Losing Nelson Read online

  All this was to come. But how strange it must have seemed to you as you lay alone there on the first night, in that room of multiple reflections. It was the first time in six months that you had slept away from your ship.

  5

  That night my sleep was broken by dreams. As so often, he was with me and there was the accustomed sense of mourning or lamentation, the massed sense of it and somehow the grain of it in the air. I never see his face clearly. I see it only in glimpses, in obscured light, a fleeting impression of the mouth, the brows, the line of the jaw. I am always strongly aware of his presence, shadowy, indistinct, but immensely potent. He knows I am there, he expects certain things from me, but I am not sure what. This time we were together on that ill-fated expedition up the San Juan River in Nicaragua.

  I had been reading Pocock’s account of it—the fullest there is. Horatio saw a good deal of action on land, a fact that is sometimes forgotten. In January 1780, as a twenty-one-year-old captain in command of the Hinchingbrooke, a frigate of twenty-eight guns, he was ordered away from the West Indies to assist the army by landing a force at the mouth of the River San Juan, which rises in Lake Nicaragua and flows into the Caribbean Sea. This was the naval part of a grandiose plan to transport troops up the river, storm the Spanish forts that controlled the upper reaches, and take possession of the lake, thus at one stroke cutting Spanish America in half.

  What had not been much studied by the army high command, if at all, was how to get troops totally unacquainted with tropical rainforest, along with their artillery and essential supplies, through the hundred miles of the river’s course. No-one knew the position of the enemy strongpoints. No-one knew what conditions were like in the interior. Apart from local Indians, nobody was thought to have navigated the river since the days of the buccaneers, a century previously. Horatio’s task was to escort a convoy of troopships to the river’s mouth and wait there on guard till they returned.

  There were, however, problems. None of the five hundred or so officers and men who had been assembled had the smallest experience of river navigation; many of them were already sickening and should have been in hospital instead of preparing for active service. And the preparations had taken too long. The dry season was already two months old; the river was so low that boats often had to be unloaded and hauled by men wading in the shallows. Now enter Horatio. He does not believe that the soldiers can manage it unaided. So what does he do? As always, he is practical, unhesitating, prompt without rashness. He offers to leave his ship at the river’s mouth and lead the way with two of her boats and fifty of her crew. Major Polson, the commanding officer, is delighted to accept.

  Offered like that, on his own initiative, fifty men! It had impressed me when I first knew of it, and I had thought often about it since. Even here, even at so young an age, he showed the angelic nature; he disobeyed or at least exceeded his orders, which were simply to await the troops’ return. I’ll give you myself and fifty men. It was the same for him, I tried to explain to Miss Lily when we were revising this section later—in May, I think. He went with them, he led them, he took the same risks. The fangs of the cotton-snake, the sucking of the vampire bats, the hammer stroke of the sun by day and the noxious damps of night. And the diseases, I said, above all the diseases—malaria, bloody flux, black vomit. Before they reached the enemy, before they even knew where the enemy were, a third of the expeditionary force was already dying. Miss Lily couldn’t see it—there is a lot she doesn’t understand and never will. It wasn’t the same for him, she said, it was his idea, not theirs. By that time she was accustomed to make remarks, whether invited or not. What had they to gain? she said, with that very clear and candid look of hers. What was there in it for them? A typical Miss Lily question, difficult to answer and at the same time quite beside the point. Those men had no destiny, I told her, tried to tell her. Horatio had. Destiny is possessed by very few.

  Fifty miles upriver, fifteen terrible days; then the first sign of the enemy, a small outpost on an island in midstream. Horatio’s sailors take the battery by storm, he leading them barefoot, his shoes having got stuck in the mud. Two days later, just below the lake, they come upon a powerful fort, called by the Spanish Castel San Juan. Horatio urges an immediate assault by storm—when did he ever counsel delay? But the castle is in a strong defensive position, above the fiercest rapids in the river. Major Polson waits to land his men, he waits to take the surrounding heights and position his batteries, he waits for reinforcements to arrive. And while he waits the clouds build up, the rains break. The forest steams; malaria kills the men in droves.

