Sir Vidia's Shadow

by Paul Theroux

  “Do you know Julian Jebb?” Vidia asked.

  “I’ve heard of you,” I said, shaking the man’s hand.

  “People say dreadful things about me. But take no notice,” Jebb said. “I’m mad, bad, and dangerous to know.” He looked aside and in an American accent said, “Hey, that’s enough of that crap!”

  He was the sort of Englishman who could express his humorous side only by speaking in an exaggerated American accent. It was not unusual. Many American academics I had known could only theorize in a precise way by using a fake English accent. Parody so often resulted from simple self-consciousness.

  “Yes, yes,” Vidia said, looking impatient at Jebb’s foolery. “Come inside. Have something to drink.”

  “I was telling Vidia how much I hate his gramophone,” Jebb said, stepping through the door. “Look, isn’t it hideous? It belongs in the V and A. It’s just a silly contraption for distorting sounds.” He put his hands to his cheeks. “I hate it!”

  Just then we heard the serious and sudden crunch of the driveway, a thoroughly satisfying sound that reminded me now of molars and nuts. This continuous grinding was caused by the broad tires of a brown Jaguar. Closer, it even sounded like a big-pawed animal hungrily padding through gravel.

  “Hugh and Antonia,” Vidia said. “Yes. Yes. Yes.”

  Jebb went to greet them. His voice was teasing and friendly but growly from his chain-smoking. He smoked French cigarettes from a blue pack.

  The Frasers were introduced to me. I said, “I met you almost ten years ago, around Christmas.”

  “I distinctly remember you,” Lady Antonia said.

  I loved her lisp on the word “distinctly.” She had beautiful eyes and pale skin, and when she spoke, her tongue and teeth, slightly out of alignment, made her awkward, and sexier, and drew attention to her pretty mouth.

  “Your book has done so well,” she said. “I’ve given copies of it away as presents.”

  Hugh Fraser, hearing this, turned to me. He was very tall and slow in his movements, with a large, thoughtful face that looked both apprehensive and domineering. His shoulders were lopsided, one higher than the other, which gave him a weary posture. It was a letter from Hugh Fraser that Vidia the graphologist had once shown me, saying of his handwriting, “Look, even upside down it’s still tormented.”

  “The Welsh are the only people who bring out my racial prejudice,” Jebb was saying to Lady Antonia.

  Hugh Eraser’s bigness and aura of helpless authority filled The Bungalow. He was a Conservative member of Parliament, and he made me wonder why anyone so judicious and reflective had wanted to go into politics. I could not imagine him giving speeches or stumping for votes. He represented Stafford and Stone, in the Midlands. I knew those places from the train window, the stops before Crewe and Stoke, on the way to Liverpool. His was a safe Tory seat and the towns looked dreary, but that could have been misleading: riding trains in England was an experience of the back yards and open windows you rarely saw. And if you said to an English person that a certain place was dreary, he’d respond, with an indulgent chuckle, “Oh, the Potteries,” as if its dreariness were irrelevant.

  “Sherry?”

  Vidia was pouring and also describing the merits of this particular sherry, a suggestion of walnuts and oak.

  “I always feel like Alice here,” Jebb said, and then he laughed and made a monkey face. “Of course, I feel like Alice in lots of places!”

  In his overloud laugh there was a scream of disturbance, yet he was funny and much friendlier than the others.

  “Stephen Tennant is the March Hare and the Red Queen rolled into one,” Jebb said, and cupped his hand close to his mouth and whispered in my ear in his affected American accent, “Faggot.”

  Jebb’s breath against my head made me so uncomfortable I said, “He’s a recluse, isn’t he?”

  “I don’t know whether I would call someone who goes to America as much as he does a recluse. He loves Bournemouth. He never misses the Christmas pantomime. Stephen is savagely peripatetic compared to Vidia, the true recluse.”

  “This is a fantastic place,” Lady Antonia said. “It’s like a cottage in an enchanted forest.”

