Sir Vidia's Shadow

by Paul Theroux

  20

  Sir Vidia’s Shadow

  SOMETIMES Vidia, looking like a laughingstock, calling himself V. S. Nipple, strutted in my dreams, tut-tutting, or in those informative early morning episodes of mumming that I saw just as I awoke, he appeared to rehearse my worst fears: black-faced Vidia, scowling West Indian with a walking stick and his funny floppy hat from Rwanda, scolding, sticking me with a restaurant bill I could not pay or giving demoralizing advice. You must leave her, Paul! Or, Problems are good!

  Now and then it was Nadira, nightmarish in a spidery sari, with a big intimidating face, the skin of her purple belly showing at her midriff, Indian fashion, like one of those hideous Indian burra memsahibs buying expensive chutney in the Food Halls of Harrods, shrieking at me. I was a nervous blushing store clerk in those fantasies, and she was a shrew, woggling her head and denouncing me.

  I was not dismayed. “Often miracles happen,” Vidia used to say. He meant in writing, or in the rewards for writing—making the million, becoming “immensely famous.” So he said. The rest of life was doggedness and uncertainty.

  If a person wishes to vanish from your life, there is really no miracle you can work to get him back. In a rational moment you think, Why would I want to see someone who does not want to see me? But urgency makes for confusion. You are stumped. You can’t get him to reply to a letter if he has no desire to respond. If you call, the phone simply rings, or else the same answering machine message mocks you in its implacable repetition: Leave your name after the beep and we’ll get back to you.

  Silence is the stern reply, as the English say. Silence is like a darkness. Or was it all a horrible mistake?

  I really did not know what to do. Nadira’s letter rankled because I was sure she had written it behind Vidia’s back. Making a fool of my friend! She sneaked it into the fax machine and then destroyed the original. I had faxed the thing back, and sent it by mail too, but such epistles were easily recognized and intercepted. Wives often roosted near fax machines, snooping and snatching. So the poor little man was still in the dark. She had abused me and forbidden me to write anything about him. As if I wanted to! As if I could! As if I had even dreamed of it!

  Suspense is hateful. Hope deferred made my heart sick. I tried to put the matter out of my mind. More important than this, Hong Kong was passing from the hands of Britain into the hands of China, and my new novel, a black comedy taking place at the periphery of the Chinese take-away, was about to be published. I had agreed to a book tour, one week, Sunday to Sunday, in England’s reliable spring. April is not the cruelest month; it is the best, my birthday month, full of buds and hope: Whan that Aprille with her shoures sote.

  It was no ordinary week. The British general election would take place while I was still in London. Great excitement and the premonition of a Labour victory after twenty-four years of demoralizing Tory smugness.

  I arrived early on a Sunday morning of mist and sun—the sun in April like someone smiling through tears. My hotel was in Kensington, the Royal Garden, with a view east over Kensington Palace and Hyde Park and the rowboats in the Serpentine, the chestnut trees in blossom and the shrouded Albert Memorial.

  I was happy being merely a visitor. I had fulfilled my goals: to leave London before I died there, to avoid ever getting a job. I had dreamed of the West Country, but my backup dream was to end up on an sunny island. I was now a man of fifty-five, a resident of Hawaii, a part-time beekeeper. “Are you the writer?” the immigration officer had asked me that morning. Sometimes such a stranger would also say, “How is your friend Naipaul?”

  Most pleasurable for me was the prospect of seeing one of my children. Around noon, Marcel rang from the lobby and came up to my hotel room. He had just finished writing a novel of his own. He was nervous and proud, but not prouder than I was of him.

  “Is there anything wrong, Dad?”

  I had been telling myself I was happy, yet he knew there was a shadow.

  “Naipaul,” I said.

  I told him about Nadira’s letter of a month before.

  He said, “No way!”

  I told him the rest.

  “She sounds stroppy.”

  “Vidia would have stopped her if he had known. All that shit about my obituary of Pat.”

  “Maybe he does know.”

