Losing Nelson (3 page)

The feeling of unrest set me walking back and forth from one end of the room to the other, passing between the table and the wall, from the zone of light and the reflections of the ships into the shadowy area at the far corner of the room. I found in my raincoat pocket—I had forgotten to take the raincoat off, so great had been my haste—a cheese-and-cress sandwich, still wrapped in its clingfoil, which I had bought the day before at a Safeway and then forgotten about. Living alone as I did, and preoccupied with my book, I quite often forgot to eat and was only reminded of the need to do so by onsets of faintness. But I never forgot times and dates. Mrs. Watson still came, as she had done in my father’s time, only twice a week now, in the mornings. I didn’t want her shopping or cooking for me. I used to leave the week’s money in an envelope on the kitchen table. Usually I stayed down in the basement, out of her way. She had no key to the basement, naturally; I had changed the lock.

I ate the sandwich as I walked about the room. I was thinking
still about the battle and its aftermath. It had not been an overwhelming victory. The Spanish, though severely mauled, had not been put out of the war. But there had been a great boost to national morale, and—of crucial importance—the Mediterranean was opened to our sea power once again. From that moment, and for the rest of the war with revolutionary France, we would never allow these waters to be closed to us; our ships would patrol them freely, enabling us to frustrate French invasion plans and defeat Napoleon’s purposes in Egypt.

For Horatio, of course, an important stage in his career, bringing the first taste of the fame he longed for. He was no humble hero, a contradiction in terms in any case. No, he wanted to have his being in glory and he wanted the world to see it, see the beautiful shine of it. That is the nature of heroes—they are nourished by fame.

He was cheered throughout the fleet after the battle, wherever they saw his pendant flying. Crowned with victory, moving through a rain of cheers—how wonderful to be Horatio at that moment. I felt my heart dilate with the pleasure of it. Nightfall, the lamps on the ships, lamplight over the water, cheers raining on him as he passes through in his launch on his way to the
Victory
, to present his respects to the admiral.

We have Horatio’s account of the meeting, as given some months later in conversation with his brother-in-law Bolton. He had come straight from the fighting. His shirt and coat were badly torn, he had lost his hat, his face was streaked with gunpowder, he was bleeding from a wound in the back made by a shell splinter. Jervis, who greeted him with outstretched hands, was immaculate in silver and blue. This was because he had been obliged to change his uniform. During the battle a marine standing close beside him on the poop had had his head blown off, and the admiral’s face and chest had been splashed with blood and brains and bits of bone and tissue. An officer,
believing him to be badly wounded, rushed to his side. No, he was not hurt, he said calmly, and he turned aside and asked a midshipman to fetch him an orange. This in the heat of the action. When the fighting was over and the day was won, he went below and washed away the evidence of mortality and changed.
The Admiral received me on the quarterdeck and, having embraced me, said he could not sufficiently thank me
.

This was to be an important friendship for Horatio. He had a gift for friendship. All through his career he won respect from superiors and subordinates alike; not only respect, affection too, he was always loved. On February 20, in the normal course of seniority, Commodore Nelson became Rear-Admiral Nelson. Later, when news of the victory reached England, the Order of the Bath was conferred upon him by a grateful sovereign. Rear-Admiral Sir Horatio Nelson K.B.

It would have been a baronetcy, almost certainly, but he had hinted in a letter to Sir Gilbert Elliot, viceroy of Corsica, who was returning to England with despatches of the battle, that he would be reluctant to accept a hereditary title as he had not the means to support one. Of course, there were some—sneaks and subversives being always with us—who attributed other motives to him. Chief sneak was Sir Gilbert’s aide, Colonel Drinkwater, who had a conversation with Horatio on the morning of the battle and afterwards published an account. He suggests that Horatio was really attracted by the very conspicuous nature of the knighthood, which carried with it the right to wear a prominent and glittering star, and that he pleaded poverty in order to obtain this.

