Arctic Summer E-Book

Damon Galgut

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

FROM THE BOOKER PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR OF THE PROMISE Shortlisted for the 2015 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction Shortlisted for the 2015 Sunday Times Barry Ronge Fiction Prize Shortlisted for the 2015 University of Johannesburg English Literary Award Nominated for the 2014 Folio Prize In 1912, the SS Birmingham approaches India. On board is Morgan Forster, novelist and man of letters, who is embarking on a journey of discovery. As Morgan stands on deck, the promise of a strange new future begins to take shape before his eyes. The seeds of a story start to gather at the corner of his mind: a sense of impending menace, lust in close confines, under a hot, empty sky. It will be another twelve years, and a second time spent in India, before A Passage to India, E. M. Forster's great work of literature, is published. During these years, Morgan will come to a profound understanding of himself as a man, and of the infinite subtleties and complexity of human nature, bringing these great insights to bear in his remarkable novel. At once a fictional exploration of the life and times of one of Britain's finest novelists, his struggle to find a way of living and being, and a stunningly vivid evocation of the mysterious alchemy of the creative process, Arctic Summer is a literary masterpiece, by one of the finest writers of his generation.

Leseprobe

ARCTICSUMMER

First published in hardback in Great Britain in 2014 by Atlantic Books,an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Damon Galgut, 2014

The moral right of Damon Galgut to be identified as the author ofthis work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by anymeans, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and theabove publisher of this book.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright-holders.The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectifyany mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

The permissions to quote from material contained on pp. 353–355form part of this copyright page.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Hardback ISBN: 978 0 85789 718 3Trade paperback ISBN: 978 0 85789 719 0E-book ISBN: 978 1 78239 279 8

Printed in Great Britain.

Atlantic Booksan imprint of Atlantic Books LtdOrmond House26–27 Boswell StreetLondon WC1N 3JZwww.atlantic-books.co.uk

ToRiyaz Ahmad Mirand to the fourteen yearsof our friendship

“Orgies are so important, and they are thingsone knows nothing about”

E.M. Forster to P.N. Furbank, 1953

Contents

Chapter One

Searight

Chapter Two

Masood

Chapter Three

India

Chapter Four

Carpenter

Chapter Five

Mohammed

Chapter Six

Bapu Sahib

Chapter Seven

A Passage to India

Acknowledgements

A Note on the Author

CHAPTER ONE

SEARIGHT

IN October of 1912, the SS City of Birmingham was travelling through the Red Sea, midway on her journey to India, when two men found themselves together on the forward deck. Each had come there separately, hoping to escape a concert that some of the other passengers were organising, but they were slightly acquainted by now and not unhappy to have company. It was the middle of the afternoon. They were sitting in a spot that offered sun and shade, as well as seclusion from the wind. Both carried books with them, which they politely set aside when they began to speak.

The first man, Morgan Forster, was thirty-three years of age and had come to think of himself as a writer. The recent publication of his fourth novel had been so successful that he felt financially able to make this journey. The six months that he planned to be away marked his first departure from Europe, and only his second extended absence from his mother. The other man was an army officer, returning to where he was stationed on the North-West Frontier. He was a few years younger than Morgan, a handsome fellow with backswept golden hair and numerous white teeth. His name was Kenneth Searight.

The two men had conversed a few times before and Morgan had found himself liking Searight, though he hadn’t expected to. The ship was full of military types and their ghastly wives, but this man was different. For one thing, he was travelling alone. For another, Morgan had seen him behave with kindness towards the single Indian passenger on board, a kindness that was otherwise in short supply, and he had been touched by it. These small signs suggested they might have more in common than he had at first supposed.

Although he had only come aboard a week ago, Morgan was beginning to feel that he had been on the ship for too long. He was travelling with three friends, but even their company sometimes wore thin. His thoughts strayed constantly outwards, into the encircling sea. He would pace the deck for hours at a stretch, or sit at the rail, lost in aimless reverie over the flying fish that leaped at the bow, or the other creatures – jellyfish, sharks, dolphins – that sometimes showed themselves. He could sink very deep at moments like these. Once he had seen tracts of scarlet, billowing in the swell, which he was told were fish spawn, waiting to hatch. Life that wasn’t human life, maturing and breaking out and expending itself, in a medium that wasn’t human either.

He was stuck with the humans, however. The same set of faces awaited him each day. The ship was like a tiny piece of England, Tunbridge Wells in particular, that had broken off and been set in motion. For some reason, perhaps because they spoke more, the women were hardest to deal with. They assumed that he shared their feelings, when most of the time he did not. One of them, a young lady in search of a husband, had made a couple of sidling approaches, till his stony face repelled her.

But it was the casual vilenesses, flung out in airy asides at the dining table, that upset him most. He had set some of these down in his diary and brooded on them afterwards. On one occasion a matronly woman, who had been a nurse in the Bhopal Purdahs, had lectured him between courses on how deplorable Mohammedan home life was. And if English children stopped in India, they learned to speak like halfcastes, which was such a stigma. “And this young Indian man who’s on board,” she added in a low voice. “Well, he’s a Mohammedan, isn’t he? He has been to public school in England, but has it improved him? He thinks he’s one of us, but of course he never will be.”

