Miss Lily came as usual on Friday evening. She was hardly through the door when she began asking me about the talk. “I was thinking about you,” she said. “How did it go?”
“Very well.”
“I saw that it was raining and I wondered, you know, if it would put people off.”
“No, no, they came all the same.” A modest smile. “The place was pretty packed.”
“Did you get some good questions?”
I had a brief recollection of the novelist’s raised hand. “One or two, yes. It was a mixed bag, you know. But there was a fair degree of interest, I think I can say that.”
“And so there should have been.”
Miss Lily said this with considerable emphasis. I looked at her, not for long—I never look long at faces—but long enough to see that she really meant it, she really was glad at the thought of my success. Her face was bright with pleasure. And I thought, if the talk is a success in her mind, then so am I and all that work is rewarded—rewarded by the look on her face. I felt a certain impediment in my throat and tried to swallow it down, but it stayed. I busied myself with papers for some moments. Then I said, “I couldn’t have got it together without your help.”
It was an effort to say this, to overcome the humiliation of gratitude. When I glanced at Miss Lily again, the pleasure was still there on her face but it was different, more serious; there was that deepening of expression I had noticed before. It came to me that there was beauty in her face, and something more—she possessed without effort the dignity I strove to protect in Horatio and in myself. It was disturbing, that I should see myself as striving to protect what he possessed so that I could possess it too. Hugo’s face came into my mind, rabbity-looking somehow, with the eyes wide apart, rather protruberant. His look that changed as the music began. You have to rise above it. Only the evening before, but it was remote already, like something in somebody else’s life.
“We’d better get going,” I said. I was still trying to circumvent the problems of Naples 1799, at least temporarily, by jumping ahead to the following year, when Horatio and the Hamiltons, after their long journey home, with the cruises, the sittings to painters, the sojourns at foreign courts—the roadshow, as Miss Lily persisted in calling it—had finally arrived in London.
In a way she was right, I had to admit that. They were performers whether they wanted to be or not. Even when they were back in England, the show went on—it had to, because the spectators were always waiting, the theatre was always crowded. The maimed admiral, the antiquated ambassador, the beautiful, corpulent dame they shared, the suffering, unoffending Fanny—fame and scandal made them players. Everywhere they went, reporters followed; every move they made was recorded in the daily press.
The rift between Fanny and Horatio was past mending now, but they still appeared together in public. I wanted not merely to catalogue the events of those days but to convey the essence, catch the highlights and the low. However, the main job that evening was to correct a mistake I had made, a confusion between two separate visits to the theatre by the Nelson party in the same week. In fact, it was difficult to be certain about Horatio’s activities during this period. Many of the newspaper reports of his attendance at public events were apocryphal; the managers of every show in London, from Pidcock’s Zoo to the Sans Souci in Leicester Square, had found out that they could fill the house at short notice by putting it about that Lord Nelson would be in the audience that evening.
The first occasion was on November the eighteenth, at the Covent Garden Theatre, where the comedy Life was playing, followed by the spectacle The Mouth of the Nile, celebrating Horatio’s victory. The theatre was packed to overflowing, and Horatio’s appearance in his box was greeted by prolonged applause. He had to take repeated bows before the curtain could go up. The cast sang “Rule Britannia”; the Reverend Edmund, Horatio’s father, burst into tears; the hero then seated himself, with Emma on his right and Fanny on his left, and the play began.
“He had the mistress on his right, you notice, his disarmed side,” I said, by way of a joke, but Miss Lily did not think it funny.
“What a fuss, all that jumping up and down and bowing,” she said. “I am sorry for Fanny, that’s all I can say. Why did he have to put her through all that?”
I made no reply to this typical piece of parochialism; I knew that if we started arguing now, we would never get the passage corrected that evening. I had ascribed to the second occasion the dresses that the ladies had worn on this one. I wanted to put it right but still keep the description, because it seemed exactly to convey their different temperaments and situations, Emma flamboyant in a blue satin gown, fashionably high-waisted to conceal her pregnancy, and a headdress with a great plume of flowers, Fanny in simple white with a violet turban and one small white feather.
After the comedy and before the spectacle, Munden came forward and sang a song specially written for Horatio:
May peace be the end of the strife we maintain,
For our freedom, our king, and our right to the main!
We’re content to shake hands; if they won’t, why, what then!
We must send out brave Nelson to thrash ’em again.
Prolonged and deafening applause. Horatio jumps up again to bow his thanks. It takes two more choruses of “Rule Britannia” to restore order for the next piece, which, being in Horatio’s honour, naturally brings the audience to its feet again with cheers and huzzas.
In short, a totally successful evening. The second occasion, which took place six days later, was less so. This was at the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane, the last occasion when Fanny and Horatio appeared together in public. The play was Pizarro, a melodrama by Kotzebue touched up by Sheridan, with the celebrated John Kemble in the part of Rolla. It had been a great hit. Pizarro hats were in fashion for a whole season. In the box with the Nelsons were Emma and Sir William, the Reverend Edmund and a certain Princess Castelcicala. The party was greeted with loud cheers from every part of the house and a spirited rendering of “Rule Britannia.” Emma had been disappointed to learn that Mrs. Siddons was not playing Elvira, but Mrs. Powell was generally accounted a success in the part. Horatio appeared to be enjoying the play; he applauded vigorously throughout the first two acts.
