Losing Nelson

by Barry Unsworth

  Thoughts of this period in Horatio’s life brought the usual vague distress to my mind. I was still standing there before the portrait, but no longer looking at it. My eyes fell on the papier-mâché bust of him standing not far away, more or less in the middle of the floor. It was larger than life-size, three feet high and crudely painted, the eyes jet black and wide open, the cheeks rouged, hectic-looking; but there was a curve of power and authority in the mouth that I liked. I had seen it in the jumbled interior of a curio shop in Camden as I was passing by, and I had gone in and bought it and brought it home in a taxi, muffled up in brown paper. Only a month or so before—I would not have done it in my father’s time. Now I found myself looking fixedly at him, at the straight line of the cocked hat that shadowed his eyes, the garish stars and medals on his chest, the gilt letters running along the base. I could not read them at this distance, but I knew what they said: ENGLAND EXPECTS THAT EVERY MAN WILL DO HIS DUTY.

  Sublime message, surely the most famous naval signal ever given. Greeted with cheers by every ship in the fleet. Then came the last message he ever gave, his favorite, number 16, the signal for close action, which remained at the top-gallant masthead of HMS Victory until it was shot away … The trance of admiration that was descending on me was disturbed by the ringing of the front-door bell. I looked at my watch: it was exactly seven o’clock. I knew at once that it must be Avon Secretarial Services in the person of Miss Lily, who came twice a week, Tuesdays and Fridays, to help me with my manuscript—no small task, as I was constantly revising the earlier sections. I could not use a computer myself. My illness had left me with an abiding fear of screens. Twenty years ago, but I had not been able to overcome it. Not mirrors or clear reflecting surfaces, I had no fear of those, but opaque electronic screens from which faces might emerge. Faces with eyes …

  I had known, of course, that she was coming. But what surprised and rather frightened me was the realization that nearly three hours had gone by that could not really be accounted for. Since the dusk of the battle and of this winter evening in London, since the separation of the fleets, as I sat by my operations table and stood before the portrait, this mass of time had accumulated and then dissolved away.

  As I mounted the basement steps and went along the passage to the front door, I felt some return of the terror of that morning. Twinges, no more. But somehow it was always later than I thought, I was constantly striving to keep abreast. So much, so very much, depended on that, keeping abreast, keeping the lines parallel.

  3

  Miss Lily was always on time. I had taken to calling her that, not to her face, only in my mind, though she had none of the aspects conventionally associated with the flower, she wasn’t languorous at all or scented much or markedly virginal, she was a steady person, in her early thirties, and her name was Lilian Butler. She had been coming for three months by then and she had never been late. This punctuality was one of the things I liked best about her; without strict timing, our lives are formless. However, Miss Lily was inquisitive, and that was a drawback.

  There she was on the doorstep, her little red car parked in the street below. Slung over her shoulder was the case that contained computer and printer. “You have been going up those stairs too quick,” she said to me when I opened the door. Even after such a short acquaintance she allowed herself remarks like that. I must have been breathing rather heavily and she had seen it. How could I explain to her that it was not a question of haste? I could never publicly admit to anxiety, any more than I could show tears or give vent to anger. And how did she know I had been down there, in the basement? Only from my breathing? It didn’t seem much to go on. It was as if she had somehow been spying on me. She had never been down there, no-one had, I always kept it locked.

  We went straight to the room I call my study, which adjoins the sitting room on the ground floor. The room where I sleep is on this floor too. The house is tall and narrow, late Victorian, like all six houses in this short row off England’s Lane. It has four floors if you include the basement, but I rarely used the two upper ones.

  It was warm in the room, and Miss Lily was clearly grateful for the warmth. Her nose was shiny from the cold air of night and she rubbed her hands together as if they were chilled, though she could have been out of the car only a couple of minutes. It occurred to me, not for the first time, that her circulation might not be so good. “It takes ages for that car to warm up,” she said, as she saw me looking at her. “I get here just when it’s starting.” She only has to come from Camden.

