Arctic Summer (9 page)

Lily had seen him eat the cheese; she looked at him across the table. He gazed down, peculiarly humiliated.

“You have tasted it,” she said, and when Laura turned to her she said, “The cheese is bad.”

“Oh, how unfortunate. I'll have it taken away.”

But in the end the cheese was only put to one side and remained, an offish whiff on the air, through the rest of the lunch. He knew that Lily was not yet done with him and later, on the journey home, she asked him in an amused tone why he hadn't spoken out honestly. He writhed and said, “It didn't seem important.”

“Oh, what nonsense. You were afraid.” She reminded him casually, “You are like your father. He always put his foot down at the wrong time, like you.” She paused to rummage in her handbag for her lozenges, before murmuring a final judgement: “He wasn't a strong character.”

He was disproportionately wounded by these little words. Although Lily had loved his father, something was always implied when she mentioned him: he had become a synonym for vacancy and ineptitude. The biggest legacy his father had bestowed on Morgan was the mistake of his own first name. Morgan was, in fact, supposed to be Henry, but on the way to the christening, when the verger had asked what the baby's name was to be, Edward had answered without thinking. So Henry had become Edward by accident, and everybody called Morgan by his second name instead.

Lily hadn't, it seemed to him, ever spoken against his father with such disparaging dismissal, but what really troubled him was her dismissal of himself. Through her eyes, with faint disgust, he saw “Morgan”, and felt ashamed. Morgan was an ineffectual, useless entity; his life would always be a little bit ridiculous. He didn't have the strength of will, nor the substance of spirit, to shape his future in any way. That was how she saw him, and the knowledge hurt deeply.

Well, soon he would escape her—and perhaps it was that imminent prospect which had coloured Lily's mood. Because Morgan was going to India in just a few months. It had been decided that he would escort his mother and her good friend from Tonbridge days, Mrs. Cecelia Mawe, to Rome, where he would abandon them, at his own expense, to keep each other company, while he boarded the ship at Naples that would take him to Bombay, from where he would make his way northward to join Masood in Aligarh. Many other travels would braid themselves around it afterwards, but that moment of reunion was the centre and the heart of this whole journey.

Masood had left at the beginning of the year, and his going had been both more subtle and more difficult than Morgan had expected. It had left a deep hollowness behind it, in which every word or gesture seemed to echo slightly; a blankness had crept into things, and even the most heartwarming of English landscapes no longer quite consoled. Almost immediately afterwards, he had fled to Belfast to visit Hom. What had he wanted there? Some kind of comfort, some kind of manly embrace; but what he'd got instead was a watchful, hardened metropolis, and a great deal of political turbulence. Ulster was highly charged with rhetorical emotion, furious talk about secession, overhung by the visit of the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, bringing new proposals for home rule. A thin fault-line was opening into something much wider; civil war seemed possible.

Hom took him to tea at the house of a stalwart member of the Ulster Reform Club, resistant to home rule in any form. This man, pink and genial in every other way, informed them that, “Belfast will listen to anyone except a Judas or a turn-coat.”

Morgan dropped a quick glance down at his own, and could not remember which side was originally turned outward. He repressed an urge to giggle.

“We are not,” the man went loudly on, “we are not acting in accordance with any principle, and we don't pretend that we are.”

His diminutive wife, nursing a baby in the background, suddenly interjected that, “It just shows the uselessness of principles,” and then repeated it, more exultantly, in a high-pitched voice to the infant.

It was all most unsettling. He had promised his mother he wouldn't attend the mass meeting at the nearby football field, but everywhere you went the air was thick with the potential for violence. Four thousand extra troops had been brought in. He did go up to the Central Hotel, where Churchill was staying, and waited with the crowd in the foyer. He wasn't exactly sure why he was there, having a personal and political distaste for the man in question, but the moment felt historic. He'd heard the colossal booing from the street outside when Churchill showed himself at a window, and not long afterwards the short, great man had himself appeared, with the pale, unhealthy pallor of an underground root, and brushed against Morgan as he pushed through the mob to the door. Morgan, unsure of how else to respond, had raised his hat politely.

