Sir Vidia's Shadow

by Paul Theroux

  Vidia smiled at it. He said, “Have I told you my joke? I would put a comma after ‘Britain.’”

  It was my first experience of British Rail. I was reassured in the big warm bosom of this friendly monster, sitting on a cushion in a corner seat, watching Berkshire go by, and the lovely fields, still green in an English winter, and the solid houses and the clumps of woods that bordered meadowland. I had not realized how disoriented I had been in black, labyrinthine London until I saw the open countryside. English people in Africa boasted of everything, but I had never heard any of them boast of the beauty of these green fields and pretty hills and indestructible-looking villages. They never spoke about such things.

  I mentioned this to Vidia.

  “Because they’re infies,” he said.

  A little later, I said, “You must have done this many times, taken this train.”

  “Oh, God.”

  I was asking about The Mimic Men but without saying so. He gave nothing away, he seldom reminisced, but he set great store by faces—how much they told; and by expressions—what a grimace revealed. So I knew that his experiences on this London-to-Oxford line had been painful and possibly bitter. He often spoke of poverty, of the misery of having no money. His version of his past was one of turmoil and deprivation. He looked back all the time, as his writing showed, but he did not talk about it.

  For lunch we both had cheese sandwiches in the buffet car. I knew that Vidia ate fish. But to me, at that time, a vegetarian was someone who ate nothing but cheese sandwiches.

  Traveling on this train, reading newspapers, was so pleasant I would not have minded going farther. My only other real experiences of trains were the overnighter to Nairobi and the Mombasa express and the gasping steam locomotives of Malawi and Rhodesia. The train soothed and comforted me and stimulated my imagination. It offered me a glimpse of the best of England and provided access to my past by activating my memory. I had made a discovery: I would gladly go anywhere on a train.

  Oxford was soon outside the window, first a platform, then a sign, finally the place itself: gray stone buildings, devotional in their contours, a wilderness of churches and cloisters, a town of ecclesiastical stone. There were more walls than steeples and spires, and many narrow streets, every stone seemingly chiseled with a coded message which, when translated, read No Trespassing.

  Before we left the station, Vidia went to the timetable on the wall and made a note of the times of the later trains to London. It seemed a wise thing to do. I never would have thought of the precaution—another lesson from Vidia in the importance of having an escape route. Once again I felt like a beginner, but I had Vidia to show me the way.

  Leaving the station, I stuffed the newspapers I had read into a barrel. -

  “Why did you buy three newspapers?” Vidia asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said, because I sensed he disapproved. One had been the Daily Mirror.

  “Most of the English press is such rubbish.”

  But I had felt starved for news in Uganda. Although we got the English Sunday papers, always late, news in Uganda was by word of mouth, rumor and speculation, just whispers. The Argus was timid, and the government paper, The People, was a mouthpiece. I was stimulated by English papers, the freshness, the frankness, the humor. But what was new to me was stale to Vidia.

  We walked up High Street.

  “This dampness,” Vidia said. “When I was here I had such terrible asthma that I lay on my bed and Patsy held me—held me in her arms—and warmed me so that I could breathe.”

  University College—Shiva’s college, and it had also been Vidia’s—was in High Street, with a large gateway, like the entrance to a cloister. A small window, like that in a tollbooth, framed the ugly face of an older man dressed in black. He stepped into the walkway, scowling, looking cruel.

  “Hello, Mr. Naipaul. What brings you ’ere, then?”

  It was a thick country accent, sure of itself, and its confidence and strength made the man seem more like a prison guard than a porter.

  “Looking for my brother,” Vidia said.

  Vidia seem somewhat uneasy; it was the way the man faced him. Vidia needed servants and flunkies to be more humble and respectful than this.

  ’"Aven’t seen ’im at all. They’ve been told to sign the book, but I don’t suppose he takes a blind bit of notice of what the master says.”

  “No. One imagines not. He’s not in his room?”

  “Your brother, Mr. Naipaul? He left ’is key. Wasn’t ’ere yesterday, neither.”

