Losing Nelson

by Barry Unsworth

  She was not much interested in his battles, not even Trafalgar. She seemed to see no more in them than a perverse expenditure of human life; all the courage and patriotism and fighting spirit counted for nothing, or she turned it into a cause for pity. As I say, her view was limited. She hadn’t much in the way of idealism. But she took a great interest in Horatio’s private life and particularly in his relationship with Emma Hamilton, whom most of the time she didn’t really care for.

  “That woman,” she said, “she played on his jealousy. She didn’t care that he was about to risk the lives of all those men.”

  I could not help smiling at this. I had been telling her about Horatio’s state of mind on the eve of Copenhagen, that strange mixture of feelings: impatience for battle, joy of fatherhood, torments of jealousy. “The risk to his men’s lives was not the foremost consideration,” I said.

  “If it wasn’t, it should have been. What was there in it for them?”

  “Horatio didn’t ask them to take any risk he wasn’t prepared to take himself.”

  “We have had this conversation before. He shared the risks, I don’t say he didn’t. But he didn’t share the rewards. If he lived, he got richer and more famous. If they lived, they stayed the same.”

  I felt my smile wearing thin. It was always the same problem with her; she simplified the issues to such an absurd degree that there was no way of explaining anything to her.

  “You can’t say there is not a difference there,” she said. “Anyway, she exploited his love, this woman he thought such an honour to her sex.”

  How did she know about it? We hadn’t got to that point yet in my book. A question not worth asking—I knew by now that my book was no longer her sole source of information.

  “I’ve been reading their correspondence,” she said, as if after all I had asked. “They go to a reception in London, the three of them, the Hamiltons and him. The Prince of Wales is there, he sees her and he fancies her—he always liked them on the large side. So he makes eyes at her. Nelson notices this, and afterwards he takes it up with her. She tells him there is nothing in it—she can’t help it if the Prince likes the look of her, but that’s as far as it goes.”

  Her face was settling already into the expression, dogged and exalted at the same time, that it always wore when she was giving vent to feelings of disapproval.

  “Strange to think,” I said, “that William Pitt the Younger was also there, together with most of his cabinet. Horatio came face-to-face with him that same evening.”

  This was an attempt to sidetrack Miss Lily, but of course it failed, because she had no idea of the significance this meeting had in my mind; she did not know the story of the chess game and the two figures side by side in my father’s book. It came to me now, with the force of some exciting, illicit impulse, that I could actually tell Miss Lily this story, as I had once told it to Penhas; I could try to explain how important it had been to me, that wound I had received in the moment of victory, the choice between the statesman and the sailor, the early lesson in concealment. I hesitated; the moment passed. But temptation once admitted leaves us never quite the same; I was to remember that urge to confide in her and how it came to me like something sinful. For the moment, I contented myself with a statement of fact: “It wasn’t a reception exactly. It was a very grand dinner party at the house of Alexander Davison, in St. James’s Square.”

  “Who was he?”

  “He was Horatio’s prize agent.”

  “What is a prize agent?”

  “That is the man who managed the prize money falling due to the people who fought in a battle. Some of the enemy ships taken might be carrying valuable cargoes. Occasionally they might be carrying hugely valuable cargoes. There was a system of prizes. The total value was divided in strict proportion. The commander of the ship got one quarter, the lieutenants got one eighth, and so on.”

  “So they just sort of shared out the booty?”

  “You could put it like that, I suppose.”

  “How much did the men get, the ordinary seamen?”

  “It depended on how many there were. There was always one quarter left after all the rest had been shared out.”

  “Sounds like blood money to me.”

  “Horatio didn’t fight for money. He fought for his country.”

  “Be that as it may, it wouldn’t have come amiss on top of his pay, that’s all I am saying. Anyway, where the party took place is neither here nor there. The Prince of Wales takes a fancy to her and she makes sure her lover knows it. As soon as he goes to sea again, she starts tormenting him. The Prince keeps cropping up in her letters. She is taking care not to go where the Prince is likely to be. The Prince is doing his best to seduce her, but so far she has managed to escape him. Then, against her will, Sir William invites him under their roof. She has her duty as hostess, what can she do? And so on. Letter after letter. That reception or dinner party or whatever it was happened in November, and she is still keeping it warm the following March. He is sitting in his boat, miles from anywhere, going through hell.”

