Sir Vidia's Shadow (28 page)

Seeing me, he nodded and looked relieved. He slid the compartment door open and took a seat opposite. The other passengers averted their eyes, which made them look even more attentive. A tall man I had seen boarding at Sherborne, probably from the school there, was holding a small faded clothbound book close to his face. He was not reading but listening, for Vidia had already started to speak to me.

“Paul, Paul, you have something on your mind. I can tell.”

“No. I'm fine.”

“Your wife is not happy. I have a vibration.”

“She wants to get a job.”

“Good! Earn a few pence.”

“What about you? How's things?”

“I have a broken wing,” he said. It was his usual expression for exhaustion and near collapse. But he explained. “For the past fifteen years I have been driven by an enormous tension.” He stiffened and grimaced in illustration, and then he went limp. “I am now so exhausted that the act of creation scares me. I'm tired. I'm idle. Insomnia, man. But look at you. Full of ideas, writing your novels. Tell me, who are you seeing in London?”

I told him.

Vidia said, “But he is no one.”

I mentioned another name.

Vidia said, “Who is he? Is he anybody?”

I told him a third name.

Vidia said, “Bogus, man. All bogus. They do not exist.”

“They've been pretty good to me—I mean, giving me work.”

“Of course. You do your work. You are busy. You have ideas. But these people will draw off your energy. After you see them you are very tired, aren't you?”

“I suppose so.” But what did that prove? After I saw Vidia, I was very tired too, and sometimes my head hurt, my brain feeling nagged at.

“They are sucking your energy.”

At the word “sucking,” the schoolmaster from Sherborne in the corner seat glanced up from his book, then quickly covered his face with it.

“They will destroy you,” Vidia said. “They are playing with art. I'll tell you a story. The first man you mentioned”—out of delicacy, Vidia did not repeat his name—“he has no gift, yet he wrote a novel. ‘I am a novelist'—the big provincial thing. He is from a rural area. He wrote his bogus novel. Just playing with art. He wrote another—farmers, provincials. But he is in London. He is bringing news. He begins to move in grander circles, still playing with art. His provincial wife is very unhappy. She thinks he is a genius. She doesn't know he is playing with art. He is caught with another woman. It is his right. He is an artist, a novelist, he can do such things. But his wife is in despair. She kills herself. Why?”

Now the schoolmaster was frankly gaping and so was I.

“Because he played with art.”

Green fields, greener than the summer fields of Africa, and clumps of trees moved past the windows, a bouncing belt of scenery. Crows flew up.

“Don't play with art.”

We stopped at Andover. No one got off. The last seat in our compartment was taken by a woman who seemed startled when I spoke.

“I'll keep that in mind,” I said. “I see
In a Free State
everywhere.”

“Do you? I'm afraid I have no interest in that.”

“It's sure to be shortlisted for the Booker Prize.”

“Prizes are such a con. I think the Americans have the right idea. Sell the book, don't go looking for prizes.”

“I mean, you were so prescient about the East African Indians being thrown out.”

“The book is important.”

“I wonder what they made of it in Africa.”

“Tommy McCoon wouldn't like it.”

The man in the corner seat looked up again.

“But it's a big book.”

A large, neat sign lettered
Stop Coloured Immigration
was painted on the stonework under a bridge near Basingstoke.

Vidia stared straight ahead. “And you booked a table at the Connaught. Oh, good.”

At Waterloo the compartment emptied fast, and as we were leaving I saw on the seat the faded book the man I had taken to be a schoolmaster had been reading. Yes, I had been right in guessing he was a schoolmaster. The book was Cicero's
Select Orations
, a Latin text, no name on the flyleaf but many pencil marks in the margins.

“We'll take it to Lost Property,” Vidia said.

On the way to Lost Property, Vidia recited an imagined dialogue between the book's owner and someone else.
It's gone, I'm sure of it
. Then,
Have a look at Lost Property. Someone might just have turned it in
. And,
Couldn't possibly
. Then,
Do let's look. There's just a chance
...