  “Very well. We will leave a note for him.”

  Vidia wrote the note while the porter stood with his arms folded.

  “You can put it in my brother’s mailbox.”

  “If ’e fucking looks in ’is mailbox, which I doubt.” The porter handled the note as if it were something of no value. “So, ’ow ’ave you been keeping?”

  “Yes, quite well, um, latterly, one has been very busy, thank you.”

  I had not imagined it: Vidia was uneasy in the presence of this domineering servant. It was as though they had no language in common, which was perhaps actually the case. It was one of the strangest conversations ever—the rough, unapologetic, cursing servant who was in charge, and the oblique, inquiring master at his mercy.

  “I shall hand this to your brother personally.”

  “Yes. So good of you.”

  The telephone jangled in the tollbooth.

  “You will excuse me, gentlemen.” The porter stepped inside and shouted into the phone.

  Vidia showed me the quad, the buildings, the spire, and in one anteroom a bright white marble statue of Percy Bysshe Shelley, once a resident of University College. The porter was still on the telephone when we left.

  Passing Blackwell’s Bookshop on Broad Street, I expressed an interest in browsing and we went in. Vidia waited and looked at books, all the while giving off a signal that indicated that I should hurry up. Vidia’s impatience was a vibration that was almost audible, a distinct high-pitched whine. I saw some first editions of Hemingway and Orwell.

  “How much is this?” I showed him the Orwell.

  “Twelve shillings. You don’t want that.”

  We left the bookstore and soon passed a round tower.

  “The Bodleian,” Vidia said.

  After a short walk we entered the gateway of another college, with paler, taller spires set beside a wide meadow.

  “Where are we?”

  “Christ Church.”

  Places like this reminded me that I was in many respects an African. I needed a simpler and less demanding world. I was at my happiest in the bush. And it was not merely that the orderly and ancient buildings overwhelmed me; the students also seemed aloof and proprietorial. They were much younger than me, and they looked right at home here. I knew I did not belong, that I would never belong.

  Back on High Street, we walked as far as Magdalen Bridge and into Magdalen College itself—more cloisters, another quad, buildings like monasteries. Being a student here seemed to me like my being an actor in a pageant in which I did not know any of my lines, one of those terrible dreams.

  I said, “I wonder what happened to Shiva.”

  Vidia said, “Seewyn’s problem is that he was raised by women, who adored him. So he takes no responsibility.”

  We went to the Ashmolean Museum. As he had done at the National Gallery, the Tate, and the V and A, Vidia made a beeline for certain rooms, for specific paintings, for particular details in those paintings, none of them obvious. He darted to a Watteau, a Whistler, a Hilliard miniature, and always indicated the tiniest features. “Look at this,” and “See how he handles paint.”

  I looked for anything of Africa—a mask, a spear, a landscape, anything of the bush. I realized how Ugandans must feel, stuck in Oxford or London after leaving the vast, deep savannah or the slopes of the Mountains of the Moon. And then I saw a painting that reassured me.

  It might have been done in Fort Portal or Mubende,
with big generous trees and tall elephant grass and flat-topped fever thorns in the distance. There were small figures at the side, some animals—gazelles, impalas, no big game—and rich colors and flowers in the foreground. I did not recognize the artist’s name. I liked this wide green canvas and the accuracy of the view and the easily identifiable plants, the precise leaves, the blossoms, and the dome of sky. Even the scraps of cloud looked right.

  I did not call Vidia’s attention to it. I was afraid he might disapprove and spoil a moment that had cheered me. It was not his Africa. My reaction to this painting made me think I should leave England soon. Vidia walked quickly over to me and frowned at the picture.

  To distract him I said, “Maybe we should go past Shiva’s college one more time, to see whether he’s come back.”

  “No, no.” Vidia turned away from the picture. “He’s on his own now.”

  I noticed that he was wearing the heavy shoes he called veldshoen. He had been wearing them that night in Kisenyi, by the shore of Lake Kivu, when he had said, “What that dog needs is a good kick.”

