Losing Nelson Page 24

  Leopold was wearing midshipman’s uniform. Was it because you saw yourself in the child? On the quayside at Chatham that cold March day, staring across the grey water at your first ship?

  It was too young. You acknowledged as much four years later, at a dinner aboard the Victory celebrating the anniversary of the battle of Cape St. Vincent. A young midshipman named Parsons finds himself, as the youngest present, seated on the right side of the withered admiral. He will write about it later: the stateroom flooded with Mediterranean sunshine, the gleam of silverware on the table, his awe at the proximity of his famous commander. He is too shy to look up during the meal, but when the cloth has been removed you turn to him, as custom demands. “A glass of wine with you, Mr. Parsons.” By way of opening the conversation, you remark on his youth: “You entered the service at a very early age to have been in the action off Cape St. Vincent.” Parsons speaks his first words: “Eleven years, my lord.” He sees the smile vanish from the admiral’s face and hears the muttered words: “Too young, much too young.”

  That September evening when they cheered and wept to see you kneel, plaudits of a different sort were rising heavenwards in Naples. There on the lamplit square they were celebrating the three-headed beast that dangled and swung below the arm of the gallows. One after the other, day after day, week after week, republicans of a short-lived republic.

  You never doubted that right was with you. Perhaps sometimes privately? How can we know? Publicly you never wavered. When the rebels surrendered, they came out from the castles as they ought, without the honours of war and trusting to the judgement of their sovereigns. You wrote that in 1803, four years later. I know what Miss Lily would say—she would say you couldn’t forgive them, that you dealt with them in the same way that you dealt with Fanny, you were still sitting up there, immobile, in your theatre box, while she suffered and they died. He couldn’t be wrong, could he? Strange how her remarks, which I generally at first thought flippant or ill-informed, lingered in the mind, persisted and strengthened, took over the ground, just as she herself, her whole person, had done in my thoughts of her.

  21

  I continued my wrestling with the facts of those Naples days, or versions of the facts rather, though there was a growing sickness now in this travail, the sickness of anticipated knowledge or anticipated defeat. I think I must already have known then, as June drew to a close and summer green thickened the hedges of the gardens, known in my heart, that this issue would not be listed among the victories, for Horatio or me. I was trying to set him securely in bluff and hearty Mahan’s embrace, save him from the clutches of spiteful Badham, who addressed the preface to his Nelson and Ruffo from the Reform Club in Pall Mall in October 1904, a creature for whom preserving Horatio’s honour mattered little.

  When Miss Lily arrived on Friday evening, June the twenty-seventh (the day Ruffo, under the illusion or in the pretence that the treaty was to be honoured, celebrated his mass of thanksgiving at the Carmine church in Naples), I was utterly weary with all these speculations. Moreover, I had neglected to eat that day, although, knowing she was coming, I had shaved and made an effort to tidy myself up. The house was not in good order. Mrs. Watson, perhaps demoralized by the fact that I avoided communicating with her except in the form of notes, was not doing such a thorough job as she had in my father’s time; there was a dustiness and unkemptness about the place, which I was sure Miss Lily noticed, though so far she had not remarked upon it.

  This evening she took one look at me and asked whether I felt all right. “You look exhausted,” she said.

  “No, I am quite all right.” However, I stood up rather too suddenly in order to get some papers. A blackness came before my eyes; I staggered slightly and put a hand against the wall to support myself. I felt her hand under my forearm, had the sense of a strong support.

  “What is it?” she said. There was alarm in her voice.

  “Just a dizzy spell. I’m all right now.”

  “Are you sure?” Her hand was still there under my arm. I felt the warmth of it. “Why don’t you sit down for a while?”

  “I tell you, I’m all right.” Her hand was gone, but I felt the warmth of it still. “Can we get on?” I said.

  But of course I had reckoned without her obstinacy. “I do think you ought to just sit down and take it easy for a bit. You would have fallen just now, if it hadn’t been for the wall and me holding you up.”

  Once you have shown weakness, it is very hard to resist advice of this kind; there is somehow a psychological weight against you. She was trying to get power over me, I knew that. All the same, I capitulated; I made for the armchair and sat down in it. She remained standing before me, inquisitorial.

  “Does it happen often, dizzy spells like that? I was frightened for a moment, I thought you were going to fall.”

  “Just lately, now and again.”

  Black specks before the eyes, sparse in the first moments, massing swiftly to form the darkness that threatened my balance. I did not go into these details with Miss Lily—the less you give away, the better. But about Horatio’s ailments I could talk.

  “He suffered from something similar,” I said, “in Naples and Palermo, after the Battle of the Nile. Giddy spells. Also palpitations and attacks of breathlessness. As if a girth were buckled tight over his breast, as he described it. These are all symptoms of Da Costa’s syndrome.”

  “And what may that be?” Miss Lily spoke in the tone she reserved for abstract concepts.

  “It’s a disordered action of the heart. Sometimes called soldier’s heart, because there were so many cases during the First World War.”

  “Are you telling me you’ve got a heart condition?” Her voice had sharpened; it sounded like reproach, strangely comforting to me.

