The following Sunday was the day of the Portsmouth trip, a prospect which had been troubling me intermittently ever since Miss Lily and I had made the arrangement several weeks before. The whole thing had been complicated further by the inclusion of this son of hers, Bobby, whose existence I had not suspected when I first suggested the outing.
As I got ready that morning, the same feeling descended on me that used to descend when I was returning to school at the close of the holidays. I had a special style of dressing then. Everything had to be done in a certain way so as to compensate for loneliness, disarm threats, make sure things would be all right. The basic principle was to do everything contrary to habit—right sock first, left sleeve first, shoelaces left over right. The more custom could be violated, the safer you would be. Sometimes in the years since then I had been able to muffle my fears and doubts in this way. I did it again now, socks before trousers, trousers before shirt, left hand first into the shirtsleeve.
I was there ten minutes early under the big clock at Waterloo Station. Exactly at eleven I saw them coming towards me, Miss Lily in a dark brown beret and a long suede coat, the boy in a padded anorak with various badges stitched to it and a red cap with a long peak. She smiled when she saw me, as if in relief. She looked quite unfamiliar, like a stranger at first, and I realized after a moment that this was because I had never seen her out of doors before—my top step could hardly be called out of doors. This was the world where people caught trains, had drinks together, looked in shop windows.
“This is Bobby,” she said. “Bobby, this is Mr. Cleasby.”
“Charles,” I said.
He was a pale boy, quite tall, with a bony face. He had his mother’s wide mouth and a gaze just like hers, very clear and steady, but the eyes were lighter, rather an unusual colour, somewhere between green and hazel.
“I am glad you were able to come along,” I said. I smiled at him. I was managing this meeting really rather well.
“But you are not wearing a coat,” Miss Lily said to me, a remark that certainly belonged to the new, outside person she was now rather than to Avon Secretarial Services. “Not so much as a scarf,” she added in accents of dismay.
“I don’t wear scarves, I don’t possess one,” I said, answering the smaller matter first. It was true that I had omitted to bring a coat with me, but I was wearing a woollen pullover and a tweed jacket and flannel trousers. And the morning had seemed mild enough. “I am quite all right as I am,” I said.
Miss Lily seemed to doubt this—there was a tendency to a pursing of the lips. “You really don’t take enough care of yourself. It might be chilly there, beside the sea. I mean, it’s only April.”
I could not help feeling the irony of it. Horatio walked the decks in all weathers, enduring everything that sky and sea could visit upon him, from the tropics to the North Pole, and here were we, discussing the perils of an April day in Portsmouth. I made a sort of face at Bobby. “Does your mother go on about scarfs to you too?”
“She does, yeah. Coats and hats as well. She feels cold, so she thinks everyone else does.”
He spoke as if he were my age, or I were his.
“Don’t you be cheeky,” Miss Lily said. She smiled at him and he smiled back, and I saw that these were two people who got on well together.
“Well, we are made of sterner stuff, aren’t we?” I said, man to man. I saw now that he was wearing a scarf, a blue and white one, tucked inside the collar of his anorak.
While I was waiting to get the tickets, I fell to wondering what it really signified, that expression—to take care of yourself. Of course Miss Lily had meant nourishing food and wrapping yourself up. But that is not the self, only the body. Harm is done to the self before we have a say in it; after that the choices are limited. It was in order to help me take care of myself that poor Penhas steered me back to Horatio.
When I turned back to them, I seemed to notice Miss Lily all over again. In that great glass hangar of a station, with its strange, bleak plenitude of light and strains of vaguely martial music, she looked bright-eyed and ready for anything in her jaunty beret. The other people I saw moving through those light-filled spaces seemed faint and somehow glaucous, leached of colour, but she was deepened. Bobby stood close beside her, solemn and still. For some reason he had turned his cap back to front—the long peak lay over the back of his neck. His eyes were on a dishevelled pigeon that had found its way in and was strutting about among the feet of passers-by.