  “Ship, not boat.”

  “I can read her like a book.”

  “Well, she wasn’t young anymore, her looks were going, she was worried about the future.”

  “Who isn’t? I mean, if we made that an excuse for everything …”

  Miss Lily was obviously not herself destined to be a fading beauty, and I privately thought this was why she was so unsympathetic towards Emma, but naturally I did not say so. Instead I suggested it might be time we got on with some work.

  My talk was only five days off now, and I was still not satisfied with what I had written. I crossed out and rewrote and crossed out again in a progression that was beginning to seem infinite. Everything took longer than expected. Miss Lily grew weary of these endless corrections. “I know you are a perfectionist,” she said, “but there is a limit.”

  A limit was precisely what I couldn’t reach, there being virtually no limit to the ways in which words can combine. Under the stress of all this, an old nervous habit had reasserted itself—a tendency, slight and I hoped unremarkable, to gulp a little, to make from time to time a sort of involuntary swallowing, the teeth meeting in a very faint click, I think audible only to me. It was a strange reflexive motion of the throat, perhaps belonging to the remote diluvian past of the species, like snapping at some wavering insect that had come too close.

  I had rewritten part of the second of my two episodes in “The Making of a Hero,” the one that occurred in 1775, when Horatio was seventeen, and marked the real end of youth for him. He had been serving as midshipman on board the Seahorse on a voyage to the East Indies, a voyage of marvels—they had rounded the Cape, stood along the northern edge of the Roaring Forties, steered north for Madras and Calcutta, then up the Persian Gulf to Basra and back to Tricomalee in Ceylon.

  From boyhood, from my first interest in Horatio, I had followed every step of the way in my school atlas, imagining the brilliant light, the sea tilting up to meet a voracious moon, deserts of red sand, the swollen waters of great rivers, stork-legged people who lived in flooded places, fiery tigers, crocodiles like floating logs. The scattered fragments of my reading and imagining all came together in that voyage of the Seahorse. Thoughts of my mother too. It was for India that she left us. Somewhere on that continent, my mother is or was. Just as I was Horatio’s witness and his shadow over this wide gap of time, so the process could work in reverse. Perhaps Horatio saw a woman in a blue robe on temple steps across wide muddy waters against the sky of swooning whiteness …

  All my childish knowledge of brutality was in that voyage too. Horatio had been to the Arctic and the tropics, but this was his first fighting ship on active service, and the captain, George Farmer, was a noted disciplinarian. On three hundred occasions, each meticulously recorded in the ship’s log, a man was stripped to the waist, lashed to the gratings, and flogged with the thonged whip known as the cat-o’-nine-tails. Two or three times a
week. Horatio would have witnessed these floggings.

  The voyage ended for him in December 1775 somewhere south of Bombay, with an attack of malaria. It was his first, and it nearly killed him. He was transferred to the Dolphin, the only available ship, to be carried home—England was thought to be his one chance of recovery. But the Dolphin didn’t sail till the following March, with Horatio still confined to his hammock, still at death’s door.

  “His famous luck,” I said to Miss Lily. But luck was the wrong word; I knew that, even if she didn’t. “If they had sailed immediately he would have died. The voyage would have taken five or six months—he could not have lasted out.”

  It was a storm that saved him. The first days were calm; the ship made slow way, with light breezes puffing her sails. I wanted to convey the quality of this calm, the slow heave of the sea, the sick boy’s hammock swaying with the sway of the ship, the moaning complaint of the timbers, the moving shadows of the rigging, the shadow of death on him as he lay there. A famous ship, the Dolphin, though he would not have cared just then: the first ship ever to sail twice round the world.

