Sir Vidia's Shadow

by Paul Theroux

  In the middle of the questions, a stout, hearty man loomed over Vidia and said in a mocking tone, “If it isn’t old V. S.!”

  “Hello, Kingsley,” Vidia said, biting his pipe stem, and watched the man sway through the room. It was Kingsley Amis, he said. “He’s drunk. He’s sad. I wonder at the achievement.”

  A hollow-cheeked man with deep, close-set eyes spoke earnestly to Vidia. He was not old but he had that gaunt, imprisoned look of someone who was overworked.

  “Paul, this is Alan Sillitoe.”

  I began to understand how a London party might be full of familiar names, while the faces were unfamiliar and even grotesque. Talking inconsequentially to Sillitoe, I kept thinking how, just a few years before, I first read The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. For their power and directness I regarded them as better than Lawrence, the clearest glimpse I’d had into English life and work—lives and households I had never seen before. But we talked about the rain and Rhodesia.

  After Sillitoe drifted away, Vidia said, “He brings news. That is what he does. Brings news from Nottingham, from working-class people. It’s not writing, really. It’s news. Don’t be that sort of writer, bringing news.”

  I promised I would not be that sort of writer.

  Vidia attracted the notice of other party guests, and he introduced me to them: John Bayley, John and Miriam Gross, and Tom Maschler. Maschler was Paul Bailey’s editor. Vidia told him I was working on a book.

  “Send your book to me,” Maschler said.

  Vidia was saying to the others, “I don’t want to meet new people.”

  It had become another of his old man’s maxims, like the sentences that started “Latterly, one has begun to wonder...”

  When we left the Cape party we saw Kingsley Amis again, and again he said, “Good old V.S.!” Vidia simply walked on. He would have said he was “cutting” Amis. He did not see or hear him. For Vidia’s sake I did not refer to Amis, so as not to call attention to his existence.

  In the lights of Bedford Square, the falling rain seemed stiffened by brightness and the black street glistened and the puddles were full of plainer light. Vidia was hurrying, looking for a taxi. He hated the expense of taxis, but after a certain hour he felt that London became menacing and unpredictable, and he feared taking the Underground because of the louts, the racists, the disorder; there were irritable tramps who rode the Circle Line continuously, for the warmth, going round and round. The tube was much dirtier at night, too, the cars having grown filthier throughout the day.

  In the taxi back to Stockwell, I saw a sign to Victoria and said, “I promised to meet someone. I’ll get out around here.”

  “Your friend,” Vidia said.

  “Would you like to meet her?”

  “No, no. But don’t be offended. It’s just that I don’t want to meet any new people.”

  He rapped on the window that separated the driver’s seat from us and told the driver to let me out at Victoria Street. Soon after that I was lying in bed with Heather. As the days had passed there were fewer and fewer preliminaries. That night she opened the door wearing a silk dressing gown, and when she kissed me, I touched her and found she was naked underneath it, and her skin was also like silk.

  We hardly spoke until we had made love once, and then, calmed by it, I lay on my back feeling buoyant. She rested her arms against my chest and put her forehead against mine, letting her long hair sweep over my face.

  “Tell me about the Pygmies again.”

  “Let me tell you about the ‘men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders.’”

  “I don’t want to be your Desdemona,” she said.

  I kissed her and said, “I like you because you’re lovely and because you know how to read.”

  “I know how to do lots of things.”

  She kissed me and filled my mouth with her tongue. She ran her hands over my body. Her fingers were cool and my skin was tender, still raw and damp from sex. I tipped her over and parted her legs and breathed in her body’s smell like fresh meat. When we made love a second time it was as if our nerves were exposed and we were peeling the skin from our flesh. The act heated me—more than that, it scorched me, and at her most passionate Heather howled like a cat that I was holding down and stabbing to death, except that they were howls of pleasure, and her only fear was that I would stop too soon. When we were done, we simply died for an hour and woke up still sweating.

  “I have to go.” It was after one on the luminous dial of her bedroom clock.

