Losing Nelson by Barry Unsworth
He paused for a moment, still pointing. Then his hand moved up to his face in a gesture of secrecy and caution. “Don’t tell her,” he said. “She won’t see, do it now, get my trousers.”
He wanted to escape from his death, which without trousers he could not attempt. He had not asked us for help ever before; appropriate, of course, that it came in the form of an order. My brother and I both made a movement to obey. Even then, in his weakness and delirium, his notion of reality was stronger than ours, his vision of himself as trousered escapee impressed itself on us. “Quick,” he said in that stranger’s voice. “You must be quick.”
We started up, both of us, momentarily ready to be his means of escape. And it came into my mind then, in that briefest of moments before I remembered the limits of his power—the question forced itself on me: did I want him back in trousers, home again, back beside the billiard table, which I was already envisaging with its glinting cover of baize and glass as our ocean, Horatio’s and mine?
This pang of hesitation was terrible; the moment of it has haunted my mind ever since. Did I want him to die? I saw Monty settle back in his chair and wondered whether he too had been blighted by this doubt. I wonder still.
When we made no move to get his trousers, my father’s face became sorrowing and then quite blank. He lay back, and soon afterwards he died. The moment was quite undetectable. We had been looking at the lifeless face for several minutes when the nurse came in, touched him, went out again, and came back with a doctor, who told us he had passed over.
There was a strange element of reversal in it, this command of my father’s to be rescued from hospital. It echoed a distant time when he had come to a hospital to rescue me. I did not think of the connection on that afternoon of his death, but it came often to my mind in the months following, and it came again that night as I lay sleepless in a darkness that was filling with voices.
I was six years old. Before my chess days, before the pictures in the book, long before I knew that Horatio and I were the same age when we lost our mothers. I had been in hospital for two weeks, after an operation to remove my appendix. I hated the hospital and wanted terribly to go home. However, adept at concealment even then, I had shown no sign of these feelings to anyone there, any of the nurses, any of the other children on the ward. I was washed and combed and ready, but they had not made me dress in outdoor clothes; I waited for him in pyjamas and dressing gown—a new, smart one, I remember it still. I was without trousers, in other words. Probably because of the car, I think now; I was to be taken home in the car. But at the time this did not occur to me. The notion of betrayal came early to me. The fact that I was still in hospital clothes made me suspect that they didn’t really mean to let me go.
He seemed from another world when he came for me, god-like. In that place of pale walls and floors, glazed and glimmering to my memory, he was alien and somber with his dark hair and eyes, his long navy-blue overcoat and maroon scarf. The clothes he wore that day made an impression on me that has never faded. He was triumphantly trousered then. His long, big-chinned face with the sociable smile on it …
Some words with the nurses while I stood waiting. They were impressed—there was a flutter of interest round him. Then he looked at me. “Ready to go?”
How I responded to this I don’t know. No more than a nod perhaps, or some shy assent—in company he made me shy. Response enough, in any case, to reveal my state of mind to him. He was always very noticing of troubled states.
“Perhaps you’d rather stay?” He looked at the nurses. “You would keep him, I dare say, wouldn’t you?”
“Only too pleased. Quite a little charmer. He has made conquests everywhere. Won’t you stay with us, dear?”
I didn’t know, I was too young to see, or perhaps my precocious suspicion of treachery prevented me from seeing, that this was not meant seriously, that grown-ups bait children in a pretence of joking, with words not really addressed to the child at all but to themselves, to one another, to celebrate their superior worldliness and wisdom. I thought they meant it. I thought he would go away again without me, leave me in that awful place. I did not know what I could say to stop him without betraying my fear, without hurting the nurses’ feelings. And on my father’s face that same expression when he glanced at me, the one I knew already—not really amused, I never saw amusement on his face, but alert, interested; he was studying me. Perhaps it was born then, my fear of eyes.
Only a moment or two, I suppose, the time that I stood there, speechless and lost, in my new dressing gown, dark blue with silver stitching round the pockets and a silver cord belt. Then the tone of the laughter changed, my father picked me up and carried me in triumph out to the car—his triumph, not mine. Thirty-six years later, in the indifferent light of a hospital room, he mutters and points and yearns for his trousers.
