Losing Nelson (25 page)

“No, no.” He sounded on the defensive—I had scored a hit with this counter-question. “No, but he spent a lot of time in the West Indies in his younger days, didn’t he? I mean, I know he was a hero and all that, but youth will have its fling—he was only about twenty. The climate favoured it. There was an abundance of woman slaves, a hundred thousand or so in Jamaica alone—no shortage of choice …”

I remembered it now, his novel was about the slave trade. Clearly an obsessive type. “There is no evidence for anything of the sort,” I said. “One can always speculate, if that is what one likes doing.” In the midst of saying this, it came into my mind, with the force of a decision already made, that I would resign from the club.

There were no more questions. Pratt-Smithers uttered some thanks, and I was released. I made at once for the door but not in any abrupt or unceremonious manner. Appearances had to be kept up. Pratt-Smithers suggested a drink with himself and guest, who it seemed wanted to pursue the question of Horatio’s sexual activities in Jamaica. This was more than I could stomach, and I declined, though politely enough, as I hope and think. Naturally I said nothing about my decision to resign, otherwise it might have seemed I was acting out of pique rather than responding to a mortal insult. I was eager to get away. Kismet Walters was bearing down, doubtless intent on telling me about his latest researches into Horatio’s secret links with the world of Islam.

“I thought your talk was really good, first-rate,” Hugo said to me as I was passing through into the corridor that led to the stairs. He came close to me in the manoeuverings at the door. He moved his narrow shoulders as if uneasy in the confined space. I saw his eyes, moist blue and full of seeming sympathy, quite close to my own. “I am ever so sorry at the poor attendance,” he said. “Shame it is such a rainy night.”

I could not be sure whether this was meant sincerely, so I said nothing, merely nodded. Next moment I was out and down the stairs, into the street. Once I was on the pavement, however, under cover of night and anonymity, my composure began to crack. It was something like the experience of having drunk too much and been constrained to conceal it, show no sign; then the release into solitude, the cooler air—one begins to stagger and lurch.

This I did now in spirit, so much so that I went the wrong way, turning left into Doughty Street. Without quite knowing how, I found myself in the unfamiliar region south of St. Pancras. The rain had stopped, but the pavements were still wet, they gleamed in the reflected lights of cars and streetlamps. I must have lost the best part of an hour wandering here, but I was not much aware of time passing. Then, quite by chance, I found myself back in Mecklenburgh Square, which was quite deserted.

I knew the way now, but I did not want to turn towards home. Nothing awaited me there but the evening’s end, the final acknowledgement of failure and fiasco. I walked round the small square several times, past the locked gates and the spiked railings. From the darkness on my left, beyond the railing, came the smell of wet leaves and mould and some vague fragrance of flowers. But the trees and bushes inside were indeterminate, massed together in the dark. I had the sense, frequent in nighttime London in these regions of quiet squares, of walking at the limits of the light, as if I were on the bright
rim of a dark bowl and the light merely served the essential darkness, made it denser, less accessible, created a territory separate enough, extensive enough—or so it seems at night—for rapine or oblivion.

An impulse came to me to climb the railings, get through somehow into the darkness beyond, enter that darkness and stay in it forever, absorbed, annihilated, unseen and unseeing in the thickest part of the bushes. All my persecutors I could escape in that way, all my problems with Horatio in that nightmare city. In fact, even Horatio would be extinguished, in that darkness beyond the railings he would die with me. For some terrible moments I wanted this, wanted to climb in there and put an end to us both. Then a car went round the square, making a soft hiss on the wet road, a small sound but it startled me, like a reminder or a warning. I turned and began to walk back towards Guilford Street. With calmer feelings came a renewed sense of my isolation. It was impossible to pretend to myself that I was unhurt. From time to time as I walked, the smart of tears came to my eyes.

I heard my name called, and when I stopped and turned I saw, but not immediately, that it was Hugo, unfamiliar in a macintosh. I had only ever seen him in the rather skimpy clothes he wore when behind the bar—tight waistcoats, shirts with narrow collars, that sort of thing. We had passed each other, it seemed, and he had recognized me at the last moment and called after me.

