Losing Nelson Read online

  The old man was in modest lodgings in Bath when the news came. He and Fanny were spending the winter there, the Norfolk parsonage too miserably uncomfortable in cold weather for his age and frailty. In February, Horatio’s promotion to rear-admiral was posted up and his father, in the innocence of joy, posted an immediate letter to him—My dear Rear-Admiral. Then, less than two weeks later, came the news of Cape St. Vincent. The rector was in the street when he heard it, heard of his son’s part in it. He was obliged to return in haste to his lodgings so as to hide his tears. The height of glory to which your professional judgement, united with a proper sense of bravery, guarded by Providence, few sons, dear child, attain to, and fewer fathers live to see.

  I know these words of his by heart. They sounded in my mind as I stood there. Orotund in phrasing, but no mistaking the pride. My father had no pride in me, or at least he never showed any. I suppose I never gave him cause, I was not good at the right things. I was good with my hands, even when quite small, good at making things. For a brief season I shone at chess. Then at fifteen a certain sort of order came into my mind, things began clicking into place, I started to do well at school. But these were not the right things. I think now that for my father there were no right things, but as a child I tried to find out what they were. I suffered when I failed and must have shown it. Better not to show, better to conceal, much better—perhaps that was the lesson, the guiding principle my father gave me.

  All the same, it was showing that brought me to Horatio: that and my father’s need—I suppose it was a need—to chasten and subdue. I remembered it again as I stood before this meek-faced father, remembered the forced jocularity of that Treasury colleague defeated at chess by a child, remembered the strangeness of my father’s displeasure and his words. Look at these people here—they had some reason to be pleased with themselves. And the two portraits side by side, the ravaged, dark-suited statesman and the dashing captain in the splendour of full-dress uniform. No comparison, then or now. But there was a shadow on the splendour now, one that I could not dispel, and it came to me in the words of Cardinal Ruffo’s secretary Sacchinelli, who wrote a biography of his employer after the latter’s death. The violation was at sea. He was talking about the violation of the treaty with the Neapolitan republicans.

  How could anything Horatio did at sea be wrong? Written years after the events, of course, and partial to Ruffo; but in the silence of that early morning the words were loud in my mind, seeming to defy argument, like a warning bell in a threatened town. No, not at sea. It was in the city that the plan was made and the harm done. Naples seemed to me more than anything else like a carnivorous plant that I had seen years before on a television wildlife program, in the days when I still watched television: a wide-mouthed, pinkish flower, like a frilly trumpet, with a pool of some sweet substance in the depths of it, into which unwary flies went slithering to be dissolved and devoured. Quite unexpectedly, as it seemed from one day to the next, I had lost the bright track of Horatio’s life, slithered down into this scented, tainted well of Naples. I felt in danger of dissolving there, ending up as a mere particle of nutriment for this monstrous host of a city, so flaunting and gross and beautiful, which so much changed Horatio’s life.

  I should have left the basement then, before Sacchinelli’s words could work their poison, but I waited long enough to feel the return of nausea, the sense of being caught in the sticky gum of a city I had never seen. Fear followed this close behind, fear of my need and my solitude, made sharper by the vastness and promise of the night outside, where some bird had started singing in the darkness; fear of the eyes and the face before me, from which I could not look away. They were mild no longer, they watched me, they were my father’s eyes.

  I was saved by a sudden thought of Miss Lily, whose eyes were calm and somehow dwelling on things but not watchful at all. She had felt sorry for Fanny in that cold parsonage with no-one to hold her in his arms. Better to be warm in bed … The matter-of-fact voice with its dying falls of Essex stayed in my mind as I left the basement, shuffled in my slippers back up the stairs to my room. Slight edge of protest in it, as if borders unquestioned by the decent were constantly being impinged upon, infringed. What borders? Once more in bed, I tried for some time to determine this. There was a slide of light now, very faint, on the plaster mouldings on the wall above the window. With the approach of dawn, the eccentric birds of England’s Lane had stopped singing. I passed into sleep without being able to decide what it was that for Miss Lily made life fall short.

