Losing Nelson (13 page)

On the other hand, there was a certain excitement in the idea and an element of self-congratulation—I had acted spontaneously, I had taken a leap. As I thought more about it, this aspect came upper-most. All in all, I decided, it had been a Nelsonian gesture, putting me, albeit briefly, on a plane with him. Of course, he was an angel, he was a creature of free, untrammelled action; in him, impulse and
decision were fused together, sheathed in the same fire. But for him too there were periods of monotony, of a constricting sameness—the weeks and months of blockading duties, the long pursuit of an elusive enemy over immensities of ocean.

And there were the periods on land, that time of travesty in Naples and Palermo, the long years of enforced inactivity on half-pay in Norfolk. I thought about these Norfolk years now as I sat on in my study, which was still somehow not quite empty of Miss Lily. How you must have hated it. Twenty-eight years old, just married, distinguished service in home waters, the West Indies, North America. Clear already that you were a commander of no ordinary gifts. Zealous, energetic, fearless in combat, a superb seaman. You had influential patrons—essential for any rapid advancement in the navy at that time. And yet you found yourself placed on half-pay and living with your wife in your father’s parsonage in the village of Burnham Thorpe in Norfolk, where you were born, which you left at twelve to go to sea. And you remained there, beached up, for more than five years.

Who the ill-wishers were, the nature of the enmity—presumably it was among the lords of the Admiralty—are questions difficult now to determine. In fact, no-one will ever answer them fully, though I had tried to address them in my book. Of course, it was a period of relative peace and low naval employment. The War of American Independence was over; the French Revolutionary War had not yet begun. A brief lull in the almost incessant fighting of the century. All the same, lesser men got ships. He himself never understood the matter. While stationed in the Leeward Islands he had made enemies; he had insisted on enforcing the Navigation Act, by the terms of which American ships could not trade in the British colonies. He had ordered the seizure of ships attempting to break the embargo, and this had caused financial loss to a number of influential people and led to quarrels with the governor, Sir Thomas Shirley. Perhaps his friendship
with Prince William did him harm; the prince had enemies in high places and was not always on good terms with his father, George III. However this may be, when Horatio, that devoted servant of kings, applied for help to Lord Hood, whose patronage had been promised, he was told that no request could be made to the Admiralty on his behalf for a ship,
as the King was impressed with an unfavourable opinion of him
.

This was in 1790, halfway through your exile. It must have been a heavy blow, this royal disapproval. Worse was to befall you ten years later on your return to London after what Miss Lily so perversely referred to as the travelling show, when you were deep in disfavour. At a royal levee, King George snubbed you publicly, addressing a brief remark to you, then turning his back when you started to reply. On that occasion, ironically, you had arrived decked out with the gifts of kings: the gold medal for Cape St. Vincent, the Star of the Bath, the Sicilian order conferred by King Ferdinand, and a resplendent aigrette, or plume of triumph, from the grand signior of Turkey, which had thirteen strands of diamonds, one for each of the French warships taken or destroyed at the Nile, and in the middle a radiant star turning on its centre by means of concealed clockwork. This glittering plumage, with its spinning centre, you wore in your hat …

Unkindness from kings cut you deeply. You needed a higher power, divinely appointed, to seal and sanctify your courage and achievement, to bestow the decorations that you hung about your person, signs of favour, marks of status. Perhaps that is why you detested rebels and revolutionaries so much—they had violated the principle of authority and authentication that gave your whole existence its meaning. And I was with you there, as in all else, every inch of the way. Without recognized authority, there is no concept of the sacred, a Nelson cannot be born.

You hated the French even before they rose in revolt, even
before they killed their king. You got that from your mother. Catherine Nelson talked fiercely against the French. For the whole of your infancy, the two nations were locked in bitter combat from Quebec to Bengal. Was it this fierce mother that made you believe so in legality, in vested powers? I believe in these things too, but my mother wasn’t fierce; she admired Gandhi, she practised yoga, a word that disturbed my childhood with painful questions, not fearful. Nothing about her inspired fear in me; she was always gentle, she touched things as if to avoid hurting them, even things that couldn’t feel. But I could not discover what this yoga was and never saw her do it; the door was always locked. I knew the rug she used, she left it there on the floor, it was thin and made of cotton and had a twining pattern of dark pink and pale blue tendrils. When she left us, she took it with her. Now I have a clearer mental picture of this rug than I have of her face. There were no photographs, they disappeared overnight, my father destroyed them all. I thought for years he had put them away somewhere, but when I went through things after his death, there were none to be found.

A total belief in constituted authority—that’s how you made enemies. You were applying the law, you were doing your duty; how could you be at fault? I would have done the same, absolutely.

It was very quiet in my study as I sat there, thinking these thoughts, communing with him. In that short terrace where my house is, just off England’s Lane, the sound of traffic is barely audible, more like a graining of the silence than a sound, something you easily get used to. I felt very close to him that night, I had the feeling of
confirmation
, like a current of power.

He was innocent and open-hearted. Miss Lily did not understand this when she criticized his letter. Only an innocent man could have written to an insecure wife in the terms he did, extolling the
virtues and attractions of a famous beauty and former courtesan who was there on the spot, swooning in his embrace. The swoon was real enough—I forgot to tell Miss Lily that; Emma was quite bruised by the fall.

No, you were innocently set on describing the nature of your triumph, of your glory … or didn’t you care?

