I slept fitfully but better than usual. I had a strange dream, different from any I could remember. I was walking on smooth sand, gleaming wet, giving slightly to the weight. I was looking for something, stones of some kind that might be concealed in the sand, but I found nothing. The sand became more shining and softer; my feet made oily swirls in it, like oil spreading on a wet film. A white goat approached me, very shyly. I tried to encourage the goat to come nearer, and it did so, finally. I put my hand out to caress the goat but found that it had turned so that its rear was towards me. I felt my hand caught in a warm dry clamp. I thought at first it was the goat’s prehensile anus but saw after a moment that he had a very long tail with a thick, fleshy bump at the end like a bullrush and this contained a kind of mouth, in which my hand was imprisoned. For some moments I tried to withdraw it, not violently but discreetly. I felt some disgust, some fear, but mainly a desire that no-one should witness my humiliating predicament. No-one did. Still politely tugging, I rose to wakefulness in the pale light of early morning. Slowly the sense of mystery and beauty and repugnance caused by this dream faded away, to be replaced by an uneasy question: why was there no reference to Palazzo Sessa in my guidebook, otherwise so packed with information? Why was it not marked on any of the maps?
Even later, setting forth, fortified by coffee and various pastries, the question still exercised me. I knew the way, of course. I had traced it in imagination a hundred times: your triumphant coach ride up from the waterfront, after the salutes of the guns; the swooning of Emma; the welcoming speech of King Ferdinand, sweating in his velvet suit.
Every detail of my walk that day has stayed with me. The glittering sweep of the bay, Vesuvius mild-looking in the early sunshine, the cindery tracks of its eruptions clearly visible, a group of policemen with gleaming revolver-holsters laughing and joking together at a streetcorner. Across the broad Via Marina, up to Largo di Castello, then steeply up again into the side of the Pizzofalcone hill. I was out of condition and had to take it slowly. The streets were narrow, paved with dark stone, the houses tall and close together. Full daylight had not arrived here yet; some residue of darkness still grained the air between the houses. There was a short alley ending in a cobbled yard with on one side a small church and on the other a vaulted passage opening onto the courtyard of the palazzo.
There it stood before me, Palazzo Sessa, official residence of the British ambassador, rented by him from the Marchese di Sessa for £150 a year, a high rent for the time; before that, home to monastic orders for something like seven centuries. Here Emma arrived on her twenty-first birthday, in the full flower of her beauty, cast off by Sir William’s nephew, though not yet knowing it, soon to be the mistress, then the wife, of the elderly uncle. Here exhausted Horatio was brought after his great victory at the Nile, to be tended by Emma, to lie and watch her as she moved about the room, her full figure under the loose drapes. Here began their celebrated love.
I scanned the façade, every inch of it. I looked carefully at the arched entranceway. It was incredible: there was nothing whatever to record or commemorate the fact that the greatest hero in our national history had spent months of his life here at a time of crucial importance, when the fate of the city was hanging in the balance. Standing there on the dark cobbles of the courtyard, I looked up to the first floor, where your room was. A line of washing obscured the tall windows. Another went across from one side of the courtyard to the other. Somewhere inside the place a baby was crying with a blind, persistent woe, hardly pausing for breath. Across from me, at the foot of the stone steps that you must have mounted to reach your apartment, two women were standing together. They had been talking but fell silent when I appeared and looked closely at me. The place was a tenement, in multiple occupation. There was no way it could be entered, no way of finding that room of your fever and dawning desire, the room I had shared with you, as I had shared thoughts of Emma’s body. With a sensation of bewilderment, I raised my head to the clear blue of the day above me, clouds moving slowly in it, swifts wheeling high up. There was a sudden silence, or so it seemed. I thought I could hear the thin shrieks of the swifts, distant as they were, some message contained in them important for me to know. But it was the sound of mourning, it fell on my upturned face, it touched my face like rain. His words printed on my mind, his courage that supplied my lack … The sky was blank, the birds were silent. I became aware again of the wailing baby, the glances of the women, the lines of washing. From somewhere behind me came music from a radio, thin notes, slightly distorted.
I turned away, went back through the vaulted passageway, past the church, back down towards the water. Everything I looked at seemed improbable, insubstantial. You saved their Bourbon majesties, you delivered Naples from the cursed French … Perhaps in the two forts where the Jacobins held out against you I might discover something that would save the day.
Castel Nuovo was the nearer, just across from the Royal Palace, on the seaward side. It took me not quite half an hour to walk there. Round, crenellated towers in dark stone, an incongruous triumphal arch in white marble, celebrating the taking of the city by Alfonso I of Aragon. I got my ticket from the small office adjoining the courtyard. Somewhere here, in a corner, royalist hostages were shot by the rebels, panicking as their time ran out. Perhaps over against the steps the killing was done, where now a group of schoolchildren clustered and chatted. Or against the wall, below the chapel—mass shootings generally seemed to take place up against something. Was this the deed of blood that determined you to deal harshly with the rebels, to regard them as beyond the pale, people to whom promises need not be kept? You see, I was still trying to find reasons. But the outrage was small compared to what the royalist mob was doing in the streets of the city. No, you were against them from the start, you loathed their libertarian rhetoric, all that claptrap, that parroting of the bombastic, bloody French.
It was a question of getting up to the top of the castle, up to the ramparts, so I could look down over the sea gates that the rebels came out of, see the view towards Sorrento as they must have seen it on that last day of their liberty, as they were embarked on the transports that became their floating prisons.
A flight of stone steps led upwards. I mounted quickly, a sort of excitement possessing me, a sense of possible revelation up there on the heights. I would see where the rebels came out along the mole; I would see them, by a stretch of imagination, as he would have seen them, waiting in his anchored flagship out in the bay, telescope to his eye, noting with approval that they were not being accorded honours of war. Perhaps in this violation of the parallels, in this splicing of viewpoints, some essential clue might be vouchsafed me …
But on the broad stone landing of the second floor my way was barred by two attendants, who pressed with their palms at the air between us and uttered words I did not understand. I heard the slam of heavy doors closing. It seemed I was required to go down to the courtyard again. What had happened? It couldn’t be closing time, it wasn’t eleven yet. The attendants were shouting among themselves. A different sort of shouting came from the street outside, a heavy, reiterated chant. And from some invisible source high above, other voices, thinned by distance.