Nothing much was said in the train. There were others in our compartment, and the presence of strangers imposed a constraint on us, who were not much more than strangers ourselves. She was sitting opposite, and sometimes our eyes met. Bobby fished out a folded magazine from his anorak pocket. It had a picture of a dinosaur on the outside and seemed to be mostly pictures inside too. We got sandwiches and tea and a Coke for Bobby from a trolley that passed down the corridor.
Portsmouth was distinctly chilly. A cold wind straight from the sea met us as we stepped from the station, striking through the poor defences of my jacket and pullover. My eyes watered. Naturally I denied any slightest discomfort when Miss Lily—inevitably—remarked on this nasty wind and asked me if I didn’t feel perished. No, no, very bracing, very refreshing. It got even colder as we approached the harbour. Miss Lily tucked her chin into the collar of her coat; Bobby took some quick steps forward and then back, as if casting for a scent. He was still wearing his cap the wrong way round.
It is not possible to go aboard HMS Victory and wander about as and when you want; you have to go in a group with a guide, and these tours take place at regular times through the day. We had an hour to wait before the next one, and I suggested a visit to the Naval Museum on the quayside. This houses the whole splendid story of our wars at sea, from the timbers of Henry V’s flagship, the Grace Dieu, to maps of naval operations in the Gulf War. But in view of the limited time, we naturally made for the Nelson Gallery.
It was warmer in here, but the sea light followed us, striking through the walls of glass that ran round the gallery on three sides—the same desolate light he must have seen on so many days, the light that lay around him as he waited that March day at Chatham to join his first ship. We mounted to the upper gallery, where the figureheads and pendants and cannon are displayed. I pointed out the ensigns and flags hanging there and explained to Miss Lily and Bobby what they stood for, whom they had belonged to. They always stirred my blood and quickened my imagination, not these naval standards only but all flags, all insignia of battle, the tattered banners of obscure regiments collecting dust in country churches, the monuments to the fallen in quiet squares, with their scrolled lists of the dead, the poignancy of these symbols wreathed in sacrifice and mourning.
Overhead and on the walls all round, the emblems hung motionless. I pointed out the ensigns on their poles, the white ones and the red, some with the Union Jack set in the upper left-hand corner, some without. “Do you know why that is?” I asked Bobby. He shook his head. His eyes seemed dazed, perhaps from the flooding of light through the huge plates of glass that surrounded us. “They started to include the Union Jack after 1707,” I said. “That was the date of union with Scotland.”
I felt cheerful and happy explaining these things. The gallery was empty; we had it for the moment to ourselves. The things that had been plaguing me, my restlessness and foreboding, my failure so far to extricate him, haul him free from the swamps of Naples 1799, all this receded and I felt at peace. Moreover, the light had changed; a thin sunshine had struck through the cloud and through our glass walls, and it fell here and there among the objects on show. Faint and pallid in itself, it brought brilliance to the painted figureheads, the pitted snouts of the cannon, the pink-faced uniformed effigies lining the gallery. I pointed out the broad pennant Horatio would have flown, as commander of a squadron, when he went into action at Cape St. Vincent, and the two flags, one below the other, that made up his favourite signal, the first in vertical stripes of red, white, and blue, the second a blue cross on a white background: Engage the enemy more closely.
“He was a great believer in close engagement.” I looked at Miss Lily as I said this, wanting her to share my feeling for the impetuous genius of Horatio, for the scenes of heroism that had taken place beneath these vivid emblems. However, she seemed no more than politely interested.
It was when I glanced at Bobby that I saw where my true audience was. He was chewing some substance now, very slowly. There was no mistaking his interest in these flags. In that pale face of his, with its thin ridges of bone at the temples and cheeks, the greenish eyes were serious and intent. “How close could they get?”
“They could still go on firing broadsides when they were practically touching.”
“But it is better to avoid fighting altogether,” Miss Lily said. “Things can generally be settled by a bit of common sense, and nobody gets hurt.”
“We couldn’t have settled Napoleon’s hash by any amount of common sense.”
“There’s always somebody’s hash to settle, isn’t there? That’s one thing that never changes. Might be the French, might be the man next door. It’s the Bedouin syndrome.”
“What on earth is that?”
“Me against my brother, me and my brother against our cousin, my family against the rest of the tribe, my tribe against everyone who isn’t Bedouin. That sums it all up for me, all these flags and things.”
