Arctic Summer (40 page)

 

* * *

 

It was five months before the book appeared, in which life lost its central impetus. There was a great deal of typing to be done, and the proofs to be attended to. But the time for changing one's mind was almost behind him; the deed was nearly irrevocable.

In this abeyance, Aunt Laura died. He had never been close to her, but he was sorry she'd gone. She had been his only surviving link with his father—or perhaps that was her house, West Hackhurst, the sole commission his father had completed in his short career as an architect. Aunt Laura had lived there for forty-six years, and now she left the lease to Morgan in her will.

This bequest caused great turmoil in their household. Lily and Morgan had only recently purchased Harnham, the Weybridge house, which till then they'd been renting. Now they had to wrestle with the prospect of selling it again and making a big upsetting move.

Lily was very resistant. Although she was disturbed at Harnham by the noise of children and dogs, she was more disturbed by the idea of West Hackhurst.

“She was always unfriendly to me,” she told Morgan. “I was always beneath her. I don't need her charity now.”

“She was very sweet to you in the last months.”

“Only because she'd lost her mind. It hardly compensates.”

It was true: Aunt Laura had always regarded his mother as an unfit addition to their family, because of lowly and suspect origins. So there had been relentless sneering and sniping from the upper ramparts of class, and it was only when she'd become addled towards the end that Aunt Laura had eventually softened. But Morgan also knew that this wasn't the real reason for Lily's reluctance.

The move signified something conclusive in her life. A last phase, a coming home to rest. His mother was seventy years old now. There wasn't much energy for fresh starts, new beginnings. He had his doubts about whether West Hackhurst would be as final as she feared—there were only thirteen years of the lease still to run—but he understood the symbolism involved. He steeled himself for a long period of dithering ahead, in which Lily wavered between one option and another, and talked about keeping up two houses.

For himself, he recognised that a different period in his life was opening up. Although his mother would always be in charge, he was a householder at last. This position of authority corresponded with a solid status in his professional career that had recently taken shape around him. He wasn't sure exactly how, but there was a renewed air of respect about his name, which came at the same time as his book.

A Passage to India
appeared in June. It was always a peculiar moment when he held a published product in his hand. What had been, till then, a mental state or a bodily condition had somehow been transformed into an object. There had been several moments recently when other people had spoken about it, using its title, which still sounded odd to his ear, and he had had to remind himself that he, Edward Morgan Forster, had created it. Now it had actually entered the world, multiplied and disseminated far beyond its source, and had taken on a separate life of its own.

Until now, he had been more ashamed of it than anything else. The struggle to get it written, to say nothing of the nine-year hiatus while he'd been stuck, had marked him with the feeling of failure. Nothing worthwhile could have emerged so tortuously. But almost immediately after it appeared, his feelings changed. Maybe it was only defensiveness, but every word of it belonged indisputably to him. The writhings and convolutions of spirit that had attended its birth now only added to its value. Nothing less would have done!

His pride was boosted by reviews. The critical tone was laudatory—and not only from the newspapers. Among his friends, almost everyone seemed to be reading it, and the response was wonderful. There was none of the backstage whispering that had hurt him before, and which had seemed directed more at the
idea
of his writing than at the books themselves. People had got used to the notion that E. M. Forster was a novelist—or perhaps it had taken this long for him to accept it himself.

Very rapidly, it became clear that he had done something marvellous. There would be dissenters—there always were—but the general agreement was that he had quietly triumphed. Everybody had finally given up on expecting anything new, and then he had slipped it out. He had written a great book, apparently, a masterpiece: the best of his career. And the timing, with questions of Indian independence so much in the air, couldn't have been better.

What pleased him most about the book, however, was something he couldn't publicly declare. He had eventually decided on the wording of the dedication, after wrestling with it for weeks.
To Syed Ross Masood and to the seventeen years of our friendship
. In the end, the simple formulation made him happy, but he was happier still at the thought of their two names, joined together in this way, proceeding forth from Weybridge into the wider world. People he had never met would know that he had an Indian friend who had been part of his life for a long time.

Seventeen years! He'd had to do the calculation, and been a little unnerved by it. On one hand, Masood was so much an element of his emotional being that he seemed always to have been present. On the other, it felt like just last week that he had come up the front steps, dark and strange and handsome, for his first Latin lesson. Masood had been a very young man then, and now he was entering his middle years, a husband and a father, becoming stout and soft. Their friendship had once promised a great deal, but it had let Morgan down and made him sad. He couldn't ignore that, but there were also times when the longevity of this affection cast a glow over the rest of his life. Not much had happened between them, it was true, but they had certainly loved one another, and that wasn't nothing. No, it was very far from nothing, even though there was no way to hold it or measure it and—when you looked straight at the place—there did seem, after all, to be nothing there.

Of course, it was typical of Masood that he managed to be both effusive and laconic about the book. He told Morgan that it was magnificent, and then barely referred to it again. No doubt he was happy to have been honoured in that way, but at the same time it was an
English
honour, happening far away from real life, which was in India. Or so Morgan surmised. As usual, there wasn't much to go on, except the sparse communications that made their desultory way from Hyderabad.

And it was also typical of Masood that, on the legal points where Morgan had relied on him for guidance, he had been wrong. The case, it turned out, would
not
have been held in such a small, provincial court. Masood had told him otherwise. On this and other aspects of Indian life, not all to do with the law, his friend might have helped him, but did not. It was most frustrating.

