Arctic Summer (23 page)

It was no good dwelling on the dead in this way; better to fix upon the living, which even these broken soldiers still were. Most of them were here only for a week or two, and would then be shipped back into the inferno; but at least for this time they were set apart, looked after and cared for, kept between sheets. Morgan was glad to let loose his more brotherly—or were they motherly?—instincts upon them. In return, one afternoon, he was given a glimpse of something celestial, just where he least expected it.

The hospital at Montazah, out on the eastern edge of the city, had once been the Khedival palace, and it had an elegant grandeur which always pleased him. One approached from the station through avenues of flowering oleander, discovering anew each time the pleasing configuration of tiles and pergolas and Moorish arches. It was set in a garden of roses and pepper trees and groves of tamarisk, on the verge of a rocky cliff, and from the terrace of the Selamlik, the men's quarters behind the palace, was a view of the curved bay it overlooked, with its ravishing reefs and promontories and breakwaters.

He was so charmed by this prospect that it took him some time to discover the stairs in the rock that led one down. He was amazed to descend into a littoral Eden of grottoes and stones and sand, peopled by men in various stages of undress. There were hundreds of them, a small benevolent army, bare-chested and bare-legged, many of them completely naked, playing games, swimming, fishing, wrestling, talking, listening to little impromptu bands play music, swinging in hammocks, some of them—like him—just wandering aimlessly. None of them paid him any mind; they were too much inside their own bodies. It was a paradisal vision, and he was most stunned by it when, at sunset, he came to the crest of a wooded knoll, a vast ring of men encircling it like a crown. Among the purple shadows and the orange flecks of light, their brown skin glowed like a heated metal, accentuated by the blue of their linen shorts, the delicate mauve of their shirts.

He returned soon afterwards, and soon after that again. The place never failed to astonish him, but was always most exceptional in that sunset hour, when its colours bloomed fully. On one such occasion he was alone on the deserted beach and felt sufficiently emboldened to set his uniform aside. So he found himself standing waist-deep in the water in his drawers when a young soldier rode up on a donkey and stopped near him to undress. Morgan watched as the naked man strained to pull the animal into the water with him, while it pulled the other way in resistance. The donkey won, but from the trembling tension of their equal moments he took the memory of red light on muscle, and ripples like feathers on the sand. It was a painting, a nude that had come to life, its beauty created solely for him.

 

* * *

 

On a breakwater there one day he overheard a snatch of conversation that gave him pause. After a few steps, he returned.

“Which of you is from the Royal West Kent?”

“All of us, sir.”

“Do you happen to know Kenneth Searight?”

An instant clamour of approval. Yes, they knew him! The friendliest officer in the regiment by far! The other officers weren't nearly so kind to the men, not like he was! He was a fine fellow!

“He's not here with you, by any chance?”

No, no, he was in Mesopotamia. He was safe in Mesopotamia, causing trouble. They themselves had been fighting in Turkey.

One of the men, who had been watching slyly from the side, asked him, “Where do you know the captain from, sir?”

“Oh . . . We met on board ship once. On the way to India . . . ”

His voice trailed off, into a memory of that conversation: the sea shining in the background, the smell of Arabia in the air. And the words; the unlikely words.
I blame it on the heat
. And Morgan had gone to India, and the heat had not undone him. He had remained respectable.

He thought now of having to admit this to Searight, if they were ever to meet again. Other people might have to confess their sins, but he, Morgan, could only confess their absence. It was a strange involution, and one which caused him peculiar shame.

With this on his mind, he stumbled on from the friendly colloquy on the breakwater, into the more opaque complications of the bay. It was near the middle of the day and the heat was intense. The rocks, the trees, could be an obstacle here, especially at high tide. What he'd thought of as a passage turned into a cul-de-sac and he was just considering turning back when he saw that he wasn't alone.