  “No, no. Horatio was afraid it was heart disease at the time, but modern medical opinion gives it out as disorder of the heart due to prolonged anxiety and physical strain. Don’t forget, it was only five months after the Battle of the Nile. That was a great victory, but it had taken weeks to find the French and bring them to action. His hours of sleep were short during all that time. He got a bad head wound in the battle; he thought at first his end had come. Then there was the affair with Emma—he was still under the Hamiltons’ roof, he was still writing home to Fanny, there must have been a lot of guilt. And think of the responsibility. He was the commanding officer. Napoleon was already in Egypt with an army, en route for India. The fate of our empire was in the balance, everything hung on this one man, thin, slight, maimed already in the service of—”

  “He probably wasn’t very used to the food,” Miss Lily said. “I mean to say, southern Italy. The food is very rich, isn’t it? Especially in those days. They hadn’t been alerted to the danger of animal fats. Ignorance is bliss, you might say, but it can’t have been good for them, can it?”

  “Good God,” I said, “we are talking about his heart and mind, not his stomach.”

  “They are all pretty well tied up together. Anyway, you can’t have this Costa thing, you haven’t been in any wars. I don’t suppose you have been hobnobbing with any ambassadors’ wives, either.”

  In saying this, Miss Lily looked at me with the teasing expression that had been more and more common with her lately. I was at a disadvantage, sitting there—I did not know how to reply. Her words constituted another proof, if one were needed, of her pedestrian way of looking at things. Had I not gone with Horatio every step of the way? I had felt his anguish at the cowardly tactics of the French. I had suffered his head wound, felt the warm blood slide over my eyes, blinding me. I had lived through his hero’s welcome, his rescue of the royal pair, the love of the motherless boy for the sensual, ample woman. Was I not during these very days living through the terrible temptations of power, his negotiations with Ruffo and the Neapolitan Jacobins?

  “I expect you haven’t been eating so well yourself,” she said now. “What did you have for lunch?”

  I did not want to reply
to this, not thinking it her business; but she waited, with her eyes fixed on me. It was only then I realized that I had omitted to eat anything that day.

  “A sandwich,” I said. “Cheese sandwich.” It was the first thing that came into my head, and at once I was carried back to the time before my mother left, that distant May afternoon, the walk along the dyke, the splendid profusion of the hawthorn flower. Moles don’t eat sandwiches. Look me in the eye, Charles …

  But I didn’t fear Miss Lily’s eyes. “Cheese and cress,” I said.

  “You are so absent-minded, you could be talking about yesterday or the day before or last week. I’ve known Bobby to have them, dizzy spells, when he skimps on his lunch at school, but he’s still growing, and I don’t think you are, are you? Well, we’ll just have to see what there is.”

  Her expression had softened talking about Bobby, but I could see that she was fixed on some purpose. “What do you mean?” I said.

  She gave two or three brisk nods. “I’ll just go and have a look.”

  I asked her where she was going, but she went out of the room without replying. After a few minutes she was back again.

  “Must have been a bought sandwich if you had one at all—there is not a scrap of either cheese or bread anywhere to be found. Cress I didn’t bother to look for.”

  “Well, it was a bought one.”

  She looked at me with a scepticism that she took no trouble to conceal. “All I can find,” she said, “in the way of foodstuffs, is four eggs that are not in a carton, so we don’t know their date of birth, a cauliflower that has seen better days, and some potatoes in a string bag. Oh yes, and a bit of margarine.”

  She paused on this. I understood now that she was proposing to do something with these poor remnants. She was waiting for me to agree or object or perhaps even to suggest, as an alternative, that we should go out to eat. But I did not want to be with other people; I wanted the two of us to be together quietly. So sudden and strong was the attraction of this idea that I was afraid to speak, afraid of giving myself away. But I think silence betrayed me just as much, or else it was something in my face. After a moment she said, “Well, it will have to do, won’t it?”

  The upshot was that instead of going ahead with the book, that evening we ate together in the kitchen. The eggs were all right still. Miss Lily broke them one by one into a cup to make sure. The central parts of the cauliflower were eatable, the potatoes virtually pristine; we had them steamed. There was just enough margarine to make an omelette. I still had a stock of claret, and I fetched a bottle up from the basement passage where I kept it.

  She sat opposite me across the kitchen table. As we ate and drank, I felt glad and relieved to be released from the book for a while. It was a kind of holiday, and I knew I could not have had it on my own, could not have had it without her. There was no-one else. Monty was no good, we had not been on close terms for years—not since we were children, in fact. And now that he was dressing up in our dead father’s clothes … There was something wrong with him, he needed some central interest in his life.

