by Damon Galgut
Masood listened calmly, nodding from time to time. In the end he merely said, “It is the same in India.”
“Not so bad, surely?”
“Oh, yes, it is bad. It is all up with you English and your Empire. A matter of time now, you will see. You will be pushed back onto your little island.”
“Where you have always been a most welcome guest, I might add.” He upset himself and almost cried. “It is not my Empire, Masood, why will you never admit it?”
“Friendship is your Empire, Morgan, I know that very well. I am only teasing you. Please remember that you were a welcome guest in India too. Though you are too afraid to come back.”
“I’m not afraid of it.”
“When will you come?”
“I don’t know, this isn’t the time to decide. Perhaps it won’t be soon. I have my mother to think of. I abandoned her during the War, I can’t do it so quickly again.”
But he continued to think about it, and the subject returned a few weeks later, just before Masood’s departure. Morgan had gone down to London to see him and they were sitting in the garden of a mutual friend, chatting inconsequentially, when a bereft sensation came over him. “Perhaps,” he mused aloud, “I must come out to India again, if I am ever to finish my novel.”
“Your novel! Your Indian novel!” It was as if the idea were striking Masood for the very first time. “How is it going? Are you close to completing it?”
Morgan laughed with unfeigned merriment. “It’s hopeless, really. I should throw it away.”
“Oh, nonsense, you are only being modest. I know you too well. It is a work of genius and it is almost done.”
But it wasn’t a work of genius and it was nowhere near done. Over the last six years—since starting Maurice—he had barely touched it. Not long after getting back to England, he had made a serious attempt to pick it up again, but that had ended quickly after a few days. He was usually a calm and methodical worker, but the words wouldn’t join in any sensible way. There had been a terrible afternoon when he had come close to screaming dementedly over it, alone in the attic. He had put it away after that and not looked at it again.
Instead he had occupied himself with his articles and his Alexandrian book. He was always busy, always working, but none of it was creative and at certain moments, when this came clear to him, he fell into despondency. He saw his middle years as a continuation of the same. He had a small paunch and the beginnings of baldness, and the reddish tinge of his nose seemed permanent. He felt he was a spent force, his finest time somewhere behind him. He didn’t think he would ever complete his novel.
* * *
And yet, after Masood had finally sailed, the Indian story remained behind, bothering him. As before, in India, Masood’s absence enlarged the presence of his book. By now he had a curious relationship with all that unfinished material. He could see it from a little way off, with its promise and its shortcomings. There was something in it, something unformed as yet, which pulled at him. But in order to proceed, he would have to become involved in it again, with the almost sensual imagining that its private world required. He wasn’t sure how to do that.
“Simply by taking up your pen,” Leonard Woolf told him.
There weren’t many people before whom he could throw out his writerly woes, but with the Woolfs he could. They paid such attention! Though without always fully understanding.
“It’s not that simple,” he protested. “I do take up my pen. I am fingering the keys, as it were, but I seem to produce only discords so far.”
“Well, persist. Your problems are not unusual.”
“Do you think so?” Morgan was genuinely surprised; his lameness felt unique to him. “I was reading it over recently and I lost all hope.”
“No, don’t thwart yourself. Really, you are worse than Virginia. You have to finish. If I could order you, I would.”
This conversation was only possible because for once they were alone. A great busyness usually surrounded the Woolfs, but today the entourage had withdrawn. He knew everybody in the group that had accreted around them; as individuals he mostly liked them, but collectively they made him shrink a little. They were all so interwoven and intimate, changing relationships and sexual tastes the way other people changed hats. To say nothing of their cleverness, which was sometimes cruel, and used against friend and enemy indiscriminately. He couldn’t air his failures too completely in front of them, and it was mostly to Leonard and Virginia that he turned.
“I told Masood that perhaps I need to go back to India,” he said now. “The place is vague in my mind, so much has come between. Egypt, the War, other writing. I have almost forgotten it.”
“Go back then,” Leonard told him brusquely. “If that is what you need to do.”
The advice was so hard-edged that it seemed like an object. Leonard did not speak whimsically. And of course, he had spent years of his own life out there, in the East; he knew very well what was involved.
Morgan said faintly, “Perhaps I will.”
Virginia was sitting nearby, smoking one of her shag cigarettes. Her presence had an intensity that made his spirit lean backward. Yet he had also grown to like her, with her long, lantern-shaped face, inhabited by sharp intelligence. She studied Morgan intently with the two bright nails of her eyes, then told him, “You know, I can’t imagine you there.”
“But I have been there already. For six months.”
“Yes, I know. You corresponded with me. I am simply saying I cannot picture you in that place. The failure is mine.”
Though somehow, with Virginia, the failure seemed always to be his.
* * *
His Alexandrian book was done and in the aftermath there was little to keep him occupied. His old talent for idleness took over, with its attendant self-reproach. Months passed, leaving no mark.