  After a siege of eleven days, the fortress surrenders. The surviving Spanish are in even worse shape than the besiegers—gaunt, starving, in rags, living in low sheds made of putrid animal skins. A stink of death hangs over this place, this possession so much suffered for, so much longed for. Spanish and British are now united in misery. The rains have swollen the river to a torrent; the expeditionary force is trapped there in the jungle, unable to get through to the lake. There, in the mud of the riverbank or among the wet leaves, they continue to die.

  And Horatio, by a miracle, is not there! He is not there to see the taking of this stronghold and its disease-ridden garrison. If he had remained, he would have died, beyond a doubt, choked on his vomit like so many. He had acute poisoning after drinking from a pool infected by the sap of the manchineel tree; he had contracted yellow fever, fatal in most cases; it is likely he had dysentery as well. Yes, he would have died … At the very last moment, before it became impossible for any boat, even a canoe, to struggle up against the flood, a message came from Admiral Parker, his commander-in-chief. Horatio was recalled; he was to make his way down to the sea again, hand the Hinchingbrooke over to his friend Collingwood, return to Jamaica, and take command of the Janus, a bigger and better frigate, with forty-four guns. Not luck, destiny, I said to Miss Lily, but it was a waste of time trying to explain such distinctions to her. Those fifty men, she said, what became of them? They all died, I told her.

  Make his way down to the sea again. Of all the phrases contained in his orders, that one had stayed in my mind. The sea was life, the land was death; these were the parallels on which my book was constructed. His mutilations were suffered on land, a fact I regard as highly symbolic. But that was not the reason these words had stayed with me. It is a question of dates. Horatio’s reprieve came on April 28, and that was the date I first started seeing Penhas. True, I was younger by a year, I was only twenty; but that is not important. The date is the same, and for both of us it meant a return to life.

  Horatio set out that same day. He could not walk unaided; he had to be helped onto the boat. As those swirling, muddy currents carried him towards the sea, I was seeking help from Penhas, who belonged to the same London club as my father and was a psychiatrist. I am aware of the time difference; in Nicaragua it would have been several hours earlier than in London. But Horatio’s journey to the sea took four days and four nights; it is the parallel that has to be kept in mind—that full river was still carrying him over shoals and shallows when I began the first of my conversations with Penhas. And it was Penhas who brought me back to him, to Horatio, whose hope lay in the sea, just as mine—guided by Penhas—lay in him.

  Of course, this was not apparent either to Penhas or myself on that first meeting between us, which was more in the nature of getting acquainted. I had been dreading this meeting, as at the time I dreaded everything not entirely familiar, which in practice meant everything but the four walls of my room.

  It was the end of my second year at Cambridge, where I was reading philosophy. I had been working very hard. I had to give up my rooms in college and find lodgings in the town. Possible reasons. How can one know? It is difficult to know the moment when the world starts to change aspect. It was mainly a matter of suspicion getting out of hand. Twenty-two years ago now. The progression of my illness has become vague to me in its detail. At first merely a daily sense of surviving,
of reaching bedtime unscathed—coming through a tutorial, a chance meeting in a café or pub, even, later, just a wave of greeting across the street or a nod to some acquaintance in the library. The days bristled with encounters and my fear of them grew, extending to glances from strangers, especially certain faces, certain eyes. Unpredictable, uncontrollable, always just round the corner, the power to smash my life. Fear of eyes kept me from sleeping. Then one morning I was unable to leave my room. I dragged a cupboard across the door. When they began knocking and calling, I remember pressing back against the wall farthest from the door, pressing hard with my back against the wall—I remember the pain of it. They had to break in, and I soiled myself while they were doing it.