  “Stay until morning.”

  “My friends expect me to be there at breakfast.”

  This was not quite true—we seldom had breakfast—but it seemed rude not to go home.

  “Naipaul is supposed to be very clever,” said Heather. “But incredibly difficult.”

  “He has been kind to me.”

  “That’s the one thing people never say about him.”

  “I guess I know his secrets.”

  “I guess you do,” she said, stressing “guess” for its being American. “Right. I’ll let you go on one condition—that you come back to me.”

  “Tomorrow,” I said.

  In the street some minutes later I was amazed by the emptiness of London at night. It wasn’t even two in the morning. As soon as the pubs closed at eleven, the streets were full. By midnight they were empty again. My taxi to Stockwell always traveled down deserted streets, over a solitary bridge, and south through a city that seemed imaginary and antique, without people or other vehicles, just black streets and yellow lamps.

  My late nights fascinated Vidia, I could see, but they created distance too: I had another life, another friend, and that friend lived in a different London. Vidia asked oblique questions, but beyond that he did not inquire. I think he detected a greediness in me, something uncontrollable and animalistic—desire that he associated with shame. I remembered how he had said of his sexual urge, “One is ashamed of being a man.”

  I was not ashamed. I was delighted to have a girlfriend who was uninhibited and intelligent and as free as I was. But I could see the end was coming. No sooner had we met than she began saying, “You’re going to leave soon and go back to Africa, and I’m going to be miserable.”

  This was too gloomy a thought for me to respond to.

  She said, “I want you to be miserable too.”

  “I will be.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  Heather was more annoyed the night of Hugh Thomas’s party. I went to her apartment afterwards and we made love and she begged me to stay. I said I couldn’t.

  “You’re always running back and forth to your friend Naipaul.”

  It was true. I never spent the whole night with her. But I was fond of her and I knew I would miss her. I even wondered what sort of wife she would be. Maybe she would visit Kampala. She said she might. As for Naipaul, this friendship I now realized was as strong as love. He was my friend, he had shown me what was good in my writing, he had drawn a line through anything that was false. I was inspired by his work and his conviction. I wanted always to be his friend.

  “I had an Indian boyfriend at Oxford,” Heather said.

  “I don’t want to hear about him,” I said.

  All this took a week: the dinner party, the Cape party, Hugh Thomas’s party, the nights with Heather. Christmas was a few days away. Heather invited me to spend Christmas with her family in the country.

  “I can’t. The Naipauls have plans,” I said. They had not mentioned any plans, but I was sure they had them. All Vidia had said was that his brother, Shiva, was coming to stay but that he was unreliable—so Vidia had said—and had not confirmed it. “I can’t let them down.”

  Heather said, “I wanted to be your Christmas pudding.”

  Why did that silly statement arouse me so much? Perhaps because it was silly and because it also meant something.

  The day before Christmas, Vidia said we might go to an Indian
restaurant, Veeraswami’s, on a lane off Regent Street. But when we got there, he sulked. He said it was suburban. He could not eat his meal. He crunched a papadam into flakes on the tablecloth with his forefinger and grumbled about Shiva, whom he called Seewyn.

  “He has long hair,” Vidia said, and indicated with his fingers how it fell on both sides of his face. He pursed his lips and spoke again, sourly. “Like Veronica Lake.”

  That night we were invited to dinner at Edna O’Brien’s. She lived in Putney, some distance from Stockwell. Vidia said that her house backed onto the river.

  “It sounds a nice place to live,” I said.

  “Those suburbs fill me with gloom.”

  “How are we getting there?”

  “Edna is sending a car at seven.”

  At just seven o’clock Vidia said, “The car is not here.”

  He was so punctilious that he grew agitated as an appointed time approached and regarded anything after the specified minute as late. He was sitting upright, stiff with annoyance, the hardback book on his lap open to its flyleaf. He had written, To Edna O’Brien from V.S Naipaul. He seemed to be hesitating over the date.

