So Harry Chapman, the man of sometimes inspired suppositions, supposed.
His morning ablutions were done. Maciek Nazwisko had helped him to wash and shave and his visit to the lavatory had passed without problems. He had drunk a moderately weak cup of tea and eaten two slices of toast with strawberry jam. With Mr Randolph Breeze in mind, he had recited Eliot’s ‘Preludes’ from memory to his usual group of poetry lovers. Dr Pereira had commented on Harry’s improving health and said that he should be free to leave in a few days.
— Unless you have a setback, but at the moment that doesn’t seem likely.
— You give me hope.
The doctor smiled his fruitseller’s smile and went off to examine a newly arrived patient.
— Harry, you are a prize cunt. I thought we were friends.
— We are, Wilf.
— Then why, why did I have to hear from that old bitch Pamela Kenworth that you were in hospital? You could have let me know you were poorly.
— I didn’t want any fuss. Take a seat. Thanks for coming.
— Christ, I hate these places. I’ve been inside too many of them. They all smell the same. It doesn’t matter if it’s an expensive clinic or a dump like this, there’s always that peculiar stench. It hit me as soon I came in at the main entrance.
— I’ve been too preoccupied to notice any smells, Harry lied. — Given your horror of hospitals, it’s truly noble of you to be sitting here with me.
— What with my prostate scare and my cataracts and my diabetes and my irregular heartbeat I think my horror, as you rightly call it, is justified.
— Absolutely. How are you feeling at the moment?
— The prostate hasn’t been sorted yet, and as you can see, the cataracts have been removed, one after the other, and now my doctor has put me on four milligrams of rat poison a day to stop me having a stroke. Apart from that, I’m as well as can be expected.
— You look healthy.
— Appearances are deceptive, not to say misleading. If I appear healthy, Harry, it’s only on the surface.
— I’m sorry to hear that.
— No sorrier than I am to have to tell you. The removal of the cataracts was a nightmare. The surgeon – if that’s the proper word for the cack-handed so-and-so – pierced a vein on his first attempt, which meant that I couldn’t see for blood. God, was I angry. I’d waited an eternity for the simple operation and now I had to go on waiting. I’ve been in the wars lately, Harry.
— It certainly sounds like it.
— To cap everything else, I now have three stents keeping my arteries open. Three, can you believe?
Harry Chapman listened enraptured to Wilfred Granger’s soliloquy, which catalogued his every complaint. His eyes, his heart, his prostate were failing him, and his recently detected diabetes ensured that he was unable to drown his ever-present sorrows, as he was accustomed to, with a generous nightly intake of wine. His ingrowing toenail was given due attention, as was his inability to masturbate.
— Can that really be the time?
Wilfred Granger consulted his watch with feigned surprise.
— An hour passes so quickly in the company of an old friend. Harry, I must be making tracks. I have a lunch appointment on the other side of London and I’m already running late. Don’t forget to phone me as soon as you’re home again.
— I shan’t forget. It was kind of you to come today.
— It’s always a pleasure seeing you.
Harry Chapman had known Wilf since the 1960s, when he’d played Third Witch in the
enfant terrible
’s controversial production of
Macbeth
. ‘There is no earthly reason why the Witches have to be women,’ Wilf had announced at the first rehearsal. ‘And what’s more, I don’t think they’re Scottish either.’ What were they then? Harry and his fellow crones wondered. ‘Let’s make them monks.’ Monks? ‘Franciscan monks. Very devout, and very close to nature.’ The First Witch protested, ‘But they are called witches, Wilf.’ ‘By the ungodly Macbeths,’ Wilf riposted.
Wilf Granger’s ‘pioneering’ interpretation was lauded by the same critics who praised Hal Musgrave’s ‘revolutionary’
Hamlet
, in which the gloomy Dane was portrayed as the crazed inheritor of congenital syphilis. Hal was Wilf’s keenest rival for a decade – each outwitting the other in their novel ‘exhumations’ (Hal’s word) of Shakespeare’s tragedies. Hal’s all-black
Othello
, with the Moor of Venice the solitary white presence on stage, was considered prophetic in 1969, and in a curious sense it was. The rivalry ended with Hal’s accidental death later that year, overdosing on heroin.