“Common sense is the virtue of the common man,” I said, “and that is one thing Horatio Nelson wasn’t.” I was rather vexed with Miss Lily for these inappropriate remarks of hers among the emblems and engines of battle. “Where did you pick up this Bedouin business?” I asked her.
“Heard it on the radio. Years ago now.” She was looking from Bobby to me with the expression of mild obstinacy that characterized her. “It stayed in my mind,” she said. “Because it’s true, that’s why.”
“We had a different style of fighting,” I said to Bobby. “The French gunners preferred to fight at long distance, cutting away our masts and rigging and so disabling our ships. Our tactic was always to get in close, taking the enemy’s fire at first, until we were near enough to do massive damage. Lay a Frenchman close enough and you will always beat him. One of our favourite sayings. And by God, it is true. I got that saying from Locker.”
Bobby was still chewing, even more slowly now. “Who is Locker?”
I looked, smiling, at Miss Lily, expecting her to answer. But she said nothing at all. Her face wore a slight frown, as if she were puzzled about something. This silence on her part struck me as distinctly odd. She must know who Locker was; I had referred to him several times in the earlier sections of my book. At this moment of uncertainty, I was again aware of the sunlight but now as a source of confusion; my mind wavered among real and fabricated things, the staring figureheads, the stiff models of midshipmen and marines, the woman and boy before me. I knew I had to be careful how I answered. “Horatio’s friend and mentor,” I said. “He was captain of the frigate Lowestoffe, thirty-two guns, which Horatio joined in April ’77 as an eighteen-year-old lieutenant. Locker was forty-six, and they became lifelong friends. Horatio had a great gift for friendship.” I was aware of the difference as I said this; I had no friends at all. But of course it was the price one paid for being on the shadow side.
The time for our visit to the Victory was drawing near. We left the museum, walked back along the quay, and joined the party waiting to go aboard, about a dozen people loosely grouped in the shadow of the mighty hull. No sign of a guide as yet.
She towered above us, fresh-painted in black and pale gold, stripped of sail but fully rigged, the Union Jack at her bow, the white ensign at her stern. I had seen her a number of times over the years, but the sight thrilled me again now: the exact intervals of her gunports, the scarlet and gilt of her figurehead, the fretted window frames of the captain’s cabin—his, Horatio’s, cabin. In this splendid ship the nation honours the time of her greatness, now gone forever, when she was mistress of the seas; honours too her greatest hero, a man fashioned for heroism just as this great wooden ship with its tiers of guns was fashioned for destruction. Instruments both … They cut pieces off him, didn’t they? Miss Lily’s question came at me again, uninvited, deeply unwelcome. I was turning to her, perhaps with some vague idea of expunging the offence by the sight of the offender, when the guide appeared at the top of the companion-ladder—he had been lurking within all this time—and beckoned us to come up, recommending caution as he did so.
A motley crew we clearly were, now that we converged on the ladder and I was able to take more note. Two couples who looked married; a younger couple who might or might not have been; two stout elderly ladies with identical-looking grey perms in company with a younger, talkative man, perhaps a son or nephew; a woman, short and whiskery, with notebook and pencil at the ready; and a silent tall man on his own. In anoraks and overcoats and hats and scarfs they had come together on this cold day to pay their respects to Horatio. However, we were unfortunate in the constitution of this group; I sensed it from the start.
“Up you go,” the son or nephew said in jovial tones to the ladies he was escorting. He glanced behind and gave the rest of us a wink. I hate these self-appointed jokers and professional jolly chaps. Urged on by him, the unwieldy permed ladies started up the ladder. They mounted with excruciating slowness, making the rest of us wait. At the top, in the confined space of the upper gundeck, we reassembled in a ring round our guide. Some members of the group made exaggerated sounds of exertion, especially one of the older couples, who had already been infected by the joker. “Mind your head, dear,” the husband said as we ducked under the beams. “You never know when you might need it.” It is always the case; you start off with one fool, then the spirit of emulation sets in and you end up with several.
