Arctic Summer (38 page)

Another letter followed, just a few days later:

 

dear Morgan

I have got the money today from you and thank you very much for it

I am absolutely bad I don't go out I can't stand

I am very weak

How are you no more today

My love to you

My love to you

 

No signature, no name. And that was perhaps appropriate. Because as he stood reading the letter on the grass behind the house, hiding his face and his feelings from his mother, Mohammed was already dead.

 

* * *

 

It took a few days for the news to reach him. Morgan had accompanied Lily to the Isle of Wight so that she could visit her friends, the Misses Preston, and two letters followed him there on the same morning. One came from Gamila and one from Mohammed's brother-in-law. Neither of them spoke English and the messages had been written on their behalf by somebody else, in formal, stilted language, though the meaning was plain.

After everything—all the mental preparation, the foreknowledge—it was still a shock to see the fact written down. A small sound escaped Morgan; not quite a word, not quite a cry either. Then he had to prepare a public face, to cover any unruly emotion.

He read and re-read the letters in the coming days, as if they might yield up something different. They did contain other, extraneous information, not relevant to the main fact, but skewing it off centre. Mohammed had owned sixty pounds and three houses. He had left Morgan a ring, which would be sent in due course. Gamila and other family members were in need of money.

The news left vacancy in its wake. He didn't care about the ring. It was hard to feel anything, except bewilderment, not least about Mohammed's financial circumstances. Perhaps after all there'd been deception about money? The doubt was added to his general uncertainty, taking form in a dream that same night, in which Mohammed came out from behind a curtain, taller than he'd been in life. No words passed between them, but it was understood that his friend was asking for forgiveness, which Morgan didn't know how to give him.

A few numb days passed before the horrible moment when Mohammed's death finally became real. Still sequestered with the old women, he had gone for a walk by himself on the Downs. He was sunk in recollection of the last few weeks he'd spent with his friend in Helouan, a resort south of Cairo. Mohammed's health had briefly rallied and they had been blessed with mild weather, so that the interlude had been strangely peaceful. One afternoon, on an outing in the desert, the two of them had become separated, and he had heard his name being called.
Margan, Margan
. The slight mispronunciation made the memory vivid. Now, absurdly, he called out in reply. He was completely on his own and the three lonely syllables sank into the sky, the grass; no answer would ever come.

Over the months that followed, he dreamed of Mohammed on most nights. Perhaps he occupied all the sleeping hours because he'd been banished during the day. There was nobody Morgan could talk to about him, except for those—like Florence Barger or Goldie—who had only known him from a distance. There was something humiliating, too, in a display of grief when the relationship had been unwitnessed. No, this was to be a private suffering, like lust or literature, lived out mostly in his dreams.

In these nightly visitations, Morgan always knew that his friend was dead. But that didn't stop him from appearing, sometimes with a face or a body that wasn't quite his own. There was no romance in these encounters, although it always felt that one or both of them wanted something. The most unsettling dream came many months after Mohammed was gone, when he took the shape of a young man dressed in black, with a small but distinct moustache. He didn't resemble Mohammed physically, but the feeling that he evoked made his identity obvious. Morgan knew that he ought to follow him, but his dream-character was like his actual one and he delayed. He knew somehow that the young man was going to get on a train and there was urgency, but when he tried to catch up with him his legs were suddenly heavy. They ended in a bathroom, filled with other figures who departed, leaving them alone. Then they spoke, but seemingly about nothing, both of them standing naked, Mohammed smiling all the while.

Even this dream wasn't troubling sexually. The most disturbing aspect was waking up, and knowing that Mohammed never would. That was what was terrible: his friend couldn't even know that he was dead, precisely because he was dead. All that was left of him was a handful of rotten remains in the Mansourah burial ground.

In the beginning, he had seen himself as a speck looking for another speck—that was how death felt. But as the months passed, deeper emotions came to the surface. Morgan wasn't obsessed with Mohammed so much as oppressed by him: there was a pulse of pain, a deep ache inside him constantly.

