As I have said, Miss Lily had broken through into a zone of immunity; she had crossed the line. I still felt hostility when she spoke against Horatio, but there had been no impulses of violence after that first. She had changed too in these few months. She had taken to reading about him, she argued, she stayed on longer than the two hours without charging me extra. Her hair was longer, and she wore it in a softer style, with a fringe over the forehead. Now that the weather was milder, she had lost that shiny look and her skin seemed paler. I looked forward now to the evenings when she came. I even looked forward to getting her view of things, limited as this invariably was. By that time I had begun to neglect my appearance rather, but on Tuesdays and Fridays, knowing she was coming in the evening, I made a point of washing and shaving and cleaning my nails.
However, she seriously annoyed me that Friday evening, two days after Copenhagen, by what she said about his conduct during the battle. Where she had got it from I don’t know. I had been repeating the story of how he clapped the telescope to his blind eye. One of the great moments in our island story. The impulse, the improvisation—
“Well,” she said, “there are them that say the importance of this incident has been very much exaggerated.”
“Exaggerated? How can it be exaggerated?” She sounded as if she had lifted the words straight from some book; they were not like her words at all.
“There is reason to believe that this Parker had a private understanding with Nelson that if he hoisted the signal at a certain point, it was to be considered optional.”
“Are you saying it was all arranged in advance?”
“I am not saying anything, I am just remarking.”
“And Foley and the others?”
“They were all in the know.”
By this time I had begun to experience the usual symptoms of rage: a sense of impaired vision, a feeling that the skin of my face was too tight. But the unusual and surprising thing was that I did not try to hide this from Miss Lily, did not turn away or make any diversionary gesture. That evening, with Miss Lily, I broke my lifelong habit of concealment.
“And the telescope?” I said. “That putting the telescope to his blind eye? Just playing to the gallery, according to you.”
I saw her eyes widen, become somehow more alert, more watchful. But she went on looking at me steadily enough.
“It’s not according to me. That is what they say about it—that he knew beforehand.”
Whatever blood had been left in my face must have drained away at this. “What they say? What they say? How can you repeat such lies? Do you realize what you are doing? You are adding to the slanders about him, you are joining the ranks …”
I had to pause to control my voice. My vision was narrowed to her face, the dark hair over the brows, the soft, undefended-looking, obstinate eyes, the wide mouth with its sharp corners.
“You are joining in the conspiracy against him,” I said, too loudly for that small room. “Two hundred years it’s been going on. It’s the same people that talk about his conduct in Naples in 1799, trying to make out that he committed a fraud there.”
“What people are those?”
Her tone had not changed; she was still looking closely at me. This steadiness had a chastening effect; my voice was more under control when I answered. “Those who cannot bear to think that anyone so great could ever have existed, who always have to undermine him, to take the lowest view of everything he did. This man who saved our country from the vile French, who had a lion’s heart inside his frail body …”
Uttering this praise of him, my voice broke a little. I turned away from Miss Lily and began to shuffle with the papers on my table, but stopped almost at once because my hands were trembling.
There was silence for some moments. Then she said, “You only say the French are vile because you know he didn’t like them. I know it means a lot to you, Charles, and it’s a very good thing to have a hobby, but he was only a man, that’s all I’m saying. Don’t take offence, but I think myself that you are too wrapped up in him. As far as I can see, nobody knows the truth of that telescope business and nobody ever will. You can think one thing or another. I mean to say, there are lots of things like that, aren’t there? I know it isn’t my place to say it, but you really need a bit more variety in your life.”
Variety, when I had his life to look at!
“I know we are going out on Sunday,” she said. “But it is still Nelson, isn’t it?”
When I turned back towards her, I found her eyes fixed on me with a serious and quite unmistakable solicitude. That she was in her own way concerned about me I had sometimes felt before. Misguided, of course; I was managing well enough. But I understood now for the first time that the way she expressed this concern was by undermining Horatio. She wanted me to think less of him, but this did not put her among the ranks of his slanderers, because she did it for my sake. In this brief moment of humility I saw—glimpsed, rather—how much less selfish Miss Lily was than I, who had wanted her to admire Horatio, not for her sake but my own, so I could share the glory with him, bask in the same sunshine.
