Arctic Summer (17 page)

He was thinking about his own father. He had never known Edward Forster, except through family anecdotes and stories, especially Lily's. But these had been enough to create a disturbing question, never sufficiently clear to be spoken aloud. There was always an antagonism, a disappointment, in Lily's voice when she mentioned him, and it seemed directed at something fey and weak and unmasculine in his character. Morgan had sensed this early on, and tried to adjust his own nature accordingly.

But something else came to him now, something he'd always known but never pondered. Morgan had an appointed guardian, a Ted Streatfeild, a very dear and close friend of his father's—so close, in fact, that he had accompanied Lily and Eddie on their honeymoon to Paris. Lily had told him this only once, many years before, in his childhood. Something acidulous about her tone had made him feel unhappy, though he hadn't understood why. And then his mother's face had closed over, and the subject was dropped and never picked up again. Just as, after his father's death, long before Morgan could even form a memory of him, Ted Streatfeild had disappeared from their lives and his name was barely mentioned.

What was one to make of this? Certainly he could never ask Lily. It felt like a private sadness, something she had been through that didn't include him. Yet it troubled him now, like a ghost that had come in an envelope from India, uniting and dividing him from his friend.

He didn't tell any of this to Masood. Their lives were no longer joined in the same way as before. Never had this been clearer than when, on a visit to the Morisons, he discovered that Masood had announced his engagement. He was hurt to learn of it like this, though a letter did follow from Masood soon afterward. He was going to marry Zorah, the woman he had mentioned, the daughter of the barrister Morgan had met in Aligarh.

It was hard to reply as he had to.
Your welcome news has moved me. I am thankful it is settled, and very happy. I have always wanted it. I suppose I
must
love you as myself if I desire a new person—not me—to come into your life. I do desire it, as with my own heart
.

The words were both true and false. And after his announcement, which had perhaps been difficult to make, Masood went quiet for a while. There were almost no letters, and Morgan was left with his longings, which sometimes threatened to undo him.

He found himself behaving in ways that were potentially dangerous, without quite knowing what he was up to. On one or two occasions he loitered in public lavatories, hoping for some offer to present itself. Open spaces, especially those in Hyde Park, excited him with possibility. But there was only ever a glance, an accidental collision, which left him turbulent with fantasies. To act out of lust, even without any tender accompanying feeling, would be less damaging, he felt, than these corrosive bursts of desire that went nowhere. He took himself to see Nijinsky dancing almost naked in
L'après-midi d'un faune
and the utter abandonment of that human body alarmed and delighted him, like an enactment of everything which roiled invisibly inside. Afterwards he longed to miss his train home and give himself up wholly to adventures in the foliage somewhere, though he wouldn't have known where to go.

His own sterility was apparent to him and would soon, he felt sure, be visible to others. Curiously, he didn't feel depressed at the prospect. He was almost intrigued by the idea of giving in to his oddness, turning into one of those remote, ineffectual creatures so warped by their solitude that they became distasteful to normal people. He had seen the type before.

 

* * *

 

A month after getting home, he'd told Masood in a letter:
I don't know that I shall ever be able to write about India—when I begin I seem to dislike you all equally. But it is certainly waiting for a great novelist. Produce one yourselves
. This declaration was so convincing that he was mildly surprised to discover himself, soon afterwards, ascending to the attic and sitting down at his desk
.

He had chosen a green ink, not a colour he'd used before, to set the book apart from the others, even if only in his mind. And at first the green words fell out of him, in a decisive and rhythmic torrent. Though much, he also sensed, remained unformed.

Through the last weeks of his Indian travels, but especially on the voyage home, he had begun to conceive of characters in a particular setting. The place that suggested itself was very like Bankipore. The river, the mud, the oppressive awfulness—all of it was there, but also the greenery visible from the rooftops, and the pleasant regularity of the Civil Station. It was a way of returning to it in his mind, and of re-joining Masood . . . though Chandrapore was also composed of all the other little towns he'd seen and passed through over the last six months.