The Indian man in question, whose name he could never quite remember, had some acquaintances in common with Morgan, but he was a trying fellow whose company was unrewarding. Morgan had also begun to avoid him lately, but he knew that his table-companion meant something different by her aversion, and he disliked her for it. Though she was not in any way unusual: almost every other passenger treated the poor man with polite contempt. Only the day before, one of the army wives, a Mrs Turton, had remarked, “They tell me that young Indian’s lonely. Well, he ought to be. They won’t let us know their wives, why should we know them? If we’re pleasant to them, they only despise us.” Morgan had wanted to reply, but held off, and felt bad about it afterwards.

So this chance encounter with the golden young officer held a tinge of promise in it. Something about Kenneth Searight – though it was hard to say what – did not belong in uniform, or with his air of impeccable politeness.

To begin with, they talked in a desultory way about the voyage. They had recently passed through the Suez Canal and the experience, for Morgan, had been curiously reminiscent of a picture gallery. And he had been disappointed by Port Said: it was, so everyone had told him, one’s first vision of the East, yet it had none of the smell and vibrancy and colour he’d been expecting. There were no minarets and only a single dome, and the statue of de Lesseps, despite pointing commandingly towards the canal, appeared to be holding a string of sausages in his other hand. He had gone ashore, of course, and some of the Arabs were beautiful, but they had spoiled it by trying to sell him smutty postcards. (“Do you wa’ to see something filthy? Noah? Well, perhaps after tea.”) All in all, it hadn’t been an uplifting experience.

“Except for the coaling barge,” Searight said.

“Yes,” Morgan answered. “Except for that.” The memory of the barge came back strongly to him. More specifically, it was the figures on top that continued to trouble him: black with coal-dust, they had woken from a death-like torpor into a frenzy of activity, singing and squabbling as they carried their baskets on board. One of these figures, of indeterminate age and sex, had stood by the plankway after dark, holding a lamp, and the image, with its deep shadows and contrasting yellow glow, had seemed both hopeful and frightening to him.

Searight had also been there, Morgan remembered now; they had been standing close to one another at the rail, watching the scene. Although they had not yet met or spoken, the moment seemed in retrospect like a kind of complicity.

They began to speak now about their plans after landing at Bombay. They agreed they might travel as far as Agra together, after which Searight would head off towards Lahore and Morgan to Aligarh.

“You are staying with a friend there?”

“Yes,” Morgan said, and then dared to admit, “He’s a native.”

“Ah,” Searight said. “I thought that might be the case. I’m glad to hear it, very glad to hear it. You won’t learn anything about India unless you mingle with the Indians, whatever anyone else might tell you. I myself have been close to many of them. Ah, yes. Very close.”

“I can’t imagine all your brother officers approve.”

“There is more understanding than you might think, but of course you have to be careful. It’s a matter of knowing your time and place.” He laughed shortly. “Is your friend a Hindu?”

“He’s a Mohammedan, in fact.”

“Ah, yes. The Mohammedans. People think of the Hindus as sensual, because of all the decadent religious imagery. On the other hand, the Mohammedans are People of the Book, just like us. Well, I can tell you, the Pathans are a breed of young savages, and I intend to make friends with many of them. It’s one of the delights of being transferred to Peshawar. I used to be in Bengal, you know, in Darjeeling, and I had a ripping time there. But I’m looking forward to the future.”

Morgan had the uneasy feeling that the topic had slid away from him and that they were talking about different things. Nevertheless, he said, “So am I.”

“You’re looking forward to seeing your friend?”

“Very much.”

“You’ve been missing him? How well I know this feeling, how well. And then I’m driven to seek consolation elsewhere. Fortunately one doesn’t have to look far, not in India. More difficult in England, as you know.”

“What is?”

“Consolation.” He looked meaningfully at Morgan. “I did meet a horse guard in Hyde Park. Just a couple of weeks ago.”

Alerted and alarmed by the turn the conversation had taken, Morgan decided to make a non-committal noise in his throat and to stare out at the water. Searight had turned towards him in his chair, his whole attitude confidential. After a pause, he began to speak about the heat. This seemed like a new topic, but it grew stealthily out of the preceding one. Over the last few days the temperature had risen dramatically; many of the passengers had taken to sleeping on deck. And had Morgan noticed how some of the men were wearing short pants? The older ones should not be allowed to do so, Searight said, their legs were not attractive. Very few Englishmen had attractive legs, it had something to do with their knees. But in India there were a great many attractive legs. Legs were everywhere on display, as Morgan would see. Flesh was generally more visible in India than at home; that was how they did things out there.

Morgan thought it best not to answer, but to wait and see what happened next.

Eventually Searight sighed and murmured, “I blame it on the heat.”

“Yes,” Morgan said carefully.

“One thing leads to another. It undoes people. I’ve seen it over and over. People go out there, to India, I mean, and they start behaving as they never would in England. I blame it on the heat.”