  Then, in early April, the storm struck with tremendous violence, choking the scuppers so that the decks flooded, splitting sails, carrying away the lighter yards and springing the heavier ones from their slings. Already enfeebled and sick, helpless in this nightmare tumult, the young Horatio came very close to his end. But now, just in time, Table Mountain is sighted across the surging waters, they reach the shelter of the Cape, the Dolphin anchors at Simon’s Town for repairs. These take a month, a month of fresh air and wholesome food for Horatio after the stifling humidity of the Indian coast—a month that saved his life.

  All these preliminaries I wanted to include, as being essential to the drama. But the formative experience came afterwards, somewhere in the Atlantic on the way home. He was returning to health by this time, but still extremely weak and listless. He thought much of the future, and in this depressed state his prospects seemed bleak.

  “I’ve decided to put it all in the first person,” I said to Miss Lily. “I want to use his own words as far as possible. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it to begin with.”

  Miss Lily turned to me a face of concern. “You are changing it again, for the umpteenth time. You are making yourself ill over it. There comes a point when you have to say enough is enough, it’s as good as I can make it.”

  “I have to do it justice. I have to quote him in his own words. This was a conversion experience, a call to vocation.” I gulped, lowered my head in an attempt at concealment, heard the tiny click of my teeth. “There he is,” I said, “standing on deck or perhaps in his quarters below. He has been in the valley of the shadow. Then the long convalescence—the body is recovering, but there is still that darkness in the mind. The future seems to hold nothing for him. What does he say? I could discover no means of reaching the object of my ambition … Then comes the deliverance, the vision—he sees a radiant golden orb suspended in the air before him, actually there before him physically. In that moment he understands his destiny, he is a boy no longer. I want to put it in his own words. A glow of patriotism was kindled within me and presented my King and country as my patron. My mind exalted in the idea. Well then, I exclaimed, I will be a hero! And confiding in Providence I will brave every danger.”

  I paused on this. I felt suddenly exalted myself. It seemed to me that some streaming of that radiance, a fainter impression of that shining orb, lay now between Miss Lily and me. “There you are,” I said. “There you have it. The vocation of hero, solemnly vowed and undertaken. That radiant vision stayed with him all his life—it must be stressed in my talk.”

  However, I saw no slightest look of exaltation on Miss Lily’s face. “I don’t believe in this orb,” she said. “It was a long time afterwards when he wrote about it—twenty years, something like that. I mean, things get embroidered, don’t they? Besides, your country can’t be a patron, it has to be a person. And King George III was off his head, and the Prince of Wales turned out to be nothing but a playboy and overweight with it. Nelson thought he was after Emma, but he probably wasn’t at all. God strike him blind if he looks at you, that’s what Nelson wrote to her.”

  It was the first time she actually quoted his words to me. Of course I ought to have known that she would be incapable of seeing the meaning of this transcendent moment in his life, patriotism experienced as religious impulse in this clergyman’s son. She was unable, constitutionally unable, to shift from the concrete to the abstract, unable to see that it was not this or that embodiment of kingship that mattered but the dedication to an ideal of service. It was really so obvious that it wasn’t worth arguing about. I said, “I want to follow it up with some general remarks about the symbolism of the orb. Held in the hand of a monarch, it signifies his sovereignty over the world. It was first used by the Roman emperors. In religious art, it is held by Christ as Salvator Mundi, the Saviour of the World.”

  “He must have been lonely, that’s all I can say.”

  “Who?” I was bewildered by this interjection, which seemed not to relate to anything I was saying. “Do you mean Christ?”

  “I mean him, Nelson. He must have been terribly lonely. It wasn’t natural.”

  There was pity in her voice—she was presuming to pity him. Even worse, when I glanced at her face, I had the impression I was being included in the same intolerable embrace.