We left the book with the clerk who sat among all the umbrellas and sinister-looking parcels.

Vidia had books to sell. We made the circuit: a taxi to Gaston's, the tobacconist for Player's Navy Cut, the newsagent, then a taxi to the Connaught, in Carlos Place. It puzzled me slightly that I had paid for both taxis.

The doorman at the Connaught was dressed in a top hat and a dark caped ulster with green piping at the seams. He had a red face and side-whiskers. The porter was mustached and alert; he wore a frock coat and striped trousers. There were fresh flowers in a vase near the entrance. The etched mirrors gleamed. All these Dickensian touches were distinct signs that the Connaught was expensive.

We were met at the entrance to the Grill Room and shown to a table. The waiter was subservient in the bossy English way—that was a bad sign too. We were given menus. Vidia asked for the wine list. He pinched his glasses to get the right angle and looked at the list with serious concentration for a full minute. Seeming to have found the right bottle, he looked up at me.

“You will do well here,” he said. “Michael Ratcliffe is very pleased with your reviews.”

Ratcliffe was the literary editor of
The Times
.

I said, “I hate doing them.”

“They force you to make a judgment on a book. It's important to reach conclusions. Most people have no idea what they think of a book after they've read it.”

The sommelier came over to us. He was dressed in black and wore a chain around his neck and could have passed for a mayor wearing the gold insignia of his office. He saw Vidia with the wine list.

“Have you made a choice, sir?”

Vidia said to me, “Let's get a real wine. Let's get a classic. A white burgundy.” He put his finger on his selection. “Number seventy-eight.”

“Very good, sir. An excellent choice. Shall I bring it now?”

Vidia nodded. The sweating silver bucket was set up and the bottle opened, the cork sniffed. It was a Puligny-Montrachet. Vidia sipped some and worked it around his teeth.

“It's good,” he said. “So many flavors. The roots of these vines go very deep. It gives complexity—taste the chalk?”

I sipped it. Was that what chalk tasted like?

“What was that name again?” I asked. I picked up the wine list and, pretending to examine the name, I glanced at the price. It was eleven pounds. The review I was about to turn in would net me ten pounds.

“The roots of your California vines are much shallower, because of the rainfall. It's not bad—different virtues. Savor their differences. These French wines have deep roots.” He sipped again.

A beef trolley was wheeled over. It contained the Thursday “luncheon dish,” boiled silverside. Vidia waved it away. Thinking that it might offend him if I chose meat, I looked at Poissons. The menu was mostly in French.

“The English recruit people,” Vidia said. “That is not widely understood. They often take on new people. They make room. It is not exclusive—it is selective.”

He was ignoring the waiter who hovered near him. The man was making me nervous.

My finger was on Truite Grillée ou aux Amandes. I said, “I'll have the grilled trout.”

“Something to start with?”

“Bisque d'Homard.”

As the waiter noted this, Vidia said, “That's a nice idea. I will also have the bisque, followed by Quenelles d'Haddock Monte-Carlo.”

“Any vegetables? Shall I make up a selection?”

“That will be lovely,” Vidia said. He sipped some more wine, sucked it past his gums, and said, “For a writer like yourself, even an American, there is a kind of recruitment, and you will be part of it. You will be coopted. I think it has started already for you. Your name is growing. What happens next is up to you.”

“Did that happen to Robert Lowell?”

“I think Lowell is fraudulent, don't you?”

This was not the moment to mention that he had been Lowell's houseguest in New York; Lowell's was the return address on a number of Vidia's letters to me. And Vidia had interviewed him for
The Listener
. In researching my book I had read the interview.

“His poems are very good,” I said. “
Lord Weary's Castle. Life Studies
.”

“I am sure I am a very bad judge of American poetry,” Vidia said, which was his way of saying he disliked Lowell's poems. But he had not said so in his interview.

Our lobster bisque was served. Swallowing some, I said, “But Lowell's crazy, isn't he?”

“That's the one thing he's not.”

“You think it's a con.”