The guide was a sandy-haired, square-faced man in a buttoned-up double-breasted blazer with coronet and shield stitched in blue and red on his breast pocket. “Well, here we are on HMS Victory, Lord Nelson’s flagship,” he said. “I am intending to conduct the tour in English, if that is okay with everyone.”
“We was sort of hoping you would do it in French,” one of the perms said. Everyone laughed at this except me and serious Bobby and the lady with the notebook. Miss Lily laughed with the others, and I was sorry to see this.
This laughter, in which she shared, was the real beginning of my suffering that day, because the guide too, as we descended to the bowels of the ship from deck to deck, stooping lower and lower as headroom diminished—he too turned out to be a comedian, delivering his commentary in a stale mix of joke and drama, no doubt derived from a hundred past tours. The joking was blasphemy, the drama was superfluous. On this ship where Horatio fought his last battle and took his last breath, all the imagination needs is the stimulus of facts.
In regard to these, the guide was competent but not wholly reliable. He said Horatio was “just turned twelve” when he joined the Raisonnable as midshipman, whereas in fact he was twelve years and three months when he was entered on the muster-roll and nearly twelve and a half when he actually joined the ship. Then he told us that the firing rate on board the Victory was a shot a minute, whereas in fact our gun crews at their best could deliver a broadside every seventy-five seconds, the French needing almost twice as long—a crucial element in the ultimate victory.
Nor did he succeed very well in conveying to his audience, accustomed to central heating and refrigerated food and the privacy of bathrooms, the nature of daily life on board a ship like this, the suffocating promiscuity of the lower gundeck, where several hundred men, among them a good number of disturbed or violent persons, lived in a proximity from which there was no escape, sleeping in hammocks slung from the beams and eating at mess tables put up between the guns. At sea, with the gunports closed, it would be dark and hot, the air would be thick with the stench of unwashed humanity. And the latrines, only six of them, out in the open, in the bows, six “seats of ease” for upwards of five hundred men …
In spite of the guide’s shortcomings, I did nothing to interrupt him but now and again shook my head at Miss Lily. At one point, my forbearance growing thin, I drew her and Bobby a little apart, in a darker space between the guns, and began to mutter some of the essential facts. But Miss Lily was only half listening to me; she was trying at the same time to hear what the guide was saying. He was telling them about the procedure for burial at sea.
“They put two cannonballs at the foot to weigh the body down. Then the tailor is brought in and he stitches the corpse into the hammock, beginning with the feet. When he gets to the face—”
“Excuse me, how many guns were there on the ship?” This was the lady with the notebook; she was in a world of her own. It was the third time she had interrupted the guide with a question, severely factual, quite unrelated to the discourse of the moment and always timed to ruin some high point in the narrative.
“One hundred and four, madam. The Victory was a first-rate, and a first-rate ship of the line had to have a hundred guns as minimum.”
She wrote this down, peering at her notebook in the light from the open gunport, just as she had peered a short while previously when writing down the cost of the ship’s construction, £63,000 in the money of the time, about £50 million today. What could she want with this information? She wore thick glasses, and there was a whiskery glint about her jaws. It was pathetic, really.
I began my muttering again, trying to secure Miss Lily’s interest, divert her attention from the guide. “That piece of rope there, you see it is blackened at one end—it has been dipped in tar in order to harden it.”
“Why did they do that?” Bobby asked. In the half-light I saw his eyes fixed on me. Miss Lily had moved away. She was listening to the guide, who was still rambling on about sea burial.
“When he gets level with the nose, he puts his needle through it as a final test of life before stitching the canvas over the face. If the face twitches or the eyes water … I can give you a practical demonstration if you like. The hammock is here before us. I’ll be the tailor. Any volunteers?”
Laughter. Again I see Miss Lily laughing among the others. She belongs in the crowd …
The laughter is cut short by the lady with the notebook, who this time performs a service. “How much canvas was used in the sails?”
“Madam, roughly four acres of canvas were needed to make the Victory’s sails.”
General expressions of astonishment. Bobby was still standing close, and he was looking at me, not the guide. On an impulse hardly understood at the time, I drew him farther from the group, away from the light of the gunport. I began in low tones to tell him about the loading procedure, illustrating with gestures in the dimness the action of pushing a charge into the bore, then ramming it home, then jabbing a stiff wire down the vent to pierce the flannel cartridge before priming and firing.
