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not the best sleep he had ever slept – in point of boring fact, it was actually one of the very worst. The dream he was currently dreaming was totally devoid of interest. He almost longed for a guest appearance by Alice Chapman in full, malignant flow. Where was the Duchess of Bombay when he really needed her? Not here, among so many shadows. Nobody lively was waiting on the dim horizon. He was asking himself if he were dead the second he awoke.
    — Am I dead?
    — Of course you aren’t, replied a voice he didn’t recognise from somewhere in the ward. — What a stupid thing to say.
    He thanked the stranger for clarifying the matter with her prompt response.
    — Don’t thank me for stating the obvious.
    — Are you Mrs Stubbs, by any chance?
    — No, I’m not. Why should I be?
    — She was here earlier today, in a wretched state.
    — Sorry, Mr Undecided-Whether-He’s-Living-Or-Dead, but I am not in a wretched state. For your information, I am only moderately unwell.
    — You sound very chirpy.
    — Chirpy? Me? Needs must, as they say. No point in being miserable, is there?
    — No, I don’t suppose there is.
    — What are you in for?
    — I wish I knew.
    — They haven’t told you anything?
    — Not yet.
    — Well, goodnight to you, anyway.
    — Goodnight.
    Oh my, the old Adam, the original sinner, was stirring down below.
    — This is not the time or the place, he instructed his penis. — Stop misbehaving.
    He couldn’t be in absolute physical decline, he assured himself. One part of him, at least, was in working order.

Monday
    He played his first, and last, major Shakespearean role when he was fifteen. To Harry Chapman’s surprise and dismay, he had been cast as the King in King Henry the Fourth, Part One , a monarch who – on first acquaintance with the text – seemed to do little more than sit on his throne and give voice to his manifold dissatisfactions, chief of which was the unruly behaviour of his son and heir, Prince Hal. It was only in rehearsals that he realised that Henry’s justified melancholy spoke to his very soul. So impressed was the producer, Mr Oliver, by the broody power of young Chapman’s interpretation that he gave him an extra soliloquy to deliver – the sombre lines from Part Two in which the King, in his nightgown, laments his inability to sleep. His lowest, lowliest subjects in their ‘smoky cribs’, on their ‘uneasy pallets’, have the gift denied him in his perfumed chamber – the temporary forgetfulness which sleep affords.
    In the course of his doleful ruminations, Henry summons up an image of a ship-boy on the ‘high and giddy mast’, sent up by the captain and crew to signal warning of storms or other dangers. Yet sleep, despite the prospect of rough winds and ‘ruffian billows’, could ‘seal up the ship-boy’s eyes’ unwittingly, even as it refuses to do so for his older and tired ones in the palace at Westminster. Harry Chapman was haunted instantly by the thought of the boy in the crow’s nest, and pictured him shinning up the pole to keep watch.
    There he was – a grey wig covering his mousy locks; a grey beard stuck to his chin with glue; a vast gold robe filling out his skinny frame – looking as like a king as it was possible for a dustman’s son to look. Inside that robe, shorn of the wig and beard, he more resembled the ship-boy of his own imagining. He called his alter ego Jack, as befitted a sailor. The years passed and Harry Chapman put on weight, and his mousy locks became pepper-and-salt and then white, but Jack remained lithe and alert, his eyes – when not sealed up – ever more vigilant for the tempests to come. Jack had accompanied Harry to Italy, America, India, Egypt, Australia, in dreams and reveries and in those frequent moments when the lad’s imaginer felt trepidation about the future.
    — Harry, I have fears for you.
    — What fears, Jack?
    — There are dark clouds looming over yonder.
    — It is kind of you to warn