“I shall wear my sola topi.”

“It will not protect you.”

“I assure you, it’s of the finest quality—”

“No doubt. But it will not save you from yourself.” Something in Searight’s face had imperceptibly altered; his expression had become a little coarse and sensual.

“I’m not quite sure I follow you.”

“Oh, I think you do.”

At this moment there was a flurry of sound from deep inside the ship, a faint uproar of music and voices, eclipsed by the rush of water at the bow – a reminder of the normal world close by. Morgan looked around quickly, to be sure they were alone. “Perhaps we had better go and get ready for dinner,” he said.

Before he could move, Searight leaned over and handed him the book he’d been holding on his lap. Morgan had barely glanced at it, assuming it to be a volume of poems like the one he himself was reading. But the fat bound notebook, green in colour, was something altogether more personal. It bore the mysterious word Paidikion on its front cover, and the many pages inside were filled with handwriting instead of print.

Though on the particular page that Searight’s forefinger held open, there seemed to be, after all, a poem.

      … I passedFrom sensuous Bengal to fierce PeshawarAn Asiatic stronghold where each flowerOf boyhood planted in its restless soilIs – ipso facto – ready to despoil(or to be despoiled by) someone else…

“Oh, dear me,” Morgan said. “What is this?”

“It is the story of my life, in verse.”

“You wrote this?”

      … the yarnIndeed so has it that the young PathanThinks it peculiar if he would passHim by without some reference to his arse.Each boy of certain age will let on hireHis charms to indiscriminate desire,To wholesome buggery and perverse letches…

“I blame it on the heat,” Searight said, and laughed noisily.

* * *

He repeated the conversation breathlessly to Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson in their cramped cabin that evening while they dressed for dinner. Even in recollection, a shock quivered through him and his fingers slipped on his buttons. It was amazing, he told Goldie; it was remarkable. To have spoken in that way to a near-stranger, to have exposed oneself so recklessly! It hadn’t been a confession – there was no shame behind it. That was the truly astonishing thing: Searight appeared to be almost proud of who and what he was.

The two men glanced at each other in silence. Then Goldie enquired delicately, “And did he swear you to secrecy?”

“No. I think he took it for granted.”

“Why did he believe that you wouldn’t…?”

“I don’t know.”

“And did you talk about yourself to him in the same open way?”

“Not at all. He didn’t seem very interested in me. I told him a little about my home life and he changed the subject.”

“Ah,” Goldie said. His tone was commiserative, but his relief was obvious.

This was the way the two of them usually communicated, in little gusts of shared enthusiasm, followed by murmurous bouts of allusion. Much passed between them without being explicitly stated. They had known one another for some years now, since Morgan had been a student at King’s, while Goldie was a don, though their friendship had been slow to flower and had only taken form more recently, once Morgan had left Cambridge behind. They were both fussy, worried men, elderly before their time, in whom a spinsterish quality was evident. Both of them had experienced love, but from afar and unrequitedly.

They understood one another well and therefore Morgan knew, though Goldie didn’t say it aloud, that the older man mistrusted Searight. He thought that anyone so indiscreet could be dangerous. Goldie came from a generation where discretion was the first line of defence and any dropping of one’s guard could lead to catastrophe. Oscar Wilde had gone to prison only seventeen years before.

Morgan, nearly two decades younger, was slightly less cautious, but only in theory. In practice, he was not nearly so afraid of the State as he was of his mother. He could not refer to his condition, even in his own mind, with too direct a term; he spoke of it obliquely, as being in a minority. He himself was a solitary. At Cambridge, among his own circle, the question was discussed, though from an angle, and safely abstracted. One could be forgiven for believing it was a matter of talking, not doing. As long as it remained in the realm of words, no crime had been committed. But even words could be dangerous.

* * *

Over the next few days, Morgan watched Searight carefully and observed that his life was broken into two. In his military existence he put on a public face, and in this area he was to all appearances vigorous and masculine. He was a member of the Queen’s Own Royal West Kent Regiment, a fine, upstanding defender of the Realm; he could laugh and drink with his fellow officers in a hearty, backslapping way; he was popular and well respected, although he avoided the company of the women on board. That was one half of him – but of course there was another secret side, which Morgan had already seen.

This aspect of Searight’s nature – which could be said to be his true character – he revealed only to those he trusted. But when the camouflage came off, it came off completely. That first conversation amazed Morgan, but it was followed by others soon afterwards. The very next day he took Goldie to the same part of the deck to meet his new friend, and almost immediately they were discussing things that Morgan had never voiced before, or only to his journal, and then cryptically.