According to the colonel, it was he who suggested to Horatio the possibility of a baronetcy, but he was stopped by a hand on his arm: “No, it must not be in that manner.” “Oh,” Drinkwater reports himself as saying, “you wish to be a Knight of the Bath then?” And Horatio’s immediate answer: “Yes; if my services have been of any
value, let them be noticed in a way that the public may know me or them.” Drinkwater is not sure about that final pronoun, but he professes himself to be sure about the rest and pronounces his judgement with confidence:
I could have no doubt of his meaning, that he wished to bear about his person some honorary distinction to attract the public eye
 …

I could not take this seriously. It seemed to me unmistakably the voice of the cynic. The two men were alone, Horatio never spoke of this conversation, there is no independent support of it, he was dead when the account was published. Would Drinkwater, whom he hardly knew, have questioned him with such impertinent directness about his wishes and ambitions? Surely not. A radiant light would have been upon Horatio that morning, the morrow of one of the greatest days of his life. Drinkwater was trying to sully that light, as there will always be people ready to do.

It was not the imputation of vanity that I found offensive. I always knew that he prized the trappings and insignia of fame. His decorations killed him in the end, the stars on his breast made him a sniper’s target at Trafalgar. The attainment of public honours is a hero’s vocation; he bears them for all those who cannot, just as he bears the nation’s dignity. No, it is the hinting at ambivalence, even duplicity, in Horatio’s attitude, the suggestion that he lied about his means for the sake of the glittering star.

To hold this smear in mind long enough to repudiate it, let alone defend him from it, made me feel I had betrayed him, stirred a feeling of nausea in me similar to that I sometimes felt in those days when I tried to understand the events of June 1799 in Naples. I had devoted myself to a study of his life, I had followed him through the succession of his days and the succession of my own, though sometimes the course had run below ground. I was nine when this started. That was in 1964, the year my mother left us. Chess led me to Horatio—chess
and my father and my absent mother and the fact that on that day I broke the rule about not showing what you feel.

I thought my mother had gone because she did not love me and Monty enough to stay. I suppose I already knew, in the way that children know such things, that she did not love my father. He, no doubt intent on setting a good example of not showing what you feel, did not succeed then or later in explaining the matter to us. He did not say she loved us or had been sorry to go. Our mother had gone to India, he said, because she had become besotted with oriental religions.
Besotted
. I did not know what the word meant, but I knew that my father was expressing his loss through contempt.

My form master of that year at the private day-school I went to was a chess enthusiast. He explained the rules to us, he encouraged us to play. He was kind to me, and I admired him, more than admired: I wanted to be where he was. I suppose I was more than usually responsive to kindness just at that time. To please him I tried hard to be good at chess, and I discovered that I was good. I had a natural talent, the master said. Mr. Lyle was his name. I don’t remember much about him now. He had glasses. I seem to remember that he wore his hair brushed straight back. Blurred remains of a focus once so intense. I joined the school chess club. I took part in tournaments and distinguished myself. Shining at few things, for a brief season I shone at chess. I see it now, the stark arena of the board, the ruthless game that hung so paradoxically on feelings of love.

I studied the game, I read the accounts of historic encounters, the ploys of long-dead masters, and I played them out alone. I would set out the pieces at random, then sweep them off and try to replace them from memory. At night, crying for my mother, I would picture the chess board, go through the moves of some legendary endgame, and find consolation.

A colleague of my father’s was there one Sunday afternoon—my
father was a senior official at the Treasury. “Your father tells me you are quite a chess player.” On his reddish face an indulgent look. “At least by his own report,” my father said. He seemed to suggest I had boasted. Perhaps I had. “Not up to your level, Henry, not yet.” Henry, Harry, Humphrey. A chess player of note. “Fancy a game, young man?”

We played and I won. He still had half his pieces on the board when I checkmated him. Pleasure in victory, expectation of praise—face and voice were not yet practised enough, I suppose I showed my feelings too clearly. My father looked at me but uttered no word. He went out, came back with a book from his study, brought it over for me to see. “Look here,” he said, the colleague meanwhile looking on. “Look at these people here.”

