END OF STORY
A Novel

1
      Facing the Sunshine
      King’s Old Boys—Cambridge, 1960
     
            "Let us have one more gaudy night,” Forster said to himself.
            It was the end of the spring term in Cambridge, and King’s College welcomed back its old boys from past generations for a reunion weekend. The wines were plentiful for luncheon on the Back Lawn. Gilmartin, the college steward, met the elderly novelist as he shuffled down the gravel pathway and offered a tray crowded with glasses. “The champagne comes highly recommended, sir.”
            “I don’t normally indulge at midday."
            “You seem uncommonly cheerful today, sir.”
            “Quite right!” The old man took the champagne and made a little toast. “Happy days!”
            With glass in hand, Forster sought the seclusion of a bench against the wall toward the river. Beneath a trellis of the white-flowering vines he could enjoy the sunshine, sip his wine, and survey the men who had found their ways back to Cambridge. His one overwhelming desire was to be left alone with his thoughts.
            He was celebrating. After so many years of waiting and worrying, the final revision of his novel Maurice had been completed that very morning. He had drafted the homosexual novel in 1913 but never published it, because the laws against obscenity and libel made it impossible. Again he said to himself, “Let us have one more gaudy night.”
            Forster sat very still beneath the blossoming vines. A grey man in a grey suit against a grey wall, he imagined himself invisible as he observed the old boys. Grouped in their little tribes that spanned decades, they gathered on the lawn to enjoy their wine and have the inevitable conversation of “Whatever happened to . . .? “ and “No, how long ago?” The college cat emerged from the myrtle and rubbed against the writer’s trousers twice before curling up at his feet.
            Some of the old boys looked very old indeed, Forster thought, while others seemed like boys too young for freshmen. He had always imagined Cambridge as a place belonging to the very young and the very old. Yet he marveled at the tricks his eyes conspired with memory to play upon him. Over there stood a fine strapping lad who must surely be Evans, the very image of the beefy boy, even sporting the boat club tie. But this young graduate with his blond hair combed back in loose waves was hardly thirty. Evans had followed a year behind him and, if still alive, must be some bent and doddering travesty of fair-haired youth.
            Only with effort could Forster recognize himself among these figures of hobbling antiquity. So he gazed with the eye of memory, the magical lens through which his novel’s cad Clive Durham would always see his undergraduate friend Maurice Hall.
     
      Out of some eternal Cambridge his friend began beckoning to him, clothed in the sun, and shaking out the scents and sounds of May term.
     
      This sentence fell on the last page of the manuscript locked in the drawer of his writing table. There were no cross outs because the sentence was perfect after years of tinkering. Now the writer-in-residence could enjoy his champagne and savor the thought that Maurice and his friend Alec Scudder, as characters in his novel, would never become aged and ugly like these old boys gathering on the college lawn. They would remain boys eternal.
            George Emerson was another. The young man standing alone nearest the river, so like Evans with backside glorious in white flannels, looked the way he imagined silent, dour George when he wrote A Room with a View. This fair-haired athlete looked like an American, though, big-boned and brawny, with a natural grace unmarred by English self-consciousness. At least the melancholy George, brooding over his world sorrow, would never know what it was to suffer old age like Evans a year behind him at King’s, and eventually this monumental youth with his blond locks tousled about his forehead, his shoulders broad like an oarsman’s.
            George Emerson never grew a day older than the afternoon when he opened his heart to Lucy Honeychurch. “Choose a place where you won’t do very much harm, and stand in it for all you are worth, facing the sunshine.” These handsome young people lived in their own eternal present, a place where they buried their enchanted crocks of gold forever, safe from a changing world. George succeeded in marrying Lucy and—as the old saying goes—they lived happily ever after till the end of their days. They remained forever young and in love and filled with wonderful, wonderful promise. George and Lucy became more real to his readers than the author himself, now a dry old rag of a man who had dwindled into fame.
            One day readers would look at Maurice much the same, as a palimpsest with layers written on top of layers, and secret stories hidden underneath. Who were his real-life models for Maurice and his friend Alec? What did the gentleman and the gamekeeper do in bed? And where did they escape after leaving the boathouse on Clive’s country estate? Where could two such men live happily ever after till the end of their days?
            Besotted after his first sex with another man, Maurice with his university education had fallen into fantasy. “We must live without relations and money.” Alec the village lad, always more levelheaded, brought him back to reality. “Don’t be daft. Your job in the City what gives you money and position? You can’t chuck your job!”