  “Nah. Poor English makes him crazy. The letter was a mess,” I said, and saw that sheet of paper before my eyes, all the printed characters, like a ransom note. “But I will never know for sure. It’s funny. Vidia used to look at someone’s essay and say, ‘Promise you’ll give up writing.’”

  Marcel made an abrupt snoring sound, the signal that he had heard this anecdote many times and was already bored and half asleep.

  “I know, I know,” I said. “But listen. What I want to say is that he used to talk about how relieved the person was when he said it.”

  “You’ve told me that before.”

  “How there would be a fracture in a friendship, or a divorce, and he would say, ‘Problems are good!’ ‘This is good for you.’ ‘You are now free.’ That?”

  “All that.”

  “Okay, what about lunch?”

  “Let’s do it.”

  That strange transition I always felt in an elevator, holding my breath to offset the pressure in my head from the descent, made me gabble.

  I said, “He doesn’t know.”

  “You’re obsessing, Dad.”

  “But I will never know for sure.”

  “It doesn’t matter. He’s the devil. Didn’t you say that he never paid for meals?”

  “He was generous in other ways.”

  Stepping out of the elevator, Marcel said, “I remember when he came to the house. ‘And what are you studying, little man?’”

  “Was that the last time you saw him?”

  “No. You asked me to deliver something to him. A manuscript. A big parcel.”

  “The Enigma of Arrival.”

  “He asked me a lot of questions. He was actually quite nice to me. I was at Westminster, my second year. It was winter. He gave me tea.” We were at the hotel entrance, at the top of a flight of stairs. “I started that book. It’s bollocks. Which way shall we go, left or right?”

  Left meant the park and Gloucester Road, right was Kensington High Street and teashops. It had to be left: my first morning in London and left was on one of my ticcy routes, like a circuit printed on my nerves.

  “Left,” I said. “We’ll head for Chelsea. The Kings Road is full of places to eat.”

  “I think Labour’s going to romp,” Marcel said as we stopped at the crosswalk on Kensington Road, waiting for the light to change.

  I said, “If only he would write to me. Then I would know whether he was aware of this whole stupid business. It’s amazing. The last time he wrote was after Pat died, over a year ago. This new woman thinks she’s Jane Carlyle—”

  “Dad!”

  “Just listen to me. Don’t shush me, I can’t stand that. I don’t know why this is bothering me.” Maybe it was my being in England again that was bringing it all back and making me short of breath. I had successfully ignored the whole thing in Hawaii. Nothing rang bells there, but London rang bells like mad. “Maybe she’s burning all his bridges, and he’ll wake up one morning with no friends.”

  As he walked just behind me, I knew that Marcel was gritting his teeth, hating this monologue, but I could not help it. I was grateful I had a listener, even if he was unwilling. I was roused to talk.

  “On the other hand, I know he’s working on his Islam book, so he is probably closeted with it while she runs his life. It seems so unfair, though. Her letter.”

  Down Gloucester Road I was hunched over and ranting, turning from time to time to say, “Know what I mean? More than thirty years! It’s a friendship.”

  “You used to say you had no friends.”

  “I had a few. What about Jonathan? Vidia was another.”

  “You could ring him.”

  “Vi
dia doesn’t answer the phone.”

  “Write him a letter.”

  “I did that. If I do it again I’ll look pathetic. If only he—”

  We had come to the crooked and perilous part of Gloucester Road where all the accidents happen, the dogleg that makes an almost blind curve where cars hurtle head on into each other, always a sprinkling of broken glass in the gutters. But I was already going numb.

  On the word “he,” Vidia had appeared in that curve, his nigrescent face fixed and stony, walking fast towards me on the sidewalk. He was the scowling, strutting creature from my apprehensive dreams. All my talk had babbled him into being as, in a’séance, the murmurs of the medium produce a blob of acceptable ectoplasm that passes for the departed soul or the summoned-up loved one. It was Vidia, looking crazy, which was why I doubted that he could be real, for he was as unlike the man of a year ago as it was possible to be. He was G. Ramsay Muir.

  What disconcerted me was that I stopped and he kept walking. He had not seen me. It was one o’clock on a Sunday afternoon, in blazing sunshine. He was thirty feet away.