The man behind the counter at the ticket office knew some English. Things were finally explained to me. A mass demonstration by the unemployed of Naples was going on outside; some of the demonstrators had infiltrated the fort, occupied the battlements. Theirs were the voices I had heard shouting down. They were armed with clubs, the man said—he gestured with his hands to show the formidable nature of these. His face took on a look of painful sincerity. They were very bad people, he said, not genuine unemployed at all. There was fear of some violent assault on the picture gallery, the frescoes in the chapel. Everything had to be locked and barred.
There didn’t seem much point in hanging about waiting. It might take a long time to expel these intruders. I thought it likely that the riot police would have to be brought in. I made for the exit gates but found these barred too. Two attendants in hot blue suits, one on either side. Please open this gate. I made gestures of unbarring and opening. The attendants shook their heads, miming in their turn: more people with clubs just outside, waiting for a chance to break in. How long will this go on? Tapping my watch, raising my eyebrows. Shrugs all round; nobody knew. I was caught there, trapped between occupied battlements and barred gates.
It was hot, even in the shade of the courtyard wall. The remote harangues from the men on the battlements still came floating down. Straining my eyes against the glare, I made out two gesturing figures. One of them raised and waved what looked like a staff or short pole, thicker at one end than on the other. Besiegers or besieged? Beyond them, the sky was glazed white, painful to look at. A moment of giddiness came to me and I felt in danger of falling. I stepped back, groped for the support of the wall, remembering as my vision cleared how Miss Lily had supported me the evening I had staggered, remembering the warmth of her hand under my arm.
There were other visitors, drifting round the courtyard or standing in the ticket office. A gaunt American couple; an Italian family, man and wife and two small, fractious girls; a mixed group of young people, probably students. Hostages all, fellow victims of circumstance, we avoided one another’s eyes. After something more than an hour the gate was unbarred, we were allowed to leave. There were no demonstrators in the street outside, but a number of helmeted policemen waited there, standing in silent groups near the vans that had brought them.
It was quarter past twelve when I emerged. The sun swooped down as if it had been waiting in ambush just for me. Nothing looked the same. The street seemed wider than before, it was a river flowing with cars; looking across it was like straining to see a far shore. It was too far, there was too much glare. I felt the eyes of the police on me.
Lunchtime was approaching, but I felt no smallest desire to eat. I set off walking, keeping the water on my right, stopping every now and again to consult my map. It took me nearly forty minutes to get within sight of the Carmine church. I had to cross the road—a hazardous business, this, as there were side lanes as well as the main ones and no-one took any notice of the traffic lights. I had to make a dash and only narrowly avoided being run over. This made my temples throb and I felt the beginning of a headache, a dull, persistent pain along the ridges of the brows. But it was cool and dim inside the church, all a harmony of variously coloured marbles. There was no-one else there. I stood still for some moments absorbing the peace and silence of the place, the inlaid pilasters at their exact intervals, the stone heads of seraphim decorating the arches. Nothing much had changed since Ruffo’s time, since that morning of June 27, 1799, when the cardinal had come here in state to celebrate a mass of thanksgiving for the fortunate outcome of the treaty negotiations.
He was happy that day—or so he gave it out. Full of contentment that the English had not only recognized but themselves executed the treaty. Sacchinelli again, the diligent secretary, writing after his employer’s death. The words sounded now like an echo in the cavern of my mind, in this sumptuous, cavernous church. What was in the cardinal’s mind as he intoned the Te Deum, raised the host that day? The rebels were already out of the forts; they had been jostled to their transports by Horatio’s marines. How much did Ruffo know, how much did Ruffo suspect? Did he really think the Jacobins would be allowed to sail for France? Or was that mass a piece of ornate and solemn hypocrisy, designed to exculpate him, throw the odium of betrayal on the British?
The same questions. I was no nearer the answers here than I had been in my basement in Belsize Park. Standing there with that dull band of pain along my brows, I felt the same sorrow, the same helplessness that I had so often felt at home in my study. Whatever one made of the documents, the truth of the past was beyond grasping—it lay in the looks exchanged, the tones used, and the eyes and voices had left no trace.
Out again, into the blinding sun. A walk of five minutes took me from the scene of thanksgiving, whether genuine or not, to the site of the indisputably genuine hangings that shortly followed. Piazza del Mercato, where the executions were carried out, where public executions had been carried out for many hundreds of years. A vast and desolate square between the dock area and the district of Forcella, with a few nondescript stalls round the edges. Along the eastern side an open-air market for cheap leisure goods—plastic garden chairs, inflatable dinghies and ducks and paddling pools, brightly coloured beach umbrellas, all set out on the cobbles. Some small boys listlessly kicking a ball around in a far corner. A Baroque church with a leadcoloured dome and eroded saints on the façade.
Somewhere here, in the middle … Whatever the rights and wrongs, the promises kept or broken, this is where it ended for the leaders of that short-lived republic. Day after day through those summer months of 1799, they were brought here in batches to combine with hangman and pull-feet and make that triple-headed, dangling beast that had so haunted my imagination.
I squinted across the vast square. The flat light of afternoon lay over everything—there were no shadows. I found myself longing for the cool of night, for the dark, as they must have done as they were led out to die. The agony would be over, they would have found their own darkness. The troops withdrew at nightfall; their only purpose was to ensure that the executions were carried out. The corpses were stripped by the hangman and left hanging, sport of the populace. If they were not citizens of Naples, no-one would claim them; they would remain there. The lazzaroni would push and pull them this way and that. Cruelty, like other motions of the heart, needs time to warm up. With time they went from jeers to knives, slashing at the bodies, cutting off the ears, the nose, the testicles, hacking through the ribs. After that came the feast. The livers were roasted, eaten, here on the square, perhaps just where I was standing. It is related that a passer-by who refused to partake of this meal was killed on the spot.