Now that the book was in print, everybody was free to have their say, and naturally the admonishments and corrections began to fly. Most were of a minor nature, though even these pricked sharply. Morgan had been wrong about the six-spot beetle, which, instead of being deadly, was utterly harmless. References to the ‘Burra Sahib' among the English community were quite wrongly used. Dog carts and Lieutenant-Governors were outdated. These sorts of mistakes were humiliating, even though they were small and forgivable. Much harder to deal with, because more significant, was the suggestion that he had misrepresented the English in India.

Naturally, it didn't come as a surprise. He'd been braced for accusations of this kind. But the outrage was still unsettling. Certain shrill denunciations were easy to dismiss and when Rupert Smith wrote to him in a fury, breaking off their friendship, he knew he wouldn't feel the loss too keenly. Far more worrisome were the letters from retired Civil Service officials who explained in reasoned tones that he didn't know his subject. He was merely a visitor who had never actually
lived
in India; he had spent time with Indians, it was obvious, but hadn't extended the same courtesy to the British out there.

He was perturbed at first by these charges, because they might contain some truth. He'd been among the English in India, but he'd disliked most of them so intensely that he might not have seen them accurately. But as he cast his mind back to some of the conversations he'd had, some of the things he'd witnessed, his own outrage stiffened inside him. He had written what he'd perceived, as honestly as he could, and if that made his judgements seem unfair, the perceptions still remained. To be honest and to be fair were not always the same thing.

 

* * *

 

But denunciation was by far the smallest part of what came his way, and in any case he'd always dealt well with it. What he had never coped with was approbation, and it was pouring down on him abundantly. Without especially wanting to be either, he found himself suddenly both famous and wealthy.

It was pleasant, and also not. He didn't want the letters, the excitement, the attention; yet it was hard not to feel amplified by them, into something more than one was. It gave enjoyment, but left discomfort in its wake.

Quite astonishingly, he was recognised by people he'd never met. One such incident, which occurred around now, unsettled him deeply. He was visiting London and had been taking afternoon tea in the Lyons Corner House in the Strand, when he sensed the awareness of an older woman on the other side of the room. She was with a slightly younger companion, who seemed oblivious, but across the crowded aisle her glances kept returning to him. It wasn't displeasing, and so it didn't happen entirely by accident that he steered a course past their table as he exited, then paused behind a convenient pillar while he searched his pockets for his spectacles.

“I do believe,” he heard the older woman declare, “that that was Mr. E. M. Forster.”

“Who?” her companion enquired.

“The author, my dear.
A Passage to India
. You must have heard.”

“Oh,
yes
. But where is he?”

“He has gone now. You were not observing.”

“No,” the younger lady admitted sadly. He could sense her disappointment. “I would have liked to see him.”

“He was not well dressed. His trousers are a few inches too short. But his book is remarkable. So everyone tells me. I intend to read it very soon.”

“I shall certainly read it too. Now that . . . now that I've seen him.”

“But you didn't,” the other reminded her. “
I
did. You were too much absorbed in your sandwich. Is this butter quite fresh, do you think . . . ?”

Their voices disappeared for a moment into the general haze of conversation and Morgan was about to depart, when a new observation arrested him. One of the women—he couldn't tell which—said distinctly, “I have heard that his life is unhappy.”

“Really?”

“Well, lonely. He lives with his mother, you know. There has never been a wife. And he is not a young man any longer.”

“How sad. He isn't an adventurous sort?”

“That is it, my dear. He is a timid soul. They say he hasn't really lived at all, except in his mind.”

“Still. That is something. He has imagination, at least. He has written a wonderful novel.”

“Yes. I really must read it.” And their voices sank again into the background noise, which may only have been roaring in his head.

The subject of this discussion caught sight of himself now, as they might have seen him, in a gilt-edged mirror on the opposite wall: a curious, contorted figure, one leg wrapped around the other, right hand clasped in the left, tousled head tilted to the side. The angle of the light wiped out the surrounding room, so that he seemed to be standing alone in the middle of an immense whiteness. A snowy, frozen landscape, on which the sun was nevertheless pouring down. Arctic summer: nothing moving, nothing alive, and yet the sky was open.

That isn't me
, he thought, but in fact it was. Everything about this man was wrong. But the reflection would never show the truth, which he wanted to shout aloud.
Do you know what I have made
, he would ask them,
out of almost nothing? I have performed miracles! I have turned water into wine, I have seen angels dancing on the head of a pin!

But standing before the two ladies—whose powdered, astonished faces resembled those of the women who had tended him all his life—he was suddenly at a loss. He was on the verge of some significant action, but what it should be eluded him. He'd felt that he might shout, but the voice that emerged was very small.

“I have loved,” he told them. “That is, I mean to say,
lived
. In my own way.”

There seemed nothing more to add. A few crumbs had appended themselves to the mouth of the older lady, trembling in the silence that followed. Or perhaps it was Morgan who trembled. In any event, things shook while they stood still.

Until he turned and did truly exit this time, spoiling the effect by stumbling on the raised edge of a carpet.

So terrible or trivial was the memory of this incident that he mentioned it to nobody. Not even to the pages of his diary, which had heard worse confessions. Though his life had become very full, and it was possible he simply didn't have the time.

 

* * *

 

He would return to India one more time, in 1945, at the age of sixty-six. His life had entirely changed and this visit in no way resembled the previous two. On the earlier occasions he had been relatively unknown, especially in these parts, a private figure stopping with friends who often belonged to what in those days was called Second Society. But he was a famous author now, sought out by the loftier echelons of British India. He dined with the Viceroy and other high officials. He was in the country for three months, at the invitation of PEN, the international writers' organisation, and he took part in conferences, delivered speeches and radio addresses, signed autographs for admirers. His opinion was sought on matters not always related to writing.