Arctic Summer

by Damon Galgut

  * * *

  He had spent a great deal of time with Masood in recent months, but on these occasions he had hardly ever been happy. Love had vexed his mind, making him irritable and irrational. There was something in human affection that was at odds with reason, he thought, like a kind of mild insanity. When he was with Masood, what he felt was that everyone around them was watching them with secret, pernicious judgement. The only time he was truly at ease was when they were alone together.

  And yet his kinship with his friend had deepened. The tone of their conversation had changed now; it was more honest and more serious. Even in letters, Masood often dropped the baroque voice he had liked to use, in which he had played a fairy-tale king or slave. In one particular communication he had confessed, I have got to love you as if you were a woman or rather part of my own body. This was not the kind of declaration he would ever have made before, and it wasn’t altogether welcome: it wasn’t how Morgan wanted to be loved.

  Just before Christmas, he and Masood went to the opera again, to Salome. Afterwards, as they wandered over to the Oxford and Cambridge Musical Club in Leicester Square, a regular haunt of theirs, they discussed what they had just seen.

  “It’s the mixture of lust and revenge,” Morgan said. “Either one alone is a worthy subject, but together they are somehow squalid. And when the music is beautiful it only makes it worse.”

  “You see,” Masood exclaimed, “it is what I have always said—lust and revenge are a very Eastern combination. You have an insight into these subjects.”

  This topic had been rehearsed many times between them and usually it was pleasing to Morgan, but tonight the rain was falling in cold, vertical lines and the heat of India seemed very far away. “You always tell me this,” he said, “but it isn’t true. There is nothing I know better than the English tea party.”

  “Nonsense, my dear chap. I have met many Englishmen and you are the only one with the power of true sentiment. You will see when we get to Turkey.”

  The two men had been making plans to go to Constantino­ple together; the idea was that they would travel in an Oriental city, a try-out for the real East. But at this moment even Turkey felt unreachable.

  They had come to the club; there was a fussing with umbrel­las and coats at the door, and a pause while they found an unoccupied corner to sit in. Masood was drinking whisky, and Morgan wanted tea. They talked in a small, inconsequential way while their order was brought, and then Morgan was hit by a sudden plunge of mood. He said, “I am never going to write another novel.”

  “Oh, you are, you are, not just one, many novels, or I shall never speak to you again.”

  “You speak lightly, because you think I’m talking that way too. I really mean what I say. You have too much faith in me. I am not half the writer you seem to think I am.”

  “Oh, come.” Masood’s gaze flitted about, while he stroked his big moustache with a well-shaped hand. He said confidently, “You are the only living writer that matters. You are twice as great as anybody else,” and then suddenly broke off as he saw Morgan’s eyes fill with tears. “I’m sorry,” he muttered, confused. “I don’t mean to joke. You know I am a foolish fellow.”

  The sudden switch from bluster to uncertainty was typical and somehow touching. “It’s all right,” Morgan told him. “You are my dear boy.”

  “I don’t understand. What is the matter?”

  Morgan himself didn’t know what the matter might be. Perhaps it was only the memory of John the Baptist’s head, carried bloodily on a platter. Surprising himself, he said quietly, “You do realise that I love you?”

  “Yes, yes. We have spoken of this many times. The feeling is reciprocated.”

  “I am not sure you understand.” Suddenly, he was filled with a steady determination. “No, I’m not sure that you do.”

  For once Masood had no reply; he sat very still, looking at the room around them. The place was very full tonight. There were people close by, and a general roar of chatter and laughter, forcing Morgan to lean in closer to speak.

  “I love you as a friend,” he said, “but also as something more than a friend. No, don’t answer for a moment. I know what you are going to tell me—that in India friends can be like brothers, and you love me in this way. But I love you as more than a friend, and more than a brother too.”

  Now Masood’s dark eyes focused on him with a puzzled, sorry look. He said, “I know,” and touched Morgan’s hand briefly on the table. A moment later he was calling for the waiter.

  That was all. A year of waiting, while the pressure built up—then the truth spilled out in a handful of words. Perhaps the wrong words, words that did not fully speak their meaning. Yet the meaning had been there. Not long afterwards they were outside, in the wintry dark, saying their farewells and hurrying in different directions.

  The feeling, at first, was euphoric. As he caught his train, Morgan was filled with a giddy sense of release. It had been so easy! And Masood had understood; there had been a quick pain in his eyes.

  But even before he reached home, the happy mood was gone. The enormity of what he had said bore in on him. It felt as if he’d taken an irrevocable step, with consequences he hadn’t properly considered. Masood had barely answered him. Although he’d been polite and friendly when they parted, might his manner not have concealed his true reaction? As he kept being reminded, his friend was an Indian and their social manners were different. Might Masood not have been horrified, or even disgusted, by him?

  By the next day he was calmer. He trusted Masood’s refinement of spirit and thought things would be all right. Neverthe­less, he sent an anxious note, asking to be reassured. There was no response.

