Arctic Summer (2 page)

Indeed so has it that the young Pathan

Thinks it peculiar if he would pass

Him by without some reference to his arse.

Each boy of certain age will let on hire

His charms to indiscriminate desire,

To wholesome buggery and perverse letches . . .

 

“I blame it on the heat,” Searight said, and laughed noisily.

 

* * *

 

He repeated the conversation breathlessly to Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson in their cramped cabin that evening while they dressed for dinner. Even in recollection, a shock quivered through him and his fingers slipped on his buttons. It was amazing, he told Goldie; it was remarkable. To have spoken in that way to a near-stranger, to have exposed oneself so recklessly! It hadn't been a confession—there was no shame behind it. That was the truly astonishing thing: Searight appeared to be almost proud of who and what he was.

The two men glanced at each other in silence. Then Goldie enquired delicately, “And did he swear you to secrecy?”

“No. I think he took it for granted.”

“Why did he believe that you wouldn't . . . ?”

“I don't know.”

“And did you talk about yourself to him in the same open way?”

“Not at all. He didn't seem very interested in me. I told him a little about my home life and he changed the subject.”

“Ah,” Goldie said. His tone was commiserative, but his relief was obvious.

This was the way the two of them usually communicated, in little gusts of shared enthusiasm, followed by murmurous bouts of allusion. Much passed between them without being explicitly stated. They had known one another for some years now, since Morgan had been a student at King's, while Goldie was a don, though their friendship had been slow to flower and had only taken form more recently, once Morgan had left Cambridge behind. They were both fussy, worried men, elderly before their time, in whom a spinsterish quality was evident. Both of them had experienced love, but from afar and unrequitedly.

They understood one another well and therefore Morgan knew, though Goldie didn't say it aloud, that the older man mistrusted Searight. He thought that anyone so indiscreet could be dangerous. Goldie came from a generation where discretion was the first line of defence and any dropping of one's guard could lead to catastrophe. Oscar Wilde had gone to prison only seventeen years before.

Morgan, nearly two decades younger, was slightly less cautious, but only in theory. In practice, he was not nearly so afraid of the State as he was of his mother. He could not refer to his condition, even in his own mind, with too direct a term; he spoke of it obliquely, as being
in a minority
. He himself was a
solitary.
At Cambridge, among his own circle, the question was discussed, though from an angle, and safely abstracted. One could be forgiven for believing it was a matter of talking, not doing. As long as it remained in the realm of words, no crime had been committed. But even words could be dangerous.

 

* * *

 

Over the next few days, Morgan watched Searight carefully and observed that his life was broken into two. In his military existence he put on a public face, and in this area he was to all appearances vigorous and masculine. He was a member of the Queen's Own Royal West Kent Regiment, a fine, upstanding defender of the Realm; he could laugh and drink with his fellow officers in a hearty, backslapping way; he was popular and well respected, although he avoided the company of the women on board. That was one half of him—but of course there was another secret side, which Morgan had already seen.

This aspect of Searight's nature—which could be said to be his true character—he revealed only to those he trusted. But when the camouflage came off, it came off completely. That first conversation amazed Morgan, but it was followed by others soon afterwards. The very next day he took Goldie to the same part of the deck to meet his new friend, and almost immediately they were discussing things that Morgan had never voiced before, or only to his journal, and then cryptically.

A collection of von Gloeden photographs, for example, well worn despite careful handling. Morgan had seen these images before, but in a context that had required sober, aesthetic appreciation. That wasn't the case now. In Searight's hand, the sullen Sicilian youths, lolling among ruins and statuary, took on a carnal frankness. His voice became husky with awe on the subject of youthful male beauty. Flesh and feathery moustaches and defiant yet vulnerable eyes . . . “And look at his sultry cock, angled to the left at about forty-five degrees. It's a real beauty. To say nothing of the testicles, which are spectacular, especially the one on the right.” In his telling, even the most tawdry encounter became luminous, operatic. He read a short story aloud to Morgan and Goldie, one he'd written himself, that made his own breathing become shallow and tortured. He let them peruse more of his epic autobiographical poem, which he called
The Furnace
. And he showed them several pages at the back of the green notebook that were filled with cryptic columns of numbers, before explaining in an undertone that they represented a tally of his sexual conquests thus far, all with statistical details of date, place, age, how many meetings and frequency of climax. These encounters were mostly with boys and young men, ranging in age from thirteen to twenty-eight, a great many of them Indian. Almost forty so far.