  15

  The night before I was due to give my talk I slept very little. I lay awake for hours in the dark, thinking of the April deaths. In our calendar, Horatio’s and mine, April is the month of deaths. It was in April 1802 that Horatio’s father died, the Reverend Edmund Nelson, pride in his son’s career darkened by distress at the wreck of the marriage, Fanny’s unhappiness, the scandal of the affair with Emma. A year later, again in April, Sir William Hamilton breathed his last, desiccated and sad, in his house in Piccadilly. In Emma’s arms, holding Horatio’s hand, he faded away “like an inch of candle.” The trio was dissolved, the pretence of Horatio as a sort of permanent guest went with it, there were just the two lovers; they could not stay under the same roof after his death. Horatio’s own end was not far away; it was in April two years later that he set out on his death-chase, the pursuit of the French fleet that would culminate in Trafalgar.

  It was in April that my father died, last April, a year ago. On a hospital bed in a private room, his life haemorrhaged away. It was a process he would have condemned as illogical if he had been able to gather himself; the tumor was not a killer by nature but became so in effect when they removed it.

  Where did the blood go? There was no outward mark of it on him, no slightest spot or faintest smear. Again, as I lay there in the dark, the question returned; I felt the same horrified incredulity at thoughts of the blood pooling slowly within the wasted vessel of my father’s body. And again, to fend off the horror, I thought about the light on the April afternoon when he died. It was that impartial light that comes through thinly curtained windows on dull or cloudy days and lies without discrimination over everything. I tried again to remember where the windows were in that room and where the bed lay, and again it seemed strange and in a way outrageous that a scene so stamped on my mind in its essence should be in its particular details quite beyond recall. Perhaps it was my own blankness of memory that made the light that afternoon seem in retrospect so blank, so unselective. There was a fan-shaped window over the door, glazed white …

  Periodically my father’s eyes would open and his hands would pluck at the coverlet, the white coverlet, yes. For perhaps half a minute he would keep this up. Then the eyes would close and the hands would be still again, as if halted by some abrupt reflection, something occurring behind the mask of the face, something that needed to be processed carefully, in utter impassivity and stillness. Whatever the conclusions arrived at, they were not communicated to Monty and me as we sat there on either side of the bed. Chairs with chrome frames, yes, their gleami
ng softened in that light. After some minutes the eyes would open and stare upward, the little fretting movements of the bloodless hands would begin again, as if in search of some fresh food for thought.

  It was strange, and I was tempted afterwards to mention it to Monty but never did, how in these intervals of ambiguous stillness, which seemed like grave reflection but might have been something else altogether, heralds of his death in any case, how then, at the edge, our father seemed most himself, most in command. He had always ruled us by not demonstrating anything, and he kept it up to the end, almost to the end. But it was not the kind of thing Monty and I could ever have talked about.

  He takes after our father in looks, the same long face and prominent square chin, the same straight cast of brow, eyes dark and rather deep-set. Perhaps this was what made him the preferred one—a doubtful blessing: more was expected. Such a resemblance is a good start, Father possibly reasoned; a boy with those looks may do something. Monty was not thought clever at school, but he is hard-working and he understands about money—like Father in this too. He makes a fair amount of it working in the City as an investment consultant for the Japanese. He likes men. My looks are different, I am fair and blue-eyed, more like my mother, at least as I remember her. I have no photographs; all likenesses of her vanished, it seemed overnight, after she left.

  Awkwardly, in that flat light of mid-afternoon, on the edge of our chairs on either side, we watched him dying. We were not told he was dying, no-one there in the hospital said so. An Irish nurse bustled in from time to time to check the suspended bottle. She must have known, all of them must have known, that his life was leaking away.

  For a few minutes, not long before he died, there was a change. He became feverish; a certain warmth—not colour—came to his face. He set up a sort of muttering, accompanied by fumbling movements of one hand, his right hand, yes, he attempted to point at the air before him or at the opposite wall. He was indicating something or asking for something, but we could not understand at first what it was. He struggled to raise himself, and we helped him. His eyes were wide open and full of urgency. He was staring across the room at the curtained recess in the white wall. “Trousers,” he said, in a voice that was clear but quite unrecognizable as his. “Get them for me.”