Read Online Chapman's Odyssey by Paul Bailey - Free Book Online Page B

Chapman tried to sleep, although he seemed to be asleep already. He certainly wasn’t awake, for there were no nurses at hand and no equipment in the vicinity. Veronica’s promised temporary oblivion was not to be his, it seemed.
    — No rest for the wicked, sneered Alice Chapman, predictable as ever.
    — I wish you would use words correctly – dead, burnt and buried as you are. I am not wicked, though I have been cruel on occasions, in common with most of the human race.
    — It was only a manner of speaking, Mr Clever-Dick, Mr Know-It-All.
    — And your manner of speaking was always, always dismissive of hope and promise.
    His hope; his promise. These were things she’d been intent on dashing. Oh, why was he bothering with her taunts? Why was he allowing himself to remember them?
    — Leave the boy alone, he heard Aunt Rose tell her sister. — Just leave him be to get on with his life.
    Then there was silence, which was the one thing he craved. He listened to it, as one sometimes listens to perfect quiet, marvelling at its power to comfort. He wanted to listen into eternity, to have no further distraction. Yes, that was definitely what he wanted.
    A phone rang somewhere, on and on. The ringing ceased, only to be resumed a moment later.
    — Hello?
    The person who picked up the receiver sounded strangely like himself.
    — Are you feeling better, Harry?
    — Yes, I think I am.
    — That is good to hear.
    — Who are you?
    The caller hesitated, coughed, and answered:
    — It isn’t of any importance who I am.
    — Why?
    — Because it isn’t, Harry.
    — I can’t put a face to you.
    — You have no need to do so.
    — You’re not English, are you?
    — No. But you have read my story in English, since you do not speak Russian. Or perhaps you are acquainted with me in French? I was a popular figure in Parisian intellectual circles in the 1890s.
    — You must be my dear friend Prince Lyov Nikolayevitch Myshkin.
    — Yes, Harry, I am he.
    — Your voice is as I imagined it – quiet and reasonable and endlessly concerned and kind.
    — I do not wish to be flattered.
    — I have loved you since I first encountered you – on the train from Warsaw to Petersburg – when I was seventeen. I took you everywhere with me, on London trains and buses, in parks, in the lavatory, at home, on visits to friends – yes, yes, Prince Myshkin, anywhere and everywhere. When I first left you at the end of July 1954, you were back in Dr Schneider’s clinic in Switzerland with a ‘permanent derangement of the intellect’ brought on by Rogozhin’s murder of Nastasya Filippovna. The second time I met you, five years later, I hoped and prayed that your life would take a different course.
    — That was sweetly silly of you, Harry.
    There was a clicking sound on the line, then silence. Harry Chapman wondered how Myshkin, even in Dr Schneider’s expensive and celebrated clinic, had access to the telephone. When was it invented? The 1870s, wasn’t it? And when was The Idiot written? Think, think. The 1860s, he supposed.
    — When did The Idiot appear? he asked Sister Nancy, who was waking him gently.
    — The idiot, Harry? There’s an idiot born every day, in my experience. Idiots appear wherever you look. Which particular idiot do you have in mind?
    His Virgil was failing him, and he smiled at the thought.
    — No matter, Nancy.
    — How are you feeling?
    — I was in pain earlier this morning, very bad pain. I can’t feel anything now.
    — We should have some news for you today.
    — Good? Bad?
    — It’s not for me to say. Dr Pereira and Mr Russell will be able to tell you. I’m hoping good, if that’s any consolation.
    — Thank you.
    — I’ll leave you to decide which poem you’re going to give us, Harry.
    — Poem? Oh, yes. I’ll rack what Dr Pereira’s drugs have left of my brain. I will think of something. Something appropriate, perhaps, to my condition.
    And what condition, precisely, was that? It could be terminal,