“How did he applaud?” Miss Lily said, and she giggled a little. “I mean, he couldn’t clap, could he?”
“I’ve no idea. Probably he cheered or shouted.” This was said stiffly; I hated his being laughed at.
“Perhaps he just jingled his medals. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that, should I? The truth is, he brings out the worst in me.”
I looked at her in absolute amazement. The man who established British supremacy at sea for a century to come, who secured for us the tea gardens of India, the sugar islands of the Caribbean, one of the principal founders of the greatest maritime empire that the world has ever known, who made this country great and died for her in the end—this man brought out the worst in Miss Lily! I couldn’t say anything, I could only stare—yes, stare. I even forgot my antipathy for the mutual regard. There were still the traces of laughter on her face.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I won’t interrupt again.”
I took a deep breath and resumed.
“At the end of Act Three, Elvira, her pleas rejected by the cold and inhuman Pizarro, breaks into her impassioned vow of vengeance. How a woman can love, Pizarro, thou hast known … How she can hate thou hast yet to learn. Elvira is alone on the stage. The audience is spellbound. Her voice rises. Thou, who on Panama’s brow … wave thy glittering sword … Come fearless man! Now meet the last and fellest peril of thy life, meet and survive—an injured woman’s fury …
“A piercing scream from the box. Lady Nelson has fainted. She has to be taken home. The curtain falls, but applause is hushed. All eyes are fixed on the box where the admiral sits immobile—”
“Do you mean to tell me,” Miss Lily said, “that he just went on sitting there when his wife—I mean, she was his wife, wasn’t she?—had just given a shriek and passed out? He had the use of his limbs, didn’t he, those that were left? I mean, he could jump up and take his bow quick enough.”
“The trouble with you, Miss Lily,” I said—she drove me to frankness—“the trouble with you is that you have no historical sense, none at all. As far as you are concerned, everything is happening in a sort of eternal present. Horatio was a great hero, a great public figure. It was an age that valued decorum. He had always to think of the figure he was cutting.”
“Well, he cut a bad one there, that’s all I’m saying.”
“There was a French word much in use at the time among the upper class—bienséance, propriety. You had always to keep up appearances.”
“That’s what I am saying—the appearance he kept up was a bad one. Besides, I think you go too far in the opposite direction.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, I dare say you have got this historical sense, but you don’t join up the past with the present. I mean, the present is where we are now, isn’t it? If you did join it up, you would see that Nelson is one of those people who think they are above everything. Whatever they do is all right because they are so popular. Like these footballers who play for England, or that punk group that smashed up the hotel, the Sex Pistols, gone without trace now thank God, or someone like Woody Allen, who goes and marries his adopted daughter when he is old enough to be her grandfather and does it in the middle of a film festival. Then he complains that the journalists won’t leave him alone. If enough people think you are great, you can do anything, but it doesn’t make you a better person.”
These comparisons were so absurd, it was all I could do to keep from laughing. “We are in the Nelson decade,” I said. “In a few years we will be commemorating the great victory of Trafalgar. The whole nation will remember Horatio with gratitude. There will probably be a two-minute silence for him at Plymouth. Do you really think that in two hundred years’ time the nation will be remembering with gratitude the goals scored by some footballer or the films of Woody Allen?”
“They’ll be cheering someone else. Some last longer than others, but it comes to the same thing in the end. Anyway, there was something wrong with him. He must have known it was humiliating for Fanny, he wasn’t stupid. Yet he insists on bringing her, he sits between them. I mean, it’s pretty obvious why she fainted, isn’t it?”
“Well, yes, she was an injured woman, but—”
“And that is what he couldn’t forgive her,” she said triumphantly. “She put him in the wrong, and he couldn’t be wrong, could he? That’s why he was so cruel to her. I mean, think what she must have felt in that theatre. What happened after she fainted?”
“She was helped out by the Hamiltons and old Mr. Nelson.”
“Did they come back?”
“No, it seems not.”
“So he sat there on his own till the end of the play? Charles, don’t you think there is something terribly wrong with that?”
“No, I don’t, as a matter of fact. You persist in looking at him as if he were any Tom, Dick, or Harry. He was the idol of the people. Do you think that the break-up of his marriage was the only thing he had on his mind? He had money problems as well. He had lived far above his means in Naples. When he came back, he had to sell half his holdings in stocks to pay off his debts. So he lost half of the interest. And he was involved in a court case with Lord St. Vincent. Do you remember who he was?”
“I’m not likely to forget him. He was the one who called for an orange in the middle of a battle, when a soldier beside him had his head shot off.”
“That’s him, yes. Two Spanish frigates had been taken the year before, and the prize money had gone to St. Vincent—fourteen thousand pounds, a lot of money in those days. Horatio thought it should have gone to him, as he was senior officer in the Mediterranean at the time—St. Vincent was in London. So you see, he had quite a lot on his mind besides Fanny.”
