Losing Nelson (28 page)

I didn’t see any mole, Monty said. I was in the same place that he was and I didn’t see any mole.

You know how imaginative he is, my mother said. Don’t be hard on him, he got carried away.

You told us a deliberate lie, didn’t you? The whole thing was a lie
.

Still that gleam of alertness about his face. Not anger, not reproach. He was
interested
, he was waiting for my confession. Then the moment of inspiration. No, I said, it wasn’t a lie, it was a trick. His face changed as I spoke. This was unexpected, it was not part of the entertainment.

Come, you must learn to face up to things. Admit it was a lie and we’ll say no more about it
.

Not a lie, a trick, it was a TRICK.

I was afraid of him in all his moods, but that afternoon I was afraid of humiliation more. This was the fear that made me obstinate, that gave me one of the few triumphs of my childhood. For I did not retract.

He was enraged. He had been ready to put the rabbit out of its misery, but if I would not admit to being a liar, where was the rabbit? He made me walk back on my own, behind the others, in disgrace.
Until you own up, until you learn to face the music
. But I never did own up.

It was not that I thought him in the wrong or myself in the right. At the time I believed his anger was due to outraged principle, my failure to face the music and so on. Only much later did I come to understand the true nature of my offence: I had spoiled his game. But
I knew even then, as I trailed behind the others, forlorn but unrepentant trickster, knew that I had held out against an adversary immensely more powerful on his own ground and I had done it by not yielding, not admitting—I had done it
by not showing
. I began to learn the lesson then: reveal yourself and you are lost, you are crushed. It is by concealment that we avoid the fate of the rabbit under the boot.

T
he following Sunday was the day of the Portsmouth trip, a prospect which had been troubling me intermittently ever since Miss Lily and I had made the arrangement several weeks before. The whole thing had been complicated further by the inclusion of this son of hers, Bobby, whose existence I had not suspected when I first suggested the outing.

As I got ready that morning, the same feeling descended on me that used to descend when I was returning to school at the close of the holidays. I had a special style of dressing then. Everything had to be done in a certain way so as to compensate for loneliness, disarm threats, make sure things would be all right. The basic principle was to do everything contrary to habit—right sock first, left sleeve first, shoelaces left over right. The more custom could be violated, the safer you would be. Sometimes in the years since then I had been
able to muffle my fears and doubts in this way. I did it again now, socks before trousers, trousers before shirt, left hand first into the shirtsleeve.

I was there ten minutes early under the big clock at Waterloo Station. Exactly at eleven I saw them coming towards me, Miss Lily in a dark brown beret and a long suede coat, the boy in a padded anorak with various badges stitched to it and a red cap with a long peak. She smiled when she saw me, as if in relief. She looked quite unfamiliar, like a stranger at first, and I realized after a moment that this was because I had never seen her out of doors before—my top step could hardly be called out of doors. This was the world where people caught trains, had drinks together, looked in shop windows.

“This is Bobby,” she said. “Bobby, this is Mr. Cleasby.”

“Charles,” I said.

He was a pale boy, quite tall, with a bony face. He had his mother’s wide mouth and a gaze just like hers, very clear and steady, but the eyes were lighter, rather an unusual colour, somewhere between green and hazel.

“I am glad you were able to come along,” I said. I smiled at him. I was managing this meeting really rather well.

“But you are not wearing a coat,” Miss Lily said to me, a remark that certainly belonged to the new, outside person she was now rather than to Avon Secretarial Services. “Not so much as a scarf,” she added in accents of dismay.

“I don’t wear scarves, I don’t possess one,” I said, answering the smaller matter first. It was true that I had omitted to bring a coat with me, but I was wearing a woollen pullover and a tweed jacket and flannel trousers. And the morning had seemed mild enough. “I am quite all right as I am,” I said.

Miss Lily seemed to doubt this—there was a tendency to a pursing
of the lips. “You really don’t take enough care of yourself. It might be chilly there, beside the sea. I mean, it’s only April.”

