Arctic Summer (33 page)

The white centre of the day ballooned and spread.

“But I beg your pardon, that isn't possible,” Morgan said.

“Oh, yes, yes, I promise you, this is the first I've heard of it.”

Morgan still didn't believe him. It had been so clear and so certain. He began to ask His Highness about what he'd meant by his various remarks and moods over the previous days. But there were innocent answers to everything. The ostrich, it seemed, was merely a metaphor; the small boy painting the wainscot had irritated simply by being underfoot, nothing more. Gradually, despite his suspicion, Morgan began to realise that he'd made a huge mistake.

How absurd, how foolish he had been! All the signs and portents that he'd read, that he'd felt so sure about, suddenly took on a different, innocuous cast: everything could be explained. There had been no cynical knowledge. There had been no judgement. He had imagined all of it.

And in the same moment he knew that everything he'd feared was now about to come true. Not because it had been discovered, but because he had revealed it. No external agency had brought him low; instead, he had dealt the mortal blow himself. Even in his extremity, the irony wasn't lost on him.

But Bapu Sahib didn't seem outraged. In the same kindly, worried tone, he asked, “Why a man and not a woman? Is not a woman more natural?”

“Not in my case. I have no feeling for them.”

“Oh, but then that alters everything. You are not to blame.”

“I don't know what ‘natural' is.”

“You are quite right, Morgan. I ought never to have used the word.” Seeing tears well in his Private Secretary's eyes, he went on hurriedly: “Now don't worry—don't worry. My only distress is you did not tell me before. I might have saved you so much pain. May I know all about this coolie now?”

Morgan told everything. He didn't hold back. In the rush of confession, he volunteered all the tawdry details, including how he had resorted to his
dirty trick
for relief. And when he'd finished, Bapu Sahib exclaimed, “But you are in a very strong position.”

“Am I?”

“Yes, yes. I was afraid you had copulated, which might have caused difficulties. But you haven't even kissed him. Now don't worry.” His voice changed, thickening in collusion. “Only you must always come to me when you are facing problems like these. I would have found you somebody reliable among the hereditary servants and you could have had him quietly in your room.” Seeing Morgan's expression, he waved a hand. “It's true, I don't encourage such people, but it's entirely different in your case, and you must not masturbate, no, no, that's awful.”

“What I haven't said yet,” Morgan told him, “is that I'm so very sorry at having deceived you—”

He felt as if he was reconciling with his father—a father nine years younger than himself—and the emotion squeezed his voice into a sob. Bapu Sahib almost cried, too, but caught himself in time.

“Oh, devil! Don't do that, Morgan. The only way with a thing like this is to take it laughing.”

Laughter didn't seem possible in this moment. But the Maharajah was deflecting them away from embarrassment by brooding on possible candidates. “Hmmm, I don't think you've seen that servant of mine, Arjuna. He is mostly at the Holy Temple in the Old Palace—very delicately formed, like a girl. Or there is a man in the kitchens . . . but he's too old, twenty-eight. Wait, let me think. There is another boy . . . he is a barber, though he does that sort of thing, I believe. But the first thing now is to see that this business with your coolie is safe. I'm sure he meant to do you no harm.”

 

* * *

 

The lightness that took hold of him in the days that followed gave him the illusion of weightlessness; the information his senses carried took on new poignancy. The hot, dry air was beautiful to him. He no longer felt parched and burnt-out by the light. Instead he could detect, deep inside, the impending monsoon. At night there were often electrical storms, great violent displays of wind and lightning, but the rain didn't fall. And when the clouds blew away, the giant constellation of Scorpio hung brilliantly overhead. Never before had he experienced those cold points of light like shrapnel in his flesh; never had the sky cupped him so tenderly in its huge palm.

But like the promised rains, the Maharajah's solution didn't come. Soon after their talk, the servant-boy he'd mentioned drifted in for a visit. But he and Morgan didn't take to each other: the boy seemed both arrogant and crushed at the same time. When His Highness asked how the meeting had gone, Morgan shook his head.

