The lights in the basement burned for three days before I could bring myself to go and switch them off. And then I went almost at a run and didn’t look at him, not at the bust, not at the portraits on the wall. If Miss Lily had been there, I would have asked her to do it, on some pretext or other. She would not have been afraid.
I told myself I needed more time. But the time did not come. The basement stayed locked. Those few hours at the table moving my ships about, celebrating our victory, drinking perdition to the damned French, before I felt him watching me—they were the last I could remember with any pleasure, and they left me only bad dreams. Soundlessly the Orient went up again. Fiery fragments rained through my nights. A featureless figure in a cocked hat bobbed on the tide, then dived and sported like a dolphin among the spars and corpses, still with his hat on. de Brueys sat bolt upright in his chair among the flames, the stumps of his legs sticking out before him. His face was melting in the heat … I would wake to find my whole body rigidly braced, as if in expectation of some blow.
Habit is strong, however. It can hold you against terror, at least for a while; it can run parallel, a parallel track. In that time of my nightmares I made another trip to Seldon’s in Sloane Street to buy a Staffordshire group depicting the moment of the fatal wound. No date on it, but typical of the mid-nineteenth century. Horatio has fallen, his lung pierced and his back broken. He is supported by Doctor Scott, the chaplain, and Hardy, both very pink in the face to contrast with the stricken admiral’s pallor. A curiosity, no value much, crudely made, with Horatio wearing an eyepatch, something he never did. But I had an open-fronted cabinet in the basement containing a small collection of such pieces, and I thought I would add this one to it.
Strange to relate, while I was buying this piece and all the time I was bringing it home, my purpose remained clear: I would put it with the other things in the cabinet. I was sustained by the years of happy acquisition, by the prospect of that healing peace that used to descend on me when I was down there, moving about among my exhibits.
It was only when I got home and the piece was on my study table that the first doubts came to me. However, I tried. I tried to pretend, to trick myself. I went with it in my hands to the basement stairs. I went halfway down, more than halfway. The door was there, deeply familiar, varnished brown, with the brass knob and the neat little slot of the lock waiting for my key. But already I was gulping and sweating. I began to feel that same hotness at the sides of my neck. Almost before I knew it, I was back at the top of the stairs.
I never tried again. I remember sitting for a long time, back there in my study, looking closely at pale Horatio with his eyepatch, at his florid, tight-trousered helpers. He was not frightening here, he had no gaze. But down below there, in the basement … You, who rescued me from fear!
So it was that in the days following the Battle of the Nile, I was obliged to face the fact that the basement was effectively out of bounds—that picture gallery, exhibition cabinets, ops room, were all closed to me. I was reduced to the bedroom, the armchair in the sitting room with my mother’s rug, the desk and walls of my study. Added to this was the fact that I could not get on with my book and could not believe Miss Lily would come back.
These were terrible days. I neglected to eat. I neglected to wash. I left a note for Mrs. Watson asking her not to come anymore and enclosing a cheque for a month’s money. Without her ministrations the spiders thrived, the dust collected, the sink got clogged, and little balls of fluff began to creep about in the passages. There was one hope, and it kept me moving through the hours. If I could solve the problem of Naples 1799, if I could show how wrong they were who accused you of treachery and falsehood, everything would fall into place again, everything would start functioning. You would look kindly at me; you and I would be together again as always before, the bright and the dark. Miss Lily would come back, we would work on the book, we would go for outings to the Maritime Museum at Greenwich and further afield to Burnham Thorpe, your birthplace, perhaps even someday abroad—Palermo, for example, where you and Emma became lovers. I would not worry about being among so many foreigners; she would keep everything safe in her handbag.
I tried to write my thoughts in the left-handed journal. My writing had improved by now, it was much firmer. But no thoughts of my own ever came to me when I took up the pen in my left hand. The pages were covered by your words, not mine, snippets from the letters and despatches, written at different times and in different circumstances. They came to me without any searching, any effort of recollection. Vacant, pen in hand, I would let my eyes and my mind skim over them.