Harry Chapman remembered, now, the joyous occasion when the First Witch or Monk asked the director why a devout Franciscan would shriek ‘I come, Graymalkin!’
‘Oh, Terence, you have such a restricted imagination. You say, not shriek, “Brother Graymalkin” or “Father Graymalkin” instead. And you, Andrew, will substitute “Brother Paddock calls”. Is that clear?’
The Three Monks, stifling incipient hysteria, nodded.
Wilfred Granger was another survivor. He had outlived four – or was it five? – tempestuous marriages. He had been a Roman Catholic, to please (and guarantee sexual contact with) his first wife; a sabre-rattling atheist; an insufferably smug Buddhist; an all-things-to-all-men agnostic; and latterly, and gloriously, a hypochondriac with a pathological interest in his own decay. He had abandoned the theatre in his fifties, and assumed the role of guru to younger directors and actors who considered his very short book,
Merely Players
, a fount of theatrical wisdom. It had attracted thousands of international worshippers to come and sit at his expensively shod feet. His unwavering self-love was the abiding reason why Harry Chapman was fond of him, knowing as Harry did that it’s the most inadequate love of all – Wilf’s insatiable need for it could never be satiated, never gratified.
And, at seventy-six, he still wore his dusty grey hair tied in a ponytail.
— Oh, Jessie, you haven’t had much of a life.
— Who says so, Harry?
They were standing on either side of Alice Chapman’s coffin. The undertaker had only just closed the lid on her, with her children’s permission.
— This isn’t the time or the place to talk about me.
— I suppose not.
He broached the subject of Jessie’s ill-fated existence some weeks later and was startled by her response.
— You have a nerve, Harry. I know you’ve travelled, which I haven’t; I know you’ve seen the world, which I haven’t, but does that give you the right to say my life’s been wasted? I don’t believe it does.
He was too stunned to speak.
— Don’t interrupt me, she said in the silence. — You think because you write books that you understand other people’s hearts and minds. But you don’t, believe me you don’t. ‘Oh, Jessie, you haven’t had much of a life,’ you said. How the hell – bless my Christian soul – would you know?
He could have replied, but didn’t, that Jessie Chapman – as far as he was aware – had been at her mother’s demanding beck and call from her schooldays onwards. There had been one prospective lover, but he’d failed to meet with Alice Chapman’s approval, and her acidic judgement of his character had meant curtains for Stanley. No romance, no adventure, no real culture – such had been his sister’s miserable lot. Or so it seemed on the surface.
— Jessie, I must apologise.
— You don’t have to. Just keep your trap shut once in a while.
It was, he conceded, good advice. He was in the literary business of delving beneath surfaces, and here he was judging his sister with the superficiality of a mere gossip. How dare he? How dare he belittle her? He wasn’t privy to her deepest feelings, whatever curious form they took. They were hers alone to express or to keep secret. That was the nub of it.
He would often think to himself that Jessie might have had a better time on earth, but he never said so again. When she, too, was dead he remarked to Graham as they left the hospital that he was distressed beyond words for what Alice had done to her hapless daughter.
— You’re being dramatic, Harry. Jessie was happy enough. She made few demands on people. And her last illness was mercifully quick. She’d be upset, and not a little angry, if she knew you were sad about her relationship with the remarkable Alice. Jessie coped. There’s much to be said in favour of those who cope.
In the late 1940s, Sir William Lilliburn’s charity school – its motto was ‘Better Deathe than Deceite’ – opened its doors to boys who had not been awarded a scholarship to study in its hallowed halls. Harry was the honoured possessor of a bursary, and Leo Duggan’s father was rich enough to pay for his son’s education, but the likes of Ralph Edmunds and his cronies lacked the academic skills required of generations of Lilliburnians from 1700 onwards. They were good at games, but little else.