  I went to hang up her coat in the little entrance hall. When I returned, she was already seated at the table she uses for these typing sessions. The screen and keyboard and printer were there before her, all connected up and ready to go; the case she keeps them in was stowed neatly behind her, against the wall. All this in the time it had taken me to walk a few paces and hang up the coat on one of the pegs! Not only that, she was sitting there somehow expectantly, as if she had been installed for some time and was wondering where I had got to. I saw that somehow I had fallen behind again. How had I spent the time? Had I studied the pegs, trying to decide which one was appropriate for Miss Lily’s dark brown, nylon-fur coat? Had some reorganization been necessary to make space for it? Had I examined the coat itself, the loop at the collar perhaps, to find a clue there as to the right peg or the right way of hanging it? I could not remember. The time was lost, it had sifted away from me.

  To disguise the disturbance these thoughts occasioned me, I began to pace about the room, something I often did in any case while dictating pages of my book to Miss Lily. It was for the sake of this dictation that I had employed her. I was constantly revising sections of the book already done, those dealing with Horatio’s early life, his marriage, and his career up to his great victory at the Battle of the Nile in 1798, his arrival in Naples in September of that year, his rescue of the royal family and the beginning of his love affair with Lady Hamilton, the wife of the ambassador, in February 1799.

  This process of revision had intensified since I had reached the impasse of that June. My text was tangled with handwritten emendations, insertions, crossings-out. No-one but I could have deciphered it. Miss Lily’s help had been invaluable; she was patient and efficient and—until that same evening—ventured no comments of her own. She also represented a notable piece of self-conquest on my part. I had hesitated for several weeks before taking the step of applying to Avon Secretarial Services, whose advertisement I had seen by pure chance one afternoon while waiting to have my hair cut. It was a difficult decision to make. I was always reluctant to change my routine, apply to strangers. But I needed someone, and there was really no choice. In the end I took the bull by the horns and phoned. Avon Secretarial Services turned out to be just one person, and that was Miss Lily.

  So far it had been a success, we had worked well together. It was rather expensive, at fifteen pounds an hour, but I could easily afford it; my father’s death had left Monty and me quite comfortably off. And I considered the money well spent. After such torments of indecision about engaging her, I did not want to lose her services now. We would continue together, or so I thought. With her help I would extricate Horatio with honour from the languors and horrors of Naples, I would accompany him through the final years to his splendid death and sumptuous funeral. My book would be the best account of Horatio ever to appear in print, a profound study of the man and a lasting tribute to the hero.

  This evening, however, I could not begin. I made no move to get my papers from the drawer in the desk where I kept them. The restlessness that had been possessing me, the sense of displacement, of tracks obliterated and time somehow running out of control, kept me moving about the room. I found myself speaking in an unaccustomed way to Miss Lily, more freely and directly than I had ever done before. More personally too—talking about Horatio was like talking about myself.

  I talked about the Battle of Cape St. Vincent, which I had just been enacting, and its aftermath and in
particular about the exchange of letters between Horatio and his wife, Fanny, after the news of the victory had reached her. “Fame had come to him at last,” I said. “At the age of thirty-eight he was a national hero, the whole country was ringing with his praises. Difficult to imagine now, but people were really afraid of French invasion. There was intense rejoicing when the news came, but Fanny didn’t find much to say. His father wrote to him, full of pride—he was wintering in Bath when he heard the news, he had to go back to his lodgings to hide his tears.”

  Quite unexpectedly, at this mention of the old man, my voice broke a little and I felt a faint prickling behind the eyes. I have always been easily touched to tears and I have always been ashamed of it—it goes counter to my upbringing and the precepts of my father—but the assault always comes before the defences can be assembled. Was he ever seen to weep? Horatio, yes, on occasion; my father, naturally, never.

