Losing Nelson (8 page)

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.

However, I did not, that night last February, dream of open skies and sunlit seas and the passage of Horatio to life again, but of that nightmare journey upriver with the fifty doomed men of the frigate
Hinchingbrooke
, the stream narrowing as the forest pressed dense and
close on either side. There was no turning back. Horatio at the prow with his narrow back turned to me, I behind him in the same boat. He looks round once, his face is noseless, eyeless, mouthless, just a pale shape of flesh beneath the sharp wings of his captain’s hat. But I know it is at me he is looking; we are about to face something terrible together. From the banks on either side a massed sound of lamentation, sorrow falling on us like rain. The river takes a bend and we come upon the Spanish stronghold, fortress of the dead and the dying, open gates, litter of corpses, crawling survivors, the swarming glint of flies. The sound of mourning grows wilder, it fills the air. Suddenly I am alone, he is no longer with me …

I woke from this sweating. I was not Horatio in the dream, he abandoned me, I did not take his place. Otherwise, how could I dream of the besieged in their putrid prison, something he never saw? An echo of the Holocaust, filmed images of the heaped dead, the walking dying, central experience of our century whether we lived through it or not, pit into which all our nightmares flow?

For a long time I lay awake in the darkness. The intensity of the dream, that mingling of horror and grief, kept my mind on a gloomy track. I thought again of those dying dragoons, lost between the lake and the sea, fumbling to blow up the fort. No-one will ever know what became of them. That much, at least, we know about Jervis’s decapitated marine. Perhaps he was no farther than a foot away. The grotesque
suddenness
of that death, no gasp or cry. And soundless in effect, amidst all that din of battle. Only the brief song of the missile, then the splatter of blood and brain over the face and chest of the crusty old admiral. Why did he call for an orange? To demonstrate unconcern? Or did some stuff splash into his mouth? Probable, yes, though naturally beyond the touch of proof. It must have been a shock. There would have been an intake of breath, an involuntary gasp of surprise. Even so seasoned a campaigner … Yes, the viscid substance
of the marine’s death, some of it entered his mouth, and he called for an orange to get rid of the taste. Naturally he stayed on the quarterdeck till victory was assured, stained with the marine’s blood and bits of his brain tissue and spinal marrow and the soft, fatty substances that had sheathed his nerves.

Somewhere that soldier’s name will be recorded, though I have never found it; also, just possibly, as an incident in some more general account, how he was standing at the moment of his death, whether loading or firing, and so on. But of course his name does not matter, what he was doing does not matter; he provided an occasion for his admiral, at the height of the battle, to call for an orange. Jervis acquired an extra name, he was created Earl St. Vincent. And Horatio, hero of the day, became Sir Horatio, Knight of the Bath …

Sea battle in those days so peculiarly designed for mutilations and maimings. A hail of missiles. Shrapnel from the cannon-shot, razor-edged projectiles from sliced and splintered timbers, whizzed through the crowded decks. Selective, however—death not a reaper but a sort of crazed sniper, here a face shorn off, there a leg carried away. Men rarely died in swaths. Sometimes, of course, when a ship was raked fore and aft—this was the fire Horatio had to suffer at Trafalgar, when he drove into the French line at right angles. But death in daily dress was the gouger, the slicer, lord of eviscerations and lopped limbs. And he, my Horatio, pacing back and forth on the quarterdeck, pausing to observe the progress of the battle, stars and ribbons prominent on his breast, showing no haste, showing no fear, as if he were out on a Sunday morning stroll, looking at birds or clouds through his telescope. What sublime conquest of self he gave proof of, not once but over and over, what shining bravery and quality of command. Nerves of steel, a courage not merely of endurance—that alone is not the hero’s brand—but possessing that fierce patience of the fighter who waits to deliver the killing stroke.
The mystery of his
courage
. Admiration, the old admiration, flooded over me as I lay there. Ever since my talks with Penhas, I had loved him for this sauntering in the midst of terrible damage. The ugly dream receded, and I felt again that prickle of tears so common with me then and now.

My own first experience of death was on a Sunday morning, during a stroll in the country. It came in the form of one sick rabbit, which my father stamped on. I was five years old—it is one of my earliest memories. My brother, Monty, was with us; he is three years older. We were out on a country walk with my father. This was in Surrey, where we lived then—it was two years later that we came to live here, in this house. We were walking along a footpath, not very wide, clay-coloured, dusty—I suppose there had been no rain for some time. Open, heathy country. I have worked out that it was a Sunday; we were generally taken for walks on a Sunday morning if the weather was fine enough, while my mother, unaided on this day of the week, saw to the lunch.