A young man, a soldier—his arm tied in bandages—was urinating against the base of a tree. He was wearing short trousers, which he had opened for the purpose, but he didn't quite close them when he was done. He engaged Morgan with a stare that might have been hostile.

“You spoke to me,” he said.

“I beg your pardon, I didn't say anything.”

“In the ward, the other day, you remember?”

He was so far out of his normal world that it took a moment to return: of course, he had interviewed this man the previous week. He couldn't quite recall his story; the fellow hadn't made much impression. Mackenzie, was it? Or Dodds? Injured in a charge? There were some you didn't notice—though the man was noticeable now, standing so tense and still, looking angry.

“What are you doing here?”

“I was trying to find a way through,” Morgan said.

“No way through here.”

“Yes, I see that now.”

They regarded each other silently for a moment. Dodds, or Mackenzie, had a sandy look to him, his hair short and gingery, face smattered with freckles.

“And you?” Morgan asked.

“What about me?”

“What are you doing here?”

“Oh, I'm looking about, looking about.”

“Looking for what?”

“Looking for trouble,” the man said, and smiled. He seemed less angry now, or perhaps it was just a softening of the light. “You'd be surprised at what you can find. Come and see.”

Morgan followed him, into a twist and curve in the rock, to where the sea and the bend of the bay were out of sight. It was dank and cold here, in this cleft, and there was no sign of the trouble the man had mentioned—unless it was in the way he had turned and was plucking suddenly at the front of Morgan's tunic.

It was distinctly alarming, and one's voice did not hold steady. “What do you
want
?”

“Only what you do.”

“I don't understand.”

“No? Really not? Because . . . when I saw you . . . in the hospital . . . I thought you did. I thought I could see . . . in your eyes . . . ”

He was searching Morgan's gaze now, as if to find again what he'd spotted there. But the real discovery was lower down, in what his flickering fingertips confirmed.

“Yes, that's better. I knew I wasn't mistaken.”

“Oh, I see. Dear Lord.”

Both of them saw now. There was no more doubt. With renewed certainty, the man was pushing Morgan's shoulders down, so that he could face the problem at eye-level.

The long curve of the bay, bathed in clear light, had always seemed innocent to him, so that his own desire was the enemy, an intruder who had slipped through in disguise—yet here it was, reflected back at him in the body of another. It didn't seem possible that he was holding a penis, not his own, in his hand. The heat and feel of it were shocking; and its primitive, root-like appearance seemed inhuman. The world was suddenly removed from him, abstracted, dreamy. He knew at the same time that this was the realest moment of his life.

There was no doubting the direction the man's hands were pushing him in, and he didn't resist, though for a second he wanted to, while his brain threw out schoolboy words that named, and could not name, the thing that was now in his mouth. Touching himself, as a child, he'd called his
dirty trick
, and he'd prayed every night to be rid of it. He thought about his mother and then his mind flew back to the baths in Eastbourne, jostling against the rubbery bodies of the other boys, the mockery they'd flung at him.
Have you seen Forster's cock, a beastly little brown thing
. The jeering had felt like a judgement, infusing every moment of desire since, so that he stood apart from himself and couldn't act. That wasn't the case now. No, his body had taken him with it, he'd failed to subdue its will, it was a creature with a life of its own—and never more so than at this present moment, when it was flooded, very suddenly, with an unpleasant taste, sharp and medicinal and strange.

All over in a moment. Then the man was buttoning himself and moving away, half polite and half fearful, saying, “Thank you, sir . . . if you'd just wait . . . let me go first . . . ”

Leaving Morgan staggering to his feet, his khaki trousers soaked to the knees, scooping up salt water to clean out his mouth. If they could have seen him doing . . . what he'd just done, his mother, oh how terrible, or Maimie or Aunt Laura, any of the old, powdery, frangible halo of women who encircled him, there would be no words. All of them would understand, as he did now, that he had crossed a line in himself, he had left their world behind, the decent world of tea parties and suburban witticisms. Of
telegrams and anger
.

