Arctic Summer (5 page)

For a time, then, Morgan had allowed himself to love both of them, Hom and Masood, silently and from afar, and in different ways. In the case of Hom, the happiness that Morgan might have felt was tempered by a sad certainty that Hom would never belong to him, not in any meaningful way. The most he would have were the chaste and clothed embraces that had marked the limit of their affections so far.

Masood, though, might be different.

 

* * *

 

Masood was in Paris for a few weeks, in the hope of improving his French. When he extended a casual invitation to come over for a visit, Morgan wavered only briefly. Aside from anything else, it would be an escape from his mother.

Masood came to meet him at the station. “It has been too frightful,” he announced. “I will never learn to speak this language with any finesse at all. And the French are ruder than the English, which I hadn't thought possible. The white races are so damned ridiculous, it's an embarrassment to have been colonised by them. Give me your bags immediately.”

He had taken rooms nearby, to which he led Morgan, talking incessantly. And their conversation barely ceased for the following week, in which they were always together. Morgan had never been to Paris before and everything had the power of freshness and discovery. Wearing identical hats they had bought together in the Latin Quarter, they walked aimlessly through the streets, wandering in and out of galleries and restaurants and theatres. The city became a vast set for their small, luminous drama. It was the first time that they'd lived together in such unbroken intimacy, without other visitors or family in attendance. Perhaps, Morgan reflected, marriage was like this: a kind of completeness between two people, like coloured shades closing off the rest of the world. He could live in this way, he thought, in a strange city with Masood, and never be bored or unhappy.

At some point in that week, they spoke about being in India together. Masood would be returning there when his studies were done, and it seemed natural—like an extension of this Paris sojourn—that Morgan should join him.

What was less natural, perhaps, was what Masood now off-handedly proposed.

“Of course,” he said, “you will write a novel about it.”

“What? India? That's not very likely, is it?”

“Why not? From the very first moment I met you, I knew that here was an Englishman who didn't see the world like the rest of his countrymen. You don't realise it, but you have an Oriental sensibility. That is why the book you'll write will be unique. It will be written in English, it will seem to be from English eyes, but its secret view will be from inside.”

“If my mind is so like yours, why do I still find you so peculiar?”

But Masood was serious today. “You are offending me. If you can write about Italy, then why not about my country?”

Morgan considered it. An interesting notion, perhaps, but so far outside his own experience that it seemed impossible. He had read a few novels set in India, but they were all of a breathless female variety. Doomed love on the Frontier, that sort of thing. And there was Kipling, of course—but Kipling was always singing the virtues of the English and the inferiority of the natives, to say nothing of the gory glory of patriotic death.

They were walking in the street, a light rain falling, but the dampness and the slippery cobbles disappeared as his mind travelled elsewhere, either deep inside or far away. “My Italian novels,” he said at last, “are really about the English. Italy was merely a backdrop.”

“What of it? Write about the English in India, if it pleases you. Though I can tell you, they are a self-important, silly lot out there. Not the stuff of which heroes are made.” But then, a moment later, his tone changed to one of affected outrage. “I demand to be a character in your novel! Or are the English the only worthy subjects? Oh, I wish I had lived at the time of the great Oriental despotisms—I would have ordered you to write me endless books, with no English characters in them.” He went stalking ahead in pretended injury—or perhaps, for a moment, it was real.

This conversation stayed with Morgan. A novel about the English in India, one in which Masood also featured: it wasn't an unattractive idea. Though he would, of course, have to pay a visit to the East, and that seemed like a monumental endeavour, one to which his life wasn't equal.

On the morning of his departure from Paris, he woke early and lay for some time, looking across the room at the face of his sleeping friend. They had known one another for three years now, and yet it was only over the past few days that the final barrier had fallen. He had never felt closer to anybody. As he drifted back towards a doze, from some subterranean recess an understanding came to him.

