I wrote no more character sketches that evening; Emma’s visit drained me. I slept better for it, however. Next day was a Friday. I spent most of it examining what information I had been able to collect as to Horatio’s state of health during those Naples days. He had received a bad wound at Aboukir Bay; a piece of shrapnel had opened his forehead above the right eye, blinding him with blood, so that he thought at first the sudden darkness was a presage of death. This came after weeks of intense uncertainty and strain while he ranged the Mediterranean trying to find the pusillanimous French and bring them to battle. After the victory he suffered from headaches and nausea and had frequently the sensation of a metal belt being tightened across his chest, constricting his breathing. When he arrived at Naples, he had been continuously at sea for six months.
Could a case be made for temporary disturbance of personality, some medical condition that made him peculiarly vulnerable—to Naples, to Emma? A blow to the forehead, almost certainly concussive, might damage the frontal lobes of the brain, disturb the judgement, loosen inhibitions …
I grew absorbed in this and did not ask myself until much later in the day—halfway through the afternoon—what I was really engaged in, what I was trying to do. Immediately I did so, I felt hot with shame. I had vowed to clear his name, not to seek excuses for him, not to explain everything away on spurious medical grounds.
I had forgotten about lunch and now began to feel hungry. There was not much to eat, however. I had by this time lost all system in my shopping. I could no longer be bothered to make lists. Sometimes there was too much and things went bad; sometimes there was hardly anything. Bread and cheese was all there was that afternoon, and half a Mars Bar. There was a cauliflower in the plastic box at the bottom of the fridge, but it was half liquefied; I had to throw it away. The bread needed to be thawed out in the oven. In those days I used to buy sliced loaves, several at a time, and keep them in the freezer. The cheese tasted all right, perhaps slightly stale. In any case, by this time I was feeling depressed and not in a mood to register gastronomic subtleties. Afterwards I tried to sleep under my mother’s rug, but I was too tense. The same questions revolved in my mind, scraps of quotations asserted their terrible familiarity, the usual clusters of doubts and misgivings forming immediately round them like scavenger fish converging on scraps of offal cast into the sea.
To make things worse, I was beginning now to feel distinctly nervous about my forthcoming talk at the Nelson Club, due to be delivered on the evening of April 9—the day, incidentally, on which Horatio, not yet eighteen, passed his examination for lieutenant and was appointed to HMS Lowestoffe for service in the West Indies. I wanted my talk to be a success, to have impact, to be something people remembered and talked about afterwards, an important contribution to the understanding of Horatio’s life. I intended subsequently to submit it for publication in Mariner’s World.
At seven in the evening Miss Lily arrived, punctual to the minute as always. She was carrying a large bunch of daffodils. In the rather dim light of my hall, the trumpets of flower and the fleshy stems looked strange and savage.
“Dad put the bulbs in, years ago now,” she said, with that sort of slight irrelevance, or excess of information, which was somehow typical of her, as if she were disarming some protest in advance. “We have a bit of a garden at the back, they keep coming through year after year. It doesn’t matter what the weeds are like, they push up through, nothing stops them.”
She paused, looking at me solemnly over the nodding heads of the flowers. Her mouth was different. Then I saw she was wearing lipstick, something I had not known her to do before—I would have noticed it sooner but for the flowers. “Nothing is stronger than a daffodil,” she said. “I think they would find their way through concrete.”
“Your father is keen on gardening, then?” I was constrained to keep on with the conversation, not knowing how to greet these clamorous intruders, afraid of a pause in which I would have to make some response. A distant memory of some similar gift tugged at my mind, a memory of helplessness and dismay.
“Dad died eight years ago—that’s what I am getting at. He died eight years ago and he put the bulbs in, I don’t know, maybe nine or ten years before he died. That’s seventeen years or so these daffs have been coming out, and they’ve spread, they’re all over the place now. No, we live with my mum. Or she lives with us, rather—it’s my house.”