  7

  On the Wednesday of the week following, I went in the evening to the Nelson Club, as I do most weeks. Wednesday evenings are open evenings at the club; there is usually someone giving a talk, and members can invite guests or bring their wives (the membership is entirely male; to the best of my knowledge no woman has ever enrolled, though I have heard talk of an Emma Hamilton Club with premises in Battersea, which boasts a large female membership). There is no Fanny Nelson Club, of course. Who would want to identify with the wronged wife?

  I had been a member of this club for eight years now. Making up my mind to join had involved me in much travail; three months of painful hesitation elapsed before I felt able to take the plunge. In fact, becoming a member of the Nelson Club and engaging Avon Secretarial Services were the two most decisive steps I had taken in years, perhaps since choosing to confide in Penhas.

  I didn’t go there for the company—far from it. I could well have done without that, but I was always hoping to learn something more about him; the smallest fact can be illuminating when it is added to others. It could be anything. Generally, of course, I was disappointed. That evening a man called Robbins, a long-standing member of the club, was due to give a talk on the system of signalling by means of coloured flags, devised by Admiral Sir Home Riggs Popham and introduced into the navy in 1803, not long before Trafalgar.

  The premises are on the top floor of a tall, narrow-fronted house off Gray’s Inn Road, above an obscure publisher of devotional literature. There is no lift, the stairs are uncarpeted, and the bannisters have a rickety feel to them; but there is a small licensed bar, open on Wednesday and Saturday evenings, a reading room where you can find the publications of the Navy Records Society and back copies of the Nelson Despatch and the Trafalgar Chronicle, and a lecture room that can accommodate an audience of seventy or so (it is rare indeed to have that many).

  They open the bar at half past six. It was about ten to seven when I arrived, and there was no-one there but Hugo, the barman, and a morose, sleepy-looking man called Jimson, sitting on his own at the far end. I was feeling very much on edge, having struggled for hours that day and the one before to disentangle the events of June 1799 in Naples and establish a strict chronology, especially for the period spanning Horatio’s arrival in the city on the afternoon of the twenty-fourth, the quitting of their forts by the rebels on the twenty-sixth, and their arrest and imprisonment on the twenty-eighth. It all lay here, in these few fateful days. If I could only get the times right, fix the moments at which things had been said and done, surely I could clear him of blame. How wonderful to be the one to free him from the shadow that has been hanging over him so long. Nearly two hundred years, ever since Robert Southey’s scathing verdict of 1812. Those terrible words of his came frequently to my mind these days: … no alternative but to record the disgraceful story with sorrow and with shame …

  I asked for a glass of red wine, with a vague idea of fortifying myself, restoring the corpuscles. It came from a Spanish bottle and was roughish but not unpleasant. While I was paying for it, a couple called Barber came in and stood beside me at the bar.

  “Here we are again,” Barber said. “Half of the draught lager for me, please, Hugo, and a Bloody Mary for Barbara. You ready for Popham’s flags?”

  This question was put to Jimson, who, however, did not reply. Barber smiled at me and shook his head. He is a shortish, balding, chirpy man with a beakish nose and a thin mouth and a ha
bit of tapping his feet. Upon meeting his eyes and his smile, I at once looked away. For years now I have not been able to sustain eye contact for more than a few seconds, and I found the close proximity of the Barbers distinctly oppressive, especially in a place so nearly empty—I can endure much better the nearness of people in a crowd. I was looking straight before me when he spoke again.

  “Your turn coming up soon, old boy, isn’t it?”

  “Not for some weeks yet,” I said. I was sure he already knew the exact date of my talk, which was Wednesday, April 9. They had asked me to do it on the second, but that is the date of the Battle of Copenhagen, last of his great victories before Trafalgar, and I wanted to be at home for it, at my table, with nothing to distract me. “It is up on the notice board,” I said. Thinking about it made me nervous—it was my first talk in eight years of membership.