  I had turned away from Miss Lily’s gaze and now fell silent for some moments, trying to think of instances. I hoped she had noticed nothing. It was weakness on my part, yes, but I had found it moving, that pride in his son, those private tears.

  “Why was he wintering in Bath?” Miss Lily said.

  “His Norfolk parsonage would have been freezing in winter. Anyway, the main point is that everyone was singing Horatio’s praises, everyone but her. All she could do was express her own fear and anxiety. That was not the note to strike with a man like him.”

  “You call him by his first name.”

  “Yes, yes, I do. An old habit.”

  Miss Lily permitted herself a smile. She has a wide mouth, rather pale, sharp at the edges, with a general tendency to curve upwards. “It seems funny,” she said, “when you think that he is long gone.”

  “Gone?” I said. “Horatio Nelson is not gone—what an idea. He lives in the memory and gratitude of the whole nation.”

  “Well, I am British enough,” Miss Lily said, this being the first of many cryptic remarks she was to make during our various conversations. I was still not sure what she intended by it when she spoke again. “But if her fear was for him, for her husband?”

  “What use was her fear to him?” I was beginning now to regret having opened my mind to Miss Lily; it was obvious that she understood nothing about the nature of heroism. “He told her what he expected of her in a letter after the battle,” I said.

  “What he expected of her?”

  “Yes,” I said, and I quoted from the letter—much of Horatio’s correspondence I know by heart: All do me the justice I feel I deserve. You will receive pleasure from the share I had in making it a most brilliant day, the most so of any that I know of in the annals of England.

  I allowed a short silence for this to sink in. Then I said, “There you are, there you have it, that is clear enough, I think.”

  “Quite clear,” Miss Lily said. “He wanted her to praise him.”

  “He says that he expected her to be pleased at his success.” Her obtuseness was beginning to annoy me. “Let us see how she replies.”

  I went to the shelf where I keep the collections of his correspondence and took down Geoffrey Rawson’s compilation of 1949 as being shorter and easier to handle than most. I found Fanny’s letter in a few moments and read it aloud to Miss Lily, deliberately dwelling on the more plaintive phrases: Thank God you are well … My anxiety was far beyond my powers of expression … Altogether, my dearest husband, my sufferings were great …

  This read, I looked rather closely at Miss Lily. “She has a hero for a husband and that is how she writes to him.”

  However, she returned my gaze firmly, and I could tell that she was not convinced, that she was siding with Fanny. Her eyes are brown and soft in expression but very steady in their gaze. I could feel my annoyance with her turning into rage. “She couldn’t give him what he needed,” I said. “She let him down.”

  “Well, after all, she grew up in the West Indies. That was where they met, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes, they met on Nevis. But what has that got—”

  “You said yourself that the parsonage would have been freezing in the winter.”

  “Parsonage?” Later I was to become more used to Miss Lily’s oblique approach to things, so strangely at odds with the directness of her gaze. But now I was bewildered. And my anger grew.

  “You probably think I am taking too much on myself. I knew hardly anything about him, about Lord Nelson, when we started this work. History was never my strong point in any case. I have got secretarial skills, that’s about all you can say. Most of my work is not historical, it is more contemporary.”

  “I don’t know what you are driving at with this reference to the parsonage.”

  “Well, she would have been used to something warmer, wouldn’t she? As I see it, he left her there alone, or with just her father-in-law for company, I mean disregarding him being a hero and all that side of it, either in a freezing parsonage in Norfolk or in lodgings somewhere she had not chosen to be. Draughty places, those old houses.” I saw her hunch herself a little and clutch at her elbows; she was putting herself in Fanny’s place. “And I grew up in this country,” she said. “He doesn’t write to ask her if she is keeping warm enough or anything like that. I mean, it was the middle of February. He was all right, wasn’t he, he was down there in the south.”

  “All right? Good God. He had received a shrapnel wound in the battle that opened his forehead to the skull. He was suffering from attacks of breathlessness due to stress and fatigue, he had—”

  “She was alone, she was frightened for him. You would think he would know what it is like to be frightened.”

