by Damon Galgut
But he had left his mother behind in Italy, with her friend, Mrs. Mawe, for company. He was free of her, at least for a little time, and determined to make use of the freedom. Yet now he felt hopeless, looking at Searight across a great dividing distance. He had the sense that the other man’s sexual practices involved tastes and behaviours that would shock him deeply, if he only knew the details, yet still he envied him the ability to translate yearning into deed. So much sex, so many bodies colliding! Morgan felt flushed and troubled by the images that came to mind. How had Searight done it? How had he set each seduction in motion, how had he known the right words to speak, the right gestures to make?
Perhaps there was a talent to it, a gift that Morgan simply did not have. Yet now he saw that there was another way to be in the world, a way to live more fully. Once he had realised this, nothing looked quite the same again. Anyone he knew could be leading an invisible, double life; every conversation could have a second meaning.
When, for example, on one of the nights following, he passed Searight in earnest colloquy with the little Indian passenger, he suddenly saw them differently. He had thought of it before as kindness, but he didn’t think of it that way any more. They were standing close together, one of Searight’s hands pressed gently to the other man’s shoulder, speaking in low voices. They might have been discussing the weather, or the progress of the ship—but they might also have been talking about something else altogether.
* * *
As he pondered it now, Morgan wondered whether it wasn’t his travelling companions who had given Searight his cue. Only he and Goldie were solitaries, but all four of them were unusual, and they had enjoyed playing up their differences from the other passengers on board. And perhaps their oddness had been a kind of signal to Searight.
Theirs was a happy group and it was something of a happy chance that they were journeying together now. Goldie had received a travelling fellowship and had decided to use it to visit India and China. He came in a spirit of social enquiry, wishing to catalogue jails and temples and hospitals, and thereby to understand moral progress in foreign places. Bob Trevelyan (known to most as Bob Trevy) had resolved at the same time that this might be a good moment to visit the East, without the hindrance of wife and children. Gordon Luce, a more distant acquaintance from King’s, was passing through Bombay en route to a posting in Burma. And Morgan—well, Morgan was travelling in order to see his Indian friend again.
In the eyes of the other passengers, they were a peculiar lot. Certainly they were aware of their eccentricity and had not shrunk from it. At mealtimes they took pleasure in discussing important classical questions in loud voices, such as the relative merits of Tolstoy versus Dostoevsky, or whether Nero had shown any theatrical talent in the staging of his circuses. To the officers and civil servants and non-official Europeans who made up the bulk of the passengers, the antics of these giggling intellectuals were cause for suspicion. Once, when all four of them were lined up, drinking tea, a soldier sitting opposite them had collapsed in laughter. They appeared to belong, but did not, quite. They had no wives with them, and they did not participate in deck games or fancy dress balls. Their irony was construed as a lack of seriousness. So they had become known as the Professors, and sometimes as the Salon, in tones that mixed familiarity with malice.
Over the days that followed, Searight became an honorary member of the Salon, sitting with them at mealtimes and strolling with them on the deck. After an initial wariness, all of them decided that they liked him. Under the bluff military exterior, a poetic and romantic soul began to show itself. He was knowledgeable and charming and witty, easy to be near. His manner was generous, and he had led a highly interesting life, which he conveyed in a succession of amusing anecdotes, often told at his own expense, in a rich baritone voice that was somehow public and confiding at the same time. Soon he was insisting that they come up to visit him at the Frontier, and they were agreeing that it was an excellent idea. He would take them on a picnic to the Khyber Pass, he said; he would show them the edge of the Empire.
But for the moment there was still the remainder of the journey on the ship, the sea wide and bright around them. By now there was a general air of excitement and anticipation, which kept many of the passengers at the rail, glaring ahead at the horizon in the hope that it would yield up something solid. The first visitation came in the form of a pair of yellow butterflies, flittering around the deck. Morgan was thrilled, but the butterflies disappeared, and no land took their place.
The next morning Bob Trevy woke him with the news that India was visible. All four of them assembled in time to watch the dark line ahead of them break up into what it actually was: a bank of moody clouds in the distance. But later in the morning the horizon did thicken incontrovertibly into a graph of curious red hills, apparently devoid of life. For some reason, Morgan thought of Italy. He had already, at an earlier time, noticed an analogy between the shapes of southern Europe and Asia—three peninsulas, with a major range of mountains at the head of the middle one, and Sicily standing in for Ceylon—but this was an Italy he didn’t quite recognise, as though it were a place seen in a dream, hinting at menace.
Then there was the arrival, with its predictable flurry and tedium, the last unpleasant meal among the same unpleasant people, before they were finally rowed ashore. As they toiled towards land, Morgan, who was sitting with Goldie at the rear of the little boat, saw Searight at the front, next to the Indian passenger, and suddenly an unsettling memory came back to him.
“I wonder why Searight wanted to kill him,” he said.
“What?” Goldie said. “Whatever do you mean?”