  No, there was no-one else. I was aware that this gratitude I felt was illogical in a way. She was kind, but it was a constant kindness, not just for me. She was merely existing, being herself. I looked across the table at her; I was able, though briefly, to look into her eyes. The June weather had brought an olive tint to her face and throat—not that the days had been so sunny, but she had the sort of complexion that is deepened by warmth. She was wearing a white shirt, open at the neck. She was in that moment the sum of all the moments of her being as these had gathered for me, as I had known her, from the first time she had come to my door, Avon Secretarial Services in person. Her jokes, her rages, the perennial surplus from which she made her gifts, the limited sympathies that made her fail to understand Horatio, her championing of dim Fanny, her belief in wrapping up well …

  As we ate and the wine went down, she talked about the circumstances of her life, something she had done rarely before and then only briefly. I had grown unused to conversation, and there seemed to me an extraordinary immediacy in everything she said; they were the things on her mind, the things that affected her from day to day. She had been overcharged for repairs to her car and intended to take it up with them, they might think women didn’t know much about engines but they would learn better, she had done a car-maintenance course at evening class. Bobby was something of a problem at school, not that he was a bad boy but he was dreamy, half the time he was in a world of his own, sometimes his teachers got cross with him, he answered a different question from the one they were asking, they thought he was trying to be funny. She had been to the school; the class teacher said it was only a phase. He was very good at designing things and drawing, where he got that from she didn’t know, she wasn’t any good at it.

  “Perhaps from his father?” I said—a bold stroke, but I was curious.

  Miss Lily did not seem to be put out. “Not him,” she said. “He might have been interested in someone behind a bar drawing him a pint. Actually he wasn’t so much of a beer drinker, as far as I remember. Scotch would have been more his style, malt of course, and a choice of wines with dinner. He had a lot of money. This will sound funny, but he was a totally ideal person to me. For a while.”

  “How was that?”

  “He was fifteen years older, divorced, rather good-looking. He was used to running the show. Like I say, he always had plenty of money. He had his own firm and he employed quite a lot of people. I suppose he told me how many—it was the sort of thing he would have told me—but I can’t remember now. The boyfriend I had at the time worked for him, that’s how we met, I was waiting for my boyfriend outside the office. I was just turned eighteen. I used to watch a lot of soaps, especially the ones where everybody seemed rich. All those glamorous people with such eventful lives. I used to love those programmes, I never missed. There was one called Dynasty, which I specially liked. My own life wasn’t glamorous or eventful, I was working in an office, typing out invoices. Then when I met this man, he seemed to belong to that other world. It wasn’t that I thought Dynasty was the real world, but I thought there was a real world that was like Dynasty. Know what I mean?”

  “I think so, yes.”

  “His name was Alex. Perfect, isn’t it? I was never a beauty, but I was attractive—I spent more time on myself in those days. I was lively too. He sent me flowers all the time. He had a Porsche. He took me to expensive places. He was like a hero to me.”

  “Like a knight in shining armour.”

  “Shining Armani, more like it. I thought, you know, this is it, this is the real thing, this is what I was meant for. When I got pregnant, the flowers stopped coming. He told me to get an abortion. If I didn’t, I would have to go it alone—he wouldn’t help. An abortion would have been the reasonable thing, but I couldn’t do it, I just couldn’t. I mean the reasonable thing then, at the time. When I look at my Bobby now, it’s just unthinkable. I had the baby on my own—Mum and Dad helped, they were great. Then when Bobby was born, this man had a change of heart. He’d be ready to help if I’d sign papers acknowledging him as the father. He would pay the rent on a flat. He was full of enthusiasm and paternal pride—it was a boy, you see. He was going to be a beautiful parent. ‘I’ll buy him a speedboat,’ he said to me. That was what did it for him. A speedboat! There was the little kid, a tiny baby, with all his need for care and love, and there was this fool who was his father talking about speedboats. See what I mean? It was just what somebody in Dynasty would have said. But things were different now. This was a real baby and I was a real mother. I told him to make himself scarce. I never took a penny from him, and I never watched Dynasty again. I never watch soaps now, except for Coronation Street.”

  I listened spellbound to this story, which Miss Lily told without rancour or bitterness of any kind. She didn’t mention any man currently in her life, though perhaps there was one. I didn’t want to think about that. She lived in a world different
from mine, not more eventful exactly—after all, I had Horatio—but somehow more spacious and hazardous. I wanted to reciprocate, find something from my own experience that might engage her interest. For some time nothing came to mind; then I hit upon it.

  “It is really quite extraordinary,” I said, “the shift there has been in the course of this century in the tone of Nelson biographies. Right up to the 1930s there was a concern to show him as he was, a truly noble character. Not all his biographers, of course, but nearly all.” I was thinking here of bilious Badham.

  “How do you mean?”

  “Well, there was a concern to show him as good. Not only brave, not only a naval commander of genius, but virtuous too. The Victorians denied the adultery with Emma because they didn’t think it proper behaviour for the hero of Trafalgar. That’s going too far—we haven’t got the hang-ups they had—but I take the old-fashioned view myself. His modern biographers don’t seem to care one way or the other. Here we have the national hero and they skate over the question of whether he was good or not, in the sense of truthful and honourable. They simply don’t seem to care.”

  “Well, we have gone down in the world, haven’t we? Nelson has gone down with us, I suppose. We don’t think we are so great anymore, so we don’t need to make him out to be so great.”

  “But that is terrible, it is degenerate.” I felt the usual distress at this belittlement of him, this abject surrender of a glorious past. “You would think it would work the other way,” I said. “Here is someone who should make us proud to be British. Where has the pride gone?”