The sprouting seeds of religious conflict; the first loosenings of the Empire. It was with a sense of buried unease, a subterranean rumbling underfoot, that he had returned to England afterwards. And that unsettled, rootless feeling had remained with him, making it hard to stay quietly at home. His writing appeared to have petered out altogether, and without it his normal life seemed empty. He passed his days in eating too much and reading the newspaper, running the occasional errand for his mother or rowing her about on the river. He slept in his chair in the garden and played the piano with small enthusiasm. He seemed to himself like a man without an edge, lacking sufficient definition even to be disappointed.

So that when he heard that Goldie had received the first Albert Kahn Travelling Fellowship and was using it to visit the East, and that he had moreover persuaded Bob Trevy to accompany him, his mind was finally made up. He would go with them at the end of the year.

In the event, it had been surprisingly easy to get Lily to agree. A little mollification, a little pathos, and she'd succumbed. Of course, it couldn't have been a complete surprise.

“You had better do it before you're too old,” she said. “And I'm relieved that you will have friends with you. You know you're hopeless when you travel. Always getting lost and forgetting the Baedeker behind.”

“I don't plan to be with my friends all the time. But I have some Indian friends too.”

“Masood, you mean.” She mused on this for a while, then said, “Well, it's probably best for you to see him on that side.”

“Why is that?”

She smiled sadly. “If he ever comes back to England, it won't be the same again.”

A
fter the much finer things he had seen on his journey, the caves were a little disappointing. The approach was almost more dramatic, for you were carried towards the Barabar Hills on the heaving back of the elephant across a parched plain, while the shapes of the giant rocks emerged from the haze. The first was the most astonishing: what appeared to be a huge, stony thumb pointing straight up at the sky. Only as you drew closer and saw it from the side did it slowly reshape itself as a mountain with an extended spine, and the single perched boulder on top became a fanlike arrangement of numerous similar boulders.

“That is Kawa Dol,” Imdad Iman said, smiling.

“What does it mean?”

“It is the place where the crow . . . ” He made a rocking motion with his hand.

“Swing, you mean? The crow's swing?”

“Ah, yes,” the old man said. “Exactly.” But the rock, however precariously balanced, did not look like a swing, and what seemed understood could possibly be understood differently. Whatever its meaning, the name stayed almost elementally with Morgan, along with his first image of the stone tower. Kawa Dol: the sound of it was ominous and old, evoking a darkness out of the earth.

It was not their destination, however. They toiled slowly past its base and on towards a second scattering of hills. Made of the same globular grey stones, piled atop each other in unlikely formations, they evoked other, living forms. While he appeared to listen to Imdad Iman, who wrote poetry in Urdu and felt warmly about many things English, from poetry to playing polo, Morgan's mind was elsewhere.

They were on an outing, which Masood had told him would be a wonderful experience. But he had said it without enthusiasm, and Morgan himself did not especially want to be here. This whole day had been planned, he knew, as a salve and consolation, because last night he had said goodbye to his friend for the final time on this journey. Although he was only halfway through his Indian sojourn, the rest of his wanderings would be completed without seeing Masood, and that knowledge pressed on him like a blue and suffocating weight.

When they drew abreast the second upthrusting of hills, the worn grey textures of their surface, unbroken except for greeny clumps of vegetation, distracted him from his melancholy. The place was so sudden, so violently improbable in the middle of the steaming flat plain, that it gave off an odd intensity. In a grove of trees at their foot were the tents of their advance party, with a line of smoke going up. But breakfast, which was supposed to be ready, wasn't; and they were advised that it might be best to see the caves first.