He reminded Goldie of the incident, which had occurred nearly two weeks before, at Port Said. A strange story had gone around the ship: the Indian had reported his cabin-mate to the steward for wanting to throw him overboard, but then the two of them had made it up and became the best of friends again. Morgan hadn’t thought about it much at the time, but now it had returned to him, in the shape of this troubling question.
Goldie blinked in confusion. “Oh, but you’re mistaken,” he said. “That wasn’t Searight.”
“No?”
“No, certainly not. It was Searight who told the story to me.”
“Of course,” Morgan said, suddenly very embarrassed. “I don’t know what I was thinking.”
It was a leap of logic to assume that Searight was sharing a cabin with the Indian; such an arrangement was unlikely. Morgan didn’t know how the idea had come to him. But afterwards, even when he knew it was untrue, he continued to be fascinated by what he’d imagined. Lust in close confines, under a hot, empty sky, breeding dreams of murder: he sensed the beginnings of a story.
CHAPTER TWO
MASOOD
The voyage to India had begun several years before, and on very dry land. In November of 1906, Morgan and his mother had been living in Weybridge, Surrey, for just over two years, when one of their neighbours, Mrs. Morison, who was friendly with the Forsters, made an unusual enquiry. Did Lily know of anybody who might be able to act as a Latin tutor to a young Indian man who was about to go up to Oxford?
“I wondered, dear,” Lily enquired, “whether you might have any interest . . . ?”
“Certainly,” Morgan said immediately. He had taught Latin at the Working Men’s College in London for the past couple of years, but his curiosity ran deeper than his competence. Who was this young man from the other side of the world, what was he doing in suburban England?
“Well, it’s a complicated story,” his mother told him. “The young man is the Morisons’ ward. You know that Theodore Morison was the Principal of the Mohammedan Anglo-Oriental College in, I forget where in India . . . ”
“Aligarh, I believe.”
“Yes. It seems that his grandfather was the founder of the college, so he is from a very good background.”
“No doubt. But
how did he come to be the Morisons’ ward?”
“I am not exactly sure of that. You will have to ask him yourself. Mrs. Morison did explain it, but the story was unclear. They refer to him as their son.”
“But the Morisons have a son.”
“Well, it seems they have two.” And Lily, who had been in a perfectly good humour till then, became unaccountably fretful and began calling peevishly for the maid, so that Morgan thought it best to retire to the piano room to practise his Beethoven.
The Indian man stayed with him, however, in the form of a mystery. A small mystery, to be sure, but with sufficient colour to stand out against the surrounding drabness. Since coming down from Cambridge five years before, he had felt himself gradually losing his way. The bright and interesting world remained, but for the most part he had to go out and visit it. Rarely did it come to visit him; much less with an appointment, and a desire to brush up on its Latin.
On the day arranged, Morgan hovered anxiously around the front door half an hour before the time. Nevertheless, his pupil was late. Syed Ross Masood was tall and broad and strikingly handsome, appearing far older than his seventeen years. His smiling face, with its luxuriant moustache and sad brown eyes, looked down on Morgan from what felt, on that first morning, like a remote height.
They had shaken hands in greeting, but Masood wouldn’t release his grip. He announced solemnly, with a tone of accusation, “You are a writer. You have published a book.”
Morgan acknowledged that the second statement was true. He had published a novel the year before, which had generally been well received, and he had two others upstairs in different stages of undress. Nevertheless, the idea of being a writer felt like an ill-fitting suit on him, which he kept trying to shrug into, or out of.
“That is a fine, a very fine thing. It is one of the noble arts, perhaps the most noble of all. Except for poetry. Have you read the poetry of Ghalib? You must do so immediately, or I will never speak to you again. Ah, that I could have lived in Moghul times! You have travelled to India? No? But that is a great crime on your part. You must come to visit me there one day.”
The low, fast, sonorous voice, never really expecting an answer to its questions, continued without a pause while they went inside and settled themselves in the drawing room, and even while Agnes was serving tea, and only then fell suddenly silent. Now the two men took stock of one another more carefully. Masood was elegantly and expensively dressed, and gave off a hint of perfume. He looked, and sounded, and smelled like a prince. Morgan, on the other hand, had a crumpled, second-hand appearance, which made him seem like a tradesman of some kind.
“You need help with your Latin,” he said to Masood.
“No, no. My Latin is beyond help. It is a lost cause.” He was carrying a couple of textbooks under his arm, which he flung down in mock-despair. “Tell me rather about life at an English university.”
“I know Cambridge, not Oxford.”
“My father was a student at Christ’s College, Cambridge. Did you know that? He was sent there by my grandfather, Sir Syed Ahmad Khan. My grandfather wished his Anglo-Oriental College to be like Cambridge, only for Mohammedan students. My grandfather was a great lover of the English, especially English education, oh yes! My father too, though he was not always well treated by his English friends. I, for my part, have yet to make up my mind.”
“What did your father read at Cambridge?”
“Law, law. He was a barrister, you see, and then he became a High Court judge. But he resigned that position in unhappy circumstances.”
Morgan asked carefully, “How is it that you came to live with the Morisons?”
“Ah. That is an interesting story. A very interesting story. But I think I do not know you well enough to tell it.”
