Arctic Summer

by Damon Galgut

  Not long afterwards, he travelled to Oxford for a visit. Summer had almost taken hold; the few days passed in a dreamy haze of punts and walks and aimless conversation. Masood was by now in occupation of the whole town, as if it were one of his expensive capes that he could put on or drop at will. He was not so much interested in his studies, it seemed, as in playing an elaborate role, though the nature of the drama was not always clear. He liked to swagger around with a silver-topped cane, reciting Paul Verlaine in his mournfully melodious voice, or to prance about the tennis courts in his whites. He played a lot of tennis—and music on the gramophone, and practical jokes. In short, he liked to play, especially in his serious moments.

  He was also the centre of a small coterie of admirers, most of them Indian, who lolled about in his rooms like the retinue of some indolent Emperor. Morgan went almost unnoticed in this company, sinking below the level of visibility, like a child or a spy. Often the talk around him was conducted in Urdu, only occasionally and laconically translated by Masood. But sometimes they all spoke in English, though the topics they discussed were almost a foreign language in themselves: customs in India, historical figures Morgan had never heard of, cities he had never seen.

  To his great delight, these conversations also sometimes involved poetry, which was theatrically declaimed in Urdu or Persian, and sometimes in Arabic. The themes, as far as he could gather, were mostly about the shortness of love, or the decline of Islam. It was odd to hear lyricism in a social setting like this, but Masood explained to him that in the East poetry occupied a public place, not a private one, as it did in England.

  “You so-called white people,” he was told, “are too afraid of your emotions. Everything is arranged coldly on shelves. In India we show how we feel, without being ashamed.”

  “Why so-called?”

  “Because your colour is far from white. More a pinko-grey, I’d say. Look.”

  When he and Masood put their arms together, to compare, he saw that it was true. He had never thought of his skin in this way before. His friend’s colouring was infinitely more attractive.

  Such ideas edged dangerously close to politics, which also came up as a topic among Masood’s friends. But in these conversations the talk turned feverish and unintelligible, though it was easy to make out that Indian independence was a common and recurrent theme. It was only when they became aware of him that they would suddenly fall silent, and shift about.

  When the time came for him to leave, Masood pressed a small parcel on him. “You’d better try them on,” he said. “I have guessed at the size.”

  It was a pair of golden slippers.

  “Oh, but I can’t accept them. They’re too beautiful.”

  “Certainly you will accept, or I shall never speak to you again.”

  The slippers fitted perfectly, holding his feet with a gentle, satiny grip. In his English trousers, which were a little too short, he seemed outlandish and a bit ridiculous to himself. But the only emotion he felt was gratitude—almost too much of it.

  A month later he was back for a second visit, at the conclusion of which Masood cast around for another gift. Looking vaguely at the assortment of Indian articles that strewed the room—embroidered quilts, jewellery, carved wooden boxes of incense—he picked out something almost at random: a hookah, which one of his friends, a man named Raschid, had been smoking the day before.

  “No. This I certainly cannot take.”

  “But you must.”

  “No. Thank you. But it is too generous. I am happy with my slippers.”

  An odd expression came over Masood’s face, a wooden detachment that fitted over his kindliness like a mask. “I insist you have it. And you must not thank me again.”

  The pressure of his hands, as he pushed the hookah at Morgan, was almost impolite. But he had softened a little by the time they came to the railway station. “You must not thank me if I give you something,” he said quietly. “And I will not thank you either.”

  “But why not?”

  “It is only strangers who thank. Thanks are not given by friends. You are like family to me. Do you thank your mother for what she does for you? No, it is merely expected. No thanks are necessary.”

  “I do thank my mother. The English like to say thank you all the time.”

  “But I am not English. And when you are with me, you are not English either.”