The mood, as I say, did not last long, but a certain obscure prospect of change had come with it, and the last of my anger was cleared away. And then I broke my second rule—I told a story detrimental to myself. I told her of my frantic mopping while Horatio thundered at the gates of Copenhagen, and she laughed. I laughed too—I remember that I laughed too.
She was not much interested in his battles, not even Trafalgar. She seemed to see no more in them than a perverse expenditure of human life; all the courage and patriotism and fighting spirit counted for nothing, or she turned it into a cause for pity. As I say, her view was limited. She hadn’t much in the way of idealism. But she took a great interest in Horatio’s private life and particularly in his relationship with Emma Hamilton, whom most of the time she didn’t really care for.
“That woman,” she said, “she played on his jealousy. She didn’t care that he was about to risk the lives of all those men.”
I could not help smiling at this. I had been telling her about Horatio’s state of mind on the eve of Copenhagen, that strange mixture of feelings: impatience for battle, joy of fatherhood, torments of jealousy. “The risk to his men’s lives was not the foremost consideration,” I said.
“If it wasn’t, it should have been. What was there in it for them?”
“Horatio didn’t ask them to take any risk he wasn’t prepared to take himself.”
“We have had this conversation before. He shared the risks, I don’t say he didn’t. But he didn’t share the rewards. If he lived, he got richer and more famous. If they lived, they stayed the same.”
I felt my smile wearing thin. It was always the same problem with her; she simplified the issues to such an absurd degree that there was no way of explaining anything to her.
“You can’t say there is not a difference there,” she said. “Anyway, she exploited his love, this woman he thought such an honour to her sex.”
How did she know about it? We hadn’t got to that point yet in my book. A question not worth asking—I knew by now that my book was no longer her sole source of information.
“I’ve been reading their correspondence,” she said, as if after all I had asked. “They go to a reception in London, the three of them, the Hamiltons and him. The Prince of Wales is there, he sees her and he fancies her—he always liked them on the large side. So he makes eyes at her. Nelson notices this, and afterwards he takes it up with her. She tells him there is nothing in it—she can’t help it if the Prince likes the look of her, but that’s as far as it goes.”
Her face was settling already into the expression, dogged and exalted at the same time, that it always wore when she was giving vent to feelings of disapproval.
“Strange to think,” I said, “that William Pitt the Younger was also there, together with most of his cabinet. Horatio came face-to-face with him that same evening.”
This was an attempt to sidetrack Miss Lily, but of course it failed, because she had no idea of the significance this meeting had in my mind; she did not know the story of the chess game and the two figures side by side in my father’s book. It came to me now, with the force of some exciting, illicit impulse, that I could actually tell Miss Lily this story, as I had once told it to Penhas; I could try to explain how important it had been to me, that wound I had received in the moment of victory, the choice between the statesman and the sailor, the early lesson in concealment. I hesitated; the moment passed. But temptation once admitted leaves us never quite the same; I was to remember that urge to confide in her and how it came to me like something sinful. For the moment, I contented myself with a statement of fact: “It wasn’t a reception exactly. It was a very grand dinner party at the house of Alexander Davison, in St. James’s Square.”
“Who was he?”
“He was Horatio’s prize agent.”
“What is a prize agent?”
“That is the man who managed the prize money falling due to the people who fought in a battle. Some of the enemy ships taken might be carrying valuable cargoes. Occasionally they might be carrying hugely valuable cargoes. There was a system of prizes. The total value was divided in strict proportion. The commander of the ship got one quarter, the lieutenants got one eighth, and so on.”
“So they just sort of shared out the booty?”
“You could put it like that, I suppose.”
“How much did the men get, the ordinary seamen?”
“It depended on how many there were. There was always one quarter left after all the rest had been shared out.”
“Sounds like blood money to me.”
“Horatio didn’t fight for money. He fought for his country.”