I had noticed the we and wondered, not for the first time, if Miss Lily shared her bed with someone. Was there someone who watched her move about, back and forth, with that absolute trust in her love? She wore no ring, but that meant nothing. “Well,” I said, “it is really very kind of you.”
“I thought they might brighten the place up a bit. You know, now that the weather is better.” While I was still puzzling over this, she said, “I’ll just go and get something to put them in.”
Barely pausing to deposit her computer, still in its case, against the wall, asking for no directions, she went rapidly down the passage and turned without hesitation into the kitchen, where to the best of my knowledge she had never set foot before. I was left standing there in the hall, in the narrow space between the door and the tall oriental jar I used for my umbrella.
I felt I should join her in the kitchen but hesitated. It seemed a risky thing to me. Too intimate, searching together in that small space for something to put the flowers in. More to the point, I thought, to look for something to put Miss Lily in; it was she that needed containing, far more than the daffodils. I still could not quite believe she had gone marching in like that. There was, however, in spite of my incredulity, a strange feeling of peace at the idea of being in the kitchen with her. I remained where I was—not for long, perhaps a minute or two. The silence seemed intense. I was aware of the small complex of cracks in the wall above the door, like a delta, and the shiny black handle of my umbrella, leaning out of the jar. I began to make my way down the passage. Faint sounds of movement came from the kitchen. I made no sound at all as I approached. I was wearing slippers, but this was an accidental circumstance—I had no intention of creeping up on her. At the doorway I stopped short. Miss Lily had taken one of the kitchen chairs and was standing on it with her back to me, reaching up into one of the overhead cupboards. She did not know I was there. Her black skirt ended some way above the knee, and as she reached into the cupboard the hem rose an inch or two. I saw that her legs, though sturdy, were well shaped, even beautiful, full at the calf and narrow at the ankle; also that she had on black tights decorated with a sort of diamond pattern; also that she had no shoes on, she had slipped them off before climbing onto the chair, but for the thin integument of the tights she was barefoot.
I did not stay there longer than the time needed to register these impressions. I retreated to the sitting room and waited there, near the open door, so I would know when she passed. She saw me as she came down the passage, stopped at the threshold for a moment, then came through. She had the flowers in a green glass vase with fluted edges, which I knew from my childhood days when my mother used to put flowers in it. It had not been used for a long time—I would not have remembered where it was.
“I had to stand on a chair,” Miss Lily said. She was smiling with pleasure as she bore the daffodils before her, holding the vase chest-high. She moved about the room with complete assurance, not as if it were strange to her at all. She set the vase down on a small round table in one corner. “There,” she said. “They look nice there, don’t they?”
All this had taken up some time. “They do, yes,” I said. “Shall we go along to the study and sort of get started?” There might have been some edge to my voice, I don’t know. I had felt a sudden impatience at this dalliance.
Miss Lily looked at me more closely. “You are very pale,” she said. “You don’t look well to me. You should try and get out more.”
“Get out more?” I said. “I’ve been in Naples all day.”
She did not smile much at this. “There is such a thing as too much studying,” she said as we made our way towards the study. She looked round at me and nodded seriously. “A bit of fresh air and a good brisk walk never did anybody any harm.” She sounded as if she might at any moment thrust a cap on my head and wrap me in a scarf and send me out for a turn round the block. It was really too much. I am not a child, I felt like saying. Secretarial services are what I need. But of course that would have hurt her—I did not want to hurt Miss Lily.
And so, a good quarter of an hour late, we began the evening’s work. As I have said, I was getting nervous about my talk. I had decided to set my book aside for the time being so as to prepare the talk well in advance. I hate being hurried—it always results in the neglect of something essential—and it was a relief, in a way, to suspend work on the book, postpone the problems of Naples. I had already written a first draft in pencil and corrected this in black ink, my invariable procedure: pencil, correct in black, dictate, typescript, correct in red, dictate. Already, even at this early stage, my pages were a mass of alterations and insertions. I was eager to dictate it all to Miss Lily so that I could then start revising on the typescript. Type gives us a whole new experience of the text, refreshing the eye, stimulating the critical faculty. Those who don’t first labour in longhand never get this boost.
