Losing Nelson (9 page)

No milk—I never touch milk. One cube of Demerara sugar. Mug in hand, I went down to the basement. I went through to the small middle room that lies between my collection of Nelson exhibits and the ops room with the model ships. This was my picture gallery, mainly reproductions—original portraits are naturally difficult to obtain
even if one could afford them, though I had some good paintings of sailing ships, among them one by John Nathan, R.A., of HMS
Victory
with sails loosed for drying at Spithead.

Fanny Nelson was there, the wronged wife; and Emma Hamilton, the adored mistress; and Sir William Hamilton, the complaisant husband; and Horatio’s uncle, Captain Maurice Suckling, who gave him his first chance; and Jervis, he of the orange; and Collingwood, who supported Horatio so loyally at the Battle of Cape St. Vincent; and Hardy, who kissed him when he was dying. Horatio himself was not to be found on these walls. I hung all the likenesses of him that I had collected in the exhibits room; he looked down over the cabinets and showcases that commemorated his wonderful life.

I stood before the portrait of Edmund Nelson, sipping my tea, warming my hands on the mug. He was seventy-eight when Beechey painted this likeness of him. Less than two years to live. A long, fairbrowed, narrow face, lugubrious, scraped close to the bone with age; resigned, yes, but not serene. The tones of the painting are sombre; his black habit merges into the dark sepia of the background, his twotailed clerical stock is tucked close up to his bony chin. Submission in the face, feeling suppressed, something feminine. Not quite the face you would expect in a Norfolk parson of yeoman stock … My father’s face quite different, all straight lines: square jaw, sheer planes at the temples, level eyes and brows, large, regular teeth—the stem of his pipe had bite marks on it.

The man who begot me, the man who begot Horatio—in death they became contemporaries, as all the dead are. In the face before me now there was no trace of the angelic, no hint of breaking the line. Duty his creed, as it was his son’s, but like many of the virtues we extol, this can take forms active or passive. The Reverend Nelson’s was the latter sort, finding its reward in sufferance. Not so Horatio, for whom duty was a seeking out, a fulfilment in fame.

His was the ambition of genius. But it was the lesson of obligation, of doing what one is called upon to do, that the father passed down. What Horatio made of it was his own.
Thank God I have done my duty
. Probably the last words anyone heard him say, as he lay dying in the dimness belowdecks at Trafalgar. The surgeon who attended him and recorded the last hours of his life heard him murmur these words some minutes before the voice was lost forever. Duty done, victory achieved—it was the same thing for him, the duty lay in the achievement. And so it is with me; I am the same, in spite of appearances. My doubts and fears, these were his purifying discharge. A medal has two faces; my face was hidden against his breast.

Still looking closely at that eroded face, I thought of the stories of Horatio’s childhood that have passed down to us. Courage, leadership, indomitable will, all so precociously shown by this slightly built, pale-faced boy. How, one Norfolk winter, he battled through great drifts of snow to get to school, urging on his faltering—and much more robust—elder brother, because they had promised their father to do their utmost.
Remember, brother, it was left to our honour
. How, at an even tenderer age, he wandered away, got lost in the woods as darkness fell, was found after long search, sitting by the side of an impassable stream. Surprising that fear did not bring you home, they said.
Fear? I never saw fear. What is it?

Useless to look for clear outlines in this twilight of infancy. These were anecdotes told after his glorious death, after he had become the saviour of his country, memories embroidered into legend. The life of a hero is a grafted tree, rooted in fact, branched with hearsay. And Horatio Nelson is the English hero; he has no rival. No threat of rivals in the future, either—this country will never produce heroes again.

Equally useless to judge by faces. This mild-faced man I was looking at now was capable, when roused, of seizing a housebreaker by the collar and throwing him bodily out of the house. Horatio and
his brothers and sisters, when old enough to sit at table, were forbidden to touch with their backs the backs of the chairs. Weak sight was not deemed a reason for spectacles. Yet the rector did not strike his parishioners as a man of forceful character, and he considered himself to be lacking in firmness. “Tremulous over trifles and easily put in a fuss,” to use his own words. Always something strange in the progenitors of genius … Self-denial imposed on a sensuous and emotional nature—was this the key to both father and son? Quite suddenly, while still formulating the question, I felt that same gathering of tears behind the eyes, but they were more urgent now; I knew that if I allowed my features to relax, I would blub in good earnest. I kept my face stiff and fought it off, knowing the cause quite well. It was the grief of never grasping, never fully knowing. Horatio had occupied my life, I knew more about him than anyone else because I was his heir, I had inherited his being. The conviction of this had grown stronger in the years that had passed since my chats with Penhas; it had been fed by both study and intuition. But still I could not reach to the essential part, the mystery of his courage.

I did not then, that February night, as I clutched my mug and resisted the tears, see myself as an angel like him, a creature of radiant violence. That came later. At the time I thought of myself merely as a repository of his essence, a sort of memorial urn. But I knew that the same forces had moulded us both—thoughts of his childhood led me always back into the labyrinth of my own. For him the lesson had been duty. What lesson did my father give to me, what guiding principle?
Put things out of their misery
. That look of alertness, a brightness on his face. My father was a watcher. Not, I think now—I permit myself to think now—a very kind one. Selective, highly so. Unobservant of many things, unseeing, locked in some cold trance of self-absorption, nevertheless he watched our faces. My mother would hesitate in replying to him, beginning in one way and changing to another, and he
would watch her with that same expression, a sort of expectancy, a hope of entertainment, in which there was also, when I think of it now, the ironic certainty of disappointment. Afterwards, long after she had gone, it came to me that she must have been afraid of him, as Monty and I were, though I cannot remember him ever raising his voice.

I looked at my watch: ten minutes past four on the morning after the great victory of Cape St. Vincent. Did Horatio manage to get some sleep in these morning hours? So much can never be known to us—whether he woke or slept, what he thought of in this aftermath of his triumph. The night before the battle he had not slept at all, and in the action itself he was wounded by a shell splinter which, though he described it as of no consequence, gave him acute pain for some days afterwards and must have made sleep difficult. He was still awake at 2
A.M
. to receive the note of casualties aboard his ship—sixty dead and wounded. We know that he wrote to his friend Collingwood later that same morning to thank him for his support in the engagement. Perhaps in the space between he was able to snatch some hours of sleep.

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.

O
n 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.