No War, or battles sound
Was heard the World around,
The idle spear and shield were high up hung;
The hookèd chariot stood
Unstain’d with hostile blood,
The Trumpet spake not to the armèd throng . . .
— What was that you were mumbling, Mr Chapman? It sounded very old-fashioned, the little I could make of it.
— It’s a poem, Nurse. It’s been in my head for more than fifty years along with a hundred others.
— Are you a professor?
— I was called the Professor when I was young. It was a family joke. My nose was forever in a book, my mother said.
— I wish my son read books.
— What does he do instead?
— Plays games on his computer.
— When is Sister Driver back on duty?
— You miss her, do you? Is there a romance blooming?
— Yes to the first question, no to the second.
— She’s on tonight, you naughty man.
Oh, the coquetry of the nursing profession. He corrected himself: the coquetry of
some
members of the nursing profession. At least Nurse Mullen wasn’t calling him ‘sweetheart’ and ‘darling’, the terms of endearment that signalled certain death.
He waited for the first ‘sweetheart’, the first ‘darling’, from Nurse Mullen’s noticeably thin lips. They were not, as yet, forthcoming.
— It isn’t every patient who spouts poetry to himself.
‘To spout’: the verb was one of his mother’s favourites. Whenever she saw him act, she accused him of spouting. He pictured a jet of words, like the foam a whale emits, gushing from his mouth.
— Why did you say that?
— Say what, Mr Chapman?
— ‘Spouts poetry’. Why ‘spouts’?
— Well, it stands to reason, if you think about it.
— Please explain.
— Well, poetry isn’t a normal way of speaking, is it? I’m not talking in verses, am I? That’s the reason poetry’s always spouted when it’s read out loud.
— Ah, yes. Thank you.
— You’ve got a wicked smile on your face.
— It’s not on my arse, Nurse Mullen.
— I’m going to love you and leave you. Doctor will be coming round shortly.
He returned her ridiculous, coquettish wave. He felt like blowing her a ridiculous, coquettish kiss but refrained from doing so. The pain in his gut had returned, barring all attempts at levity.
— Christ Almighty, he whispered.
No earthly use invoking the son of God, he thought. He and his ancient pa won’t waste their celestial time on an old reprobate like you.
— Good morning, Mr Chapman. And how are we feeling today?
— We? I’m not royal, I do assure you. I am a common or garden queen and a lifelong republican.
— I am here to offer you spiritual comfort, if you require it.
— How very kind, Reverend. I am sorry to disappoint you but I have my own spiritual resources. I shall be my own comforter. You’re Roman Catholic, I assume. You made the sign of the cross when I exposed myself as an ordinary queen.
— Yes. I am Father Terence.
— Allow me to ask you a theological question, if I may.
— Please do.
— When I was five years old I nearly died of diphtheria. It was one of the diseases that afflicted poor families. My mother became a regular churchgoer – Anglican, Father – throughout the eighteen months I waited for death’s door to open. If it had opened, as it almost did, where would I have gone to all those years ago?
— Were you a good little boy?
— I had no desire to be bad.
— Then I think a home would have been found for you in heaven.
— Not limbo?
— No, Mr Chapman. I am not alone in regarding limbo as a literary concept. You had been baptised, yes?
— Yes.
— Heaven, without a doubt.
— Oh, Father Terence, what a happy little soul I might have been, playing with my other infant friends for all eternity. Are toys allowed up there?
— Toys lead to squabbles and envy. No toys. Just you as you were born, naked and unadorned and blessed by the Holy Spirit.
— And look at me now, as unblessed as you can get. I am wasting your time. There must be people in here in serious need of your attentions. Thank you for talking to me.
— God bless you.
That was the longest conversation he’d had with a priest in years, he realised when the amiable Father Terence departed. He’d had no cause to converse with clerics, to put it pompously. He had spoken nothing less than the beautiful truth when he’d told the father he had his own spiritual resources. Step forward sweet-tempered George Herbert, heartless but transcendental John Donne, radiant and disconsolate Christopher Smart, virginal sexpot Teresa of Ávila, stoical Marcus Aurelius. His chorus line of comforters was unending.