  As the silence went on over the coming days, Morgan’s equanimity was tested. There was no one on whom to vent his worry except his mother, and he found himself snapping at her, then feeling bad about his shortness of temper. His misery was small but deep, and it worsened when a birthday present from Masood arrived. It was an ugly gift, quite the most unappealing present his friend had given him—a tray with a candlestick, matchbox and sealing wax—and the note that accompanied it was bland. Reading and re-reading the empty words, Morgan concluded that the parcel must have been sent before his reckless announcement in the club. It felt like the forerunner of disaster.

  He had to consider, then, the possibility that their friendship might be over. A life like his old life, in which he did not see or speak to Syed Ross Masood: it was a horrible thought. But in it there was a reckoning, and a choice. There was the simple temptation just to wall Masood off. It would be easy, so easy, to belittle him, and to think himself well rid of their friendship.

  Upset and stirred by these thoughts, which were like voices calling up from some depth in himself, he went for a long walk alone. He felt he had to bring some order to his emotions, and so he dwelt on the association between himself and Masood, which had begun on the front doorstep of his home four years ago. Their friendship had come to seem like something separate from the rest of his English life—separate, even, to the two men who’d given rise to it. To turn away from the image of his friend would be a stain on what had joined them. The love that he had felt, however fruitless it might be, was like a kind of grace—that is to say, a gift bestowed from outside—and he had no right to refuse it. Even if the silence was permanent and they had to part, he would not give in to insult and regret.

  Having achieved this resolution was a triumph, and one that lasted, if a trifle waveringly, past that evening. So that it came as something of a let-down when Masood did finally write, but without acknowledging the full weight of Morgan’s confession. There is nothing to be said, everything is understood. Well, that was true—but then he wandered on to other, everyday topics, infuriating in their smallness. It was obvious that he didn’t want to say any more about it.

  * * *

  Constantinople came to nothin
g; six months later they went to the Italian lakes instead. They would spend some days on the Swiss side of the border and then, after Masood left, Morgan would join Goldie in Italy itself. It was a good substitute: Italy was the country where he had first felt his spirit stir in him. Travelling there with his mother, ten years before, he had been slowly wakened by the sensuality of heat and landscape and exotic ruins, till one day, out for a walk by himself near Ravello, a wild imagining had somehow become true.

  He was in a forest, surrounded by tangled trees, and a wind had suddenly begun to blow out of the centre of a dry, still day. Morgan had stopped, staring around him into the moving leaves, and the fancy had come to him that this little breeze might herald the arrival of some old, pre-Christian god. Pan, perhaps. No sooner had this thought struck than the wind increased its power, till the branches had started to heave, and Morgan to run. He was genuinely afraid, but also thrilled: hot on his heels, on his neck, the ancient world pursued him. Only when he had emerged from the trees, and the modern roofs of the town had appeared below, did he stop and bend over to catch his breath. He felt frightened and ridiculous and amused by what had happened—or, more accurately, not happened—and only then became aware that a story had appeared in him, whole and entire. He could hardly get back to the pensione fast enough to put it down.

  He had been back to Italy many times since, and had set two novels there. It had never failed to overturn the cold and ordered world of the English suburbs and to promise something pagan in return. He had similar hopes of this visit with Masood, but things had not worked out like that. There had been a joyous closeness between them, and one especially lovely moment on the train when they had knelt together in the corridor, looking out the window at the stars. But there was also sadness, because their time in England was drawing to a close; Masood was in London now, reading for the bar, and would be returning to India in a few months.

  On one of the first days, Masood had begun to speak in a suggestive, nudging tone about a waitress at the hotel. It had been slow to dawn that what was being intimated was that he, Morgan, might like to approach her. An astonishing notion, after everything that had happened.

  “Do you remember that conversation we had?” he asked. “I mean in the O and C Club, just before Christmas?”

  A small frown appeared between Masood’s eyes. He nodded slightly, it might have been in confusion.

  “I’m not sure whether you understood me properly then. I don’t think I made my meaning clear.”

  “I did understand you,” Masood told him.

  A silence opened up between them. They were in Tesserete, in the room they were sharing, and the waters of the lake were visible from the window. Morgan looked out on the grey, moving surface, rather than at the face of his friend. “Please allow me to speak,” he said.

  “Yes, please, speak, speak.”

  “When I say that I love you, I don’t mean it in some passing way. I mean that I would like to spend my life with you. Not close to you, or parallel to you, but with you. I mean . . . ” He trailed off, his meaning slipping away from him.

  “You are always with me, Morgan.”

  “No, I’m not saying it correctly.” He made a gesture with his hands, of helplessness and frustration. “What I want,” he began bravely, “I mean to say . . . I want . . . ”

  What he wanted hung between them both, unsayable.

  “I do understand,” Masood said, a little crossly. “But it is not possible. Please believe me, if it were possible, I would give this to you. But I cannot.”