A collection of von Gloeden photographs, for example, well worn despite careful handling. Morgan had seen these images before, but in a context that had required sober, aesthetic appreciation. That wasn’t the case now. In Searight’s hand, the sullen Sicilian youths, lolling among ruins and statuary, took on a carnal frankness. His voice became husky with awe on the subject of youthful male beauty. Flesh and feathery moustaches and defiant yet vulnerable eyes… “And look at his sultry cock, angled to the left at about forty-five degrees. It’s a real beauty. To say nothing of the testicles, which are spectacular, especially the one on the right.” In his telling, even the most tawdry encounter became luminous, operatic. He read a short story aloud to Morgan and Goldie, one he’d written himself, that made his own breathing become shallow and tortured. He let them peruse more of his epic autobiographical poem, which he called The Furnace. And he showed them several pages at the back of the green notebook that were filled with cryptic columns of numbers, before explaining in an undertone that they represented a tally of his sexual conquests thus far, all with statistical details of date, place, age, how many meetings and frequency of climax. These encounters were mostly with boys and young men, ranging in age from thirteen to twenty-eight, a great many of them Indian. Almost forty so far.

Almost forty! Morgan himself had never had a lover, not one. The world of Eros remained a flickering internal pageant, always with him, yet always out of reach. It had been only three years before that Morgan had fully understood how copulation between men and women actually worked, and his mind had flinched in amazement. His mother and father engaging in such physicality to produce him: it was almost unthinkable. (But must have happened, at least twice.) His father had died when Morgan was not yet two, and when he contemplated sex in any form it was the image of his mother, Lily – widowed, middle-aged, perpetually unhappy – that rose before him, to intervene. As she did now.

But he had left his mother behind in Italy, with her friend, Mrs Mawe, for company. He was free of her, at least for a little time, and determined to make use of the freedom. Yet now he felt hopeless, looking at Searight across a great dividing distance. He had the sense that the other man’s sexual practices involved tastes and behaviours that would shock him deeply, if he only knew the details, yet still he envied him the ability to translate yearning into deed. So much sex, so many bodies colliding! Morgan felt flushed and troubled by the images that came to mind. How had Searight done it? How had he set each seduction in motion, how had he known the right words to speak, the right gestures to make?

Perhaps there was a talent to it, a gift that Morgan simply did not have. Yet now he saw that there was another way to be in the world, a way to live more fully. Once he had realised this, nothing looked quite the same again. Anyone he knew could be leading an invisible, double life; every conversation could have a second meaning.

When, for example, on one of the nights following, he passed Searight in earnest colloquy with the little Indian passenger, he suddenly saw them differently. He had thought of it before as kindness, but he didn’t think of it that way any more. They were standing close together, one of Searight’s hands pressed gently to the other man’s shoulder, speaking in low voices. They might have been discussing the weather, or the progress of the ship – but they might also have been talking about something else altogether.

* * *

As he pondered it now, Morgan wondered whether it wasn’t his travelling companions who had given Searight his cue. Only he and Goldie were solitaries, but all four of them were unusual, and they had enjoyed playing up their differences from the other passengers on board. And perhaps their oddness had been a kind of signal to Searight.

Theirs was a happy group and it was something of a happy chance that they were journeying together now. Goldie had received a travelling fellowship and had decided to use it to visit India and China. He came in a spirit of social enquiry, wishing to catalogue jails and temples and hospitals, and thereby to understand moral progress in foreign places. Bob Trevelyan (known to most as Bob Trevy) had resolved at the same time that this might be a good moment to visit the East, without the hindrance of wife and children. Gordon Luce, a more distant acquaintance from King’s, was passing through Bombay en route to a posting in Burma. And Morgan – well, Morgan was travelling in order to see his Indian friend again.

In the eyes of the other passengers, they were a peculiar lot. Certainly they were aware of their eccentricity and had not shrunk from it. At mealtimes they took pleasure in discussing important classical questions in loud voices, such as the relative merits of Tolstoy versus Dostoevsky, or whether Nero had shown any theatrical talent in the staging of his circuses. To the officers and civil servants and non-official Europeans who made up the bulk of the passengers, the antics of these giggling intellectuals were cause for suspicion. Once, when all four of them were lined up, drinking tea, a soldier sitting opposite them had collapsed in laughter. They appeared to belong, but did not, quite. They had no wives with them, and they did not participate in deck games or fancy dress balls. Their irony was construed as a lack of seriousness. So they had become known as the Professors, and sometimes as the Salon, in tones that mixed familiarity with malice.

Over the days that followed, Searight became an honorary member of the Salon, sitting with them at mealtimes and strolling with them on the deck. After an initial wariness, all of them decided that they liked him. Under the bluff military exterior, a poetic and romantic soul began to show itself. He was knowledgeable and charming and witty, easy to be near. His manner was generous, and he had led a highly interesting life, which he conveyed in a succession of amusing anecdotes, often told at his own expense, in a rich baritone voice that was somehow public and confiding at the same time. Soon he was insisting that they come up to visit him at the Frontier, and they were agreeing that it was an excellent idea. He would take them on a picnic to the Khyber Pass, he said; he would show them the edge of the Empire.

But for the moment there was still the remainder of the journey on the ship, the sea wide and bright around them. By now there was a general air of excitement and anticipation, which kept many of the passengers at the rail, glaring ahead at the horizon in the hope that it would yield up something solid. The first visitation came in the form of a pair of yellow butterflies, flittering around the deck. Morgan was thrilled, but the butterflies disappeared, and no land took their place.

