Losing Nelson (33 page)

I did not want to reply to this, not thinking it her business; but she waited, with her eyes fixed on me. It was only then I realized that I had omitted to eat anything that day.

“A sandwich,” I said. “Cheese sandwich.” It was the first thing that came into my head, and at once I was carried back to the time before my mother left, that distant May afternoon, the walk along the dyke, the splendid profusion of the hawthorn flower.
Moles don’t eat sandwiches. Look me in the eye, Charles
 …

But I didn’t fear Miss Lily’s eyes. “Cheese and cress,” I said.

“You are so absent-minded, you could be talking about yesterday
or the day before or last week. I’ve known Bobby to have them, dizzy spells, when he skimps on his lunch at school, but he’s still growing, and I don’t think you are, are you? Well, we’ll just have to see what there is.”

Her expression had softened talking about Bobby, but I could see that she was fixed on some purpose. “What do you mean?” I said.

She gave two or three brisk nods. “I’ll just go and have a look.”

I asked her where she was going, but she went out of the room without replying. After a few minutes she was back again.

“Must have been a bought sandwich if you had one at all—there is not a scrap of either cheese or bread anywhere to be found. Cress I didn’t bother to look for.”

“Well, it was a bought one.”

She looked at me with a scepticism that she took no trouble to conceal. “All I can find,” she said, “in the way of foodstuffs, is four eggs that are not in a carton, so we don’t know their date of birth, a cauliflower that has seen better days, and some potatoes in a string bag. Oh yes, and a bit of margarine.”

She paused on this. I understood now that she was proposing to do something with these poor remnants. She was waiting for me to agree or object or perhaps even to suggest, as an alternative, that we should go out to eat. But I did not want to be with other people; I wanted the two of us to be together quietly. So sudden and strong was the attraction of this idea that I was afraid to speak, afraid of giving myself away. But I think silence betrayed me just as much, or else it was something in my face. After a moment she said, “Well, it will have to do, won’t it?”

The upshot was that instead of going ahead with the book, that evening we ate together in the kitchen. The eggs were all right still. Miss Lily broke them one by one into a cup to make sure. The central parts of the cauliflower were eatable, the potatoes virtually pristine;
we had them steamed. There was just enough margarine to make an omelette. I still had a stock of claret, and I fetched a bottle up from the basement passage where I kept it.

She sat opposite me across the kitchen table. As we ate and drank, I felt glad and relieved to be released from the book for a while. It was a kind of holiday, and I knew I could not have had it on my own, could not have had it without her. There was no-one else. Monty was no good, we had not been on close terms for years—not since we were children, in fact. And now that he was dressing up in our dead father’s clothes … There was something wrong with him, he needed some central interest in his life.

No, there was no-one else. I was aware that this gratitude I felt was illogical in a way. She was kind, but it was a constant kindness, not just for me. She was merely existing, being herself. I looked across the table at her; I was able, though briefly, to look into her eyes. The June weather had brought an olive tint to her face and throat—not that the days had been so sunny, but she had the sort of complexion that is deepened by warmth. She was wearing a white shirt, open at the neck. She was in that moment the sum of all the moments of her being as these had gathered for me, as I had known her, from the first time she had come to my door, Avon Secretarial Services in person. Her jokes, her rages, the perennial surplus from which she made her gifts, the limited sympathies that made her fail to understand Horatio, her championing of dim Fanny, her belief in wrapping up well …

As we ate and the wine went down, she talked about the circumstances of her life, something she had done rarely before and then only briefly. I had grown unused to conversation, and there seemed to me an extraordinary immediacy in everything she said; they were the things on her mind, the things that affected her from day to day. She had been overcharged for repairs to her car and intended to take it up with them, they might think women didn’t know much about
engines but they would learn better, she had done a car-maintenance course at evening class. Bobby was something of a problem at school, not that he was a bad boy but he was dreamy, half the time he was in a world of his own, sometimes his teachers got cross with him, he answered a different question from the one they were asking, they thought he was trying to be funny. She had been to the school; the class teacher said it was only a phase. He was very good at designing things and drawing, where he got that from she didn’t know, she wasn’t any good at it.