Nawab Imdad Iman was Masood's friend, and had been told to look after Morgan's every need. He was displeased at the tardy preparations and said that he would stay behind to oversee the food, so his two nephews—who were loutish and unlovely—accompanied Morgan up the nearest hill. They walked along a path under trees. Almost immediately they came upon a shrine, a hollowed-out alcove in the rock with a graven idol in the centre of it, garlanded with dying flowers, but if there was a holy man in attendance there was no sign of him. The path began to climb, lifting into light and heat. The trees thinned out, bird calls giving way to a buzzing of insects. None of them spoke, and the only sound between them was a panting of breath.

It wasn't a bad ascent. After only a few minutes they emerged onto a shoulder of the hill and the nephews steered him towards a long, rounded rock with a double-ridge on top, made of granite, looking something like a whale emerging from the deeps. The first cave was simply there, a rectangular doorway cut into the side. It was late in the morning already, and the night's coolness had long since departed the few remaining shadows. But the inside of the cave, at least, provided some relief.

A single domed chamber, perhaps thirty feet long. The walls were polished and smooth. There was nothing whatever inside it; nothing to see, nothing to admire. But immediately the nephews were wanting something from him, plucking at his sleeve insistently, saying a word over and over. He didn't understand; he said, “Yes, yes,” impatiently, only to shut them up. He could tell already that these caves were going to let him down. Then the little party was outside again, in the brightness, and they were taking him up a flight of stairs in the side of the rock, to two more caves on the other side.

They led him to the second entrance first. This was the only cave with anything like an ornate doorway, a stupa-shaped arch with elephants carved in procession along it, and a sprinkling of what he took to be Pali. But compared with some of the statues and temples he remembered, what was on offer here seemed curiously unfinished. Through a square-cut passage you went into an inner chamber with a vaulted roof, which took you, by way of another short passage, into yet another dome-shaped room within. But the surface was only half-carved and its roughness was off-putting.

As he stumbled back towards the third cave entrance, the middle one of the three, he struggled to remember what it was that Imdad Iman had said about them, as they rolled atop the elephant. Buddhist caves, two hundred and fifty BC . . . ? It was the Emperor Ashoka who had ordered them to be made, he felt almost sure about that. But there was something else, something to do with the shape of the caves, that escaped him. Was it about meditation? He hadn't been paying close attention, his mind had been preoccupied, and now their purpose remained a mystery—as it seemed so much in this country was destined to, at least for him.

This cave was by far the most impressive. Again there was the vaulted first chamber, but in this one the rock had been worked to a planed and polished surface, so highly refined that it might have been done with a modern machine. And again there was a doorway leading to an inner room, high and conical, shaped like a beehive. The darkness here was total, till one of the boys lit a candle. Then another flame seemed to well up from inside the granite itself, and the rock revealed its grain in a swirling of red and grey. The walls had been polished to the consistency of glass and the hard smoothness, under his trailing fingertips, was pleasing and beautiful.

The two unpleasant nephews, who had very little English, were still repeating their word over and over, which he still couldn't make out. But the word—indeed, every word that was spoken in here—set off an overlapping mirror of itself, which hissed and rustled all around. Then at last he understood. The word was “echo”, and that was why the cave walls had been so highly polished: to help the echo along. The dome-shaped room was meant for chanting, and the chanting was meant to reverberate. But the effect, like the caves themselves, was less than remarkable, returning every sound in the form of an indistinct surf-like roaring.

Then one of the nephews said, “Breakfast”, and blew out his candle, and the expedition was apparently over.

They descended the hill again in silence, leaving the rocks and the darkness behind. But the caves were not what Morgan had supposed. They were not Buddhist, and the language inscribed around that third entrance wasn't Pali, though it was equally old and equally dead. The caves had been inhabited by a different sect, people who followed an ascetic path more extreme than most. Indeed, they had been avoided by those who followed gentler faiths, for their custom of abandoning their old and their sick, out in the open, to die. What exactly they believed, and their way of believing, was lost now. But some of their presence, perhaps, had remained behind, a kind of ghost, or another reflection in the stone, to brush against the visitor whose skin was receptive to it.