— He seemed a nice man for a Catholic, he heard his mother say. — Why everyone can’t be Church of England is something I’ve never understood. I’m glad you were polite to him. You can be so rude to clergymen when you want to.
— Mea culpa.
— What are you talking about? You do it to annoy me, speaking foreign. And why did you have to tell that Holy Father you nearly died of diphtheria? You have a morbid streak, Harry. You always did have.
— Always?
— As far back as I can remember. I swear you came out of my womb in a temper. You didn’t look pleased to be here.
— I wanted his expert opinion. He gave it to me. He said I would have gone to heaven if, if –
— There was no ‘if’, was there?
— If, if I wasn’t here now, listening to you again. If I’d been ‘gathered’, as you were fond of saying. If, if, if, Mother mine.
— Get back in your pram, Harry Chapman.
That taunt for all his childhood; that lethal combination of five short words intended to diminish him; oh, the terrible inference that he would never grow into the kind of manhood she might approve of – here it was, harshly expressed, unsettling him, angering him, in this hospital ward, in a changed London, on the eve of his seventieth birthday.
— I’m seventy, Mum.
— Seventy? Seven, seventeen or seventy, you’re still the same useless object I brought into the world.
— It’s good to have your support.
He reminded himself that Alice Chapman had been dead for twenty-two years. To his and Jessie’s amazement, she had left instructions that she wished to be cremated. The urn containing her ashes had been buried in St Peter’s churchyard in the small country town where she had been born and raised. Yet here she was, in some form or another, goading him with the familiar words of long ago.
— Mr Chapman? Mr Chapman?
He came out of his gruesome reverie and saw Dr Pereira.
— Nurse Mullen tells me you were sick this morning.
— I was.
— Immediately after breakfast. Is that correct?
— Yes.
— You will be given no more solid food for the time being. You will be fed intravenously.
— I understand.
— Until we discover exactly what is wrong with you.
— Why the delay?
— We have to be absolutely certain, Mr Chapman.
A saline drip was duly attached to him later that morning and a card with the instruction NIL BY MOUTH placed above his head.
— I feel trapped.
— Don’t talk silly, said a nurse called Marybeth Myslawchuk, as her name tag informed him. — This is for your benefit. You’re not trapped one teensy bit.
— You sound American.
— I sound Canadian, if that’s all right by you. I sound Canadian because that’s what I am.
— I do apologise.
— No need to. Since you are so curious, my family hails originally from Ukraine.
— I was in Lvov once. A pretty place, with some interesting Italianate architecture.
— Never been there, and I can’t say I want to go. My grandpa and grandma were happy to get out, and I am more than happy to be in jolly old England, where it’s never too hot or too cold. That’s me in a nutshell, Mr Harry Chapman.
— No one can be contained in a nutshell, Marybeth Myslawchuk. Oh, I do hope I pronounced that second name even half correctly.
— Nine out of ten for trying, Mr C. More emphasis on the ‘mys’ and you’d be perfect. The word’s going round the ward that you know a whole lot of poetry.
— I do.
— Say some for me, then. That’s a polite request.
It was the easiest poem to remember. It was in his bloodstream, had been there since he was a skinny boy of twelve, when love – with its delights and sadnesses – was still on the horizon, but the beauty of his inherited language had already established itself in his mind and heart, the two indistinguishable. So he serenaded the plump, middle-aged Canadian by enquiring if he should compare her to a summer’s day, and assuring her in thirteen more lines of his undying affection, surviving beyond the grave.
They were both silent when he had finished. He was slightly embarrassed, as if the feelings he had expressed were his very own and their object the stately Nurse Marybeth. It was almost as if he had been wooing her.
— Well, Mr Chapman, you’re a Shakespearean son of a gun, if I ever heard one. That was a treat. I thank you.
He thanked her for thanking him, so touched was he by her response.
— That’s enough thank-yous for today, thank you very much. And no more silly talk of being trapped.