“You don’t usually go this way,” he said.

“Well, no. I felt like a bit of exercise, so I decided to take a turn or two round the square before making for home.”

We stood there a moment or two without saying anything more, and I was about to resume my way before the silence grew too protracted, and in fact may even have taken a step or two, preliminary to bidding Hugo a cheery good-night, when he said, “I live quite
near, just round the corner. Would you like to come for a coffee or something?”

I had actually started to refuse this offer, I think, when something—perhaps no more than a renewed wish to postpone my lonely and defeated homecoming—made me change my words in midcareer, shape them to a stumbling acceptance. And so we went together back to the square again and along the western side of it.

“Very handy, living so near the club,” Hugo said as we went along. “Ten minutes after leaving home I can be behind the bar.”

He had a basement flat just off Great Ormond Street, not far from the hospital. He took my coat and umbrella and hung them up in the narrow hallway. I sat on a sofa with pink and white stripes while Hugo made the coffee, a process I could watch from moment to moment as the tiny kitchen was built on an open plan with only a counter separating it from the room where I was sitting. The lower part of Hugo was cut off by the counter; his head and shoulders were sometimes visible, sometimes not, depending on whether he was standing straight or reaching down for something.

A sense of wonder possessed me as I sat there, conversing intermittently, glimpsing Hugo in sections, his glinting earring, his furry-looking hair—he wore his hair very close-cropped—his rust-coloured pullover, narrow-fitting and short, as all Hugo’s clothes seemed to be.

“I think it is a real shame so few people came to your talk,” he said through the hatchway as he put the coffee things on the counter. “They missed something, they missed an experience.”

It irked me, this further reference to the fiasco of my talk; it brought back my earlier doubts as to where Hugo stood in the matter. Was he probing the wound to elicit winces and whimpers so he could then carry tales back? It was important to give nothing away.

“Well, it was a rainy evening,” I said. “Besides, the talk is what it
is. I mean, it is as good or bad as it was before I gave it, irrespective of the audience.”

I wasn’t quite sure what I meant by this, but Hugo widened his eyes at me and nodded seriously. He was sitting opposite in an armchair upholstered in some velvety red material—there was a lot of red in this room. A faint, sweetish smell like incense hung in the air, and on the wall behind him there was a poster, a picture of a man with fine-drawn features, rather androgynous-looking. His hair was matted with some silvery dust, and his suit glittered with tiny spangles like coarse sugar. In the background, a dark sky thickly scattered with stars.

“Well, my word,” Hugo said, “I call that a really mature attitude.”

Away from the softer lighting of the bar, Hugo looked older, nearer my own age, rather than in his middle twenties as I had thought. The earring and the short bristle of the hair and the clothes like those of an adolescent growing too fast had all contributed to this impression, as did his habit of twitching his shoulders from time to time, as if in some impatience with his own body.

“Take your jacket off if you feel too hot,” he said now. “I keep the heating full on, it’s my only extravagance.”

“I’m all right like this,” I said. It was indeed very hot in the room, and the predominance of red made it seem hotter still. I felt a wave of nostalgia for that cold breath that had reached me through the railing of the square and the promise of oblivion that had come with it.

“I love the heat,” Hugo said. “I should have been born in the tropics. I like to go round, you know, just light clothes. Sometimes in the summer I don’t bother with clothes at all. It is very private here, no-one can see in.”

I said nothing to this. Hugo waited some moments, then said, “Rise above it, that is what we’ve got to do. Like he did.”

“Who’s that?”

“Him, Lord Nelson.”

This seemed a very strange thing to say about Horatio, who did not need to rise above anything, because he was above already. What could Hugo mean, what could he be referring to? I was about to ask him when he started speaking again.

“Rise above it, that’s the only way. Take my case now. I have only got these two evenings at the bar, and on Saturdays and Sunday afternoons I work in a bookshop in Covent Garden. I have to manage on that for the time being. There was someone sharing with me, but he walked out two weeks ago. Just up and left without a word and took a looking-glass that used to belong to my grandmother, framed in silver and mother-of-pearl—a family heirloom, you might say.”

