Losing Nelson (40 page)

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.

All the details of my arrival at the hotel were attended by this same sense of obstacles ovecome: checking in, ascending in the lift, following the porter down the quiet corridor, finally finding myself alone, still all in one piece, in my distinctly handsome room—they had given me one overlooking the bay.

Only now, in this first solitude achieved in Naples, about to reach for the phone, only now did I register the address of this hotel—such a famous name, it had not been necessary to mention the street. But I noticed it now on the brochure lying beside the phone: Via Partenope 46. Parthenopean Street. It was named after that short-lived republic whose fate had tormented me for months, named after those Neapolitan Jacobins whom Ruffo and his Calabrian irregulars defeated and drove into their forts, to whom the
promise of safe conduct was made and not kept, who came out in the end to cast themselves—you said—on the mercy of their notoriously unmerciful sovereigns. Did you believe it? Did you? It was that botched attempt at liberty, those heart-sickening deaths, that the street commemorated, not your loyal support of the Bourbon monarch … I felt a chill, something like premonition, as I took out my wallet, found the card on which I had written Sims’s number, made the call.

“Ah, it’s you,” he said without particular expression. “So you have arrived.”

“Minutes ago,” I said. “You see I lost no time in phoning.”

“No, you didn’t.”

“I am very much looking forward to—”

“Did you have a good journey?”

The conventional politeness of this took me quite by surprise. The journey had nothing to do with it; I was on a mission. “Yes,” I said. “Quite uneventful.”

“Uneventful is always good,” Sims said. “Especially on aeroplanes.”

“I was wondering if tomorrow we might meet …”

“During most of the day I am busy, unfortunately. There are so many things to see to before I go away. But late in the afternoon I would have some time, if that suits you. Or perhaps you would prefer the day after?”

“No,” I said. “No, tomorrow would be fine.”

So it was arranged. Sims would come to the Santa Lucia at 5:30; we would have a drink together at the hotel bar. It was a great relief to me to have definitely fixed this appointment. Sims was a resident of this city, he would know Italian, he was a knowledgeable, scholarly fellow, he might put me on to something, new material, a line to follow up. I would have to be on the alert—it might be small, something Sims himself might not think was important. Something to establish
your good name forever and join mine to it. Entwined together, inseparable, vindicated and vindicator, the bright and the dark.

In the glow of hope these thoughts afforded me, I went over to my window and looked across the bay. Your eyes saw this when you looked out from the balcony of your room in the Palazzo Sessa, residence of the Hamiltons, where you stayed. Not perhaps the immediate foreground lying just below me, the little harbour with its moored launches and yachts, the gently glimmering water warmed by the reflections of the boats to shades of ochre and pale orange. No, but you would have seen the more distant view, the open sea, the island of Capri with its ridged head and long jaw. Like some fabulous dragon. Perhaps you too made just that comparison in your mind, looking out from your room that September of your second visit, when you were falling in love with Emma Hamilton. Some warm evening like this one. Languid and feverish after your great victory at the Nile, still suffering from the strain of it and the shock of the wound. She moves quietly about in the room behind you, preparing something for your comfort. What you need most for your comfort is the enfolding of her lovely thighs, but this is five months away still, in Palermo, on a cold day of February. No heating to speak of, chilly marble everywhere in those Sicilian palaces; Miss Lily would not have liked it, she feels the cold. In the tent of the blankets a warm refuge, a mingling of breaths.

A white cruise liner was crossing the bay from right to left, in the direction of Sorrento. Immediately below me a policeman in a white helmet and pale blue uniform was directing the traffic. To the north, barely a hundred yards beyond the marina, was the Castel dell’Ovo or Castle of the Egg, from which, under the eyes of the British fleet, some of the Jacobins, clutching the belongings they would never need again, were embarked on their transports. A massive, squat, square-topped building, windowless on the shore side. I could make
out a poster on the façade, brightly coloured, with a figure on it that looked like Donald Duck but of course couldn’t be. This castle was so close, only minutes away, I could leave it to the last.

It was after seven. Already there was some gathering of darkness in the air; strings of coloured bulbs on the café fronts and along the harbour railings had been lit while I watched. After the trials of the day I was tired. I would eat at the hotel, go early to bed. In this new place a nightmare might give me some respite. I would be fresh next day, ready to search for him, ready to face Sims. I had high hopes of Sims.

I
slept fitfully but better than usual. I had a strange dream, different from any I could remember. I was walking on smooth sand, gleaming wet, giving slightly to the weight. I was looking for something, stones of some kind that might be concealed in the sand, but I found nothing. The sand became more shining and softer; my feet made oily swirls in it, like oil spreading on a wet film. A white goat approached me, very shyly. I tried to encourage the goat to come nearer, and it did so, finally. I put my hand out to caress the goat but found that it had turned so that its rear was towards me. I felt my hand caught in a warm dry clamp. I thought at first it was the goat’s prehensile anus but saw after a moment that he had a very long tail with a thick, fleshy bump at the end like a bullrush and this contained a kind of mouth, in which my hand was imprisoned. For some moments I tried to withdraw it, not violently but discreetly. I felt some disgust, some fear, but mainly a desire that no-one should witness my
humiliating predicament. No-one did. Still politely tugging, I rose to wakefulness in the pale light of early morning. Slowly the sense of mystery and beauty and repugnance caused by this dream faded away, to be replaced by an uneasy question: why was there no reference to Palazzo Sessa in my guidebook, otherwise so packed with information? Why was it not marked on any of the maps?