Losing Nelson (24 page)

Famous lines. Miss Lily considered for a while, compressing her lips and slightly tilting her head, as she did when focusing on something dubious. Then she made a quick, decisive movement of the shoulders. “No,” she said, “he’s got it quite wrong. I know poets have to follow their inspiration, but if he had stopped to think, he would have seen that the cruellest month is November, because you know that winter is just round the corner.”

Accusing that most sober and cerebral poet of ill-considered haste! All her hatred of cold weather in those words, and something more: a literalness of mind that now, remembering it, seeing her convinced face, made me smile broadly in the dark. Poor Miss Lily.

I
spent most of the next day going over my talk, resisting the temptation to make further changes—it was too late for that now. The day began fine, but in the afternoon the sky clouded over and towards five o’clock it started to rain, something less than a downpour but much more than a drizzle, very steady and remorseless.

When I left the house, it was still raining at the same steady pace. I thought briefly of a taxi, but my habit of economy prevailed. Armed with raincoat and umbrella, I walked to Belsize Park station, took the tube to Russell Square, and cut through behind St. Pancras to the club premises.

In my anxiety not to be late I had left home earlier than necessary, and it was still not quite seven when I arrived, a good half-hour before the talk was due to begin. Ample time for a drink, a glass of red wine to steady me, give poise to my body and timbre to my voice. Only one, however …

Hugo was there as usual and gave me good-evening in his thin, rather nasal tones. He is conscious, I think, that his voice lacks natural bonhomie and tries to make up for this, infusing warmth into it by drawing out the vowels, which makes him sound stagy at times, to me at least.

There were only three people in the bar, but I thought nothing of this at the time; no premonition came to me. It was early, after all. Afterwards it was to occur to me that there was cause for misgiving right from the start, not so much in the small number of people but in who they were. Kismet Walters was there, and Robbins, the expert on naval signals in the age of sail, and a pallid man named Summerfield, a great admirer of Admiral Cornwallis, the commander of the Channel Fleet at the time of Trafalgar. Now the point about these three was that despite being very different one from the other in their personalities and opinions, they were all absolute regulars, people who passed probably the greater part of their leisure time on the club premises, invariably present at talks and slide shows, snoozing away odd hours in the reading room or browsing through the compilations of the Naval Records Society and back numbers of the
Mariner’s Mirror
. In short, they were people who would have been there
in any case
.

As I say, the significance of this did not come home to me at first. Having decided in advance against a second glass, I took this one slowly. I had to be careful not to cloud my mind; I needed clarity for the numerous questions I was sure my talk would provoke. I encountered Horatio’s regard in the Abbot portrait up on the wall behind the bar, that face of suppressed pain. Something about the eyes I had never noticed before: they seemed to look inwards, as if in search of a self that was deserting, absconding, leaving him to the pain of his wounds and the loneliness of the stars on his chest.
They cut pieces off him, didn’t they?

It was anxiety about my approaching talk that gave me these negative thoughts about him. I knew that a bright angel never looks inwards, though dark angels may. Introspection makes for hesitation and divided counsels. No, consistency of word and deed, magnanimity, fearlessness, self-command—these are the heroic virtues. Honour, in a word … A shaft of anguish struck me. Naples, 1799. Just one week from your arrival in the city to the embarkation of the rebels. Just one week in a lifetime.
The violation was at sea
. Of course, Sacchinelli was biased, Ruffo was his employer, he wanted to show him in a good light …

I could feel that my palms were sweating. I had the folder containing the pages of my talk held closely under my left arm. I saw Hugo’s movements duplicated in the mirror behind the bar. He caught my eye and gave me his slightly rabbity smile.

It was twenty past seven. I had again the impression that time had somehow accelerated, gone ahead of me. These thoughts, which had seemed of the briefest, had occupied twenty minutes. Naples, it was Naples that had slowed me down … There were six people in the bar now. Summerfield came over to me and said he was looking forward to my talk, but this was just a prelude and a pretext; he wanted to tell me about a talk that he himself was due to deliver on the subject, inevitably, of Cornwallis.

“The point is, you see,” he said, “and it can’t be repeated often enough, that without Cornwallis, Nelson’s victories would not have been possible. Nelson gets all the credit. No-one ever praises Cornwallis, he is the unsung hero, but if it hadn’t been for the blockade of Brest between 1803 and 1805, Napoleon would have been landing troops in Kent long before Nelson got to grips with Villeneuve at Trafalgar.” Summerfield’s eyes, so pale as to be almost colourless, were wide with sincerity. “In my talk I intend to set the record straight,” he said.

As always, I sprang to Horatio’s defence. “Wars are won by winning battles.”

“Listen, what was the navy trying to do from 1803 onwards? Basically, I mean basically, what were we trying to do?”

“Destroy the French fleet, break French naval power, drive them from the seas.”

Summerfield shook his head. “You are talking in Nelsonian terms. You are conditioned, like everyone else in this club. What we were doing was trying to prevent a French invasion. The true hero of Trafalgar is therefore Cornwallis, who kept them bottled up in Brittany for the best part of two years.”

Even in my growing agitation at the poor turnout, I could not help thinking it strange that a man would join the Nelson Club and spend much of his time on its premises when the main focus of his interest was not Nelson at all but an obscure admiral named Cornwallis, an effective blockader no doubt, but that was about all—no glamour, no hint of the angelic. Not for the first time, it occurred to me that the club numbered too many cranks among its members. “Well,” I said, “the obvious thing to do is go off and found a Cornwallis club.”

