Losing Nelson (30 page)

He took a few stiff paces to dramatize the event.

“They turned here, at the ladderway. Then they started out towards the stern …”

With a sudden gesture he opened the palm of his right hand and showed us what he had been holding there: a lead ball, looking too small to do much harm, like a small marble that a child might play with.

“The admiral was struck by one of these.”

I thought this was a pretty cheap piece of showmanship, but there was no doubt it impressed the others, except the woman with the notebook, who was, as I have said, in a world of her own and about to prove it yet again. My feeling of hostility towards the guide returned when I saw them riveted on him, Miss Lily included. Paunchy, undistinguished-looking, not totally reliable as to the facts, he yet could command attention, hold the stage. He had seduced her away from me. But not Bobby …

“Entered by the left shoulder,” the guide said. He was still displaying the ball in the palm of his hand. “Passed through one lung and lodged in—”

“Excuse me,” the woman with the notebook said. “How much rope went into the rigging?”

A muttered exclamation from someone, I think the tall, lonely
man, at this crassly inopportune question. The guide looked a bit glassy, as if he had taken a punch. However, he behaved well, I had to admit it. His big moment had been ruined, but he showed no more than a laborious politeness.

“Twenty-seven miles of rigging, madam, on HMS
Victory
. It lodged in the admiral’s spine.”

On this anticlimactic note and with a chorus of thank-yous, the guided tour came to an end. I remember little more about the day. Bobby wanted a hamburger, so we went to a McDonald’s and all had one. I enjoyed mine, but I did not say much. I felt ill at ease and overexposed among the shiny surfaces and bright colours. Miss Lily was chatty—it seemed she had enjoyed herself. But it was the other members of the group she talked mainly about, not Horatio; she had noticed all sorts of things about them that had quite escaped me, and formed opinions as to their occupations, material condition in life, character, and degree of personal fulfilment. Bobby, I remember, ate with gusto, pale face intent over his plate, cap still back to front.

We had the compartment to ourselves during the train journey home. Miss Lily was still quite talkative. She had been affected by the drama of Horatio’s last moments, but it was not so much the heroic sacrifice that moved her as the sad cutting short of a promising love.

“They could have had another twenty years together,” she said. “He would have retired—they had already bought a house in the country. I haven’t all that much time for Emma Hamilton, I mean she wasn’t my sort, too much of a show-off. But think what she must have felt when the news came. She had no friends in England, she had no secure income, she had a young child to bring up on her own.”

Her mouth had thinned with feeling as she spoke. I could see that she was acknowledging something she felt she shared with Emma. I personally felt the situations to be distinctly different, but this was not the moment to say so, not with Bobby sitting there.

“If they had really thought so much of him, they would have carried out his last wishes for her,” Miss Lily said. “I read all about it before we came here to Portsmouth. One of the last things he said was that he left Lady Hamilton and their daughter as a legacy to his country. He said it with his dying breath. It was the only thing he asked them for. And what did they do? They left her to die abroad, completely penniless.”

“She was a very extravagant woman,” I said. “Her life in Naples hadn’t exactly taught her restraint. She was addicted to gambling, and in her later years she had what we would now call a drink problem.”

“And so?” She had flushed a little and was looking at me with that particular sort of steadiness that I recognized as the prelude to indignation.

“Well,” I said, “she was a difficult woman to help.”

“Charles, don’t mind me saying this, but you can be really dodgy sometimes when it comes to discussing things. What’s the point of saying she was difficult to help when you know perfectly well that they didn’t even try to help her? It was his dearest wish, and they just let her go to the dogs and the child with her. They were ready to give him a big funeral and put up statues to him but not to recognize the woman he loved, the mother of his child. It was the same thing when he was dead as when he was alive. They went on cutting pieces off him. Don’t you think there’s something terribly wrong with that?”

Asking me to share a sense of wrongness was one of Miss Lily’s favorite ploys in argument, and I generally resisted on grounds of principle. But here, in the enclosed space of the compartment, with her earnest face so close before me, it was more than usually difficult. She had made progress in debate in these months, I had to admit that; she had become formidable.

“But really, don’t you think so?” she said now. “They didn’t want
to honour him as a man, that’s all I am saying. I mean, they didn’t even let her attend his funeral, did they?”

It was Bobby who saved the day for me, relieved me from the need to answer, showing again that reverence for facts as opposed to sentiments that I had noticed in him earlier. “What did they do with him?” he asked.

“Do with him?”

“How did they get him back? I mean, the
Victory
took a long time to get back home, didn’t she? Did they put him in a coffin?”

“They had to preserve the body,” I said. “They stripped him and put him in spirits.”

“What spirits?”

“Brandy, I think it was.”

I saw that a smile had appeared on Miss Lily’s face, the curving smile I liked, with her mouth just sufficiently open to show the white edges of her teeth. Her indignation was forgotten.

“Cognac,” she said. “Must have been French. There you are now, that’s what you call a turn-up for the books. He hated the French so much and he was brought home pickled in a barrel of French brandy.”

Bobby’s stare, its solemn character unaffected by his mother’s levity, came back into my mind that night, when I was alone again at home. He was a boy for facts. One fact that the notebook woman had not elicited and the guide had forgotten to tell us, to my mind the most staggering of all, was that more than two thousand oak trees had gone into the making of the
Victory’
s hull; she was a floating forest. On that scale, the British fleet at the battle of Trafalgar must have represented something like fifty thousand oaks, roughly two million years of oak tree life. Bobby was twelve; his sense of scale and number would be developed enough. I resolved to impart these facts to him when I saw him again so that he could incorporate them in his project.