“Total con, total con.” Vidia was concentrating on his soup, which he ate neatly, his spoon at a studied angle.

I said, “He goes to mental hospitals, gibbering.”

“He's playing,” Vidia said. “Hospitals are wonderful places for people to act out their fantasies of infantilism. I think Lowell adores being in a hospital.”

“His hospital poems are pretty scary.”

“I don't know them. Should I read them?”

“It's up to you. What about his wife, Lady Caroline?”

Vidia rested his spoon, leaned over, and said, “I was sitting next to her a month ago at a dinner.” He made his disgusted face, and his features were so distorted it looked like a Kali mask. “She
pongs!
”

I laughed out loud, but Vidia was still frowning and sniffing.

“The title means a lot to Lowell,” he said. “What is it about titles? Americans are so glamoured by titles.”

“That's because we don't have them,” I said. “Anyway, it's a big deal, isn't it?”

“A title is nothing,” Vidia said.

The waiter was listening, and it was hard to tell whether he approved. He was obviously torn because, being a flunky in such a classy place, he had been trained to admire something that was for him unattainable.

“Careful, gentlemen, the plates are very hot,” he said, positioning my trout in front of me and serving Vidia his quenelles. He then made a business of serving us four different vegetables, working two spoons in his fingers like tongs.

When he was gone, Vidia began eating. I waited for him to say something about the food. He said nothing.

“I have the idea that they should sell titles at the post office,” he said. “You'd pay for it the way you'd pay for a television license. You go in, buy some stamps, and paste them into a little book. Save up. Buy some more stamps. Fill up books. Three books of stamps would get you an MBE. Six for an OBE. A dozen books of stamps would be worth a knighthood.”

“That's what it's worth?”

“That's what it's worth.”

We went on eating and Vidia went on denouncing the Honours List over the food-splashed table.

The waiter returned to whisk our plates away and hand us the dessert menu, which was also Frenchified: Pêche Melba, Glaces, Framboises, and a selection of Fromages.

“I won't,” Vidia said.

“Coffee?”

“Black,” Vidia said.

A child began to cry in the foyer, the cries diminishing as the child descended the staircase in someone's arms. I was touched by hearing a child's wailing amid all this pomposity.

“God,” Vidia said, “who would bring a child here?”

“In Italy they bring children to restaurants.”

“A low peasant habit,” Vidia said, and he ranted. But I knew this rant, about all the articles that were written about children. Why didn't someone write a piece about people who, like Vidia, had made a conscious decision never to have children?

I shrugged, but I felt like a coward for not telling him how fiercely I loved my children. Just before I had left The Forge, Marcel, my older son, had said, “Buy me a Ladybird book in London!” and his brother, Louis, had echoed him, “Book!” Just thinking about them in the restaurant, I felt a pang. I missed them.

“A workman came the other day.” Vidia was smiling at the thought of what he was about to say. “He told me that when he is at work he misses his children. Can you believe that?”

“Yes. I miss my children now.”

“Really.”

While he had been talking, the waiter had approached and put a white plate on the edge of the table. On this white plate was the bill, folded in half. It now lay between us. Vidia's “Really” had produced a silence—such apparent interest on his part always indicated its opposite: disbelief, incomprehension, boredom—and in that silence I poked at the bill with my fingers and tweaked it open.

Seeing me looking at it, Vidia became preoccupied. He sat back, his expression altered to a glow of serenity. He was lost in his thoughts.

“Seventeen pounds and sixty-four pence,” I said.

Vidia was smiling. He was deaf. He heard an American at a nearby table saying, “I'd be happy to pay you for it. It's just that my wife saves menus from all the foreign places we eat, especially when we're traveling in Yerp.”

“You see? One of your fellow countrymen.”

I took out four five-pound notes from my wallet. Only two one-pound notes remained.

“Oh, good,” Vidia said.

“What about the tip?”

“That's plenty,” he said, meaning that the twenty would cover it. “That will make him very happy. Anthony Burgess is frightened of waiters and tips them extravagantly. Taxi drivers, too.”