that was an expression to be regretted, even if he’d only thought it. There was a special dignity in being a commoner, as he had often made plain.
— You always did believe you were a cut above the rest of us, didn’t you?
There was no mistaking that vinegary voice.
— I suppose I did, once upon a long, long time ago, Mother.
— You were a stuck-up little tyke.
Ah, that beautiful word. How lovely to hear it again. ‘Tyke’: a mongrel child, an imp, and in Australia a Roman Catholic.
— I wasn’t a mongrel child, was I?
— You were what you were, she answered, gnomically.
— And that was adorable, Aunt Rose intervened. — You and your sister were adorable children. You were little treasures.
Before his mother could make a predictable riposte, Harry Chapman was suddenly conscious of being lifted from his bed and placed on to a gurney.
— The anaesthetist is ready for you, Harry.
— But am I ready for him, Nancy?
— It’s a her, my dear. And very capable she is.
He was pushed along corridors and into a capacious lift, which plunged downwards.
— He doesn’t look too good, someone whispered to another.
— It’s bad, whatever it is he’s got, the another remarked to the someone, who were both beyond his vision.
— You see bad sights, working in here.
That was the someone again, who inspired the another to observe:
— You do indeed. A truer word was never said.
Who were these cheerful souls, these loud whisperers?
— He’s as pale as my Alf was, the day he toppled over.
— But he’s all right now, isn’t he?
— Yes and no. He has to mind what he eats and drinks. He used to be partial to steak and kidney, but his stomach can’t abide it any more. He swears he’s in purgatory when his nose gets a whiff of it.
— Poor Alf. Still, he’s lucky to be with us, steak and kidney notwithstanding.
The someone – or was it the another? – pondered the accuracy of this observation.
The lift doors opened, and Harry Chapman was propelled along a wide corridor, at the end of which was a room where a woman who introduced herself as Dr Helen Burgess greeted him. She checked his pulse, his blood pressure, and told him she was confident enough to go ahead.
And go ahead she did, and soon Harry Chapman found himself slowly vanishing, and then he had no sense at all that he was anyone . . .
. . . and then a distant music came to his awakening ears. Schubert’s tormented winter traveller could be heard far off on the snowy plain. Three blood-red suns suddenly appeared in the sky above the wanderer and then as suddenly evaporated.
The singer – a portly baritone in a tattered frock coat – was moving closer to Harry Chapman. He was singing of the comforting darkness that would be his last consolation. Not far from him, barely visible, was an old organ-grinder playing on his hurdy-gurdy.
—
Wunderlicher Alter, soll ich mit dir gehn?
Willst zu meinen Liedern deine Leier drehn?
sang the baritone, and so did the patient in the theatre, in a voice raw with feeling.
— Well done, Sunshine.
The man who was addressing the waking Harry Chapman looked vaguely familiar.
— I’m Mr Russell. I opened you up. You may not have realised it, but you were singing towards the end of the operation. The words sounded like German.
Harry Chapman, unable to speak because of the equipment in his mouth, nodded assent.
— You are in the intensive care unit, in case you don’t recognise your surroundings. You will stay here for a day or two.
A bespectacled woman with her hair in a tight bun appeared at the doctor’s side.
— This is Nurse Dunckley. She’s in charge. She’ll be at your beck and call.
— Think of me as Jeanette, my love, said the nurse. I’m a friendly soul, Harry. I may call you ‘Harry’, mayn’t I?
He hadn’t heard ‘mayn’t I?’ in ages, if ever. Since he could neither smile nor speak, he managed a cursory nod.
— So we’re Jeanette and Harry, my love.
— I’ll check up on you later, Sunshine, the doctor promised, and left.
Why, Harry Chapman wanted to know, was Mr Russell calling him ‘Sunshine’? He would ask Jeanette for an explanation, as soon as he could form a coherent sentence.
— You’re a very handsome Harry, my love. We want you to stay in the world as long as possible.
Oh, that was a reassuring observation from the lanky Jeanette, whose inamorato he had inexplicably become.
— She’s flannelling you, snapped the Clytemnestra of the gasworks and the candle factory. She’s a cold-hearted bitch behind all that smarmy talk. ‘My love’, indeed. Watch her carefully, Harry Chapman.
What else was there for him to do – cabined, cribbed and confined as he was in this brightly lit ward?
He longed, now, for the company of Sister Nancy, of Marybeth, of Philip and Maciek, of the dutiful Veronica. They were his new-found friends. He wanted to be back among them, hearing their familiar voices, seeing their concerned or irritated expressions, entertaining them – if that was what he’d been doing – with the poetry he had made his own.
— We’ll have you up and about in no time, my love. No time at all.
Had there ever been a golden age in the long life of Harry Chapman? He tried to recall it as he lay – dying, perhaps – in the room reserved for those poised on the very brink. It was a futile question, he soon decided. He’d had, in common with countless others, moments of happiness, of well-being. Moments? No, there were hours, days, weeks even, he could summon up if he applied himself to the task of remembering. One image, and one alone, came to him without effort. He was standing in the courtyard of the Forte Belvedere, looking down on the city of Florence on a May morning, marvelling at the exquisite colours – mostly pink and green – of the Duomo and the Campanile. The day was gradually heating up, but at ten o’clock it was relatively mild. Here was paradise on earth. It was as if his past had been obliterated. Harry Chapman, at the age of thirty-one, was like a slim Cortez, silent upon his very own peak in Darien. He’d smiled at the notion then, and he might have smiled again, had he not been encumbered with tubing.