Losing Nelson (39 page)

Such problems did not trouble Mahan, of course. He did not see them as problems at all. His view of things was admirably clear. Ruffo was the trickster; he had taken advantage of the sailor’s simplicity. A man such as Nelson, totally honourable and honest, does not suspect duplicity in others. He had promised not to hinder the embarkation and he did not do so; but he had never wavered in his refusal to accept the treaty. He would not stand by and see those miscreants go unpunished. They were traitors, friends to the cursed French, vapid theorizers, full of airy-fairy ideas, not an ounce of true grit among them.

Irish accent, faint but attractive. A bluff and likable fellow, Mahan. He flings his long legs out before him when he sits. Nothing mean or cramped about him. Laughter lines in that weather-beaten face. A man whose conversation is frank and far-ranging, who exacts nothing from you. A man to repose in, have a drink with.

Badham comes into view, skulking behind, narrow-shouldered and dark-suited. A bitter smile of disbelief.
Nelson wasn’t that stupid,
nobody could be
. Those conflicting signals, all the confusion—it worked in his favour. Armistice and treaty, embarking and sailing—these are words we play with when vagueness suits us. He wanted them out of the forts, he wanted them hanged, let them think what they liked. Badham’s glasses shine, he is wearing a wing collar, he raises one evil, black-gloved hand. I wait for Mahan to get up and give him a straight right to the jaw, but he seems not to have heard. If I could get round to the other side, get within range of that narrow skull … I found myself looking round the room for a weapon. It was at that moment of desperate impulse that the idea came, a kind of call. And it was associated from the first with the name of a man I had never met but whose five-year-old notepaper I still had, a man named E. L. Sims, a resident of Naples.

It was appalling, but it was undeniable. There was nothing more that I could do here. If I wanted to keep Horatio with me, I would have to go in person to that city. Naples must contain him still, must contain the truth of those June days. The rooms he ate in, slept in, the streets and buildings he knew—they were still there. Take a trip, Miss Lily had said—advice I had never intended to act on. Dread mounted within me. I was going to act on it now.

T
he salient facts about Sims were that he was an honorary member of the Nelson Society and that he had lived in Naples for a good many years and so must know the city well. He would be just the person to give me some tips, set me on the right track. That he was an honorary member was largely due to me, which I thought might give me some claim on him. Five years before I had seen an article of his in the
Historical Review
entitled “Four Days in Naples,” which dealt with Horatio’s first brief visit to the city in the September of 1793, when he was thirty-four years old, a mere captain still and a faithful husband, and had both eyes and all his limbs and was in proud command of his spanking new ship, the
Agamemnon
.

I had been impressed by Sims’s meticulous scholarship, the detailed way in which he charted Horatio’s movements: the meetings with the Hamiltons and the prime minister, Sir John Acton; the dinner at the royal palace, when he sat at the king’s right hand; the
breakfast aboard ship on the Sunday morning, when he was host to a distinguished company, including Lord Grandison and the bishop of Winchester and family; the sudden request, shortly before 11
A.M
., that his guests should quit the ship because a French man-of-war had been sighted off Sardinia and he intended to sail immediately to intercept her.

Nothing new in this, but by following the timing so closely and cross-cutting between events, Sims had succeeded very cleverly in conveying the drama of Horatio’s life at this time—the glitter of high society, the political manoeuvring, the looming death-struggle with France for supremacy at sea, which was not to end until twelve years later, at Trafalgar. Sims was a man with a sense of the clock, so much was clear; a man with a feeling for parallels. After several weeks of painful indecision I had written to him, and he had replied with thanks, courteous though brief. Whereupon I had proposed to the committee that Sims should be invited to become an honorary overseas member. He had accepted the invitation. No more had been heard from him, but somewhere I still had the single sheet of his notepaper with at the head his address in Naples and—or so I hoped—the telephone number.

Of course, he might well have moved since that time. It was Friday afternoon on the fifth of September when I had the impulse to inflict grievous bodily harm on Badham. I knew that if I hesitated much or launched on any sort of debate with myself, I would never make the call. As if under the duress of a dream, I opened drawers, fumbled among papers, finally found Sims’s note. There was a telephone number at the head. Then it came to me that my passport might be out of date. I had not been out of the country since the trip to Tenerife with my father. After more minutes of search I found it: still seven months to run. I did not know the code for Italy—I had to look it up in the phone book.

In the course of these harassing preliminaries, the protection of dream wore off and my hands became unsteady. However, I did not dare to pause. A peevish, waspish sound to the ringing tone, foreign and far away. Could he be there, at the back of such a sound? Five years … Then a voice, without discernible accent but in some way familiar.

“Sims.”

The hiss of his identity seemed to hang in the air between us. There was an agitation in my throat, but I contained it. I explained to him who I was.

“Yes,” he said, after a considerable pause, “I remember that you wrote to me. Some years ago, yes. Where are you now? Are you in Italy?”

“No,” I said. “No, I am here.”

There was what sounded like a thin clearing of the throat at the other end of the line. “Here is always where we are,” the voice said.

“Here in London,” I said. “I am planning to visit Italy, Naples in fact, and I wondered if we could … It would give me great pleasure if you could spare some time for me. I thought we might meet for a drink. Compare notes.”

“Notes?”

“As you know, I greatly admired your article about Horatio’s first visit to the city.”

There was again a pause, this time rather briefer. “Horatio, yes,” Sims said. “Well, it would have been very pleasant, Mr. Cleasby, but I am leaving Naples soon and I’ll be away until the end of the year, so I am afraid—”

I showed a promptness now I had not known I was capable of. “When?” I said. “When are you leaving?”

“At the end of next week.”