The next morning Bob Trevy woke him with the news that India was visible. All four of them assembled in time to watch the dark line ahead of them break up into what it actually was: a bank of moody clouds in the distance. But later in the morning the horizon did thicken incontrovertibly into a graph of curious red hills, apparently devoid of life. For some reason, Morgan thought of Italy. He had already, at an earlier time, noticed an analogy between the shapes of southern Europe and Asia – three peninsulas, with a major range of mountains at the head of the middle one, and Sicily standing in for Ceylon – but this was an Italy he didn’t quite recognise, as though it were a place seen in a dream, hinting at menace.

Then there was the arrival, with its predictable flurry and tedium, the last unpleasant meal among the same unpleasant people, before they were finally rowed ashore. As they toiled towards land, Morgan, who was sitting with Goldie at the rear of the little boat, saw Searight at the front, next to the Indian passenger, and suddenly an unsettling memory came back to him.

“I wonder why Searight wanted to kill him,” he said.

“What?” Goldie said. “Whatever do you mean?”

He reminded Goldie of the incident, which had occurred nearly two weeks before, at Port Said. A strange story had gone around the ship: the Indian had reported his cabin-mate to the steward for wanting to throw him overboard, but then the two of them had made it up and became the best of friends again. Morgan hadn’t thought about it much at the time, but now it had returned to him, in the shape of this troubling question.

Goldie blinked in confusion. “Oh, but you’re mistaken,” he said. “That wasn’t Searight.”

“No?”

“No, certainly not. It was Searight who told the story to me.”

“Of course,” Morgan said, suddenly very embarrassed. “I don’t know what I was thinking.”

It was a leap of logic to assume that Searight was sharing a cabin with the Indian; such an arrangement was unlikely. Morgan didn’t know how the idea had come to him. But afterwards, even when he knew it was untrue, he continued to be fascinated by what he’d imagined. Lust in close confines, under a hot, empty sky, breeding dreams of murder: he sensed the beginnings of a story.

CHAPTER TWO

MASOOD

THE voyage to India had begun several years before, and on very dry land. In November of 1906, Morgan and his mother had been living in Weybridge, Surrey, for just over two years, when one of their neighbours, Mrs Morison, who was friendly with the Forsters, made an unusual enquiry. Did Lily know of anybody who might be able to act as a Latin tutor to a young Indian man who was about to go up to Oxford?

“I wondered, dear,” Lily enquired, “whether you might have any interest…?”

“Certainly,” Morgan said immediately. He had taught Latin at the Working Men’s College in London for the past couple of years, but his curiosity ran deeper than his competence. Who was this young man from the other side of the world, what was he doing in suburban England?

“Well, it’s a complicated story,” his mother told him. “The young man is the Morisons’ ward. You know that Theodore Morison was the Principal of the Mohammedan Anglo-Oriental College in, I forget where in India…”

“Aligarh, I believe.”

“Yes. It seems that his grandfather was the founder of the college, so he is from a very good background.”

“No doubt. But how did he come to be the Morisons’ ward?”

“I am not exactly sure of that. You will have to ask him yourself. Mrs Morison did explain it, but the story was unclear. They refer to him as their son.”

“But the Morisons have a son.”

“Well, it seems they have two.” And Lily, who had been in a perfectly good humour till then, became unaccountably fretful and began calling peevishly for the maid, so that Morgan thought it best to retire to the piano room to practise his Beethoven.

The Indian man stayed with him, however, in the form of a mystery. A small mystery, to be sure, but with sufficient colour to stand out against the surrounding drabness. Since coming down from Cambridge five years before, he had felt himself gradually losing his way. The bright and interesting world remained, but for the most part he had to go out and visit it. Rarely did it come to visit him; much less with an appointment, and a desire to brush up on its Latin.

On the day arranged, Morgan hovered anxiously around the front door half an hour before the time. Nevertheless, his pupil was late. Syed Ross Masood was tall and broad and strikingly handsome, appearing far older than his seventeen years. His smiling face, with its luxuriant moustache and sad brown eyes, looked down on Morgan from what felt, on that first morning, like a remote height.

They had shaken hands in greeting, but Masood wouldn’t release his grip. He announced solemnly, with a tone of accusation, “You are a writer. You have published a book.”

Morgan acknowledged that the second statement was true. He had published a novel the year before, which had generally been well received, and he had two others upstairs in different stages of undress. Nevertheless, the idea of being a writer felt like an ill-fitting suit on him, which he kept trying to shrug into, or out of.

“That is a fine, a very fine thing. It is one of the noble arts, perhaps the most noble of all. Except for poetry. Have you read the poetry of Ghalib? You must do so immediately, or I will never speak to you again. Ah, that I could have lived in Moghul times! You have travelled to India? No? But that is a great crime on your part. You must come to visit me there one day.”