“Perhaps from his father?” I said—a bold stroke, but I was curious.

Miss Lily did not seem to be put out. “Not him,” she said. “He might have been interested in someone behind a bar drawing him a pint. Actually he wasn’t so much of a beer drinker, as far as I remember. Scotch would have been more his style, malt of course, and a choice of wines with dinner. He had a lot of money. This will sound funny, but he was a totally ideal person to me. For a while.”

“How was that?”

“He was fifteen years older, divorced, rather good-looking. He was used to running the show. Like I say, he always had plenty of money. He had his own firm and he employed quite a lot of people. I suppose he told me how many—it was the sort of thing he would have told me—but I can’t remember now. The boyfriend I had at the time worked for him, that’s how we met, I was waiting for my boyfriend outside the office. I was just turned eighteen. I used to watch a lot of soaps, especially the ones where everybody seemed rich. All those glamorous people with such eventful lives. I used to love those programmes, I never missed. There was one called
Dynasty
, which I specially liked. My own life wasn’t glamorous or eventful, I was working in an office, typing out invoices. Then when I met this man, he seemed to belong to that other world. It wasn’t that I thought
Dynasty
was the real world, but I thought there was a real world that was like
Dynasty
. Know what I mean?”

“I think so, yes.”

“His name was Alex. Perfect, isn’t it? I was never a beauty, but I was attractive—I spent more time on myself in those days. I was lively too. He sent me flowers all the time. He had a Porsche. He took me to expensive places. He was like a hero to me.”

“Like a knight in shining armour.”

“Shining Armani, more like it. I thought, you know, this is it, this is the real thing, this is what I was meant for. When I got pregnant, the flowers stopped coming. He told me to get an abortion. If I didn’t, I would have to go it alone—he wouldn’t help. An abortion would have been the reasonable thing, but I couldn’t do it, I just couldn’t. I mean the reasonable thing then, at the time. When I look at my Bobby now, it’s just unthinkable. I had the baby on my own—Mum and Dad helped, they were great. Then when Bobby was born, this man had a change of heart. He’d be ready to help if I’d sign papers acknowledging him as the father. He would pay the rent on a flat. He was full of enthusiasm and paternal pride—it was a boy, you see. He was going to be a beautiful parent. ‘I’ll buy him a speedboat,’ he said to me. That was what did it for him. A speedboat! There was the little kid, a tiny baby, with all his need for care and love, and there was this fool who was his father talking about speedboats. See what I mean? It was just what somebody in
Dynasty
would have said. But things were different now. This was a real baby and I was a real mother. I told him to make himself scarce. I never took a penny from him, and I never watched
Dynasty
again. I never watch soaps now, except for
Coronation Street
.”

I listened spellbound to this story, which Miss Lily told without rancour or bitterness of any kind. She didn’t mention any man currently in her life, though perhaps there was one. I didn’t want to think
about that. She lived in a world different from mine, not more eventful exactly—after all, I had Horatio—but somehow more spacious and hazardous. I wanted to reciprocate, find something from my own experience that might engage her interest. For some time nothing came to mind; then I hit upon it.

“It is really quite extraordinary,” I said, “the shift there has been in the course of this century in the tone of Nelson biographies. Right up to the 1930s there was a concern to show him as he was, a truly noble character. Not all his biographers, of course, but nearly all.” I was thinking here of bilious Badham.

“How do you mean?”

“Well, there was a concern to show him as
good
. Not only brave, not only a naval commander of genius, but virtuous too. The Victorians denied the adultery with Emma because they didn’t think it proper behaviour for the hero of Trafalgar. That’s going too far—we haven’t got the hang-ups they had—but I take the old-fashioned view myself. His modern biographers don’t seem to care one way or the other. Here we have the national hero and they skate over the question of whether he was good or not, in the sense of truthful and honourable. They simply don’t seem to care.”

“Well, we have gone down in the world, haven’t we? Nelson has gone down with us, I suppose. We don’t think we are so great anymore, so we don’t need to make him out to be so great.”