            True, men must work to build something lasting. He himself had spent an entire year drafting Maurice. Nobody could imagine the loneliness of such an effort. In 1913 the name of Oscar Wilde still could not be uttered without fear of giving offence. Such a waste of his good time, Forster thought, being a homosexual in England. But his novel was not written for an Edwardian public. Nor was it written for the friends who furtively read and returned the manuscript. It was written after visiting Edward Carpenter and his homosexual circle at his country estate—and meeting the astonishing couple Martin St. John Howell and his friend Alan Somebody—when he felt compelled to write something absolutely new for future readers.
            Then came the regrets. Virginia Woolf wouldn’t have understood, discovering once again only the lack of cohesion she found in all his books. She may have believed all our minds are threaded together, but he always felt she was poised to snap at him, so he never showed her the manuscript. His novels were never beautiful enough for her, never sad enough compared to her best works like To the Lighthouse—the book where nobody ever reached the bally lighthouse!—and far too dependent upon coincidences. Yet he no longer felt intimidated when he realized that his emotions were not hers. When the flesh educates the spirit, as Alec did for Maurice, the results ought to become staggeringly ordinary. Perhaps he built with bricks that needed to be lighted up, irradiated with something beyond themselves, but at the end of the day they remained plain bricks. That was their special beauty, to be exactly and abundantly what they were.
      ***
            The Provost’s wife was trying to catch his eye. The only woman at the party, she was wearing the indigo frock she reserved for festive occasions. Her white glove gripped the arm of a distinguished-looking government man who probably wanted to be introduced. Was Forster obliged to show his sociable side? He wondered if the Provost’s wife would be so keen for arranging these handshakes if she really knew. The hand that wrote such clever novels had done other things.
            Forster took from his pocket a small book of Cavafy’s poetry, its margins cluttered with his spidery handwriting. From long experience in basement restaurants and railway compartments, he knew nobody would bother him with his nose buried in a book, his eyes retreating farther behind his spectacles. He had done a little to spread Cavafy’s fame, about the best thing he ever did, and now he opened the well-worn pages and pretended to read this poet who always stood at a slight angle to the universe. They met in Alexandria when he was struggling to revise Maurice—was it really as far back as 1916?—and for the first time in his life he parted with respectability with a soldier on the beach. Now all these long years later he didn’t know why he suddenly became obsessed with finishing the novel. He had arranged a typist who could be trusted for publication after he died. Long ago he had rejected the original ending with the two men parting at Southampton. No, Alec would not sail away to South America while Maurice resigned himself to live as before, alone, his tear-streaked face toward England in a brave blur of exalted emotion. Resignation had been the tragic flaw of the modern age.
            Now he had also cancelled the Arcadian epilogue in which Maurice’s sister Kitty discovered her brother and his friend, many years later, working as woodcutters in the forest. After making these last changes, Forster felt the same sense of relief that Alec expressed in his last words in the boathouse: “And that’s finished.”
            Never mind the review in the Daily Telegraph, his old friend Strachey already passed the harshest verdict. He believed that sex between the two men was unnatural not because it was diseased, but because there was so little of it. These healthy young men surely had erections. Could Alec continue Maurice’s erotic education when the author himself could not imagine where those lessons led? And what about Maurice and Alec buggering? His young friend Isherwood grimaced at quaint words like sharing to describe two men having sex. But how could E. M. Forster have written otherwise? How could he say they fucked each other? He never wrote that George fucked Lucy. Fuck was not a word he liked seeing in print. For all its quiet cruelties and domestic horrors, the age of repression when he composed Maurice had also been an age of innocence and good taste.
            Strachey and Isherwood were not alone. All of Forster’s friends had appointed themselves experts on his books, when all he ever wanted from his critics was their praise. D. H. Lawrence said the unpublished manuscript was the cramp that kept him from writing other novels. Lady Chatterley’s Lover was one book Forster truly envied because it included honest details of the sexual act, everything so utterly real about the coming together of two bodies in passion and love, all of the frank intimacies missing from his own novel Maurice. Yet the story of Lady Chatterley and her gamekeeper Mellors ended no more satisfactorily, each lover saddled with a spouse who refused to grant a divorce, with no sense of where the couple could go and how they could live. Maybe Italy where the English always went to discover their passions.