My brother and I have met only once since the funeral, and that was to settle some matters arising out of the plan we had made together for me to buy him out of his half of the house. I was arranging to do this by using some of my share of the money placed in trust for us by our mother’s father, who died when I was ten and Monty thirteen. The balance of the capital was still enough for me to live on, more than enough.
He came on a Sunday afternoon, the eighteenth of May. I was down in the basement when he rang the bell, drinking red wine and rearranging some of the cabinets. I had lost no time in having cabinets fitted to house the pieces I valued most, the nineteenth-century long-case clock with a picture of HMS Victory on the face, the set of Wedgwood vases in coloured jasper made in 1905 to celebrate the centenary of Trafalgar, a Liverpool creamware soup tureen with tinted portraits of him in the panels. The other pieces I kept on open shelves set round the walls. What a joy it had been to get these things out of the boxes they had lived in so long, set them out where they could be seen.
I remember the date of Monty’s visit quite well—it was on the eighteenth of May, 1803, that Horatio, newly appointed commander-in-chief Mediterranean, hoisted his flag in the Victory. I was having a glass of claret down there in the basement to mark the occasion. I was working my way through a stock of it that my father had been obliged to leave behind.
I got a terrible shock when I opened the door. I thought for a moment that it was my father walking in, come back to resume residence, take over the basement. Monty had grown a narrow moustache on the exact model of Father’s, he had parted his hair near the middle in just the same way. He was wearing an old-fashioned brown tweed suit with broad lapels, which I recognized as having belonged to Father. The shirt looked old-fashioned too. Monty had kept all his clothes, down to socks and underwear, or so I now suspected, and in a final bid for approval he was dressing up in them.
The strangest thing of all was that I made no comment about this and neither did he. We had not been in the habit of confiding in each other, not of late years, not since my illness. Seeing him impersonating our father like that made me seriously doubt his mental balance. Certainly not a person to show one’s Nelson collection to. I had never shown it to anyone, as a matter of fact. I kept the basement always double-locked.
Penhas was at the funeral, rather surprisingly—no personal invitation had been sent to him. A notice had been sent to his and my father’s club, the Atheneum; he might have seen that, or perhaps been told of it—he was not really a viable club member any longer, though I did not realize this until we talked together.
He was sitting towards the rear of the church with a woman in a stiff-looking black hat beside him. After the first surprise, it seemed somehow natural that he should have come. I had not seen him in the years since my illness, but I had always thought of him as belonging to my life rather than my father’s; I don’t think they had ever been particularly close. To me he had been, if not a friend exactly, for a while, in a way, a fellow twenty-year-old. In his efforts to help me he had told me stories about his youth, brought himself to an age with me. It was he, after all, who had put me back on the
This feeling was confirmed afterwards, after the delivery of my father’s body to the flames, when I found them both waiting outside in the uncertain spring sunshine, the woman still beside him, taller than he and straight as a ramrod. We shook hands. He did not introduce the woman, she introduced herself—her name was Elizabeth White. It was she, not he, who expressed their condolences. Even before he spoke, it was clear that Penhas was greatly changed. The short imperial beard was still in place, quite grey now. The eyes were as I remembered them, dark and depthless—the first eyes I was able to sustain when I was beginning to recover. But the rest of the face had departed, so to speak, from the sombreness of the eyes. The features were relaxed and oddly puffy; the mouth looked softer and thicker and it wore a half-smile, inappropriate for a funeral. The whole face was blurred somehow, as if it had been sponged over.
“He wanted to come,” Mrs. White said. “He wouldn’t take no for an answer.”
“Well, nothing is forever,” Penhas said. His voice still had the careful modulations of a foreigner, but it was slower and thicker than I remembered. “There was the poule de luxe, do you remember her? Living on the earnings of a highball lady. Born, worn. She kept us in funds for nearly … How long was it?” Very swiftly and adroitly, almost imperceptibly, he winked at me. “She has a most amazing repertoire, that woman, she is a professional contoonist, made of india-blubber. Rubber. God, the things she gets up to.”
