Losing Nelson

ALSO BY BARRY UNSWORTH

The Partnership

The Greeks Have a Word for It

The Hide

Mooncranker’s Gift

The Big Day

Pascali’s Island

(published in the United States under the title
The Idol Hunter
)

The Rage of the Vulture

Stone Virgin

Sugar and Rum

Sacred Hunger

Morality Play

After Hannibal

Losing Nelson

The Songs of the Kings

The Ruby in Her Navel

Land of Marvels

The Quality of Mercy

I
had a bad fright that morning. I wouldn’t have left the house at all on such a special day if the man at Seldon’s hadn’t phoned to say they had a piece I might be interested in. It was an oval plate, bone china, frilled at the edges, slightly curved at the sides, pale cream in colour, with a central medallion enclosing his profile in dark blue. There was an inscription of the same colour in slightly worn cursive, running round the upper half of the medallion:
Hero of the Nile
. They had used the De Vaere profile made for Wedgwood in the summer of 1798. Nothing very remarkable about it. But of course I agreed to buy it. It bore his image. It was seldom indeed I could resist that.

I was on my way back home with it, back to Belsize Park. It was a raw day and the sky was darkly overcast. Nevertheless, I decided to walk as far as Knightsbridge for the sake of the exercise. I had time to spare—or so I thought. As I was crossing Pont Street it started to rain, not very heavily. The platform in the Underground was crowded and
became steadily more so while I waited. There was a silence among the people there, silence of waiting—they were resigned. I began to feel the first twinges of panic. Then an Asian voice on the loudspeaker: a delay on the line due to security checks at Gloucester Road station.

It was thirteen minutes to twelve. Imagine my feelings. This was February the fourteenth; it was the two hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Cape St. Vincent, Horatio’s first great disobedience, the day he became an angel. On this day, at 12:50
P.M
.—just over an hour’s time—his ship, the
Captain
, went into close action. And here was I among this mute herd, sweating despite the cold, a good two miles from my table and my models. The ships were not even set out. It mattered so much to get the time right, therein lay the whole meaning—how else could I keep my life parallel with his? Before my father died—he died last April—I fought out this battle wherever I could: on my bed, on the floor, one freezing day in the shed behind the house. We never missed, year after year we broke the line at ten minutes to one. Now I had the basement all to myself. The thought that I might fail the appointment now was unendurable, it made me feel sick.

There was no time to be lost. I struggled back to the surface along with numbers of others who had made the same decision. I was feeling distinctly unwell by now; my breath came with difficulty and there was the usual suffusion of blood at the temples, obscuring my vision, making me feel hemmed-in. It was still raining and there were no free taxis anywhere near the tube, nor outside Harrods. I had to walk some way towards Hyde Park Corner before I found one, and even then I was lucky; the previous fare was alighting as I came up.

I gave the address and sat back and concentrated on keeping my face composed and my breathing inaudible. Closing the eyes has always helped me to cope with anxiety, but now I waited two minutes
by my watch before allowing myself the luxury. Timing is the key to control, and control is the key to concealment. The driver, if he glanced in his mirror, would think it strange if his passenger were dozing too soon. My father was a master of concealment; he kept it up so well that nobody knew just when he died, nobody registered the precise moment.

We made it with twelve minutes to spare. I was still gasping a little as I went down to the basement. I did not allow myself to be sidetracked by considerations of where among the shelves and cabinets to put my new acquisition; such a decision would involve extensive rearrangement, it could easily have taken the whole afternoon, in these last months I had got steadily slower. I simply left the plate, still in its damp wrapping, on the floor and went straight through to my operations room and began setting out the ships, the Spanish first in their two loose groups, 9 in the van, 18 in the rear, these last headed by de Córdoba in his great flagship, the
Santissima Trinidad
, 4 decks, 136 guns, the most powerful wooden warship ever built. One of the first models I made; I was fourteen, home from school for the summer holidays. Odourless now, the ship in my hands, but still seeming to bear the spiritous, heady scents of its making—glue, paint, freshly cut shavings. The shed had a smell too, dust and hot creosote and the rank weeds that grew against the boards outside. Smells are more intense for solitude and remembered more intensely, as every lonely person knows. Sounds too. But I wasn’t lonely, I had him.

Now for the English fleet, under Admiral Sir John Jervis in the
Victory
, Horatio’s death-ship at Trafalgar eight years later—eight years, eight months, and one week. In contrast to the disorderly Spanish, our ships are sailing in impeccable close order, fifteen warships in perfect line-ahead formation, approaching from the south at right angles, making for the fatal gap in the enemy fleet, two feet wide on my table, roughly seven miles in actual fact.

The sight of them now, disposed for battle, gunports open and cannon run out, quite restored my calm. In full press of sail, with their flags and pennants and painted hulls, their figureheads picked out in gold and vermillion, they made a fine show. How much care and devotion I lavished on those models, those sloops and frigates and ships of the line, what pride I took in them. Before my father died I had to keep them in cardboard boxes in my bedroom, together with all the other Nelson memorabilia I had collected over the years. My room was full of boxes, you couldn’t get the door more than half open, you had to edge your way in. Now my ships had for their manoeuvres the whole surface of the billiard table that had always been a feature of the basement. My brother Monty and I used to play on it sometimes, before he left. I had covered it with dark blue baize and had a sheet of glass fitted exactly over it. In the light of the lamp overhead—no daylight ever entered that room—the surface glinted like dark water and reflected the colours of the ships.

Eight minutes to go. Since first light these stately, deadly vessels have been slowly drawing closer together, approaching in a fashion apparently leisurely the thunder and carnage of a close encounter. Incongruous, and to me entirely fascinating, this dreamlike slowness. Consider the ferocious fire power of those ships, their capacity for destruction, more devastating than anything known before, on sea or land. Jervis is taking well over a thousand cannon into action with him. Now they are 25 miles west of the Portuguese headland of St. Vincent, 150 miles northwest of Cadiz, for which port the Spanish are running with a fair wind.

They would avoid the engagement if they could, but they cannot be allowed to, they must be intercepted. A heavy weight of responsibility lies on Jervis’s shoulders today. The French Revolutionary War has reached a crucial phase. The Dutch fleet has joined with the
French at Brest. One attempt to invade Ireland has already been made. Admiral Lord Bridport’s Channel Fleet has been driven back to England by bad weather and forced to abandon the blockade of Brest. Only this same bad weather has so far prevented an enemy break-out and an unopposed Irish landing. If the Spanish are allowed to join them, the odds will become impossible. Not only have the English been forced to quit the Mediterranean—a vital sphere of influence—but the whole of continental Europe is now dominated by the armies of France. Drained by the subsidies she has been obliged to pay to keep her allies in the field, her trade routes curtailed, her merchantmen harassed by privateers, England is on the verge of bankruptcy. Ireland is simmering with rebellion. There are rumours of mutiny in the ships of the Royal Navy. It is indeed true, what Admiral Jervis is heard to remark as the weather brightens: “A victory is very essential to England at this moment.”