Losing Nelson Read Online Free PDF Page A

she allowed herself remarks like that. I must have been breathing rather heavily and she had seen it. How could Iexplain 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 thecoat 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