The programme ended, and someone switched off the set. The men started talking. A man in his twenties was the immediate focus of their attention. They demanded to hear more stories of his sexual exploits. The blond cockney Lothario, whose right leg was in plaster, was happy to regale his eager audience with the adventures that had brought him to this pretty pass of broken bones and torn ligaments.
Lothario, alias Brian, had jumped from a balcony to avoid a confrontation with an angry husband who had returned to the second-floor flat he shared with his wife, ‘an old woman pushing forty’. Brian, hearing a key turning in the front door, had slipped out of Mrs Paterson with greater speed than he had slipped into her, and – clutching his trousers, shirt and underpants – he’d climbed over the railing and leapt to freedom, leaving the naked Mrs P and his second-best pair of moccasins behind. He’d hobbled away from the scene of the crime in only his cotton socks, ‘in complete bleeding agony’, and got his clothes back on in an alley, and now he was an invalid, thanks to a few minutes of fun and games with a sex-mad ratbag.
Brian had a fiancée, Harry learned, and the lucky girl’s lovely mother very much approved of the match. Whenever the daughter was off on her travels – she had a job with a perfume company, with branches outside London – Mummy gave her future son-in-law a thorough workout in the master bedroom.
It was generally agreed among the listeners that his marriage, if it ever happened, would end in tears. Everyone asked for an invitation to the wedding – which had been postponed because of his accident – when it was rescheduled. They would come to the church laden with tons of confetti to throw at the bride, who would be a vision in white, and the groom, in his top hat and tails. If there was any left over, they’d sprinkle Brian’s in-laws with it, as a token of respect for the mother in particular, who had managed to keep a straight face throughout the ceremony.
Harry Chapman reckoned that Brian, if he hadn’t been murdered by a cuckolded husband or by one of his discarded lovers, would be in his late forties now. He pictured him as a portly raconteur, with hundreds of personal anecdotes at his command, inspiring new and younger Lotharios to feats of recklessness. Perhaps his wife had borne him a son, the identical model of his devious dad, who was leaping off balconies, hiding in wardrobes, sticking on false moustaches and presently re-enacting all the dear, familiar clichés of theatrical adultery, while Harry – no longer subscribing to the idea of the futility of human existence – clung on to his life, what little there was left of it, in the Zoffany Ward.
Young Harry Chapman was alone in the Chapmans’ half of the house that afternoon. He turned on the radio, or the ‘wireless’ as everybody called it in those days, and was soon compelled to listen intently. A man was describing the progress of a tennis match, and Harry had to make sense of unfamiliar words such as ‘forehand’, ‘backhand’, ‘volley’ and ‘lob’. ‘Love’, which up till now he had associated with affection, suddenly meant ‘nothing’ or ‘nothing on the scoreboard’. Harry had never seen anyone play tennis, because there were no courts at school. Football and cricket were the games on the curriculum, and Harry hated both, especially the latter. The boys in his class had laughed at him when he’d gone in to bat, closing his eyes in fear as the hard ball was bowled in his direction. He was declared to be a coward at the wicket, and was happy to be relegated to the rank of bored spectator.
He was intrigued by what he was hearing. One of the players, Jaroslav Drobny, a Czech who claimed Egyptian nationality, seemed to be the crowd’s favourite, judging by the loud applause that greeted every winning shot. His opponent, an American with the very American name Budge Patty, was making it a fierce, closely fought contest.
For years afterwards, whenever he attended the championships at Wimbledon, Harry Chapman would marvel that he had been bewitched by tennis long before he had ever seen a ball served and put into play. He saw himself, now, in the poky kitchen, his ears attuned to Max Robertson’s vivid commentary, deciding on the instant that if there was a single sport in the world he might possibly enjoy it could only be tennis.
The pain in his gut returned with renewed force.
— Oh, God. Oh, dear God.
Nancy Driver was soon at his side.
— Harry? What’s up, my sweet?
— It’s back. I’d hoped it had gone away, but no such luck.
— I’ll see if I can find Dr Pereira.
— Please. Please.
Jack, the ever-present, ever-reliable ship-boy, advised him to be calm. Harry had no cause to panic.
No, perhaps not. Perhaps this was, at last, the end. So be it, he thought, while wishing it were otherwise. So bloody be it.
— At least you’re in a clean hospital bed, son, not in a stinking filthy, Flanders trench like me.
— Yes, Dad.
— With the rats coming out at night to see if I’m fodder yet.
— Yes, Dad, I’m lucky.
He was aware that Dr Pereira was looking down at him.
— Harry, I need to put a little pressure on your stomach. I’ll be as gentle as possible.
Gentle as the doctor was, he wasn’t gentle enough for Harry Chapman, who cried out in agony.
— I’m going to give you a sedative, Harry. I want to make the next few hours easy for you.
Ah, the magic potion again, administered by the curly-haired fruitseller, in his white hospital coat.
— There, Harry. I’ll be back tomorrow morning. You’ll be able to rest now.
— Harry Chapman, I’m not going to call you a third time. If you don’t get out of bed this instant, you’ll be late for school.
What was the point of leaving the warmth of the blankets and sheets for the chill of a December morning? His father, who had slept alongside him for the last six months, was dead and only recently buried and the pointlessness of rising, washing and dressing for a new day was uppermost in his eleven-year-old mind. Yet rise he did, at the behest of his sister Jessie, when she admonished him gently for not respecting their daddy’s memory.
— He wanted you to have the education he never had.
This was a truth he could neither ignore nor deny. He studied French – the inexplicable language Frank called ‘parlee-vous’ – with special application that Wednesday. He would bring honour to the Chapman name, he thought as he mastered the present tense of the verbs
être
and
avoir
. He would make that his mission in life.
