Sir Vidia's Shadow (19 page)

While the editor's attention was drawn by someone needing a decision on a dust jacket, I said to Heather, “Would you like to have a drink later?”

“I'd love to,” she said, and suggested a pub nearby. She would meet me there after work.

Entering the pub in her winter coat, her face framed by the high collar, she seemed even prettier than she had in the office. We talked for a while and drank wine and at last I said, “I'm staying with a friend in Stockwell, so I can't ask you back there.”

“That's all right,” she said.

“No. It's inconvenient,” I said, and solemnly translating from Swahili to English, I added, “Because I want to take you back there and sleep with you.”

What lovely teeth she had—she had thrown her head back and was laughing, and I thought, Oh, well, at least she heard me in the din of this crowded pub. She said nothing more about it. Another hour passed. I told her African stories, about the Pygmies, about the butterflies that gathered and made a white fluttery carpet on the Jinja Road, about the man-eating lion that escaped from its cage at Mityana. I taught her to say
Mimi nyama, wewe kisu
—I am the meat, you are the knife. I talked so that I could study her pale eyes and pretty face, the way she listened with her lips. Afterwards, in the taxi to Victoria, where she lived, she kissed me, and the kiss meant yes.

It was late when I arrived back in Stockwell. I tiptoed to my room. Vidia was already up reading his proofs when I went downstairs the next morning. He said, “I think you've made a friend.”

Pat and I went shopping in Brixton Market for a dinner party she was giving that night. It was a street market, mostly black vegetable sellers and stall holders I took to be West Indians. I saw a woman spanking a child very hard and scolding loudly as the child wailed. I told Pat that I found it upsetting. Children were seldom spanked in Africa. There was little necessity for it; anyway, young children were raised by patient older sisters, practicing to be mommies, and took the place of dolls. Mother was always working in the garden, while Father sat under a tree with his friends, drinking some sort of sour, porridgelike beer. Such was life in a village, a far cry from this flogging.

Pat was smiling. She said, “Vidia would like that. He says that children aren't spanked enough.”

The dinner party preparations were a strain for Pat. Vidia played no role at all other than supervising the wine. Pat did all the cooking, she worried about the food, she fretted over the seating arrangements. Vidia was serene. He said he was planning to change out of his pajamas and robe.

“I can offer sherry to start off,” he said. “I had a bottle of whiskey, but one of the neighbors came over a month ago and punished it.”

The purpose of the party was for Vidia to introduce me to his friends. They were old friends, he said. He repeated that he did not want to meet new people. The guests were Hugh Thomas, who had published a book on the Spanish Civil War (he had just returned from Cuba); his wife, Vanessa, who was “grand,” Vidia said; Lady Antonia Fraser and her husband, another Hugh, a member of Parliament; and Tristram Powell, who was my age. When they arrived, they were all on such intimate terms that I felt excluded. Their talk startled me; I said very little.

“Paul's just come from Africa,” Vidia explained.

“I thought he looked a bit stunned,” Hugh Thomas said. “That explains it.”

Instead of replying to that, I complimented him on his book about the Spanish Civil War. A few days before I had found a copy of it in Vidia's library and had read the first chapter.

Over dinner, Tristram Powell said he was making a film for the BBC. Lady Antonia was writing a book. Her husband, the MP, said that Vidia should visit him at the House of Commons one day when he was free.

Vidia said, “I don't want to meet new people.”

When it came time for them to leave, Hugh Thomas said to me, “We're giving a party the day after tomorrow. Come to the dinner beforehand.”

Vidia was pleased for me. He said the invitation was significant. I would meet new people. I would get on. London was not socially static, he said. London was interested in new people.

“But I am not interested in meeting any more new people,” he said.

Heather had invited me to dinner the night of the Hugh Thomas party and was annoyed when I called her to say that I had to go out with my friend and his wife.

“Who is this friend?”

“Do you know the writer V. S. Naipaul?”

“He's a friend of yours? He's famous,” she said. “Okay, what about tonight?”

“There's a publisher's party. Jonathan Cape.”

“You're doing all right for an African,” Heather said.

“Maybe I can meet you afterwards.”

“You know where to find me.”

I loved hearing that. I loved her address—Ashley Gardens, Victoria—and it excited me to know that after the party I would find her waiting for me in her warm room.

It was a Christmas party at the Cape offices and also a book launch for a young novelist, Paul Bailey, whose book,
At the Jerusalem
, was already being praised. Bailey was a slim, sweet-faced boy with blush patches on his smooth cheeks. He looked shy, even fearful, but he was poised. When Vidia asked him whether he earned a living with his pen—a Vidia expression—Bailey said no, he worked at Harrods. “Tell me, tell me, tell me,” Vidia said. In which department did Bailey work? How did he answer the telephone? How were staff instructed to address the customers? He asked Bailey to verify every rumor he had ever heard about the rituals at Harrods. Bailey obliged him with answers, his face reddening, yet he spoke with extreme politeness, as though this were Harrods and he a clerk and Vidia a customer. Vidia did not mention Bailey's novel.

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.