Arctic Summer (37 page)

Then Morgan became very calm. He knew now with a clear certainty that Mohammed was dying. He also knew that he himself could survive it.

Where had it come from, this new steadiness of spirit? When Mohammed's illness had first showed itself, three years before, his reaction had been panic. His fear then was not so much that his friend might lose his life, but that he might lose his friend. Now, when that prospect seemed sure, it didn't break him into pieces.

He didn't dwell on the future too much. It seemed more sensible, not to say helpful, to approach the matter practically. Money would make things easier, and that he could provide—although not in an unlimited way. Mohammed's circumstances were dire: no job any longer, no income and no savings. His wife and some of her relatives were dependent on him, and his baby daughter was herself quite ill, in the hospital at the moment. Morgan had enough in the bank at home to look after him for six months, or perhaps a year. But he didn't want to send a large sum, which he thought would soon be lost. It would be a better idea to find somebody reliable, living nearby in Egypt, who might be depended on to pay over a monthly allowance.

What he also needed to do, quite urgently, was to take Mohammed to see a specialist in Cairo. So far he had been treated only by a local doctor who was, as far as Morgan could tell, a quack and a thief. But he didn't know the name of any suitable person, and to get one he would have to speak to some of his expatriate friends.

He went to Alexandria. He was away for a week and by the time he returned to Mansourah he had found somebody who would help with payments. Gerard Ludolf, who had been assisting him with research on Alexandrian history, was happy to be of use in this way. He also had the name of a doctor in Cairo who specialised in consumption, and had made an appointment to see him.

This man was English and plump and round, the embodiment of appetite and good health. Morgan introduced Mohammed by name, and nothing further was asked. But when the examination was over, it was to Morgan that the doctor turned, not to his patient. Even before he spoke, the news was visible in his face.

“I'm afraid it's what you feared,” he said.

“Is there anything that can be done?”

He shook his head. “Not very much. The disease is far advanced. A matter of months, perhaps even weeks. I'm sorry.”

It didn't seem possible that they could be sitting in a normal room, on a normal day, discussing such things. Not even Mohammed appeared concerned, while he studiously did up his buttons. So that it didn't feel unnatural for Morgan to ask, delicately, “Will he . . . that is, will there be much suffering?”

“Not necessarily.”

The reply was really no reply at all, and through the hot vacancy in its wake the two men walked silently back to their hotel. Each was plunged in thought, and separate from the other. Until the Englishman lifted a hand and touched his friend on the shoulder.

“It doesn't matter,” Mohammed said. “I think he doesn't know.”

“I'm sure you're right.”

“He says it is consumption, but he doesn't know. My doctor in Mansourah . . . ” And he began a complicated account of what that charlatan had told him, a story involving money and false hope.

“Of course,” Morgan said, when he was done. “You are young, you have power. You will get better.”

“Yes. And if I do not, that also doesn't matter.”

 

* * *

 

Three weeks later, it was time to go. Mohammed accompanied him as far as the train station in Cairo, and as they pulled up outside in a carriage Morgan was murmuring distractedly about a parcel that he would send soon, with medicine and clothes and tins of food. It was easier—it always was—to speak about plans rather than feelings, but Mohammed cut him short.

“Don't let us talk of anything, except that you will see Mother soon. My respects to her. And then you will see Mrs. Barger, my respects to her. And you will see Bennett . . . ” He began to name various other friends and family, who made up Morgan's life, although he had never met any of them.

Inside the station, all was confusion, until they found the right train. In the compartment, a small space of quiet presented itself, at the centre of which the two men sat thoughtfully next to each other. The fact of parting felt curiously distant.

Mohammed jogged him gently with his elbow. When Morgan looked at him, he said, “My love to you. There is nothing else to say.”

“Yes.”

“I will get out now, and wave from outside.”

“No, I'll come and say goodbye on the platform.”

It was crowded and noisy outside and Mohammed was half in conversation with an acquaintance he'd bumped into, so that he didn't hear the request the first time.

“What?”

Morgan wanted to remember his friend's face cleanly and, with faint desperation, he repeated, “Take off your spectacles.”

“Why?”

“You are more beautiful without them.”

“No.” He shook his head irritably.

Almost immediately, it seemed, the train began to move and Morgan had to run to get back on. He leaned through the open door for a last look back. Now, too late, the moment did pierce him. He knew he would never see this face again, except in memory and photographs, but Mohammed had already turned away.

O
n his first trip up to London, he bumped into Virginia. He was despondent and aimless, and when she suggested he come back with her to Hogarth House, he was happy to accept.

It did help to sit for a few hours in Richmond with the Woolfs, talking over his time away. He had barely been home for two weeks, but already he was at odds with his familiar life, ruing a loss he couldn't name. It wasn't only Mohammed's impending death, which already seemed like a fact; it was Dewas and the Maharajah, as well as Masood. He had been given a glimpse of other Morgans that he might have been, and then they were whisked away again.

It was impossible to express all this. His funk had immobilised him, so that he couldn't find the words. Instead he mumbled half-sentences about his mother and Bapu Sahib and, when asked about living in a palace, all he could talk about was the sparrows that had flown around the rooms. “I used to shout at them sometimes. One got caught in the electric wire. There it hung, until it wrenched its claw off and flew away . . . ”

A silence followed, while they stared at him, perturbed. Despite himself, the image had conveyed something personal. He felt like a small, soft creature, hanging by one foot.

It had been the hardest homecoming of his life—worse, even, than the return from Egypt after the War. England felt passive and indifferent to him. He was withdrawn and remote with his friends. People had got used to his absence. Even Lily had only been briefly stirred, before sinking again into private abstraction and lamentations about her rheumatism.

