Arctic Summer (41 page)

The larger world itself was profoundly different. It had just been through another immense convulsion, with revelations about human nature that stunned the imagination, although India, as far as he could see, wasn't interested—everybody he met there spoke only about themselves. Europe and America, it seemed, did not exist; they had been cancelled. India itself was on the verge of major transformation: in just two years it would at last be independent, and the signs of violent pregnancy were becoming visible on the air.

Even the manner of journeying was different. No more the slow two-week arrival by ship. Instead he was there in three days, travelling by flying boat at a speed and height that had once felt like the symptoms of a declining world. But rather than the future, it was the past which seemed to infuse the flight with melancholy, as he floated over, and touched down upon, many of the places that had been part of his early life. First France, then Italy, then Egypt, all passed beneath the wings, full of memories, haunted by ghosts.

The same could be said about both his home and his destination. In England, he had suffered a great displacement recently on the death of his mother. She had been ill for some time and in March of that year, at the age of ninety, she had grown very weak. It became clear that the end was near. Morgan had slept in the passage outside her room on that last night, and in the morning they had said goodbye to each other.

“I shan't be long with you,” she'd told him.

“No,” he replied. “But I shall have your love.”

He was very glad, afterwards, for that moment. It was a bond of great complexity that was being annulled and it would leave its guilts and regrets. His mourning wasn't small. He had been preparing for it imaginatively over the past ten years, but there was no way to conceive of how deep the event would go. It struck a bass note in him, close to the centre, which vibrated outwards through the rest of his life. In the beginning he had sometimes wanted to die too. He broke down at peculiar moments, often out in public, feeling how alone he was, remembering some arbitrary conversation or image. But it was also true that part of what wrung him was the awful knowledge that her vanishing had lifted off a great weight, so that he felt he could breathe more easily. It was terrible to feel that; he did not want her gone. On the contrary, he conjured her continually. He had put honeysuckle on her pillow when he'd left; he would take back a leaf from an Indian tree to lay on her grave.

Her death had made it possible for him to be there—a sort of gift. The journey served also as a great distraction, because she had never been to that country, it had no association with her. In that sense, India was clean.

But India, too, had its departed dead. For by now the two Indians who had meant most to him—who were, in fact, the reason for his previous visits—had both gone.

Masood had died first. His life had reached a high point in 1929, when he had been made Vice-Chancellor of Aligarh Muslim University, as the Anglo-Oriental College was now known, like his father and grandfather before him, and it had seemed as if a circle was being closed. But it was a brief triumph. Politics at the university and tensions with the British authorities, partly his own doing, had ousted him five years later. In compensation, the Begum of Bhopal had made him Minister of Education in her state, but his spirit had already been broken and three years later he suddenly died.

The news came through the most impersonal of channels, a report in
The Times
. The moment that he read it had been one of cold, white shock for Morgan, the world briefly encased in ice. It didn't seem possible, but the fact was there for everyone to see, in print. The story was still unclear, with a suggestion of something sinister, but over the coming weeks it would emerge that he had died merely of kidney failure. An ordinary, unexceptional death, then, at forty-seven. They had always spoken, only partly jokingly, of becoming old men and sitting together under a tree in India. Now Morgan found himself under the tree alone.

Recently Masood's old habits of not communicating for long periods had returned, and when he did write he expressed himself with such circular pomposity that he might not have bothered. Morgan had felt far from him for some years already, and yet the past was suddenly very near. There had been a time when everything that mattered had seemed possible between them. Something of that feeling, of hope and excitement, had continued to flicker somewhere, and flared up again now in a brief blaze of anguish.

He did travel to Aligarh, but couldn't bring himself to pass near the house where they had lived together for only a week, a quarter of a century ago. He'd heard that it had been left abandoned, to fall slowly into ruin. Masood's two sons had gone into trade, and he blamed that for a great deal—though they couldn't know, of course, what they were treating with such indifference. But he didn't think he could bear to see it, or carry what it might stir up.

