Arctic Summer (28 page)

Nor was their parting an inconceivable idea any longer. There were signs that the War might be drawing to a close. The end wasn't yet discernible, not even a topic for conversation, but Morgan could sense a time when he would have to leave. He and Mohammed back in their proper compartments, lives entirely separate from each other. When that happened, he wanted to know that his friend was all right.

 

* * *

 

In the end, Mohammed did marry, but not his brother's wife. Instead he married her sister. The perfunctory change in plans reflected something deeper: he'd told Morgan that he'd read about love, but didn't know what it meant. The arrangement was practical, nothing more, yet no less effective for that.
I feel I was not in the world the time before, everyday I am so happy
.

With Hom and then with Masood, Morgan had learned to accept the inevitable. The men he loved all married. It didn't cancel out what had gone before—or what was, in this case, ongoing. So he had made his peace with the idea, even before something else occurred, next to which all other worries seemed thin.

When Mohammed had come to Alexandria again recently, Morgan had noticed that his back looked hollow. But when he was asked about it, he'd become irritable.

“It's nothing,” he said. “I am having stress about money. Nothing more.”

But Morgan remembered that there had been complaints for a while now, about being weak and listless. He felt a faint chill deep inside, like an underground stream, and it didn't come as a complete surprise when—shortly before he got married—Mohammed wrote to say that he'd been coughing up blood.

The word that went through Morgan's mind was the name of the disease that had carried his father off. Lily had spoken about it with respectful dread, and something of the same tone infiltrated when he wrote a difficult letter. But the reply that came was close to laconic.
I think my illness is what you say, consumption but the doctor did not tell me thinking that I may be very unhappy. I do not trouble much about my illness I believe that only the death is my relief from this troublesome world
.

In real distress, Morgan became very calm. He continued with his usual life, mild and diligent, but under his perpetual half-smile the centre of his attention was elsewhere.

A different doctor, whom Mohammed went to see at Morgan's expense, gave some reassuring news: he thought the condition had been caught in time. With care and a healthy regimen, the young man ought to pull through. Morgan very much wanted to believe this. And when he returned to Mansourah in December, not long after the Armistice was declared, it did seem that Mohammed had put on some weight again. Nor was his mood despondent. Taking advantage of the wartime economy, as well as a loan from Morgan, he had recently begun trading in cotton, buying it in the countryside and bringing it to the city to sell to dealers, and the work had cheered him up.

His marriage had also rooted him somehow. The change was indefinable but obvious. Morgan glimpsed Gamila, his wife, mostly in passing: a shy, pretty figure, very young, almost a girl still, who left the room as soon as he entered it. She put him in mind of some kind of country creature, who bolted at the least sign of disturbance. But she had made Mohammed happy, and he heard the two of them laughing together when he wasn't with them, a sound that stirred him in a complicated way.

How could it be otherwise? He wanted things to be well with his friend, but there was no doubt that he'd been displaced. Since his last visit, the tenant had moved downstairs, and the more spacious top floor—two rooms, a paved hall, a kitchen and bathroom—had been taken over by the young couple. There would be no more lying snugly together in the warm dark; Morgan had his own room now.

Nevertheless, the emotion between them was unfeigned, not to mention deepened or, at the very least, renewed. Life was more or less in balance and, though it was hard that some distance had intervened, it wasn't unfitting that it should have happened now. It was one's duty to be optimistic, and it helped in this endeavour that his relations with Mohammed, though surrounded by complexity, were in themselves simple. In a certain way, things between them didn't change. It was the greatest event to touch his life so far, and it made him proud. In some indefinable way, he felt he had grown up, he had become a man. Something had finally
happened
to him.