“Can’t you get it back from him?”

“He didn’t leave a forwarding address, did he?” Hugo gave a twitch of his right shoulder. “What a creature,” he said. “After two years and a bit. I don’t know why I am talking to you like this—I just feel you are a very understanding person.”

He paused on this and again seemed to wait. Silence lengthened in the room. My eyes were confused by the heat, the pink sheen of the sofa, the spangled figure on the wall. I was troubled by the blank television screen on my right, a lurking presence whose gaze I could only avoid encountering by being careful not to glance that way.

Hugo shifted in his chair. “Well, anyway,” he said, “one has one’s value as a human being, they can’t take that away, can they? I am a bit of a psychologist, and working behind a bar gives you scope for it, if you know what I mean. Of course, you have to have intuition. I am very rarely wrong about people. You always struck me as a free spirit. First time I saw you, I thought to myself, here is someone who knows his way about, someone who has seen a thing or two, been in some
odd corners. Someone not easily shocked. A man of the world in the true sense of that term. Some of those others, you would think they had spent their entire lives with only Nelson for company.”

I was conscious now of the beginnings of a headache. “Who is that chap with the silver hair and spangly suit?” I asked.

“Who do you mean?”

“The man on the wall behind you.”

Hugo smiled a little, as if he thought I was joking. Then, as he looked at me, his face lost all expression. “You don’t know who that is?”

“No idea, I’m afraid.”

“That is David Bowie.”

“He’s a pop star, isn’t he?”

Hugo shook his head slightly, as if seeking to dislodge some small object. “I don’t believe we are having this conversation,” he said. “David Bowie is much more than a pop star, he is a wonderful actor and a superlative singer, he is the media star of our time, he is the person I would most have wanted to be. He is just like me—he has the same attitudes that I have, he is nonaggressive, he believes in cosmic harmony and animal rights.”

“You can’t really tell whether he is a man or a woman, can you? Why is he wearing that sugary, shiny stuff all over him?”

“That is stardust. David Bowie belongs among the stars.”

This was a fairly sickening thing to say in any case, but there was something in the inflection that brought about a return of my suspicions. I thought back quickly over his earlier remarks, and it seemed to me now that I could see a pattern in them. What had he meant by saying that Horatio had to rise above it?
Rise above what?

“I’ve got everything of his.” Hugo gestured towards a low, openfronted cabinet against the wall near the sofa where I was sitting. “Would you like to hear something?”

“Are you trying to make a convert of me?”

Hugo seemed not to hear this. He got up, crossed to the wall beside me, and crouched before the cabinet. “What shall it be?” he said, crouching there at the side of the sofa, close beside me, tilting his head and stretching his neck to see along the row of CDs. His pullover had ridden up over his narrow waist, showing some inches of dark red shirt. His eyes were invisible to me. There was the back of his head, his neat ears, the left one with its gold band; there was the pale, undefended nape of his neck. Higher, up towards the crown, a glaze of pinkish skin showed through the sparse hair. Hugo was balding.

Pity for his early baldness, for the pathetic inadequacy of his starry icon, made this dwelling on him more terrible, more monstrous. He was too close to my eyes. Sensation, sound, the hot colours of the place, the lingering smell of joss-sticks, all merged in that helpless scrutiny of the frail skull. I was impaled on my own regard; my eyes were pierced to an even narrower focus, the slight bump above the hairline, just before the more pronounced convexity of the occipital bone. A ridge rather than a bump. It had the dull shine of an eggshell under the hair …

Then he straightened up, moved away. “Got to begin somewhere,” he said. “Let’s try this.” He put in the disc, then turned towards me. He was smiling, I suppose in anticipation of the music. But it seemed to me that his face changed when he met my eyes. A moment later a sound of lamentation filled the room, a voice that resonated with shuddering falls, as if the recording had been made in some remote and echoing cavern far from human eyes. It was like all the sorrow of my dreams. I was sweating heavily and I felt giddy. I spoke loudly through the music, explaining to Hugo that it was late, that I had to leave. He seemed not to understand.