  She was dressed like a shepherdess, her soft skin set off by a frilly lavender blouse and a velvet peasant skirt with brightly embroidered bib and shoulder straps. Her greenish-blue eyes were beautiful, as was her somewhat tousled blond hair. With her big soft lips she seemed half girl, half woman, laughing as she disagreed.

  “If I lived here I would never leave,” she said. “You talk such rubbish, Julian.”

  “About Stephen?” Julian pretended to be indignant, puffing pompously on his French cigarette. “I am probably the only person in this room who’s met him. I think of him as a sort of Oriental potentate. He greets all his visitors by lying on a lovely couch, draped in silk shawls. Something terribly Oriental about that—and of course something frightfully epicene too,” he said, cackling.

  “There is something magical here,” said Lady Antonia.

  “Stephen had the cottage built for himself,” Jebb said. “He never set foot in it. He’s just over there, you know, giggling over something very naughty.”

  I wondered whether Vidia would tell Lady Antonia why the ivy-strangled trees were dead, but he said nothing. He had heard more guests arrive—the gravel again in the driveway. He was alert to the crunching. This was a taxi.

  “Yes, yes,” he said, and went to the door. A young couple entered, and Vidia introduced them as Malcolm and Robin, visiting from New Zealand. Vidia had met them there on a lecturing visit. Malcolm had dark hair and a face so ruddy it looked like a higher form of embarrassment, the kind of color only English farm boys and some Scotsmen had—a naturally pale person’s rude health. Robin was sweet and square-shouldered, wearing a soft, unnecessary hat, as New Zealanders seemed habitually to do.

  “Beaut book, Paul,” Malcolm said to me. “When we met Vidia in Auckland, I told him that it was a dream of mine to meet you when we came to England. So this is a pleasure.”

  Jebb said mockingly, “A real fan!”

  I ignored him. Being a pest was part of his humor. “My pleasure. Are you a writer?”

  “I do some writing. I’m on the English faculty at the uni. I took Vidia around when he visited. Sort of smoothed the way.”

  He was younger than me, and I knew exactly what his role had been, because it was the role I had played ten years before. I saw him as a Vidia protégé and seemed to be looking at my younger self, when I had visited England and Vidia had rewarded me for smoothing the way for him in Africa.

  “It gets dark so early here,” Robin said. “And listen to that wind.”

  If I had not heard New Zealand in her nasalized dahk I would surely have heard it in her weend. But I had made the same observation of English weather when I had first arrived.

  “Quite right,” Hugh Fraser said, but he was speaking about something else to Vidia. He had stood up. His head was near the ceiling. He looked awkward in the room’s smallness, but then he probably looked uncomfortable in most rooms. “I knew him well,” Fraser said. “I would have given anything to work with him again. He always showed up in these sort of marvelous suits. ‘Got it in India,’ he’d say. ‘Made from the chin hairs of a certain goat in Kashmir.’”

  “I felt I could eat that cloth,” Vidia said.

  Who were they talking about? But I didn’t ask. Parties in England were full of remarks like these, about colorful people you’d never heard of.

  “Instead, why don’t you eat some food?” Pat said, emerging from the kitchen. She greeted everyone and apologized for being preoccupied with the meal. She looked harassed, but I could see that she had help, a woman in a brown sweater and apron ladling soup into bowls.

  Vidia poured the wine, saying, “I think you’ll like this. It’s balanced, it’s firm, perhaps a bit fleshy, but smooth and, I think you’ll agree, round.”

  “We are taking no notice of Vidia’s
diet today,” Pat said. “This is Mrs. Griggs’s oxtail soup.”

  Vidia was served a plate of smoked salmon, which he had to himself, and I knew when I saw it that everyone else at the table would have preferred it to the brown soup.

  Jebb said, “Vidia is such an absolute fanatic about food. There’s a new restaurant in London called Cranks, for vegetarians. I always think of Vidia when I go by. I’m usually cottaging in that area—see, no one even knows what it means!”

  “One is thinking of buying a car,” Vidia said, abruptly changing the subject. “Tell me, what car should one buy?”

  “I’m car-blind,” Jebb said. “I can’t tell them apart. I can’t even drive. I hate them, really. I’m car-bored, rather.”