You saw none of this, you saw none of the executions, you came nowhere near the contagion of the mob. You were … elsewhere. On board ship or in Sicily or dozing through the hot afternoons in the Palazzo Sessa. You heard it, you must have heard it—no-one in Naples could escape it, that great roar of jubilation as the victim was launched into space.
The dome of the church opposite was clear in every detail. I had the impression of some quivering or disturbance in the air, like the single swing of an invisible pendulum. Then the square was blank again, drab, dusty, featureless, pressed down under the flat light. The garish beach goods, the occasional voices of the children, the squat little church … That great sum of terror and pain—I had somehow expected to find it reflected here, but there was only this bleakness and ugliness of the present.
Turning away, quitting the square, was attended by a curious sense of effort. No more than tiredness, I suppose, but I felt I could have stayed there a long time without moving, one of the derelict props of the place. It was twenty past two; Sims was coming to the hotel at five-thirty; there would be time to see the other fort, Castel dell’Ovo, but I had omitted to find out whether it was open to visitors in the afternoon. Probably not, I thought. It was near the hotel, in any case. I was exhausted, but the thought of resting or stopping to eat something did not come into my mind. I did not want to take a taxi, shrinking from the human encounter it would involve. Only Sims I wanted to see; I had hopes of Sims.
I was walking more slowly now; it took me more than an hour to get to the fort. I was relieved to find the gate open; but as I approached, I was astonished to see that the figure on the poster over the entrance, which I had observed at a distance from my hotel room and which had so much resembled Donald Duck, was in fact Donald Duck, complete with jaunty sailor’s cap and chortling beak and clumpy webbed feet. Above his head in bright red letters, Il Mondo dei Paperi. Ripples of light moved over the poster, cast up by the jiggling reflections of the harbour water. Mondo was world—the World of Donald Duck. After some moments of incredulity, I understood: there was a Donald Duck exhibition taking place inside this venerable building.
It might be possible to bypass Donald, get a ticket for the fort only. I went through the vaulted tunnel of the entrance and spoke to the man inside the little glassed-in ticket office. I spoke carefully through the grid. Not Donald, please. But you couldn’t have one without the other. I didn’t like the man’s eyes, they were small and black, I didn’t like the way he stared through his glass wall, as if there were something wrong with me, something strange about wanting to give Donald a miss. It occurred to me now that I could ignore the exhibition altogether, go straight on past. I would walk past, make my way up to the sunlit bastions, inspect the cannon, still in their emplacements, look out from those heights over the water to where your ships lay at anchor.
But at the entrance to the exhibition I came upon two young people, a boy and a girl; they were wearing Donald Duck T-shirts; they had spotted the brightly coloured ticket in my hand, it too bearing Donald’s image. They smiled in greeting; they held out catalogues; they thought I had come for him. I was too tired, too confused, the smiles and T-shirts were impossible to disappoint; I could not simply slink past, keeping my head down so as not to see their expressions change. I tried to smile, tried to assume the look of someone looking forward to a rare treat, and passed inside.
Once in, there was no quick way out again. It was a one-way system, arrows pointed from room to room. The exhibition was enormous; it occupied three floors, all of them strangely resonant with voices. Voices and echoes of voices, in the cavernous rooms; but no faces of people, none that I can remember, so terrible was the impact of the faces on the walls. All Donald’s relatives were there, grotesquely blown up, staring down. Everywhere I looked I met their eyes, enormous, unshaded by lashes, horribly intent. The primary colours shrieked from the walls. The glands at the sides of my neck felt hot, I felt the run of sweat on my chest and back. Twice I tried to go back, to retrace my steps, but the way was barred by more young people in Donald Duck T-shirts. They smiled, they pointed at the arrows; I had to follow the arrows. The second floor was worse than the first, with the Scottish branch all represented and named in glaring capitals, Jack McDuck and Dirty Dingus and Sir Quackly, huge and terrifying in a top hat and spats. There was nowhere in the room to look, nowhere my eyes could take refuge from them. A moment came when I doubted my ability to walk across the room, expose myself to the barrage of those eyes, reach the stairs to the third and final floor, the only way out. I wanted to hide, to press back against the doorway. I was aware of my own noisy breathing. I made it to the slit of a window, peered out at a sudden, brilliant section of sea, the broken crest of Vesuvius, the mole of the fort along which the Jacobins made their way to be embarked. Here, finally, was the view I had wanted. Turning back, I encountered with an irrepressible leap of terror the enormous, baleful eyes of old Scrooge McDuck, the collective stare of a boatload of jowly dog-pirates in black masks.
How long I stayed here, how I found the resolution to get out, I cannot clearly remember. In the end, keeping my eyes down, I forced myself to walk across to the foot of the stairs and mount upward. The third floor was better. There were no more monstrously enlarged and malignant ducks, only a few of Donald’s milder-eyed cousins, Molly Mallard, Cuthbert Coot, Luke Goose.
The last gallery was quite different from the others, devoted to copies of well-known paintings, faithful in every particular except that the human subjects had been replaced by Disney characters. I stayed here some time, waiting for my breathing to come back to normal, for that flush of panic to subside—fear with me was a fever, not a chill; the chill came now as the sweat cooled on my body. There was the Arnolfini Betrothal by Jan Van Eyck, with the Happy Hippos, Horace and Clarabella, as the engaged couple, and Caravaggio’s celebrated Lute Player, with Minnie Mouse plucking the strings.