“You didn't like him?”

“I'm afraid not, I very much regret . . . ”

Bapu Sahib waved his regret away. He seemed vexed for a moment, but his basic approach to this problem was good-humoured and soon, in a jolly mood, he told Morgan that he'd made enquiries and nobody in the court was aware of what had happened. Better still, the coolie boy was not from Dewas; he came from elsewhere in the Deccan, and would be returning there as soon as building work in the palace was over.

“But now tell me something, Morgan,” he went on. “I have been wondering. These habits of yours. Have you indulged them in other places?”

“Do you mean England? No, it wasn't possible at home.”

“You have been in Egypt during the War. Did you, perhaps, learn these ways while you were there?”

His manner was innocent, but his eyes had narrowed. Morgan understood his meaning. He wanted to blame this vice on the Mohammedans, whom he held responsible for a great many ills in the world.

“Certainly not,” Morgan said. “I never saw anything of the kind in Egypt.”

“Ah, I only wondered.” And he changed the subject; in a minute they were talking of other things.

It was the only moment in this period of trial when Morgan felt His Highness had behaved less than well. It wasn't proper, he thought, that his behaviour outside of Dewas should be questioned. But for now the matter was put away, out of sight. No more candidates were sent for inspection and the topic wasn't raised again. The whole problem seemed to have been forgotten and very soon the silence hardened into disappointment; the days became long and empty once more.

Into this vacancy, desire swelled again, and he experienced its full futility one evening in the back seat of his carriage.

It had become part of his daily routine to take a drive, once the heat of the day had gone, to a quiet garden about two miles away, where he could sit for a while under enormous trees at the edge of a cistern to think. It was a little island of repose and contemplation in the midst of pandemonium, and he was usually accompanied on these expeditions by the Mohammedan sais, who clung to the back of the Victoria, somewhere behind Morgan, out of sight. On this particular afternoon his thoughts had all been physical in nature, a performance in his mind of what he couldn't accomplish with his body, and by the time he climbed back into the carriage for the drive home he had worked himself up into a feverish state. The bleached, bare landscape was like a thin sail, stretched to its limit by an unseen wind. Morgan's arm lay extended across the top of the seat, and the idea came to him that the sais was about to touch his hand. They were close to each other; they both contained the same idea; only an inch divided them. The notion of the tiny gap closing, of the touch that was about to happen, was too much, and the stretched sail tore and broke. With a little cry, quickly stifled, Morgan ejaculated in his trousers, a visible embarrassment he had to conceal when he climbed down. It had happened without the touch ever taking place—and only as he scuttled away, half-twisted around his shame, he realised that it wasn't even the right sais.

 

* * *

 

There might have been some outlet if he'd been able to write. He'd brought the damned manuscript of his novel with him, thinking that being in India might wake the story up again. But the effect, strangely, was the opposite: the continent pressed in on him so hugely that he could barely see it. When he looked at the pages he'd written, they seemed to be about an imaginary place, somewhere he'd never been. None of it was convincing, all of it was unreal. Feeling nauseous, he locked the book away again in his trunk.

He simply couldn't write at the moment. His senses were open to their fullest; the world was moving in one direction only. Better to watch, to take note, to take in. There were always details you could use, conversations that you needed to remember for later, sometimes in unexpected places.

One such occurred now, in the palace dining room. The head engineer of the electric company had been sent up from Bombay with his wife, to install the unused batteries at the Electric House. Morgan was supposed to oversee him, but he knew nothing about electricity and it was a relief when the work was over and the social niceties resumed again. At dinner His Highness took over the burden of conversation and Morgan became quieter.

Then the engineer's wife told a story. On their last visit to Dewas, she said, they had been motoring back to Indore to catch their train when a strange incident occurred.

“We had just crossed the Sipra,” she said, “and some kind of animal, we couldn't see what it was, came running out of the ravine and charged our car. We had to swerve aside and almost hit the parapet.”

