Arctic Summer (27 page)

“Do what you want,” he said.

It didn't seem possible that he meant it. Morgan looked at him in consternation. But his confusion felt ungrateful and, instead of speaking, it was more natural to act. He pulled the material aside and there it was, the shocking object one had imagined so often.

He thought, of course, of Montazah, but this event was more languid, without the terror of possible discovery. Both of them looked down without speaking, observing like solemn spectators, as Morgan went to work on his friend. The rhythmic tugging, when it wasn't applied to oneself, was surprisingly hard work. At the moment of climax Mohammed pushed his hand aside and gave a small grunt, almost like a word.

After which he became very brisk. He seemed cross as he cleaned himself with a piece of cloth, sighing once or twice. And his voice sounded irritable as he asked, “Are you happy now?”

“Yes,” Morgan said truthfully. “I am.”

But the real happiness was in the hours that followed. It was too late for him to go home and when they lay down to sleep together Mohammed suddenly wrapped an arm around him from behind and lay snugly against his back, holding him. It was the first time in his life that Morgan had ever shared a bed. He had shared rooms, of course, many times, but never had there been this compact assembly of limbs and skin in the dark, the touch of warm breath on the back of his neck. Something in his life had been made whole and complete, he thought, but the momentousness was inseparable from silence and drowsiness. This was not a clamorous triumph.

There were just a few days before Mohammed had to leave and it seemed that they were at the station almost immediately, saying goodbye. Between them they had wrestled his heavy bag, which seemed to be made of tinfoil and brown paper, all the way from the Home of Misery, and after all this sweaty labour the moment of farewell seemed somehow empty. Nor was any touch beyond a handshake possible, not under the eyes of strangers.
Good luck. Goodbye. Thank you
. The politeness was nearly intolerable. But as the train began to pull out of the station, some of the buried emotion reached the surface, and Mohammed's voice called suddenly out of the clamour: “Don't forget me, don't—”

It was like a curtain coming down at the end of an act.

 

* * *

 

Back in England, Maimie Aylward finally died. But Morgan knew by now that he wasn't ready yet for home. Mohammed would have leave at some point; they would see each other again.

Then a cable came from London. He was to be Head Searcher for the Red Cross in Egypt, which meant he was to supervise those for whom he'd been working till now. Although he didn't much care for promotion, he was tentatively pleased at first, because he hoped it might mean more leisure time. But very soon he found himself enveloped in a row: Miss Grant Duff was unhappy.

She had always been a complicated sort, quivering on the verge of unnamed affront, but her outrage now had found a focus. There had been several moments when it had seemed worryingly to Morgan that she might be in love with him, but what she displayed now was very far from love. Whenever he came near her, her lips drew tightly inward and her eyes rolled like those of a skittish horse.

“It is a want of confidence,” she said. “The leadership does not believe in me.”

“Oh, come,” he said, very eager to placate her. “It's not as if I'm in charge.”

“That is exactly what it is,” she said. “They have put
you
in charge.”

She used the word “you” like a pair of tweezers, picking Morgan up by the neck to examine him and finding him insufficient.

He didn't care enough for a fight. He saw that it mattered greatly to her—indeed, it was her whole life—how she was seen by other people. She regarded him as a usurper, a sly intruder who had levered her from her seat. He wrote wearily to London, asking them to undo the appointment, but was overruled.

This made everything much worse. She ceased to speak to him at all and turned away when she saw him, her face pinched and pale. She opened letters that were addressed to him. It very soon became insufferable, and he went away for a while to escape, to the Nile temples and the pyramids. Nothing had changed on his return and he had to find more inventive consolations. Music was one, and he banged out his Franck and Chopin on Irene's old upright. He started a few new friendships and allowed them to dictate some of his social arrangements. He thought of taking up his Indian novel again, but felt too far from it, and settled for some journalism instead.

