Losing Nelson (21 page)

But this, in a sense, was beside the point. Horatio would have done it—he would have burned Copenhagen to the ground if necessary. There was only one portrait of him I had seen which reflected this capacity for extreme measures, that painted by Heinrich Füger, court painter of Austria. Both Emma and Horatio sat to him in his Vienna studio in the course of their return from Naples to England in 1800. By training he was a miniaturist, but failing eyesight had obliged him to take up the larger scale.

I felt an urge to look at this portrait again. The only form in which I had it was as a colour plate in the
Nelson Companion
. I found the book on the shelf and took it over to my table. This was covered with papers—notes about Horatio in Naples in 1799, discarded sheets from my forthcoming talk at the club. I pushed them aside, feeling distaste at these reminders of my labours. I felt again that longing for freedom, for the removal of my doubts. To be his chronicler was not enough, it never had been …

I found the portrait, brought the arm of the lamp closer down to
it. He is in full-dress uniform and encrusted with silver and gold: gold collar, gold facings and epaulettes, the silver rays and gold suns of his three orders—the Bath, St. Ferdinand, the Turkish Crescent—pinned to his breast on the left side, with the three gold discs of his naval medals one below the other down his front.

I stared at his face, under the strong light. Füger had caught something no other artist had, perhaps because of his training as a miniaturist, a technique that requires close observation. Not caught,
detected
: there was a ruthlessness here, a capacity for intense concentration. But it was a borrowed face, it was not his … Eyes a greenish brown, an expression cold, pitiless, but not as though native to him—it was induced, laid on his face. The cruelty was something he was bleakly resigned to, as he was resigned to his role. Not the travelling player now. This was Horatio in the part of killer.

Always a mistake to look at anything too long. Already in childhood I knew this. In the days of my illness it was a kind of frightening game. Any object can become dangerous when detached by the violence of the eyes from everything else in the world. A pencil, an elastic, a light switch. And how much more the pictured human face—and his, of all faces! I looked too long at this face of a necessary killer and I felt my being dissolved in his stronger one, I felt the terror of this necessity, there was a darkness at the edges of my vision. I raised my hand to my face, but I could feel nothing that made this face my own. I shut my eyes and clutched at the front of my jacket and felt the rough tweed and knew it was mine. I closed the book without glancing again at the picture. I stood there at the table for a time that seemed short but may not have been, striving to keep my eyes unfocused. By degrees I came to myself again, a self that was clammy: I had been sweating all over my body, and the sweat was cold.

A
s I have said, Miss Lily had broken through into a zone of immunity; she had crossed the line. I still felt hostility when she spoke against Horatio, but there had been no impulses of violence after that first. She had changed too in these few months. She had taken to reading about him, she argued, she stayed on longer than the two hours without charging me extra. Her hair was longer, and she wore it in a softer style, with a fringe over the forehead. Now that the weather was milder, she had lost that shiny look and her skin seemed paler. I looked forward now to the evenings when she came. I even looked forward to getting her view of things, limited as this invariably was. By that time I had begun to neglect my appearance rather, but on Tuesdays and Fridays, knowing she was coming in the evening, I made a point of washing and shaving and cleaning my nails.

However, she seriously annoyed me that Friday evening, two days after Copenhagen, by what she said about his conduct during the battle.
Where she had got it from I don’t know. I had been repeating the story of how he clapped the telescope to his blind eye. One of the great moments in our island story. The impulse, the improvisation—

“Well,” she said, “there are them that say the importance of this incident has been very much exaggerated.”

“Exaggerated? How can it be exaggerated?” She sounded as if she had lifted the words straight from some book; they were not like her words at all.

“There is reason to believe that this Parker had a private understanding with Nelson that if he hoisted the signal at a certain point, it was to be considered optional.”

“Are you saying it was all arranged in advance?”

“I am not saying anything, I am just remarking.”

“And Foley and the others?”

“They were all in the know.”

By this time I had begun to experience the usual symptoms of rage: a sense of impaired vision, a feeling that the skin of my face was too tight. But the unusual and surprising thing was that I did not try to hide this from Miss Lily, did not turn away or make any diversionary gesture. That evening, with Miss Lily, I broke my lifelong habit of concealment.

“And the telescope?” I said. “That putting the telescope to his blind eye? Just playing to the gallery, according to you.”

I saw her eyes widen, become somehow more alert, more watchful. But she went on looking at me steadily enough.

“It’s not according to me. That is what they say about it—that he knew beforehand.”

Whatever blood had been left in my face must have drained away at this. “What they say?
What they say?
How can you repeat such lies? Do you realize what you are doing? You are adding to the slanders about him, you are joining the ranks …”

I had to pause to control my voice. My vision was narrowed to her face, the dark hair over the brows, the soft, undefended-looking, obstinate eyes, the wide mouth with its sharp corners.

“You are joining in the conspiracy against him,” I said, too loudly for that small room. “Two hundred years it’s been going on. It’s the same people that talk about his conduct in Naples in 1799, trying to make out that he committed a fraud there.”

“What people are those?”

Her tone had not changed; she was still looking closely at me. This steadiness had a chastening effect; my voice was more under control when I answered. “Those who cannot bear to think that anyone so great could ever have existed, who always have to undermine him, to take the lowest view of everything he did. This man who saved our country from the vile French, who had a lion’s heart inside his frail body …”

Uttering this praise of him, my voice broke a little. I turned away from Miss Lily and began to shuffle with the papers on my table, but stopped almost at once because my hands were trembling.

