A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E. M. Forster (29 page)

Mohammed’s father died two days after he returned home, and two days later in a cruel double blow he “received a wire from Tanta [in the Nile Delta] stating that my brother—the tailor—drowned in the Nile.” “Griefs never come one by one,” Mohammed told him, “they always come in battalions . . . What am I going to do? I have always asked myself the question but I did not find the answer yet.” Mohammed had never felt close to his father, but his brother Ahmed was beloved, and the death bewildered and shattered him. “He was a good swimmer and the Canal [where he drowned] is not so deep. I did not realise it yet.” Morgan immediately traveled to Mansourah to console him. The visit “was even better than either of us had hoped. Does one experience a renewal or a deepening of emotion each time?” he asked Florence.

Mohammed now found himself in a middle-class predicament: jobless, but a homeowner. For once, the men had some privacy—“perfect conditions”—though
they were a reiteration of the Home of Misery. The house was more like three tiny houses connected together in a slum near the railway station, and Mohammed had rented out all but one small room to keep to himself. This was considerably less clean than the room in Bacos, but no matter: the men “seldom touched [the muddy floor] bottom.” They headed straight for the bed. Food was brought in to them by a “semi-slave” who “squatted in the passage while we ate.” To wash they stripped in a passage under the stair, “pour[ing] little tins of water over each other.” Though Mohammed was “awfully grave at first,” he rebounded the next day, wrestling and ragging with Morgan in the bed, playfully threatening, “‘Morgan I will hurt you—Edward I will kill you’ and we went on fooling until we fell asleep.”

Here there was no need to be coy. Mohammed gave him quite a tour of Mansourah by boat and carriage, introducing him to “Mr. Ganda and all [his] other friends.” The two men cheerfully planned Mohammed’s next step: marrying his brother’s widow and adopting their two-year-old child, of whom he was fond. Morgan told Florence: “I am rather in favour of it. He likes her and has often seen her, and she likes him and approves the scheme . . . She requires no dowry, and—being a widow—there will be no expense over the wedding.” Morgan prided himself on his pragmatism and knowledge of local customs, pointing out that he returned by third-class ticket, traveling like a proper Egyptian to spite British hauteur.

Mohammed’s wedding plans did not diminish their intimacy. While lying in bed they had another frank conversation about sex. “I theorised to him . . . rather deeply against R[espectability]—how afterwards I found it even more important than at the time. He said very gently ‘I quite understand’”—neatly accommodating both Forster’s sexual needs and his conviction that loving Mohammed meant hating the British. Now Forster had “the happiness of knowing that things are sound even on an intellectual basis.” In a parallel confidence, Mohammed told Morgan that he had blackmailed men over sexual advances when he was younger but abandoned this “low down” behavior over sympathy for his victims. He concluded, “All is exceptions in men as in English grammar.” Now they were both firmly on the same side.

“Sick of” Mansourah, Mohammed returned to Alexandria late in July to visit Morgan. He teased him about finding a pair of Morgan’s socks—distinguishable by the hole in their toe—which he had left by the latrine in the dark. On the fourth anniversary of the start of the war, while everyone
else was watching military exercises, they slipped off to the remote beach at Mex, beyond Ramleh, “bathing and sprawling among the rocks on the breakwater.” Mohammed had decided to marry a different woman, his widowed sister-in-law’s unmarried sister, Gamila. This was a “more romantic” choice, with “more probability of nice children in consequence—at least isn’t that so? . . . I hope he may yet live ‘as a happy man in my own paternal home.’”

But by the fall, with marriage plans advancing, Morgan became deeply worried about Mohammed’s health. Perhaps it was tuberculosis—Mohammed was coughing and had alarmingly lost weight—“his back looks hollow.” Perhaps he was only ground down by the sorrows of the summer. Morgan’s concerns were magnified by a new sense of urgency, for big political events augured an end to the war, and to their idyll. The British had already taken Jerusalem, and in October Damascus fell. Everywhere the Turks were being pushed back. Soon he must leave Egypt. As the wedding approached at the beginning of October, Morgan became seized with dread. He wrote Florence:

I think A’s [Adl’s] must be the saddest letter a man ever wrote on his wedding eve. The marriage disconcerts me more and more. It seems just a hygienic measure. He says he has read about love in books, but he just doesn’t know what it means. Now I wonder whether I should have dissociated with him. I was so anxious for him to have whatever might enlarge his life . . . I trust it is not this disease. I feel morbid as well as sad so I won’t go on . . . In my calmer moments I tell myself he merely hasn’t eaten enough, and that this desolating breakdown of spirits is natural in one who has suffered as he has. If he should die I shall cable to you as it will relieve me.

