Arctic Summer (7 page)

But in every other way, his writing felt to him light, insubstantial. He did not have the weight, he thought, to measure up to his themes. He was writing about money and power, among other things, and he bumped up every day against the thinness of his knowledge. Always he ran aground on the edges of what he knew, and found himself beached in ignorance. And here again was the old question of marriage, and the way that men and women behaved together. What could he say about these things?

Apparently too much. When the book was finished, and publication was imminent, he circulated the proofs among those close to him and almost immediately he became aware of a chilliness in the way some people responded to it. But worst of all was his mother. Lily appeared to be steeped in enjoyment at first, but there came a day when Morgan found her in the drawing room, stiff and pale, his pages scattered on the floor at her feet.

“What is it?” he asked her. “Has something happened?”

“Yes, something has happened.”

“What is it?”

“It is,” she told him, “it is . . . something. Oh, I cannot speak about it.”

“You must speak about it. Please, tell me what has upset you.”

“It is you, Morgan, who have upset me.”

“What have I done?”

She had not looked directly at him until now, and when her gaze fell on him he felt the temperature drop. It had been a long time since he'd seen her so distressed, though in recent years disappointment had set permanently on her features, like a glaze. The thought had come to him recently that if he had any life's work to speak of it was not to rule the natives in some far-flung outpost, but to take care of his mother, and that the white man's burden was nothing beside his. When he was younger they had been good companions together, unromantically and chastely married, but lately his goodwill had been harder to maintain. She had become sourer and sadder as she grew older. Her rheumatism was bad, but she was also afflicted by spiritual abrasions that he struggled to understand. There were days when it seemed that she found nothing, absolutely
nothing
, worthwhile.

“Everybody we know,” she said, “will read this book. Will talk about it. Did you not think of me at all?”

He understood, finally, that it was Leonard Bast's seduction of Helen Schlegel that had undone her so.

“It is human nature,” he said. “People do these things.”

“Whom do we know who does these things? I don't know anybody who behaves in this way. It is only the lower orders who lapse, and why should they be written about? I can't believe it of you, Morgan.”

“Anybody can lapse,” he said, with a quick flash of defiance. Then he immediately regretted it. “Let us not quarrel.”

“Let us not talk of it at all.”

He tried a different approach. “You know I would not want to upset you. Your Poppy would never do that.” Poppy, Popsnake—words left over from childhood, part of a secret baby language between the two of them, in which his very voice changed, becoming wheedling and needy.

But the appeal didn't work today; her face was sealed against him. “I am feeling unwell, a headache, I am going to my room. Please send Agnes to me.”

He sat on after her withdrawal, stewing in quiet misery. He too had misgivings about this part of his book, but on aesthetic, not moral grounds. Neither in books nor the real world did he know anything about the inner workings of women, their bodies or their minds. The seduction, the pregnancy: he had handled them badly, he hadn't pulled them off. The sequence was not sensual enough to be offensive; it had suffered more than any other part of the book from his deficiency of knowledge.

Lily tortured him for some time afterwards, not by talking about his crime, but by not talking about it. She was polite and cold in her dealings with him, reminding him at every opportunity, without ever saying it, that he had failed her, as he always seemed to do. Yet the topic was not mentioned again between them. He began to dread how others might respond. He had been raised in an encircling palisade of older women, all of whom had a particular idea of him, which he might be about to destroy. Those who had survived would judge him most harshly. There were still Maimie and Aunt Laura to deal with.

 

* * *

 

But Maimie liked his book.

And not only Maimie. The reviews were rapturous, and the word from those in his own circle was equally warm-hearted. Apparently he had written a masterpiece. He was talked about, and talked to, in a way that was new to him, and not entirely welcome. The word “greatness” was casually thrown about.

Fame was like a glow that soon became too hot, and he felt himself sweating in the glare. To his alarm, some people had begun to take him seriously. Through invitations and oblique approaches, he experienced the pull of literary society. He resisted; he would not feel at home there. He could only come to it as a supplicant. He developed a technique for dealing with praise, which involved staring down at the floor while being spoken to. One had to avoid listening, but to assume an attitude of modesty, while sending one's imagination down, down through the earth, to New Zealand on the far side. If you practised this assiduously, then fame did not matter so much.

The only possible benefit of all this attention was that his mother's outrage dwindled. She let it be known that she was bored by his literary success, but when the expected opprobrium failed to materialise, Lily withdrew into grudging resignation. Her son might not have learned to live in the way that real men did, but he had ventured into the world through his thoughts, and some of his acclaim reflected back on her.

Hom had written to say how much he'd liked the novel. And then, in the same month that the book appeared, he came to Weybridge for a visit. Success made Morgan's skin glow; he could feel his own youthful confidence; he could sense that Hom found him attractive. On one particular afternoon, when his mother and Ruth and Agnes were all out of the house, the two men took tea together in the drawing room. Again, Hom spoke about how much he admired the book; it had made him feel close to Morgan, he said.

Just how close became apparent soon afterwards, when he set down his teacup and took hold of his host. They rolled around on the sofa for a while, and then somehow continued on the floor. For the first time Hom kissed him—not just once, but repeatedly—and put his tongue into Morgan's mouth. The sudden moist intimacy was startling, and all the more so because they had not touched each other in a year. Yet all that Morgan could think of was that Hom must have learned this from his wife.

The sound of Lily coming back from a social visit made them separate and return to their upright positions on the sofa. Morgan finished his cold tea, feeling dazed. He was thinking about his complicated history with his friend, everything that it had promised, how little it had delivered. Hom was very much married by now, and the father of twins. He had recently been appointed to a professorship in Belfast, and was moving over there. But his wife, Christabel, was refusing to go with him, and there had been a brouhaha among certain members of their social circle because, it was felt, she was not a good mother to the children.