The people he imagined were likewise made from those he'd encountered in India. Nobody was precisely anybody: he built them from aspects and shards and impressions. He had learned, with his earlier novels, that if you screwed up your inner eye when looking at somebody familiar, you could glimpse a new personality, both like and unlike the original. Once this outline had taken shape, you could fill it with traits that in turn had been borrowed elsewhere.

Mr. Godbole, for example, had survived the voyage, and had taken up residence in a corner of Morgan's mind, seated with arms and legs impossibly neatly folded. But he had shed his comic veneer and was chanting a sort of obscure wisdom. Nor did he resemble—except in his singing, and in a certain composure of temperament—the old man encountered in Lahore. A name, a quality, a way of behaving: these came together to suggest a person.

Or, more exactly, many people: the world, for Morgan, had always been a throng. You couldn't tell a story without two people, at least, at the centre of it. Accordingly, he had imagined a friendship at the heart of the story which echoed his own with Masood. It wasn't thinkable that he could write a book about India without also writing about this, the great affection of his life. It had been the fount and the source, and it continued to haunt him, even now. But of course he couldn't write it down directly; he had to camouflage the known.

In the case of Masood, he could successfully mingle his qualities with those of Ahmed Mirza, as well as Mirza's brother, Saeed. He saw a young man, passionate, intense, full of pride and injury—exactly the sort of person Morgan responded to. Masood's bluster and febrility were in there, too, as well as the emotions that coloured certain Indian conversations. Out of such elements, Aziz had very quickly taken on his own life; he was the character who had most completely arrived.

Harder to do was the Englishman, Fielding. He couldn't be like Morgan exactly; he didn't think of himself as heroic. But Malcolm Darling did provide the mould for a certain kind of man, a vessel into which Morgan might pour himself—a person he could have been in a different life. And he drew on Leonard Woolf, too, with whom he was recently becoming more friendly. They had known each other a little at King's, but it had only been in the months before he'd left for India, when Leonard had taught him horse-riding, that a closeness had crept in. He'd been thinking a great deal about him lately: Leonard, who had spent years in the Civil Service, alone with his high principles in the jungle in Ceylon. But there were not a great many other Englishmen, not among those he'd seen in India, who might think or feel the way that Leonard did.

This was distressing to him. Indeed, when he dwelt for any length of time on his Indian experience, it was unpleasant to realise how difficult it had been. Yes, the place had hurt him, in complicated, contradictory ways. He couldn't stand too much ugliness, and there had been a lot of that. Worse, it was in human relationships that the ugliness had showed itself. In the relationships between Indians, or even between Indians and himself, there was no essential problem, but in the treatment that the English meted out to the local population he hadn't found much cause to be proud.

He was angry about it, and the anger showed in his writing. This was something new for him. His previous books had a lightness, a humour, which he struggled to find now. Over and over he kept returning to the subject of power, racial power, and then the ugliness appeared again. He wasn't an especially political person, and he didn't like what was coming out of him. Yet it was what he had seen and felt, almost from the moment he'd boarded the ship in Naples, and he had never raised his voice against it. He had murmured and muttered, it was true, and he had tied himself into convoluted knots, but that was the extent of his protest. Now his spirit wanted its say.

The story that was forming would turn around a young woman, rather a lost, dry creature, on her first visit to the country, eager to get to know Indians. Not unlike himself, in other words, and maybe that was why she was giving him trouble. He couldn't even settle on her name: at first she was Janet, then she became Edith, but neither struck the right tone. Much would depend on what exactly happened to her in the caves and, until he understood that better, her nature would stay inscrutable.

The closer he came to those caves, the more he began to falter. He knew that something took place in the dark, a sexual attack across racial lines. The caves held that kind of power. But it wasn't simply a question of the action; it was what the action arose from—what it meant. The problem was fundamental. No matter how he tried it, the words sat on top of the deed; they had no soil and no roots. There was something wrong with how he had imagined it, something essentially dishonest and out of balance, and as his narrative crept toward the threshold, the rock refused to open for him.

