Losing Nelson (27 page)

As a refuge from these thoughts, I turned back to Horatio, to the December of that same year, when he and the Hamiltons were guests
of William Beckford at his country estate in Wiltshire. Strange guests, a strange host—the incongruities of this visit had intrigued me for years, ever since I first read about it. Beckford had inherited great wealth from his merchant father, something like £60 million in equivalent value today. At the age of five he had been given piano lessons by the child prodigy Mozart, aged eight. He was the author of the celebrated
Vathek
, classic among Gothic novels, a tale of gloomy splendour and bizarre invention. Eccentric, romantic, increasingly reclusive, he devoted most of his energies—and vast sums of money—to the construction of a Gothic “abbey” on his estate, all turrets and crenellations, with an octagonal central tower that rose eventually to a height of nearly three hundred feet.

He invited them because they were celebrities—it is difficult to see what else they could have had in common. They were escorted from Salisbury by a detachment of cavalry. As they made their way up the drive to Beckford’s mansion, a thirty-piece band played “Rule Britannia.” Beckford waited for them on the steps, accompanied by his pet monkey and a dwarf he had acquired in Portugal.

The highlight of the stay was a visit to the abbey, which took place after lunch on the twenty-third. Also in the party were Madame Banti, the opera singer; Benjamin West, the American painter; John Wolcot, a composer of satirical verses; and an architect named Wyatt, who was helping Beckford in the design of his amazing folly. Darkness was already falling when they climbed into their carriages and set off across the park through the gloomy avenues of trees. Their way was shown by lanterns hung from the branches. As they came in sight of the vast building, a hidden orchestra struck up a solemn march. The massive walls rose above them, and the great tower, still incomplete, was half lost in the darkness.

Once through the portals of the place, we walk across the hall, a room so high that the lights in the sconces do not reach the ceiling,
then into the Cardinal’s Room, hung with purple damask, where hooded servants silently take our cloaks and hats. We sit down to eat at an enormous refectory table covered with golden baskets of sweetmeats and flagons of spiced wine. Solemn music sounds from the gallery. But where is Emma? She is not there beside us.

Some moments of anxiety—her presence is necessary, indispensable. But Sir William does not seem perturbed. Then, from the far end of this vast, dim room, glimmering and vague at first, dressed in a simple white robe, she advances, very slowly. She is bearing a golden urn. Urbane, knowledgeable Sir William whispers behind his hand: “Agrippina bearing the ashes of Germanicus.” We nod, as being well acquainted with this episode in Roman history.

Emma passes from pathos to pride, from sorrow to scorn, from rage to final triumph as she rouses the Romans to revenge the death of her husband. It is one of the most successful and memorable of her Attitudes. Her fellow guests, sitting in that strange room with its yellow hangings and candlelit statues and reliquaries, are moved to tears as they watch. Above them in the darkness rises the great tower. It is nearing completion—it will reach an amazing 276 feet. Seven years later it will collapse, destroying most of the building.

Scholars, poetasters, opera singers, journalists—you were the odd one out in that company, as you always were in any company on land. Sir William was a collector and bookish. His taste did not run to the Gothic, but he would have had much in common with Beckford. Emma was a natural actress and a talented singer, she won applause with her Attitudes, she sang duets with Madame Banti. But you? Victor of the Nile, saviour of your country—your brightness was eclipsed among them. Better so, better you were dimmed. As an angel, you could not have endured such company. It was much like what you had come from in Naples.
A country of fiddlers and poets, whores and scoundrels
. That is how you wrote of Naples on the morning after
your fortieth birthday. Those were the early days, before you were caught in the toils of the city.

As always, I had returned to Naples. Whatever the point of departure, I always ended there. I had solved nothing by leaping with Horatio to a London theatre or a Gothic folly. The doubts kept pace with me, however far ahead I went in his life—and only five years remained for him now. He took the city with him wherever he went, and so did I, and so we both would until I could clear him.

P
erhaps it was fear of drowning in the poisonous flower-trap of Naples that was responsible for the dream I had that night. Fear was my inseparable companion in one form or another—and it has many forms.

A pervasive presence in this dream was a woman called Pat, whom I did not see but knew to be living in the desolate aftermath of an unhappy love affair with the president, he too invisible. I was approaching Pat’s ruined cottage, which I knew in my dream represented her ruined life. In the abandoned garden was an old Morris Minor, half submerged in water. The garden itself had sunk and flooded, and I found myself standing chest-high in black water, tepid, not unpleasant. A woman who was not Pat appeared beside me and told me to look at my legs. I succeeded somehow in getting one leg out of the water. It was naked and covered with black centipede
shapes printed on the skin. I felt a horrified repugnance and knew that I had stayed too long in the water. Rising before me was a sort of stone column, not very tall. If I could climb that, I could get out of the water. I had to embrace the column in order to climb. But the stones were loose, they crumbled in my hands, I kept slipping back. Surmounting the column, outlined against the sky, a figure leaning towards me, a shimmer of light on his chest. He leans towards me, but he does not offer to help. He is leaning to watch me, not to help me. He is faceless, some suggestion of wispy hair. He is wearing the same cocked hat, I feel the same terror as he brings his face nearer.

I woke from this sweating profusely, and for some time afterwards I groaned to myself in the darkness. Thoughts of my dead father came into my mind, and I was stricken with a sense of irreparable loss, as if something immensely valuable, irreplaceable, had slipped from my grasp and shattered beyond mending. It was myself I grieved for, what I might have been to him; I suppose I knew that then. It was the same grief that coloured my dreams, all-enveloping, too pervasive to be contained, an element of weather, like mist or dew.