For some reason, Morgan felt moved to address this issue now. “It's shocking,” he told Hom, “that she will not accompany you. I intend to speak to her about it.”

“She can't be forced. No, please do not bring it up. She will only turn against you.”

“She already is against me.”

“Morgan, that's untrue. She likes you very much. Speaking to her will ruin it. I implore you, in the name of everything that has happened between us . . . ”

Pleased at this reference, Morgan softened. “Well, it is your concern, of course. But I think you should not allow a woman to undermine your life like this. If I were in her place,” he added, “I would move to Belfast with you tomorrow.”

“I hope you will come to visit me there often.”

“I hope I shall.”

The meeting had ended happily after all. Morgan could not know it yet, but this was to be the last time that he and Hom ever touched each other in this way. What he took away from the encounter was a warm, sad afterglow, like the fading radiance of a burnt-out fire, and it was still with him the next day, when he went to the opera with Masood.

Sitting next to his other friend, his Indian brother, their knees and elbows pressed together, he was nevertheless aware that he was not awake to his presence. His mind, his heart, were still rolling around on the carpet at home. It was possible to love two people at the same time, he reflected, but not on successive days. He was used to feeling desire. But what stirred him on this occasion, and stayed with him, was the knowledge that he had been desirable to somebody else. That was something he hadn't felt before.

 

* * *

 

He had spent a great deal of time with Masood in recent months, but on these occasions he had hardly ever been happy. Love had vexed his mind, making him irritable and irrational. There was something in human affection that was at odds with reason, he thought, like a kind of mild insanity. When he was with Masood, what he felt was that everyone around them was watching them with secret, pernicious judgement. The only time he was truly at ease was when they were alone together.

And yet his kinship with his friend had deepened. The tone of their conversation had changed now; it was more honest and more serious. Even in letters, Masood often dropped the baroque voice he had liked to use, in which he had played a fairy-tale king or slave. In one particular communication he had confessed,
I have got to love you as if you were a woman or rather part of my own body
. This was not the kind of declaration he would ever have made before, and it wasn't altogether welcome: it wasn't how Morgan wanted to be loved.

Just before Christmas, he and Masood went to the opera again, to
Salome
. Afterwards, as they wandered over to the Oxford and Cambridge Musical Club in Leicester Square, a regular haunt of theirs, they discussed what they had just seen.

“It's the mixture of lust and revenge,” Morgan said. “Either one alone is a worthy subject, but together they are somehow squalid. And when the music is beautiful it only makes it worse.”

“You see,” Masood exclaimed, “it is what I have always said—lust and revenge are a very Eastern combination. You have an insight into these subjects.”

This topic had been rehearsed many times between them and usually it was pleasing to Morgan, but tonight the rain was falling in cold, vertical lines and the heat of India seemed very far away. “You always tell me this,” he said, “but it isn't true. There is nothing I know better than the English tea party.”

“Nonsense, my dear chap. I have met many Englishmen and you are the only one with the power of true sentiment. You will see when we get to Turkey.”

The two men had been making plans to go to Constantino­ple together; the idea was that they would travel in an Oriental city, a try-out for the real East. But at this moment even Turkey felt unreachable.

They had come to the club; there was a fussing with umbrel­las and coats at the door, and a pause while they found an unoccupied corner to sit in. Masood was drinking whisky, and Morgan wanted tea. They talked in a small, inconsequential way while their order was brought, and then Morgan was hit by a sudden plunge of mood. He said, “I am never going to write another novel.”

“Oh, you are, you are, not just one, many novels, or I shall never speak to you again.”

“You speak lightly, because you think I'm talking that way too. I really mean what I say. You have too much faith in me. I am not half the writer you seem to think I am.”

“Oh, come.” Masood's gaze flitted about, while he stroked his big moustache with a well-shaped hand. He said confidently, “You are the only living writer that matters. You are twice as great as anybody else,” and then suddenly broke off as he saw Morgan's eyes fill with tears. “I'm sorry,” he muttered, confused. “I don't mean to joke. You know I am a foolish fellow.”

The sudden switch from bluster to uncertainty was typical and somehow touching. “It's all right,” Morgan told him. “You are my dear boy.”

“I don't understand. What is the matter?”

Morgan himself didn't know what the matter might be. Perhaps it was only the memory of John the Baptist's head, carried bloodily on a platter. Surprising himself, he said quietly, “You do realise that I love you?”

“Yes, yes. We have spoken of this many times. The feeling is reciprocated.”

“I am not sure you understand.” Suddenly, he was filled with a steady determination. “No, I'm not sure that you do.”

For once Masood had no reply; he sat very still, looking at the room around them. The place was very full tonight. There were people close by, and a general roar of chatter and laughter, forcing Morgan to lean in closer to speak.

“I love you as a friend,” he said, “but also as something more than a friend. No, don't answer for a moment. I know what you are going to tell me—that in India friends can be like brothers, and you love me in this way. But I love you as more than a friend, and more than a brother too.”

Now Masood's dark eyes focused on him with a puzzled, sorry look. He said, “I know,” and touched Morgan's hand briefly on the table. A moment later he was calling for the waiter.

That was all. A year of waiting, while the pressure built up—then the truth spilled out in a handful of words. Perhaps the wrong words, words that did not fully speak their meaning. Yet the meaning had been there. Not long afterwards they were outside, in the wintry dark, saying their farewells and hurrying in different directions.

The feeling, at first, was euphoric. As he caught his train, Morgan was filled with a giddy sense of release. It had been so easy! And Masood had understood; there had been a quick pain in his eyes.