Then he sat up, fully awake, in a flurry of panic. It was so obvious that he hadn't seen it, or had managed to call it by other names. But once the true name had been uttered, it couldn't be unsaid.

Yet even now he wondered. He had been aware for some time of where his true inclinations lay, and Masood didn't fit them. The previous year, through his friend Sydney Waterlow, he had been invited to dinner with Henry James in Rye, and an incident there had revealed his own appetites to him. The evening had been passably pleasant, though not for one moment had he felt truly at ease, truly in place. It had begun badly, with the Master emerging from his house, laying a plump hand on Morgan's shoulder and telling him, “Your name's Moore.” That misunderstanding had been cleared up, but it had been followed by another confusion between Weybridge and Wakefield, and this awkwardness had stamped itself into all the social intercourse that followed.

It was only when he left Lamb House that something had become apparent. In the warm gloom, a labourer was leaning against the wall, smoking a cigarette, and the man's indistinct form, the red glow of the coal, had moved something in Morgan that all the high talk inside could not. He remembered the working-class men who had stirred him in his life, and remembered too a glimpse he'd had from a train window of two naked brown bodies sunning themselves in a warehouse. He had understood then what drew him; what his ticket was. Not just the lean outline propped against the wall, but the larger world he belonged to—the darkness, the evening under the sky, the smell of smoke and fields.

It was impossible, of course, because it was not his world. He belonged to what he'd just left behind: the polite, constricted ritual around the dining table, the buttoned-down conversation about books and travel and opera and architecture. Yet even there he could not keep his gaze from sliding sideways, to the figure of the servant who bent in to clear the plates. Although they brushed against each other, there was an immeasurable gulf between the two worlds, and something in him longed to close that gap.
Only connect
: he had set the yearning down in the book he was busy writing—yet it remained a yearning, an incurable ache.

And Masood, for all his difference, his exotic pedigree, belonged to Morgan's world. He had never for a moment been out of place in Oxford, or Paris, or at his mother's dining table in Weybridge. It was a matter of class; it nearly always was in England. It was not unusual in the least that Morgan should spend a week on holiday with Masood, but a week like this with Ansell, the garden boy, or that labourer outside Lamb House? Unthinkable!

All of this passed through Morgan's mind in an incoherent tumble, while Masood finally groaned and turned and yawned, coming to wakefulness. The realisation of love was important, but it also seemed improbable. They were too much alike, they fitted too closely together, for love to have taken hold. Love was what could never work; love was the longing across an insuperable barrier.

So it was something else, then, a misplaced fondness, a brotherly closeness. He put on his social face again. Yet something of his earlier disquiet lingered, making him unsettled and cold. At the station, when the time came to say goodbye, England was already upon him. He held out his hand to be shaken.

“Well,” he said. “I had better run for the train. Thank you so much for everything—I have enjoyed myself enormously.”

Masood stared at him, his handsome face becoming suffused with dismay. It took a moment for his voice to emerge. “What are you
saying
to me?”

Morgan was genuinely confused. “I am saying goodbye.”

“This is how you say goodbye? To
me
? After the wonderful few days we have spent together, the sort of days I have never shared with anyone—” He broke off in a sort of strangled wail. “Oh, what is the use, what is the use?”

“If I miss my train, it will put my mother to great trouble. She and my grandmother—”

“I don't care about your grandmother!” Masood's eyes flashed, as if he might become violent.

So intense was this display that Morgan thought his friend was putting on an act. It took a few moments for him to understand that the performance was real. “I'm seeing you again in a few days,” he said at last. “I didn't think sentiment was necessary.”

“You are saying goodbye like an Englishman.”

“I
am
an Englishman.”