As I stood before these travesties in the blankness of mind that followed upon fear, through my weariness, my headache, my strained sight, there came to me some dawning hope of revelation. These images imposed on images, this simpering Minnie, these toothy hippos—perhaps here, not outside on that sunlit sea, was the secret, the key I was looking for. This Vermeer, with a pinafored Snow White in the kitchen among hanging fowl and the utensils of an alien culture … If one could peel the layers away, find the truth below the image, before the original painter found it, before the first, deceiving brushstrokes … A memory came to me of the coloured stamps I had so loved as a small child—transfers, as they were called, about the size of a matchbox top, backed by some thin adhesive tissue. You peeled the tissue away, you pressed the stamp on a blank sheet, and there, clearly printed, was the image. Angelfish, flamingos, a boat on a blue sea, a huntsman in a red coat. It would work on your skin too, particularly where the skin was pale and hairless, like the inside of the forearm. A transfer could be used only once, but one could be superimposed on another, and this was always a temptation and always regretted, resulting in botched shapes, blurred colours. Perhaps my earliest experience of sorrow, that remorse for the blighting of the pristine image, the knowledge that it could never be recovered.
I was driven away by the arrival of a chattering group of children shepherded by an elderly lady—their teacher, as I supposed. Finally there was an escape route—stone stairs led down and away. Too late now to see more of the fort. I was due to meet Sims at half past five in the bar of my hotel. If I wanted to be there before him, there was time only to find my way out of this place, walk back past the little harbour, cross the broad road that ran along beside the bay.
I reached the air-conditioned haven of the bar with six minutes to spare. I felt sticky and dishevelled, but there was no time for a shower if I wanted to be in place first. The bar was long and darkly shining. Pale lights were already on behind the counter, but shaded sunlight still lay over the wicker chairs and glass-topped tables at the nearer end. Hobnobbing on the bar stools was quite out of the question; I knew my disabilities, I did not want to sit too close to Sims, I would not have been able to talk to him or meet his eyes. I went to the bar and asked for red wine. I took my glass over to the corner table farthest from the bar and sat with my back to the wall so as to observe the approaches. At this early hour I was alone there, among the tables. I drank some of the wine, which was good, full-bodied, dark ruby in colour—from Sardinia, the barman had said. Almost at once, with the first taste of it, my headache receded, my weariness disappeared, and I felt entirely alert.
He came at twenty-three minutes to six. I knew him at once, before he had reached the table, before he had broken into the smile, signal of uncertainty, apology in advance for possible mistake. I had never set eyes on him before, but I experienced a pang of delighted recognition. That large, loose-knit figure, the careless, slightly shambling gait, the light hair, tanned face, the lines round the eyes that came from scanning wide horizons—it was Mahan to the life.
As he drew near and I stood up to answer his smile, the impression grew stronger and stronger. He corresponded in every detail. So much so that when he held out his hand and said, “Sims, Ernesto Sims,” I was momentarily at a loss for his meaning.
“Charles Cleasby,” I said. “So kind of you to find the time for me.” Somewhere between the beginning of this sentence and the end of it, the incongruity, the foreignness of his first name struck me. He seated himself opposite my chair, at the farthest remove, and I was pleased by this, it seemed like a mark of tact. I asked him what he wanted to drink—a waiter had materialized at his elbow. He asked for something called carpano, which I had never heard of but took to be a sort of apéritif. This again seemed slightly incongruous—I had set Mahan down as a whisky-and-soda man, whether on foreign verandahs or by the hearth of home. I asked for another glass of the Sardinian wine. “Good of you to give up your time,” I said, shyness causing me to repeat myself.
“Not at all. It is good to meet a fellow member of the Nelson Club.”
There was something in the tone of this that made me glance quickly at him. Nothing showed on his face. Did he know I was no longer a member? Why had I thought his eyes were blue? They were dark, almost black. But his long legs were thrust out before him, carelessly sprawled, just as they had been that day in my study. He was wearing a linen jacket, rather crumpled. A dark blue handkerchief fell in loose folds from his breast pocket.
“How are you liking Naples?” he said.
An odd question, I thought it. How could I tell him that Horatio’s Naples and mine was a sticky trap, a smeared web? He lived in Naples. I could not risk giving him offence; he might withhold his help.
“Well,” I said, “I’m not really here as a tourist, you know, I am here to try and pick up his traces.”
“Excuse me, whose traces are we talking about?”
“Why, his, you know. Nelson’s. I have rather drawn a blank so far.”
I suspected nothing. In that first flush of confidence I began to tell him about my book, about the problem I had run into. “I wondered whether you might be able to put me on to something,” I said.
I had spoken in a light tone, not wanting Mahan to think me stumped but merely casting around. He had leaned forward in his chair. The red-brown stuff in his glass was hardly touched.
“A plaque?” he said. “Did you expect to find a plaque commemorating Nelson on the wall of the Palazzo Sessa? One of those blue ones that they put on houses in London?”
This was not the tone I had expected; there was something harsh in it, something derisive, setting me on the defensive. “Perhaps not a plaque,” I said, “but something at least, something to mark his stay there.” Ernesto. And the eyes, dark, fathomless …
He looked down for a moment, and his shoulders slumped in what seemed a long release of breath. “My dear man,” he said, “you have had a disappointing day, but you could walk round in this city every day for a year and you wouldn’t see the slightest sign of Nelson anywhere, neither hide nor hair of him. Not a syllable. The Palazzo Sessa looks down over the Piazza dei Martiri. Did you look at the monument there?”
“No.”
“The martyrs in question are the Neapolitan Jacobins who went to the scaffold in the name of liberty in 1799, sent there through the good offices of Lord Nelson. This hotel is on a street named after the republic that Nelson helped to bring down.”
“Yes, I know that.”