A week after the wedding, Morgan developed an exaggerated fear that telling Mohammed he would leave might actually kill him.

I have just been writing a ghastly letter to him . . . telling him it is unlikely I shall be in Egypt much longer. They are bound to move us. The breakup of Turkey leaves Alexandria nothing to do . . . I understand A’s psychology but not his physiology and I tremble lest it have at such a time a bad effect—the mixup of his marriage and illness and then me coming on the top.

To Morgan’s relief, marriage made Mohammed feel serene, happy, and manly, as if he “was scarcely in the world before.” And a doctor, paid for by Morgan, told him, “[h]e has not actually got consumption—is on the verge.” Even better, “Our relationship just doesn’t change. He wants me to stop with him. I shall once again before I go.”

In mid-November, just after the Armistice, Morgan traveled again to Mohammed’s home in Mansourah to meet his new wife. The arrangements were entirely unorthodox and to Morgan “the first twelve hours of my visit were as perfect as I have known.” The only disquieting fact was that Mohammed, though “fatter,” still felt ill. Morgan massaged him to sleep, but he awoke with terrible itching, and Gamila took over.

Morgan crashed the honeymoon by invitation, but the visit was a severe breach of local custom. The companionship of a European with a married man was unthinkable, and Morgan realized that Mohammed had made “more sacrifices for me than I ever had for him.” Gamila herself stayed out of the way except for “glimpses.” Morgan liked her a great deal, though the Egyptian form of marriage seemed as strange to him as (no doubt) Forster’s presence must have seemed to her. “She is like some tame and pretty country animal, and he will be kind to her as all, but the idea of companionship seems never to have entered his head. It is queer even to me, who know the East a little . . . At present he regards her alternately as a [play—scratched out] comfort and a financial anxiety.”

Mohammed had moved to the larger part of the house, much nicer, and with a capital loan of seventy pounds from Morgan, set up as a cotton broker, “buying cotton from the country people & selling it to the dealers.” A second visit in late January 1919 confirmed Morgan’s sense that Mohammed was happily settled in his marriage. This time he brought the gift of an inlaid wooden box to the stunned Gamila, and he and Mohammed took turns teasing her by exaggerating its cost. “God help the man—he must be mad,” she exclaimed, hearing one estimate. But neither man admitted to the lie: it was a shared secret. Choosing presents for Florence’s children—a hat, some small tin whistles—Mohammed offered a startling suggestion. “Why not take them costlier gifts? Why not take them a pair of Egyptians?” Morgan wished he could. Was it possible to transplant what they had grown together? It seemed unthinkable, an even greater fantasy than Maurice and Alec in the greenwood.

The wedding offered one advantage: now he could tell Lily about the marriage of a new Egyptian friend. Fit and happy, Mohammed followed Morgan back to Alexandria to see him off to the ship, promising to stay in touch. Three eventful years! As he sailed off, Morgan was officially separated from his Red Cross service. And though neither she nor her husband knew it yet, Gamila was already pregnant with a son they would name Morgan.

Three years later Morgan took up his pen to dedicate a little notebook:

To Mohammed el Adl,

who died at Mansourah shortly

after the 8th of May, 1922,

aged about twenty three: of consumption;

his mother, father, brother, and son

died before him: his daughter has

died since, his widow is said to

have married again:

and to my love for him.

August 5th 1922.

He gathered up ephemera: several small studio photographs of his lover, a ticket stub from their first tram ride together, and a pathetic little packet comprising all of Mohammed’s letters to him. Each day he walked alone at Chertsey Mead, the watermeadows a mile from Harnham, pausing at the entrance stile to slip on the ring Mohammed’s widow had sent him—a circle of gold set with a cheap red stone. Each night he slept with the ring under his pillow. “I am sure that I could have lived with him had he been in occupation and good health,” Morgan wrote to Florence. But now that dream was dead. Save for this little trove Mohammed was completely erased from the world.