Nor did he visit Dewas. The Maharajah had died six months after Masood, at the end of the same year. But the condition of his demise had been far more ignominious, and far more public. The downfall of His Highness had already been gathering shape when Morgan knew him. Profligacy with state expenses, rumours of maladministration: they had already begun to define his reputation in the eyes of his British masters. Things had got worse when his son and heir, the Crown Prince, had become convinced that his father was trying to poison him and had fled. When the finances of the state became truly untenable, the Maharajah had got into negotiations with the Indian government, who could have helped him. But it all turned sour, and each side began laying down conditions that the other would not fulfil. The tipping point was reached when, on a pilgrimage to the south of India, Bapu Sahib and his entourage had abruptly turned left and gone instead to Pondicherry, still a French enclave, and taken up station there, refusing to leave. A disastrous move. His Highness had thought, perhaps, that it would strengthen his hand, but in fact he had unwittingly resigned the game. A provisional government was set up in Dewas under his son, and he was never to return. He died in Pondicherry four years later, possibly of a broken heart.

Malcolm had been to see him in his exile, and Bapu Sahib, he reported, had laid his head down in his lap and wept like a child. That was awful to hear, and Morgan had been very exercised on his behalf. The British authorities—as they had been with Masood—were both correct in their dealings and utterly wrong at the same time. Their wrongness derived from the inability to see the human being under the strictures of protocol. Nobody who hadn't met them could know how lovely each of these men was in his excellent moments.

All of it now was in the past, and probably best left there. It was self-defeating to be looking backward continually, when you had only one existence and it was always slipping through your fingers. Grief could undo every solid structure if you let it. Nevertheless, he was unable to get away from Aligarh without one last abrasion of the heart.

He had come there at the invitation of the university, in order to receive honorary life membership of the Student Union, so there was no way to escape that particular patch of the past. Even to walk about there transported him back to his first visit with Masood, and the unfavourable impression the place had left on him. Nor had it improved meanwhile, as far as he could see. There was an atmosphere of dust and corruption and religion which made it hard to breathe. And the sly Vice-Chancellor, with whom he had to socialise, had always been an enemy of Masood's.

His duties done, it was to this man he had to turn for help. “Before I go, I very much want to see . . . ”

“Yes, yes. It is already arranged. One of the students will take you there.”

The university mosque was neat and clean, but the cemetery attached to it had an overgrown and abandoned air. Masood's tomb—and that of his grandfather close by—was shockingly neglected. The grass on top had been allowed to overflow the sides and the marble hadn't been cleaned in many months. It didn't look as though anybody had come to visit in a long time. Dead only eight years and, it seemed, already forgotten.

The student appointed to be his guide was one of the gaunter, more fanatical-looking types, and he was keen to point out the inscription by Iqbal on the maqbara. But Morgan cut him short.

“If you don't mind,” he said, “I would like to be left alone with my friend.”

The boy looked taken aback. How could the dead be your friend? But there was no other word for the man under the ground, who would be—for the one left behind—never quite gone.

He fussed for a few minutes around the grave, pulling out weeds and clumps of dead grass, but very soon there seemed to be no point. Then he wept a little bit, but without much heat, for everything that was past. The next day he would be on a train to Calcutta and he would never come back here again. But that scarcely mattered: there was no real communion with a mausoleum and what counted was in any case invisible. The only defence against time was what he had learned in Egypt: that true affection left something behind it, something that lingered, with its own mysterious life.

So he gave himself over instead to the present, finding a seat nearby in the sun where he could think for half an hour. He dwelt on Masood for a while, but couldn't help himself from dozing off. He wasn't a young man any more and his body frequently let him down. Though in many ways it always had.

And was that truly so terrible? The day was warm, there was the comforting sound of bees in a bush close by, the shadows of birds swooped across the graves. These things mattered too: they were part of Life, and beautiful, and therefore important.

Eventually he felt able to leave. Though he wasn't quite sure of the procedure. He stood at the foot of the grave, waiting for an appropriate goodbye to strike him, but none did. In the end, you could only nod and rub your eyes without clearing them and then wander back along the way you'd come, down the path to the gate.

