Chapman's Odyssey (3 page)

He was in the library one morning when he saw her chosen name on the spine of a very slim book. It was a study of the life and music of Anton von Webern, and he could tell immediately that it was written with graceful lucidity. Could it be possible there was another Anya Lipschitz, an authority on the twelve-tone technique Webern had pioneered? This Anya was fluent in German, to judge by her translations of the composer’s writings, as well as being a skilled explicator of his intricate works. No, he decided, this was a different Anya, a scholar unlikely to be deceived and abased by a Turkish gigolo. She was, surely, too wise to have surrendered herself to such an obviously professional charmer.

Was she, or was she not, the scholarly Anya? The question remained unanswered for several months, because the Duchess of Bombay and the battered car in which she had made her home had vanished from the district. The vehicle, he learned, had been pronounced a threat to health, the Duchess’s cavalier way with discarded food greatly attracting the local rodent population, thus causing it to be removed on the instructions of the borough council. It was scrap by the time he went to visit her. Then he assumed she was dead, gone where her inebriated courtiers had gone, and he was too occupied with the novel he was struggling to write to bother about identifying the author of
Anton von Webern: A Life in Music
. The Duchess was relegated to the back of his mind.

On a chilly November day he heard her call out to him.

— You. You. Come over here, you.

She was sitting on a doorstep, rubbing butter onto her legs.

— Taking precautions for the winter. Nothing like butter to keep the cold out.

— How are you? Where have you been?

— You can see how I am. I’ve been nowhere.

He asked her if she knew anything about the Austrian composer Webern. She replied by humming a fragment of his youthful passacaglia.

— Did you write a book about him?

— Perhaps I did, and perhaps I didn’t.

That was answer enough. He decided not to pursue the subject. Besides, he had no alternative, for now she dismissed him with a curt ‘Go away’.

— Goodbye, he said, and left.

And then there she was, on Saturday, yards from his house, howling like Lear on the heath although it was a balmy September afternoon, the light gently autumnal. As he watched her from a first-floor window, the pain in his stomach assumed an agonising new dimension. He picked up the phone and dialled 999 and asked for A & E. He waited, crouched on the carpet, for the ambulance to arrive. When it did, he could only mumble that he had been constipated for a week and he didn’t know why. He was usually regular. The paramedics, a young man and younger woman, advised him not to speak any more, to take it easy, to try not to worry. They would be at the hospital in double-quick time. The local football team was playing away in the north of England and the roads, for once, were free of excess traffic.

— Harry?

— Is that you, Sister Nancy?

— None other.

— Is it night already?

— No, no. I came in early. I have masses of paperwork to get through.

— I envy you.

— What on earth do you mean?

— My work’s paperwork, Nancy. I should like to be at my desk, mulling over the next sentence. That’s why I’m envious. My hands are useless in here.

— Try not to fret too much.

Nancy Driver’s voice, he thought with a smile, is ever soft, gentle and low, an excellent thing in woman.

— I’ll try.

— That’s my Harry. What’s that old saying? ‘Smile and the world smiles with you, weep and you weep alone.’ Is that how it goes?

— I’m afraid so.

— You have that mischievous twinkle in your eye.

— My eye’s the best place for it.

The nurse named Marybeth had joined Sister Nancy at his bedside.

— Has he recited a poem for you, Sister?

— You’ve lost me, Marybeth.

— Mr Chapman is a living and breathing anthology. He serenaded me with a Shakespeare sonnet this morning. He was word-perfect.

— Well, well. We’ve never had a patient who entertained us with poetry. The odd singer, yes. There was that fat Welshman who burst into song if you so much as glanced at him.

— Oh my God, what a caterwauler he was. I’d have cheerfully strangled him, had I been given the opportunity.

— I nearly had, and I nearly did, said Sister Nancy. The two women laughed at the revelation of their shared guilty secret. Or so Harry Chapman supposed.

— Now then, Mr Chapman, Sister Driver is waiting to hear your dulcet tones.

— Is she?

— I am, Harry. If you would be so kind. Something short and sweet.

He asked them to wait. He had to think. He needed to conjure up a poem that suited the sister’s requirements. There was a host he could choose from.

— This should do the trick.

How old was he when he committed the little beauty to memory? His teacher, Mr Robertson, had copied it out for him from a yellowing book in his collection. Yes, he was thirteen, and precociously addicted to Elizabethan poetry, and Mr Robertson, knowing his taste, had picked out this gem for him. He had learned it on a late afternoon in early spring, making it his own as he strolled alongside the Thames at Chelsea.

Would it come back to him now? Was it still there in its brief entirety? He took a breath, and began.

—
The lowest trees have tops, the ant her gall,

The fly her spleen, the little spark his heat;

Hairs cast their shadows, though they be but small,

And bees have stings, although they be not great.

Seas have their source, and so have shallow springs,

And love is love, in beggars and in kings.

He paused, looked at his rapt (he hoped) listeners, and continued.

—
The ermine hath the fairest skin on earth,

Yet does she choose the Weasel for her peer;

The panther hath a sweet perfumed breath,

Yet doth she suffer apes to draw her near.

No flower more fresh than is the damask rose,

Yet next her side the nettle often grows.

He stopped once more, and signalled to the nurse and the sister that there was one last stanza.

—
Where waters smoothest run, deep’st are the fords,

The dial stirs, though none perceive it move;

The fairest faith is in the sweetest words,

The turtles sing not love, and yet they love.

True hearts have eyes and ears, no tongues to speak,

They hear and see, and sigh, and then they break.

— That’s it, ladies.

— It’s deep, that’s for certain.