  At home in London, here in this house, in my familiar room, the fear receded, but I knew it waited for me outside. I kept my door locked. Monty talked to me, and so did my father—it was my father who wanted me to see Penhas. I had been schooled to trust my father’s judgement, and in his judgement what I needed was this fellow member of his club. Even so, I must have been somewhat better by then, or I could not have been persuaded.

  Penhas was in his fifties, aquiline of feature, with a short beard lighter in colour than the hair on his head, somber dark eyes, and a smile of disconcerting charm. Some faces grow indistinct in our minds as the years pass, but his has never done so, nor the slow, emphatic gestures he made with his hands as he talked. He talked a great deal. I have often heard since that the psychiatrist’s function is mainly to listen, but this was not true of Penhas, at least not at the beginning. He told me a great deal about certain things that had befallen him when he was just my age. He was a Sephardic Jew whose parents had gone from Spain to Turkey in the years before the Second World War. The family had an agency for imported machine tools in Izmir, but this collapsed, leaving them in poverty.

  Penhas wanted to get back to Spain and set off in 1952 with almost no money in his pocket. All sorts of things happened to him on the way. He had begged in the streets and snatched washing off a line and even rooted about in rubbish bins. But the stories I afterwards remembered most vividly were the stealing of the bicycle and the adventure with the high-class prostitute, the poule de luxe, as Penhas always called her, reverting to French for this salacious interlude.

  Both these stories contained a moral lesson in Penhas’s view, but the lesson of the bicycle was easier to see. In some hilly region, footsore and penniless, he had seen two bicycles standing outside a lonely farmhouse, one very old and battered, the other quite new. He had stolen one of them. Which one did I think? “The new one,” I said, because it was expected, but he shook his head. No, he had taken the other. Now came the lesson: in thievery, as in all else, there were degrees of gravity. This, rather obvious in itself, led to the more important point: the vital need to make distinctions. Sanity depends on our ability to make distinctions, Penhas was fond of saying. The bicycle he took was falling to pieces. The reason he stole the washing was to wrap it round the wheels, the tyres having rotted off. He had done a thousand kilometres on this contraption, he told me.

  The poule de luxe episode must have happened before this. It seems she took a fancy to Penhas, took him to live with her in her luxury apartment, which he had to vacate whenever there were clients, maintained him for some unspecified period of time—a period he brought to a close by leaving at dawn with the contents of her purse. As I say, the lesson in this case was not so clear to me. It had to do with clarity. Incompatible missions, Penhas said. Hers was to pursue her profession, his was to get to Spain. Sanity depends on clear perceptions of incompatibility.

  His adventures were interesting to hear about, and when I did begin talking to Penhas, it was not so much a matter of admitting or confessing anything but of trying to invent a personality for myself capable of responding to the confidences he had made me—the confidences of a fellow twenty-year-old. I think now that this was his deliberate purpose. Otherwise, how could it have been that I knew so much about these youthful escapades of his but nothing at all about his later life, his metamorphosis into a psychiatrist with an office in Brook Street, W1, speaking carefully perfect English, and a member of the same club as my father, about whose doings at twenty I knew nothing at all? I could not match his exploits with any of my own, but I could more than match them with Horatio’s.

  So it was that in the presence of this talkative psychiatrist I found him again. He had been there all the time but underground, obscured by the stress of A levels and my studies at the university. In the course of time I told Penhas about the chess game, the two faces side by side in my father’s book, the luminous moment of my discovery that Horatio and I had lost our mothers at the same age. I told him about my history teacher, the redoubtable Grigson. I told him about the scrapbooks and the model ships.

  Once this was avowed, there was no going back. Penhas fastened on it. With gentle questions, he led me along. For months he was the only person I really talked to. I told him about my earlier conviction that there existed some intimate link between this great man’s life and mine. Penhas encouraged me. He never reacted immediately. Things I said would lie dormant between us, sometimes for several meetings. Meanwhile, though he never admitted so much, he did some studying on his own. His knowledge of eighteenth-century sea battles visibly increased. He even began to use nautical terminology.