He kept in touch with Mohammed, of course, but the news that came wasn’t good. Little baby Morgan had sickened and died, and that was sad enough. But Morgan had never seen the child and his very existence seemed like a fable. Far more real and distressing was that Mohammed’s health was also under strain. Since his time in prison, the old sickness, consumption or whatever it was, had returned. And he still struggled for work, and was noticeably more bitter that his English friend couldn’t help him.
There was nothing to be done. Mohammed’s life had been touched, but not changed, by Morgan’s, and his fate had been shaped by his station. Race and class were a kind of destiny; very little could dent them. Morgan himself had been decanted back into the vessel that had made him. It was better to stay there, at least for now; and if he flowed elsewhere in the future, it would probably not be to Egypt.
India, then. Even though he couldn’t go yet, it continued to call to him in various voices. One of these was Masood’s. Since his visit to England, a great tenderness had been restored, and it was in this tone that he wrote to say that he had set some money aside to pay for Morgan’s journey: a touching, if not practical, suggestion.
At almost the same time another message came through Malcolm Darling, who was back in England on furlough. Between rabid diatribes on the Amritsar massacre, which seemed to preoccupy Malcolm to the point of obsession, he brought a fresh invitation from His Highness, the Maharajah. Would Morgan be prepared to drop everything forthwith and come to India as his Private Secretary?
“He asked me that once before,” Morgan said. “I don’t even know what it means.”
“Oh, the Indians like titles,” Malcolm told him. “It’s merely an administrative position, a bit like being a guardian to the constitution, although there isn’t one. An Englishman is in the post at the moment, but he has to go on sick leave for a few months. He had a small accident. Fell out of a train.”
“I can’t do it, Malcolm. I long to go, but I can’t.”
It was quite true: inwardly he strained in
that direction, till he made himself quite East-sick. And after a few months, feeling that he was committing an infidelity, he wrote quietly to Dewas, asking whether the position of Private Secretary had been filled yet.
He didn’t expect a reply. But just in case one came, he raised the matter with his mother. They were sitting together after dinner, reading companionably, when he lowered his book and said, “How would Mummy feel if Poppy left her again?”
She sighed and marked her place with a finger. “It would depend on where he wants to go.”
He told her about Dewas and the possible invitation. He was watching her expression carefully, but she seemed unperturbed.
“Can this princely state not do without your assistance?” she asked.
“I daresay it can. I have a different motive. I mean my novel—my Indian novel, of course.”
“Oh, yes,” she said vaguely.
“Perhaps you don’t remember it. It has been stuck for some time, but only because all the details of India have become blurred in my mind. I need to go back, to refresh my impressions.”
“Well, go if you must, dear,” she said, opening her book again. “But do take care out there.”
It seemed too much to hope for that she would accept the blow so calmly. Though it probably wouldn’t matter, because he doubted the invitation would ever come.
And then, of course, it did.
He was again on holiday in Lyme Regis with Goldie when the cable arrived. The message was wordy but vague, and he stood in the hallway reading it over several times, before going through into the drawing room, where Goldie was working. His bemusement must have been obvious, because the older man looked up and murmured, “Everything all right?”
“Yes, I think so. That is, I have been asked back to India.”
“Oh, how dreadful.” Goldie set down his pen. “Are you very pleased?”
“I don’t know.” It was almost a shock that the impossible had suddenly happened, and what was distant had come into reach. “He wants me to leave immediately.”
“Not for anything would I return there. If there is celestial punishment, and if my sins were very great, the Almighty would send me. But no Maharajah has the power.”
Goldie had spent the War in a morbid pacifist funk, closeted away in Cambridge, wanting, he said, to absorb the full horror of the time. At the very start of hostilities, he had drafted his scheme for a League of Nations and had been pushing the idea along ever since. The Covenant of the League, adopted at the Peace Conference, had made him feel powerful again, and his mood had improved considerably. Though he had been very exercised again of late by the parlous state of the world—everything, from the famine in China to the lynching of negroes in America, upset him greatly—since coming away with Morgan he had undergone a transformation. He had passed his days in comparative contentment, wrapped up in his dressing gown, scribbling away on his translation of Faust. And he spoke now with a grave tone, but his sensitive mouth betrayed amusement, and the little tassel on his mandarin cap jiggled merrily.
Morgan had already started out the door. “I am going to cable my reply.”
“No pause for reflection? Is that wise?”
“What?” Morgan was confused. The question seemed meaningless for a second. “There is nothing to reflect on,” he said. “I am going. Certainly I am going.”
* * *
Now that the news was definite, Lily lost some of her good humour. In his last few days she became toneless and inconsiderate, but he knew it was out of love for him, and bore it. And on the night before his departure, she wrote a little note, with some of her gentlest words. I feel I got up days ago, and that you have been gone a very long time. The house seems sorrowing for you—such a desolate feeling as if it knew you had really gone and were not in London for the day or away on a visit. I felt in a dream when I was out, rather as I felt when war was declared.
