Losing Nelson Read online

  I had been impressed by Sims’s meticulous scholarship, the detailed way in which he charted Horatio’s movements: the meetings with the Hamiltons and the prime minister, Sir John Acton; the dinner at the royal palace, when he sat at the king’s right hand; the breakfast aboard ship on the Sunday morning, when he was host to a distinguished company, including Lord Grandison and the bishop of Winchester and family; the sudden request, shortly before 11 A.M., that his guests should quit the ship because a French man-of-war had been sighted off Sardinia and he intended to sail immediately to intercept her.

  Nothing new in this, but by following the timing so closely and cross-cutting between events, Sims had succeeded very cleverly in conveying the drama of Horatio’s life at this time—the glitter of high society, the political manoeuvring, the looming death-struggle with France for supremacy at sea, which was not to end until twelve years later, at Trafalgar. Sims was a man with a sense of the clock, so much was clear; a man with a feeling for parallels. After several weeks of painful indecision I had written to him, and he had replied with thanks, courteous though brief. Whereupon I had proposed to the committee that Sims should be invited to become an honorary overseas member. He had accepted the invitation. No more had been heard from him, but somewhere I still had the single sheet of his notepaper with at the head his address in Naples and—or so I hoped—the telephone number.

  Of course, he might well have moved since that time. It was Friday afternoon on the fifth of September when I had the impulse to inflict grievous bodily harm on Badham. I knew that if I hesitated much or launched on any sort of debate with myself, I would never make the call. As if under the duress of a dream, I opened drawers, fumbled among papers, finally found Sims’s note. There was a telephone number at the head. Then it came to me that my passport might be out of date. I had not been out of the country since the trip to Tenerife with my father. After more minutes of search I found it: still seven months to run. I did not know the code for Italy—I had to look it up in the phone book.

  In the course of these harassing preliminaries, the protection of dream wore off and my hands became unsteady. However, I did not dare to pause. A peevish, waspish sound to the ringing tone, foreign and far away. Could he be there, at the back of such a sound? Five years … Then a voice, without discernible accent but in some way familiar.

  “Sims.”

  The hiss of his identity seemed to hang in the air between us. There was an agitation in my throat, but I contained it. I explained to him who I was.

  “Yes,” he said, after a considerable pause, “I remember that you wrote to me. Some years ago, yes. Where are you now? Are you in Italy?”

  “No,” I said. “No, I am here.”

  There was what sounded like a thin clearing of the throat at the other end of the line. “Here is always where we are,” the voice said.

  “Here in London,” I said. “I am planning to visit Italy, Naples in fact, and I wondered if we could … It would give me great pleasure if you could spare some time for me. I thought we might meet for a drink. Compare notes.”

  “Notes?”

  “As you know, I greatly admired your article about Horatio’s first visit to the city.”

  There was again a pause, this time rather briefer. “Horatio, yes,” Sims said. “Well, it would have been very pleasant, Mr. Cleasby, but I am leaving Naples soon and I’ll be away until the end of the year, so I am afraid—”

  I showed a promptness now I had not known I was capable of. “When?” I said. “When are you leaving?”

  “At the end of next week.”

  “I was planning to come more or less at once. You will still be there in the early part of the week?”

  In a tone that I thought indicated resignation, he said, “Yes, in the early part of the week, certainly, I will still be here.”

  And so it was all arranged. I would telephone Sims from my hotel on the evening of my arrival. We would meet and have a drink together.

  Reaction set in immediately. I had some moments of giddiness moving away from the phone, and then I experienced a sort of twitching behind the knees, distinctly alarming. It might have been an obscure symptom of hunger; nothing had passed my lips since the tea and digestive biscuits of the morning. Despite this weakness, I was pleased with myself. I had acted with decision, I had not allowed myself to be fobbed off. Something like Hotham’s Action, when we nobbled the Ça Ira. I decided to celebrate by phoning the takeaway for a pizza.

  There was a shadow over things, however, and it grew darker while I waited for the pizza to arrive. I would not be here for Miss Lily’s return. She was due back at the end of the following week—I had been ticking off the days. Now, after all this time of waiting, I would not see her before I left. It couldn’t be helped, I knew that. Sims might hold the vital clue, perhaps even something he wasn’t himself aware of. Armed with it, I would return. Miss Lily would commend my initiative, we would complete the book together, it would revolutionize Nelson studies … All the same, I felt heavy-hearted at the thought of missing her, and when the pizza arrived I no longer wanted it. I had some red wine instead.

  They were anxious days that followed. There were things I had not foreseen, not being an experienced traveller. It was short notice for early September, still the holiday season. I succeeded in getting a flight to Rome for the following Monday afternoon, but no connecting flight to Naples was available. I would have to go by train. I could have got the train ticket through the agency, but it didn’t occur to me.

  The whole thing bristled with difficulties. What should I pack, what should I wear for the journey? I had been shuffling around in old clothes for months, not changing very often. My shirts had been folded away too long; they had grubby marks along the folds. My trousers had horizontal crease marks made by the hangers. Before I could become a traveller, before I could present myself to Sims, I had to clean myself up, go to a barber, buy some socks.