  I said to myself, in a fearful mutter, “What do we have here?”

  Being conscious of the stagy line only made me more nervous, for it was like a line in a play that is spoken in a panicky situation. It does not advance the plot; it focuses and freezes the moment.

  Still Vidia did not recognize me, nor see me, evidently. He had to be a vaporous apparition, and yet he seemed solid enough. His face was black, the rest of him looked gray. It was his newly grown beard, salt-and-pepper bristles. He was striding, thrashing the pavement with a walking stick; he wore a fruity little hat, floppy brim and all, a tweed jacket, a turtleneck. He was Ramsay Muir, a little old soldier marching madly north towards Hyde Park. But Marcel and I were on the same stretch of sidewalk. What the—?

  Seconds had passed. Not even seconds—hundredths of seconds. He glanced in my direction, not at me, and turned from a little English veteran into a little Indian. Into Ganesh Ramsumair.

  Small solitary Indians on London streets have a hunted vulnerable look. They know they are the prey of brutes and skinheads. And who will come to their aid should they be thumped? The littlest Indians were picked on and mocked. And so Ganesh did not make eye contact. To a frightened Indian, my son and I were two swaggering Paki-bashers, almost filling the sidewalk, threatening to lamp him.

  Vidia! It was he. In a city of seven and a half million, our paths had miraculously crossed. He was fearful, looking at me—more than fearful, something as profound as horror, for he saw a dangerous double, a grim echo. And just a moment before, what had he been thinking? Undoubtedly his Ganesh paranoia had seen all the taunting faces: the Monkey, hairy book-hating beast; Mr. Woggy in his robes and sandals; Cuffy, the West African with the purple face, the ornamental scars, and the big dong; the infies up from the Home Counties to howl, “You write dishonest books!” Drunks and National Fronters and Mosleyites and immigrant-haters and the man who smacked him on the head on this very road at the time he was writing The Enigma of Arrival—all the creatures in his personal demonology who threatened his notion of civilization. He had been terrified. Now these wicked twins, bower boys and Paki-bashers, taking long strides towards him, to boot him up the arse with their Doc Martens.

  “Vidia?”

  “Paul!” It was a groan coming out of tired and smoke-tortured lungs.

  He looked up at Marcel and almost lost his hat from the angle of his head, for Marcel was twice his size.

  “And this is your son!”

  “Marcel,” my son said, sticking out his hand.

  “Where are you going?” I asked.

  “I just had my lunch. I’m taking a little walk in the park,” he said in a prissy, nervous voice.

  As he spoke he started to move forward again. I had last seen him almost a year before, but he seemed eager to keep going—agitated, anyway.

  To detain him I said, “How is your book going?”

  “One more month, one more month,” he said, and took a breath and seemed to strain forward. “It has been a tremendous labor.”

  “I’ve heard it’s good,” I said, inventing a remark, clinging verbally, wanting him to pause so that I could think. I had something to say, but what was it?

  “I must go. My walk...”

  I was hot, I was nerved and trembly, I could hardly breathe. I stammered, saying, “Vidia, did you get a fax from me?”

  “Yes. Now I must—”

  “Do we have something to discuss?”

  “No.” He had almost broken away. He was moving crabwise, crouching a bit, cramming his hat down.

  “What do we do, then?”

  He drew his mouth back. His face went darker. His mouth twisted down. It was the look of helpless suffering he wore the very first time I saw him in Uganda. His fingers on his cane went pale and prehensile.

  “Take it on the chin and move on.”

  The word “scuttled” came to mind as he moved. He was off, the mimic man personified. He was fearful and he was in a hurry.

  He knew. It was over. It never occurred to me to chase him. There would be no more. And I understood the shock of something’s being over, like being slapped—hurt as the blood whipped through my body. “Like being hit by a two-by-four,” my friend had said when Vidia insulted her in Oregon.

  Watching Vidia scuttle up the road towards Hyde Park, I noticed something amazing. On this bright day in April, the sun slanting into Gloucester Road, Vidia was very small, and shrinking fast, and it was as if he would vanish before he reached Kensington Road—so tiny, indeed, he cast no shadow. Without a shadow he seemed even smaller than he was, and darker, as though he had no substance. As though he were the shadow.