This resolution made me think of his face and particularly his eyes, his awe in that dim place, my recognition of him as someone I had known, and that strange paralysis of faculties that had descended on me. I had wanted the world to continue, I had wanted to shout a warning. But the memory of this was easy and calm now, it was like recalling an anecdote. Miss Lily had glanced at us when we rejoined the group, with an expression difficult to read—approval, perhaps; two men getting together. Perhaps something else altogether.

The faces, mother’s and son’s, thinned away and I was left with a memory of that drab and disparate group standing round the memorial plaque. They saw Horatio as a being expressing their own humanity and aspirations. Totally wrong, of course. He was not an ordinary man translated into greatness by particular circumstances; he was a bright angel. He is unaccountable, unjudgeable by the standards of those who gather at the place of his death—except for me, except for me.

At 1:25
P.M
. on October 21, 1805, a French sharpshooter perched aloft in the topmast of the
Redoubtable
drew a bead on your starred and medalled breast. The ball struck you as you were about to take your third step from the companion-ladder towards the stern. It pierced your lung and broke your back, and you fell silently to the deck. At that precise moment, all around you on the upper deck and on the gundecks below, men were screaming and dying. Only half an hour before, at almost exactly the same point, your secretary, John Scott, had been cut in two by a round shot. But it is your death that we commemorate; there is only one plaque. Many were crucified, but there is only one cross.

I
let six weeks go by before resigning from the club—time enough, I thought, for the decision to seem considered, deliberate. They were weeks of waiting, for what exactly I didn’t know—certainly not for the moment when I would be writing to inform Pratt-Smithers of my decision to cancel my subscription. That had been my intention, worthy of Horatio himself in its unswerving firmness, from the moment I realized the implications of those empty seats.

I didn’t attend the club in the interval. I didn’t want to see any of them again, and certainly not Hugo—I wanted no deepening of acquaintance there. A man who could work behind the bar in the Nelson Club, have Horatio’s image constantly before him for two nights every week, and then go and pin up an effeminate pop star on his wall. He and I had survived something that night. It was enough.

No, the waiting went on, it continued after my resignation, though
taking on some extra quality afterwards, some quality of dread, something that disturbed my nights rather than my days—these were still absorbed in the close study of that June week in Naples in 1799. I had not lost hope of being the one to clear his name. I was reading A. T. Mahan’s account of those days, contained in his 1897 life of Nelson and in his subsequent articles in the
English Historical Review
defending Horatio from charges of fraud. Mahan is the great champion of Horatio’s honour and argues the case very strenuously and forcibly. Chief opponent among his contemporaries is F. P. Badham, a waspish close reasoner, dangerously precise in the matter of dates and times. These two, with names so similar, the impetuous and patriotic Mahan and the lucid, sardonic Badham, had come to seem like allegorical figures to me, Virtue and Vice personified.

This, as I say, kept my days busy. My paper had failed, I was resigning from the club, but there was still my book. Miss Lily came as usual on Tuesday and Friday evenings. A week after our visit to Portsmouth she brought me a burgundy-coloured woollen scarf, which she had knitted herself. “I had a lot of wool left over,” she said, “just lying around, taking up space.” Bales of it, she implied. All her gifts were the result of some surplus, or so she said, and all described in the same way, hasty but not shy—she always looked straight at me when she spoke, and I was finding myself, as time passed, more able to look firmly back at her, meet her eyes. Nowadays we looked at each other when we spoke together.

“You said, you know, that you hadn’t got one.”

As always, I found thanks difficult. Besides, some part of me resented this attempt to change my habits. What I had actually said was that I never wore them. The scarf lay there, over the back of a chair, till the following Monday. Then, noticing it again, on an impulse I picked it up and held it against my face.

I was thinking at that time about suggesting a trip to the Maritime Museum at Greenwich one Sunday afternoon. They have a whole section devoted to Horatio there. With the days getting warmer now, it would be a pleasant outing. We could walk across the park or along the river and have tea somewhere in Greenwich. She could bring Bobby too, now that a precedent had been set. In any case I had a certain feeling of tenderness for him after those moments of communion between us on the lower gundeck. But the days passed and I did not ask her, I found reasons for delay. Instead of taking the plunge, I made more and more elaborate plans for a time when the plunge had been taken. We could go to Burnham Thorpe in Norfolk, Horatio’s birthplace, and stay at the village inn, the Nelson Arms. On that occasion Bobby could be left with his gran. It would mean a weekend together …

With all this to occupy my mind, the general election and the Labour landslide went over my head. I did not know of it till the Friday evening, when Miss Lily told me. I had forgotten altogether it was voting day, impaled as I was on the twin prongs of Mahan and Badham, trying to establish to my own satisfaction whether Cardinal Ruffo had indeed withdrawn the Russian troops from their advanced positions on the morning of June 26, 1799, as the acerbic Badham maintained, whether he had merely threatened to do so, or whether there had been neither the act nor the threat, as generous Mahan appeared to be asserting. It was a crucial point; if there had been no threat, Horatio had been under no pressure, would not have needed to mask his purposes, trick the rebels into surrender so as to hand them over to their Bourbon king.

She was elated by the election results, but I didn’t want to talk about it, I didn’t find it interesting, I didn’t know what any of them looked like. I still had the horror of blank screens that had been with
me since my illness, so there was no television set anywhere in the house, and for some months now I had not been bothering with newspapers. Miss Lily, of course, could not forbear to comment.