  Morgan looked down at his fingers. They seemed like something separate to him, pale and curious and segmented. He imagined them as he often saw them, holding a pen, setting words down in a line across the page, and the thought came to him that they would never hold another human body. Not in the way that he wanted.

  “Yes,” he said.

  More softly, Masood went on. “I have known . . . I have understood . . . for some time, my dear. I was afraid at first, but then . . . ” Now it was his turn to run dry. He shrugged his big shoulders, and blew through his moustache in a vexed way. “You are my very best friend, Morgan,” he said at last. “I don’t want that to disappear.”

  “No, of course not.”

  There was a strained silence, before Masood stretched and yawned ostentatiously, and said, “Now I think we should go for a walk. I need to build up an appetite before dinner.”

  So what mattered most was put away between them, and not mentioned again. The remaining days of their trip were spent in contented companionship, unbroken by any high emotion—unless it was Masood’s seduction of the rather ugly waitress, which he only half-concealed from his friend.

  * * *

  He returned to England and the familiar morbidity. His maternal grandmother Louisa had died seven months before, and this event had shattered his mother. For his own part, he had loved his grandmother and thought she had lived fully and well. Her going brought sadness, but her life had been in every sense complete; her final gift to him had been a sense of gratitude at being alive himself. But Lily was broken. She had wept and cried aloud in Louisa’s last hours, and something of that dissolution had stayed with her afterwards. Her mourning became a weight that she had to carry around physically, and she did not cease from complaining.

  He had hoped that something might change during his month away. In the earlier part of the year, after the first time he’d spoken out to Masood, his own health had taken a turn for the worse. Perhaps disappointment had sapped him; certainly he had felt significantly older, as if time had shrunk. Tuberculosis was mentioned. His opsonic index was low and his doctor told him that he might have to go to a sanatorium. But he had fought back, invisibly, under the skin, and both his spirit and his body had recovered. He was determined that his second disappointment would not return him to that state.

  Yet here he was, battling not only his own sadnesses, but those of his mother as well. Her grumbling and fault-finding ate away at the solid ground beneath him. Worse, he seemed to have arrived at a point where the way forward was no longer apparent. He had published a collection of short stories recently, but even this form, which he had always enjoyed, now felt somehow out of reach. Instead, furtively, with a strong sense of the forbidden, he had started to write another kind of short story.

  These were sexual in nature, a living-out of what he had only dared imagine in his mind. He wrote them not to express, but to excite himself. Although he liked some of them, he also felt a certain repetition at work, a compulsion that centred on the same figure: tall, dark, athletic and good-looking, when he entered the scenario, the rest became inevitable. This man was nowhere visible in real life—or he was everywhere visible, and unattainable.

  He could not show these stories to the world. Shame and secret excitement: they had been the stuff of so much of his life, and they appeared now to have infected his words. He had started a new novel, too, which he called Arctic Summer, but he felt its emptiness, its diminishing momentum. The idea for it had seeded itself in him at Basel station, on his way back from Italy, when he had found himself in a horrible tangle of English tourists on the platform, and had almost been flung beneath a train. But part of the problem was that he had written about these people before. Hapless English travellers, finding or losing themselves in Italy—what more could he say about them? He knew them too well; he wanted to leave them behind.

  Perhaps the answer lay further afield, in the Indian novel he’d been thinking about. In any case, India was becoming more certain in his mind. Howards End was selling strongly, and he had the money to make the trip. He had developed a daydream which he told to nobody else, which featured him travelling to India and vanishing. He would not die, exactly, but he would drift away, into a new life, a new identity, and he would never revisit his old one in England again. This daydream was most intense when his mother was at her worst.

 
On one particular evening she had worked on his nerves to such an extent, finding such fault with everything that he did and his manner of doing it, that he had almost lost control. She was supposed to be going out that night to call on a friend, but she wondered aloud how she could possibly go, when none of the household tasks had been attended to, the maid and the cook were away and Morgan could not be relied on to feed himself in her absence. And her back hurt, from bending over in the garden, or possibly it was the rheumatism.

  “My body, my miserable body,” she cried. “Why isn’t it strong? Oh, why can’t I simply walk away and be gone? Why can’t I finish my duties and be gone? What is the point of all this talking? What is the point of anything?”

  Eventually, she did depart. Alone in the house, Morgan stood in the drawing room, feeling the silent furniture pressing in upon him with jagged, spiky lines. It was intolerable that he should have to share the house with this woman for the rest of her life, or his. And she was only fifty-six! Years and years of lustreless future stretched before him, drawing him in like a vacuum. He knew he couldn’t endure it another moment.

  Stepping up to the mantelpiece, he swept it clean of ornaments with a wild movement of his arm. The cacophony of brass and smashing china echoed a chaos in him. It was the end of his invisibility, the end of his hidden and smothered life. Who could have known, when he himself did not, that such violence had been cooking below his placidity? He bent and picked up one of the broken shards from the floor and without hesitation drew it across his throat. The pain, the bright line of blood, were a relief and escape. Then he rushed wildly out of the door, into the darkness and the cold.