This knowledge consoled him in his last two months, which were otherwise difficult. He had to prepare himself for the future. Great events had blown him here in a strange, anomalous gust, and now they would carry him back again. He dreaded his return. He was glad that the War had ended, of course, but he suspected that the world had changed irrevocably and he doubted it was for the better. Everything he had heard about England in his absence had deepened his idea of it as a dirty place: its manners, its morals, its thinking, all contaminated by the fighting, infused with a dark, new, compromised spirit.

And although he had resisted and strained inwardly against it, Egypt had touched him more than he knew. It was hard to think he might never come back. He had started writing his book on Alexandria, and consequently the city had taken on a different solidity. It had become freighted with history and legend, not a small part of which had to do with Mohammed.

The work was far from finished and this aspect of the country, at least, he would be taking back home to England with him, to complete. Everything else he would be leaving behind. Now that it was inevitable he almost wished he could slip away without any final moments: board a ship at midnight, fade into the dark.

But Mohammed would be all right, he thought. The consumption, if that's what it was, seemed to have been beaten down in time. When Morgan returned to Mansourah for a last visit, his friend had a physical fullness he hadn't seen for a while. It was heartening that his health did seem so much better. He had fattened out a bit and hadn't coughed up blood, he said, in many weeks. He no longer felt perpetually exhausted.

All this was good, and the sound of Mohammed giggling with his wife, privately, in their room, didn't bother him as much as before. He was leaving his friend better off, he thought, than when he'd first met him as a tram conductor in Alexandria, living in one rented room with not much money, perhaps not lonely but certainly alone.

Though when the two of them went for a walk early on the second morning, into the fields outside the town, Mohammed became plaintive. They had a good life in Egypt, could Morgan not stay? Why did he want to go home? He had asked these questions in letters recently too; he knew how to work on Morgan's weakest places.

“Do you think I haven't thought about it? I don't want to go, but I'm afraid I must. I have obligations. I have my mother.”

“Fetch Mother back here with you to Egypt. She will be my mother too.”

“That isn't possible.” He smiled into his moustache at the idea, but at the same time it gave him a pang to think of how little Mohammed had understood of what his English life was like. How he wanted to mix the two! To bring Mohammed to his home, to show him to his friends and relations, let them think what they liked. It would be such a relief not to care.

But in fact it had only been two or three weeks before that he had mentioned his Egyptian friend to Lily for the first time, and he'd been careful to slip in a reference to his marriage.

“Can you not find me a job in England? I will come immediately.”

“I'll try,” Morgan told him insincerely. “But I think you wouldn't be happy.”

“Anywhere you can find work for me, I am gratitude to you. Even India. I should like to travel there with you next time you go.”

“Perhaps one day you will,” Morgan said—but that idea was impossible too. India was another life, another love; he couldn't think of bringing Mohammed there.

The flat landscape they were strolling through reminded him very much of Cambridge, stretching away mistily to knots of trees and farm buildings. They climbed down into the bottom of a ditch, where Mohammed undid his trousers to allow Morgan to fondle him for a few minutes. He was only half-hard and Morgan only half-enthused. Neither of them commented on what they were doing, and it didn't seem important to bring matters to a climax.

Two weeks later he stood at the rail of the ship that carried him away. Water in every direction, no land visible. Nothing solid to fix on. The farewell that preceded this journey was as difficult as he'd feared, in part because it contained no meaning; everything that mattered had come before. To dwell on it was pointless and, perhaps for this reason, his mind wasn't with Mohammed, but with the poet.

Morgan had gone to see him a few days before in the Rue Lepsius to say goodbye, and they had stood on the balcony, drinking raki, looking out towards the eastern harbour. In the dusk, all the faults and failures of the city were annulled; a soft breeze carried in from the sea.

The two men had chatted in their usual desultory way on historical topics, before a silence crept in between them. Then Cavafy had said, “So. You are going home.”

“Yes.”

“How I wish to be going with you. I have always thought of myself as an English subject, even though I am a Hellene.” He sighed happily. “But I am used to Alexandria. Even if I had money now, I'm not sure that I would move, though the place disturbs me. A small city can be a great burden, don't you think? For a man like me, an unusual sort of man, a large city is essential.”