More solidly, he found himself taking interest in the idea of a larger subject. Since Mohammed's departure, the city had felt somehow deserted, and he thought now that he might fill it up with the past. He had long been aware of an invisible history, underfoot and all around him, but perhaps, he thought now, it might be possible to recreate it in words. Since space was controlled by the military, he would travel through time instead. He had recently been reading Gibbon again, with almost sensual enjoyment, and he hoped he could summon lost centuries as vividly and enthrallingly.

He thought of the book as a sort of reconstruction, the building of a vast ghost city. Aside from a few stray ruins, a hunger for practicality and commerce had razed the ancient world, leaving grit and grimness in its place. The footsteps of kings, emperors and patriarchs had been covered over by pavement; no trace of them was left. No less an absence were the great spiritual philosophies that had taken form here and been eclipsed by others. Alexandria was made of debris and displacement, and its air of grubby nostalgia demanded some appeasement.

Of the people with whom he discussed his project, none were as enthusiastic as Cavafy.

“Oh, excellent, Forster,” he declared, snipping a cigarette in half, his usual miserly habit. “I myself have always been poised between history and poetry. I could have written either, and perhaps I have made the wrong choice.”

Morgan felt encouraged enough to confide, “Greece will be at the heart of the book, just as she is at the heart of Alexandria.”

“No longer. Alas, my dear Forster, no longer. The Hellenic Empire has long since disappeared. She is merely an influence and an echo.”

“But the echoes are not negligible. I have thought of your country as my stronghold for sentiment, ever since my student days.”

Immediately Cavafy became sorrowful, and turned his face away. “Oh, the Greeks,” he cried. “Never forget about the Greeks that we are bankrupt. That is the difference between us and the ancient Greeks and between us and yourselves. Pray, my dear Forster, that you English never lose your capital, otherwise you will resemble us—restless, shifty, liars.”

He had tried to flatter Cavafy, but had never been allowed to draw near. Nevertheless, his project almost put their friendship on a new footing. The advice came in a torrent, nearly all of it useful and encouraging. Had Morgan read Plotinus? Did he know about Philo and the Logos? Was he up on his Athanasius? He, Cavafy, had some books that Morgan simply had to read.

As he researched in preparation, Morgan realised that he and the poet were embarked on a similar labour. He thought of this book as a resurrection, restoring a graveyard to life. And in his own work, in his own way, Cavafy was doing the same thing. Dipping into myth and ancient history, veering off into the modern streets, too, his poems stitched between an old, lost Alexandria and the immediate, sensual, modern one he lived in. In his words, the past quite literally drew breath.

But Cavafy lived here, after all. What pulled Morgan so powerfully? He hadn't responded warmly to Egypt when he'd first arrived. When he considered it, he decided that it was precisely because Alexandria felt like a place—almost a country, alone—separate from what surrounded it. And what stirred him most deeply was that it was a mixture: an interbred miscegenation, a bastardy of influences and traditions and races. He had learned to mistrust purity—or the idea of purity, rather, because the real thing didn't exist. Everybody by now was a blend; history was a confusion; people were hybrids.

 

* * *

 

His own hybrid self missed Mohammed terribly. All his newfound activity was only a means to divert himself from loneliness. Those few months of companionship now seemed irretrievable. Why had he worked so hard to bring them to an end?

His sufferings were private and complicated. Their separation had become a condition, as chronic and persistent as illness. Mohammed wrote every few days, but the letters were polite and said little. He wasn't working as a spy, of course; more as a clerk, and it sounded tedious. He was far away and the prospect of leave was remote.

Just before he'd left Alexandria, Morgan had arranged for Mohammed to be photographed. Now he kept the picture close to him and frequently took it out to study it. Wearing Western dress—a dinner jacket, white shirt and bow-tie—with his red tarboosh, his Egyptian friend sat looking serious, one leg crossed over the other, an ivory-handled fly-whisk in his hand. He stared out of the image, out of the past, into a restless place in Morgan that wouldn't lie still.

