Losing Nelson (11 page)

According to James Harrison, one of his first biographers, late one night some three weeks after this bleak encounter, Horatio left the rented house in Dover Street where he was living with Fanny and walked for hours through the streets, quite alone. He went eastward along the Strand and Fleet Street as far as St. Paul’s, then down to Blackfriars Bridge, then back via the Embankment and Soho. Slightly built, maimed, wasted in looks, quite unrecognized. Miles of walking in the dead of night.

I came onto Fleet Street and turned eastward. Now I was on his actual route. The streets were quieter in the vicinity of the City. I had the feeling that I was stepping in time with him, my heavier footfalls and his lighter ones making a single rhythm. I knew with absolute certainty where he had lingered, where he had hurried. When I paused at the corner of Pilgrim Street, I knew he had done exactly the same, that he had looked at these same gaunt, unlighted buildings against this same black sky. I knew what his thoughts had been that night—he had been possessed by the strange discrepancy between his private and his public life.

The most celebrated Englishman of his time, victor of Cape St. Vincent and the Nile, scourge of the hated French, destroyer of Bonaparte’s designs on Egypt and India. From the moment of his arrival in Yarmouth, squads of cavalry escorted him throughout the county. In Ipswich the crowd took the horses from their traces and drew his carriage in triumph through the town. In London he was cheered wherever he went, admiring throngs followed his every step. If it was known that he intended to go to the theatre, every seat in the house would be instantly sold; he would enter his box to the strains of “See
the Conquering Hero Comes” from the theatre orchestra. By day there was business at the Admiralty and the Navy Office; the evenings were occupied with banquets, presentations, receptions in his honour. He had taken his seat in the House of Lords—he was a peer now, Baron Nelson of the Nile.

Such adulation has seldom befallen mortal man. But at home within the walls of number 17 Dover Street, there was tension and distress. This same evening of our lonely walk, or so I believe, he had earlier insisted that the Hamiltons be invited to dine. He could never accept defeat, it was not in his nature. Emma was advanced in pregnancy, a fact that may or may not have been known to Fanny. During the meal she felt ill and left the table. Rebuked by Horatio for neglecting their guest, Fanny went after her. There followed a painful parody of that mutual good will he must still have been hoping for: the dutiful wife held the basin while the pregnant mistress vomited into it.

Had he witnessed this scene before he set out? As I crossed Ludgate Circus, I felt suddenly convinced that he had. Harrison does not give us the date, but I believe it was on that same night, after the Hamiltons had returned home to Grosvenor Square, after Fanny had gone to bed. It was this grotesque episode that threw him into despair, set him walking the night streets. He expected the fear and antagonism of the women to melt in the warm breath of his enterprise, as the odds had melted at Cape St. Vincent and would again at Trafalgar. Sure mark of the hero, this believing so completely in the transforming power of his desire.

It was well after ten now, and Ludgate Hill was all but deserted. The banks and business houses were darkly cavernous within their Corinthian porticoes, waiting for the next day’s tide. I felt footsore—I was not used to so much walking—but I was happy to be so close to him in understanding and sympathy. I stood looking up at the dome
of St. Paul’s, followed the struggling white of pigeons caught up there in some remote alarm, fluttering in the milky shafts of the floodlights. I had the brief impression that they were trapped in the light itself, the rays were like bars.

In the crypt of this great church he lies entombed—this is where they brought him, after the Painted Hall at Greenwich where he lay in state, after the room in the Admiralty where he rested overnight before the funeral service. No-one before him in the whole history of England ever had such a splendid funeral. Thinking of this, and of his nearness and farness, I felt the air around and above me thicken with mourning; that massed cry of lamentation I experienced in my dreams came raining down from the cathedral and the buildings all around—it came like gentle rain, not sound, enveloping, all-pervasive, like rain.

How long this grief endured I could not tell. It was broken by an unkempt man who appeared from some dark place beyond the churchyard and came up to me and asked me for money. He was old and smelled very bad and he did not look at me. I put a pound into his hand, taking care not to touch him.

