Losing Nelson Read Online Free

it, let alone defend him from it, made me feel I had betrayed him, stirred a feeling of nausea in me similar to that I sometimes felt in those days when I tried to understand the events of June 1799 in Naples. I had devoted myself to a study of his life, I had followed him through the succession of his days and the succession of my own, though sometimes the course had run below ground. I was nine when this started. That was in 1964, the year my mother left us. Chess led me to Horatio—chessand my father and my absent mother and the fact that on that day I broke the rule about not showing what you feel.
    I thought my mother had gone because she did not love me and Monty enough to stay. I suppose I already knew, in the way that children know such things, that she did not love my father. He, no doubt intent on setting a good example of not showing what you feel, did not succeed then or later in explaining the matter to us. He did not say she loved us or had been sorry to go. Our mother had gone to India, he said, because she had become besotted with oriental religions.
Besotted
. I did not know what the word meant, but I knew that my father was expressing his loss through contempt.
    My form master of that year at the private day-school I went to was a chess enthusiast. He explained the rules to us, he encouraged us to play. He was kind to me, and I admired him, more than admired: I wanted to be where he was. I suppose I was more than usually responsive to kindness just at that time. To please him I tried hard to be good at chess, and I discovered that I was good. I had a natural talent, the master said. Mr. Lyle was his name. I don’t remember much about him now. He had glasses. I seem to remember that he wore his hair brushed straight back. Blurred remains of a focus once so intense. I joined the school chess club. I took part in tournaments and distinguished myself. Shining at few things, for a brief season I shone at chess. I see it now, the stark arena of the board, the ruthless game that hung so paradoxically on feelings of love.
    I studied the game, I read the accounts of historic encounters, the ploys of long-dead masters, and I played them out alone. I would set out the pieces at random, then sweep them off and try to replace them from memory. At night, crying for my mother, I would picture the chess board, go through the moves of some legendary endgame, and find consolation.
    A colleague of my father’s was there one Sunday afternoon—myfather was a senior official at the Treasury. “Your father tells me you are quite a chess player.” On his reddish face an indulgent look. “At least by his own report,” my father said. He seemed to suggest I had boasted. Perhaps I had. “Not up to your level, Henry, not yet.” Henry, Harry, Humphrey. A chess player of note. “Fancy a game, young man?”
    We played and I won. He still had half his pieces on the board when I checkmated him. Pleasure in victory, expectation of praise—face and voice were not yet practised enough, I suppose I showed my feelings too clearly. My father looked at me but uttered no word. He went out, came back with a book from his study, brought it over for me to see. “Look here,” he said, the colleague meanwhile looking on. “Look at these people here.”
    He had opened the book roughly in the middle. There were two faces, one on either side: William Pitt the Younger and Horatio Nelson. Neither name meant anything to me at the time. Later, of course, I knew them for close contemporaries—Horatio was a year older and died three months earlier.
    “Take a good look,” my father said. “These two men saved our country. They had reason to be pleased with themselves.”
    He meant it for my benefit, or so I like to think. He did not want me to be jubilant in victory, to overrate small achievements. He wanted to inspire me with worthy ambitions. But in his manner and tone I sensed displeasure; he was not pleased at my success, it had disturbed