“I don't know. I have never lived in a large city myself.”

“I should leave this flat, certainly. Though on the other hand, I have everything I need here. There is the brothel downstairs, which caters for the flesh. There is St Saba nearby, where my sins may be forgiven. And there is the hospital opposite, where I may die.”

Morgan had heard this joke before and soon afterwards, when Cavafy fell to wondering aloud whether to move or to install electric lighting instead, he knew that it was time to go.

From the street below, he turned to look up. The pale face was still visible on the balcony, and even from a distance it seemed inscrutable and strange, an oddity in what surrounded it. His mind went back to the visit three years before when he'd heard the first poem. “The God Abandons Antony”.
Bid farewell to her, to Alexandria whom you are losing.
He waved a hand and perhaps the poet waved back, it was hard to be sure.

 

* * *

 

From almost the first instant he stepped ashore in Gravesend, the country that revealed itself to him was one he knew, and also did not recognise. He tried to break the surface, to sink into what he knew. He rushed about, visiting friends and family. He stopped with Aunt Laura and the Bargers and Edward Carpenter; he saw the Merediths in Belfast and took a two-week holiday with Goldie in Lyme Regis. But it rained without stopping at Aunt Laura's and Florence was a wonderful confidante when one was writing to her but, alas, a little dull as company, and Carpenter more interested in lecturing than in listening, and Hom's family life was depressing, along with Goldie's gloom and misery over the state of the world, although the cottage they stayed in was nice.

If he kept dashing about nevertheless, it was because sitting still was painful. And at home of course there was his mother, from whom he felt even more removed, owing to the Great Events he had to keep from her.

Though what mattered most had to stay concealed, confession lurked always just below the skin. Past and present almost came together one morning at the breakfast table when he opened a letter from Mohammed, telling him that Gamila was pregnant. If the child was a boy, his friend added, he would be called after Morgan. This was more than Masood or India had ever done for him, and he found himself knocking over the milk jug and becoming disproportionately upset. He was appalled at himself for making a scene.

But Lily was unexpectedly sweet to him, stroking his hand while he struggled to explain.

“It's my nerves,” he said. “I haven't yet accepted that I'm home. It was a great strain, being away for so long. I meant to be gone for three months, and it turned into three years.”

His voice sounded brittle to himself, but his mother was unusually in tune with him. She had been making an effort since his return, and he'd been pleased to be welcomed—for the first time since his childhood—by family prayers read in his honour. The emotion between them was best contained in ritual.

“I too thought it would go on forever,” she murmured. “Or the end of my life, at least.”

Which was nearer now than before. She had noticeably aged while he'd been gone. In shape and thickness, she was more than ever a pillar; time had smoothed away some of the sharper edges. Nevertheless, he resolved afterwards not to put himself into her power in that way again. It wasn't safe to break in front of her; the truth had a way of seeping through the cracks.

His one moment of weakness aside, Egypt could usually be held at a distance. The closest he could come was in writing about it. He was still busy with his Alexandrian book, which carried him back in imagination at least, but now he also began writing journalistic articles and reviews, many of which were about the country he'd left behind.

For the rest, it was a topic best reserved for the breakfast table, where the newspapers provided fodder for outrage. The end of the War had stirred up hopes in many subject peoples, and some of these hopes had been dashed. So Egypt bubbled and stewed, while loud voices shouted from mosques and Coptic pulpits alike. Blood had been shed, and at first it was English blood.

“Forty dead,” Lily announced in shock one morning, the headlines vibrating in her hand.

“Really, it is one thousand and forty. But the thousand are Egyptians, and they don't count.”

“Don't be unreasonable, Morgan. You can't expect me to care about people I don't know, ahead of my countrymen.” After a moment she conceded: “You, I suppose, do know an Egyptian or two.”