I walked the whole way back with Horatio, all the way to Dover Street. I was afraid of the streets so late, but I did it. I was tempted briefly to give it up when I reached Trafalgar Square, and take a taxi home. I was tired out and, as I say, afraid. Moreover, it seemed fitting to leave him there with his pigeons and lions, standing on his tremendous column at the farthest reach of the light, too high to be really seen from the common level, endlessly scanning the Thames, keeping his eye on Big Ben. But the parallels had to be kept up. I went on; I went all the way back with him.

M
iss Lily’s attitude towards me had changed significantly in the two weeks since our disagreement over Horatio’s treatment of Fanny, as had mine towards her. She had survived something that night and it had brought her into a privileged zone. I could not think of her now merely as someone I was employing, not when I had looked with such passionate interest at the back of her skull. She registered the change, of course, though she could hardly have known the reason, and it made her bolder. She became somehow more personal, she felt free to interject, to express opinions. To the danger of her sleuthing was now added this irritant of her judgements. Then on Tuesday, March 11, she came bearing a circular tin with a design in tartan around the top. Her manner seemed less positive than usual. “These are for you,” she said.

The weather was still cold, and Miss Lily presented her usual chilled appearance. It was an accident, the date; she didn’t know or
had forgotten that this was Horatio’s wedding day. Or so she was to maintain. I opened the tin and found to my astonishment that it was full of biscuits.

“Shortbread,” Miss Lily said. “They are home-made.” She was looking at me in a way that seemed almost apprehensive. Miss Lily is not pretty, but she has unusual eyes, a deep, soft brown and very steady, somehow undefended-looking, like a cow’s—they seem to have no means of concealment or retreat. But they are not timid, far from it; they do not flinch away. Miss Lily notes things. This gaze of hers, helpless and perceptive at the same time, makes it difficult to know whether what you see there is a disturbance of her feelings or a reflected disturbance of your own. “I put them in that tin,” she said. “Just to have something to carry them in, nothing to do with Scotland.”

I was sure at this point that she had schemed to make an effect by timing this gift of biscuits to coincide with his wedding day. I was on the point of handing back the tin, telling her I never ate biscuits, which was actually true, since it never occurred to me to buy them. I almost began to say this, then held back at the last moment. The fact is that I hate people giving me things under any circumstances; it is demeaning, it subjects you. But to show this openly looks like weakness. Something of an impasse. So I held back, I said nothing, I just looked at her.

This I was able to do as she was for the moment distracted, she was burrowing in her capacious handbag for something, a hankie as it turned out, so I had a short period of grace in which to regard her undetected. Tonight she was wearing her hair loose and she had on a dark blue woollen jumper and a rather narrow-fitting grey skirt which came down to just above the knees. She usually wore loose, smocky sorts of things, but the jumper, without being very tight, showed Miss Lily’s straight shoulders and the shape of her breasts. There was
something I recognized as characteristic in her movements as she searched in the bag, a sort of total intensity of purpose, as if for these few moments nothing else existed in the world. She looked up and caught my eye on her. “I made a good lot,” she said, “and I thought, you know, why not take some round, he probably doesn’t get homemade shortbread all that often.”

“Well, that is quite true, he doesn’t,” I said. “The right day for gifts, in any case, on the anniversary of his wedding day.”

“I didn’t know you had been married.”

“Two hundred and ten years ago today he married Frances Nisbet at Nevis in the West Indies.”

“Oh, you were talking about him.” A silence followed, during which Miss Lily seemed to be considering or absorbing something. Then she said, “I didn’t know.”

“The whole thing is in my book. You have typed it out at my dictation and we have revised it at least once since then. Perhaps you knew subconsciously?”

Miss Lily had flushed, though this might have been owing to the warmth of the room. “People use that word a lot, don’t they?” she said. “In my opinion, you either know something or you don’t, and I didn’t. I knew they were married on Nevis, but I had forgotten the date.”