“Yes, I wish I could forget it for just a moment, I wish
you
could forget it! Are emotions a sack of potatoes, to be measured out, so much the pound? Are we both machines? Will you use up your feelings if you express them? Can you not speak from the heart, just one time? Oh, Morgan, you bloody fool,” he cried fiercely, flinging his powerful arms around him and lifting him off the floor, “don't you understand, we're
friends
!” He made as if to throw Morgan onto the tracks, kissed him hard on the cheek, then set him down and strode off, a whole head higher than the crowds around him.

Morgan was astonished, and disquieted, and pleased. On the journey home, he thought confusedly back to that conversation on the platform, and to his half-wakeful thoughts that same morning. It had long been a problem, this question of his formality against Masood's natural extravagance. On his visits to Oxford he had been chastised for any gratitude, or for evaluating an experience in terms of how good or bad it was. These kinds of formality were cold, in Masood's opinion; he was above such petty distinctions. All manners should be washed away in a balm of friendly emotion.

For his part, Morgan had his doubts. Protocol and courtesy might be ritualised, but they had weight and significance too. And emotion could hide things as well as show them.

They would probably never agree on this point. It was a matter of nationality, of course—but there was also the larger matter of character. Perhaps Masood was right to mistrust the English tendency to properness, but he, Morgan, hid a very real feeling behind his apparent coolness. If Masood could only hear the words he would
like
to speak, perhaps he would be less keen on sentiment.

 

* * *

 

When a letter arrived a few days later, he carried it up to his room to open it, as if the words inside might be dangerous. Masood's handwriting, like his personality, spilled in every direction. The tone was at odds with the distress on the station platform, though Morgan was gently upbraided again for his avoidance of sentiment. But this time, dryly, Masood also explained himself.

There was a quality in the Eastern character, he said, called Taras, which made a man ever-alert, ever-sensitive, to what was happening around him. True sentiment implied the power of physically feeling the difficulties of another person. For an Indian like himself, walking into a room required immediately being perceptive to the surrounding emotions, and to his place in them. He knew that Morgan shared this quality, which was why he had always thought of him as Oriental under the skin. And that was why his reticence, his formality, were so difficult to accept.

He said all this, and then, at the bottom of the paper, he had scrawled a quote from some unnamed poem.
O love, each time thou goest out of my sight, I die a new death.
The emotion of these words, in complete contrast to what had gone before, was profoundly unsettling. The lines were written by somebody else, for somebody else, but they arrowed directly into Morgan, hurting him exquisitely. In a moment he knew, because he relived it again, that what he'd felt in the Paris hotel room was true.

It was his habit, on the last day of each year, to review the events, both inward and outward, that had shaped the preceding twelve months. On this occasion, just a few days after returning from Paris, he allowed himself to speak. He had very recently begun keeping his diary in a locked journal, and secrecy made him feel brave.
Let me keep clear from criticism scheming,
he wrote
. Let me be him. You've stopped me. I can only think of you, and not write.

He paused for a long moment before continuing
.
Once the word was set down, he felt, it would be irrevocable. It took courage to tell the truth, even if only to oneself. But he had gone too far to stop. Trembling slightly, he took up the pen again and went on.

I love you, Syed Ross Masood: love.

There. It was visible.
Love
. The word, separate from him at last, seemed to shiver and flutter on the page. But what use was it there? Action had to be taken. And though action was not his strength, in this case it felt easier to speak out than to keep silent, even though it was probably no use. The feeling was too strong to live on unconfessed. Whatever the shock, Masood's mind would surely right itself again. But even the thought of speaking undid him, so that his Chopin preludes, which he sat down to later, were wobbly and full of wrong notes.

They saw each other just a few days later. Morgan had recently turned thirty-one, and Masood insisted that he come down to London so that he could take possession of a birthday present. A painting, which they had looked at together in a gallery, and which he could certainly not afford. Morgan stifled the urge to admonish, for fear of being called formal again. But all his fears, which had multiplied like germs since he'd made his resolution, vanished in the presence of his friend. They spoke about many things: once again especially, memorably, of India, as a place in which both of them would be present together one day, just as they had been in Paris.