“Of course. I didn’t mean to pry.”
Masood reflected thoughtfully for a moment, then leaned forward in his chair, his dark eyes becoming darker. “Some years ago, when I was ten, my father lost his mind. He was very drunk, you see. Alcohol was the downfall of my father. It is the reason he resigned from the law as well.”
“I am sorry to hear that.”
“Yes. He took me out onto the lawns of the college one night. It was very dark and cold. He tried to show me how to use a wooden plough. He was talking a great deal of nonsense about the politics of agriculture. He wanted to teach me something, I believe, about what it means to be Indian. I was extremely afraid. My mother, too, was afraid, and she ran to call Mr. Morison, who came very quickly. He wrapped me up in his coat and took me home, and I have never left again.”
“I see,” Morgan said—though he didn’t, really. There was a great deal about the story that he did not understand.
“Well, it is sad, terribly sad. The life of my father was a sad one. He has passed on now, a few years after this incident I mentioned.” Having said this, Masood brightened considerably and asked Morgan, “Where is your father?”
“My father died a long time ago, when I was very young. I don’t remember him.”
“That is also terribly sad.”
“I do not feel it to be so.”
The two men looked at each other with renewed awareness. Morgan didn’t know what to make of his visitor, who had been so utterly forthright in such an un-English way. Part of him was tempted to be shocked, but he decided instead that he liked this young man, precisely because he spoke without restraint.
And his liking only grew over the succeeding weeks, in which they met regularly. Very little Latin was learned, however. Although Morgan prepared his lessons, when they sat down to the task Masood immediately began to writhe and squirm and to speak of other things.
On the third occasion, Morgan tried to insist. “You must attend to these declensions,” he told his pupil. “It is the purpose of our being here.”
“It is so terribly boring. Why don’t we go for a walk?”
“When we are done with our lesson.”
Masood looked mournfully at him. Then he sprang up and seized hold of Morgan, pushing him backward on the couch and tickling him furiously. It was shocking—for the first instant like assault and only then like play. Something in Morgan was thrown back in time to childhood, afternoon, the smell of straw in the heat. Ansell, his favourite of the garden boys, had frolicked with him like this.
That moment did it; Masood became his friend. The distance between them had closed.
* * *
India had encroached on the edge of Morgan’s mind before now, not a place so much as an idea. It had become a tradition for Kingsmen to join the Indian Civil Service and many people he knew had gone out there to make their careers. It was spoken of at dinner parties, usually with extreme seriousness, as the vital cornerstone of the Empire. On the other side of the world, yet somehow part of England, it was not a place he had ever thought he might visit. Yet now, as he listened to Masood talk about his childhood, and sensed the homesickness in his voice, he began to imagine himself against the same background. Perhaps, yes, perhaps he would go there one day.
In the meantime, however, England was very much with him. The suburbs especially, with their hateful self-righteousness, and where his life seemed to consist of an endless round of tea parties and amiable, empty conversations, mostly—it felt to him—with elderly women.
One of these was his mother’s great friend, Maimie Aylward. When Lily mentioned Morgan’s new pupil to her, she put a hand up to her face.
“Oh, dear,” she said. “I do hope he won’t steal the spoons.”
Morgan laughed politely, though he didn’t feel like laughing. He had learned to feign enjoyment in conversations like these, and hated himself for the pretence. Although he was English all the way through, a great many English attitudes felt foreign to him.
For this reason, what Morgan found most interesting in his new friend was the strangeness of him, the exoticism import
ed into his drawing room. The most familiar topic, seen through Masood’s eyes, became unpredictable, unusual. And what was ordinary to Masood seemed to Morgan remarkable.
Such as the casual mention one day that he could trace his ancestry back to the Prophet Mohammed at the thirty-seventh generation. “And to Adam at the hundred and twentieth,” he added. The world, in that moment, felt very old and beautiful.
Though Morgan, of course, knew nothing about Mohammedanism, and this was irksome to Masood.
“Let me explain,” he said patiently. “Not to drink wine. Not to eat the pig. There is one God and Mohammed is His prophet. To believe in the Last Judgement. Oh yes, and not to eat an animal that has died. Even a white man could follow these simple rules.”
“In theory, yes. But I don’t believe in religion.”
“You mean you are a Christian.”
“No, no. I lost my belief when I was at Cambridge.”
“My dear Forster, all Englishmen are Christians. It is very sad. The English are a tragic race, I feel deeply sorry for them. I would like to help them, but they are too numerous, there is nothing to be done.”
When Masood went up to Oxford soon afterwards, Weybridge felt immediately emptier. There was nobody left that Morgan cared for. But their communication went on in the form of frequent letters that stitched back and forth. In a continuation of the tone they had already established, Masood’s letters were written in a faux-Eastern style, elaborate and overwrought, a mixture of sentiment and irony. He addressed Morgan in exalted terms: a great deal of Thou and Thine, and pledges of eternal devotion, against an imaginary background of minarets and muezzins. Very quickly, Morgan began responding in the same way.