Almost forty! Morgan himself had never had a lover, not one. The world of Eros remained a flickering internal pageant, always with him, yet always out of reach. It had been only three years before that Morgan had fully understood how copulation between men and women actually worked, and his mind had flinched in amazement. His mother and father engaging in such physicality to produce him: it was almost unthinkable. (But must have happened, at least twice.) His father had died when Morgan was not yet two, and when he contemplated sex in any form it was the image of his mother, Lily—widowed, middle-aged, perpetually unhappy—that rose before him, to intervene. As she did now.

But he had left his mother behind in Italy, with her friend, Mrs. Mawe, for company. He was free of her, at least for a little time, and determined to make use of the freedom. Yet now he felt hopeless, looking at Searight across a great dividing distance. He had the sense that the other man's sexual practices involved tastes and behaviours that would shock him deeply, if he only knew the details, yet still he envied him the ability to translate yearning into deed. So much sex, so many bodies colliding! Morgan felt flushed and troubled by the images that came to mind. How had Searight done it? How had he set each seduction in motion, how had he known the right words to speak, the right gestures to make?

Perhaps there was a talent to it, a gift that Morgan simply did not have. Yet now he saw that there was another way to be in the world, a way to live more fully. Once he had realised this, nothing looked quite the same again. Anyone he knew could be leading an invisible, double life; every conversation could have a second meaning.

When, for example, on one of the nights following, he passed Searight in earnest colloquy with the little Indian passenger, he suddenly saw them differently. He had thought of it before as kindness, but he didn't think of it that way any more. They were standing close together, one of Searight's hands pressed gently to the other man's shoulder, speaking in low voices. They might have been discussing the weather, or the progress of the ship—but they might also have been talking about something else altogether.

 

* * *

 

As he pondered it now, Morgan wondered whether it wasn't his travelling companions who had given Searight his cue. Only he and Goldie were solitaries, but all four of them were unusual, and they had enjoyed playing up their differences from the other passengers on board. And perhaps their oddness had been a kind of signal to Searight.

Theirs was a happy group and it was something of a happy chance that they were journeying together now. Goldie had received a travelling fellowship and had decided to use it to visit India and China. He came in a spirit of social enquiry, wishing to catalogue jails and temples and hospitals, and thereby to understand moral progress in foreign places. Bob Trevelyan (known to most as Bob Trevy) had resolved at the same time that this might be a good moment to visit the East, without the hindrance of wife and children. Gordon Luce, a more distant acquaintance from King's, was passing through Bombay en route to a posting in Burma. And Morgan—well, Morgan was travelling in order to see his Indian friend again.

In the eyes of the other passengers, they were a peculiar lot. Certainly they were aware of their eccentricity and had not shrunk from it. At mealtimes they took pleasure in discussing important classical questions in loud voices, such as the relative merits of Tolstoy versus Dostoevsky, or whether Nero had shown any theatrical talent in the staging of his circuses. To the officers and civil servants and non-official Europeans who made up the bulk of the passengers, the antics of these giggling intellectuals were cause for suspicion. Once, when all four of them were lined up, drinking tea, a soldier sitting opposite them had collapsed in laughter. They appeared to belong, but did not, quite. They had no wives with them, and they did not participate in deck games or fancy dress balls. Their irony was construed as a lack of seriousness. So they had become known as the Professors, and sometimes as the Salon, in tones that mixed familiarity with malice.

