Chapman's Odyssey by Bloomsbury Publishing

Author:Bloomsbury Publishing
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2011-10-14T16:00:00+00:00

— 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.

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