            On his first visit to Italy, Forster was taken to Herculaneum and recalled as a schoolboy reading Pliny’s letter about the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. An American professor guided him through the Villa of the Papyri where excavations continued, showing him a great pile of charcoal lumps that had once been scrolls of poetry and philosophy. These books had been burnt to cinders when the volcano blasted through. A miniature of the great library at Alexandria had been reduced to nothingness in a few terrible moments. Was here the complete poetry of Sappho? Aristotle’s lost treatise on comedy? What mattered the timing of Maurice’s publication, already consigned to a shadowland for half a century, when compared to all the lost classics heaped together in the ruined villa?
      ***
            The Provost was walking in his direction, bringing Sir Somebody who wanted to be introduced and shake hands. Roused from napping at his feet, the college cat slipped back into the periwinkle.
            Forster considered rising. He always liked the Provost. The man was literary. He wrote the biography of Virginia Woolf’s father.
            The Provost spoke with a genial smile, “Stay, stay.”
            Forster lied. “A bit wobbly in the legs today.”
            “You know Sir Adrian Fortescue, of course, the economist.”
            “Like my old friend Keynes, another King’s man.”
            Sir Adrian extended his hand. “Of course you must have known Keynes. He was here at King’s for ever so long.”
            “The Provost tells a wonderful story about Keynes, found pacing the chapel one afternoon. He had invested college funds in wheat futures, you see, and was afraid of being caught short. That would have meant several metric tons of wheat delivered to the front gate. Space would have been needed to store it.”
            Fortescue asked, “Did it really happen? How did things turn out? It’s a wonderful story.”
            The Provost said, “The college wasn’t caught short, I’m glad to report.”
            Forster added, “And wonderful stories don’t really need to happen, just need to be wonderfully told.”
            “On the topic of stories, my wife and I enjoy your novels tremendously.”
            “I am surprised your work allows time for reading any novels.”
            “Oh, yes, all six of the very best, every year without fail.”
            Forster had published only five novels, and the winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics knew nothing about the unpublished manuscript of Maurice. Sir Adrian meant something else entirely. He was clearly referring to the six novels of Jane Austen. An awkward moment followed, relieved only when their little company was joined by Sutherland, the college’s don in English literature.
            The Provost said, “We are having a pleasant talk about novels.”
            Sutherland replied, “Forster is always pleasant when I’m around. I’m the official biographer. One swipe of my pen, and anything nasty might happen.”
            “Worse,” Forster said. “You can make my life seem boring, which it is.”
            “Goebbels put you on the list for extermination when the Nazis conquered England. Call that boring?”
            “Sir Adrian prefers Miss Austen’s novels.”
            “Why shouldn’t an economist? Our corporate alliances compare neatly with the marriage alliances in Austen’s novels. And the happy endings, always happy endings. You can take your art, you can take your music, but give me a good story about young couples who get married and settle down. Austen grants us a wholly satisfying sense how these couples will live, even where they will live. I can see the Darcys happily settled at Pemberly, the Brandons at Delaford, and the Knightleys at Hartfield. Happy couples, happy homes, happy endings. Stories need to be life-affirming. That’s the one principle we insist upon, my wife and I.”
            “I should be very glad if my works induced people to enjoy a bit more fully this marvelous world.” Forster changed the subject. “When I lectured in America, readers constantly thanked me for creating Captain Horatio Hornblower.”
            Sutherland said, “Americans not knowing the difference between E. M. Forster and C. S. Forester–it’s vintage. The episode belongs in your biography,”
            “Are you putting this episode in? Enjoying this gaudy reunion, meeting Sir Adrian, and chatting about Jane Austen, my own favorite author?”
            “Probably not, unless you choke on a cucumber sandwich. There is always a witness to history.”
            “Rubbish! A well-written biography is merely another form of storytelling—and then . . . and then . . . —but not a real life. Every time an episode goes missing because it doesn’t fit, your biography becomes more like a novel, and myself no different from a character in it, what Lawrence called the leavings of a life spoiled by the novelist’s touch, no coincidences and nothing improbable.” Forster tapped his biographer’s arm. “If the public thought I created Captain Hornblower and Lucy Honeychurch, posterity would remember me as a far more interesting writer.”
            “There are things that will make you far more interesting later on. The reading public always likes the unexpected.” Sutherland knew all about Maurice. He knew its publication would provide a surprising coda to Forster’s life.
            The Provost said, “You novelists have a great advantage over us biographers. Your stories are exactly what you make of them, no loose ends, no missing bits. Fiction writers foster the wonderful illusion of a more manageable human race.”