  I felt almost distraught, locking the front door, locking myself out, hoisting my case down to the waiting taxi. However, this state of nerves subsided, eclipsed by the different order of stress involved in finding my way about at Heathrow. On the whole I acquitted myself well there, I think. I lost some minutes waiting in the wrong queue, among people who were travelling business class, but I soon realized the mistake and moved on down to the right counter.

  I got the train from Rome Airport to the central railway station without mishap, but I had a bad time at the station itself. I was confused by the crowd and the jostling movement, by the need to be constantly stepping out of the way. Untrustworthy-looking people in white caps with plastic peaks repeatedly asked me if I wanted a hotel. However, I found the ticket office, joined the queue. When I got up to the counter and met the dark, indifferent gaze of the clerk—eyes that had seen so many other eyes, so close; horrendous thought—at this last moment I asked for a single ticket, not a return, asked for it in English and with a sudden loud insistence, as if it might be denied me.

  It wasn’t, of course; the clerk’s expression did not change by the slightest flicker. When I tried to ask about train times, he shook his head, raised one hand in a gesture that seemed to take in the entire station. Information was to be sought out there; his job was selling tickets.

  Clutching my little oblong of pinkish card, I walked away. I had a sense, exhilarating and alarming, that I was burning my boats behind me. This single ticket was a mark of my determination, my commitment. Without the truth, I would not return. However, I had first to get to Naples. I still did not know the time of departure. The information office was full of people waiting and there was only one woman behind the counter to answer their questions. Here and there along the station concourse there were large illuminated screens, but these did not show times of arrivals and departures, as I was expecting, only a series of images fleeting and diverse, quite soundless: a woman undressing, drifting autumn leaves, oddly angled faces.

  Anxiety fastened on me almost unawares. I fou
nd myself breathing open-mouthed, as if I had been running. It was quarter past two. The heat of the day outside had flowed in, struck through the girders of the roof high above. I felt it pressing down on my head. I was still lugging my case. I thought of finding a left luggage office, but what if I had to leave in a hurry? There was no friendly-looking buffet where one might have hoped to get tea and a jam doughnut in total anonymity; there was only a sort of glassed-in café, where waiters hovered about. You would have to sit down, catch the waiter’s eye, struggle to make your wants known, worry about how much to tip. I could not meet the hazards of such a place until I knew the time of my departure, and probably not even then.

  I was not far from total anguish and immobility when I came upon a poster at the far end of the station that had details of intercity connections. There was a train to Naples at 2:46. A little star was printed after the time, and I saw from the foot of the poster that this was a Eurostar train, distinguished with a note in both Italian and English, Alta velocità, High speed. There would almost certainly be an extra charge on a train like this. It was now 2:27 by my watch. A man in a railway uniform was passing close to me. I stepped in front of him, swinging my case. “Eurostar ticket?” I said to him loudly. He regarded me without much expression but not unkindly. I tried again. “Eurostar ticket?”

  He raised a forefinger as if testing the wind. “Uno,” he said. “Binario uno.”

  Platform one. We were then alongside platform twenty-two. Hastily back the full length of the station, humping my case. Sure enough, there it was, clearly marked, the Eurostar ticket counter. A strip of red digital lettering above stated that all seats had to be booked in advance. Five or six people were already queueing there. It was 2:35. Minutes ticked away. I was sweating heavily, unable to prevent myself from gasping. I have always, from childhood, practised open-mouthed breathing as a relief from all manner of stress, and now it has become quite involuntary. I felt that people were looking at me, but I did not return these glances. It had become immensely important, symbolical, not to miss this special high-speed train. I understood now that the train itself was a part of the design, that I was being tested. A failure at this point could put my whole enterprise at risk.

  At last my turn came. I paid the supplementary charge, received the white card that recorded my booking. Where did the train leave from? Platform twenty-two, naturally. It was now exactly 2:43. I had three minutes to traverse the whole length of the station again. In a panic of haste I set off. The blood throbbed at my temples, my vision was clouded, I heard my panting progress through the crowd. I made it with half a minute to spare. The brand-new train was there, towering above me, in all the gleam of imminent departure. I found my seat, collapsed into it, waited for the moment of drawing away.

  We remained where we were, without explanation, for the next seventeen minutes, while my breathing returned slowly to normal, my heart quietened, the perspiration cooled on my body. I understood the whole thing now: there had been no need for haste, no need for fear, a period of error had been allowed for, the train had been scheduled to wait. This thought brought no ease of mind; it merely increased my sense of responsibility. It came to me now, in these moments of restored calm, came to me like a folding of wings, that it had not after all been fear of missing the train that had agitated me so but fear of what I was doing, of the mission itself, a fear no doubt quickened by the distress I had just been put through, but already there, already existing—I had brought it with me from Belsize Park. Miss Lily’s face came into my mind, that flushed look of hers and her indignation when she met with something that seemed contrary to common sense. I was swept with a desolate sense of her absence and I seemed to hear her voice saying, “But what does it mean, Charles, what does it mean?”