“We all have our troubles,” Miss Lily said. “But we still have to try to do the right thing.”
“He was in the situation, there was nothing else he could have done.”
Miss Lily looked at her watch, something she did openly only when she had decided that the session was over. “That’s what is so terrible about it,” she said. “That’s why he had to do all that fighting and killing, isn’t it? That’s how people come to get their heads blown off.”
A typical non sequitur on her part, though I lacked the energy by this time to take her up on it. When she had gone, I stayed where I was in the study, thinking about the conversation. It had followed the form of nearly all our talks about Horatio. Miss Lily generally started by joking, then worked herself into a state of indignation and ended on a softer, more sympathetic note, which contained, however, some quality of darker hinting. For my part, I always tried to be indulgent, to make allowances for her obvious inability to appreciate Horatio’s genius. My closer understanding made me—as it made him—impervious to the sort of criticisms that she brought to bear. All the same, there was something troubling to me in the note of pity she struck so frequently these days. Troubling too, even more so, was the fact that I looked forward to Tuesdays and Fridays, looked forward to breathing the air Miss Lily brought with her …
As a refuge from these thoughts, I turned back to Horatio, to the December of that same year, when he and the Hamiltons were guests of William Beckford at his country estate in Wiltshire. Strange guests, a strange host—the incongruities of this visit had intrigued me for years, ever since I first read about it. Beckford had inherited great wealth from his merchant father, something like £60 million in equivalent value today. At the age of five he had been given piano lessons by the child prodigy Mozart, aged eight. He was the author of the celebrated Vathek, classic among Gothic novels, a tale of gloomy splendour and bizarre invention. Eccentric, romantic, increasingly reclusive, he devoted most of his energies—and vast sums of money—to the construction of a Gothic “abbey” on his estate, all turrets and crenellations, with an octagonal central tower that rose eventually to a height of nearly three hundred feet.
He invited them because they were celebrities—it is difficult to see what else they could have had in common. They were escorted from Salisbury by a detachment of cavalry. As they made their way up the drive to Beckford’s mansion, a thirty-piece band played “Rule Britannia.” Beckford waited for them on the steps, accompanied by his pet monkey and a dwarf he had acquired in Portugal.
The highlight of the stay was a visit to the abbey, which took place after lunch on the twenty-third. Also in the party were Madame Banti, the opera singer; Benjamin West, the American painter; John Wolcot, a composer of satirical verses; and an architect named Wyatt, who was helping Beckford in the design of his amazing folly. Darkness was already falling when they climbed into their carriages and set off across the park through the gloomy avenues of trees. Their way was shown by lanterns hung from the branches. As they came in sight of the vast building, a hidden orchestra struck up a solemn march. The massive walls rose above them, and the great tower, still incomplete, was half lost in the darkness.
Once through the portals of the place, we walk across the hall, a room so high that the lights in the sconces do not reach the ceiling, then into the Cardinal’s Room, hung with purple damask, where hooded servants silently take our cloaks and hats. We sit down to eat at an enormous refectory table covered with golden baskets of sweetmeats and flagons of spiced wine. Solemn music sounds from the gallery. But where is Emma? She is not there beside us.
Some moments of anxiety—her presence is necessary, indispensable. But Sir William does not seem perturbed. Then, from the far end of this vast, dim room, glimmering and vague at first, dressed in a simple white robe, she advances, very slowly. She is bearing a golden urn. Urbane, knowledgeable Sir William whispers behind his hand: “Agrippina bearing the ashes of Germanicus.” We nod, as being well acquainted with this episode in Roman history.
Emma passes from pathos to pride, from sorrow to scorn, from rage to final triumph as she rouses the Romans to revenge the death of her husband. It is one of the most successful and memorable of her Attitudes. Her fellow guests, sitting in that strange room with its yellow hangings and candlelit statues and reliquaries, are moved to tears as they watch. Above them in the darkness rises the great tower. It is nearing completion—it will reach an amazing 276 feet. Seven years later it will collapse, destroying most of the building.
Scholars, poetasters, opera singers, journalists—you were the odd one out in that company, as you always were in any company on land. Sir William was a collector and bookish. His taste did not run to the Gothic, but he would have had much in common with Beckford. Emma was a natural actress and a talented singer, she won applause with her Attitudes, she sang duets with Madame Banti. But you? Victor of the Nile, saviour of your country—your brightness was eclipsed among them. Better so, better you were dimmed. As an angel, you could not have endured such company. It was much like what you had come from in Naples. A country of fiddlers and poets, whores and scoundrels. That is how you wrote of Naples on the morning after your fortieth birthday. Those were the early days, before you were caught in the toils of the city.
As always, I had returned to Naples. Whatever the point of departure, I always ended there. I had solved nothing by leaping with Horatio to a London theatre or a Gothic folly. The doubts kept pace with me, however far ahead I went in his life—and only five years remained for him now. He took the city with him wherever he went, and so did I, and so we both would until I could clear him.