  On the way back to London on the train, Vidia said, “I wonder whether any of my books will last?”

  I said that I thought A House for Mr. Biswas was a masterpiece that would last as long as people read books.

  “You’re so kind,” he said. He seemed to consider the word “masterpiece.” Then he said, “One hopes so. It’s a big book.”

  We talked about the book. Vidia said that although he had never reread it, he had put everything into it—his family, his island, everything he knew. Even small things in the book pleased him. He smiled at a memory.

  “There are three Negro workmen in the book—just simple fellows, with shovels. Do you remember them? They only have first names, Edgar, Sam, and George.”

  “They work on Biswas’s house.”

  “Yes, yes.” But he was already laughing. “Edgar Mittelholzer, Samuel Selvon, and George Lamming,” he said, naming three black novelists from Trinidad.

  He almost gagged laughing at this private joke, but after a while, still talking about the novel, we discussed Mr. Biswas’s views on typefaces. Vidia became animated again. With his mouth close to the window of the train, he exhaled on the glass.

  “This is Times.” He sketched a letter with his finger, then added embellishments and more letters. “This is sans serif. And this”—he was still adding letters to the steam-clouded glass—“is Bodoni. I like this.”

  He was intent, still sketching with his finger, still describing.

  I said, “Sometimes they put that information on the last page of a book. I never know what to make of it.”

  “I love it,” he said.

  “And this,” he said, working his finger on the window, “this is Caslon. Notice the difference?”

  The letters seemed to fade. But no, they remained on the glass. As soon as we got near London they were lit again by the city’s lights, all those different letters.

  The day before I left, there were workmen in Vidia’s house. They were hammering in his bedroom, fixing some shelves that Vidia considered badly built. It was a Saturday. I called Heather and asked if we could meet. She said yes but suggested a pub, not her apartment. She knew I was leaving. At the pub, she complained that I cared more about Vidia than about her.

  “He’s my friend,” I said.

  “Thanks,” she said.

  Seeing I had hurt her, I said, “You’re my friend too, of course you are.”

  I could not explain how Vidia mattered, and how his friendship was different from anyone else’s. I knew he loved Shiva, but he seemed to depend on me so much more than he did on his brother, and he knew more about my writing ambition than I had ever dared tell my own family.

  Heather and I went on drinking. We did not make love that day. The omission made it more final a farewell.

  Vidia looked grief-stricken when I got back that night. Pat was on the parlor sofa. He was sitting in his armchair, an expression of sorrow on his face, but when he began to speak to her, he sounded like a small child who had been wronged.

  “I can’t sleep in that bed,” he said. “It’s tainted. Why did he do it? The foolish, ignorant man!”

  He was disgusted and near to tears.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “One of the workmen in Vidia’s bedroom was explaining something,” Pat began. But she seemed too frightened to continue.

  His face twisted in nausea, Vidia said, “And he sat on my bed, Patsy. He put his bottom on my bed.”

  The next morning, Vidia was still seated in his armchair in the parlor. He looked grim. Fatigue made his skin grayish. He had not slept. It would be a long day, and I could not begin to comprehend how the bed that the workman had tainted by sitting on it would ever be purified. Violation by a workman’s bottom was one of those problems that were unique to Vidia. Only he understood the problem, and so only he had the solution.

  He looked weary. He said he was sorry I was leaving, and he meant it—he looked as though he needed to be propped up. Pat was fretful and weepy, but I could not tell whether my departure was the cause.

  As always, Vidia said, “You’re going to be all right.”

  7

  Air Letters: A Correspondence Course

  VIDIA CLAIMED that handwriting spoke volumes. Even if you could not read the words, the way they were written, just the loops and slants and how a t was crossed, told you what you needed to know. He had taught me to read the moods in his handwriting, for which he always used a fountain pen and black ink. Large and loopy meant he was idle and calm, regular squiggles indicated concentration, small meant anxious, tiny meant fearful and overworked, and at its most minuscule he was at his wits’ end. It was perhaps some consolation that, graphologically inclined, he knew what his own handwriting told him.