“But that is terrible, it is degenerate.” I felt the usual distress at this belittlement of him, this abject surrender of a glorious past. “You would think it would work the other way,” I said. “Here is someone who should make us proud to be British. Where has the pride gone?”

“It hasn’t gone anywhere, as far as I am concerned. It was never there in the first place. I’m not proud to be British any more than I would be proud to be a Hottentot. There’s such a thing as luck, I grant you that. Hottentots might have less going for them in the way
of secondary education and supplementary benefits. But I honestly don’t see where the pride comes in. How can you be proud of an accident?”

This was so wrong-headed and even perverse that for some moments I could not find the words to reply. “Where you are born is a matter of chance,” I said at last. “No-one would deny that. But from that moment onwards, you accumulate impressions, form attachments, grow familiar with certain habits of thought and speech, certain great events in the past of your people. Horatio Nelson looms large in our past—he established our supremacy at sea for a century to come, he saved us from the vile French. Imagine what would have happened if it had gone the other way at Trafalgar and that rabble had come sailing up the Thames. That is what I meant by saying he should make us proud to be British.”

Miss Lily paused a moment, then said, “Charles, I know you would like me to admire him as much as you do, and I take that as a compliment, but I can’t. It’s no good pretending. I can see he had his good points, but I wouldn’t like my Bobby to turn out the way he did, just shaped for one purpose. There is more to life than shooting broadsides at the French, that’s all I’m saying. As I see it, they took him away at twelve and sort of processed him. That midshipman business was a way of processing people. As far as I can see, they’ve been processing him ever since. Why couldn’t they say, Well, yes, he was a great admiral and a very brave man, and yes, he was generous and warm-hearted, and he won a sweeping victory in the hour of his country’s need, but he was narrow-minded and eaten up with vanity and could never admit he was in the wrong? He was a person, in other words. But no, they had to make him into a great man.”

“You can’t talk about him as an ordinary man. He wasn’t an ordinary man. He was a great hero. And I don’t believe he was processed, either. You are seeing things in the light of the present. As
usual. You are ignoring the nature of eighteenth-century society. You talk as if he had a lot of choice. He was well connected on his mother’s side, but he couldn’t expect much help there—on land, at least. He inherited no fortune. He wasn’t bookish, he didn’t want to be a parson like his father. One step down and it would have been minor civil servant or farm bailiff.”

“But that is the whole point. That made it easier for them.”

“How do you mean?”

“The less choice he had, the easier they could brainwash him.”

“Who on earth are the
they
you keep talking about?”

“Them that stood to gain. Anyway, we were talking about being proud, and he really doesn’t make me proud at all. Being proud means not lowering yourself. Same thing applies to me and you and Nelson and everybody. I was left with Bobby, but I kept my head up. I’ve had to bring him up on my own, trying to make ends meet, working free-lance so I could be home when he got in from school. If he turns out well, maybe I can be proud of that. No, I’ve said it before, I can’t help it, he puts my back up—Nelson, that is. He was always so ready to get people killed. If you look at it one way, he was a sort of serial killer. I like men who are gentle and kind and try not to hurt anyone. Women too, for that matter.”

She paused again, then said in a deeper tone, “People like you, Charles. You can put it down to the wine if you want, but there’s something I’ve been meaning to say to you for a long time now. I mean, I know you are very bound up with him and it’s a good thing for a man to have a hobby, but I have to say that you are just about as different from Admiral Lord Horatio Nelson as a person could possibly be.”

I was quite unprepared for this. She had spoken with such conviction, it was almost like a blow. My first impulse was to get up, move to where she could not see me. She was wrong, of course, I was
Horatio’s other self, the shadow side, the reverse of the medal; I could not lose him without losing myself. But she was saying that she liked me, that I belonged among the people she liked. It came to me in my confusion that perhaps these contradictions were only apparent. After all, Miss Lily had nothing much in common with theatrical, beautiful, self-deluding Emma, but sometimes, in my thoughts and dreams, their bodies had blended …