“Now then, keep the party clean,” Mrs. White said. She gave me a look of grim patience. I had thought for a wild moment that Penhas might be referring to her, though her appearance made this improbable. Then I understood that she was a nurse or attendant of some kind.
“That was in Stralsburg,” Penhas said. “No, wait a minute …” The smile disappeared and his face became anxious and intent. “Salzburg, Stralsburg, Strassburg …”
There were other people I should speak to. Monty had already gone back to the house to receive those of my father’s relatives and closer acquaintances due to forgather there. I was beginning to express my thanks, beginning to withdraw, but Penhas—who I don’t think had a total sense of where he actually was—began to tell me the story of the bicycles, how somewhere in a hilly region north of Bolzero or Bulzano, footsore and penniless, on his way to Spain, he had seen two bicycles standing outside a lonely farmhouse, one very old and battered, the other brand-new. He had stolen one of them. Which one, did I think?
“No idea,” I said. I didn’t want to spoil his story.
“I took the old one. I was not a high-trade thief, you see. Grade.”
“Sanity depends on making distinctions,” I said, couldn’t help saying.
Penhas nodded, his smile broadened, and little webs of saliva stretched at the corners of his mouth. He seemed to be attempting, with that sponged-over face, the same expression, ironic and sly, that he had worn twenty years before when he told me the story of the bicycles.
I spoke on an impulse, a thing very rare with me. “You are not someone who steals, Mr. Penhas, you are a giver. You gave me Horatio, you brought me back to normal life.”
“Horatio?”
“Horatio Nelson.”
There was no faintest look of recollection on his face. He had no idea at all what I was talking about. Whatever had brought him, it was not the professional follow-up to an interesting case. I thought I knew now what it was. He had not come here for me at all but for himself, to grope through the mist that was descending on him for the self he had been when he told me the stories, bold and adventurous in a way I had never been, with Spain and the world before him.
“Horatio?” he said. “Sheer affectation. Why not Horace?”
Mrs. White took him by the arm. “Time to call it a day.” She smiled for the first time, a smile incongruously cheerful. “Homeward bound.”
Penhas gave me a look, perhaps of complicity, the fathomless eyes seeming to cast sadness over the ruins of the face and mind. Then, obediently, without farewells, he allowed himself to be led away. I watched them walk down the path to the chapel gate. He had a walk that was at once shambling and quick. Mrs. White kept close beside him, a head taller, regimental-looking in her black hat.
I was left with my memories of the story, the theft of shirts and knickers from a clothesline, the binding of the bare rims of the wheels with them, the epic journey on this rattling steed. Somewhere south of Avignon, in difficult terrain, it finally gave up the ghost.
Perhaps after all I was wrong, I thought now; perhaps Penhas had told these stories to scores of people since … Such questions occupied me as I lay through the hours of darkness thinking of the April deaths, actual and foreshadowed. Towards dawn I heard the resident blackbird strike up in the small drenched garden behind the house. It sang the story of faces, Penhas’s spongy and sly, my father’s transfigured by eagerness for his trousers, Horatio’s pale and noble in the allegorical painting by Benjamin West, where the dead hero’s body, unmarked by blood or wounds, is raised by Neptune and Victory into the arms of mourning Britannia.
Other birds joined in; the song became a chorus of lamentation, like the rain of grief I sometimes experienced in my dreams, which was both sound and touch. I felt something of the oppressive sorrow that comes on waking from such dreams and then a return of the terrible restlessness that afflicted me all through that spring and summer, the sense that my life was changing, that something would be required of me. My body had tensed—with resistance, with acceptance, with a kind of fear. Then, quite casually, with a typical absence of fuss, Miss Lily came into my mind and I remembered a conversation we had had about April, how I had quoted to her the lines of T. S. Eliot, in which he says that April is the cruellest month. Quoting poetry to Miss Lily! Three months ago I would not have dreamed of such a thing. I thought of the lines again now; they come, appropriately enough, at the beginning of The Burial of the Dead in The Waste Land:
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire …
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.
16
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 …