Arctic Summer (18 page)

There was no denying it, he had a strange, internal power. Tall and thin, wearing tweedy country clothes, he had a way of facing the world that was very upright, very open. Although he was nearly seventy, he listened and spoke with the same open, intense directness. It was both unnerving and uplifting.

They talked about India, and for the first time Morgan felt he'd met another Englishman who understood. Carpenter wasn't interested in colonies or conquest; he cared about people, the simpler the better. He had spent much of his time in India and Ceylon among ordinary workers who did unimportant jobs. It was his belief, he said, that England would either have to grant more freedom in India or quit it altogether, unthinkable though that might be. He had also, to Morgan's great surprise, visited the Anglo-Oriental College in Aligarh, and had been hugely impressed by what he'd seen.

This led him to tell a story that startled Morgan, about two Muslim men, students at the college. “They loved each other so much,” Carpenter said, “that when they were forced to part, they killed themselves. Yes, yes, it's true. The one drowned himself and the other, if I recall correctly, lay down in front of a train.”

A silence followed, while the two men contemplated dying for love. Morgan glanced around surreptitiously, looking for Carpenter's companion, who had so far not shown himself. There were other people nearby, he could hear them, and a female figure had passed the window at one point, but nobody else was in the house. Stirring himself, Carpenter asked, “What of you? Do you have a . . . special friend?”

Morgan replied that he did not. “I am alone.”

Carpenter snorted. “Nobody is alone. We are all part of a great world community. If the world only knew it.”

“Yes, yes, quite so, but I—”

“Come into the garden and meet George.”

Morgan trailed behind his host across the grass, towards a small stream that burbled happily over stones. A shirtless man, perhaps ten years older than Morgan, was dancing from one foot to another in the sun. George Merrill's whole body seemed to aspire upwards, though his moustache, and his eyelids, drooped. He did not cease from dancing, even as he clasped Morgan's hand. “The water is wonderful,” he told their visitor. “You should undress and have a bathe.”

“Perhaps another time. It's a little chilly for my taste.”

“Nonsense, nonsense,” Carpenter cried. “You are merely inhibited. What are your thoughts on nudism?”

This was another subject close to Carpenter's heart; clothing, like many social habits, concealed what was natural and lovely in human beings. A little desperately, Morgan repeated, “I should like to bathe another time. At this moment I want to see the grounds.”

For the most part, the place had been left to grow wild, aside from a kitchen garden that was as geometric as the house. But there was a real charm to the view down the valley, with hills and hedgerows and flowers all around. At some point during their stroll, George caught up with them, still tucking in his shirt. While Carpenter spoke about what Millthorpe meant to him—the Utopian vision of returning to the land—his special friend kept glancing sideways at Morgan, and once he winked in a knowing way.

Morgan was perturbed by this, but only a little. People conducted themselves differently in this house, he knew that. Carpenter and his devotees were trying to live out a revolutionary view of life, in which all the normal rules were thrown aside. From a distance it could seem absurd, even frightening, but from close up, what he sensed more than anything else was kindness—kindness of a human and immediate sort. It was surprising how very radical this simple emotion could be.

This feeling persisted through the hours that followed. While they wandered outside and afterwards, while Morgan sat in the kitchen and watched George prepare lunch, he kept thinking:
why not? Why not live like this?
The thinnest of veils seemed to separate his own life, as it was now, from this alternative vision of how to approach everything. There was no reason why he should not lift the veil aside.

Well, there was Lily. He could imagine his mother's face if he told her he was giving up meat and alcohol and going to live off the land and make sandals. Not to mention homogenic love. The veil might be thin, but in certain cases it was insurmountable. Though Carpenter might not agree. Carpenter himself had come from an upper middle-class home in Brighton. He had also gone up to Cambridge, on some sort of religious scholarship, before casting religion and the academic life aside.