  “What is it about again?” Mrs. Barber asked, and she tilted her head a little, like a thrush on a lawn—she is birdlike too, they are both birdlike people. The question irritated me, though of course I showed no sign. There was no interest in it, only a sort of social reflex; she was keeping the conversation going.

  “Two Episodes in the Making of a Hero,” I said.

  “Ooh!” Mrs. Barber straightened her head from its tilt with an exaggerated suddenness, clearly derisive in intention. Why did she come to these meetings? I wondered, not for the first time. What possible interest could she have in Popham’s system of naval signalling? Anyone might think she would be glad to see the back of Barber for a while. But no, she always came with him.

  A short silence followed this exclamation of hers. To the oppression of their closeness was added that of their mockery. I have no friends in the club. People are jealous of me, they envy my intimate knowledge of his life. I never boast of this, but there is nothing I can do about the aura it creates about me.

  “Don’t much care for the title,” Jimson said, speaking for the first time, as if emerging from some unhappy sleep. “Heroes are born, not made.”

  “Quite right, good point,” Barber said, eager to ally himself against me.

  “Well, that is true of idiots,” I said.

  “I beg your pardon?” Jimson’s eyelids fluttered; he was rising to an unprecedented state of wakefulness. It came to me that he had misunderstood, he thought I was calling him an idiot. I felt an impulse to prolong this impression.

  “What is the point you are seeking to make, old boy?” Barber said. “We lowbrows need things spelling out.”

  What could they know about heroes? Jimson was interested in eighteenth-century naval dockyards; Barber dabbled in Horatio’s life, as many do, but had no essential knowledge of him. I felt indifferent now to their hostility. “Fools, cretins, morons, blockheads,” I said, and I paused long enough for them to suspect that I might be ending here, with these terms of abuse. Then I went on. “These are born, not made. You can’t refine on stupidity, can you? But the true hero has to go through the fire, he has to be purified, he has to shed his dross.”

  My own words moved me, they came close to my feelings about him, too close—I could feel my hands trembling slightly. I rested them on the bar; I don’t think anybody noticed. I glanced towards his portrait on the wall behind Hugo, high above the glass shelves and the rows of bottles, one of the earliest of the many likenesses of him painted by Lemuel Abbot.

  “What about humble heroes, then?” Hugo said from behind the bar. “People you’ve never heard of that do something really brave.”

  Hugo is somewhere round the thirty mark and has a narrow, long-nosed face, rather sensitive. He has a gold band passing through the pierced lobe of his left ear. He is not a member, at least he wasn’t then; he just came to do the bar twice a week. What he did with the rest of his time, I had no idea.

  “Or what about the people that devote their lives to others?” he said now. “You know, asking for nothing, spirit of service and all that.”

  “Hear, hear, good point,” Barber said.

  “I have nothing against them. They are not heroes, that’s all. Humble hero is a contradiction in terms. Heroes are public figures, they represent the nation.”

  Jimson was beginning to say something indignant about lowly privates who won the VC, he wanted to bring it all down to obscure people, but at this point I withdrew from the conversation. I turned away and rested my elbows on the bar and began to look more steadily at the portrait, which was deeply familiar, a rather good copy of the famous one commissioned by Horatio’s friend William Locker and painted during the autumn of 1797 while Horatio was convalescing at Greenwich after the amputation of his right arm above the elbow. The stump had not healed yet, he was still in much pain from it.

  Sparse grey hair swept back, mouth resigned to the maiming, the right eye not much showing its damage, though virtually sightless by now, three years after the injury on Corsica. A face bleak with pain and the knowledge of glory. He would be scarred a year later by a wound on the forehead at the Battle of the Nile, but otherwise this face would not change in the eight years remaining to him. It would, however, change greatly in the versions of him made by Lemuel Abbot, who died insane in 1803. Abbot did at least forty subsequent portraits of Horatio, slowly slipping into idiocy as he did so. In fact, Horatio was his main source of income during this long decline. Versions were painted for Lady Nelson and Collingwood and many others. In these later Abbot portraits, Horatio loses the severe and drawn expression of a man who has suffered much and made a conquest of suffering. His looks become gentler, better-tempered, like a ruddy, benevolent farmer at first, then gradually plumper, softer, more vacuous. Like Abbot’s brain, it occurred to me now. I have always been fascinated by parallel tracks, and this was an almost perfect example. Forty likenesses over the years. Horatio’s face softening back into infancy along with Abbot’s brain.