Memories spring without warning or bidding into the mind, near and far, real and fabricated, all weeds in the same garden. There was no definite moment of transition, no moment when you saw him cross the great divide. There should be a moment, there must be a moment. The one detectable change was when his face lost that cruelty of keenness, of questioning. He died then.

So many things realized too late, understood too long after. I thought he was concerned with truth. A May afternoon, late May, I was seven years old—it was the year after my stay at the hospital. Another of those country walks, but this time my mother was with us and it was in Cambridgeshire, where her parents lived.

Childhood memories are so helplessly subject to tampering. So
difficult not to take a chisel to them, or a brush. Sure memory of it is only sunlight, of being first high up as we walked, then low down between the hawthorn bushes, my mother in a light blue summer coat, no hat, her hair loose, blown sometimes across her face. Later days of similar weather must have got into the picture, but to me the essence of May is concentrated in that afternoon of broken cloud and hazy sunshine, the silver gleam of the birches, the hawthorn blossom everywhere in profusion, pink and white, accompanying us along the path like a prodigal bridal.

We had driven out to Devil’s Dyke, to where the road crosses the dyke on the Newmarket Downs, not far from the racecourse. The footpath ran along the top of the dyke and it was high at first, you could see a long way across the downs on either side. To children from London the openness was exhilarating, the broad views, the vast sky crisscrossed with singing larks. The larks were stitching up the sky, so my mother said, that day or another. Who had torn it? Some giant, I imagined. I am not sure, she said; perhaps it tears itself. But the larks are busy stitching it up. Smiling, flushed with the sun, her reddish brown hair falling sometimes across her face. Blue eyes, like mine.

Then the dyke flattened down into wooded gullies, with clumps of alder and scrub willow. Names not belonging to that day, learned later. The path was more winding, less clearly defined, there were possibilities of detours and shortcuts. My father set Monty and me on to a game of his own devising, in retrospect totally characteristic of him, a game of observing and competing and reporting. Perhaps he had seen that we were flagging. In any case, a good way of getting rid of us for a while. We were to go on ahead, take careful mental note of everything, and return to make a full report.

It was seductive, to be an explorer, to break new ground before the adults, to be able, just for once, to tell them something they didn’t
know, couldn’t know. I remember the excitement of running ahead. I kept close to Monty at first, thinking that if I looked where he looked I would see what he saw, a tactic wholly mistaken—I could not know what messages were being conveyed to him, and he, wanting to outshine me, offered no clues.

So I developed ambitions of my own, and from the very beginning they were enormous. I wanted to have something outstanding to report. I wanted to find another pathway, one that nobody else knew about, a sort of secret alternative to the one we were on. Did it start there, the fascination with the parallel track, the private access, a life to run alongside my own life?

Down into those wooded hollows, plunging down, looking for the big scoop. Cardinal error, looking for what you hope to find rather than looking at what is there before you. My father would not have made that error, nor did Monty. I was lost in the confusion of detail, not knowing the names of things. Flowers, birdsong, broken sunlight.

Meanwhile my brother, sober and methodical, three years older, not distracted by grand designs, pursued his observations. When I saw him run back I ran after him, wanting somehow to share in the credit, but then I had nothing to report, I stood silent under a blank sky. Monty had seen tracks of a dog, a big dog, in a place where the ground was soft; he had seen a colony of ants in a dead tree; he had seen briar roses in the hedge. He brought back, concealed till the moment of presentation, a pheasant’s tail feather, a piece of the chalk on which the downs rested.
Good work, Monty. Try again, Charles—use your eyes, boy, you must learn to use your eyes
.

But my eyes were clotted with failure. My mother was smiling, but she knew what I was feeling, she knew my distress. Did I know hers? So difficult, across this ocean of time, to see her, to know. She spoke very quietly to me, a little aside. Perhaps you will see some oxlips. The yellow flowers with leaves like primroses. Not among the
trees, they grow on the banksides. They like the chalk, you know. My father could not hear, but he saw, he guessed.
No special treatment, Dorothy. The boy must learn to use his eyes
. But I knew that with my eyes I could not win.

I knew there were creatures called moles, and they fascinated me because they were black and blind and had a mysterious alternative life under the ground. What more triumphant thing than to see one in broad daylight? I reported that I had seen a mole.

My father’s face at once took on a certain gleam. I think he understood from the beginning that I had made it up, but he didn’t say so, he expressed no hint of scepticism, offered me no joking way of escape. That was not his way. No, he led me on with questions, friendly questions.

Gracious me, a mole. Did you hear that, Dorothy? What was it like?

I said it was little and velvety-black and explained that it kept its nose close to the ground as it went along because it couldn’t see very well.

What was it doing when you saw it?

I said it was just walking along; it was enjoying the sunshine after being in its dark burrow underground.

Is that all it was doing, just walking along?

Some hint of disappointment in my father’s voice. My report was not dramatic enough. I said that I had seen it eating something.

Really? Now that is really interesting. What was it eating?

I think my mother attempted to intervene at this point. I have a vague memory of some words, an expression of remonstrance on her face as she looked at my father. But he was enjoying the game too much.

No, no, fair play. The boy must be allowed to make his report. What was it eating?

I said it was eating a piece of sandwich. It seemed reasonable—I had seen scraps of old picnics blown down there.

The trap was closed. My father’s face lost its smile.
Moles don’t eat sandwiches. Look me in the eye, Charles. You didn’t see any mole at all, did you?