When he reeled out again, into the sunlight, he was certain that everybody would be staring at him. Everybody would
know
. It was a second, slow shock to discover that the universe had continued in his absence, indifferent to his transgression. Some men were throwing a ball to each other and when it landed near him he picked it up and tossed it back to them. Not one of them gave him a second glance. At the base of the stairs that went up the cliff he saw somebody he recognised, and they greeted each other in a friendly way. Nobody called out his name; nobody pointed at him; nobody accused.

Nevertheless, the fear he hadn't felt in the moment came to him now. Halfway up, his knees wouldn't bend properly and he felt a little faint. He began to perspire heavily. Crouching down to recover, keeping his head low, he whispered it to himself, not quite believing it was true: “It has happened . . . It has happened . . . ”

He was thirty-seven years old.

 

* * *

 

In the days that followed, the strongest residual feeling was sadness. There was no remorse. If he had only been able to take this step, he thought, at the normal age—when one was young, excited, eager—he might have had remorse and more happiness. But by now something had run its course in him; he was tied to a life of the spirit, a cold, lopsided, inward life, rather than the body. (Why did people believe it was only the flesh that binds?)

In any event, the hunger wasn't satisfied. Even in one's most physical moments, the real craving was for love. Those few fumbling seconds at the edge of the sea: they had given him something and then immediately taken it away. There had been no opportunity to converse; for God's sake, he didn't even know the man's
name
.

Nor did the sadness depart. It shaded off into a general gloom, a vague feeling of incompetence, which took specific form in a bout of vomiting at a dinner party. Thankfully, this could be diagnosed: he was told he had jaundice, and he was sent to stay at the officers' quarters in the General Hospital to recover. But although the sickness passed, the spiritual malaise did not.

He had been in Egypt for a year and a half, but he still hadn't learned to like it. There were some nights, coming back to his room alone, when a weariness seized hold of him.
Will it always be like this
? he wondered. Day after day, the level sameness of events. A numbing round of habit with no feeling inside it. He feared at certain moments that the only new knowledge he would take away from this country was learning how to swim and use the telephone.

By now he was in lodgings; through a friend, he had been put in touch with Irene, who was Greek but spoke Italian, and owned two boarding houses in Ramleh, in the east of the city, where most of the expatriate community lived. His work had taken him there almost daily, because some of the larger buildings had been commissioned by the Red Cross as hospitals. Now his journey was in the other direction: back to St Mark's Square, where his reports had to be written and handed in.

Riding on the trams was mostly tedious: lost time, which would never come back. But on one of these journeys, going home on a cold night in January of 1917, he lifted from a murky sea-bed in himself to an awareness that a young man was leaning over him. He was wearing a conductor's uniform and Morgan began searching for his ticket, but the man held up his hand.

“Excuse, please,” he said. “I am asking you to rise.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“My coat is under your seat. I am sorry to disturb.”

He got up hurriedly, so that the young man could retrieve his coat. As he put it on, Morgan said to him, “Yes, it's cold,” and they smiled at each other.

They were almost at Saba Pasha, where his journey would end, but in the remaining minutes Morgan realised several things. He was the only passenger left and he had been so sunk into his mood that he hadn't recognised his new acquaintance, but now he remembered that they had seen each other before. The first occasion had been half a year ago, when from the platform he had noticed a handsome dark head passing, a white flash of teeth under a red tarboosh, and thought:
nice
. The morning had been sunny and its freshness enlivened by this transient glimpse of beauty.

He had looked for the young man since, and had noticed a delicacy to the way he performed his duties: stepping between the feet of the passengers, rather than treading on them as the other conductors did. There was a delicacy, too, to the moment when he was saying goodbye to a soldier-friend at the terminus. Framed in the doorway of the tram, the farewell had taken a sensual form: the conductor had lingeringly touched each button on the soldier's tunic, almost as if he were playing an instrument.