Over the days that followed, Searight became an honorary member of the Salon, sitting with them at mealtimes and strolling with them on the deck. After an initial wariness, all of them decided that they liked him. Under the bluff military exterior, a poetic and romantic soul began to show itself. He was knowledgeable and charming and witty, easy to be near. His manner was generous, and he had led a highly interesting life, which he conveyed in a succession of amusing anecdotes, often told at his own expense, in a rich baritone voice that was somehow public and confiding at the same time. Soon he was insisting that they come up to visit him at the Frontier, and they were agreeing that it was an excellent idea. He would take them on a picnic to the Khyber Pass, he said; he would show them the edge of the Empire.

But for the moment there was still the remainder of the journey on the ship, the sea wide and bright around them. By now there was a general air of excitement and anticipation, which kept many of the passengers at the rail, glaring ahead at the horizon in the hope that it would yield up something solid. The first visitation came in the form of a pair of yellow butterflies, flittering around the deck. Morgan was thrilled, but the butterflies disappeared, and no land took their place.

The next morning Bob Trevy woke him with the news that India was visible. All four of them assembled in time to watch the dark line ahead of them break up into what it actually was: a bank of moody clouds in the distance. But later in the morning the horizon did thicken incontrovertibly into a graph of curious red hills, apparently devoid of life. For some reason, Morgan thought of Italy. He had already, at an earlier time, noticed an analogy between the shapes of southern Europe and Asia—three peninsulas, with a major range of mountains at the head of the middle one, and Sicily standing in for Ceylon—but this was an Italy he didn't quite recognise, as though it were a place seen in a dream, hinting at menace.

Then there was the arrival, with its predictable flurry and tedium, the last unpleasant meal among the same unpleasant people, before they were finally rowed ashore. As they toiled towards land, Morgan, who was sitting with Goldie at the rear of the little boat, saw Searight at the front, next to the Indian passenger, and suddenly an unsettling memory came back to him.

“I wonder why Searight wanted to kill him,” he said.

“What?” Goldie said. “Whatever do you mean?”

He reminded Goldie of the incident, which had occurred nearly two weeks before, at Port Said. A strange story had gone around the ship: the Indian had reported his cabin-mate to the steward for wanting to throw him overboard, but then the two of them had made it up and became the best of friends again. Morgan hadn't thought about it much at the time, but now it had returned to him, in the shape of this troubling question.

Goldie blinked in confusion. “Oh, but you're mistaken,” he said. “That wasn't Searight.”

“No?”

“No, certainly not. It was Searight who told the story to me.”

“Of course,” Morgan said, suddenly very embarrassed. “I don't know what I was thinking.”

It was a leap of logic to assume that Searight was sharing a cabin with the Indian; such an arrangement was unlikely. Morgan didn't know how the idea had come to him. But afterwards, even when he knew it was untrue, he continued to be fascinated by what he'd imagined. Lust in close confines, under a hot, empty sky, breeding dreams of murder: he sensed the beginnings of a story.

T
he voyage to India had begun several years before, and on very dry land. In November of 1906, Morgan and his mother had been living in Weybridge, Surrey, for just over two years, when one of their neighbours, Mrs. Morison, who was friendly with the Forsters, made an unusual enquiry. Did Lily know of anybody who might be able to act as a Latin tutor to a young Indian man who was about to go up to Oxford?

“I wondered, dear,” Lily enquired, “whether you might have any interest . . . ?”

“Certainly,” Morgan said immediately. He had taught Latin at the Working Men's College in London for the past couple of years, but his curiosity ran deeper than his competence. Who was this young man from the other side of the world, what was he doing in suburban England?

“Well, it's a complicated story,” his mother told him. “The young man is the Morisons' ward. You know that Theodore Morison was the Principal of the Mohammedan Anglo-Oriental College in, I forget where in India . . . ”