Losing Nelson by Barry Unsworth

the question, I felt that same gathering of tears behind the eyes, but they were more urgent now; I knew that if I allowed my features to relax, I would blub in good earnest. I kept my face stiff and fought it off, knowing the cause quite well. It was the grief of never grasping, never fully knowing. Horatio had occupied my life, I knew more about him than anyone else because I was his heir, I had inherited his being. The conviction of this had grown stronger in the years that had passed since my chats with Penhas; it had been fed by both study and intuition. But still I could not reach to the essential part, the mystery of his courage.
    I did not then, that February night, as I clutched my mug and resisted the tears, see myself as an angel like him, a creature of radiant violence. That came later. At the time I thought of myself merely as a repository of his essence, a sort of memorial urn. But I knew that the same forces had moulded us both—thoughts of his childhood led me always back into the labyrinth of my own. For him the lesson had been duty. What lesson did my father give to me, what guiding principle?
Put things out of their misery
. That look of alertness, a brightness on his face. My father was a watcher. Not, I think now—I permit myself to think now—a very kind one. Selective, highly so. Unobservant of many things, unseeing, locked in some cold trance of self-absorption, nevertheless he watched our faces. My mother would hesitate in replying to him, beginning in one way and changing to another, and hewould watch her with that same expression, a sort of expectancy, a hope of entertainment, in which there was also, when I think of it now, the ironic certainty of disappointment. Afterwards, long after she had gone, it came to me that she must have been afraid of him, as Monty and I were, though I cannot remember him ever raising his voice.
    I looked at my watch: ten minutes past four on the morning after the great victory of Cape St. Vincent. Did Horatio manage to get some sleep in these morning hours? So much can never be known to us—whether he woke or slept, what he thought of in this aftermath of his triumph. The night before the battle he had not slept at all, and in the action itself he was wounded by a shell splinter which, though he described it as of no consequence, gave him acute pain for some days afterwards and must have made sleep difficult. He was still awake at 2 A.M . to receive the note of casualties aboard his ship—sixty dead and wounded. We know that he wrote to his friend Collingwood later that same morning to thank him for his support in the engagement. Perhaps in the space between he was able to snatch some hours of sleep.
    The old man was in modest lodgings in Bath when the news came. He and Fanny were spending the winter there, the Norfolk parsonage too miserably uncomfortable in cold weather for his age and frailty. In February, Horatio’s promotion to rear-admiral was posted up and his father, in the innocence of joy, posted an immediate letter to him—
My dear Rear-Admiral
. Then, less than two weeks later, came the news of Cape St. Vincent. The rector was in the street when he heard it, heard of his son’s part in it. He was obliged to return in haste to his lodgings so as to hide his tears.
The height of glory to which your professional judgement, united with a proper sense of bravery, guarded by Providence, few sons, dear child, attain to, and fewer fathers live to see
.
    I know these words of his by heart. They sounded in my mind asI stood there. Orotund in phrasing, but no mistaking the pride. My father had no pride in me, or at least he never showed any. I suppose I never gave him cause, I was not good at the right things. I was good with my hands, even when quite small, good at making things. For a brief season I shone at chess. Then at fifteen a certain sort of order came into my mind, things began clicking into place, I started to do well at school. But these were not