He had opened the book roughly in the middle. There were two faces, one on either side: William Pitt the Younger and Horatio Nelson. Neither name meant anything to me at the time. Later, of course, I knew them for close contemporaries—Horatio was a year older and died three months earlier.

“Take a good look,” my father said. “These two men saved our country. They had reason to be pleased with themselves.”

He meant it for my benefit, or so I like to think. He did not want me to be jubilant in victory, to overrate small achievements. He wanted to inspire me with worthy ambitions. But in his manner and tone I sensed displeasure; he was not pleased at my success, it had disturbed his sense of the natural order.

Two faces side by side, two lives in parallel. I think I was fascinated by parallel tracks even then. Both plates were in colour, but for some reason the two men were depicted at quite different times in their lives, Pitt dark-suited, close to his end, ravaged by alcohol and the strain of government, Horatio the twenty-year-old captain, in the dark blue and gilt of his full dress uniform, his youthful face severe,
intrepid. There was no comparison, none at all. I scarcely looked at the statesman, the architect of victory; my eyes were all for the splendid young fighter, so slender and small-boned, so different from me in physical form, even then. I am on the heavy side, with thick wrists and big hands. Not clumsy, though; I am good with my hands, good at making things.

My interest in chess did not long survive that day; the lesson in humility proved the death blow to it. I continued to play during what was left of the term, but my heart was not in it, I lost the appetite for victory, my game fell off. In the autumn Monty and I were sent away to boarding school. I never saw Mr. Lyle again and I never played chess again.

With Horatio it has been otherwise. My interest in him seemed altogether to disappear, but it had merely gone underground, waiting for another sign. This came when I was thirteen, during a history lesson, when I discovered that Horatio Nelson lost his mother
when he was nine years old
.

It came with the force of revelation, like an assault of light. All the surrounding circumstances were lit up by it, as if by the arc of a flare in the night. The usual darkness descends again, but the print is there forever. My exact position in the classroom, the desktop mutilated by generations of idle inscribers, the look of the blackboard, the gestures of the master’s hands. These things were as present to me that afternoon last February as they had ever been. Undimmed, untarnished over the years, the lustre of the kinship so casually discovered then.

I felt the need now to look again at the Rigaud portrait, the picture my father had shown me on my last effective day as a chess player, my first sight of Horatio’s face. I got up, went through to the next room. The plate I had bought that morning was still lying there on the floor, but I left it where it was. I crossed to the wall where the
portrait hung above a narrow cabinet containing objects commemorating his death: a black silk bookmark with the date of Trafalgar on it, a piece of Staffordshire pottery that showed him dying in the arms of two officers, a model of his funeral car that I made myself when I got interested in Horatio again, after my illness.

The original portrait, of course, is in the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich, a three-quarter-length oil by John Francis Rigaud. My picture was a photograph, blown up to poster size, mounted, and framed. Horatio was an eighteen-year-old lieutenant when it was begun. It was commissioned by his commanding officer, William Locker, who must have seen his distinction even at that age. Before it was quite finished, Horatio had to sail for the West Indies. He didn’t return until 1780, three years later, still desperately ill with the yellow fever that nearly killed him and destroyed his youthful bloom forever. But Rigaud changed nothing in the face, merely touched in the background and added the insignia of Horatio’s new rank—he was a captain by then, one of the youngest in the navy.

I stood before the portrait for a time I did not measure. He had been through the shadow of death, but the painter had allowed no hint of mortality. No sickness, no lines of pain, mar the confidence of his face. His sword is planted before him, his hands rest on the hilt. In the background, painted on his return, a view of Fort San Juan in Nicaragua, scene of the ill-starred expedition of the year before.

Disasters, fevers, the great victories, and the heroic death—all this was before him, undreamed of, when this impervious face was painted. Twenty years away his crushing defeat of the French at Aboukir Bay, the triumphant entry into Naples, the gratitude of monarchs, the songs and the praise and the abundant love of Emma, Lady Hamilton. Twenty years away his dealings with the Neapolitan Jacobins, which day by day, with oppressed spirits, I was striving to disentangle.