— Education’s all very well, but too much of it can bring you trouble, said his mother, dispensing the wisdom she imparted to him throughout his schooldays and beyond.
He shrugged by way of reply.
— You’ll mark the truth of my words one day.
— Leave the boy be, Alice.
— You always take his side, Rosy Glow.
She takes everyone’s side, the young Harry Chapman heard his older self explain to the dead woman who had brought him into being, because she understands what few of us are granted to understand – that we all merit, whatever our failings, some acknowledgement of our worth. Aunt Rose had acknowledged her nephew’s worthiness from his infancy.
— You lovely boy.
He had been ‘lovely’ for once or twice in the year, when Rose had come to visit. Jessie had been designated ‘lovely’, too. Aunt Rose had brought them fruit and sweets and chocolates and little pictures of St Francis of Assisi, who, she said, for all that he was a Catholic, was someone in touch with birds and animals and plants and the wonders of the universe. He was her hero of heroes, and she’d happened upon him by chance, through nursing a dying Jesuit, back in her early days of tending the sick.
— You were a nurse, Auntie Rose?
— Of course I was, forgetful Harry.
Yes, yes, he remembered, now, his sweet-natured aunt had cared for the elderly at a home in the seaside town Broadstairs. She had gone there in her late twenties and remained
in situ
until she was sixty, when she decided to live ‘like a lady of leisure’ on her pension. So the kind soul who would end her days in the Eventide Home, talking to the mischievous, invisible Gertie, had cared for hundreds of people who had their own unseen friends and acquaintances.
How many funerals can a man have? And just how many times can he die?
These were the questions nagging Harry Chapman as he lay in an open coffin waiting for the service to begin. There wasn’t even a hint of gold, which led him to believe that this repeat performance was taking place in somewhere other than St Mark’s.
— Hello and goodbye, said a grinning Christopher. — I’m here to make sure you’ve gone.
— Very kind of you. As thoughtful as ever.
— It was the least I could do.
Then it was Wilfred Granger’s turn to pay his last respects.
— I wish I had your luck, Harry. I may look healthy, but I’m really very ill. First of all, my heart. Second, my diabetes. Third, my prostate. Fourth, my ingrowing toenail. And you never had to endure cataracts, did you?
— I’m so sorry for you, Wilf.
— I wish other people were. It’s a cruel, uncaring world we live in. Oh, the indignity of getting old.
An exasperated Alice Chapman had no sympathy for the whining individual who was saying goodbye to her son.
— Push off, misery guts. What kind of man are you? Moan, moan, moan. Is that what Harry wants to hear at a time like this? No, it bloody well isn’t.
Actually, it bloody well was what he wanted to hear because Wilf’s limitless self-concern and self-pity amused Harry Chapman. He couldn’t explain to his mother – who was no longer there, anyhow – why this was so. She had always found his sense of humour peculiar.
The NIL BY MOUTH sign was in place once more.
— How’s the pain, Harry?
— It seems to have gone away for the moment. Is that you, Marybeth?
— One and the same.
— Is it morning, afternoon or evening?
— The latter.
— I shan’t be leaving here this week, shall I?
— That’s not for me to say. Try not to worry about it too much. I know that’s easier said than done, but try, honey.
‘Honey’ would try his best to be stoical. He managed to mutter Edgar’s wonderful – to Harry Chapman wonderful – lines in
King Lear
:
—
The worst is not,
So long as we can say ‘This is the worst.’
— That bears a lot to think about and mull over, said Marybeth Myslawchuk, blowing him a kiss as she left him alone in his bed near the main entrance to, and exit from, the Zoffany Ward.
Tuesday – Wednesday – Thursday – Friday
— There isn’t much to shave down here, Mr Chapman, said Maciek Nazwisko. — Just a few days’ growth.
— Can you count the hairs?
— Four and a half. The half is just a tiny – how you say? – sprout.
— In five days? That’s a miracle.
Where had he read, in his youth, that human hair and nails have an independent life? You die, and if you’re not cremated but buried, the hairs on your head, if you’re not totally bald, and your body, if you are hirsute, and the nails on your fingers and toes keep growing while the rest of you rots.
— You’re ready for theatre now, Mr Chapman.
— Thank you, Maciek.
He was placed on a gurney and taken along the same corridors and wheeled into the same capacious lift which plunged downwards. A new someone commented on his paleness to a new another, who responded that she’d seen more colour in an uncooked fillet of cod.
If I ever get out of here, I shall use that remark one day, the novelist in him thought.
— We meet again, said Dr Helen Burgess, the anaesthetist. — You know the procedure.
— Yes.
She examined him thoroughly, and told him she still felt confident to go ahead.
He heard her wish him good luck before the anaesthetic took Harry Chapman away from every sight and sound.
These men were doctors – that much was clear – because they had stethoscopes draped down their white coats. One of them was saying:
— Gentlemen, what we have here is a most interesting specimen. This human object we are examining has eaten nothing but peas for the past three months. Fresh garden peas, tinned peas, frozen peas, and haricot beans for variation. Observe the effects, gentlemen. Examine him, examine him, if you please. If the body emits natural gas, then the peas have served our purpose. The patient’s pulse is irregular, is it not?
— It is, Doctor, says a lone voice.
— And his eyes, see how dead they are. They lack all lustre, gentlemen. It must be our immediate purpose to restore their sparkle. How do we achieve that end?
— No more peas, Doctor. Change his diet.
— Excellent thinking. Let us move to the next bed, gentlemen, where we will find another fascinating case. What we have here is a throwback to the beasts of the field. That is why he is kept in chains. He has been fed nothing but dried bread and water for six months. Approach him at your peril, gentlemen.