Arctic Summer (6 page)

What they did not speak of was what Morgan truly wanted to say. The words rose up in him, reaching his mouth and swelling there. But they would not come out. This was the moment, surely: a perfect, possible opportunity. But as the minutes went by, his courage slipped away. He had a train to catch, after all, in order to get home, if he didn't want to upset his mother.

Another time; there would be another time, soon. In the meanwhile, things had changed—and only because he had insisted on going to Paris. The invitation had been tepid, and easily ignored; it might almost not have happened. But he had gone, and since then he had felt buttressed and buoyed up by a constant, consoling emotion.

In a letter a few days later, he addressed Masood as his
Dearest boy
. And signed it, after a slight hesitation,
from Forster, member of the Ruling Race, to Masood, a nigger
.

It was a measure of how far they'd come that he knew his friend would laugh.

 

* * *

 

India was creeping closer in other ways. After his third novel had been published, Morgan had received an effusive letter of appreciation from Malcolm Darling, whom he had known at King's. The book had been well received by the critics, but his friends had mostly not liked it, so this response was especially valued. Malcolm had joined the Indian Civil Service in 1904, and was writing from the tiny state of Dewas Senior, where he was tutor to the Prince. He had become very fond of his young charge. He had read one of Morgan's short stories to His Highness, he reported, and the Prince had been enchanted by it—which enchanted Morgan in turn.

Malcolm's life seemed fantastic to him, spiced by peculiar magic. In the letters that began to pass between them, carried across the intervening distance by ship, some of the strangeness and wonder of India carried too. Malcolm told him, with accumulating anecdotal evidence, the story of how Dewas State had split into two dynasties, Senior and Junior, in which every institution had had to be duplicated, with two competing bureaucracies. It was, so Malcolm said, the oddest corner of the world outside of
Alice in Wonderland
, and something in it did seem mad and ridiculous and bizarrely inspired, like an event that defied gravity.

Although they had not been close before, their friendship began to grow now in these letters. They had already generated great warmth before the next chance had come to see one another, when Malcolm had returned to England on leave, in order to get married. Morgan had visited him in London and some understanding, already agreed upon between them, had been cemented in that time.

But there had also been an incident, terrible and strange, which he could not forget.

He had been invited to eat at the Rendezvous, a restaurant in Soho, with Malcolm. “And I hope you won't mind, Forster, if I bring along Ernest Merz. He is my very best friend in the world, and he's to be a groomsman at my wedding.”

“Of course not. How could I possibly mind?”

“He's a good sort. And a Kingsman too. Also, he's a bachelor like you. So there will be a lot to speak about.”

Morgan wondered for a moment whether some coded message was implied by that word, “bachelor”. But no, he didn't think so. Malcolm, for all his affable niceness, was a rigid fellow in his thinking. There were no secret codes in his social world, and bachelors were merely bachelors.

And Merz was indeed a good sort. He laughed almost more than he spoke, and the laughter increased as the evening wore on. They had, all of them, several friends in common, and it was as if some of the radiance of King's had descended on their little corner of London. It was in a genial good humour that they finally left the restaurant, strolling together through the summer evening.

Malcolm said goodbye to them soon afterwards, leaving Morgan and Merz to walk on. For the first time, a small silence embedded itself, uniting rather than separating the two men. Morgan was thinking of bachelorhood, his own, and what it meant.

Perhaps a similar thought was on Merz's mind, because he said, “Another one gone.”

“What do you mean?”

“Oh, Malcolm getting married.” He laughed shortly. “You've met Josie, of course. How did you like her?”

“We were only introduced recently. I haven't formed an opinion yet.”

“I hardly know her myself,” Merz said. “I didn't mean to suggest . . . ”

“I quite understand. There's no need to explain.”

As it happened, Morgan felt wary of Josie, as he was wary of all young women, especially those who laid claim to his friends. But she also seemed an overly impulsive sort to him, who spoke before she'd weighed up her words, and a couple of her political opinions had alarmed him. Nevertheless, he could see that Malcolm adored her and he hoped his friend would be happy.

He didn't want to discuss this with his new acquaintance, of course, even though he instinctively liked him. But he thought he'd detected, from Merz's side, a sadness underlying his jolly demeanour, and wondered what it meant.

“What about you?” he asked, trying to sound casual. “Is there a marriage on the horizon?”

“Me? No, no. That is, not at any time soon. There is somebody,” he said, “somebody possible. But I'm not sure yet. Or not ready.”

Their footsteps echoed off the brick walls close by.

“And you?” Merz added. “Any marriage for you?”

“No,” Morgan said. “Not for me.”

Both of them became aware of an awkwardness around this subject, and Merz hurried to cover it.

“You have written very sensitively about marriage, I think. How have you understood it so well without experiencing it yourself?”

“I'm glad you think I have understood it well. It doesn't seem that way to me. The little I know I have absorbed through my friends.”

“Are you not lonely?”

“No,” Morgan said quickly, though the question had pierced him. It was only later that he regretted not answering more truthfully, because by then he understood that Merz was talking about himself.

They moved on to other topics, with less edge, none of which Morgan could later remember. Merz had said that he was going to his club in St James's and, as they strolled down Piccadilly together, a young man emerged from the shadows and passed them. He was rough-looking but handsome, a working-class youth, hands in pockets, face half-shadowed by a cloth cap. But as he drew level with the two men, he smiled. It was an arch smile, loaded with knowing irony, and it silenced both of them in a moment.

They emerged from the silence, embarrassed. Morgan had to get to Charing Cross to make his train, and the time had come for them to part. “Well,” he said. “I have enjoyed meeting you very much.”

“I too. It has been an honour. You are a very fine writer.”

“Oh, come.” They shook hands, and Merz laughed, without apparent reason. Then the two men moved away from each other.