It couldn't be for everybody. Goldie had also tried this lifestyle, Morgan knew, when he was a young man. Goldie had had a spell of living on a farm, among working-class people, trying to embody the new philosophy, but it had turned out to be disastrous. It was only as a thinker that Goldie could find his place. For some people, Morgan among them, the only possible life was the life of the mind. And what was wrong with that? Carpenter himself had been influenced by F. D. Maurice, the theologian and Christian socialist, during his Cambridge years. Maurice had inspired the creation of the University Extension Lectures and, along with Goldie's father and some others, had founded the Working Men's College in London. Morgan and many of his friends had taught there, and had formed some lasting connections with men from the lower classes.

They talked a little about Maurice while they ate. Carpenter could do an amusing impression of the great man, closing his eyes and smacking his face with his fingers while he formulated thoughts incoherently. Yet those same thoughts had radiated outwards and down the years, leading perhaps even to this cottage and Carpenter's way of life. Maurice had believed in the power of personal relationships, of love between people, beginning with the family and extending to society. Where was that power on more evident display than here, in this room, where George, the working-class boy from the Sheffield slums, had moved his chair next to Carpenter's and was running his hand through his older lover's hair?

Only connect
. The gap had closed, or vanished, for those who chose to ignore it. Class and age and background could be pushed aside by a gesture of human affection.
God si love
. For a moment, this little tableau was everything. Perhaps much of Carpenter's life was beyond Morgan; he could not live in this rough, rude way. But to be sitting next to a man of a different background, touching him gently, casually, with no thought of wrongness—why was it so impossible? He wanted it, he could have it, if he would only
do
it. The choice seemed suddenly so obvious and uncomplicated.

Then George was pushing his chair back and clearing plates from the table. It was the middle of the afternoon already; Morgan still had to return to Harrogate this evening. He ought to be readying himself to move. In a half-polite, half-distracted way, he tried to help. He wasn't used to carrying crockery, or to the intimate gloom of the kitchen; it wasn't his usual part of the house. Looking for a clear surface on which to set down the plates, he was aware of George's closeness behind him, and of the sound of his breathing.

“Is this all right?” he asked. “Here?”

“Let me see. Yes, that's all right. Just put them down.”

He put them down and stood, not moving. He could still hear the sound of breathing, close enough to be intrusive. Then he realised it was his own.

“Oh,” he said, surprised.

And then a little frightened.

Because George was touching him.

It was merely a hand, in the lower curve of his back. The contact was suggestive, though the fingers didn't move. Perhaps it was the talk they'd been having, or the thoughts he'd entertained, but there was something subversive about that hand. Something flowed out of it, transmitted through the palm: a presumption of equality, or worse—of ownership. Yes, this must be how it felt, to be touched by a lover. He could feel the heat of it, the possessive certainty of its contact. Then the hand dropped down, to his bottom, wavered there for a moment, and came to rest a little above his buttocks, at the base of the spine.

It was astonishing. Something had happened to him. He wasn't quite in the kitchen any more, not quite in his own body. His mind had flashed away from itself, to some inner place where the events of the day were still being arranged. Now they were arranged differently.

“Yes,” George said again. “That's all right, there.”

Carpenter's voice called outside, and the hand fell away. Not a weighty moment after all. But on the long walk back to Totley station, with the afternoon shadows stretched long and pale across the ground, Morgan's mind was digging in the sand. He was excavating an outline, a form that had become imperfectly plain to him.

He had a story, a new story. Afterwards, it would seem to him that it had arrived whole and entire, rushing in somehow through the small of his back. But in fact it was in the aftermath of that touch, especially in the ride on the train, that he had assembled its disparate parts. They had been lying around in him for a long time, like bits of shattered statuary, and something had happened to make the fragments fly together. When he got back to Harrogate, he made his excuses to Lily and retreated to his room. He had a terrible stomach from George's cooking, but he also had paper, he had his pen. Between frequent visits to the bathroom, he started to write.

 

* * *

 

One book displacing another: his Indian novel was forgotten. Instead he was writing about being a minorite. A homosexual story! For all his life he had had to imagine the opposite, the joining and unjoining of men and women, while secretly longing to speak about himself. Now a chance touch at the base of his spine had let loose this other, buried narrative. In one moment, as if lit up by lightning, he had seen the whole arc of events, the three characters at the centre of them.