 

* * *

 

There was refuge in writing. On a surface level, he was quite sociable, seeing a great many people and acquitting himself well in company, but an essential part of him had become deeply withdrawn, hardly noticing the outside world. This part, when it wasn't contemplating death, was happy now to retreat to the attic and to work. Alone for hours at a stretch, not even really in the attic any more, sunk into some crevice in his head.

Anguish obscures, but grief is limpid. It was in this state of curious clarity that Morgan returned at last to the moment in the caves on which he'd foundered almost nine years ago.

Nine years, stuck in the dark! Poor Miss Quested had twisted in every direction, trying to escape. At least she had finally acquired a name that became her, Adela, though the driest, most sticklike part of her remained Morgan. There had been times when he felt he couldn't abide her another second, while she struggled and writhed to get away from her attacker.

But whose hands were grabbing at her? At one moment they belonged to Aziz, at another to the Indian guide—but mostly, he suspected, they were his own, ineffectually shaking his creation. In any case, none of it convinced. The seizing of breasts, the choking and hitting, the strap of the field-glasses twisted around the throat—all of it was forced, willed rather than felt, the rhythms out of alignment. He had never been good at writing physical calamities, though the emotional ones came naturally.

It was better to start cleanly, he decided. He made a fair copy of what he'd roughed out before, throwing the old pages away. And tried again.

And was quite suddenly back there, in the Barabar caves, on that morning. Alone, enclosed in the rock. The darkness was complete and of a piece with the stony smoothness beneath his fingers. The echo seemed present, under the silence, and it took a physical form: somebody else was there, moving when he did, stopping when he did, mirroring him. A presence, an outline—no more substantial than that. But who was it? No way to know. The other remained a mystery.

Almost immediately, he was in despair again. More than anything, he would like to throw the scene to one side, but of course he couldn't do that. He was the author, after all; he had created the question and so it was his job to provide the answer. He couldn't leave the central event of the plot unexplained.

And then the thought came to him, so strongly that he spoke it aloud: “Why not?”

Why not let everything turn on a mystery?

Immediately, in a quiet way, he became excited. The moment he thought it he knew that the lack of an answer was, in fact, the answer. He had circled around the question for nine years, while all along the solution was almost underfoot. He'd been casting around, in search of the cornerstone of the scene, but he'd been looking in the wrong place.

Dry, earnest, ignorant Adela. All this time, she'd been in love, longing to be touched, and her longing had transmuted into violence. Imaginary or real or ghostly: let it remain mysterious. He wouldn't explain what had happened, because he didn't
know
what had happened. As a writer, he'd felt he had to provide answers, but India had reminded him that no answer would suffice. There had been so much he'd seen and heard in that country which had baffled him and which rational thinking couldn't penetrate. Mystery was at the heart of things there and it would be at the heart of his novel too. It was right that there should be an obscurity at the core of events, echoing the physical shape of the cave, around which the characters and events would dance. One could move outwards from that absence, suggesting infinite expansion.

He especially liked this idea, because it seemed to work like certain pieces of music did (Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, for example) which left him with the sensation that something was heard once the orchestra had stopped, something that hadn't actually been played. Now, in an extended clarity, he saw the way forward. He had wanted the story to open out, and suddenly it had, in the most Indian of ways, into wider questions about the universe. And when he took up his pen again to write, for the first time in years his hand trailed behind his head, trying to keep up.

Wearing Adela's skin now, which fitted him better than he liked, he burst out of the tunnel, into the blinding light. At the end of his recent visit he had gone travelling with Masood and one afternoon he'd tried, against all sensible advice, to climb up to a hilltop fort and had got himself into bad trouble with cactuses. It was horrible to fall headlong through them again now, lacerated and torn on their spines, his own frenzy entrapping him. He flailed and cried—but did break free in the end, into the open plain, the horizon remote. There was nothing to hold him back now and he ran, he ran.