The news came the next day, in the form of a telegram from Malcolm. The words, so sparse and incontrovertible, could not possibly be true. Yet they also could not be false.

Morgan rushed back down to London. He went to be a friend to Malcolm, but also for his own sake, to understand. But there was no understanding on offer. No note, no explanation, no
reason
. Merz had not, it seemed, visited his club after all. Instead he had gone back to his rooms in Albany, drunk a glass of whisky and hanged himself.

Malcolm was pale, shrunken with shock. “You were the last person to speak to him,” he told Morgan. “Did he say anything that made you think . . . ?”

“Not at all. He seemed fine, he was normal.”

Normal
. The word, Morgan was beginning to think, had no meaning at all.

“But what did you talk about? He must have said something, he must have given you a clue.”

“Really not. It was a perfectly ordinary conversation, like the one we had in the restaurant.”

Was that true? Yes, in a certain sense—but in another way Morgan doubted himself. Perhaps there had been hints; clues, as Malcolm had put it. But they could not be understood unless you were part of the minority. A secret language, a secret way of speaking—which was also a way of not speaking. Morgan couldn't be sure that anything had actually been said.

Nor could any of this be spoken to Malcolm. Not directly. It would mean speaking about himself too, in a way that they had never spoken before. And Malcolm, with his closed, conventional thinking, might not understand. So even at one remove, when all either of them wanted was to find out the truth, they could only circle the subject obliquely, with hints and half-questions.

Not to anybody did he mention the young man who had passed them, with his knowing look. Had he been available, if one had the money and the courage? It was possible, Morgan thought, that Merz had retraced his steps and gone after him, and that something had taken place which had led to this calamity.

What had befallen Ernest Merz was a warning to him. There was an edge in daily life, invisible and almost underfoot, over which the unwary might easily step. And what made it especially dangerous was the seductive power of gravity. He felt it often, especially at this time of his life. Without warning, his body would throw up a pang of yearning so extreme that there seemed no reason to resist. On one occasion, passing a soldier in the street and meeting the flat indifference of his stare, he had conjured a mental image of the man's private parts that was shockingly vivid. He was nervously aware of every handsome face he saw and often changed his route, or his train carriage, to come closer to that sort of beauty. At night, before he slept, his brain would distil these various faces into a single, unattainable vision, passing across the ceiling.

It was lust, nothing more, and there were times when lust felt like a kind of idealism. But it was also a part of his nature he reviled. His own desire repulsed him. Though if he could not aspire to purity, then he was sufficiently aware of what his mother and certain others might think, not to give in to baseness. And that was a sort of goodness, he thought, which might substitute for the real thing.

Nevertheless, he was tormented. Lunching with a friend in the Bath Club one day, he suddenly fell through a weak spot in their conversation into an awareness of the pool attendant standing close by, wearing only a towel around his waist, folding up other towels and stacking them. The near-nakedness of the man and, beyond him, the shimmering blue-green oblong of the water, with more half-clothed male figures almost glimpsed beyond in the underlit smoky air: it was like a vision of some other country, a place of warmth and sensual appetites, that couldn't be England. It didn't seem possible that, just a few bricks away, London continued in its rainy tumult.

More worryingly, after lunch with the same friend at the Savile Club not long after, Morgan was talking in a loose, unguarded way about his teaching at the Working Men's Col­lege. He spoke without thinking about ‘a charming boy' he had met there, and instantly one of the members sitting opposite him let down his newspaper and looked at him over it, with a glare that was stony but accusing, fired out of the double barrels of two sanctimonious, middle-class eyes. Morgan was quite unnerved, and he carried his consternation with him to the barbershop afterwards, where he realised after a few moments that the man had followed him. They looked at each other, looked away, looked back again. The man changed seats and came to sit next to Morgan. He started a seemingly innocent conversation which led, by a series of sharp turns, to a suggestion that he very much needed to borrow ten pounds to bet on a horse that afternoon. Morgan, flustered, had pretended not to understand and got up quickly to go, patting his pockets all the while. He had kept looking behind him and, though the man had disappeared, it felt to Morgan as if he'd been followed for the rest of the day.

 

* * *

 

He was reading, and thinking, about India more and more, all in preparation for a visit which he now knew was certain, though its timing was not. He did not have the money to go soon, nor could he take his mother with him, or conceive of leaving her behind. But he had faith that the moment would come. Perhaps his new novel, which was almost complete, might make it financially possible.

Although he had published three books, and his head was jostling with short stories, still he did not think of himself as a writer. Not in the true, vocational sense. It was more like his piano playing: a frivolous but enjoyable distraction. Writing required courage, but a greater courage would be to give it up. And he might; he really might do it. He didn't need to work; he had received a legacy from his great-aunt Monie that kept him comfortably. Nevertheless, he thought that in time he would like to find a real job, as most of his friends were doing. He understood that they, his peers, were taking over from their fathers, grasping the levers of power, learning how to run the Empire, while he stayed at home with the women. And in just a few years, he knew, it would be too late. He would not even be able to write properly about them then. It was in work that people became most essentially themselves, but he only saw them when they were idle, like he was. He did not—he felt this anxiously—he did not truly know the world.

Never had he learned this more keenly than in the writing of his new book, despite the fact that at the heart of the story was an emotion very personal to him. This emotion had been with him since the age of thirteen, when he and Lily had had to move from Rooksnest, the house in Stevenage where his earliest and best years had been lived. That wrenching away had always felt to him like a fall from grace, a breaking from a time when life was somehow whole and complete, a perfect circle of loving and being loved. He could never recover that time, or find a place that moored him quite as deeply, and he poured all his loss and longing over it into the work. Where sincerity was concerned, at least, he did not doubt himself.