Chapman's Odyssey

by Paul Bailey

  — I never could get a handle on parlez-vous, he’d confided to his son on a walk back from the park in the long ago. — But you’ll be different, you clever little sod.

  But here was Babar, out of breath and tired, arriving in the town and seeing hundreds of houses. As well as houses, there are broad streets known as boulevards, and motor cars and buses. He looks with particular interest at two men in conversation on a street corner and marvels at how well dressed they are. He would like some fine clothes, too, but has no idea how to acquire them. Luckily for him, a very rich Old Lady who has a fondness for little elephants understands that he is longing for a smart suit. The Old Lady, who is wearing a long red dress and a fur tippet, takes pity on Babar and hands him her purse . . .

  — Whoever heard of an elephant going to a department store and buying a green suit, a derby hat and shoes with spats?

  — It’s a fantasy, Mother. It’s make-believe.

  — Make-believe never put bread and butter on the table.

  Babar is so pleased with his first clothes, in which he looks very elegant, that he goes to a photographer to have his picture taken. Just imagine: an elephant posing in front of an old-fashioned tripod camera.

  This being a book by a Frenchman, when Babar has dinner with his friend the Old Lady, he balances a glass of red wine – a vintage claret, perhaps – on the tip of his trunk. Only a few pages back, he was in the African wilderness, and now here he is, dressed up to the nines, eating soup and ham, and enjoying civilised discourse with a wealthy widow. Harry Chapman, at fifteen, assumed she was a widow, like his mother. Anyway, she lives alone, with only a tiny dog in tow.

  Babar moves into the Old Lady’s house, and every morning he joins her as she exercises, doing press-ups, and afterwards has a satisfying soak in the bath . . .

  — Can you really believe, clever-dick Harry Chapman, that an elephant – an elephant! – could plonk his bum on a seat made for men, women and children? You saw the one at the zoo, when your dad and me took you and Jessie for a treat, and he opened his backside – didn’t he? – and it was like a deluge what came out of him.

  Deluge? Had she said ‘deluge’? Maybe she had. It was in her character to surprise her son occasionally with an unexpected word. The elephant at London Zoo in 1947 had indeed emitted a deluge of mud-coloured shit, which Harry and Jessie witnessed with giggling fascination.

  — I wouldn’t like that keeper’s job. He’s ready and waiting with his shovel. How many times a day do you think he has to clear up after Jumbo?

  — Why don’t you go and ask him, Frank, seeing as how you’re so interested?

  Babar was too refined, too considerate a mammal to have behaved as that huge, ungainly beast behaved six decades past. He would have been discreet in his ablutions, this king-in-waiting, Harry Chapman informed his constantly down-to-earth mother slyly.

  — King, did you say?

  — I did.

  He showed Alice Chapman the illustration of King Babar and Queen Céleste in their bridal-cum-coronation robes, brought from the nearest town by an obliging dromedary, who arrives in the nick of time. The previous king, he explained to her, had died as the result of eating a bad mushroom. He had turned green from top to toe.

  — Hoof. Hooves, she corrected him. — Elephants have hooves.

  — Yes, Mother. You could be right. But I think they’re called feet as well.

  — It just so happens I bought a quarter-pound of mushrooms today. I hope there’s not a bad one among them. I don’t fancy the idea of you and your sister going green.

  He saw those mushrooms now, lightly peppered and salted, fried gently in a dab of butter.

  Suddenly, as if from nowhere, he caught the sound of a man singing. The voice and the tune and the words were familiar to him. He listened intently as the debonair singer referred to feeling awfully low in a world turned cold. But there was hope. All he had to do was picture his beloved and immediately he felt aglow with love and happiness at the way she would be looking tonight.

  This isn’t any man, this is Fred Astaire, in white tie and tails, wearing a top hat set at a jaunty angle. His hands are elegantly gloved and he is carrying a cane. He is dressed, as always, for a special occasion.

  — Your Majesties, he says, bowing deeply.

  — I believe, Mr Astaire, that you wish to dance with my beloved consort, Queen Céleste.

  — That is true, Your Majesty. It would be the greatest honour for me to lead Her Majesty on to the floor.

  — I, too, should be honoured, says Queen Céleste, in a surprisingly squeaky voice for such a very large lady. — It has long been my dream – if you will forgive me, my dearest husband – to hoof it with the unparalleled Mr Fred Astaire.

  King Babar instructs the band (the motliest crew of two monkeys, three ostriches, a leopard, a tiger, a camel, a snake, a zebra and an antelope) to strike up.

  — Take it away, he commands.

  And there it is again, the blissful song by Jerome Kern, first heard by Harry Chapman coming out of the eccentric wireless in the apology for a kitchen where Alice slaved over a thousand meals.

  — He’s got a lovely voice, remarked his usually malevolent mother. – And he’s not a bad dancer, come to that.

  Queen Céleste alights from her throne and offers her front legs to Fred Astaire, who takes them in his outstretched hands. Soon they are in a decorous embrace, and Fred – his cane and top hat discarded – leads her effortlessly in what he tells his glowing partner is a foxtrot. Her ball gown billows in the spring breeze.

  — You are very light on your feet, Your Majesty.

  — Back hooves, Mr Astaire, she corrects him, sounding for an instant like Alice Chapman.

  — I beg your pardon, Your Majesty. May I observe that you have a finer feel for the music, for the rhythm, than has Miss Ginger Rogers?

  — You may, responds Céleste, reverting to her regal squeak. — I am flattered. It is the highest compliment I have been paid since my cousin Babar asked for my hand in marriage.

  Mr Astaire hears himself singing about the laugh that wrinkles the regal nose and instantly corrects himself:

  — I’m so sorry, Your Majesty, trunk.

  — Apology accepted, Mr Astaire.

  — And that laugh that wrinkles your trunk, sings Fred, seeming to mean every word as he tells the elephantine queen that his foolish heart is touched by the very sound of her laughter and the sight of her puckering trunk

  — That serpent is a remarkable clarinettist, Your Majesty.

  — Isn’t he? Funny what a fang can do, don’t you think? Snakes have not been looked upon favourably since that regrettable business in the Garden of Eden, but Oscar – bless his cobra’s chilly cotton socks – is a very loyal courtier in addition to being, as you perceive so cogently, a talented musician.

  — He’s the equal of Benny Goodman.

  — We, King Babar and myself, will convey your appreciation of his playing to him.

  — You are most gracious, Your Majesty.

  — All in the day’s work, Mr Astaire. If a queen cannot be gracious, what is a queen for?

  — 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.

  Thursday – Friday – Saturday

  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.r />
  — 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.