  “We once made the finest motorcars on earth,” Hugh Fraser said. His voice was solemn and slow. We waited for more. “And no doubt we shall again.” He paused and added, “Perhaps you should wait until then, when these paragons of British workmanship are once more rolling off the assembly lines.”

  “How do you like your Jaguar?” I asked.

  “It’s a bit of a tired old warhorse,” he said. “Like its owner.”

  “Except when you’re out on the road and speeding and calling out, ‘Eat my dust!’” Jebb said, slipping into an American accent again. Then Jebb said to Malcolm with intense interest, “Isn’t there a fabulous native name for New Zealand?”

  “I think you mean Maori.”

  “I suppose one does,” Jebb said. He was smoking at the table, while everyone else was eating.

  “Aotearoa,” Malcolm said. “It means, The Land of the Long White Cloud.”

  “Or, The Land of the Wrong White Crowd, more like,” Jebb said. He turned his back on the New Zealanders and smiled at Lady Antonia, who hadn’t heard.

  “There is nothing I would love more than living on one of those islands,” Lady Antonia was saying to Pat Naipaul. But they weren’t talking about New Zealand. They were engaged in a separate conversation, about the West Indies. “I would adore being absolutely idle.”

  “You’d get tired of the heat.”

  “I’d adore the heat.”

  “You would be so bored.”

  “Not at all,” Lady Antonia said. “I would love it. Flowers. Heat. The sun. The sea. It’s my idea of heaven.”

  This lovely woman, naked under a loosely fitting white dress with frilly sleeves and a big floppy bonnet and a white parasol, came smiling towards me in a tropical garden while I sat on the verandah of a yellow stucco plantation house at a table set with tea things, including marmalade made from my own oranges. A jovial parrot squawked in a big cage and sunlight blazed from the blue sky, showing the veins in the large green leaves of my anthuriums and Lady Antonia’s body silhouetted in her thin lacy dress. I was pouring tea for her and she was utterly at peace and fragrant with pheromones. Heat, idleness, and contentment were the combination that produced sensuality.

  “I love those hot islands,” she was saying to Pat as my temperature went up. “I love doing nothing.”

  “You’re the busiest woman I know,” Pat said. She had gotten up to pass the plates for the second course, poached fish and buttery leeks and salad.

  Lady Antonia was protesting, but I didn’t care. I had already eloped with her, and I was barefoot on the verandah in my planter’s shorts and straw hat, living out my fantasy of bliss in a coconut paradise.

  “How is your wine?” Vidia asked me.

  “You were right. Fleshy. Round. Smooth.”

  Jebb said, “Are you talking about Princess Margaret?”

  “Afterwards we’re all going to try some snuff,” Vidia said, cutting him off.

  “Harold Macmillan took snuff,” Hugh Fraser said. “One was perpetually badgered to try.”

  “I won’t badger you,” Vidia said.

  “I want to try,” Lady Antonia said eagerly.

  On our tropical verandah she was always saying yes to my wild suggestions, and she needed only to sigh and twitch her dress with her fingers for me to say yes. I looked up and saw Mrs. Griggs collecting the plates and realized that my fantasy had possessed me so completely, lunch was over.

  “I’ll have a go,” Malcolm said. “Robin?”

  Robin nodded, yes, she would try some snuff.

  “What a pathetic lot of sheep,” Jebb said. “I will not put that vile substance up my nose. I’d rather have a fag. Oh, look at Paul! He’s so shocked.”

  I said, “I know ‘fag’ means cigarette, Julian.”

  “But I mean the other kind of fag,” Jebb said. He laughed at me, and in his American accent said, “Faggot.”

  The correct response, I knew, was to let yourself be teased and not get riled, and then merely smile in pity at the teaser to make him feel childish. Or else to say, You may well be right!

  “That snuff just vanishes up Vidia’s nose,” Pat said.

  “Aren’t you supposed to sneeze?” Robin asked.

  “Vidia never sneezes,” said Pat.

  “I love to sneeze,” Lady Antonia said. “I wonder why that is.”