It was my good fortune to have under my command some of the most experienced officers in the English Navy, whose professional skill was seconded by the undaunted courage of British sailors … I have brought home a faithful and honourable heart … I shall return—if it please God—a victor; and it shall be my study to transmit an unsullied name …
An unsullied name—that was his wish, his dearest wish. Tears came into my eyes at the simplicity of it, at my failure so far to deliver it to him. I had been clinging during these last few days to the Fatal Misunderstanding Theory, which has been advanced by various of his biographers over the years. According to this, on that morning of June 26, both parties were labouring under a misapprehension: the rebels came out believing in the treaty, Horatio believed they had understood that the treaty no longer applied. Could this be possible? The trouble with it as a theory is that only the rebels’ view of things had any circumstantial support. They had come out with their belongings packed and ready—books, linen, plate. They had embarked. Surely this meant they believed in the treaty. For what Horatio believed, there is only the evidence of his own statements, and these are sometimes confusing. His letter to Lord Spencer some fortnight later, for example: The rebels came out of their forts with this knowledge, without any honours, and the principal rebels were seized and conducted aboard the ships of the squadron.
The knowledge that they were surrendering unconditionally, you meant. But it looks from your words as if the seizure followed immediately on the surrender, whereas the rebels were allowed to embark before the ringleaders were seized. Haste? A careless oversight? How could one know? I was in chase of meanings and motives gone forever, fishing in the past with nets always too coarse for the agile fish I was after, never getting more than the flash of a tail. It seemed like an ocean to me, and I went down into it with my crude equipment day after day. Ruffo and Hamilton, the subtle priest and the wily diplomat—could they have contrived between them to keep you in ignorance? But it must have struck you as odd. You saw the rebels come out. Through your telescope, from the deck of the Vanguard, you saw them come out through the sea gates of their forts. You must have thought it was odd that people who knew they were going to be seized, put in irons, and handed over to the tender mercies of Ferdinand and Maria Carolina would embark with their luggage. The real trouble with the Fatal Misunderstanding Theory was that it made you seem incredibly dense.
Such problems did not trouble Mahan, of course. He did not see them as problems at all. His view of things was admirably clear. Ruffo was the trickster; he had taken advantage of the sailor’s simplicity. A man such as Nelson, totally honourable and honest, does not suspect duplicity in others. He had promised not to hinder the embarkation and he did not do so; but he had never wavered in his refusal to accept the treaty. He would not stand by and see those miscreants go unpunished. They were traitors, friends to the cursed French, vapid theorizers, full of airy-fairy ideas, not an ounce of true grit among them.
Irish accent, faint but attractive. A bluff and likable fellow, Mahan. He flings his long legs out before him when he sits. Nothing mean or cramped about him. Laughter lines in that weather-beaten face. A man whose conversation is frank and far-ranging, who exacts nothing from you. A man to repose in, have a drink with.
Badham comes into view, skulking behind, narrow-shouldered and dark-suited. A bitter smile of disbelief. Nelson wasn’t that stupid, nobody could be. Those conflicting signals, all the confusion—it worked in his favour. Armistice and treaty, embarking and sailing—these are words we play with when vagueness suits us. He wanted them out of the forts, he wanted them hanged, let them think what they liked. Badham’s glasses shine, he is wearing a wing collar, he raises one evil, black-gloved hand. I wait for Mahan to get up and give him a straight right to the jaw, but he seems not to have heard. If I could get round to the other side, get within range of that narrow skull … I found myself looking round the room for a weapon. It was at that moment of desperate impulse that the idea came, a kind of call. And it was associated from the first with the name of a man I had never met but whose five-year-old notepaper I still had, a man named E. L. Sims, a resident of Naples.
It was appalling, but it was undeniable. There was nothing more that I could do here. If I wanted to keep Horatio with me, I would have to go in person to that city. Naples must contain him still, must contain the truth of those June days. The rooms he ate in, slept in, the streets and buildings he knew—they were still there. Take a trip, Miss Lily had said—advice I had never intended to act on. Dread mounted within me. I was going to act on it now.