Arctic Summer (11 page)

“The future, the future . . . I have to make decisions.”

“Decisions concerning what?”

“As I told you, the future. Don't cross-examine me, Morgan, I have enough of that in court. Would you like a mango?”

Even more distressing was the realisation that they wouldn't be spending much time together. Plans had been left blurry and undefined, but Morgan had hoped that Masood might join him as he travelled around. He quickly learned that it wasn't to be.

“I have to go back to Bankipore for work. I am not a free man here, you see, no, not at all. But I will go with you to Delhi next week and we will have a fine time together.”

“And after that?”

“And after that you will travel. Oh, you will see many things, especially the Moghul splendour I have often mentioned. All of it will go into your book!”

“But when will we see each other again?” He tried to ask it casually, but his voice shot up into a higher pitch, giving him away.

“You will come to Bankipore to visit. I am returning there very soon. It is an awful place, I don't think you'll like it.”

“You will be there, Masood. That is the point.”

“Yes, of course, that is the point.” But even now—or perhaps especially at this moment—his friend was looking out of the window, his eyes anxious and unsettled.

“And will we travel together then?”

“Perhaps so. Yes, perhaps by then it will be possible.” His voice became fuller and more confident. “My life is simply too big for me at the moment, you must forgive me, my dear, it does not detract one tiny bit from my devotion to you, you know that.”

When they moved on to Delhi a week later, things didn't greatly improve. They were staying with a friend of Masood's, Dr Ansari, whose wife was also invisible, though she sent continual little gifts of betel nut and scent. The house was very small, and Morgan and Masood shared a room. Not only with each other: a constant stream of visitors passed through, perching and squatting everywhere, while a cat and three dogs roamed about, and a shrieking cockatoo defecated on the mosquito net. Masood had recently had a cholera inoculation and spent most of his time in bed, worrying that he was sick, or that he wasn't sick enough. Now and then he reflected aloud that he was dying.

“But don't languish here with me, Morgan, my dear chap. I have organised a car to take you on some sightseeing expeditions. History awaits you.”

“Won't you come?”

“I am too ill, my dear, truly. But you must go. I beg you, no, I
order
you, and if you don't I shall never, never speak to you again.”

So Morgan went to old Delhi alone. He went to the Jama Masjid, and visited the Red Fort, where the spaces between the scattered buildings suddenly seemed very big and cold, overshadowed by the looming ugliness of the military barracks. He saw the great stone elephants, and the parapet where the English King and Queen had showed themselves to the crowd, but all the while unhappiness scratched at him inside. He had a headache, there was nobody to talk to, the grand sights left him disappointed.

Only on the very first morning did his friend accompany him, because they were visiting the Qutb Minar. The ruined remnants of Moghul times elicited Masood's highest flights of rhetoric, but it was hard not to feel the tension between these crumbling remnants of the past and the throbbing, smelly motor car that had brought them there. This same tension was especially evident at Humayun's Tomb, where a view out over a plain of broken forts and old mosques was undercut by modern Delhi in the distance, and the Marconi radio apparatus that was used for signalling at the 1911 Durbar.

At this Durbar, Morgan knew, George V had announced sweeping changes to the political system in India. The capital was to move from Calcutta to Delhi; the hated partition of Bengal had been reversed and the province reunited. The breeze of democracy had picked up a little, dispersing some of the noxious fumes that still swirled heavily after the Mutiny, nearly half a century ago.

Politics, back in England, had a leaden, immovable weight, as if history could not be altered very much. That wasn't the case here. In India, when people talked politics they were talking about the future—and it mattered a great deal. When Morgan spoke to Masood's friends about it, their voices took on a tense, knotted quality; their eyes became hooded. It was clear that they spent a lot of time thinking about their freedom, not as an abstract concept, but as a concrete and achievable goal. There was no little corner of life that seemed untouched by it, either in hope or despair.