  The absurdity of this notion didn’t blunt its feeling, and a tiny point of gratitude stayed lodged in Morgan on the journey home. The hookah was much admired, on the train and in Weybridge, sending out glints of reflected light. But it was only when he was alone in his room that he allowed himself to feel again its true value, which was in what Masood had said to him. You are like family to me. The words stayed with him. He had always wanted a brother, a male figure close to him in age and sensibility, somebody he could confide in. Before his own birth, there had been another baby, which had died. He thought of that absent child as the brother he couldn’t have.

  He put the slippers on his feet and sat on the edge of his bed with the hookah to his lips. There was a faint and fragrant scent of old tobacco, almost imperceptible.

  * * *

  By this time his second novel had been published. It had been a pleasurable book to write, falling out of him with almost confessional ease, though at the same time, in a contradictory way, it had occasionally felt to him too symbolic and bloodless. The problem was that he was writing about men and women, about marriage, which were subjects he knew nothing about. It was an ongoing vexation to feel that his true subject was buried somewhere out of reach, and could perhaps never be spoken aloud.

  He had dedicated the book to the Apostles, otherwise known as the Cambridge Conversazione Society, the exclusive group of intellectuals to which he had belonged from his fourth year at King’s. Theirs had been a communion of minds, and his first and most lasting taste of friendship.

  Many of the Apostles, and the sort of conversation they made, had featured in the story. Perhaps this was the reason they couldn’t fully warm to it. He had tried to disguise them, or jumble them up, and in any case there was more of him in there than anyone else. One of the characters, however, was based to some extent on the Apostle he cared for more than any other. Hugh Owen Meredith—known as Hom to his friends—had occupied a central place in Morgan’s affections until now.

  He and Hom had become close in their second year at Cambridge. His dark, athletic good looks were immediately attractive, but his mind had a real power too. It was Hom, in fact, who had sponsored Morgan’s election to the Apostles, though his influence had gone further than that. Almost as soon as they had become friends, he had started to work on Morgan’s religious beliefs, questioning and undermining them with a rigorous and cynical vigour.

  Morgan was ready to be challenged. The form of religion was one thing, but the content was something else entirely and, once he thought about it, the content started to feel very thin indeed. The idea of the Trinity was an absurdity. And Jesus was a humourless fellow, lacking in intellectual substance, who placed a perverse value on pain. If you knew he was in the next room, would you want to go and talk to him? No, Christianity was a distraction rather than a solution, and he came soon to a clear-sighted moment where he set it aside entirely. Afterwards, he felt almost physically lighter.

  It was Hom who had given this lightness to him. But Hom himself had a heavy spirit, despite his outward cheeriness. Under all his conversation, a thread of defeat and futility ran deep. Morgan was drawn by this darkness, perhaps because he hoped to cure it. Certainly when the two of them were together they created a sense of hopeful excitement between them, in which a bright future seemed possible. What exactly that future contained was unclear as yet. But—in Morgan’s mind at least—it might hold both him and Meredith in some blissful undefined companionship.

  It had almost seemed possible for a whil
e. His years at Cambridge felt like a high and radiant moment, where the world was on the point of opening for him. He had discovered the Greeks, and the ancient Hellenic universe, which was the first Empire, could justify so much. And it was under the cover of Plato that he had allowed himself to love Hom’s body, rather than his mind.

  He had left his student years at Cambridge behind by then; he was living with his mother in a hotel in Bloomsbury, and Hom was nearby, studying at the London School of Econom­ics. They spent a great deal of time together. One night, in the middle of a frantic discussion on the Symposium, they found themselves entangled on Hom’s couch, fingers running through one another’s hair. “I love you,” Morgan told his friend, but the emotion had only risen in the wake of the words—fierce and freshly minted, true somehow for the very first time.

  The words, and the feeling, had been rehearsed many times since. Yet the two men stayed in their clothes. Hands could range over the surface; fingertips could trace the outline of eyebrows, nose, mouth. On one especially heated occasion Morgan had dared to press his lips—fumblingly, inaccurately—against those of his friend. The brief touch, dry and tasteless, had fired a flare in his head. But he had felt Hom pulling back and away.