Silly talk or not, he did feel trapped now, waiting here for his friend Graham to arrive from Sri Lanka, where he had gone to take stock of his life so far and to contemplate his future. Graham was in the jungle somewhere, dressed only in a sarong, in a hut by the side of a lake, cut off from all contact with the West. No electricity, no telephone, nothing. Oh, the luxury, Harry Chapman thought, of going native for the purpose of self-improvement, thousands of miles from civilisation and its discontents.
Almost the last person he had seen before the unbearable pain had sent him phoning for an ambulance was the woman known to the cognoscenti as the Duchess of Bombay. She was standing outside his house in her customary makeshift clothing – a tattered Napoleonic overcoat, a faded cotton dress, brown stockings rolled down below her knees and those improvised shoes composed of scraps of newspaper and plastic bags – and shouting abuse at the world. Her adversary had to be the entire universe for there was nobody else in view. The Duchess, in her remote youth, had trained to be a concert pianist. As Anya Lipschitz (born Anne Lipton) she had played Grieg’s Piano Concerto with an orchestra made up of former students of London’s music colleges, and had given two well-received solo recitals, the last at Wigmore Hall in 1959. On that memorable evening, she performed an eclectic repertoire: a Chopin polonaise; a fantasia by Liszt; some early pieces of Alban Berg; five of Brahms’s intermezzi and Beethoven’s ‘Les Adieux’ sonata. There were several encores.
That was the beginning, and the end, of her fame. Two things destroyed her potentially brilliant career – the sudden death of her parents in an air crash in France, and the arrival of a young man from Istanbul with whom she became captivated and then infatuated. She was now very rich, thanks to her father’s bequest, and for the next three years she lived solely for Acil, in a large house in west London she leased. It was her love nest in that quiet, tree-lined street whenever Acil was there with her, and her desolate moated grange when he was inexplicably absent. Each time he returned she attempted to be calm and reasonable, trying and failing to conquer the jealousy that possessed her. To console him, because he was always the injured party, she bought him tailored suits, handmade shirts and shoes, expensive – and, to her eyes, rather vulgar – items of jewellery. He liked to remind her that she was lucky to have such a handsome and virile lover, and then she thanked him for bestowing upon her the favours most women could only dream of – yes, yes, she assured him, she knew just how lucky she was.
All this she had recounted to Harry Chapman, in snatches of conversation over two decades, on fine or clouded afternoons, in the course of chance encounters. Her need to reveal her past to him depended entirely on the mood she was in, for sometimes she was vindictive and laconic, her eyes blazing with anger, her mouth pursed contemptuously. Her narrative, given the deranged state of her mind, was surprisingly continuous: it was not until she had dealt with Acil’s final departure that she ventured to talk of her afterlife, as she referred to it. He heard of her descent into depression, her eviction from the house, her bankruptcy, and her overpowering reliance on the temporary comfort afforded by Bombay Sapphire, her favoured gin. For a terrible while, she was the leading lady in a troupe of public guzzlers who gathered together, existence permitting, on a forlorn strip of grass, intended as a communal garden, near a busy roundabout. One of their number, a perpetually defeated Irishman called Colum, had honoured her with the title of Duchess of Bombay – in respect of her refined way of speaking, her briefly flickering intelligence and her obvious hauteur (a word, she explained to a bemused Harry Chapman, decidedly not in Colum’s vocabulary). She was the brightest star in a belching, hiccuping, incoherent firmament, and she played her appointed role with, she told him, a regrettable relish. She was a somebody – she’d had a wonder-filled past as Anya Lipschitz – among an assortment of nobodies. The troupe disbanded, courtesy of the Grim Reaper, who took Sean and Seamus and Muriel and Betsy and Eamon and who-knows-whom-else in his icy clasp. She found herself an isolated survivor who no longer craved company. She had arrived at a state of almost complete solitariness. Almost, yes, but not quite, because she still cared to convey her sorrows to a man she did not know as Harry Chapman. He was her appreciative port in a seemingly lasting storm. He listened to her every word.