The low, fast, sonorous voice, never really expecting an answer to its questions, continued without a pause while they went inside and settled themselves in the drawing room, and even while Agnes was serving tea, and only then fell suddenly silent. Now the two men took stock of one another more carefully. Masood was elegantly and expensively dressed, and gave off a hint of perfume. He looked, and sounded, and smelled like a prince. Morgan, on the other hand, had a crumpled, second-hand appearance, which made him seem like a tradesman of some kind.

“You need help with your Latin,” he said to Masood.

“No, no. My Latin is beyond help. It is a lost cause.” He was carrying a couple of textbooks under his arm, which he flung down in mock-despair. “Tell me rather about life at an English university.”

“I know Cambridge, not Oxford.”

“My father was a student at Christ’s College, Cambridge. Did you know that? He was sent there by my grandfather, Sir Syed Ahmad Khan. My grandfather wished his Anglo-Oriental College to be like Cambridge, only for Mohammedan students. My grandfather was a great lover of the English, especially English education, oh yes! My father too, though he was not always well treated by his English friends. I, for my part, have yet to make up my mind.”

“What did your father read at Cambridge?”

“Law, law. He was a barrister, you see, and then he became a High Court judge. But he resigned that position in unhappy circumstances.”

Morgan asked carefully, “How is it that you came to live with the Morisons?”

“Ah. That is an interesting story. A very interesting story. But I think I do not know you well enough to tell it.”

“Of course. I didn’t mean to pry.”

Masood reflected thoughtfully for a moment, then leaned forward in his chair, his dark eyes becoming darker. “Some years ago, when I was ten, my father lost his mind. He was very drunk, you see. Alcohol was the downfall of my father. It is the reason he resigned from the law as well.”

“I am sorry to hear that.”

“Yes. He took me out onto the lawns of the college one night. It was very dark and cold. He tried to show me how to use a wooden plough. He was talking a great deal of nonsense about the politics of agriculture. He wanted to teach me something, I believe, about what it means to be Indian. I was extremely afraid. My mother, too, was afraid, and she ran to call Mr Morison, who came very quickly. He wrapped me up in his coat and took me home, and I have never left again.”

“I see,” Morgan said – though he didn’t, really. There was a great deal about the story that he did not understand.

“Well, it is sad, terribly sad. The life of my father was a sad one. He has passed on now, a few years after this incident I mentioned.” Having said this, Masood brightened considerably and asked Morgan, “Where is your father?”

“My father died a long time ago, when I was very young. I don’t remember him.”

“That is also terribly sad.”

“I do not feel it to be so.”

The two men looked at each other with renewed awareness. Morgan didn’t know what to make of his visitor, who had been so utterly forthright in such an un-English way. Part of him was tempted to be shocked, but he decided instead that he liked this young man, precisely because he spoke without restraint.

And his liking only grew over the succeeding weeks, in which they met regularly. Very little Latin was learned, however. Although Morgan prepared his lessons, when they sat down to the task Masood immediately began to writhe and squirm and to speak of other things.

On the third occasion, Morgan tried to insist. “You must attend to these declensions,” he told his pupil. “It is the purpose of our being here.”

“It is so terribly boring. Why don’t we go for a walk?”

“When we are done with our lesson.”

Masood looked mournfully at him. Then he sprang up and seized hold of Morgan, pushing him backward on the couch and tickling him furiously. It was shocking – for the first instant like assault and only then like play. Something in Morgan was thrown back in time to childhood, afternoon, the smell of straw in the heat. Ansell, his favourite of the garden boys, had frolicked with him like this.

That moment did it; Masood became his friend. The distance between them had closed.

* * *

India had encroached on the edge of Morgan’s mind before now, not a place so much as an idea. It had become a tradition for Kingsmen to join the Indian Civil Service and many people he knew had gone out there to make their careers. It was spoken of at dinner parties, usually with extreme seriousness, as the vital cornerstone of the Empire. On the other side of the world, yet somehow part of England, it was not a place he had ever thought he might visit. Yet now, as he listened to Masood talk about his childhood, and sensed the homesickness in his voice, he began to imagine himself against the same background. Perhaps, yes, perhaps he would go there one day.

In the meantime, however, England was very much with him. The suburbs especially, with their hateful self-righteousness, and where his life seemed to consist of an endless round of tea parties and amiable, empty conversations, mostly – it felt to him – with elderly women.

One of these was his mother’s great friend, Maimie Aylward. When Lily mentioned Morgan’s new pupil to her, she put a hand up to her face.

“Oh, dear,” she said. “I do hope he won’t steal the spoons.”

Morgan laughed politely, though he didn’t feel like laughing. He had learned to feign enjoyment in conversations like these, and hated himself for the pretence. Although he was English all the way through, a great many English attitudes felt foreign to him.

For this reason, what Morgan found most interesting in his new friend was the strangeness of him, the exoticism imported into his drawing room. The most familiar topic, seen through Masood’s eyes, became unpredictable, unusual. And what was ordinary to Masood seemed to Morgan remarkable.

Such as the casual mention one day that he could trace his ancestry back to the Prophet Mohammed at the thirty-seventh generation. “And to Adam at the hundred and twentieth,” he added. The world, in that moment, felt very old and beautiful.