Harry Chapman wondered, now, what Leo Duggan, the friend who had introduced him to Mendelssohn and Babar the Elephant, would have thought of his liaison with Leo’s tormentor, so cavalier with words of abuse such as ‘Yid’ and ‘kike’.
— The Ralph Edmundses of this world are best ignored. Leave them to stew in their own filthy juice.
He had dined, and attended concerts, with Leo and Eleanor during the years of his Queequeg and Ishmael assignations. Once, the conversation had drifted onto the subject of anti-Semitism in post-war Britain and Leo had remembered the first occasion on which Ralph and his braying followers had pointed to his circumcised cock and joked about the size and shape of his nose – or ‘conk’, as they called it. Two nights before, Harry had lain with Ralph in a Bloomsbury hotel after being squeezed breathless in the shower.
— Poor brainless Ralph, said the gentle Leo. I hope he made something of himself. He came from a rough background.
— I hope so, too, the secretive Harry Chapman concurred. – I really hope so.
What was this music he was hearing?
— It’s a song by Brahms, the sixteen-year-old Leo tells him. — ‘Gestillte Sehnsucht’, or ‘Satisfied Longing’. It’s Ma’s particular favourite. She becomes very weepy every time she hears it. Once a week, Harry, to be precise.
— And who is that singing?
— You don’t know? You poor Babar-starved Harry. That’s Kathleen Ferrier, no less. Ma, Pa and I think she has the loveliest voice in the world.
When the song is over, Leo explains its meaning. The unhappy singer, in the golden glow of evening, hears the soft voices of birds and prepares herself for sleep. But this sleep, Leo says with a smile, is obviously the final one – the last sleep that eradicates every pain, every earthly longing, leaving only peace.
— That’s morbid, Leo.
— No, it’s not. I can’t say why, but it’s not morbid at all when the music is very beautiful.
Harry Chapman, thinking of the Queequeg and Ishmael of Melville’s imagination, recalled his previous stay in hospital, twenty-seven years earlier. He’d had an abscess on his upper gums which his dentist – a cheery New Zealander with permanent bad breath – had been unable and unwilling to remove. The specialist at Roehampton had noticed that he was holding a copy of
Moby-Dick
and had asked him if he was mad.
— Don’t misunderstand me, Mr Chapman. By ‘mad’ I don’t mean certifiably insane, I just mean mad enough to read a book as long and rambling as that. It’s about a whale, isn’t it?
— Partly.
— I like suspense myself.
— You don’t have a sufficiency in your work?
— If I answered ‘yes’, you wouldn’t let me perform the operation. There will be no suspense tomorrow, I can promise.
So the madman sat on a bench in the hospital grounds that warm summer afternoon and opened the much-loved book and scanned the familiar pages. There was a ‘damp, drizzly November’ in his own soul as he attempted, and failed, to read on. He had learned recently of the unexpected death of an actor of his own age whom he’d shared a scene with in a television cops series. Victor had looked the fittest of the fit, treating his body as if it were a temple. And then, on the third of July, 1980, running around his local park with his teenage son keeping pace with him, Victor stopped to take what would be his final breath. He opened his mouth, made to clutch his heart, and fell to earth for ever.
Melville’s words swam in front of him. He felt then as he’d felt as a boy, standing in the graveyard of St Mary’s Church, reading the names and dates and pious tributes on the blackened tombstones. Those Joshuas, Elizas, Alexanders and Lydias had been a long time mouldering, with generation upon generation of worms taking sustenance from their remains. This was man’s fate – a progress from nothing into nothingness.
Later that evening, in the ward, he joined a group of male patients who were watching a television documentary about Laurel and Hardy. Stan Laurel’s face reminded him of his father’s, and his sense of futility deepened, if that were possible. He smiled, of course, as the incomparable pair tried to carry a piano up a flight of steps, just as he’d smiled as a small boy at the very same sequence in his local cinema, the Super Palace. It was known as a fleapit, and the auditorium always smelled of an especially lethal disinfectant. That smell returned to him briefly as he watched the dead comics, immortalised on celluloid.