“And do you know that if you went out of here and turned right you would come before long to the Via Caracciolo, a broad and beautiful avenue that runs along beside the sea towards Vomero? Or that if you went a little way up Via Santa Lucia, which is just behind us here, you would arrive at the little church of Santa Maria in Catena, which contains Caracciolo’s tomb? That same Caracciolo, the Neapolitan admiral whom Nelson, on doubtful authority, had court martialled for treason and condemned and hanged in the course of a few hours—he was already hanging there from the yardarm when Nelson sat down to dinner. It was Caracciolo’s corpse that rode the waves, you remember? Yes, of course, you will have read Parsons’s account. The local fishermen recovered his body from the scrape in the sand where the English had left it, without even protection from the dogs. Now he lies there in state, one of Italy’s most honoured sons.”
He paused here and took a sip of the syrupy-looking liquid in his glass. He had been careful otherwise, but ordering that drink had been a false move on his part. I knew now that he was not what he seemed. I knew I’d have to be very careful.
“You have come for the wrong hero,” he said. “Caracciolo is the hero here. Heroes are always local.”
I saw the sudden, ironic twist of his lips as he said this. Thin lips. It was clear that heroes meant little to him, whether English or Italian. Mahan would never have said a thing like that. This was a person without ideals. A change had come over him while he spoke. He seemed narrower somehow in his chair; even his face seemed narrower, and the hairline more receding. He was an impersonator, a dangerously clever one. But his disguise was slipping away.
“After all,” he said, “they would not be likely to honour the memory of someone they consider responsible for the destruction of the one of the most cultivated societies in Europe. Between the July of Ferdinand’s return and the following March, a hundred and twenty were put to death in Naples and the islands and two hundred twenty-two were sentenced to life imprisonment. To say nothing of the hundreds given shorter sentences who died in Ferdinand’s filthy jails. Very few of these were men of the populace—perhaps two or three. All the rest were nobles, officers, lawyers, doctors, professors, and men of science and letters. In the exercise of his royal mercy, Ferdinand strangled or decapitated or shut away the whole of the Neapolitan intellectual class. Do you appreciate the gravity of a loss like that? They cut off the head and left the trunk to the mob and the church and the Bourbon tyranny. The whole south of Italy still feels the effect of that today.” He was shaking his head. “And you come here to look for Nelson.”
“He was not responsible,” I said. “How could he have known what would happen to them?”
These words of mine served only to give the person opposite me more power, I knew that. I was afraid of him, but I could not prevent myself from inviting more harm, from putting my head on the block. It was why I had arranged the interview, I understood it now. I looked away from him, summoning resolution. There were more people at the bar, and three men in business suits were sitting at one of the tables, but too far away to hear us. People were passing through the swing doors that gave onto the street outside, people entering and leaving. Rapid shapes of light were made by the swinging of these doors, flexing, spiralling shapes, gone as soon as glimpsed. This light had a reddish tinge—the awning outside the hotel was red, I suddenly remembered. The reception area lay beyond the doors, beyond the passing people and the play of light. It seemed strangely distant, and the air looked thicker there, opaque and still, like cloudy water in a glass tank. It was suddenly quite clear to me that I had not come here to find Horatio at all: I had brought him here to be killed, and myself with him. “I intend to clear his name,” I said.
“Clear his name?” Even the voice seemed different now, thinner, more nasal. I nerved myself to meet the dark eyes. He was smiling, that same uncertain smile he had worn as he approached me, as if not sure of my identity. “Have you read the Italian sources?”
“Those that have been translated.”
“But most of them haven’t. I work at the National Library here in Naples, you know. It is one of the best in Italy—we like to think it is the best. I am in charge of the European history department. It contains the most extensive collection of local materials—chronicles, journals, eyewitness accounts—anywhere to be found. They don’t leave you in any doubt as to what the rebels themselves believed. Even in early July, when they had been embarked for more than a week, they still believed they would be sailing for France. Gaetano Rodinò, in his Racconti Storici, tells us that Mario Pagano, who was subsequently executed, was still planning as late as the fifth to set up a fencing academy when he got to Toulouse. Rodinò, as you will know, was a fellow prisoner of his on board one of the transports.”
“It is not a question of what they believed. Horatio acted in good faith—he needn’t have had any knowledge of what they believed. How can he be held responsible for what went on in their minds?” It was my last attempt to fight back. I straightened myself, I looked the fellow in the face. “There is no evidence,” I said. “None whatever.” It is a terrible thing to face a cynic and put all your hope in a negative. “Not a scrap,” I said, and I pressed my lips together to keep them from trembling.
I had looked away, but his voice came over to me, unhurried, unmistakably nasal now, slightly metallic. “This is a case where the search for evidence complicates the issues and obscures the truth, as it has been doing now for two hundred years. You say there is no evidence, therefore we cannot know. That is false reasoning, Mr. Cleasby. We should look first at what we already know, because it often precludes the need for evidence. If we know the painter’s work, we don’t need his signature on the painting—not necessarily. Don’t you agree?”
“We do if we have to prove it.”
“But we are talking about knowledge, not proof. What do we know about Horatio Nelson? A gifted naval commander, certainly, but that does not help much. A hero, yes. Heroes never admit mistakes, let alone wrongdoing. Heroes need to succeed gloriously—it is obligatory, at least until the moment comes for them to die gloriously, and this was not his moment. We know he was inordinately vain, we know he could gobble up flattery by the cartload, we know he took in hatred of the French with his mother’s milk, we know he was a lifelong devoted servant of monarchs, we know he was totally ignorant of Naples except for where it lay on his charts, we know he was besotted with Emma Hamilton, who was besotted with Queen Maria Carolina, who wasn’t besotted with anyone but had a lively desire to save her kingdom from the French and avoid the fate of her sister Marie Antoinette. She was just as set on winning as the admiral but a lot more adaptable. Or perhaps I mean intelligent. My saviour, she said to him. Devoted Lady Hamilton said the same. The queen and the mistress. Do you not see what this comes to, the irresistible conclusion? Look at the picture. Do you really need a signature?”