“Be that as it may, it wouldn’t have come amiss on top of his pay, that’s all I am saying. Anyway, where the party took place is neither here nor there. The Prince of Wales takes a fancy to her and she makes sure her lover knows it. As soon as he goes to sea again, she starts tormenting him. The Prince keeps cropping up in her letters. She is taking care not to go where the Prince is likely to be. The Prince is doing his best to seduce her, but so far she has managed to escape him. Then, against her will, Sir William invites him under their roof. She has her duty as hostess, what can she do? And so on. Letter after letter. That reception or dinner party or whatever it was happened in November, and she is still keeping it warm the following March. He is sitting in his boat, miles from anywhere, going through hell.”
“Ship, not boat.”
“I can read her like a book.”
“Well, she wasn’t young anymore, her looks were going, she was worried about the future.”
“Who isn’t? I mean, if we made that an excuse for everything …”
Miss Lily was obviously not herself destined to be a fading beauty, and I privately thought this was why she was so unsympathetic towards Emma, but naturally I did not say so. Instead I suggested it might be time we got on with some work.
My talk was only five days off now, and I was still not satisfied with what I had written. I crossed out and rewrote and crossed out again in a progression that was beginning to seem infinite. Everything took longer than expected. Miss Lily grew weary of these endless corrections. “I know you are a perfectionist,” she said, “but there is a limit.”
A limit was precisely what I couldn’t reach, there being virtually no limit to the ways in which words can combine. Under the stress of all this, an old nervous habit had reasserted itself—a tendency, slight and I hoped unremarkable, to gulp a little, to make from time to time a sort of involuntary swallowing, the teeth meeting in a very faint click, I think audible only to me. It was a strange reflexive motion of the throat, perhaps belonging to the remote diluvian past of the species, like snapping at some wavering insect that had come too close.
I had rewritten part of the second of my two episodes in “The Making of a Hero,” the one that occurred in 1775, when Horatio was seventeen, and marked the real end of youth for him. He had been serving as midshipman on board the Seahorse on a voyage to the East Indies, a voyage of marvels—they had rounded the Cape, stood along the northern edge of the Roaring Forties, steered north for Madras and Calcutta, then up the Persian Gulf to Basra and back to Tricomalee in Ceylon.
From boyhood, from my first interest in Horatio, I had followed every step of the way in my school atlas, imagining the brilliant light, the sea tilting up to meet a voracious moon, deserts of red sand, the swollen waters of great rivers, stork-legged people who lived in flooded places, fiery tigers, crocodiles like floating logs. The scattered fragments of my reading and imagining all came together in that voyage of the Seahorse. Thoughts of my mother too. It was for India that she left us. Somewhere on that continent, my mother is or was. Just as I was Horatio’s witness and his shadow over this wide gap of time, so the process could work in reverse. Perhaps Horatio saw a woman in a blue robe on temple steps across wide muddy waters against the sky of swooning whiteness …
All my childish knowledge of brutality was in that voyage too. Horatio had been to the Arctic and the tropics, but this was his first fighting ship on active service, and the captain, George Farmer, was a noted disciplinarian. On three hundred occasions, each meticulously recorded in the ship’s log, a man was stripped to the waist, lashed to the gratings, and flogged with the thonged whip known as the cat-o’-nine-tails. Two or three times a week. Horatio would have witnessed these floggings.
The voyage ended for him in December 1775 somewhere south of Bombay, with an attack of malaria. It was his first, and it nearly killed him. He was transferred to the Dolphin, the only available ship, to be carried home—England was thought to be his one chance of recovery. But the Dolphin didn’t sail till the following March, with Horatio still confined to his hammock, still at death’s door.
“His famous luck,” I said to Miss Lily. But luck was the wrong word; I knew that, even if she didn’t. “If they had sailed immediately he would have died. The voyage would have taken five or six months—he could not have lasted out.”