            Forster said, “Really? Nothing between the lines of a novel? No tantalizing foretaste of a sequel? Are not our characters, like ourselves, people whose secret lives remain invisible and their futures await a proper telling?”
            Forster sank back on his bench, carefully, as if protecting brittle bones. He made a great show of feeling tired.
            From the pavilion, the college steward brought forward his wines. Gilmartin lowered the tray so that Forester had an easier reach. “May I suggest another coupe of champers, sir? The claret is a bit corky.”
            The Provost led the way to the sandwiches, and the gentlemen moved along the gravel path with a parting compliment from Sir Adrian about A Room with a View. “Your one novel where none of the main characters dies!” Emerging from the myrtle verge, the college cat curled up again at Forster’s feet.
      ***
            Now where is our young Evans? Ah, Forster thought, there beside the river in front of a stand of willows, glorious backdrop to his summer whites and golden curls, jacket off and draped over his arm, better to show off the physique of a Nordic Apollo.
            As a homosexual and a writer, Forster never penetrated much beyond the physical beauty of such men. Strachey noticed how the reader never truly grasped Alec’s feelings in Maurice. What did the gamekeeper want when he climbed the ladder into Maurice’s bedroom? The author himself couldn’t say. Very clearly Maurice was the sort of man who thought himself into a muddle, but Alec felt directly and acted. Not every character is burdened with an inner life. Full of surprises, the gamekeeper might have turned out very different over time. Much as he believed lovers should act as if things lasted, experience taught that no human relationship is constant. Alec was strong, he was resourceful, and he had a wrestler’s grit and agility for handling whatever the years threw his way. He had a spirit of adventure, even the soul of an artist, if only given the future denied him by the novel’s abrupt ending.
            But how could he and Maurice have remained anywhere in England? Maurice’s medical nerve specialist said quite rightly when trying to cure the young man’s homosexuality, “England has always been disinclined to accept human nature.” Could Maurice and Alec live together anywhere in 1914 and live happily ever after?
            Half a lifetime ago, Isherwood began asking for a continuation of the story. “There should be a sequel,” he wrote from Berlin where he went looking for pretty boys before the Nazis. “Alec and Maurice have all their troubles before them. I should love to know what they’re doing now.” It became a game that the two writers never tired of playing. So many possibilities sprang to mind for Maurice Hall and Alec Scudder after they disappeared from England, so soon after first bedding each other.
      ***
            The year was 1913, and the Great War was approaching with a speed that staggered everyone. Maurice had already joined the Territorials, then a peacetime militia. Could the two young men have been soldiers together, Maurice as an officer and Alec as his batman?
            How to manage getting assigned to the same battalion? Clive Durham M.P. could arrange matters. Maurice with his wounded pride was determined never again to cross tracks with his former lover, but Alec liked taking risks, like his plan for emigrating to Argentina and making a new life abroad. He remained the swaggering village buck with more than a country boy’s instinct for criminality. Hadn’t he written “I know about you and Mr. Durham” as threat of blackmail to Maurice? To Clive, the homosexual world would remain forever a cesspool, and one breath from it at election time could ruin him.
            If Maurice and Alec become soldiers together in the Great War, what about their lives in the trenches? Alec might take sick. Influenza and trench fever killed more troopers than poison gas. Though gravely ill, the batman receives scant attention from the company doctor, a gentleman. So Maurice cares for Alec. He nurses him. He empties the patient’s slop. Alec complains. “It’s nasty. You mustn’t have to do with my filth.”
            Talk goes round the mess of an officer caring for his servant. The brigadier insults Maurice in front of his men, saying sarcastically, “We’ll have you wheeling the baby next!”
      ***
            No, that won’t do. They’re back in the same damned problem over class.
      ***
            Maurice has an old Cambridge friend in his battalion, by name Ramsey, who attended the same tutorials on Thucydides. Under the machineguns, their conversations relive the disastrous military expedition to Sicily, while Alec washes the cooking pans and looks sour. Andrew is a poet celebrating the band of brothers in the muck of the trenches. Brimming with short lyrics, his notebook has been passed around and his verses pronounced braver, more beautiful than Rupert Brooke’s.