  “Think of the mystery of the man, use him as a source of meditation.”

  “What mystery?”

  “The mystery of his courage. Think of him there, in the heat of the action, on the quarterdeck. Think of the tendency to fear there must have been. Men are more likely to be mastered by fear when they are fully conscious of the risks they are running. Everyone else would be too busy manning the guns and so on. Only the officers on the quarterdeck had to stand still and be shot at. Think of that quarterdeck. At the forward end, looking across the waist towards the forecastle, there was only an open rail. That is where your Horatio stood. Think of him there, dressed impeccably—full uniform, cocked hat, silk stockings, buckled shoes. Immaculate. Unoccupied, fully aware of his danger, carnage all around him. Like a rock, Charles, like a rock. That is the way, that is the way forward. Horatio is your lifeline—stay with him, he will get you out and about. Join the Nelson Club, there must be one—in London there is a club for everything under the sun, if you can run it to earth. I’ll get my secretary to find the address.”

  This was towards the end of my treatment. I remember it quite well, an afternoon in late summer. I remember the gesture of his hands as he spoke, a downward movement, with the palms facing inwards, about eighteen inches apart, as though sketching two sides of a box. Dark eyes with their look of sombre sincerity. Sunlight filtered through thin curtains, white or beige. Two parallel lines, the sides of a box. Horatio is your lifeline.

  There is a club; Penhas was right. It is called the Nelson Club and has premises in Bloomsbury. But I did not become a member then, in spite of his advice. In fact, I did not join until much later. At the time I was not up to joining anything. I did not return to university. For quite some time I could not easily be persuaded to leave the house. Neither Penhas nor anyone else succeeded in explaining how it had come about, how it was that I had stumbled into such terror. It might as well have been some viral infection, like jaundice, for example. You are dreadfully familiar with the symptoms but you don’t know why it happened, why it happened to you. However, I stayed with Horatio, who did not know fear, and he with me; we have been together ever since.

  The fifty lives he had offered were wretchedly consumed. Many thousands more were to go the same way before Dalling, the governor of Jamaica, and Lord George Germain, the colonial secretary, were to abandon the dream of possessing Lake Nicaragua and opening a route to the Pacific. There was no expeditionary force left by this time. Since the previous February, two thousand troops had been sent to Nicaragua, of whom fewer than a hundred survived, and they were wrecked in health. More than a thousand sailors died in their ships.
These are details that make Horatio’s escape more wonderful, and I liked to dwell on them.

  The final act of this tragic farce was curiously fitting. When, finally, the survivors made their way downriver (the boat they left in was called the Lord Germain, after the man who in the remote purlieus of Whitehall dreamed up this costly enterprise), the rearguard of Light Dragoons was left behind with orders to blow up the bastions of the fort before abandoning it. Of these soldiers, recruited in the quayside bars and brothels of Jamaica, a motley assortment of Portuguese, Italians, Negroes, and a few British, nothing more is known. Perhaps the charges were too weak, or the bastions too strong, or they were surprised by the Spanish before they could complete the work. Presumably they died there. All that is known for certain is that by the end of the year the Spanish flag was again flying over the Castle of San Juan. The jungle closed over the corpses just as the discreet silence of government closed over the expedition itself.

  How fortunate for Horatio that he was not present at the final stages of this fiasco. Now that is luck, I said to Miss Lily. I was still trying to make her see the difference. He was not associated with the defeat. Because, you see, he had advocated immediate assault by storm, but Polson had chosen to wait. Waiting proved disastrous, so Horatio emerged with credit, his superiors were favourably impressed. Had young Nelson been listened to, they said, the castle would have been taken, the lake attained, and the healthy uplands of Nicaragua occupied before the onset of the rains. It was never put to the test, of course. That is what we mean by luck, I told her. Reputation thus enhanced, skeletonic, dressed in his captain’s uniform of blue, white, and gold, he was borne swiftly away, down to the open sea. Heroes have both, I said, they have luck and destiny.