Where the gaunt student, it turned out, was crossly waiting.

“You are ready?” he wanted to know.

It wasn't clear what he meant: the official visit was over, and Morgan had only to depart. But he nodded anyway and smiled at the young man.

“Yes,” he told him. “I am ready.”

In my research, I have relied first and foremost on E. M. Forster's own writings, both fiction and non-fiction, including his diaries (Pickering and Chatto, 2011) and letters (edited by Mary Lago and P. N. Furbank; the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Volume One 1983 and Volume Two 1985). For permission to quote from his published work, I am grateful to The Society of Authors as the Literary Representative of the Forster Estate. For permission to quote his unpublished writing, I am grateful to The Provost and Scholars of King's College, Cambridge, and The Society of Authors.

I wish to state that I have seeded quotes from
A Passage to India
at certain unrelated points in my novel, in order to suggest the wide range of sources from which Forster may have drawn his material. I should also point out that where I have used actual dialogue recorded by Forster (and others) in letters or diaries, I have sometimes altered the words a little, on the assumption that nobody recalls conversations, even their own, with complete certainty. On the other hand, I have tried to be as accurate as possible in evoking the India of Forster's time, down to modes of address and the use of place names. For the same reason I haven't modernised spellings, with the exception of a couple of words.

I am also indebted to four biographies of Forster. It would be hard to surpass P. N. Furbank's superb two-volume
E. M. Forster: A Life
(Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977, 1978). Mr. Furbank was also kind enough to meet with me to share some of his personal impressions and reminiscences of Forster. I have used information, too, from
Morgan
by Nicola Beauman (Hodder Stoughton, 1993),
A Great Unrecorded History
by Wendy Moffat (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010) and
E. M. Forster
by Francis King (Thames Hudson, 1978). Helpful, too, was the
Paris Review
interview with Forster conducted by P. N. Furbank and F. J. H. Haskell in 1952, which appears in the First Series of
Writers at Work
(Viking Press, 1958).

In addition, I have been helped by Miriam Allott's introduction to the Abinger edition of Forster's
Alexandria
and
Pharos and Pharillon
(edited by Miriam Allott; André Deutsch, 2004); Elizabeth Heine's introduction to the Abinger edition of
The Hill of Devi and other Indian Writings
(edited by Elizabeth Heine; Edward Arnold, 1983); and Philip Gardiner's notes to
The Journals and Diaries of E. M. Forster
(edited by Philip Gardiner; Pickering and Chatto, 2011).

Biographies of other figures connected to Forster that I have drawn on are, in no particular order:
Cavafy
by Robert Liddell (Duckworth, 1974);
Edward Carpenter
by Sheila Rowbotham (Verso, 2008);
Lytton Strachey
by Michael Holroyd (Chatto Windus, 1994);
The Priest of Love
by Harry T. Moore (William Heinemann, 1974);
Leonard Woolf
by Victoria Glendinning (Simon and Schuster, 2006); and
Virginia Woolf
by Hermione Lee (Chatto Windus, 1996). I have adapted excerpts from
The Diary of Virginia Woolf: Volume II 1920-1924
(edited by Ann Olivier Bell; diary copyright 1978 by Quentin Bell and Angelica Garnett; the Hogarth Press, 1978; reprinted by permission of the Random House Group Limited in the United Kingdom and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in the USA). For permission to quote Virginia Woolf I am grateful again to The Society of Authors as the Literary Representative of her Estate.

For historical background on India at that time I have used
Raj: The Making and Unmaking of British India
by Lawrence James (Little, Brown, 1997);
Women of the Raj
by Margaret MacMillan (Thames and Hudson, 1996); and
Raj, A Scrapbook of British India
by Charles Allen (Book Club Associates, 1977). Invaluable for my Egyptian section was Michael Haag's wonderful
Alexandria, City of Memory
(Yale University Press, 2004).