            Then one sunny day after a night of intense shelling, in a dugout among the ruins of a farm house, Maurice and Andrew are sitting with a group of men and doing something as ordinary as sharing a meal, cheese perhaps, smoking, passing around a bottle of wine, tipping it back, complaining. Suddenly they hear the noise like a railway engine and an explosion that shakes the earth. There is a flash and a roar that goes red and a rush of wind. Maurice cannot breathe at first. One man is screaming next to him. The soldier’s leg is gone, the stump twitching beside Maurice on the bare ground. An artillery shell has landed on the house. Andrew Ramsey is killed in an instant, his notebook blown up with him, gone.
            Wounded slightly in the arm, Maurice mourns his friend’s death while Alec feels jealous and wants to chuck the whole business of soldiering. The loss renders Maurice disillusioned, too, so he and Alec make their escape together, rowing across the alpine lake for safe haven in Switzerland.
            No sooner in neutral territory than Alec becomes seriously ill, and Maurice takes him to hospital. He suffers one wave of fever after another. Maurice stays in the room, holding his friend’s hand until the end. The country lad lies unconscious the whole time, and it does not take very long for him to die. Maurice thanks the doctor and turns off the light and closes the door. He feels that he is saying goodbye to a statue.
            Maurice puts his friend’s clothes in a paper sack, the old corduroys and woolen pullover, and he leaves the hospital and walks back in the rain to the boathouse where he had left the rowboat. After betraying his country rather than abandoning his friend, he has only this paper sack with Alec’s scent clinging to the old clothes inside.
      ***
            Call that a happy ending? Why are nearly all novels feeble at their conclusions? Perhaps if the two men leave Europe behind absolutely.
      ***
            At the beginning of the fighting in 1914, Maurice joins the flying corps. He had loved speeding his motorbike through the fens outside Cambridge, so becomes an aviator who brings back pictures of enemy positions. Perhaps Alec operates the camera as he learns the science of photography.
            Or perhaps Alec becomes Maurice’s mechanic, always checking the petrol lines before takeoff. Nothing could appear more natural than that close relationship between an aviator and his mechanic. The country lad was good with his hands and understood tools. “They must have owned wonderful machinery to make a thing like that,” Alec said when admiring the winged Assyrian bull at the British Museum, just before they were interrupted by the arrival of Mr. Ducie, Maurice’s old school teacher, who prided himself on never forgetting a former pupil. But such an absurd coincidence, when the schoolmaster pops up and recognizes his old student, at such a critical moment in the action!
            Next they join Lawrence of Arabia as part of his guerilla campaign against the Turks. The faraway desert was the right place for these two men. Disguised as Bedouin tribesmen, they lose almost completely their identities as Englishmen. They fight side by side and they sleep side by side, openly and without shame, people of the desert. Maurice pilots his two-seater over a landscape of creamy hills and scarlet valleys. He loves the arid region for the same reason that Lawrence did, because it is clean.
            Then one day Maurice is flying alone and his aeroplane is struck by gunfire from the ground. Petrol leaks and soaks his seat. There is a spark from an electrical line. Flames are borne aloft by the rush of wind and engulf the cockpit, the pilot. Maurice crash-lands among the dry hills, horribly burned. His face is disfigured, almost beyond recognition, when the tribesmen bring him to a field hospital. Alec takes care of him and dresses his wounds and stays at his side. Sly and quick-handed, he pilfers ampoules of morphine in broad daylight.
            They are evacuated back to Italy where Alec keeps them moving from one field hospital to the next, until they outrun the paperwork and Maurice falls between the cracks of the military bureaucracy, exactly what Alec wants for the injured officer known to the Italians as simply the English patient.
            When the allies advance on retreating enemy troops, Alec arranges their passage northward to Lake Como, with stolen papers identifying Maurice as a French lieutenant educated at Cambridge, hence his perfect English, for when they are stopped at checkpoints. A sympathetic American ambulance driver, who claims he is writing a novel about the Caporetto retreat, transports them to the isolated village of Bellagio. Maurice and Alec remain in a hilltop villa, just the two of them among olive groves and azalea terraces, after the Prince and his household had fled across the lake to Switzerland.
            Alec makes do with what little medicine he can scrounge, mostly codeine drops for sleep. Maurice’s legs are so badly destroyed that bone shows through. His chest is scorched to dark purple. Bandages cover his body like a winding cloth. His head remains exposed, hairless and charred black. Alec pours calamine lotion on patches of burnt flesh, blowing on wounds too raw for ointment, as flakes of skin keep shedding off. Exposed for sponge baths, his penis has become grey and lifeless. Maurice complains, “Don’t nanny me. Please, don’t nanny me!”