This thought, intensely disagreeable, swooped on me before I could block it. Of course he would have cared; that was not the point. But did he
see?
Enthusiasm, generosity of judgement—these are merely terms, they can mean more than one thing. Was it that Horatio didn’t see other people as existing in a space separate from his own, that he couldn’t admit into his mind the possibility of different minds? Not opinions, he was used to differing over the conduct of battles, but sensibilities, other ways of feeling things.

The silence in my room had lost its comfort, it had become stark, there was no refuge in it. So often lately, since my father’s death, I had been undermined by unworthy thoughts of this kind, proof not of any defect in Horatio but of my own corrupted nature. It was a poison that spread, and the centre of the discharge was Naples. I was struggling against darkness now, this madness of judgement that opened the gulf between us, broke the current of power. I felt that constriction in my breathing and the throbbing somewhere behind the eyes that always accompany my agitation. Then the room was again bright and clear about me. I could feel the beat of my heart, but my breathing came easier. I had realized my error. I had been upsetting myself over irrelevant issues. You had every virtue that could be reconciled with the mission and destiny of a hero. Probably, too, I had been unconsciously confusing your physically impaired sight with moral blindness, a great blunder—there was no doubt, of course, that your eyesight was deteriorating; even before the wound, while you
were still “on the beach” in Norfolk, from the inner corner of each eye, a membranous substance was beginning to cover the ball. If you had lived to be old, you would have died blind.

Released from the nightmare of doubt, I turned my mind to the January of 1793, which was when the call came. This was one of my favourite episodes in his career; I used often to dwell on it. On the twenty-sixth the news comes from Paris: Louis XVI has gone to the block before a jubilant populace. Even as the royal head rolls into the basket, life changes for Horatio—his long exile is over, his days as petty squire draw to a close. It is the beginning of that twelve-year struggle with revolutionary France which was to take him to the heights of achievement and renown. That same day there is a despatch from the Admiralty: he is appointed to command HMS
Agamemnon
, sixty-four guns. At the beginning of February, France declares war on Britain. Four days later, Horatio leaves Burnham Thorpe for London, never to return.

What an amazing change of fortune. As yet no-one knows his name. All his great battles are before him. He is thirty-four years old, emerging from obscurity with all his energy and ambition, still whole and unmutilated, at the height of his powers and in the prime of life. The ship they have given us is in the prime of life too, twelve years old. She is sheathed in copper to reduce the drag of accumulated weed and shellfish. Standard practise by then. But the
Agamemnon
is one of the first ships to have her plating secured by copper bolts instead of iron to avoid electrolysis. Technically, her sixty-four guns are too few for a rating of ship of the line, but her sailing qualities more than make up for this. That February, as he sets about commissioning her at Chatham, Horatio is taking possession of a warship that for her size is one of the fastest and strongest in the world.

Thinking of this, the power and promise of it, the mettle of the man and the ship, I felt again the prickle of tears, companion of my
solitude. I was with him as he trod a quarterdeck for the first time in five years, amid the odours of river water and tar and raw hemp and wet planks, with him as he went down to his cabin, opened the new logbook with its binding of black leather, saw in its unmarked pages his days of opportunity ahead.

There is a lot to be done before we are ready for sailing: the hold has to be trimmed, a new foremast and bowsprit have to be fitted, stores to be loaded, working clothes and hammocks to be issued to the crew. By the middle of April she is ready. She waits in the Downs Roadstead for a convoy she is to escort down-Channel to Portsmouth. I see her swinging at her anchor, tugging at her cables—the ship as impatient to be gone as her captain. The ancestral foe across the water … It was the beginning of his true life, the phase of glory.

With this image, the slim figure pacing the deck, the scent of battle borne to his nostrils through the Channel mists, I took myself off to bed. A few pages of Keegan’s
Battle at Sea
and I was ready for sleep. I passed into first sleep easily enough in those months but almost always woke in the early morning and then could not sleep again. Waking me this time was one of my sorrow dreams, as I was in the habit of calling them. The ground floor of an old house, ruinous and empty, with wooden floors that echoed to the steps. From somewhere above me a voice raised in lamentation—high-pitched, throatformed sounds, overwhelmingly lonely and desolate, as if from some far edge of the world. As always, the sorrow seemed tangible, physical, like rain, and the rain had a light of its own, whitish, slightly phosphorescent. It came down through the house, enveloping but not touching me. The voice was known to me, but I resisted the knowledge. Then the divisions between the levels of the house melted away and I saw in a sort of sliding diagonal vista the slope of attic ceilings and a figure with its back to me, sitting on a bed. High-collared coat, narrow shoulders, some suggestion of a wig. Then I was in the same
room, the figure had fallen silent, the head was beginning to turn slowly towards me. I made a clattering escape downwards and away, a sensation like running downhill in a landslide, a debris of metal or wood moving under my feet. I slid and scrambled down, away from the turning head, the terrible prospect of meeting the eyes. This clattering descent drowned other sounds. However, it was not the panic of being pursued that I woke to but the anguish of that screaming grief and the fear that lay below it, a fear that kept me lying rigidly there, as if waiting for an assault in the dark—fear of grief itself, fear of the loss foretold.

I
slept again when the light came. But all next day and the one following I felt the shadow of that dream over me, a sense of foreboding and at the same time a sort of restlessness, a feeling of impending change. This mood was broken on the thirteenth of the month, when—as always—I celebrated the engagement known as Hotham’s Action. March 1795—an important date, I had always considered it. Though hardly more than a skirmish compared to his great battles of later, it was the occasion when Horatio first showed signs of angelic promptings, his capacity for breaking free, breaking the line.