  “We must take care . . . ” he said, his voice trailing off, echoing nevertheless in Morgan’s mind.

  Care had to be taken. What felt so spontaneous, natural, was in fact dangerous. That danger could in itself be exciting, as Morgan was to learn on subsequent nights, when the embraces and fondlings continued. The possibility of discovery, the sound of other people on the far side of the wall: these gave an extra intensity, like a magnetic effect, to the movement of skin on skin. There were times when he thought his heart might stop. Nothing had ever felt so complete or so powerful as the encirclement of male arms. But he knew, even in the most ardent of clinches, that what was happening meant something different to each of them.

  “Why are you doing this?” Morgan asked him once, when Hom’s hand had fallen listlessly away from him.

  “Why? Well, why not? If it was good enough for the Greeks . . . ”

  “Is that why, really? Simply to imitate the unspeakable vice of the Greeks?”

  “We are speaking, aren’t we, at this moment? Besides, we haven’t indulged in any vice.” In a sudden movement, Hom straightened up, pushing Morgan aside. “It hasn’t been carnal,” he announced, in a new, clipped voice. “We’ve merely expressed our feelings. Is that so unforgivable?”

  “Not to me.”

  “Nor me. I am very fond of you, Morgan. Let’s think of this as an experiment.”

  “An experiment? To find out what?”

  “That we can only know by trying. I am sick of following rules that society has laid down. ‘You may do this but not that, you may feel this but not that.’ It’s intolerable. I would like to go where my feelings lead me.”

  “I agree,” Morgan said—but his feelings had ebbed for the moment.

  He had taken to spending a lot of time among the Greek statuary at the British Museum and there were days when all passion seemed to be frozen in marble. The gods felt human to him, and the humans god-like. There was one statue in particular, a young man of ideal form—though an arm had broken off—which evoked a deep ache. It was the beauty of art, but also the beauty of the male body, that stirred him. And there was sadness in the stirring, because he did not think he would ever lie close to naked beauty like that.

  To touch, to hold. To be touched. The yearning was so strong sometimes that it hurt. The more so because it could not be spoken. Not even—not really—to Hom.

  Especially not after Hom told him casually, soon afterwards, that he had become engaged.

  “To a woman?” Morgan asked stupidly.

  “To Caroline Graveson.” She was a friend of his from Cam­bridge. “We are thinking of starting a co-educational school together.”

  “What a good idea.”

  “Yes, it has given my life fresh power.” Meredith was beaming. “She is so very lovely, Forster, and I know she is the right person for me.”

  “Of course.” Morgan was trying to smile. This was an injury he had never felt before. He could see Hom’s mouth working as he talked about his plans, but he couldn’t hear the words.

  At the end of the evening, when it was time to go, Hom pulled him close and held him. Morgan could feel the warmth of his body, and hear his breath. He experienced a great confusion of emotion, which continued when he walked back alone through the night-time streets to his mother.

  Perhaps Meredith was right. Perhaps when all was said and done, one had to do the right thing. Marriage—a joining of lives—was the only possible way to be happy. But could it be his way? He had thought from time to time that, perhaps, if he only found the right person, it might be possible. But it was only with old ladies that he could be at ease. His dealings with young women were awkward, and the few occasions when he’d tried to show an interest had been mawkish and misjudged. During at least one episode, he had behaved in a way that reflected embarrassingly on him. In truth, most females felt like a different species to him; they made him afraid.

  He had wrestled a great deal—invisibly, below the surface—with the whole question of marriage. In the end, it was a problem he could only solve in words. He worked it out of himself, knottily, in the bigger knot of his book. The Longest Journey, as it wound itself out of him, showed him strangenesses in his own nature that partly alarmed him, but partly pleased him too—because they confirmed what he hoped about himself: that he did not belong, not quite, in the deadly properness around him. No, there was a whole aspect of his character that was an unmentioned half-brother to his civilised side: drunk and disorderly and primitive, closer to the woods than the city. He even wrote a scene for this side of himself in which he capered, naked and goat-like, through a landscape that accepted him utterly. Then thought better of it later and struck out the pages.