Masood, too, could become excited on this topic. Back in England, his political musings had always had a theatrical quality, as if he were performing his beliefs rather than feeling them, but on a few occasions here the temperature of his blood did momentarily rise. One such moment came on Morgan's last night in Delhi, when Dr Ansari insisted on treating him to a nautch, a party with dancing girls. This couldn't be held in his own house, because his neighbour, an Englishwoman, wouldn't approve, so it was arranged in the home of a friend of his in the old city. But next door were the offices of
The Comrade
, a political journal run by the Ali brothers, who were friends of Masood's. Morgan had already looked through its pages in Aligarh and had been unnerved by what he found inside. It didn't seem untruthful to him, but it was so very angry, with a rage leavened only slightly by jokes and doggerel.

When they called in at the offices of
The Comrade
now, Mohammed Ali was in an agitated state, and greeted them by announcing that he was about to commit suicide.

“What is it?” Masood said. “What has happened?”

“Oh, I am absolutely miserable. It is too terrible to think about. The Bulgarian army is within twenty-five miles of Constantinople.” On the verge of tears, he swept into the next room, from which his voice carried out ringingly. “Let no quarter be asked, and none given now. This is the end!”

The emotion of this drama touched Morgan, though the history did not. He had already been exposed to these feelings among Masood's friends in Aligarh. It was clear that some sort of international Islamic sentiment was stirring Mohammedans in India. The fortunes of Turkey, which was facing defeat in the Balkan War, left Morgan indifferent, but it was hard to be unmoved when Masood became roused, as he did now. “This is the turning point of my career,” he cried out dramatically. “We shall give the Turks all the money we have collected for the university!”

But ten minutes later, typically, all this high feeling had left Masood again. It became important to him that Mohammed Ali join them for the nautch. But Ali didn't want to go; he was steeped in his morose hysteria. “Nonsense, nonsense,” Masood told him imperiously, “we can be serious again tomorrow,” and he picked him up bodily and carried him out of the office.

The nautch was full of its own dramatic intensity. There was a small crowd of onlookers, all male, all—except for him—charged with glandular anticipation. He tried to be attracted to the dancers, even in a theoretical way, because he supposed it was expected. There was a fat girl with a ring through her nose, and a thinner one with a weak but charming face; both in truth frightened him, and though he tried to enter the spectacle through its noise and harsh emotion, he remained outside its ritualised exterior. There were moments when he almost glimpsed what this display might mean to an Indian, but in the end he was exhausted by it and the screaming did violence to his head. Alarmingly, it threatened to continue for ever, until he understood that only his leaving would end it. Dr Ansari tried to make him kiss the singers, but he slipped away with a quick hand-squeeze of the older, thinner lady. He was possibly not the only one relieved.

And then he was being seen off at the station at one o'clock in the morning and the first part of his Indian visit was over.

 

* * *

 

He knew he would see Masood again in a few weeks. But it was hard not to feel a sort of low-grade anguish, which was with him even in his better moments. He had hoped for more than he'd got, and the future might not deliver anything better.

Certainly there was some comfort at his next stop, which was Lahore, with the Darlings. It wasn't thinkable that he could come to India and not see them, though he wasn't yet entirely at ease with Josie, or her Tory politics. Still, here she was, and their little boy John Jermyn too, giving him hospitality and kindness, showing him around the vast, soulless distances of the city, introducing him to their friends. Very soon any underlying anxiety had been dispelled and he felt relaxed in their company. Malcolm had always been all right; he was good-hearted and filled with idealistic principles, which accounted for his exile to these parts, in a minor post in the Punjab. In truth, Morgan found him a little too earnest, but in certain quarters Malcolm was considered a dangerous radical and his efforts to befriend Indians had made him genuinely unpopular. There was a lot to admire about Malcolm.

In Lahore he was also reunited with Bob Trevy and Goldie, who had meanwhile been to Ellora. Goldie's presence in particular was a consolation, with his familiar dry intelligence shot through with flashes of nonsensical humour. Goldie knew Masood, of course, and had some idea of Morgan's expectations. So when he asked how Aligarh had been, and Morgan answered that it had been lovely, a deeper understanding passed between them, which didn't need to be spoken.

“And Masood is well?”