I could not answer him. His loquacity amazed me: deliberate, unfaltering, with a constant edge of malice in it. Those wrinkles round his eyes that I had thought due to scanning far horizons came from squinting over books in his library. He was shortsighted, of course. He would have his glasses in a case in one of the pockets of his jacket. Rimless glasses.
“In order to satisfy his appetite for victory, in order not to disappoint those who hailed him as their saviour, in order to punish those who had dared to desire a republic on French lines … Do you not see? He could not fall short in any particular. In his way were a few hundred men and women who thought they were protected by a treaty, and an intractable warrior-priest named Ruffo, who had made the treaty with them and wanted to save his face. So a way was found, a form of words. The appearance of good faith was preserved. And lo and behold, the rebels come walking out into the arms of the British marines.”
So far I might have resisted; it was still, after all, in the realm of argument. But he had foreseen everything, even this vestige of resistance. He had planned everything in advance. He kept the killing stroke for the end.
“What does it matter, after all?” he said. “Why should it matter?” That thin smile was on his face again. “He was a man in a tight corner, wasn’t he? We were at war with France—it was a struggle for survival, great issues were at stake. A spot of fraud, a few hundred expendable people, the statutory cover-up afterwards. Fairly standard for our times, isn’t it? Or any other times, for that matter. Look at this century of ours, the things that have been done. Churchill made shadier deals and he is thought a great Englishman, whatever that means.”
“He was a politician.”
He leaned forward—he hadn’t heard me. “What was that?”
“Churchill wasn’t a hero.”
“Oh, I see. It’s because Nelson was a hero that they have been trying so long to keep the taint of falsehood from him. That’s why he couldn’t be allowed to do anything underhand. Well, heroes are useful, there is no denying that. Nelson was useful at the time, and he has been useful ever since. The Royal Navy keep a silence for him on Trafalgar Day, don’t they, and fly the flags at half-mast? Stirring stuff, especially now that most of the glory has departed.”
“He was a rebel too. He broke the line …”
My voice was again reduced to little more than a whisper. He gave no sign of having heard me. “Don’t you know it yet?” he said. “Heroes are fabricated in the national dream factory. Heroes are not people.”
He was looking at me as he spoke, but I could not meet his eyes. I looked down at his hands. One lay palm down on the table, the other was loosely curled round his almost empty glass. The nails were immaculate. The pads on the knuckles looked soft.
“You know,” he said, “dulce et decorum, sweet and fitting. Not to die for one’s country exactly, not necessarily, but to dream of it and be proud. To deal with our fears by dreaming. There are no heroes out there, Mr. Cleasby, there are only fears and dreams and the process of fabrication.”
He knew me, somehow he knew me. I was still looking at his hands.
“No heroes,” he said. “Surely you know that?”
Soft indoor hands. Quite hairless on the backs. Of course. The hair had been worn away by gloves, kid gloves, black … Why hadn’t I seen it before? He was Badham.
I stood up quickly. “Another drink?”
He made as if to rise from his seat. He didn’t want me to get away. “No,” I said, “it’s on me.”
“The waiter will come,” he said, but I didn’t answer, I turned and walked over to the bar. There were more people there now, someone was asking for a drink, I had to wait, and this was a good thing because it enabled me to gather myself together. Some sort of a plan had to be made. I had to prevent him from realizing that I knew his true identity.
I glanced towards him. He was sitting in the same position, with his back to the bar. Across the few yards that separated us I took in the details of his appearance, seen thus from behind: the slightly ridged line of his jacket collar, the strip of shirt above, a cream or pale yellow colour. The shirt seemed too tight; it creased the flesh of his neck into folds at the sides. Above this the hair on his nape grew in loose thin curls like delicate shavings of some pale wood. The bar had hushed around me, all sound had drained into this closeness of sight. But I must have shifted my position, moved a little closer to the counter of the bar. I met Badham’s eyes! There was a narrow panel of mirror set in the angle of the wall behind my chair, and he was watching my face in the glass. His own seemed to change now as he met my eyes, and I knew he had understood I was on to him.
There was no time to lose. There were no lifts on this side of the hotel, so I could not follow my first escape plan, which was to mount to the first floor and then come down by the stairs past the reception desk and out to the street. I would have to walk past him—there was nothing else for it. My heart was beating heavily and my throat had gone dry. He would assume I was going to the gents, or so I hoped. When I got opposite the swing doors I darted suddenly sideways, bumping into a porter with a luggage trolley and knocking my shin on one of the cases. And so I made it out into the street.
The sun was low over the sea now but still strong; I felt the heat of it as I stepped out from the shade of the awning. I must have crossed the road directly and gone down the steps, because I was suddenly there in the little marina where the white boats rested in their moorings, side by side. The boats didn’t move, but the surface of the water was shivering all over, and this seemed strange, unaccountable, the masts and mooring ropes quite motionless, their reflections wriggling in the water like snakes, there was blood in among them too, a shuddering of red, as if the snakes were bleeding as they writhed. The cruelty that Badham had used against me came to my mind. A lump formed in my throat and my eyes filled with tears. The surface of the water glimmered and blurred and it seemed to me that the ripples of blood were gaining, spreading, soon they would cover the whole surface of the harbour. I had to get away from this. I went back again, onto the pavement. The white rocks on the foreshore below me were dazzling in the sunlight. There was the gleaming sweep of the bay, the softly glowing crests of the promontories beyond. In this luminous moment the message came to me, like a pulse beat in the softness of the evening: Villa Emma. The little house that Hamilton built for her at Posillipo. Where we went to escape the foul city, where we walked hand in hand through the gardens above the sea. I would go there now, at once. She would be waiting. I would get a taxi or a bus.
I began to walk across the pavement. I was still almost directly opposite the hotel. I saw Badham come through the swing doors, pass under the awning, and emerge onto the pavement. I saw him hesitate, look this way and that. I had the impression that he might be going to cross the road towards me. I went rapidly back down the steps. One of the boats had a black rubber guard tied to the bow, and I saw this stretching and contracting in the water like a lung. I waited some minutes, then I went up again, holding myself in readiness for flight. There was no sign of him on the opposite pavement, but this meant nothing in itself, he could easily have been hiding somewhere.