So he had already lost momentum when something else happened to throw him off course completely.

 

* * *

 

Lily's rheumatism was still bad, and in September of 1913 she decided to take a cure at Harrogate, in the north. She planned to be there for a month, and Morgan was to stay with her for much of the time. But Harrogate was in reach of Millthorpe, and Millthorpe was where Edward Carpenter lived.

He had heard Carpenter's name many times. They had some acquaintances in common, Goldie most notable among them. Many years before, when he had been an undergraduate and in love with Roger Fry, Goldie had gone to stay in Millthorpe Cottage and had retained a glowing enthusiasm for the place and for its owner. He had urged Morgan to visit and had provided him with written introductions, but he had never taken up the suggestion. It was always the wrong time, or the journey was too inconvenient—though in truth he was simply afraid.

Carpenter had a reputation. Or perhaps it was more true to say that he had many reputations. Born thirty-five years before Morgan, he had long been vocal in support of different but related causes, from socialism to vegetarianism to women's rights. This had made him famous, not to say infamous, in certain circles, though it was a different campaign that had ensured his notoriety.

Carpenter was a minorite. But unlike Morgan and Goldie, he had spoken out about it, publishing two books and delivering speeches and generally behaving in a brave and brazen way. True, he had hidden what he believed under a veil of mysticism, and he had always been careful to take cover behind a general openness in sexual matters. True too, he picked his language carefully, speaking about love between comrades and invoking a tradition of male companionship that went all the way back to the Greeks. But he hadn't shrunk from living what he believed, and it was well known that he shared his home with a much younger, working-class man. They had been together, Goldie told him, for more than twenty years.

Morgan had read some of Carpenter's writings on what he called “Homogenic Love”. They had excited him, and echoed many of his own feelings. But he had been wary of drawing closer to Carpenter in person, for fear of what it might lead to. Since his visit to India, however, he had felt more daring and courageous, and when this opportunity was presented he knew he should take it.

It was not an easy expedition. For one thing, he couldn't tell Lily where he was going, so he had to cover himself with vagueness and excuses. For another, Millthorpe was not on any regular rail connection: from the nearest station he had to walk for miles through the countryside. And he was nervous that, when he did finally arrive, he and the great man might not hit it off. But these were small concerns in the end. When he stood shaking Carpenter's hand at last, it felt like a significant moment, long overdue.

“
Ee Em
Forster,” his host intoned, smiling through his beard in gentle irony. “What coy initials to hide behind. What is your
name
?”

“Edward, like yours. But everybody calls me Morgan.”

“And are you like me in other ways?”

“Possibly I am, but I don't know you well enough to say.”

“Soon you will know me better. You are very welcome here. I should measure your feet.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“For sandals. I'd like to make some for you. You are in need of release, your poor feet cannot know the earth in dreadful shoes like those.” Carpenter's own feet were sandal-shod, and both of them looked down for a moment at his long, gnarled, brown toes. “My first sandals came from Kashmir,” he told Morgan. “My dear friend Cox sent them to me.”

“I have just recently returned from six months in India.”

“Ah, India, India! It is the most marvellous, extraordinary place! Though in fact it is many places. I spent some months there, oh, twenty years ago now. You must tell me all about your experiences, but first please come inside.”

The stone cottage was plain and regular, built in rigid lines. There was no passageway linking the rooms together, so that they simply followed on from one another, in an abrupt and linear way: kitchen to scullery to wash-house to stable. The sitting room, where Morgan was allowed to settle himself, resembled a bare, bureaucratic space, but the view from the windows—of a leafy, private garden—was pleasant enough. And the starkness of the distempered walls and wooden floors had the effect of amplifying Carpenter's presence, once he had seated himself opposite Morgan.