It was strange—I forgot myself completely, acting this out for Bobby. I explained, in no more than a murmur, the mechanism of the flintlock, the spark that ignited the priming.
“Flintlock.” He lingered on the word. I saw the gleam of his eyes in the dimness. He was still wearing his cap back to front in that ridiculous fashion. “Did the flint always make a spark? What happened if the flint didn’t make the spark?”
“They used a piece of hemp as a match. There is a piece of it over here.”
We moved a little farther away. We were standing close together, speaking very quietly so as not to disturb the others. His face was turned up to me, very pale, glimmering slightly. He was looking towards the source of light, the open gunport and the thirty-two-pounder cannon within it, resting massively there on its blocked wheels. It suddenly seemed to me that I knew Bobby’s face from somewhere long ago; it was the face of someone I had once known well. I felt a certain threat to my balance as I stood there on that motionless deck, then something more, a feeling of urgency, an impulse to raise my voice, speak a loud warning. I had to go on talking, I could not look away from his face.
“This is a kind of shrine now. You must try to picture it as it was when the ship was in action—the heat and the din, the deck heaving, the guns roaring, the crews barefoot so as not to slip in the blood, the powder monkeys running up with cartridges from the magazines.”
“They were boys, weren’t they?”
“Boys like you. Younger than you. They had to be small and light to get up and down the ladders quickly. Men and boys alike wore bands around their heads to keep the sweat—”
“Protect their ears.”
“What?”
“I put it in my project. The teacher told us. They wore the bands over their ears instead of earplugs.”
“Quite right, your teacher is quite right. Not that cotton headbands were much good—the men would bleed from the ears after the battle, quite copiously, yes, gushes of blood, did your teacher tell you that? No? Well, you can put something in your project that he doesn’t know or at any rate doesn’t say.”
“He says our sailors were the best in the world and we had better officers.”
I could not remember when I had last looked into another human face for as long as I had now looked into this boy’s. Again I felt the impulse of warning; again I blunted it, held it off with speech, but in a voice not like my own.
“And then there are the types of shot—cannonballs for damage to the body of the ship, chains to cut through the rigging, grapeshot for killing the crews …”
I could feel my larynx working and was aware of my mouth stretching and contracting, but it was as if I were listening to someone else on a bad line. Then I suppose I stopped talking altogether; there was a sort of resonant hush, faint and steady, like a distant sea. Through this the guide’s voice came, from somewhere behind me. I wrenched my gaze from the boy’s face, looked again at the tarred rope’s end, the hemp match, the grapeshot in cloth bags, strangely like testicles, lying on their racks behind the thrusting black muzzle of the cannon: things placed here for display, for devotion. It was true what in my agitation I had said to Bobby. This was a shrine, a memorial to forms of warfare long superseded. Here, in the still heart of the ship, one knew it. The Victory, so painted and burnished, so scrupulously maintained, was dead.
“Three tons of metal on wheels,” the guide said behind me. “Imagine the recoil of it, imagine what happened to the men in its way if once it got free.”
How much time had passed in this talk with Bobby I had no definite idea; not very much, I suppose. No-one paid any attention to us when we moved back to rejoin the group. Miss Lily glanced at us and smiled. After some minutes more we went down to the cockpit in the orlop, where the dying Horatio was carried. And now at last there was unity among us and harmony of feeling, an absence of that coarse human propensity to belittle things, bring them down to our own mediocre level. No-one was so grossly insensitive as to make jokes down here, not even that clown of a nephew or son.