            Alec, still bossing things, chews an apple and passes the fruit from his mouth into Maurice’s. He carts books from the library and keeps a fire ablaze through freezing alpine nights, all the while studying his friend’s lengthening silences.
      Maurice spends his days reading Thucydides in a battered student edition from 1890, one last keepsake of a Cambridge education. Between the pages, he inserts his own letters and diary entries, maps, leaves cut from other books, favorite poems by Whitman and Rumi copied in his own neat handwriting, all folded into the textbook, more a commonplace book now. There is so much new writing that Alec can smell the ink.
            “Pliny must have walked down ancient paths like these,” Maurice mutters in the middle of the night when his mind wanders, moving between dreams and waking delusions, his memories becoming more vivid as the codeine takes hold. “And Stendhal, too, because bits from La Chartreuse de Parme took place in this part of Italy.”
            When sunlight seeps through the curtains, Maurice looks down and contemplates what had been a boxer’s body, agile and aggressive, offered to Alec for sexual pleasure, then in love and companionship, now hideously disfigured. “You have wedded yourself to a corpse,” he hisses through charred lips. “A man with no face. A heap of charcoal. Nobody can love a ghost.”
            “Everyone loves a diamond. And what’s a diamond but charcoal what’s been under pressure for a goodish while?” Alec jokes to rescue him from morbid thoughts. “You’ve too much pluck to go under now.”
            At night the villa floats among cypress trees. The Prince must have been a fan of American adventure stories as a boy, because his library has Last of the Mohicans and Huckleberry Finn that Alec reads aloud by firelight. Maurice sucks on morphine tablets, his eyes fixed straight ahead, unfocused, in his poppy haze. The paraffin lamp casts light upward where painted figures of griffins and bagpipes come alive and dance across the ceiling.
            There was less pain in the first weeks when nerve endings were burned off. Now that there is healing, there is pain, constant searing pain, and Maurice’s eyes beg for an end to it. Warming his hands with a mug of horlicks foraged from a supply boat, Alec resolves upon a final loving act.
            Alec’s fingernail taps the glass syringe. He searches for a usable vein in an arm that lies like a flow of black lava upon the sheet. Both men drift away with the mildew smell of the old mattress, half imagining themselves back at the boathouse in Wiltshire, motionless while watching for squirrels to come down from the treetops to drink beside the lake.
            The hearth blazes with the last books from the library. Alec crawls beneath the blanket. Maurice closes his eyes and slips into darkness, tugging at Alec’s spirit as he goes. Breathing out and breathing in, breathing out and breathing in. Breathing out. The last exhalation parts his lips like a silk ribbon.
            Alec’s only keepsake is the volume of Thucydides filled with Maurice’s letters, jottings, maps of their travels together, and postcards used as bookmarks. These were the pages where his hands had rested and his eyes scanned and scanned again the sentences. Glued inside the back cover are faded yellow petals from an evening primrose, one last relic of their long-lost English countryside.
      ***
            Powerful but not exactly a happy ending, Forster thought, and too much like The Charioteer which Mary Renault sent him “with best wishes.” Perhaps no happy outcome awaited any man who witnessed the horrors of Great War. But why must the sodomite always die? He himself killed off the Italian fisher lad in “The Story of a Panic,” and the African chieftain stabbed his missionary lover before throwing himself from the parapet in “The Life to Come.” Why must there always be a murder, maybe two, or a youth dangling from a noose? Why must writers always kill the queer?
            He admired Tolstoy’s courage for showing his main characters growing old. With only the rearrangement of a few fundamentals, rather better luck all around, Maurice and Alec might have achieved something permanent. Surely these two men could prosper somewhere without their love lapsing into social habit or dwindling into mere marriage. There must be some wilderness where they could chop wood, drink from mountain streams, and live in a mud-brick house built with their own hands. And live free! Perhaps his real-life models Martin and Alan, wherever they disappeared after the weekend at Carpenter’s, found the happy ending that the novelist could not properly imagine.
            Ah, there is our young Evans again!
            Lost among his musings as champagne sported with his brain, Forster suddenly realized that the golden-haired Evans was staring at him across the wide lawn. What did the monumental youth see? A famous author or a pitiful old man? It didn’t signify, Forster thought, so long as the young man wanted to introduce himself and have a nice handshake. Where was the Provost’s wife when he really needed her?
            So big and athletic-looking, he must be an American.