The club president, Pratt-Smithers, now came in, accompanied by a man with a short white beard and an abstracted way of looking about him, as if he were not quite sure of being in the right place. This was the guest for the evening. Members were allowed to bring guests, but quite often someone was invited in the name of the club as a whole; and Pratt-Smithers, who knew nothing much about Horatio but liked running things, tried to bring in people who might be good for some publicity or might help to increase the membership. This one, it seemed, was a writer who had just published a long novel about the eighteenth-century African slave trade. I hadn’t read it. Until that moment I hadn’t heard of it, or him. I am not a man for fiction.

“Absolutely monumental,” Pratt-Smithers said now, apparently referring to this novel.

The novelist had a slightly crooked smile and large grey eyes behind thin-rimmed glasses. The eyes were mournful in spite of the smile, and the glasses were very old—the metal of the frame was tarnished green here and there. I didn’t much take to this man; he didn’t look the sort who would take pride in our country’s great past, and that’s a fundamental division of categories with me, those capable of patriotism and those not.

“Scotch, please, no ice, no nothing,” he said to Hugo in a voice that contained traces of northeast England. Waiting for it, he squinted vaguely round the bar. “This all the audience?” Not tremendously tactful. I had a feeling it wasn’t his first drink of the evening.

“Oh, there’ll be others,” Pratt-Smithers said. “Not everyone comes to the bar, you know, some people wait in the auditorium.” He smiled at me, and I knew what the smile was saying:
This is the most miserable turnout for any talk in the history of the club
. “It’s a rainy night,” he said. “Puts people off, some people.”

“Auditorium?” Summerfield looked bewildered. “We were just talking about Cornwallis.”

“Friend of yours?” the novelist said.

Summerfield is a solitary character, easily thrown out. First there had been the unusual word, then this dreadful ignorance. Looking if possible paler than ever, he made a rather abrupt movement of the head, jerking it sideways, then back to the front again. The novelist followed this jerking motion with his eyes. Summerfield had seemed to indicate the area behind the bar.

“That’s him, is it?” The novelist was looking at the Abbot painting. “Naval man, I see, yes.”

“Good God, man,” I said, “that’s Nelson.” It was all I could do to keep my voice steady. I couldn’t yet quite believe, not altogether, that
the membership as a whole could have boycotted my talk. I knew it, yes, but I resisted the knowledge. Perhaps I had slipped out of parallel again, gone too far ahead somehow … The sounds in the bar seemed to die away, and a sort of ringing hush came to my ears. I was still clutching my file, pressing it close against my side, under my left arm. I felt some pain at this pressure now from the hard edges of the folder.

“Time we were going in, I think,” Pratt-Smithers said. “Ah, you’re having another.”

This was said to the novelist, who it seemed had asked for another whisky, which Hugo was now passing to him. He disposed of it with a fair turn of speed, but it was twenty minutes to eight by the time we got into the lecture room.

Not until I was there at the table, facing my audience of seven scattered persons in a room with seating for seventy, with the carafe of water and the clean glass before me and Pratt-Smithers’s introductory remarks sounding in my ears, not until then did I finally accept it: they had deliberately stayed away. The rain was not the reason, though of course it was the reason they would give.

In that moment, while I was still arranging my papers before me, everything came together, everything made sense. I knew this was a plan that had been concerted against me. They had been waiting several weeks, for this occasion of my talk, to deal the blow. A faint feeling of sickness accompanied this realization, but there was no surprise in it. Ever since joining the club, I had known that my better understanding of Horatio was resented by the common run of the members. Brilliance of any kind infuriates the mediocre. It was the same with Horatio. When he broke the line at Cape St. Vincent and so secured the victory, there were those who urged Jervis to reprimand him for disobeying orders.

If this was a plot against me—and I now felt certain it was—then
the people who had actually come were obviously suspect too; among them there must be spies whose sole purpose it was to observe my reactions and report back. Otherwise, where would be the satisfaction? There and then I made my resolution, and it was one worthy of him: I would show no sign of disappointment, I would give my talk, I would deliver it with clarity and force, I would speak to this small, spy-riddled group as I would have done if the room had been packed to overflowing. I owed it to him, I owed it to myself.
Never show what you feel
. My father’s lesson.

And I kept to it. I redeemed the occasion for us both, I made it my own and his. I relaxed my shoulders, I lightened my glance. I heard my voice in that almost empty room, reading the sentences I had put together with such careful toil. The two essential elements, vision and conversion. The lonely boy at the dockside, his vision of divinity in the person of his metamorphosed uncle, in that light and spacious cabin of his first warship; then the conversion, the radiant orb, the culminating phrase:
Why then, I will be a hero
.

As I spoke I glanced at the faces, wondering who were the spies. No-one could be excluded, not the president or the guest, not Hugo, who had left the bar and come to sit at the back of the room, not even Summerfield or Kismet Walters. Any or all of them might be in the enemy camp. But I did not falter. I was defending him as well as myself, I was saving his dignity with my own. The hero carries human dignity for all those who cannot. Horatio’s role and mine—I felt closer to him that evening than perhaps I had ever felt before.

Of course, such exertions take their toll. When I sat down again at the table and reached for the water glass, I saw that my hand was shaking and realized that this would be obvious to anyone who saw me try to drink. I retracted the hand with studied slowness, as if I had thought again.

Pratt-Smithers was now on his feet, inviting questions. There
was a short interval of silence, and then the visiting novelist raised his hand. “It would be interesting to know,” he said, “whether Nelson ever had a black woman?”

This was the question, this was the level of interest my talk had aroused. Contempt for question and questioner steadied me now; the trembling ceased. I poured out water and drank, without a clink or a spill. I allowed myself a slight smile. “You are suggesting that that would be a third stage in the making of a hero?”