A man dressed in a dark suit and carrying a briefcase was approaching along the pavement. I moved into his path. “Villa Emma,” I said. He raised his eyebrows and moved his head a little to one side. He had not understood, or so I thought at the time. “Villa Emma, Posillipo,” I said. At this he smiled and made a sort of pointing gesture over his shoulder. There was a bus stop not far behind him, twenty yards or so, and he seemed to be indicating this. I think he was about to say something more, but then his expression changed completely; a cheeping sound had come from somewhere in the region of his heart. He thrust a hand inside his jacket and brought out the cheeping thing and spoke to it as if he wanted to soothe its alarm. At this moment a bus pulled into the stop and one or two people began to descend from it. I was still afraid that Badham might be somewhere near. I ran the distance at an unsteady jog and clambered up.
The driver started up again as soon as I was on board. He did not look at me or ask for any money. I had to stand to begin with; the bus was full. It jerked and shuddered and swayed heavily on the corners. I found a rail near the door and clung to it. I could not see where we were going. It was very hot inside the bus; I could feel the sweat gathering on my scalp and in all the concave places of my body. Some of the people inside the bus struggled to a yellow box attached to the rail near the entrance. They thrust white slips at this and it made a ringing sound. I understood that they were stamping tickets that they must have had before boarding the bus.
People got on and off, and after a while I found a seat. We had left the sea and turned inland—I only noticed it now. The street ascended steeply; the sounds of the engine were guttural and grinding. It was now that the pair of them got on, a woman and a girl, the woman bulky and matronly with a red canvas shopping bag, the girl with a face from a nightmare bestiary, wedge-shaped, with a hideously elongated nose like the proboscis of an anteater.
I suspected nothing at first. All I felt was a sort of dread. The seats on this bus did not all face the same way; they were in two lanes separated by an aisle, and the four at the front faced towards the others. I was sitting in the most forward of these four. For the moment there was no-one sitting opposite. What I was dreading came about. The two of them chose to sit side by side directly in front of me, faceon, the square-faced matron with the shopping bag on her knees and the monstrous girl with her staring green eyes and flexible snout and chin receding to nothing. And both of them looked fixedly at me.
It was this fixity of regard that alerted me. I could feel their eyes on me all the time. Things began to fall into place. Badham emerging from the hotel, looking to right and left—that had been a signal. The man with the telephone, receiving instructions. The bus that drew up so opportunely, the driver who did not ask me to produce a ticket. And now these two, keeping me under observation.
They were cunning; every time I glanced at them, they were looking somewhere else. The girl sat hunched forward. She was continually wrinkling the loose skin on her nose and opening her mouth in a snarling expression. She had on a white T-shirt with Louisiana Country Club inscribed across the bosom. What did that mean? They could have been notified that I would be on this bus, but how could Badham have known I would get on it in the first place? Could he have watched me? I had not actually seen him walk away.
The girl was looking about her, still wrinkling her nose and snarling. She was looking at the other people on the bus. Suddenly I realized: it was an outing, she was enjoying herself, this was her best T-shirt. She was retarded, to say the least, and this woman was looking after her. Surreptitiously, I scanned the woman’s face. I was afraid, but I had to do it. Broad cheeks, small deep-set eyes, an expression of placid resignation. Not the mother—a nurse of some kind, the girl’s keeper … She had taken some trouble to change her appearance, but I knew her now, I recognized her, I had last seen her leading away poor Penhas on the occasion of my father’s funeral. Nothing to do with Badham. Her name was Mrs. White. I felt a great rush of relief. I caught her eye and nodded slightly to show that I had understood, and she blinked twice in reply.
We were on a level now, far above the sea, moving between large buildings with identical balconies. The roads were wider and there were pockets of greenery here and there, scattered groups of trees and clumps of brightly flowering bushes. There were not many people on the bus now, but a man was sitting opposite me on the other side of the aisle. I leaned forward and spoke to his averted face: “Posillipo?” He turned and looked at me for some moments in silence. Then he shook his head and pointed in the direction the bus had come from. He called forward to the driver, who merely shrugged. Some minutes afterwards the bus stopped. “Capolinea,” the man said. He again pointed behind him, the way the bus had come. The bus driver got down from his seat and came towards us. “Capolinea,” he said.
Everyone was getting off; we had come to the end of the line. I understood now. They had wanted to keep me away from Villa Emma at all costs. Misled by the man with the telephone, I had boarded the bus on the wrong side of the road. Posillipo was in the other direction. The driver showed me his watch and made a little circle above it with his forefinger. One hour. I would have to wait an hour before I could get a bus back. The driver smiled; his moustache lifted. He made little chopping motions in the direction from which we had come. “Posillipo.” He was in it too, of course.
Everyone else was off the bus by now. I followed them. The driver got back into his seat and the bus drew away, gathered speed, disappeared in the distance. If this was the end of the line, where was he going? I thought I knew the answer to that. Mrs. White and her charge had got off with the others. They were someway off, walking along together by the side of the road. I had no idea where I was or what I should do. It was ten minutes to seven. The sun was setting in silver cloud over a sea invisible from here. I was not proposing to stay where I was, in that empty place, alone and exposed, without cover of any kind. I was not such a fool as that. While I was still hesitating, the signal came. Mrs. White glanced slightly over her shoulder. I immediately began to follow, taking care to keep a distance between us.
The road curved away; I lost them from view. When I came round the curve, there was no sign of them. But there was an unsurfaced road going off at right angles, with houses on one side and a stone wall on the other, bordering what looked like private grounds. After a while the road narrowed, the houses were less frequent. It was no more than a footpath. There was no sign of Mrs. White or the girl. I had made a mistake somehow, I had misread the signal. I stopped at the edge of the road and stood still. Immediately, with this ceasing of movement, I became aware that I was being watched. I was in a trap. I could not simply go back the way I had come, it was too dangerous, it was what they expected. Then I saw that there was a gate in the wall on the other side, a little way farther along, a metal gate, painted green.