He was carried down to die among the dying. Space was made for him in a narrow corner. The pallet he died on is still there, and a low lamp is kept burning. He received his wound while the issue was still in doubt, but he was alive when they came to him with the news of the victory, the greatest British naval victory in history, the annihilation of the enemy that he had hoped for, prayed for. Some of the words of that last prayer he wrote before the battle ran through my mind: May the great God, whom I worship, grant to my country and for the benefit of Europe in general a great and glorious victory …
The prayer was answered. The Franco-Spanish fleet was destroyed, their dead and wounded five times ours—the French lost twice as many men by drowning alone as we lost in the whole action. A triumph to ease the pains of his wound, the approach of death. Thank God I have done my duty. As we stood there in silence, the spirit of devotion rose in me, as it always had in this place, finally setting to rest the disturbance I had felt earlier, whispering to Bobby on the dark gundeck. I knew in that moment that I had been foolish and perverse to think this great ship was dead. Our small group, standing in awkward silence at the place where the hero died, was part of a vast annual pilgrimage. Millions of people had stood where we were standing in this obscure corner of the ship, far below the water line. Millions … That was hardly to be called a death. He had not died, he never will, not while our country’s great past is still remembered.
The tour finished on the quarterdeck, at the point where he received his wound. How vast the world seemed after the closeness and darkness belowdecks, how vast it must have seemed to them on that morning of Trafalgar as they prepared for battle. We stood round the polished brass plaque flush with the deck, marking his exact position when the ball struck him.
“Captain Hardy was walking with him,” the guide said. “Hardy was a big man, a good foot taller than Nelson. More of a target, you might say. It’s the luck of the draw, isn’t it? They were walking side by side here on the quarterdeck. Ten paces forward, ten paces back.”
He took a few stiff paces to dramatize the event.
“They turned here, at the ladderway. Then they started out towards the stern …”
With a sudden gesture he opened the palm of his right hand and showed us what he had been holding there: a lead ball, looking too small to do much harm, like a small marble that a child might play with.
“The admiral was struck by one of these.”
I thought this was a pretty cheap piece of showmanship, but there was no doubt it impressed the others, except the woman with the notebook, who was, as I have said, in a world of her own and about to prove it yet again. My feeling of hostility towards the guide returned when I saw them riveted on him, Miss Lily included. Paunchy, undistinguished-looking, not totally reliable as to the facts, he yet could command attention, hold the stage. He had seduced her away from me. But not Bobby …
“Entered by the left shoulder,” the guide said. He was still displaying the ball in the palm of his hand. “Passed through one lung and lodged in—”
“Excuse me,” the woman with the notebook said. “How much rope went into the rigging?”
A muttered exclamation from someone, I think the tall, lonely man, at this crassly inopportune question. The guide looked a bit glassy, as if he had taken a punch. However, he behaved well, I had to admit it. His big moment had been ruined, but he showed no more than a laborious politeness.
“Twenty-seven miles of rigging, madam, on HMS Victory. It lodged in the admiral’s spine.”
On this anticlimactic note and with a chorus of thank-yous, the guided tour came to an end. I remember little more about the day. Bobby wanted a hamburger, so we went to a McDonald’s and all had one. I enjoyed mine, but I did not say much. I felt ill at ease and overexposed among the shiny surfaces and bright colours. Miss Lily was chatty—it seemed she had enjoyed herself. But it was the other members of the group she talked mainly about, not Horatio; she had noticed all sorts of things about them that had quite escaped me, and formed opinions as to their occupations, material condition in life, character, and degree of personal fulfilment. Bobby, I remember, ate with gusto, pale face intent over his plate, cap still back to front.
We had the compartment to ourselves during the train journey home. Miss Lily was still quite talkative. She had been affected by the drama of Horatio’s last moments, but it was not so much the heroic sacrifice that moved her as the sad cutting short of a promising love.
“They could have had another twenty years together,” she said. “He would have retired—they had already bought a house in the country. I haven’t all that much time for Emma Hamilton, I mean she wasn’t my sort, too much of a show-off. But think what she must have felt when the news came. She had no friends in England, she had no secure income, she had a young child to bring up on her own.”
Her mouth had thinned with feeling as she spoke. I could see that she was acknowledging something she felt she shared with Emma. I personally felt the situations to be distinctly different, but this was not the moment to say so, not with Bobby sitting there.
“If they had really thought so much of him, they would have carried out his last wishes for her,” Miss Lily said. “I read all about it before we came here to Portsmouth. One of the last things he said was that he left Lady Hamilton and their daughter as a legacy to his country. He said it with his dying breath. It was the only thing he asked them for. And what did they do? They left her to die abroad, completely penniless.”