It was not the house that was in mourning; it was his mother. But not even her sadness could stop him. Twelve days after sailing from Tilbury, he was in Port Said.
He had arranged to meet Mohammed onshore, but to his astonishment, just as he was struggling to disembark, a familiar face welled up beaming in the crowd. They clasped hands and stared. It had been two years since they’d seen each other, and for a long moment he didn’t understand anything.
“Are you not glad to see me, Forster?”
“I am, of course. But how did you get onto the ship?”
“I had to bribe. Everything is baksheesh, as you know. Here are expensive cigarettes, my gift to you. The box is not full, because I had to give to many people in order to find you. But I think you do not like me any more.”
The ship was full of people; there was nowhere to demonstrate his liking. While they toured the second-class decks, the most that was possible was to bump flanks occasionally through their clothes. It was a cold night, with low, scudding clouds, and Mohammed was thickly wrapped up. Suddenly he stopped and with his blue knitted gloves took hold of Morgan’s hands and said, “How are you, friend, how are you?”
“I am well, very well. And how are you?”
Instantly, his face fell. “I am sick. I have lost four pounds. And Gamila’s father has become bankrupt. Life is not good.”
Morgan stopped him. “I have only a few hours,” he said. “I don’t want to be sad. Please, let’s talk only of happy things.”
Mohammed brightened again. “Yes, I agree. Let us pretend.” They were standing at the rail, watching the coaling barges move immensely through the gloom, and he suggested now, “Let’s go ashore and drink some coffee.”
It was only a five-minute ride to solid land. On the motor boat, Morgan tried to see how thin Mohammed really was, but he was wearing a heavy greatcoat—one of his own cast-offs—and his body was hidden from view. Perhaps it was better that way; it didn’t help to know too much.
It was good to be standing on Egyptian soil again, next to his friend. He hadn’t been able to visualise such a moment until now. They drank a Turkish coffee together and collaborated on a postcard to his mother, before walking out along the canal. A sea-mist was coming in and the water dissolved at the edges. Even the figures of people near the docks seemed substanceless, unreal. “It is like a dream,” Morgan said.
“Yes,” Mohammed said, though perhaps they were speaking of different things. For the first time a silence dropped over them, and they walked half-pressed against each other, shoulders touching, down the mole to the statue of de Lesseps. Only the feet were visible; the body disappeared upwards into night. They stood looking at it in silence for a few minutes and then went on along the deserted beach, where, a little way back from the sea, they found a hollow in the sand to sit in.
“So,” Mohammed said at last. “India.”
“India, yes. For a year, perhaps.”
“Let me come with you.”
“Next time,” Morgan said, avoiding his friend’s gaze. He quickly added, “I shall stop with you on the journey home.”
“But how long will you stay? You are here now for only four hours. What is so important in your India that you must arrive there so fast?”
“On my way back I will stop with you for longer.”
His voice had become hoarse with suppressed emotion. Both of them knew why they had walked out here, into the dark, and it was no surprise when he leaned over and reached his hand through the folds of Mohammed’s coat.
His friend sighed, but leaned back accommodatingly. “Foolish,” he said, shaking his head.
“All have their foolishness, and this is mine.”
CHAPTER SIX
BAPU SAHIB
The dullness of the evening sky hung heavily, reflecting Morgan’s mood. It had been a long and tiring journey, the train nowhere near as clean or comfortable as on his previous visit. And the road from Indore was rough, running straight between
small, dispirited trees, doing nothing to uplift him. His thoughts were all of indecency and failure, so that when the car passed a dead cow at the roadside, a ring of vultures hunching and bobbing around it, the image seemed like an omen. That’s how it will end.
Ever since leaving Bombay, he had been musing on what lay ahead. He had accepted a position at the royal court, where his duties felt unclear and his abilities insufficient. He was sure he could be of no use to His Highness. Much more worrying, however, was the prospect of being a liability. His sexual imaginings had been rampant ever since stepping ashore and he felt almost capable, after his time in Egypt, of putting them into practice. But that way lay disaster; he could not—he must not—be weak. He told himself: the least I can do is to cause no trouble. But he had no faith in his own character, so that the rotting cow carcass spoke louder than his resolve.
His despondency lasted all the way to Dewas. But when they arrived at the New Palace, the Maharajah was capering joyfully outside the front door.
“Morgan! Morgan! So fine to see you. I have been waiting some time. Let us send cables immediately to announce your arrival. One to Malcolm. And one to your mother! Then we must find some Indian clothes for you, we are going to a party tonight. Where is my secretary?”
He wore no head-dress and his face—although eight years older now—had the impish delight of a child. Morgan cheered up.
He was cheerier still once he had been taken upstairs to his rooms and dressed in jodhpurs and silken waistcoat and a scarlet turban, and then driven off by carriage to the Cavalry barracks to watch a play performed by a visiting troupe of actors. He squatted on the floor for as long as his hips could bear it, before retreating to a chair at the back of the hall. The noise and colour and strangeness confirmed indisputably that he had, finally, arrived.