The Maharajah had been drowsy, but he suddenly woke up. “It came from the left?”

“Yes, it did.”

“A large animal. Larger than a pig, but not as big as a buffalo?”

“Yes, exactly.” She was staring at him. “But how did you know that?”

“You really couldn't be sure what kind of animal it was? You didn't see?”

“No.”

He slumped a little in his chair again, becoming morose. “It is most unfortunate,” he said.

“But how did you know?”

He didn't want to talk about it; he was staring at the table-top. “Years ago I ran over a man there. I wasn't at all to blame—he was drunk and he ran out into the road. I was cleared at the inquiry and I gave money to his family. But ever since then he has been trying to kill me in the form that you describe.”

All three of them were stupefied. Such an extraordinary event, described in such an ordinary voice: it was a challenge to the rational mind. And though Bapu Sahib soon changed the subject and spoke of other things, the story continued to bother his Private Secretary. Magic—a world of omens and portents: this was part of India, too, and inseparable from its mystery. It was a kind of thinking that had been worn away in England, lingering mostly in its literature. So that what struck Morgan most forcefully when he encountered it here was how casually it took place, almost underfoot, an accepted part of everyday life.

He didn't believe—not really—in the supernatural. But he didn't entirely disbelieve either. India scraped up to the surface a kind of buried animism in him, a propensity towards the mystical. Although he'd shed his religion early on, it was only the Church of England that he'd dropped, with its safe morning prayers and Sunday services. He had never ceased to yearn for something rawer and rougher, something closer to the earth, or perhaps the sky, of which the brain could not partake. He remembered Pan rippling through the forest in Italy; he remembered the shepherd boy above Salisbury. Those moments were elusive and few in the life that he'd known, but they were far more frequent in the East. You could hardly walk a few steps without coming across a temple or a shrine, daubed with ghee and reeking of incense, and you had only to look into the faces of those worshipping to recognise blind, atavistic devotion.

In theory, he didn't believe in God, certainly not in the avuncular versions that his own upbringing had formed. But the myriad godlets that Hinduism threw up were a more interesting proposition altogether. The sadhus at the riverside who had so horrified Masood: they stirred something else in Morgan, something not unrelated to envy. And he felt these stirrings at other moments, too, whenever Indians spoke about religion. Though he couldn't let go of himself enough to worship, he had never lost a sense of an ultimate cause, a Thing at the back of things, which propelled events without actually shaping them. Whatever the ruptures and ructions of human life, he felt, the universe operated according to some vast, unfolding principle, and to abandon oneself to its rhythms wasn't a senseless undertaking.

It came to him now that his book might express something of this unity through its structure. It was always a useful moment when a story revealed its deeper nature to him—told him, as it were, why he was writing it—and he experienced such a realisation now. He had a sense of a gathering shape, of an underlying architecture to his narrative. Part of the reason that he'd faltered was because he couldn't see further than politics; to write merely of Indians and Englishmen wasn't enough. But the story had broadened, suddenly, into a much larger channel, in which politics was only one stream. Religion, the lifeblood of India, flowed more strongly, and he saw now that the temple would offset the mosque and the caves; it would replace the one god and the no-god with a multiplicity of gods. If it wasn't order exactly, it was something better, because it more closely resembled the world. Things were not rounded off and resolved; rather, they expanded outwards, perhaps for ever, and his book could suggest that possibility.

Mosque, caves and temple. Three kinds of spirituality; three sections to his novel. A trinity, for its own spiritual reasons, was always symmetrical and pleasing. And it could be made to resonate further, by being linked to the seasons of India: the cold weather, the hot weather, and the rains. Though Morgan himself hadn't yet experienced the latter, the skies had been pregnant and moody for some time and the monsoon would soon be here.

 

* * *

 

One evening the Maharajah sighed and said, “That barber I told you about. He has been hanging about the palace. I don't like it. It's no good for the servants.”