— I liked the beggars and kings.

— I should explain, he said, enjoying his pedantry —that the hairs that ‘cast their shadows’ are the hairs on one’s body, not the hares you eat jugged.

— Is that by Shakespeare, too?

— No, Nurse Myslawchuk.

— Tell us who wrote it, Harry.

— I can’t. The poet’s name is lost in history. It might be his only poem for all I know. He’s one of hundreds, perhaps thousands, grouped under the title Anonymous. You could say, if you were fanciful, that his soul lives on whenever someone reads him. That’s what I like to believe.

Was he sounding pompous? Impossibly high-minded? What did it matter?

— I can be very serious, Nancy, when the mood hits me.

— You don’t need to apologise. It’s been lovely listening to you. Hasn’t it, Marybeth?

— Surely.

— We’ll be your captive audience again tomorrow, Harry.

After they had gone, he felt a momentary glow of satisfaction. He hadn’t spoken, or spouted, ‘The Lowest Trees Have Tops’, in – oh, what – twenty, thirty years? – and yet, minutes past, he had rejoiced in each of its sweet cadences, precisely recalled and thoughtfully delivered.

— Don’t get too pleased with yourself. Your head’s big enough as it is.

There she was again, the perpetual dampener of every prideful feeling, her bottomless bucket of ice-cold water perpetually at hand.

— Leave me alone, can’t you?

— I can’t and I won’t. You didn’t leave me alone when you put me in a book.

— I tried to understand you.

— Is that what you were doing?

— Yes, it was.

— Well, you didn’t succeed.

— How would you know? You couldn’t read it. You never read my books when you were alive, and this one was written after you were dead.

— Playing safe, were you? Thought I wouldn’t notice?

He willed himself to be sensible. It was his own idiotic conscience that was summoning up her rasping tones; that, and his inability, even at this late stage in life, to shake off the mockery she had inflicted on him and Jessie after her husband’s sudden death that faraway November. She’d hated Frank for dying once her grief had subsided and her taunts had been fuelled by the anger she felt at being abandoned. He and his sister could only guess at the cause of her malevolence and then learn to endure it until, for him, it became unendurable.

He wasn’t hungry – the drip was supplying him with the necessary vitamins – but his thoughts were now of food. It was dinner time in the ward and the smells of curry and cabbage and something his nostrils couldn’t identify were reminding him, achingly, of meals he’d prepared or savoured. He recalled, as he lay there helpless, a soup of fennel and fava beans he had consumed on a chilly December night in Palermo. He had ordered a second bowl of it, so entranced was he by its subtle taste, its heavenly aroma. Closing his eyes, he pictured once again its warming, welcoming greenness.

— Come on, Harry, our lives won’t be worth living if we’re late for Sunday dinner. Your mother’s been cooking all morning, getting herself in a terrible sweat, like she does.

They left the park, where his elderly father – his impossibly elderly father – had been playing bowls with his ancient companions. They walked briskly against the wind, with Frank every so often consulting his pocket watch to ensure they would arrive home at the expected time.

— Ten minutes, Harry. Put a step on it. Ten minutes and we’re safe. Twelve or fifteen minutes and we’re done for.

They’d been done for in the past, with Alice complaining loudly about her husband’s lack of consideration.

— You’re teaching that son of yours your own bad habits.

— He’s your son, too, woman.

— Sit down and eat, the pair of you. Jessie and me have already partaken, as the posh folks say.

They sat and ate the lamb or the beef or the pork or – once or twice a year – the chicken. There were vegetables aplenty: peas and runner beans in summer; turnips and Brussels sprouts and parsnips in winter; potatoes in every season in various guises.

— That was the last meal I had with you and Jessie and your mummy, his father was saying, interrupting his reveries of Alice’s plain but satisfying cuisine.

— Was it, Dad?

— Yes, son. I started dying two days later, if you remember. Talking in my not-very-sleepy sleep.

— I came home from school at four in the afternoon. You were lying in the bed Mum shared with Jessie. Your face was covered in sweat. You were shouting at people I’d never heard of.

— They were my comrades in the trenches, Harry. My mates in Flanders. They’d all gone ahead of me. They were ghosts.

— As you are. As you must be.

There was no answer. Silence prevailed. He wanted to eat the unusual soup, a grilled lemon sole, a piece of cheese – Taleggio, perhaps, or Manchego – and drink a chilled Sancerre and then something robust from Sardinia. He longed to share this feast with one of his friends, with all his friends, with Graham, some day soon. He would be cook, however fragile his health, whatever fate the medics decided was in store for him.

— I love that chocolate mousse you make, Harry.

— I know you do, Jessie dear.

— It’s that flavour of rosemary I like so much. Do it for me the next time you ask me round to your house.

— How can I say no?

He could say no because she wasn’t alive any more. She’d died – when? – three years ago, very suddenly, in that London hospital most resembling a luxury hotel. She had asked him and Graham to let her know what happened in her favourite television soap opera that evening: would the mad Indian solicitor murder her shopkeeper lover, as she threatened to do in the previous instalment?

— We’ll record it for you, Jess, said Graham, taking her cold hand and kissing it.

— I haven’t missed an episode in twenty-five years.

— There’s devotion to duty.

As they were watching the solicitor rolling her lustrous eyeballs, the telephone rang. Graham received the news that Miss Chapman was gravely ill. She needed to see her brother desperately. Their journey back to the hospital tested Graham’s driving skills to the limit, for it was raining cats and dogs and elephants and rhinosceroses. The downpour was tropical in its intensity – they might have been in the Philippines, or India during the monsoon season, not south-west London. They arrived too late for a last goodbye.