  Her smile when she heard about the brandy—I hadn’t minded it somehow. And Bobby’s solemn stare … The progress of the train was smooth, almost silent. I felt weary but safe from harm for the moment, quite relaxed. The countryside south of Rome slipped by unheeded. I began to think again, in a wandering, sleepy kind of way, of that last voyage in the battered flagship, that long return to gratitude and grief. They took every care to keep you fresh, repeatedly draining the spirits off from below, topping them up from above. But the sentinel who was on guard beside your barrel got a bad fright one morning—he saw the lid lifting up and gave the alarm. Nothing supernatural in it; your body had absorbed most of the brandy, and a pressure of gas had built up.

  It was early in December when you arrived at Spithead, two weeks later when you made your way round to the Nore. When you were taken from the cask and inspected, you were found to be in a perfect state of preservation. An autopsy revealed that your heart and liver and lungs were free of all trace of disease; all your vital parts were perfectly sound. You might have lived to a great age, the doctors said. But your remaining eye was going; in a few years you would have been completely blind.

  They took you and put you in a plain coffin, one that had been waiting for you ever since 1798, made from the timbers of the Orient, the French flagship destroyed at Aboukir Bay. This was cased in lead and then enclosed in an outer coffin encrusted with heraldic devices, your coat of arms, the stars of your orders, a crocodile representing the Battle of the Nile. In this you lay in state in the Painted Room at Greenwich. Here the Prince of Wales came alone to pay his respects, that same prince who had once caused you torments of jealousy. Next day the doors were thrown open to the people, who came in such enormous numbers that the governor of the hospital panicked and called for extra troops. They were not needed, there was no disturbance, the people were docile with grief.

  Three days later the grand river procession from Greenwich to London, the stately City barges with the black and gold of their cabins and the brocaded liveries of the oarsmen, your funeral barge towering above them with its huge canopy and its plumes of dyed ostrich feathers tossing in the wind off the river, the silent crowds lining the riverbanks. There was a moment which I had always felt to be significant, ever since first reading about it. I couldn’t remember when—perhaps in the Grigson days. As your barge was brought alongside Whitehall Stairs, the sky darkened and there was sudden violent squall of rain, lashing the bearers as they struggled to raise the coffin and place it on the waiting funeral car. This intervention of the sky was remembered and retold, those darkened moments when you quitted forever the element that had seen your triumphs.

  A vast procession had been assembled to escort the body to St. Paul’s, but there were too many soldiers, it was a river of red, the blue naval uniforms were almost overwhelmed. Just forty-eight men, seamen and marines from HMS Victory. The crowd roared its approval of them—they were cheered continuously as they marched past, proudly displaying the flags of their ship, two huge Union Jacks bearing the marks of the enemy shot and the St. George’s ensign, which they held up to view, ripped and shattered, amid the sobs and plaudits of the crowd. But silence fell at the passing of the funeral car. As it went by, with its tall four-posted canopy and nodding plumes, bearing the gilded coffin high above the heads of the people, its progress was accompanied by a great rustling noise like the sound of waves on the seashore, as the thousands of male onlookers removed their hats.

  The burial service was performed after the office of evensong. The coffin made its slow way up the aisle to the haunting music of William Croft’s “Burial Sentences”: I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord. But the piece most people remembered and spoke about came at the end of the service, just before the coffin was lowered to its final resting place in the crypt: the music composed by Handel for the funeral of Queen Caroline in 1737, with its ringing assertion But his name liveth evermore!

  Precisely at thirty-three and a half minutes past five, the coffin was lowered into its grave and disappeared from public view. It was the garter king at arms—I tried to recall his name but could not—who proclaimed the style and the titles of the dead lord: Thus it hath pleased Almighty God to take out of
this transitory life, unto his divine mercy, the Most Noble Lord Horatio Nelson, Viscount and Baron Nelson of the Nile, and of Burnham Thorpe, in the County of Norfolk, Knight of the Most Honourable Order of the Bath, Vice-Admiral of the White Squadron of the Fleet …

  I drifted into sleep before getting to the end of the list. I roused myself to produce my ticket when the inspector came, but for most of the journey I was comatose. I didn’t take much notice of the surroundings until we were approaching Naples and I saw the tawny, crumpled summit of Vesuvius, familiar to me from a hundred illustrations. There were glimpses of the coast, a glitter of sea, a strip of bright sand, a vivid cluster of beach umbrellas, swallowed up almost at once by the ugly and haphazard jumble of buildings stretching up from the shore. On the other side, to my left, a constant rippling line of mountains, bare, bluish in this afternoon light, rank on rank of them.

  I took a taxi from the station to my hotel, the Santa Lucia, closing my eyes on the anarchic disorder of the traffic. This improved when we reached the wide seafront road where the hotel was. All the same, I was glad to climb out from the taxi into the flooding sea light that came off the bay, glad to be able to understand the driver’s English, work out the liras, give him a tip that seemed acceptable. Glad, in short, to have survived thus far. My visit was already assuming the characteristics it was to have all the way through, almost till the end: a surviving of encounters, a sense of having—only just—kept a step ahead. Horatio was in this city. I had to keep going till I found him. More than that: I had to keep on the lookout, keep my mind open for the truth when it came. I kept on, I was careful—almost till the end.