I could not help feeling the irony of it. Horatio walked the decks in all weathers, enduring everything that sky and sea could visit upon him, from the tropics to the North Pole, and here were we, discussing the perils of an April day in Portsmouth. I made a sort of face at Bobby. “Does your mother go on about scarfs to you too?”

“She does, yeah. Coats and hats as well. She feels cold, so she thinks everyone else does.”

He spoke as if he were my age, or I were his.

“Don’t you be cheeky,” Miss Lily said. She smiled at him and he smiled back, and I saw that these were two people who got on well together.

“Well, we are made of sterner stuff, aren’t we?” I said, man to man. I saw now that he was wearing a scarf, a blue and white one, tucked inside the collar of his anorak.

While I was waiting to get the tickets, I fell to wondering what it really signified, that expression—to take care of yourself. Of course Miss Lily had meant nourishing food and wrapping yourself up. But that is not the self, only the body. Harm is done to the self before we have a say in it; after that the choices are limited. It was in order to help me take care of myself that poor Penhas steered me back to Horatio.

When I turned back to them, I seemed to notice Miss Lily all over again. In that great glass hangar of a station, with its strange, bleak plenitude of light and strains of vaguely martial music, she looked bright-eyed and ready for anything in her jaunty beret. The other people I saw moving through those light-filled spaces seemed faint and somehow glaucous, leached of colour, but she was deepened. Bobby stood close beside her, solemn and still. For some reason he had turned his cap back to front—the long peak lay over the back
of his neck. His eyes were on a dishevelled pigeon that had found its way in and was strutting about among the feet of passers-by.

Nothing much was said in the train. There were others in our compartment, and the presence of strangers imposed a constraint on us, who were not much more than strangers ourselves. She was sitting opposite, and sometimes our eyes met. Bobby fished out a folded magazine from his anorak pocket. It had a picture of a dinosaur on the outside and seemed to be mostly pictures inside too. We got sandwiches and tea and a Coke for Bobby from a trolley that passed down the corridor.

Portsmouth was distinctly chilly. A cold wind straight from the sea met us as we stepped from the station, striking through the poor defences of my jacket and pullover. My eyes watered. Naturally I denied any slightest discomfort when Miss Lily—inevitably—remarked on this nasty wind and asked me if I didn’t feel perished. No, no, very bracing, very refreshing. It got even colder as we approached the harbour. Miss Lily tucked her chin into the collar of her coat; Bobby took some quick steps forward and then back, as if casting for a scent. He was still wearing his cap the wrong way round.

It is not possible to go aboard HMS
Victory
and wander about as and when you want; you have to go in a group with a guide, and these tours take place at regular times through the day. We had an hour to wait before the next one, and I suggested a visit to the Naval Museum on the quayside. This houses the whole splendid story of our wars at sea, from the timbers of Henry V’s flagship, the
Grace Dieu
, to maps of naval operations in the Gulf War. But in view of the limited time, we naturally made for the Nelson Gallery.

It was warmer in here, but the sea light followed us, striking through the walls of glass that ran round the gallery on three sides—the same desolate light he must have seen on so many days, the light that lay around him as he waited that March day at Chatham to join
his first ship. We mounted to the upper gallery, where the figureheads and pendants and cannon are displayed. I pointed out the ensigns and flags hanging there and explained to Miss Lily and Bobby what they stood for, whom they had belonged to. They always stirred my blood and quickened my imagination, not these naval standards only but all flags, all insignia of battle, the tattered banners of obscure regiments collecting dust in country churches, the monuments to the fallen in quiet squares, with their scrolled lists of the dead, the poignancy of these symbols wreathed in sacrifice and mourning.