Though Morgan, of course, knew nothing about Mohammedanism, and this was irksome to Masood.

“Let me explain,” he said patiently. “Not to drink wine. Not to eat the pig. There is one God and Mohammed is His prophet. To believe in the Last Judgement. Oh yes, and not to eat an animal that has died. Even a white man could follow these simple rules.”

“In theory, yes. But I don’t believe in religion.”

“You mean you are a Christian.”

“No, no. I lost my belief when I was at Cambridge.”

“My dear Forster, all Englishmen are Christians. It is very sad. The English are a tragic race, I feel deeply sorry for them. I would like to help them, but they are too numerous, there is nothing to be done.”

When Masood went up to Oxford soon afterwards, Weybridge felt immediately emptier. There was nobody left that Morgan cared for. But their communication went on in the form of frequent letters that stitched back and forth. In a continuation of the tone they had already established, Masood’s letters were written in a faux-Eastern style, elaborate and overwrought, a mixture of sentiment and irony. He addressed Morgan in exalted terms: a great deal of Thou and Thine, and pledges of eternal devotion, against an imaginary background of minarets and muezzins. Very quickly, Morgan began responding in the same way.

Not long afterwards, he travelled to Oxford for a visit. Summer had almost taken hold; the few days passed in a dreamy haze of punts and walks and aimless conversation. Masood was by now in occupation of the whole town, as if it were one of his expensive capes that he could put on or drop at will. He was not so much interested in his studies, it seemed, as in playing an elaborate role, though the nature of the drama was not always clear. He liked to swagger around with a silver-topped cane, reciting Paul Verlaine in his mournfully melodious voice, or to prance about the tennis courts in his whites. He played a lot of tennis – and music on the gramophone, and practical jokes. In short, he liked to play, especially in his serious moments.

He was also the centre of a small coterie of admirers, most of them Indian, who lolled about in his rooms like the retinue of some indolent Emperor. Morgan went almost unnoticed in this company, sinking below the level of visibility, like a child or a spy. Often the talk around him was conducted in Urdu, only occasionally and laconically translated by Masood. But sometimes they all spoke in English, though the topics they discussed were almost a foreign language in themselves: customs in India, historical figures Morgan had never heard of, cities he had never seen.

To his great delight, these conversations also sometimes involved poetry, which was theatrically declaimed in Urdu or Persian, and sometimes in Arabic. The themes, as far as he could gather, were mostly about the shortness of love, or the decline of Islam. It was odd to hear lyricism in a social setting like this, but Masood explained to him that in the East poetry occupied a public place, not a private one, as it did in England.

“You so-called white people,” he was told, “are too afraid of your emotions. Everything is arranged coldly on shelves. In India we show how we feel, without being ashamed.”

“Why so-called?”

“Because your colour is far from white. More a pinko-grey, I’d say. Look.”

When he and Masood put their arms together, to compare, he saw that it was true. He had never thought of his skin in this way before. His friend’s colouring was infinitely more attractive.

Such ideas edged dangerously close to politics, which also came up as a topic among Masood’s friends. But in these conversations the talk turned feverish and unintelligible, though it was easy to make out that Indian independence was a common and recurrent theme. It was only when they became aware of him that they would suddenly fall silent, and shift about.

When the time came for him to leave, Masood pressed a small parcel on him. “You’d better try them on,” he said. “I have guessed at the size.”

It was a pair of golden slippers.

“Oh, but I can’t accept them. They’re too beautiful.”

“Certainly you will accept, or I shall never speak to you again.”

The slippers fitted perfectly, holding his feet with a gentle, satiny grip. In his English trousers, which were a little too short, he seemed outlandish and a bit ridiculous to himself. But the only emotion he felt was gratitude – almost too much of it.

A month later he was back for a second visit, at the conclusion of which Masood cast around for another gift. Looking vaguely at the assortment of Indian articles that strewed the room – embroidered quilts, jewellery, carved wooden boxes of incense – he picked out something almost at random: a hookah, which one of his friends, a man named Raschid, had been smoking the day before.

“No. This I certainly cannot take.”

“But you must.”

“No. Thank you. But it is too generous. I am happy with my slippers.”

An odd expression came over Masood’s face, a wooden detachment that fitted over his kindliness like a mask. “I insist you have it. And you must not thank me again.”

The pressure of his hands, as he pushed the hookah at Morgan, was almost impolite. But he had softened a little by the time they came to the railway station. “You must not thank me if I give you something,” he said quietly. “And I will not thank you either.”

“But why not?”

“It is only strangers who thank. Thanks are not given by friends. You are like family to me. Do you thank your mother for what she does for you? No, it is merely expected. No thanks are necessary.”

“I do thank my mother. The English like to say thank you all the time.”

“But I am not English. And when you are with me, you are not English either.”

The absurdity of this notion didn’t blunt its feeling, and a tiny point of gratitude stayed lodged in Morgan on the journey home. The hookah was much admired, on the train and in Weybridge, sending out glints of reflected light. But it was only when he was alone in his room that he allowed himself to feel again its true value, which was in what Masood had said to him. You are like family to me. The words stayed with him. He had always wanted a brother, a male figure close to him in age and sensibility, somebody he could confide in. Before his own birth, there had been another baby, which had died. He thought of that absent child as the brother he couldn’t have.