And his own mind, of course, was elsewhere—behind him, or in some theoretical future. He was waiting for something, though he wasn't sure of what. Mohammed would certainly die, but that wouldn't change Morgan's English existence. Perhaps he was thinking about his book. Though in fact he hadn't looked at it in months.

Just the previous week, however, he had taken a momentous step. On an impulse—which had, he realised, been brewing in him for months—he had burned all his erotic short stories in the fireplace at Harnham. They had been piling up in the attic for years, written at feverish moments of compulsion, though less to express than to excite himself. That kind of agitation seemed like a hindrance to him now rather than a liberation; he had discovered in Dewas how lust could block the channels.

But if he'd imagined that his little act of destruction would free him up to work, he was mistaken. In the aftermath, he felt more stuck and inert than before. It wasn't that India was far from his mind any more; if anything, it was too much with him. But writing was removed from life, and he didn't have that distance, that clearness.

He discussed the matter with Leonard. Not on that first visit, but during lunch a few weeks later, when he felt less leaden. He thought he should abandon the book, he said. It wasn't anything solid as yet—a fragment, rather, which should probably stay that way.

“You ought to read it again,” Leonard told him.

“I don't see the point.”

“You might, if you read it. You need to try to finish it, even if it's not a success, or how will you really know that it's a failure? The first step, in any case, is to look at what you have.”

The advice wasn't startling; he had thought of it himself. But somehow it was comforting to be steered by somebody else, who had implicit faith in him.

So he returned to his fragment. Which was, in fact, more substantial than he'd thought. And Leonard was right: reading what he had gave him a sense of how he might forge ahead. More out of curiosity than passion, he found himself taking up his pen.

 

* * *

 

Although he'd dipped into his manuscript from time to time, it had been years, really, since he'd worked properly on it. Not since 1913, before
Maurice
had thrown him off track. And then life, and the War, had taken over. Trying to find his way back into it now, after so much had intervened, was both harder and easier than he'd imagined. His story felt remote from him, and whatever feelings it had once aroused had long since cooled.

Fiction was too artificial and self-conscious, he thought, ever to convey anything real. More than that, his way of seeing things had altered, so that his original conception seemed faintly absurd. His literary idealism had drained away. He no longer imagined explaining the East to suburban England through his words; people everywhere, whether Indian or British, felt like shits to him.

So his characters, he felt, weren't likeable. No, they had been forged in angry gloom, scored and scratched by their maker. It worried him sometimes that he'd succumbed to pessimism; he'd always thought of despair as not only a moral but also an aesthetic failure. On a crude level, he feared that nastiness was boring, and that none of his creations would hold attention for long. Or perhaps he simply struggled to be in their company himself.

Years before, in writing the early books, he had thought of characters as a form of vegetation, and what he had here, he thought, was a shrubbery. Low, tangled forms, vibrating in the wind. He lacked a lone tree or two, standing in heroic isolation against the sky, but his newfound cynicism worked against it. To compensate, he found himself building up the atmosphere instead, tilting the narrative out of true. The weather, the stones, became portentous, but they hadn't yet delivered up their meaning.

Still, he went on. And as he returned to it, day after day, the words gradually became his again. Fire did spark occasionally between the bits of dead coal. He had bought an ornamental toy in India, a little wooden bird, green with patches of red on its wings and sticklike yellow legs, which he set up on the edge of his writing desk, and it looked impartially on as he struggled with himself. His trysts with the pages in the attic became the unacknowledged centre of his existence. Though there was a persistent sense of unreality to the hours he spent there. The truth, he suspected, would always be in actual events, which continued to pile up around him.

Deep inside himself, he was braced for news of Mohammed's death. In some way, he wanted to hear it had come: only then, he thought, would he be free of dread. Pity and worry obscured the image of his friend, while he awaited what couldn't be escaped.

Meanwhile, they wrote to each other.
I think we shall meet each other if not in the world it will be in the heaven
. Not even lines like these wrung Morgan's heart too much. He had been dwelling in his mind, as honestly as he could, on his memories of Mohammed. It seemed to him now, in his most lucid moments, that perhaps he had exaggerated their passion. From his friend's side, there had been little harshnesses, little instances between them when Mohammed had been hard or hurtful, which he'd chosen to sweep aside. He remembered now, more than he would like, that final goodbye in the train station in Cairo: the irritable way that Mohammed had refused to take off his spectacles and how, as the train had pulled out and Morgan had kept his gaze fastened desperately on his friend, Mohammed had turned away to speak to somebody else.

Such moments made him think that the picture he'd built up—of a glorious, immortal union—had been untrue. He'd needed it, to persuade himself and others that his life had served up at least one big success. He had loved Mohammed, certainly, but what could Mohammed realistically have felt in return? He'd been excited and flattered, of course, to be courted by an Englishman. And he'd been eager for the financial help too. He might have felt gratitude or politeness or pity. But love, in the way that Morgan had experienced it . . . ? No, he didn't think so.

These candid reflections were difficult, but they also helped to insulate him. The prospect of Mohammed's death hurt less. He and his situation were very far away; in a sense none of it was entirely real. When the end came, it might be a sort of fiction too.

So he told himself—but his heart lurched into a different register when Mohammed's health abruptly faltered again and the tone of his letters became very dark. An especially bare one upset him deeply:

 

dear Morgan

I am sending you the photograph

I am very bad

I got nothing more to say

the family are good. My compliments to mother.

My love to you

My love to you

My love to you

do not forget your ever friend

Moh el-Adl

 

Morgan understood quite viscerally what was behind these words. It must be awful to feel so weak and sick and to know that the last light was flickering. But it would be over soon for Mohammed, and Morgan would be the one left behind. For the first time he had a sense that what lay ahead of him would be much bigger than he'd imagined.