“He seems to be, yes. A little preoccupied, perhaps. He is thinking about his future.”

“Ah,” Goldie said, and nodded sagely. He had wasted years of his own life on a fruitless love with a German man, who had given him a lot of torment.

And Goldie too seemed unsettled. When Morgan asked him about Ellora, he merely said, “Oh, it was fascinating. Yes, fascinating.” But his face tensed up, and when he added in an undertone a moment later, “though it isn't England,” Morgan understood that something about the place had troubled him.

With Goldie and Bob, he went on to Peshawar for their reunion with Searight. Morgan hadn't forgotten his shipboard acquaintance or their remarkable conversations, though there was no trace here of his other, secret identity. No, in this place Searight was the very model of an English officer, aside from one sly wink soon after their arrival. He was heartily pleased to see them and hadn't forgotten his promise that he would show them the edge of the Empire.

A day or two later, he took them a little way into the Khyber Pass. They sat on a patch of grass at the bottom of a ravine and watched tumultuous caravans passing in both directions, donkeys and camels and horses and dogs and goats and chickens among their human minders, the gait and attire regal, the faces fierce and inscrutable, emblematic of unknowable lives. All of it raised a brown screen of dust through which the stately pandemonium seemed to pass, at a great remove of time and distance, for a full hour and a half. The way was only open twice a week, under armed guard, and each caravan was followed by an escort of the Khyber Rifles. In the early afternoon the pass was cleared again, and left to barbarism and bandits until the next caravan day. To the north and west, marked by impregnable peaks, stretched a no-man's land of hostile tribes; beyond was Afghanistan; and beyond that was Russia, with its secret imperial designs. At their backs was English civilisation, and one felt it nowhere so keenly as here, where it ceased. Nothing had ever seemed quite so homelike as the white veranda posts outside the Mess when they returned there in the afternoon.

That evening, Morgan managed to lose his collar stud and was ten minutes late for dinner. He imagined that everything would have continued without him, but only when he arrived did the band strike up “The Roast Beef of Old England” and the evening properly begin. It was a good hour or two before he shed his embarrassment on Searight's account, but nobody else seemed to mind very much. Most of the soldiers were young and rosy-cheeked—still almost boys—but even the older ones seemed full of a kindly forbearance that forgave all differences. After dinner, while the band played on, they danced
pas seuls
up and down the veranda in their scarlet coats. Searight, almost unrecognisably glorious in his full regalia, carried Bob Trevy on his back and then seized hold of Morgan and whirled him around in a drunken foxtrot. The cheerful comradeship that surrounded them was like a balm that cleaned away every bad impression he'd ever formed of the English abroad, and for the first time he understood a little of how Searight had made a life for himself in unlikely outposts such as these, where women were intruders and the only real love was between men. A couple of days later, when they said goodbye again, they promised each other they would meet many times in the future, and some letters did pass back and forth over the years, but in fact they would never be true friends.

He was parting again here from Goldie and Bob, who were travelling on to Delhi, while he was going to Simla. They would meet once more in Agra in a few days, but meanwhile Morgan was on his own. He had wandered alone in Europe, and found it unsettling, but India had called something forth in him that Italy and Greece never did. A peculiar second nature seemed to have showed itself in him; a capable other Morgan, who traversed great distances and made decisive choices, often in the face of resistance. And as he moved about, it was hard to keep his mind from slipping sideways, off Masood and onto the landscape that contained him.

Over the two days of his journey up from Bombay to Aligarh, the strangeness, the distant otherness of India, had already marked itself on his mind. Even the light had seemed different, till he'd realised that the windows of the train had a darkened cast to them. Somehow, though, that bluish colouring still overlaid what also seemed familiar: certain pastoral vistas resembled Surrey, though particular details (the shocking brightness of a woman's sari, a cow blissfully chewing the cud on a station platform) tilted the world off its axis. Not even the Indian moon, with its power to evoke deep yellows and purples from the surrounding sky, seemed to match its English equivalent. And the sky itself had a hugeness, a blankness untextured by cloud, that could annul the whole earth beneath it.