He put the slippers on his feet and sat on the edge of his bed with the hookah to his lips. There was a faint and fragrant scent of old tobacco, almost imperceptible.

* * *

By this time his second novel had been published. It had been a pleasurable book to write, falling out of him with almost confessional ease, though at the same time, in a contradictory way, it had occasionally felt to him too symbolic and bloodless. The problem was that he was writing about men and women, about marriage, which were subjects he knew nothing about. It was an ongoing vexation to feel that his true subject was buried somewhere out of reach, and could perhaps never be spoken aloud.

He had dedicated the book to the Apostles, otherwise known as the Cambridge Conversazione Society, the exclusive group of intellectuals to which he had belonged from his fourth year at King’s. Theirs had been a communion of minds, and his first and most lasting taste of friendship.

Many of the Apostles, and the sort of conversation they made, had featured in the story. Perhaps this was the reason they couldn’t fully warm to it. He had tried to disguise them, or jumble them up, and in any case there was more of him in there than anyone else. One of the characters, however, was based to some extent on the Apostle he cared for more than any other. Hugh Owen Meredith – known as Hom to his friends – had occupied a central place in Morgan’s affections until now.

He and Hom had become close in their second year at Cambridge. His dark, athletic good looks were immediately attractive, but his mind had a real power too. It was Hom, in fact, who had sponsored Morgan’s election to the Apostles, though his influence had gone further than that. Almost as soon as they had become friends, he had started to work on Morgan’s religious beliefs, questioning and undermining them with a rigorous and cynical vigour.

Morgan was ready to be challenged. The form of religion was one thing, but the content was something else entirely and, once he thought about it, the content started to feel very thin indeed. The idea of the Trinity was an absurdity. And Jesus was a humourless fellow, lacking in intellectual substance, who placed a perverse value on pain. If you knew he was in the next room, would you want to go and talk to him? No, Christianity was a distraction rather than a solution, and he came soon to a clear-sighted moment where he set it aside entirely. Afterwards, he felt almost physically lighter.

It was Hom who had given this lightness to him. But Hom himself had a heavy spirit, despite his outward cheeriness. Under all his conversation, a thread of defeat and futility ran deep. Morgan was drawn by this darkness, perhaps because he hoped to cure it. Certainly when the two of them were together they created a sense of hopeful excitement between them, in which a bright future seemed possible. What exactly that future contained was unclear as yet. But – in Morgan’s mind at least – it might hold both him and Meredith in some blissful undefined companionship.

It had almost seemed possible for a while. His years at Cambridge felt like a high and radiant moment, where the world was on the point of opening for him. He had discovered the Greeks, and the ancient Hellenic universe, which was the first Empire, could justify so much. And it was under the cover of Plato that he had allowed himself to love Hom’s body, rather than his mind.

He had left his student years at Cambridge behind by then; he was living with his mother in a hotel in Bloomsbury, and Hom was nearby, studying at the London School of Economics. They spent a great deal of time together. One night, in the middle of a frantic discussion on the Symposium, they found themselves entangled on Hom’s couch, fingers running through one another’s hair. “I love you,” Morgan told his friend, but the emotion had only risen in the wake of the words – fierce and freshly minted, true somehow for the very first time.

The words, and the feeling, had been rehearsed many times since. Yet the two men stayed in their clothes. Hands could range over the surface; fingertips could trace the outline of eyebrows, nose, mouth. On one especially heated occasion Morgan had dared to press his lips – fumblingly, inaccurately – against those of his friend. The brief touch, dry and tasteless, had fired a flare in his head. But he had felt Hom pulling back and away.

“We must take care…” he said, his voice trailing off, echoing nevertheless in Morgan’s mind.

Care had to be taken. What felt so spontaneous, natural, was in fact dangerous. That danger could in itself be exciting, as Morgan was to learn on subsequent nights, when the embraces and fondlings continued. The possibility of discovery, the sound of other people on the far side of the wall: these gave an extra intensity, like a magnetic effect, to the movement of skin on skin. There were times when he thought his heart might stop. Nothing had ever felt so complete or so powerful as the encirclement of male arms. But he knew, even in the most ardent of clinches, that what was happening meant something different to each of them.

“Why are you doing this?” Morgan asked him once, when Hom’s hand had fallen listlessly away from him.

“Why? Well, why not? If it was good enough for the Greeks…”

“Is that why, really? Simply to imitate the unspeakable vice of the Greeks?”

“We are speaking, aren’t we, at this moment? Besides, we haven’t indulged in any vice.” In a sudden movement, Hom straightened up, pushing Morgan aside. “It hasn’t been carnal,” he announced, in a new, clipped voice. “We’ve merely expressed our feelings. Is that so unforgivable?”

“Not to me.”

“Nor me. I am very fond of you, Morgan. Let’s think of this as an experiment.”