  Oppressed by this thought, which in some way seemed disloyal to him, I turned my eyes away from the portrait. The bar was more crowded now, though I had not been aware of people coming in. I expected to see Jimson and the Barbers, but there was no sign of them. Standing beside me now was Kismet Walters. My glass of wine was still half full. Through the open door I saw people passing down the passage towards the lecture room, among them the president of the club, a tall, slow-moving man named Pratt-Smithers. I had again the feeling that time had slipped away from me, I had somehow fallen behind.

  “Heroism is a form of pure energy,” I said to Kismet Walters, and he instantly and fervently agreed, nodding his head so forcibly that his white hair—still thick, though he is well into his sixties—flopped over his forehead. He is the only member of the club who comes remotely near to sharing my feelings for Horatio, but he is a dangerous ally because his notions are very simple, some might say crude. His nickname, which no-one ever uses in his hearing, comes from his lifelong denial that Horatio ever said “Kiss me, Hardy” when he lay dying belowdecks at Trafalgar. Walters regards such a request as out of keeping with the heroic character, altogether too unmanly. According to Walters, what Horatio actually said was “Kismet, Hardy,” this being the Arabic word for “destiny.” Basing himself on this premise, he has spent twenty-five years accumulating evidence that Horatio was early attracted to the faith of Islam, was in fact a secret convert, and made incognito trips to Cairo on three separate occasions for audiences with the sharif. He is intending someday to publish the results of this research.

  “Fuelled by faith,” he said now. “A hero has to believe.” He reared his head back and fixed me with his small blue eyes. “Valhalla,” he said.

  “Right enough.” I finished my wine in one go. “It’s nearly halfpast,” I said. “Shall we go in and hear what Robbins has to say?”

  There were a respectable number of people in there, about thirty-five, I estimated—not too many empty seats. Robbins had fixed up a blackboard so that he could illustrate with coloured chalks the way the system worked, how the same coloured flags or pennants were used for the numbers 0 to 9 and fo
r the letters of the alphabet 1 to 26 and how each ship had a codebook in which common words or phrases were allotted numbers from 26 upwards. Where possible, the ships used these standard forms; any other words had to be spelled out with a flag for each letter. The flags were hoisted to the upper yardarms or the mastheads, wherever they could be seen by the ships they were addressing.

  Robbins had faults as a speaker—he was hesitant in delivery and tended to repeat himself—but the miraculous nature of this new form of communication came through all the same, to me at least. He quoted the young Henry Blackwood, commanding the leading frigate, Euryalus, in the build-up to Trafalgar, within four miles of the enemy and nearly sixty from Horatio’s flagship, yet still, as he later wrote to his wife, “talking to Lord Nelson by means of Popham’s signals.” In that slow approach, as the British fleet closed in and the French under Villeneuve tried first to wriggle through the Strait of Gibraltar for the safety of Toulon and then made a run for Cadiz, it was the frigates that kept Horatio informed, using Popham’s system. And in that last, most famous message to the fleet, the word expects was substituted for confides because it was in the codebook and the other wasn’t, and could therefore be signalled with only one flag instead of eight.

  It was after half-past eight when the talk finished. I did not return to the bar or speak to anyone; I got my coat and went straight downstairs and out onto the street. It was a cold night, very clear. In spite of the streetlights, the sky looked black, and stars were visible in it. I went across Mecklenburgh Square with the intention of making my way to King’s Cross and getting the tube home. However, when I came out onto Gray’s Inn Road, without pausing to think about it I turned south, towards the river.