  For the next five years, we conversed by airmail over long distances. I was in Africa and later in Singapore; Vidia was in and out of England. He usually wrote me on blue air-letter forms from the post office, the ones with preprinted stamps on the front. They unfolded to narrow lengths of paper that seemed Chinese to him, he said. He used them vertically, cramming them with his handwriting.

  These letters were for me a source of wisdom and strength and amounted to a correspondence course in creative writing; from Vidia I learned the reality of being a writer. During this period I had no telephone, I had no other close friends, I did not leave the Equator. The mail was everything. Face to face, anyone can say he is your friend and can promise to write faithfully, but the test of friendship is the letters themselves, the fondest proof that you are remembered. I did not want to be forgotten, for once again I was buried in Africa.

  It bewildered me when the first letter I received from him was cold. Worse than cold: somewhat offensive. That curfew book I had given to his editor Diana Athill, at André Deutsch, had been turned down. Her letter had discouraged me in what I had thought was a great idea: a book about Africa in the form of a chronicle about a violent curfew. I had complained to Vidia of her indifference.

  In his letter, a Lebanese stamp on the envelope, written on the stationery of the Bristol Hotel in Beirut, Vidia stood by his editor. He said her judgment was sound. He would not give me any further advice about publishing. He suggested that I was patronizing him in the language of my letter, that I misread Africa, that I did not understand Martial’s epigrams, and he wished me well in my journalism. This seemed belittling to the fiction I was trying to write. He closed with a mention of Francis Chichester, at that moment sailing his Gipsy Moth IV solo around the world. He wrote, “I hope he drowns.”

  It was a bad-tempered letter, written in one of his moods. I could have guessed that when I saw his handwriting. Though he was in Beirut, he did not refer to it, except by using the hotel’s ornate letterhead—I suspected him of ostentation. He did not say where he was going, or why. It was a grand gesture, his letter from Lebanon, a romantic and cosmopolitan place that was on the itinerary of a
successful writer.

  In fact he was on his way to India, Pat wrote, in a letter I received a week later. She called his trip “a journalistic assignment” and said he would be in India two months, for a long article. His dismissive mention of my journalism, which had rankled, perhaps also explained why he had not said he was going to be a journalist in India.

  They were terrible letter writers, all of them, Pat said. Shiva did not even write home. I should not expect too much, and yet she said that it had pleased her to see that we were exchanging letters regularly—it was uncharacteristic of Vidia to write so often.

  She reported Vidia’s comings and goings like a doting mother. He had been living in the Kent town of Sandwich, in a loaned house, while Pat had commuted by train every few days from her teaching duties. Running on the beach—running on the beach? I had to read the sentence three times—Vidia had sprained his ankle, but he had looked so comic falling down and gesturing that Pat had not taken it seriously. A swollen ankle was the upshot, and, as a fellow athlete (the man had once water-skied to France), the doctor was sympathetic.

  Pat Naipaul’s affectionate letter lifted my spirits and explained Vidia’s mood. He was much sweeter, his old encouraging self, when I heard from him again, on his return from India two months later. He praised me, he praised my letters—I was gifted; he complained that he was dull, he was slow, and that he often gave offense without meaning to.

  Here were some examples, he said. Shiva had gotten married. Vidia had offended him and offended his wife. He had also offended his editor in New York. The answer was to acknowledge one’s limitations and as a letter writer to write the simplest, most businesslike notes, so that they could not be misconstrued.

  I need not have feared that he would be businesslike with me. He described how, at the house of Anthony Powell, he had seen an advertisement for my novel—my first novel—in a New York magazine. He talked about the way Israel, a place he had been bored by, was being praised while the Arabs were being scorned. He recalled how noble the stereotype of the Arabs had once been: “fine gentlemen, romantic desert folk, fair in battle, unconquerable in love”—no more!