  This was my chance. I said, “The reason it’s so pleasurable is that there is erectile tissue in the nose—even a woman’s. The nose is also a sexual organ. It’s very sensitive. I mean, it can become aroused and swollen. There are some people who can’t breathe through their nose when they’re sexually excited.”

  Everyone stared at me.

  “It says so in Krafft-Ebing,” I went on, blabbing. “Psychopathia Sexualis. Sneezing and sex.”

  Lady Antonia smiled, but her husband was frowning in contemplation at his big hands, and his face was darker as an uneasy silence descended on the table. I had probably said too much, but I didn’t mind. I was thinking of nakedness on a hot island.

  “That sounds like the voice of experience, Paul,” Jebb said.

  “If it sounds that way it’s because I am boasting,” I said. “But haven’t you been told you have a virile nose?”

  “All the time, but fortunately for me I am impotent,” Jebb said. “I am ‘The Maimed Débauché.’”

  Malcolm put his elbows on the table, and his pink face grew pinker as he recited:

  So when my days of impotence approach,

  And I’m by pox and wine’s unlucky chance

  Forced from the pleasing billows of debauch

  On the dull shore of lazy temperance...

  “That sounds so lovely spoken in New Zealandish—is that right?” Jebb was puffing energetically and blowing smoke. “Or do I say ‘Kiwi’?”

  “That verse is terribly familiar,” Lady Antonia said. She was dabbing her pretty lips.

  “John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester,” Malcolm said.

  “Malcolm’s doctoral dissertation was about the Augustans and court wits,” Robin said. “I typed every word, so I should know.”

  “Rochester is delightful,” Lady Antonia said. “Do you still read him, Vidia?”

  Before Vidia could answer, Malcolm stuck his pink face into Antonia’s pale one and said, “‘Delightful’ is a strange word for porno.”

  “I don’t find Rochester in the least pornographic. You New Zealanders must be rather easily shocked.”

  I liked that. We would read Rochester on our verandah, Lady A. and I. Instead of giving her a direct reply, Malcolm propped himself up on his elbows again, a beaky Kiwi in the throes of pedantry, proving his point to the Poms, and declaimed:

  By all love’s soft yet mighty

  powers It is a thing unfit

  That men should fuck in time of flowers

  Or when the smock’s beshit.

  “I think you’ve just proved my point—you’ve certainly revealed something about your own shockability,” Lady Antonia said. “Rochester is a moralist, really, and very funny for being a wee bit naughty.”

  “A wee bit naughty!” Malcolm cried. Speaking in his New Zealand accent he could not make much of a point; he sounded as if he were satirizing himself. He angrily recited again:

  You l
adies all of merry England

  Who have been to kiss the Duchess’s hand,

  Pray, did you lately observe in the show

  A noble Italian called Signor Dildo?

  “‘Naughty’ is precisely how I would describe that,” Lady Antonia said.

  Vidia was fidgeting, made uncomfortable by the turn in the conversation. I knew he was impatient to leave the table and end this talk. He had taken out his pipe and was smoothing it and sticking his thumb in the bowl.

  “Malcolm can go on all night,” Robin said, and patted her husband’s rigid arm.

  “Rochester is all foreplay,” Jebb said. “Who was it who said foreplay is terribly middle class?”

  Malcolm’s eyes were glassy with rage, and I guessed it was because Lady Antonia was smiling and turned slightly away from him, her hands primly in her lap. Malcolm set his jaw at her and said:

  So a proud bitch does lead about

  Of humble curs the amorous rout

  Who most obsequiously do hunt

  The savory scent of salt-swollen c—

  “Language, I hear!” Jebb shouted in glee, and then, “Your New Zealand accent lends piquancy and incredible nuance to Augustan poetry.”

  “Shall we have coffee?” Pat said.

  “Is this another branch of the awful study of English?” Vidia said.

  Jebb said, “My grandfather hated that poetry. Do you know my grandfather?”

  I said, “No. Do you know mine?”

  “Mine was Hilaire Belloc. Who was yours?”

  Lady Antonia was smiling directly at Malcolm now. He looked fussed and breathless and indignant. She put her lisp to dramatic advantage as she said,