Of course, he could never publish it. He couldn't even show it to most people he knew. There were some, naturally, who would understand, and he wrote for them, or for himself. Anyhow, some idealised reader who would accept everything, and forgive.

The feeling of release was huge. An enormous pressure had built up behind the words, years and years of silence, which now pushed into the open. Few things are more powerful than confession, and he told it all to the page. The uncertainty, the doubt, the slowly dawning realisation: he could let it spill. He travelled back in his mind to the unfolding of his spirit in Cambridge. Though some concealment was necessary.

He plucked the name of Maurice from his afternoon with Carpenter; it would do as well as another. And to separate Maurice from himself, he made him vigorous, athletic, extroverted—Morgan in another life! Hom was closer to the truth in the form of Clive Durham, and what had happened between the two of them was also present, in altered form. But the family details and the lesser characters, all this was disguised, in case the wrong eyes should fall on it.

It was hard to keep away from the work in the beginning. It was all so vital, so necessary, that the act of writing took on an electrical charge. There was so much to be conveyed, so much of it rooted in his own life, that the enjoyment felt private and personal. He even began to dream about it. Thinking about his past had raised it close to the surface; he was remembering images and sensations and events from long ago. The years at Cambridge were one thing; they had been his awakening. But his minorism had begun much earlier, of course, when he was very young.

His first sexual feelings had had no object. He had liked to climb the trees at Rooksnest and stimulate himself against the branches. Then later he had been terribly excited by the various garden boys, especially Ansell and the tickling in the straw. And the fat, dark Irishman, Mr. Hervey, who had been his tutor at Stevenage for a while, when Morgan was eight. He'd had a very disturbing dream about Mr. Hervey's penis, which had been like a long, white snake that filled the whole hall and dining room, winding Morgan in its coils. He'd believed the dream to be absurd, because he, Morgan, was the only person in the world to have a penis.

The first conscious moment of choice had come later, when he was eleven. On holiday in Bournemouth with his mother, he had been preoccupied by a sense of the future as a territory of many forking paths. He would have to find a way through this unknown, twilit landscape, and the decision he made at each split in the road would define his whole destiny. It was a cause of great anxiety to a little boy and, looking out of the hotel window, he decided to leave the biggest choice to fate.
It all depends
, he thought,
whether a man or a woman first passes
, and then he had waited fearfully for what the empty street might deliver. When a man with a brown moustache appeared from the right, he had experienced a rush of relief.

A line of uneasy wanting—though of what exactly he couldn't say—had run through all his school years. At Kent House in Eastbourne, the sourish smell of the public baths had lodged permanently in his nose, an accompaniment to all the naked boys leaping in and out of the water. Underscoring the flickering, innocent skin around him, the mingled roar-moan of the sea, connected to the baths by a subterranean passage, was a reminder of a larger, more frightening world outside the dripping walls. He always remembered this weekly event with a sensation that was half-thrilled, half-sick, though nothing of importance had happened to him there.

Genuinely important, though probably best forgotten, was the actual, ordinary man, without a moustache, but wearing knickerbockers and a deerstalker, whom Morgan had found defecating on the Downs above Eastbourne one midwinter afternoon. That was shocking enough, but meaningless by comparison with what followed. The man had drawn him aside, among bushes, his flies still undone.
Pull it about
, he'd said.
Dear little boy, pull it about
. Morgan had pulled it about, till some kind of white fermentation had taken place. Then the man had grown bored and offered Morgan a shilling, which he refused. The reporting of this incident, first to his mother, then, on her instructions, to the headmaster, had sent out waves of shock and consternation, centred on him. He understood that something awful had taken place, for which, it was implied, he might be partly responsible. Nevertheless, at the age of eleven, it had made him feel powerful. With indignation, he had told the horrified headmaster, on their way to the police station, that the man's bowels had been diseased. When he received counsel, in return, about the dangers of accusing the innocent, he had said:
We shall know him, sir, by this disease
.