  “But he did,” I said. “He never showed fear himself, but he understood it in others, and he was always gentle with those who—”

  “But that is among men, isn’t it?”

  I had no idea what she meant by this, but I could not escape the feeling that she was getting the upper hand in this discussion. And she was daring to criticize him, Horatio. The skin on my face felt tight with the efforts I was making not to let my fury show. I was afraid it would show in my eyes, which tend to get suffused with blood when I am upset. I moved round behind her to the other side of the table, where she could not see me without swivelling right round in her chair. The screen was facing me now, but I took care not to look at it. At a distance of about three feet, I found myself studying the back of Miss Lily’s head. Her dark brown hair was caught up behind in a ponytail, exposing the nape of her neck, naked, palest cream in colour, surprisingly sturdy-looking, with a tender, faintly gleaming down on it, just below the hairline. Her earlobes looked pink and waxy seen from this angle, somehow improbable; ruby-coloured drops of glass dangled from them and seemed to shiver in the light. Words continued to issue from the front part of this head: “It’s just like Scott of the Antarctic, he left his wife alone for months and years while he went looking for the South Pole …”

  One moment the words were there, in the space before her. Then, quite suddenly, the sound of them diminished, receded. A sort of throbbing hush descended on me, as if something had been pressed over my ears. I was still looking intently at Miss Lily’s undefended nape and the shape of her skull under the hair. Then she turned in her chair a little, as if to glance round. I had a moment of giddiness and the hush was broken, sounds started coming again, occupying all the room. I moved round to the side of the table. I felt no anger at all now, only a sort of surprise.

  “I read about it in the paper,” Miss Lily said.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, “what was it you read about?”

  “This rumour that she had an affair while he was away in the frozen wastes. His son was asked about it and he said it was absolutely untrue and slanderous because his mother was not that sort of woman. What sort of woman did he mean?”

  Her voice had risen. I looked at her face and saw that she was flushed. “What did he mean?”

  This sudden annoyance over an issue so trivial seemed absurd to me and
went a good way to restoring my feeling of being altogether on a higher plane than Miss Lily. I could not understand how I had allowed myself to get so upset. After all, from Avon Secretarial Services, what could one expect? She was light-years from appreciating that for a bright angel like Horatio, praise was manna, it was essential nourishment, essential combustion, he fed and blazed, like the sun. No good trying to explain this to her, she was still talking about the wretched explorer. Where did Scott come into it, a person only remembered for the manner of his death? Scott was not a hero. Heroes succeed.

  “He probably didn’t know what he meant himself,” she said, more quietly. “Years ago I read it, and it always sticks in my mind.”

  I decided to let her go early. It was too late now to start dictating. Besides, the mood was wrong. This time when I went to get her coat, the parallels stayed in place: she was still busy when I returned, putting her things into the bag. I waited until we were at the door. Then, quite casually, I put the question to her. “How did you know I had been in the basement?”

  “In the basement?” She looked puzzled, but this could well have been a pretence.

  “When you arrived this evening, when I came to answer the bell, you said I had come up the stairs too quickly. I have been wondering—how did you know I had come up the stairs? Was it just because I seemed out of breath?”

  “Oh, that,” she said. “Well, yes, you did seem a bit breathless as a matter of fact, but I would have known anyway. These dark evenings, before you come to answer the door you always put the light on in the passage, and anyone standing on the top step outside, if they look up at the glass panel over the door, they can see a sort of shadow passing over it. If the shadow comes from the right—my right as I am standing there—it means you must have come up from the basement. If it comes from the other side, you have been in your study or the sitting room.”

  She was standing immediately below me, on the bottom step. Light from the passage behind fell upon her face. She was smiling as she looked up at me. Not a broad smile, just a sort of deepening of her usual expression. “How funny you should remember,” she said. She seemed pleased, I couldn’t quite see why.