Arctic Summer Read Free

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.
    Â 
    * * *
    Â 
    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.