Months went by and still they could not meet. It was only in May—half a year since they'd last seen each other—that Mohammed managed to return to Alexandria for a couple of days. He stayed with a friend in Bacos and Morgan visited him there. Still fearful of being spotted by somebody he knew, they spent a day at Mex, beyond the western edge of the city, where they swam among the rocks and sat on a hilltop in the sun. He was reminded of the scene he had written, where Maurice and Clive played truant from Cambridge: this had something of the same illegitimate leisure.

He had often thought about
Maurice
recently and wished he were writing it now. How differently he would handle the relationship at the heart of it! His imagination had squared up so timidly to the reality. And by contrast, how like a bad novel his life would have been, how mean and small, if this had never happened to him.

“Give up your job,” he told his friend now. “Come back to Alexandria to stay.”

“And what work will I do?”

“It doesn't matter. I will support you.”

Mohammed shook his head, smiling faintly. When they said goodbye again properly, in the Nouzha Gardens, he told Morgan, “Two days have passed like two minutes, yet I think perhaps it is best like that.”

“But why?”

“If I walk with the same friend every day I have sometimes wanted another. Now we shall again be anxious for one another for six months and then have the time of happiness.”

Morgan didn't think he could bear another six months. Damn the military zone! Mohammed couldn't leave it, nor could Morgan get in.

 

* * *

 

When Mohammed did abandon his army work soon afterwards, it wasn't to return to Alexandria and to Morgan. Instead he went back to Mansourah to stay. His life had thrown up a double calamity in the form of two deaths: first, very suddenly, his father, and then, just two days later, his brother—who had drowned while swimming in a canal.

Mohammed had loved his brother. And yet, although the drowning was a mystery, he hadn't enquired too closely. “What is the use?” was all he said, when pressed. “If only it was the rest of my family instead.”

This disaster brought Morgan, finally, to Mansourah for a visit. Mohammed had inherited the house—or rather, as Morgan now realised, three tiny houses joined together. Two of them had been let out and his friend was living in the third, although it consisted mostly of one dirty room, crowded with bits of furniture, in a muddy lane close to the station, in which poultry wandered between puddles.

Lying in bed together on the second night, Mohammed said, “I am thinking of marrying my brother's wife.”

“Is that possible?”

“Many people do. No dowry has to be given, so it's cheaper. There is also a child, who needs a father.” After a pause, and in a different, quieter voice, he added, “I want to be a happy man in my own paternal home.”

“I understand,” Morgan told him. He knew that what sounded like a statement was, in fact, a question, and that his answer was a form of permission.

Earlier that evening, Mohammed had told him about how, in Kantara in the Canal Zone, he'd been seduced by an English soldier. The man had cadged a cigarette off him, then taken him back to his tent. The exercise had been repeated the next day. But the story didn't make Morgan jealous, any more than the prospect of Mohammed's marriage did. Bodies could collide, in their confusion of appetites; what mattered was something different, which he struggled to put a name to.

During his visit, the two men had wandered the esplanade along the edge of the Nile; they had visited some of Mohammed's friends, and taken a boat trip on the river. They had had themselves measured by a tailor for a suit that they would own together, a little too big for Mohammed, a little too small for Morgan. In the evening they had washed in the passageway under the stairs, pouring tins of water over each other. And when they had got into bed they had wrestled and tickled one another like children, Mohammed screaming playfully all the while that he was going to kill his friend.

This kind of companionship had far more value to Morgan than their few, fumbling physical encounters. Sex could be forgotten, or made into something that it wasn't, but feelings were much harder to erase. There had been moments, from their time in Alexandria, when they had simply sat together talking quietly, or smoking cigarettes in brotherly contentment, when he'd felt that they were removed from other people. Paired off. And it had come to him then that there might be many men like them, in the past as well as the present, who had been together in a similar uncelebrated way, encircled by invisible emotion.

Invisible but powerful. Affection was like a colour, or a scent on the air; you couldn't seize it in your hand, but it lingered, it lasted. When he and Mohammed were gone, he thought, some trace of their joining together would still be here: a ghost haunting an empty room.