We met the rabbit, or it met us—it was coming from the opposite direction, hopping slowly towards us along the edge of the path, not seeming disabled or distressed, not at first, though slower than you would expect a rabbit to be in the open and in full view. When we were quite close, it stopped, and I saw the gummy bulge of its eyes and I knew there was something badly wrong with this rabbit. Its head was too big. At the last moment, when we were almost upon it, fear supervened; it made an effort to get away, leaving the path and going off perhaps three yards into the grass. Then it stopped again. I saw now that the rabbit was trembling all over. I looked at my father’s face to see what we were to make of this business, but there was no expression on his face at all. A last impression of the bloated head, the swollen, suppurating eyes. Then my father, without a word, stepped off the path, approached the rabbit, raised his right knee well above
the horizontal, and stamped down with force—a single, plunging motion. Then he briskly but thoroughly wiped his shoe in the grass.

Strange how clearly I could remember these actions in their exact sequence, yet had no certain recollection of the dead rabbit, nothing I could be sure belonged to the time. Images of pulped or squashed rabbits visited my mind frequently enough afterwards and still sometimes do, but I can never be sure they are authentic. The stamping and the wiping I remember well, however, the gray flannel trouser leg, two or three inches of greenish sock, the stout, cherrybrown brogue; this last could not have been much below my eye level at the time, when raised to stamping height—he was a tall man. He looked at us and I remember his face.
We have put the poor beast out of its misery
, he said.

I don’t know what I felt about this or what I feel now. We crave a dominant note, we seek in memory for the single element, one stain to colour the whole. But the tints do not blend, the colour eludes us. There was no balance in the thing. The dreamlike preliminaries, the loping, lolloping rabbit, my father’s casual stepping aside, the violence of the plunging shoe, that brisk rubbing in the grass.

We have put the poor beast out of its misery
. He included Monty and me in that decisive act. It was true, he had done a merciful thing. A paradox too difficult for a child to appreciate, the intention of mercy expressed in a gesture so seemingly brutal. And then there was the look on his face, a certain look of alertness, almost eagerness, as he scanned our faces to see if the lesson had gone home.

That is the earliest memory I have of my father’s face; the latest is the face of his death, that settling of stillness, as if he had answered his own question. But what lesson was it that he was seeking to bring home to us? This is the nature of reality, this is what the world is like, a place of suffering and pain which a man must confront with
decision? Something like pleasure on his face, a sort of brightness; not at killing the rabbit, I don’t think he took the smallest pleasure in that, but at the stern message implicit in it. He was observing his sons’ faces, driving home a moral, making a useful dent on the soft minds of Monty and me. The memory is all violence now, like the springing of a trap in a silent place; the moral side of it has been diluted. In later years my father seemed often to be held in that same incommunicable woe of the rabbit. Not his eyes, not the alertness of his glance, that was unimpaired …

I did not want to think about this. Horatio was my refuge, as so often. I felt the impulse to look again at the face of his father. For some minutes I lay there, summoning resolve. Then I got up, put on my heavy dressing gown, and went along to the kitchen, with the idea of making some tea and taking it down to the basement.

I
t was not yet light and very cold. I always turn the heating off before going to bed; it makes the air too dry and gives me headaches. Besides, a cold bedroom is more manly, or so I was brought up to believe. Apart from anything else, it’s a long-standing habit and habit is law, habit is safety; without habits we would just flop around and die. I put the heating back on now, however, and began to make the tea.

By then it was taking me a long time to make tea. In fact, everything seemed to take longer and longer. I urgently wanted to look at Edmund Nelson’s face, but things had to be done in order, I knew I couldn’t take short cuts. I had given up cooking because it took up too much time, all the pondering what to buy and getting lost in supermarkets. And there had been times when it conflicted with some important date in the Horatio calendar—I celebrated all the key events of his life. I didn’t mind giving it up, there is no framework in
it, no procedure, as an activity it is messy, amorphous, clogged with alternatives. Mrs. Watson would have cooked for me, at least on the days that she came, but I didn’t want that, it was too much of an involvement.

Run the cold water for ninety seconds to flush out the pipes, kettle two-thirds full, warm the pot, two level teaspoons of Darjeeling, catch the kettle at the precise moment it rises to the boil, on no account must it bubble or oxygen is lost and then you have to start all over again. Pour from a height of eight inches—I had made a pencil mark on the wall. Tea cosy. Allow to stand a full three minutes. Strainer at the ready, resting on its blue saucer. I believe in procedures. When our world comes crashing down about our ears, when this planet chokes in its own fumes or stings itself to death like a demented scorpion, it will be owing to neglected procedures. Horatio knew the importance of procedures—none better.

I have my own mug, blue and white, with a thin band of silver going round the top. It has my monogram on it in a panel of pale blue, two curly C’s twining together, Charles Cleasby. It was a present from my mother when I was six years old, one of a number of things given to me when I came home from hospital after my appendix operation. It seemed to me miraculous that she should have found a mug with just my initials on it, among all the initials and all the children in the world. Only years later, long after she had left us, did it occur to me that she might have had them specially put on. I had been drinking my tea out of that mug for thirty-five years. Apart from the rug in the sitting room, it was all of her I had left.