I intended to base my talk upon two episodes in the early life of Horatio, absolutely crucial, in my view, to his development as a hero, as the English hero, no slightest admixture of the Celt there, he came from generations of Norfolk yeomen. These episodes took place in 1771 and 1775, respectively. The earlier one concerned the first days of his naval career, when he joined the Raisonnable, a sixty-four-gun ship taken from the French twelve years before and captained now by his uncle, Sir Maurice Suckling. Wanting to render this episode as vividly as possible, I had decided to recast parts of it in the present tense. I began my dictation as soon as Miss Lily was ready.
“It is March 1771. His father, the Reverend Edmund, has accompanied him from Norfolk to London, to the inn from which the coaches leave for Chatham. There, in the yard of the inn, father and son say good-bye, with sage advice on one side and earnest promises on the other. Now the boy is quite alone. He is twelve years old, small for his age, delicate in appearance.
“The coach goes jolting along—it is a six-hour journey to Chatham, time enough to ponder the future. Perhaps he wonders if he has after all made a mistake. But to admit the possibility of mistake was not much in his nature, nor is it in the nature of heroes generally. They know they have been singled out; in the furnace of their destiny, mistakes are either consumed or transmuted to the intentions of providence.
“When he arrives at Chatham, he asks people at the staging inn for directions, but no-one has so much as heard of the ship. Carrying his baggage, he makes his way down cobbled streets to the docks …”
By a coincidence that to my mind far transcended chance, the Victory was also lying in the Medway at this time. In seeking his first ship Horatio passed close to his last, his death-ship, which had been commissioned in the year of his birth. I was tempted to include mention of this pattern of timings, in which I too, as his parallel walker, was involved. But I decided against—it could not be done briefly; it would have disturbed the balance.
“Still lugging his valise, he asks passing sailors if they know where the Raisonnable lies. One of them points. The boy strains his eyes. Across the grey, wind-scourged water of the Medway, he makes out the ship lying at her moorings. But now comes the real problem: how can he get to her? There are no boats. The ship is too far away for him to attract the attention of anyone on board. For a time that seems endless he waits there in the icy wind, completely helpless and forlorn.”
At this point, as I was dictating my text to Miss Lily, there came to me a sensation not altogether unfamiliar but more pronounced that evening than ever before: my voice, the quality and sound of it, had become more present to my mind than the words it was saying, the meaning it was seeking to convey. From being a strand of sound edged with silence, it was filling the whole room, there were no borders to it; it was not my voice at all but someone else’s, someone whose borders of silence lay elsewhere. I saw Miss Lily’s hands pause, move away from the keys, and come to rest at either side of the keyboard. I looked at her hands—this was an evening for noticing things about Miss Lily. Strong hands but not ill shaped. Like the rest of her. I came back to myself at the sight of them, and in the momentary blankness of this return I felt a sudden rush of pity for Horatio and myself and all the lost children. But pity for him was wrong; I had never felt it before, he was not to be pitied. In that lonely moment, under that hostile sky, the steel of resolution had entered the child’s heart. It was an essential moment in the heroic career. Miss Lily had not looked up. With a sense of having got away undetected, I resumed my dictating.
“Finally a passing officer takes pity on him and arranges for a boat to carry him across the river. For the first of many times, he climbs aboard a warship. Step by step, as he climbs the companion-ladder, he is entering a new world. He is a child—it is natural that a sort of dread should descend on him, he does not know what will be required. However, the captain is his uncle, after all. Uncle Maurice will guide and advise him.
“But Uncle Maurice is not on board; he is not expected for some days. No-one has heard of the new midshipman, no-one shows the slightest interest in him. He waits for someone to take notice of him, tell him where he should go, what he should do. Eventually he is told to carry his luggage down the two steep ladders that lead to the midshipmen’s berth on the orlop deck. Here all seems chaos and confusion to him. It is dark down here, below the water line. The beams are low, and there is a smell of tar and damp rope. Someone shows him how to sling a hammock, how to stow away his things.