  Take it on the chin and move on. It was, as always, challenging advice. But he talked tougher than he looked, because really he looked like Sir Vidia Nye-Powell.

  Marcel was saying, “What a wally!”

  I was dazed, because I was liberated at last. I saw how the end of a friendship was the start of an understanding. He had made me his by choosing me; his rejection of me meant I was on my own, out of his shadow. He had freed me, he had opened my eyes, he had given me a subject.

  Before we got to Cromwell Road I had begun this book in my head, starting at the beginning. That is everything.

  Afterword: Memory and Invention

  NOT LONG AFTER Sir Vidia’s Shadow was sent to the printer, I was fossicking among some papers and found an old notebook labeled “Diary,” with a date, and as a sort of title, “When I Was Off My Head.” This was an unexpected discovery because, except for some letters and a detailed one-page dream I had written down in a notebook that contained material for a novel, I had depended on memory alone for my Naipaul book. Here, I thought, was a chance to verify my memory.

  Thirty-two years ago, in Africa, V. S. Naipaul had made me promise never to keep a diary. Such an activity, he said, was an obstacle to the workings of the imagination. Except for the exhaustive notes I made in diaristic travel journals, for the purpose of converting them into travel books, I had more or less kept my promise. In the year or so it took to write my book about our friendship, I was amazed by how clearly conversations and scenes returned to me. I started each day with a period of meditation, shutting my eyes and pressing my fingers to my temples, like an overacting clairvoyant. By degrees I could hear and see Naipaul. And the activity of writing an episode helped too, since all writing is itself a memory jogger.

  Another mechanism aided my memory. It was Vidia’s very personality: demanding, judgmental, fastidiously attentive; he had kept me alert, not to say self-conscious. Being with him, always just this side of nervous, fearing I would be wrong-footed, I was given something bordering on total recall. In the neurology of memory there had to be something animal, related to survival, in the way anxiety helped one remember sights and sounds. So I was able to write my book almost without notes.

  When I finished, I had two shocks. The first was
that the friendship kept unspooling in my mind. I had developed such intense habits of concentration, of remembering and sifting, I found I could not switch off my active memory. In these afterthoughts were snippets of conversation or whole speeches I had not included in the book. I belatedly recalled Vidia’s ritually pronouncing, “I am going to open an account with him,” meaning he would settle someone’s hash; and “Women of sixty think of nothing but sex"; and how, as I was driving with him in Kampala, he once said, “They call those [speed bumps] ‘sleeping policemen’ in Trinidad.”

  Some of these memories comprised whole episodes rather than one-liners. There was a tea party at which a book reviewer Vidia thought I should meet (“He’s very civilized; his wife is incredibly rich”) played a coarsely comic phonograph record that was loudly lavatorial, causing Vidia to make a frowning face and leave abruptly. And there was a long lunch in London with one of my relatives that did not surface into my consciousness until it was too late to include in the book. That the latter was a fairly disastrous meal a Freudian would put down to repression on my part.

  Another vagrant memory concerned Vidia’s friend Colin MacInnes (1914–1976), who was a roving journalist in London in the 1950s and a novelist (City of Spades, Absolute Beginners). Vidia used to say how spending just a short time with Maclnnes would draw off all his energy: “He took away my vitality. He sapped my strength. I was exhausted when he went away.” Vidia frequently had this same effect on me. Many of these afterthoughts were trivial, yet in the detail that makes up a friendship, almost everything matters.

  Then there was the diary. The many closely written pages in this newly disinterred notebook contained the feverish and wide-ranging garrulity that afflicts me when I am in a state of funk, as well as the busy sentences of a troubled mind. That I had forgotten having kept the diary was not odd, in my experience. My diary-keeping is rare and nearly always associated with distress. Far from being an aid to memory, a diary has often been my way of forgetting. The consigning of anxious thoughts to a notebook is akin to dumping them into a barrel—the obscurity of a trash barrel rather than the potentially more stimulating cracker barrel.