Overhead and on the walls all round, the emblems hung motionless. I pointed out the ensigns on their poles, the white ones and the red, some with the Union Jack set in the upper left-hand corner, some without. “Do you know why that is?” I asked Bobby. He shook his head. His eyes seemed dazed, perhaps from the flooding of light through the huge plates of glass that surrounded us. “They started to include the Union Jack after 1707,” I said. “That was the date of union with Scotland.”

I felt cheerful and happy explaining these things. The gallery was empty; we had it for the moment to ourselves. The things that had been plaguing me, my restlessness and foreboding, my failure so far to extricate him, haul him free from the swamps of Naples 1799, all this receded and I felt at peace. Moreover, the light had changed; a thin sunshine had struck through the cloud and through our glass walls, and it fell here and there among the objects on show. Faint and pallid in itself, it brought brilliance to the painted figureheads, the pitted snouts of the cannon, the pink-faced uniformed effigies lining the gallery. I pointed out the broad pennant Horatio would have flown, as commander of a squadron, when he went into action at Cape St. Vincent, and the two flags, one below the other, that made up his favourite signal, the first in vertical stripes of red, white, and blue, the second a blue cross on a white background:
Engage the enemy more closely
.

“He was a great believer in close engagement.” I looked at Miss Lily as I said this, wanting her to share my feeling for the impetuous genius of Horatio, for the scenes of heroism that had taken place beneath these vivid emblems. However, she seemed no more than politely interested.

It was when I glanced at Bobby that I saw where my true audience was. He was chewing some substance now, very slowly. There was no mistaking his interest in these flags. In that pale face of his, with its thin ridges of bone at the temples and cheeks, the greenish eyes were serious and intent. “How close could they get?”

“They could still go on firing broadsides when they were practically touching.”

“But it is better to avoid fighting altogether,” Miss Lily said. “Things can generally be settled by a bit of common sense, and nobody gets hurt.”

“We couldn’t have settled Napoleon’s hash by any amount of common sense.”

“There’s always somebody’s hash to settle, isn’t there? That’s one thing that never changes. Might be the French, might be the man next door. It’s the Bedouin syndrome.”

“What on earth is that?”

“Me against my brother, me and my brother against our cousin, my family against the rest of the tribe, my tribe against everyone who isn’t Bedouin. That sums it all up for me, all these flags and things.”

“Common sense is the virtue of the common man,” I said, “and that is one thing Horatio Nelson wasn’t.” I was rather vexed with Miss Lily for these inappropriate remarks of hers among the emblems and engines of battle. “Where did you pick up this Bedouin business?” I asked her.

“Heard it on the radio. Years ago now.” She was looking from Bobby to me with the expression of mild obstinacy that characterized her. “It stayed in my mind,” she said. “Because it’s true, that’s why.”

“We had a different style of fighting,” I said to Bobby. “The French gunners preferred to fight at long distance, cutting away our masts and rigging and so disabling our ships. Our tactic was always to get in close, taking the enemy’s fire at first, until we were near enough to do massive damage.
Lay a Frenchman close enough and you will always beat him
. One of our favourite sayings. And by God, it is true. I got that saying from Locker.”

Bobby was still chewing, even more slowly now. “Who is Locker?”

I looked, smiling, at Miss Lily, expecting her to answer. But she said nothing at all. Her face wore a slight frown, as if she were puzzled about something. This silence on her part struck me as distinctly odd. She must know who Locker was; I had referred to him several times in the earlier sections of my book. At this moment of uncertainty, I was again aware of the sunlight but now as a source of confusion; my mind wavered among real and fabricated things, the staring figureheads, the stiff models of midshipmen and marines, the woman and boy before me. I knew I had to be careful how I answered. “Horatio’s friend and mentor,” I said. “He was captain of the frigate
Lowestoffe
, thirty-two guns, which Horatio joined in April ’77 as an eighteen-year-old lieutenant. Locker was forty-six, and they became lifelong friends. Horatio had a great gift for friendship.” I was aware of the difference as I said this; I had no friends at all. But of course it was the price one paid for being on the shadow side.