“For the rest of that day and all the next he walks the deck. The weather could hardly be worse—‘fresh gales with squally weather and snow,’ according to the ship’s log. No-one pays any attention to him. He walks about on the tilting deck, he looks across the choppy waters towards where London lies, and beyond that, Norfolk.
“Then at last, to much ceremony of saluting and a great shrilling of bosuns’ whistles, Captain Suckling comes on board. With his appearance everything changes, the ship takes on life and purpose. He summons his nephew aft to the great cabin. This is on the upper deck, where only the captain can have his quarters. The tallest man can walk upright here, and it is flooded with light. The wide bow windows occupy the whole width of the ship, beautifully framed in scrolled wood, elegantly curving, giving broad views across the river. From the dark, cramped, malodorous place where he has been peering and creeping below, the boy mounts into space and light …”
I paused here, and Miss Lily paused with me, and for some while there was silence. I was not yet satisfied with this passage. I wanted to convey the contrast somehow more vividly, as vividly as it was present to my own mind. For in this contrast lay the whole meaning. The chintz and mahogany of that beautifully appointed cabin, furnished in masculine style but with great elegance, the great swaths of light, the order and the calm. The strangely different uncle, metamorphosed from the country squire the boy knew, resplendent in his blue, gold-trimmed uniform. Uncle Maurice was transfigured, he was a god, he had come aboard and breathed life, he lived up here in the pure ether. As the diminutive Horatio listened to his uncle explaining the workings of the ship, he understood the meaning of power and godhead. It was the first lesson of his naval career and one he never forgot.
I was about to resume when Miss Lily spoke, breaking the silence. “That was really interesting, if you don’t mind me saying so. I could just see that poor lonely boy, walking about in the chilly wind, not having the least notion what to do with himself. My brother used to live near Gravesend, it can get bitter down there. I hope he had a good coat on.”
Her imagination, as usual, had been stirred by the drama of weather. But had she got the essential point, I wondered, the being summoned into light, that crucial early experience of the privilege that went with command? It irked me that she should seem so sorry for him—it reminded me of my own earlier moment of weakness.
“They took hardship better in those days,” I said. “They were tougher, more enduring. They didn’t expect to be cossetted, as people do now. There was no Granny State to shelter them from the cradle to the grave.”
“Cradle to the grave? You been on the South Bank lately, round Waterloo Bridge? You won’t see much of Granny there, unless it is her that gives them the cardboard boxes. Anyway, I wouldn’t have liked it, I do know that.” She grimaced in saying this and wrinkled her nose, a sign of serious emphasis. I didn’t know if she meant the period as a whole or just Horatio’s experience. “Why didn’t he just go and find some corner where he could sit down?” she said. “Somewhere out of the wind?”
“He didn’t want to appear idle. Character was character in those days.”
“I can’t see the point of suffering for nothing. If he had kept out of the wind, I would have thought more of him. They cut pieces off him, didn’t they?”
“Well, the surgeons had to take off his arm after the failure of the attack on Tenerife, and then there was the eye, but that—”
“I don’t mean pieces of his body, I mean pieces of himself as a person.”
“I don’t understand what you are getting at.”
“He was an orphan, wasn’t he? His mother died when he was nine, and he was only twelve when he went away to sea. After they parted that day in London, his father never knew him again as a child—it was years before they met again, he was grown up by then. You can’t take a boy away from home and the world he has grown up in without him losing some bits of himself. I don’t know whether you’d call it cutting pieces off or just sort of putting him in a narrow place where he couldn’t grow.”
Miss Lily paused. I saw the rise and fall of her breathing. She was impassioned. “He was hemmed in, that’s all I am saying,” she said.