  “What is she like?” I asked, trying to distract him.

  He thought a moment, then grimaced and clawed his hair. He said, “She has drunk London to its dregs.”

  The thought of this Irish woman guzzling London in this way excited me as much as I want to be your Christmas pudding.

  Vidia snapped the book shut—it was his Mr. Stone and the Knights Companion—and said, “I knew the car wouldn’t be here on time.”

  “How did you know?”

  “I had a vibration.”

  Pat was becoming anxious, and she said without any confidence, “I expect the car will be along any minute now.”

  But at seven-thirty it still had not come. The three of us remained seated, listening, leaking energy. It was impossible to talk about anything except the car that had not arrived.

  Without a word, but biting his pipe stem, Vidia leaned over and put the inscribed book back on the shelf, slotting it angrily and jamming it tight between two fatter books, as though finishing an obscure bit of masonry.

  “I don’t want to go anymore,” he said. In a frivolous woman’s voice he said, “Oh, don’t worry, I’ll send a car for you.” He chewed his pipe stem. “But there is no car!”

  Vidia’s eyes went black. His anger resonated in the air like a high-frequency hum of such pitch and intensity that everything in the room seemed fragile, as though at any moment it could all shatter or explode.

  “Ring her,” Pat said. “I’m sure it’s a mistake.”

  More coaxing at last got Vidia on the phone, and he held the heavy receiver against the side of his head like a weapon.

  “Edna.” Vidia’s voice was stern. “The car has not come.”

  There was a pause, the twang of a hurried explanation, and “sorry” repeated over and over. Her apology was as distinct as the call of a particular species of bird.

  “I see.” Vidia listened some more, looking grim. “In that case,” he said, “I will see if Rogers will take us.”

  Rogers was the minicab driver, although from the way Vidia spoke of him, he sounded like his personal chauffeur. AD such flunkies were for Vidia just surnames, like Brown the charlady. It was after eight when Rogers arrived in his Rover.

  “You sit next to the tiger,” Pat said to me.

  Vidia was still angry. The angle of his pipe in his mouth told everything. And he had not brought his book. We traveled in silence along cold streets to Putney.

  The house, on Deodar Road, was tall, and with a Christmas wreath on the door and all the lights burning it looked festive. Edna O’Brien greeted us with kisses and apologies. Several guests had already arrived, including an American named Coles and the writer Len Deighton. I did not know Deighton’s writing, but Heather had a copy of Horse Under Water on her bedside table, and I associated this book with our sexual postures, another prop in the love nest, like the little lamp, the ashtray, and the clock face that glowed in the dark. Deighton was a rumpled, soft-spoken man. Coles looked overdressed and agitated.

  Edna was pretty, Irish to her fingertips, slim, with a friendly girl’s face and red piled-up hair and a lace blouse. She said, “Vidia’s told me all about you. Now do sit down—what will you drink? I should warn you, we’ve just been discussing the American expression ‘credibility gap.’ I can’t understand it for the life of me.”

  Coles said, “It means just what it says. It’s the difference between how much you believe and how much you don’t.”

  “I must be stupid,” Edna said. “I don’t get it.”

  What made Coles unpersuasive was his beard, which he had just begun to grow, making him look unshaven more than bearded. His bristly face was a distraction and gave him a dubious appearance. He said he was a publisher in New York and was hoping that Edna would write something for him.

  “You live in London?” he asked me.

  “No. Just visiting. I live in Uganda. I’m at the university.”

  “So what are you studying?”

  “I’m a teacher.”

  “Pretty dangerous down there, isn’t it?”

  “No. It’s wonderful. New York is dangerous.”

  “That’s bullshit,” Coles said.

  Pat Naipaul winced as he said this. She did not understand that when I was with Americans I tried to provoke them, or even be offensive. I would not have dared do this with an English person, but I resented Coles’s complacency. This sort of older man would expect me to join the U.S. Army and be sent to Vietnam so that he could sit and grow his ridiculous beard in New York City.