Nor did his velocity slow in the coming days. Even when he had left the Barabar Hills behind and was back again behind the Civil Lines in Chandrapore, the words continued to braid and flow. He was writing quickly and decisively, sure of his footing, and more sure of where he was going.

“I have come unstuck with my novel,” he told Leonard, when they next saw each other, then immediately corrected himself. “That is, no, rather the opposite. I mean to say, I have
found
my path again. And I have you to thank, for urging me to persist.”

“It is moving again?”

“Yes, it is moving quickly.”

“I'm very glad.” Leonard eyed him shrewdly, sucking on his pipe. “Now perhaps you will let us publish it for you.”

Instantly, Morgan folded into himself. His writing, along with his grief, was in a private area of his life; he hardly spoke about it to anyone. He needed to keep the work secret, exactly like a certain kind of relationship. Talk of publication belonged to a future, theoretical world.

“I wish you well with the Hogarth Press,” he said.

“We pay generously, let me remind you. Ten pounds for every thousand words.”

But money bored Morgan.

“In any case, I am bound to Edward Arnold. I have been promising him my Indian novel for a decade now.”

“Well, not your Indian novel then,” Leonard said irritably. “Don't you have something else? What about this history of Alexandria you have been talking about for years?”

It still hadn't appeared. Morgan had signed an agreement with Whitehead Morris in Alexandria, and entered upon the most hopeless publishing process he'd yet experienced. The representative of the company in Egypt, the nervous, colourless Mr. Mann, seemed to have no idea what was involved in putting a book like this together. There had been endless back-and-forth discussion about maps and illustrations and, though he had finished the bulk of the text not long after his return, it had taken another three years before the proofs were ready. He had read from them aloud to Mohammed in Helouan, and they had sent his friend to sleep—perhaps their only purpose in the world so far.

“It will appear at the end of the year,” he said uncertainly. “That, anyway, is what they tell me.”

“Nothing else lying around?”

“Well, there is one possibility.”

“What might that be?”

“I have been wondering about collecting together all my Egyptian writings. You know, all the bits and pieces that I have done for the papers . . . ”

Leonard liked the idea. Among the occasional pieces that Morgan had cooked up for the
Egyptian Mail
—entertaining impressionistic vignettes about English life in Alexandria—there were twelve that immediately suggested themselves, which would need only to be slightly rearranged. The Hogarth Press would bring it out the following year; they would call it
Pharos and Pharillon
.

Very quickly, Morgan decided that he would dedicate the book to Mohammed. The gesture felt important to him. But he didn't have the courage to address him by name, which would have drawn questions and curiosity. So he chose a cryptic camouflage instead. The dedication was in Greek, to the god Hermes Psychopompos—the conductor of souls. Others might not understand, but he did. He liked the allusion to conducting, it was amusing, but there was a more serious meaning too. One soul could help another: Mohammed had done that for him, probably without meaning to, although the afterglow continued to radiate.

His long leave-taking of Mohammed had gone on inside him, out of sight. He didn't forget his
ever friend
. It had started to matter, though it hadn't in the beginning, that he get hold of the ring that had been promised him. Almost five months of letters and requests and money passed back and forth before he finally held it in his hand. Then he didn't know what to do with it. A plain, brass circle, glinting dully in his palm. There were so many associations with a ring like this, but all of them belonged to a Western world, a world of men and women, which neither he nor Mohammed were part of. What did the ring
signify
?

Nothing, perhaps. It was merely an object. He owned only two other items that had belonged to Mohammed, both given as gifts when he'd first left Egypt—his conductor's whistle and a pencil. He sometimes wore the whistle around his neck, where it hung uselessly. Nor could he do much with the pencil. But he took comfort in these little keepsakes, if only because they had once touched the living skin of his friend.