Avon Secretarial Services, from Camden, were remarking on the narrowness of Horatio Nelson’s life. It was so absurd that I could not feel angry. In fact, I think I smiled. “A narrow place, was it? Horatio served five months as a midshipman on the Raisonnable, then he sailed as captain’s servant on a West Indiaman bound for the Caribbean archipelago. He went from Florida and Yucatán to Venezuela, then to the Bahamas and the Antilles Islands. He saw birds of paradise and coral snakes and armadillos. He saw forests of palm. When he returned, still only fourteen, he piloted a longboat on the Thames, transporting stores from the Pool to the Delta, learning to deal with crosscurrents and shoals. In the following year he took part in an expedition to the Arctic, where he saw polar bears and fields of ice and the sun at midnight. Then he joined HMS Seahorse and went to the East Indies with her, from Bengal to Bushire. And he was still only sixteen. Would you really call that a hemmed-in life, Miss Lily?”
I had become excited in my turn, stirred as always by these gorgeous travels. “If he was hemmed in, what are we?”
“What was it you called me?” Miss Lily was smiling slightly but looked at the same time rather perplexed. I realized then that I had made a slip.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “That’s what I call you when I think about you. It just came out.”
“When you think about me?”
“You know, when you need to think about someone or something, you generally give it a name. Might be Socrates or dialectical materialism or Manchester United. Your name in my mind was always Miss Lily.” As I was saying this, I realized in a confused kind of way why I wanted her to see what a wonderful person Horatio was, how marvellous his life had been. He and I were so close, she could not admire Horatio without admiring me.
Miss Lily’s expression changed; her smile faded. I had the impression that my confusion of feeling was reflected in her eyes, which continued to look steadily at me. Not experienced on her part, simply reflected. “Well,” she said, “I’m not going to call you Mr. Charles.”
“Charles will do.”
My face felt hot. I could not remember when I had last invited anyone to call me by my first name. It was Miss Lily who brought things back to order. “What he didn’t have was a normal life, that’s all I am saying,” she said. “By the way, I meant to ask you, what is a midshipman exactly?”
I was aware that this was a sort of diversion, but I was grateful for it. I explained that midshipmen were junior ratings, mainly intending to be officers, that they lived together in the cramped and crowded quarters of the orlop, that they were of all ages from children of ten or eleven to full-grown men, the raw material of the officer class.
Miss Lily listened carefully enough, but her comments, when they came, only served to prove how tenacious she was in argument. “That’s exactly what I was getting at,” she said. “I didn’t mean narrow in the physical sense. I meant emotional. He was narrowed down in his emotions. Stands to reason, really, doesn’t it? If you are pushed out too soon, certain kinds of feelings aren’t much use to you anymore, so they sort of get lost. Must have been the same with all those boys, those that went to the midshipman—it just isn’t normal.”
“That’s how the navy got its officers—the ship was the school. That was the system and it worked—it gave us Camperdown and the Battle of the Saints and the Glorious First of June. Above all, it gave us Trafalgar, it gave us supremacy at sea into the twentieth century.”
“Be that as it may,” Miss Lily said, “I can’t help thinking it sort of blunted them. I am glad my Bobby doesn’t need to go through it.”
“Your Bobby?”
“That’s my little boy. He is just twelve. The same age Nelson was when he went to sea.”
“I didn’t know you had a child.”
Miss Lily glanced away as if momentarily distracted. “It didn’t come up before.”
I was quite staggered by this news, which was somehow completely unexpected. “You must have been very young when you had him.”
“I brought him up myself,” she said, as if this fully solved the question of youth. “Me and Mum. His father pushed off at an early stage, which was just as well, in my opinion—and I even thought so at the time. I was wondering—Bobby is ever so interested in ships and battles. He has been doing a project on Nelson at school. When I told him, you know, that we are going to Portsmouth to see the Victory, I could tell he really wanted to go. He didn’t say much, but I could tell. It would be so good for him to have a man to show him round …”
And so it was decided. Still in a state of mild shock at the news of Bobby’s existence, I agreed on a date for the Portsmouth trip. We would go—the three of us—on the first Sunday after my talk.