“She was a very extravagant woman,” I said. “Her life in Naples hadn’t exactly taught her restraint. She was addicted to gambling, and in her later years she had what we would now call a drink problem.”
“And so?” She had flushed a little and was looking at me with that particular sort of steadiness that I recognized as the prelude to indignation.
“Well,” I said, “she was a difficult woman to help.”
“Charles, don’t mind me saying this, but you can be really dodgy sometimes when it comes to discussing things. What’s the point of saying she was difficult to help when you know perfectly well that they didn’t even try to help her? It was his dearest wish, and they just let her go to the dogs and the child with her. They were ready to give him a big funeral and put up statues to him but not to recognize the woman he loved, the mother of his child. It was the same thing when he was dead as when he was alive. They went on cutting pieces off him. Don’t you think there’s something terribly wrong with that?”
Asking me to share a sense of wrongness was one of Miss Lily’s favorite ploys in argument, and I generally resisted on grounds of principle. But here, in the enclosed space of the compartment, with her earnest face so close before me, it was more than usually difficult. She had made progress in debate in these months, I had to admit that; she had become formidable.
“But really, don’t you think so?” she said now. “They didn’t want to honour him as a man, that’s all I am saying. I mean, they didn’t even let her attend his funeral, did they?”
It was Bobby who saved the day for me, relieved me from the need to answer, showing again that reverence for facts as opposed to sentiments that I had noticed in him earlier. “What did they do with him?” he asked.
“Do with him?”
“How did they get him back? I mean, the Victory took a long time to get back home, didn’t she? Did they put him in a coffin?”
“They had to preserve the body,” I said. “They stripped him and put him in spirits.”
“What spirits?”
“Brandy, I think it was.”
I saw that a smile had appeared on Miss Lily’s face, the curving smile I liked, with her mouth just sufficiently open to show the white edges of her teeth. Her indignation was forgotten.
“Cognac,” she said. “Must have been French. There you are now, that’s what you call a turn-up for the books. He hated the French so much and he was brought home pickled in a barrel of French brandy.”
Bobby’s stare, its solemn character unaffected by his mother’s levity, came back into my mind that night, when I was alone again at home. He was a boy for facts. One fact that the notebook woman had not elicited and the guide had forgotten to tell us, to my mind the most staggering of all, was that more than two thousand oak trees had gone into the making of the Victory’s hull; she was a floating forest. On that scale, the British fleet at the battle of Trafalgar must have represented something like fifty thousand oaks, roughly two million years of oak tree life. Bobby was twelve; his sense of scale and number would be developed enough. I resolved to impart these facts to him when I saw him again so that he could incorporate them in his project.
This resolution made me think of his face and particularly his eyes, his awe in that dim place, my recognition of him as someone I had known, and that strange paralysis of faculties that had descended on me. I had wanted the world to continue, I had wanted to shout a warning. But the memory of this was easy and calm now, it was like recalling an anecdote. Miss Lily had glanced at us when we rejoined the group, with an expression difficult to read—approval, perhaps; two men getting together. Perhaps something else altogether.
The faces, mother’s and son’s, thinned away and I was left with a memory of that drab and disparate group standing round the memorial plaque. They saw Horatio as a being expressing their own humanity and aspirations. Totally wrong, of course. He was not an ordinary man translated into greatness by particular circumstances; he was a bright angel. He is unaccountable, unjudgeable by the standards of those who gather at the place of his death—except for me, except for me.
At 1:25 P.M. on October 21, 1805, a French sharpshooter perched aloft in the topmast of the Redoubtable drew a bead on your starred and medalled breast. The ball struck you as you were about to take your third step from the companion-ladder towards the stern. It pierced your lung and broke your back, and you fell silently to the deck. At that precise moment, all around you on the upper deck and on the gundecks below, men were screaming and dying. Only half an hour before, at almost exactly the same point, your secretary, John Scott, had been cut in two by a round shot. But it is your death that we commemorate; there is only one plaque. Many were crucified, but there is only one cross.