There was silence for some moments. Then she said, “You only say the French are vile because you know he didn’t like them. I know it means a lot to you, Charles, and it’s a very good thing to have a hobby, but he was only a man, that’s all I’m saying. Don’t take offence, but I think myself that you are too wrapped up in him. As far as I can see, nobody knows the truth of that telescope business and nobody ever will. You can think one thing or another. I mean to say, there are lots of things like that, aren’t there? I know it isn’t my place to say it, but you really need a bit more variety in your life.”

Variety, when I had his life to look at!

“I know we are going out on Sunday,” she said. “But it is still Nelson, isn’t it?”

When I turned back towards her, I found her eyes fixed on me
with a serious and quite unmistakable solicitude. That she was in her own way concerned about me I had sometimes felt before. Misguided, of course; I was managing well enough. But I understood now for the first time that the way she expressed this concern was by undermining Horatio. She wanted me to think less of him, but this did not put her among the ranks of his slanderers, because she did it for my sake. In this brief moment of humility I saw—glimpsed, rather—how much less selfish Miss Lily was than I, who had wanted her to admire Horatio, not for her sake but my own, so I could share the glory with him, bask in the same sunshine.

The mood, as I say, did not last long, but a certain obscure prospect of change had come with it, and the last of my anger was cleared away. And then I broke my second rule—I told a story detrimental to myself. I told her of my frantic mopping while Horatio thundered at the gates of Copenhagen, and she laughed. I laughed too—I remember that I laughed too.

She was not much interested in his battles, not even Trafalgar. She seemed to see no more in them than a perverse expenditure of human life; all the courage and patriotism and fighting spirit counted for nothing, or she turned it into a cause for pity. As I say, her view was limited. She hadn’t much in the way of idealism. But she took a great interest in Horatio’s private life and particularly in his relationship with Emma Hamilton, whom most of the time she didn’t really care for.

“That woman,” she said, “she played on his jealousy. She didn’t care that he was about to risk the lives of all those men.”

I could not help smiling at this. I had been telling her about Horatio’s state of mind on the eve of Copenhagen, that strange mixture of feelings: impatience for battle, joy of fatherhood, torments of jealousy. “The risk to his men’s lives was not the foremost consideration,” I said.

“If it wasn’t, it should have been. What was there in it for them?”

“Horatio didn’t ask them to take any risk he wasn’t prepared to take himself.”

“We have had this conversation before. He shared the risks, I don’t say he didn’t. But he didn’t share the rewards. If he lived, he got richer and more famous. If they lived, they stayed the same.”

I felt my smile wearing thin. It was always the same problem with her; she simplified the issues to such an absurd degree that there was no way of explaining anything to her.

“You can’t say there is not a difference there,” she said. “Anyway, she exploited his love, this woman he thought such an honour to her sex.”

How did she know about it? We hadn’t got to that point yet in my book. A question not worth asking—I knew by now that my book was no longer her sole source of information.

“I’ve been reading their correspondence,” she said, as if after all I had asked. “They go to a reception in London, the three of them, the Hamiltons and him. The Prince of Wales is there, he sees her and he fancies her—he always liked them on the large side. So he makes eyes at her. Nelson notices this, and afterwards he takes it up with her. She tells him there is nothing in it—she can’t help it if the Prince likes the look of her, but that’s as far as it goes.”

Her face was settling already into the expression, dogged and exalted at the same time, that it always wore when she was giving vent to feelings of disapproval.

“Strange to think,” I said, “that William Pitt the Younger was also there, together with most of his cabinet. Horatio came face-to-face with him that same evening.”

This was an attempt to sidetrack Miss Lily, but of course it failed, because she had no idea of the significance this meeting had in
my mind; she did not know the story of the chess game and the two figures side by side in my father’s book. It came to me now, with the force of some exciting, illicit impulse, that I could actually tell Miss Lily this story, as I had once told it to Penhas; I could try to explain how important it had been to me, that wound I had received in the moment of victory, the choice between the statesman and the sailor, the early lesson in concealment. I hesitated; the moment passed. But temptation once admitted leaves us never quite the same; I was to remember that urge to confide in her and how it came to me like something sinful. For the moment, I contented myself with a statement of fact: “It wasn’t a reception exactly. It was a very grand dinner party at the house of Alexander Davison, in St. James’s Square.”

“Who was he?”

“He was Horatio’s prize agent.”

“What is a prize agent?”

“That is the man who managed the prize money falling due to the people who fought in a battle. Some of the enemy ships taken might be carrying valuable cargoes. Occasionally they might be carrying hugely valuable cargoes. There was a system of prizes. The total value was divided in strict proportion. The commander of the ship got one quarter, the lieutenants got one eighth, and so on.”

“So they just sort of shared out the booty?”

“You could put it like that, I suppose.”

“How much did the men get, the ordinary seamen?”

“It depended on how many there were. There was always one quarter left after all the rest had been shared out.”

“Sounds like blood money to me.”

“Horatio didn’t fight for money. He fought for his country.”

“Be that as it may, it wouldn’t have come amiss on top of his pay, that’s all I am saying. Anyway, where the party took place is neither here nor there. The Prince of Wales takes a fancy to her and she
makes sure her lover knows it. As soon as he goes to sea again, she starts tormenting him. The Prince keeps cropping up in her letters. She is taking care not to go where the Prince is likely to be. The Prince is doing his best to seduce her, but so far she has managed to escape him. Then, against her will, Sir William invites him under their roof. She has her duty as hostess, what can she do? And so on. Letter after letter. That reception or dinner party or whatever it was happened in November, and she is still keeping it warm the following March. He is sitting in his boat, miles from anywhere, going through hell.”