Arctic Summer

by Damon Galgut

  “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 sh
ort 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.

  But in every other way, his writing felt to him light, insubstantial. He did not have the weight, he thought, to measure up to his themes. He was writing about money and power, among other things, and he bumped up every day against the thinness of his knowledge. Always he ran aground on the edges of what he knew, and found himself beached in ignorance. And here again was the old question of marriage, and the way that men and women behaved together. What could he say about these things?

  Apparently too much. When the book was finished, and publication was imminent, he circulated the proofs among those close to him and almost immediately he became aware of a chilliness in the way some people responded to it. But worst of all was his mother. Lily appeared to be steeped in enjoyment at first, but there came a day when Morgan found her in the drawing room, stiff and pale, his pages scattered on the floor at her feet.

  “What is it?” he asked her. “Has something happened?”

  “Yes, something has happened.”

  “What is it?”

  “It is,” she told him, “it is . . . something. Oh, I cannot speak about it.”

  “You must speak about it. Please, tell me what has upset you.”

  “It is you, Morgan, who have upset me.”

  “What have I done?”

  She had not looked directly at him until now, and when her gaze fell on him he felt the temperature drop. It had been a long time since he’d seen her so distressed, though in recent years disappointment had set permanently on her features, like a glaze. The thought had come to him recently that if he had any life’s work to speak of it was not to rule the natives in some far-flung outpost, but to take care of his mother, and that the white man’s burden was nothing beside his. When he was younger they had been good companions together, unromantically and chastely married, but lately his goodwill had been harder to maintain. She had become sourer and sadder as she grew older. Her rheumatism was bad, but she was also afflicted by spiritual abrasions that he struggled to understand. There were days when it seemed that she found nothing, absolutely nothing, worthwhile.

  “Everybody we know,” she said, “will read this book. Will talk about it. Did you not think of me at all?”

  He understood, finally, that it was Leonard Bast’s seduction of Helen Schlegel that had undone her so.

  “It is human nature,” he said. “People do these things.”

  “Whom do we know who does these things? I don’t know anybody who behaves in this way. It is only the lower orders who lapse, and why should they be written about? I can’t believe it of you, Morgan.”

  “Anybody can lapse,” he said, with a quick flash of defiance. Then he immediately regretted it. “Let us not quarrel.”

  “Let us not talk of it at all.”

  He tried a different approach. “You know I would not want to upset you. Your Poppy would never do that.” Poppy, Popsnake—words left over from childhood, part of a secret baby language between the two of them, in which his very voice changed, becoming wheedling and needy.

  But the appeal didn’t work today; her face was sealed against him. “I am feeling unwell, a headache, I am going to my room. Please send Agnes to me.”

  He sat on after her withdrawal, stewing in quiet misery. He too had misgivings about this part of his book, but on aesthetic, not moral grounds. Neither in books nor the real world did he know anything about the inner workings of women, their bodies or their minds. The seduction, the pregnancy: he had handled them badly, he hadn’t pulled them off. The sequence was not sensual enough to be offensive; it had suffered more than any other part of the book from his deficiency of knowledge.

  Lily tortured him for some time afterwards, not by talking about his crime, but by not talking about it. She was polite and cold in her dealings with him, reminding him at every opportunity, without ever saying it, that he had failed her, as he always seemed to do. Yet the topic was not mentioned again between them. He began to dread how others might respond. He had been raised in an encircling palisade of older women, all of whom had a particular idea of him, which he might be about to destroy. Those who had survived would judge him most harshly. There were still Maimie and Aunt Laura to deal with.

  * * *

  But Maimie liked his book.

  And not only Maimie. The reviews were rapturous, and the word from those in his own circle was equally warm-hearted. Apparently he had written a masterpiece. He was talked about, and talked to, in a way that was new to him, and not entirely welcome. The word “greatness” was casually thrown about.

  Fame was like a glow that soon became too hot, and he felt himself sweating in the glare. To his alarm, some people had begun to take him seriously. Through invitations and oblique approaches, he experienced the pull of literary society. He resisted; he would not feel at home there. He could only come to it as a supplicant. He developed a technique for dealing with praise, which involved staring down at the floor while being spoken to. One had to avoid listening, but to assume an attitude of modesty, while sending one’s imagination down, down through the earth, to New Zealand on the far side. If you practised this assiduously, then fame did not matter so much.

  The only possible benefit of all this attention was that his mother’s outrage dwindled. She let it be known that she was bored by his literary success, but when the expected opprobrium failed to materialise, Lily withdrew into grudging resignation. Her son might not have learned to live in the way that real men did, but he had ventured into the world through his thoughts, and some of his acclaim reflected back on her.

  Hom had written to say how much he’d liked the novel. And then, in the same month that the book appeared, he came to Weybridge for a visit. Success made Morgan’s skin glow; he could feel his own youthful confidence; he could sense that Hom found him attractive. On one particular afternoon, when his mother and Ruth and Agnes were all out of the house, the two men took tea together in the drawing room. Again, Hom spoke about how much he admired the book; it had made him feel close to Morgan, he said.

  Just how close became apparent soon afterwards, when he set down his teacup and took hold of his host. They rolled around on the sofa for a while, and then somehow continued on the floor. For the first time Hom kissed him—not just once, but repeatedly—and put his tongue into Morgan’s mouth. The sudden moist intimacy was startling, and all the more so because they had not touched each other in a year. Yet all t
hat Morgan could think of was that Hom must have learned this from his wife.

  The sound of Lily coming back from a social visit made them separate and return to their upright positions on the sofa. Morgan finished his cold tea, feeling dazed. He was thinking about his complicated history with his friend, everything that it had promised, how little it had delivered. Hom was very much married by now, and the father of twins. He had recently been appointed to a professorship in Belfast, and was moving over there. But his wife, Christabel, was refusing to go with him, and there had been a brouhaha among certain members of their social circle because, it was felt, she was not a good mother to the children.

  For some reason, Morgan felt moved to address this issue now. “It’s shocking,” he told Hom, “that she will not accompany you. I intend to speak to her about it.”

  “She can’t be forced. No, please do not bring it up. She will only turn against you.”

  “She already is against me.”

  “Morgan, that’s untrue. She likes you very much. Speaking to her will ruin it. I implore you, in the name of everything that has happened between us . . . ”

  Pleased at this reference, Morgan softened. “Well, it is your concern, of course. But I think you should not allow a woman to undermine your life like this. If I were in her place,” he added, “I would move to Belfast with you tomorrow.”

  “I hope you will come to visit me there often.”

  “I hope I shall.”

  The meeting had ended happily after all. Morgan could not know it yet, but this was to be the last time that he and Hom ever touched each other in this way. What he took away from the encounter was a warm, sad afterglow, like the fading radiance of a burnt-out fire, and it was still with him the next day, when he went to the opera with Masood.

  Sitting next to his other friend, his Indian brother, their knees and elbows pressed together, he was nevertheless aware that he was not awake to his presence. His mind, his heart, were still rolling around on the carpet at home. It was possible to love two people at the same time, he reflected, but not on successive days. He was used to feeling desire. But what stirred him on this occasion, and stayed with him, was the knowledge that he had been desirable to somebody else. That was something he hadn’t felt before.