  He had had an encounter on the hills above Salisbury, where he had been visiting Maimie Aylward, that had showed him this secret face in a mirror. He had walked to the Figsbury Rings, the two Iron Age stone circles, with the twisted tree growing in the middle. He’d been there before, of course, but had never seen another human figure; something of the power of the setting derived from its loneliness. But on this particular day there was a shepherd boy, smoking at the centre of a crystalline silence. When Morgan had settled himself close by, the boy had offered him—unruffled, almost uncaring of his presence—a puff on his pipe. Morgan had held the pipe for a moment, feeling its faint heat, then returned it to the rough hand. He thought he ought to offer something in exchange, but when he held out sixpence the boy shook his head. In the soft exchange of conversation between them, none of which he could remember distinctly afterwards, the strongest impression he had taken away was that the boy had not called him ‘sir’, not once. He had not called him anything, in fact, but it felt as if he’d addressed him by name. It was only when the boy had stood up to go that Morgan had seen his club foot.

  This conversation, and the place where it had happened, had stayed with Morgan afterwards; it had rippled through him, like the two concentric stone circles, moving outwards from some ancient point. Nothing had happened, but something had changed. The boy was real but he was also a sort of ghost. England had brewed him up.

  Morgan had put him into the book, his rough truthfulness, even his pipe—as well as the landscape from which he could not be separated. But his club foot he had taken away from him and given to somebody else. The foot was not a foot; it was another kind of impediment, like a tongue that couldn’t speak. Yes, he had put the foot onto himself, and himself into another life, one in which he did marry, although he ought not to. And the Apostles were there, and Hom too, and the suburbs that held him in their bloodless grip. It was all mixed up, all coded and undisclosed, too many opposites swirling in a muddle that he couldn’t solve. But he lik
ed it afterwards, this lack of a solution, because it was the truth.

  * * *

  Masood wrote: Centuries may pass, years may turn into 2000 centuries and you never hear from me you are not to think that the great affection, the real love the sincerest admiration that I feel for you has in any way diminished . . .

  Affection. Love. Admiration. Morgan’s head turned dizzily. But by degrees he detached himself and thought it through rationally. He remembered the other letters Masood had written him, their heightened, heated language. The little contact he’d had with other Indians, through Masood, had taught him that many of them spoke in this way. A few weeks before, in Oxford, a recent Indian acquaintance had told him earnestly that he was his very best friend in the world, and seemed utterly sincere when he said it. The words didn’t mean what they did to the English. The language seemed bigger than it was.

  And yet, despite himself, Morgan couldn’t help responding. The tender declaration set something ticking. He understood, in that instant, what was happening to him. By a slow increeping, Masood was taking Hom’s place in his heart.

  By this time Hom was married—though not to Caroline Graveson. He had broken off that first engagement almost immediately, and had then suffered a breakdown of some kind, a long inward darkness, in which he’d seemed close to something extreme. Morgan had spent a great deal of time with him, speaking to him, and Hom had told a number of people that he only felt he came to life when he was in Morgan’s company. And then he had got a little better, had taken a lecturing post in Manchester and met somebody else soon after moving up there. But although Morgan had felt it as a seclusion, a closing off, and his relationship with Hom’s wife, Christabel, was coolish, the peculiar, lopsided bond between him and his friend was still in place.

  For a time, then, Morgan had allowed himself to love both of them, Hom and Masood, silently and from afar, and in different ways. In the case of Hom, the happiness that Morgan might have felt was tempered by a sad certainty that Hom would never belong to him, not in any meaningful way. The most he would have were the chaste and clothed embraces that had marked the limit of their affections so far.