There was no padlock on the gate, just a simple bar. It opened quite easily. I was planning to make a detour, keeping within the shelter of the wall, until I could get back to the dirt road again at a point somewhere near where it joined the main road, find a hiding place where I could wait for the bus. But I was too much in fear of the open, I stayed in the shelter of the wall too long. When I finally hoisted myself over it and dropped down on the other side, bruising my elbows and jarring my legs in the process, there was no sign of the road. I was in what I took to be the grounds of some large house or perhaps hotel. A gravel path wound away through thick shrubbery. All I could do was follow this—I had lost all sense of direction now.
I came out onto an asphalt driveway and an empty car park with white lines marking the spaces. On the other side of this were some single-storey brick buildings that looked like offices and then a large white house with balconied windows. I crossed the car park, passed round the nearer of the brick buildings. Through a window I saw two men in long white coats talking together. They stared at me as I passed.
I began to walk more quickly. There was a pavement now, leading in the direction of the white house. A man appeared suddenly from a side turning and walked towards me. He was passing a hand over his face, down and up again, with rapid repeated movements. As we drew opposite he stopped doing this, but he kept his hand stretched over his nose and peeped at me over the top of it.
Someone called out, perhaps in greeting, someone hidden by an angle of the building. From an upper room I heard the sound of a woman’s laughter, strangely sustained, as if she were laughing also on the intakes of breath. A uniformed nurse came round a corner of the building with a very old man in a wheelchair. His face was tilted back and his eyes were closed, his sharp nose pointed up towards the sky. From the frame of his wheelchair there dangled a teddy bear and a black monkey with glass eyes. The bear and the monkey jerked and danced—they were on strings of elastic. The old man’s eyes were not closed, they were white slits, he was watching me. The nurse said some words I did not understand. She left the wheelchair and came round towards me.
I understood everything now. Mrs. White and the girl were in it too, they had led me here. The men with white coats, the hand signals, the laughter … They had anticipated everything. There was no time to lose. I jumped over the low hedge that bordered the pavement, ran back across the car park and into the shrubbery. There was great power and freedom in this running at first. I ran in a wide circle, crashed through another low hedge, climbed a wooden fence, and found myself behind the house on ground that led upwards through a straggle of bushes and bare earth and patches of burned-out grass.
That sense of freedom did not last. I was breathing hoarsely, open-mouthed, lungs straining as I climbed higher. A thin screen of trees, cluttered with ivy. I pushed through them and half scrambled, half fell down a bank on the other side into a deep-sided cutting, broad and flat enough at the bottom to walk along—it looked as if there might once have been a single rail track here. There were grassed-over mounds of stones at intervals along the way.
Down here the night had begun to take over, there was an advance of darkness between the banks. After a while I stopped and listened, but there was no sound of pursuit. When I judged the distance to be safe, I climbed up the bank on the farther side. I had to get up on hands and knees and I was torn by brambles and thorny scrub. But when I reached the top of the bank, I forgot my hurts. I was looking down over the distant lights of streets and houses and the vanishing gleams of traffic, looking beyond this to the glimmering radiance of the bay. The sun had gone, but the sea still held the last of the light in a luminous solution of silver.
This was what you climbed up to as a boy, climbing from the sheltered glebeland, from the riverside meadows where the parsonage lay, mounting the bridle path towards the high ground above the village, high above, between the shoulders of the downs, from where we could look down over sand and saltmarsh, strands of gold and strips of shallow pool and at the verge the real sea, the mass of it, seamed white or silvered over. Behind us great rafts of bright cloud and the soft gleam of the sun on wet sand ripples and mudflats and the glitter of dried pebbles and shingle up the beach. Curlews whistling above the marshes, the terns with their wild cries and plunging flight.
How often we had seen it together. But now I was alone and the light was fading and I knew I had been brought here only for this, brought here alone to see the line of the sea as you saw it that evening in March when you were twelve years old, the evening before you left. It was the only point in all the countryside around from which to get a view of the sea. You came here in the fading light and looked at the sea and you walked away to spend your life with the sea and when you did that you took my life with you.
What I would have done, how long I would have stayed there, I don’t know. I thought everything was at an end. But then the miracle happened, the boy appeared. For some moments I could not believe it. Only a dark shape at first, surmounted by the pale glimmer of the face. There below me, in the last of the light he came walking. Between the crest of the cutting where I crouched and the lights of the houses below, neither fast nor slow—it was a path well known to him. On his back a sort of bump, which I made out to be a small rucksack. Of course, his provisions would be there, his provisions for the journey. He was not going home to the parsonage, he was leaving, he was going away to spend his life with the sea, he was taking my life with him.
Down the slope again, through the thorns and scrub. I found a stone big enough, not too big. Panting now with the fear of being too late, I kept along the cutting out of hearing, out of sight. When I clawed myself up again, he was still there below me, a diminutive figure, walking at the same pace, looking ahead of him. And now, when I had to get behind him, he started singing!
Incomprehensible words in a child’s treble—your voice had not broken yet. A blunder of the first order, preventing you from hearing me as I drew closer behind you, my step uncertain in this difficult light. Perhaps at the last moment you heard or sensed something. But then it was too late, too late to turn on me the terror of your eyes. I struck downward at the small head, once, twice. The figure sank to its knees, half turning towards me, raising an arm. A sound came from it, not very loud, like sobbing but more liquid—as though there were some liquid in the throat. I struck again and he fell forward. I heard the crash of his fall.
Then I walked away, continuing the boy’s path, keeping the lights below me. There was no need to hurry now. I had nothing to fear. I had done it, I had broken the line. Dark and bright angels meet at twilight, it is the only time. And when they meet they join. We can never lose each other now.