  “Dad, I broke my watch strap.”

  A small boy was tapping Coles on the shoulder. He wore a school uniform and had a whining English accent. Dad? It could only have been Coles’s son. Coles did not introduce him. In fact he seemed slightly embarrassed by the boy, who was making a whiffling complaint in his prissy English accent to his gruff New Yorker father who took little notice of him.

  Another boy entered the room, one of Edna’s sons, dressed in sneakers and jeans and a sweatshirt. Like the other boy, he was about ten. He said, “I’m going to do a magic trick. Does anyone have a pound note?”

  I gave him one. He inserted it between the rollers of a little machine and it disappeared. Everyone groaned, to encourage him. Then, just as I had abandoned any thought of getting it back, he made the pound note reappear.

  “I need help carving the turkey,” Edna said.

  “Vidia’s no use,” Pat said, glancing at Vidia, who looked horror-struck, as though he had just remembered something.

  “I have some salmon for Vidia,” Edna said, and Vidia relaxed. “Come help me in the kitchen, Paul.”

  She handed me the carving knife and a long fork and the platter for the meat. The turkey gleamed in its wrapper of roasted skin. Edna seemed so pleasant and hospitable that it struck me as unfair that Vidia had left the dedicated book behind.

  She said, “Have you been to the Congo?”

  “Twice,” I said. “It’s an amazing place. It looks just the way you expect it to—green and colorful and violent, and that big muddy river.”

  “I’d love to see it. It has Irish connections, you know. Roger Casement.”

  “Oh, yes, that’s right.” But it was a meaningless name to me. I said, “I’ll meet you in Leopoldville. We’ll go up the river in a steamer. We’ll penetrate the Congo and drink it to its dregs.”

  Vidia’s phrase for her had bewitched me.

  “Oh, get on with you,” she said with affection, and she touched me tenderly. She put her face close to mine and made a fish mouth. “Carve the turkey.”

  I helped serve it. We ate in the dining room. Vidia’s salmon was presented to him like a prize he had won.

  Len Deighton said, “The painter Sidney Nolan lives over the road.”

  “I don’t want to meet any new people,” Vidia said.
/>   The American, Coles, was talking about Vietnam, what a mess it was, but what else could we do? It was the sort of line that made me recklessly offensive.

  “I think Wallace is right,” Vidia said. “The problem is with the pointy-headed intellectuals.”

  Coles said, “George Wallace?”

  “That’s the man. He has an awful lot of common sense.”

  Deighton said, “I am more interested in the case of that colored cricketer from South Africa. Did you see the write-up in today’s paper?”

  “The important thing to remember,” Vidia said, “is that he is a slave.”

  Coles was scratching at his half-grown beard. He said, “I don’t get any of this. Are you serious?”

  Edna said, “Now I have to make Irish coffee. If anyone watches me pouring the cream in over a spoon, I’ll make a mess of it and it’ll sink.”

  Vidia was not listening. He was facing Coles. “When you understand that he is a slave, you will be able to discuss him.”

  Edna served the coffee with the cream floating on top, and we drank it in the lounge. Coles, bewildered by Vidia on the subject of slavery and South Africa, once again began to talk about the Vietnam War. He spoke in such a futile way, I remembered why I had decided to stay in Africa, and I longed to be back in Uganda.

  It was snowing when we left. Edna kissed me and said that I could come back anytime. Putney was the first part of London I had seen that I felt I would be able to live in. I liked the wide black Thames behind her house, the way the river sucked and eddied at the end of her garden.

  Rogers had been huddled in his minicab, waiting. In the car, Vidia said, “That obnoxious American and his son. Did you notice the way the son spoke? So precise. Such an English schoolboy. The father was embarrassed.”

  Pat challenged him, though it was what I had felt.

  Vidia said, “I had a vibration.”

  Pat said to me, “Are you going to see your friend?”

  “No. She’s spending Christmas with her folks in the country.”

  “The English thing,” Vidia said. “Did she invite you?”