“I was planning to come more or less at once. You will still be there in the early part of the week?”

In a tone that I thought indicated resignation, he said, “Yes, in the early part of the week, certainly, I will still be here.”

And so it was all arranged. I would telephone Sims from my hotel on the evening of my arrival. We would meet and have a drink together.

Reaction set in immediately. I had some moments of giddiness moving away from the phone, and then I experienced a sort of twitching behind the knees, distinctly alarming. It might have been an obscure symptom of hunger; nothing had passed my lips since the tea and digestive biscuits of the morning. Despite this weakness, I was pleased with myself. I had acted with decision, I had not allowed myself to be fobbed off. Something like Hotham’s Action, when we nobbled the
Ça Ira
. I decided to celebrate by phoning the takeaway for a pizza.

There was a shadow over things, however, and it grew darker while I waited for the pizza to arrive. I would not be here for Miss Lily’s return. She was due back at the end of the following week—I had been ticking off the days. Now, after all this time of waiting, I would not see her before I left. It couldn’t be helped, I knew that. Sims might hold the vital clue, perhaps even something he wasn’t himself aware of. Armed with it, I would return. Miss Lily would commend my initiative, we would complete the book together, it would revolutionize Nelson studies … All the same, I felt heavy-hearted at the thought of missing her, and when the pizza arrived I no longer wanted it. I had some red wine instead.

They were anxious days that followed. There were things I had not foreseen, not being an experienced traveller. It was short notice for early September, still the holiday season. I succeeded in getting a flight to Rome for the following Monday afternoon, but no connecting flight to Naples was available. I would have to go by train. I could have got the train ticket through the agency, but it didn’t occur to me.

The whole thing bristled with difficulties. What should I pack, what should I wear for the journey? I had been shuffling around in old clothes for months, not changing very often. My shirts had been folded away too long; they had grubby marks along the folds. My trousers had horizontal crease marks made by the hangers. Before I could become a traveller, before I could present myself to Sims, I had to clean myself up, go to a barber, buy some socks.

I felt almost distraught, locking the front door, locking myself out, hoisting my case down to the waiting taxi. However, this state of nerves subsided, eclipsed by the different order of stress involved in finding my way about at Heathrow. On the whole I acquitted myself well there, I think. I lost some minutes waiting in the wrong queue, among people who were travelling business class, but I soon realized the mistake and moved on down to the right counter.

I got the train from Rome Airport to the central railway station without mishap, but I had a bad time at the station itself. I was confused by the crowd and the jostling movement, by the need to be constantly stepping out of the way. Untrustworthy-looking people in white caps with plastic peaks repeatedly asked me if I wanted a hotel. However, I found the ticket office, joined the queue. When I got up to the counter and met the dark, indifferent gaze of the clerk—eyes that had seen so many other eyes, so close; horrendous thought—at this last moment I asked for a single ticket, not a return, asked for it in English and with a sudden loud insistence, as if it might be denied me.

It wasn’t, of course; the clerk’s expression did not change by the slightest flicker. When I tried to ask about train times, he shook his head, raised one hand in a gesture that seemed to take in the entire station. Information was to be sought out there; his job was selling tickets.

Clutching my little oblong of pinkish card, I walked away. I had a sense, exhilarating and alarming, that I was burning my boats behind
me. This single ticket was a mark of my determination, my commitment. Without the truth, I would not return. However, I had first to get to Naples. I still did not know the time of departure. The information office was full of people waiting and there was only one woman behind the counter to answer their questions. Here and there along the station concourse there were large illuminated screens, but these did not show times of arrivals and departures, as I was expecting, only a series of images fleeting and diverse, quite soundless: a woman undressing, drifting autumn leaves, oddly angled faces.

Anxiety fastened on me almost unawares. I found myself breathing open-mouthed, as if I had been running. It was quarter past two. The heat of the day outside had flowed in, struck through the girders of the roof high above. I felt it pressing down on my head. I was still lugging my case. I thought of finding a left luggage office, but what if I had to leave in a hurry? There was no friendly-looking buffet where one might have hoped to get tea and a jam doughnut in total anonymity; there was only a sort of glassed-in café, where waiters hovered about. You would have to sit down, catch the waiter’s eye, struggle to make your wants known, worry about how much to tip. I could not meet the hazards of such a place until I knew the time of my departure, and probably not even then.

I was not far from total anguish and immobility when I came upon a poster at the far end of the station that had details of intercity connections. There was a train to Naples at 2:46. A little star was printed after the time, and I saw from the foot of the poster that this was a Eurostar train, distinguished with a note in both Italian and English,
Alta velocità, High speed
. There would almost certainly be an extra charge on a train like this. It was now 2:27 by my watch. A man in a railway uniform was passing close to me. I stepped in front of him, swinging my case. “Eurostar ticket?” I said to him loudly. He regarded
me without much expression but not unkindly. I tried again. “Eurostar ticket?”

He raised a forefinger as if testing the wind. “
Uno
,” he said. “
Binario uno
.”

Platform one. We were then alongside platform twenty-two. Hastily back the full length of the station, humping my case. Sure enough, there it was, clearly marked, the Eurostar ticket counter. A strip of red digital lettering above stated that all seats had to be booked in advance. Five or six people were already queueing there. It was 2:35. Minutes ticked away. I was sweating heavily, unable to prevent myself from gasping. I have always, from childhood, practised open-mouthed breathing as a relief from all manner of stress, and now it has become quite involuntary. I felt that people were looking at me, but I did not return these glances. It had become immensely important, symbolical, not to miss this special high-speed train. I understood now that the train itself was a part of the design, that I was being tested. A failure at this point could put my whole enterprise at risk.