Of course, if she truly hadn’t known, it made the symbolism of the timing stronger. This gift to me, Horatio’s sharer … “Easy to forget dates,” I said. “He met her first in the May of 1785, when he was commander of the twenty-eight-gun frigate
Boreas
and posted to the West Indies.”

She was some months his senior, widow of a surgeon, with an infant son, Josiah. Slender and delicate, a daughter of colonial society, her father a senior judge on the island, her uncle president of the council. A product of her time and class, parasol-wielding, tea-dispensing,
intensely proper. Not original or forceful or very clever but loyal and devoted. The other woman, who was not proper at all, was waiting in the wings. She would wait without knowing for thirteen years to release the joys and torments lacking in his marriage and to share in his fame. Seven years younger than the victim-wife, outstandingly beautiful, the daughter of an illiterate blacksmith named Henry Lyon, London maidservant at the age of thirteen, then some years of modelling and occasional whoring. At sixteen she was the mistress of a wealthy young baronet who cast her out when she got pregnant. When Horatio met Fanny on the island of Nevis, Emma Hart, as she called herself then, was living in a house on the Edgware Road, installed there by Charles Greville, second son of the Earl of Warwick and the nephew of Sir William Hamilton, at that time British ambassador to Naples. Later, wanting to marry well and recoup his fortunes, Greville passed Emma on to this elderly uncle, who had seen her on a visit to London and been smitten.

The graphs of these lives are fascinating to me, the parallels, the convergences and collisions. In the centre the glittering thread of Horatio’s life, with these others running alongside, above and below, some lightly touching the thread, some giving it a twitch, some clinging. That May, when Horatio met his wife-to-be, Emma was sitting for portraits to Romney, who painted her in a bewildering variety of attitudes; Hardy, who was to give the dying Horatio his last kiss, was a sixteen-year-old midshipman in the Channel Fleet; Arthur Wellesley, later Duke of Wellington, had just been taken out of Eton on grounds of invincible stupidity; Napoleon Bonaparte was a sulky cadet at the Military School in Paris.

I did not speak to Miss Lily of these presences hovering over his wedding day. In fact, we did not talk much more about Horatio’s wedding. I mentioned—still clutching the tartan tin—that his “people,” the crew of the
Boreas
, gave him a silver watch, which they had clubbed
together to buy. “A very handsome gift,” I said. “They didn’t have much money, you know. But then, he was always greatly loved.”

Miss Lily made no reply to this. She had never seemed much impressed by this quality of Horatio’s. Charisma, we would call it today, the devotion he inspired in crew after crew, the way his men would follow him wherever he led and be ready to lay down their lives for him. This great gift—for we must call it that—which I so much admired and which so moved me, seemed to leave Miss Lily quite cold. Perhaps a question of gender. All the same, in some obscure way I was disappointed. I wanted her to see how wonderful Horatio was. She smiled now, but it was not a smile that occupied much of her face. “Well,” she said, “it’s his wedding anniversary, not yours. You can’t expect silver watches.”

I could have said much to that: nothing that ever happened to Horatio did not also happen to me. I had stood with him that Sunday morning in the great drawing room of Montpelier House, the president’s mansion, where they were married; I had stood beside Fanny, who wore a gown of Irish lace. She was given away by Prince William Henry, son of King George III, a personal friend. Toasts and speeches, to which we replied with grace and wit and a likable sincerity. Arm in arm down the steps of polished teak, out into brilliant sunshine. Behind us the immaculate house with its white wood gables and verandahs. Arm in arm on the flawless lawns, kept trim and vivid by generations of faithful blacks. We assemble in the shade of the great silk-cotton tree. Popping corks. We are surrounded by well-wishers, all dressed in light colours, the men in satin suits, the ladies in summer dresses, smiling in the tinted shade of parasols. Beyond the terraced gardens and the parkland, as far as the eye can see, the smooth green sweep of the sugarcane fields …