It was a storm that saved him. The first days were calm; the ship made slow way, with light breezes puffing her sails. I wanted to convey the quality of this calm, the slow heave of the sea, the sick boy’s hammock swaying with the sway of the ship, the moaning complaint of the timbers, the moving shadows of the rigging, the shadow of death on him as he lay there. A famous ship, the Dolphin, though he would not have cared just then: the first ship ever to sail twice round the world.
Then, in early April, the storm struck with tremendous violence, choking the scuppers so that the decks flooded, splitting sails, carrying away the lighter yards and springing the heavier ones from their slings. Already enfeebled and sick, helpless in this nightmare tumult, the young Horatio came very close to his end. But now, just in time, Table Mountain is sighted across the surging waters, they reach the shelter of the Cape, the Dolphin anchors at Simon’s Town for repairs. These take a month, a month of fresh air and wholesome food for Horatio after the stifling humidity of the Indian coast—a month that saved his life.
All these preliminaries I wanted to include, as being essential to the drama. But the formative experience came afterwards, somewhere in the Atlantic on the way home. He was returning to health by this time, but still extremely weak and listless. He thought much of the future, and in this depressed state his prospects seemed bleak.
“I’ve decided to put it all in the first person,” I said to Miss Lily. “I want to use his own words as far as possible. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it to begin with.”
Miss Lily turned to me a face of concern. “You are changing it again, for the umpteenth time. You are making yourself ill over it. There comes a point when you have to say enough is enough, it’s as good as I can make it.”
“I have to do it justice. I have to quote him in his own words. This was a conversion experience, a call to vocation.” I gulped, lowered my head in an attempt at concealment, heard the tiny click of my teeth. “There he is,” I said, “standing on deck or perhaps in his quarters below. He has been in the valley of the shadow. Then the long convalescence—the body is recovering, but there is still that darkness in the mind. The future seems to hold nothing for him. What does he say? I could discover no means of reaching the object of my ambition … Then comes the deliverance, the vision—he sees a radiant golden orb suspended in the air before him, actually there before him physically. In that moment he understands his destiny, he is a boy no longer. I want to put it in his own words. A glow of patriotism was kindled within me and presented my King and country as my patron. My mind exalted in the idea. Well then, I exclaimed, I will be a hero! And confiding in Providence I will brave every danger.”
I paused on this. I felt suddenly exalted myself. It seemed to me that some streaming of that radiance, a fainter impression of that shining orb, lay now between Miss Lily and me. “There you are,” I said. “There you have it. The vocation of hero, solemnly vowed and undertaken. That radiant vision stayed with him all his life—it must be stressed in my talk.”
However, I saw no slightest look of exaltation on Miss Lily’s face. “I don’t believe in this orb,” she said. “It was a long time afterwards when he wrote about it—twenty years, something like that. I mean, things get embroidered, don’t they? Besides, your country can’t be a patron, it has to be a person. And King George III was off his head, and the Prince of Wales turned out to be nothing but a playboy and overweight with it. Nelson thought he was after Emma, but he probably wasn’t at all. God strike him blind if he looks at you, that’s what Nelson wrote to her.”
It was the first time she actually quoted his words to me. Of course I ought to have known that she would be incapable of seeing the meaning of this transcendent moment in his life, patriotism experienced as religious impulse in this clergyman’s son. She was unable, constitutionally unable, to shift from the concrete to the abstract, unable to see that it was not this or that embodiment of kingship that mattered but the dedication to an ideal of service. It was really so obvious that it wasn’t worth arguing about. I said, “I want to follow it up with some general remarks about the symbolism of the orb. Held in the hand of a monarch, it signifies his sovereignty over the world. It was first used by the Roman emperors. In religious art, it is held by Christ as Salvator Mundi, the Saviour of the World.”
“He must have been lonely, that’s all I can say.”
“Who?” I was bewildered by this interjection, which seemed not to relate to anything I was saying. “Do you mean Christ?”
“I mean him, Nelson. He must have been terribly lonely. It wasn’t natural.”
There was pity in her voice—she was presuming to pity him. Even worse, when I glanced at her face, I had the impression I was being included in the same intolerable embrace.