Sir Vidia's Shadow (34 page)

Jebb fell in with us, and he turned to me and said, “I've got a tide for my novel at last. Want to hear it?” He spread his hands before him, laying it out in the air. “I'm going to call it
Light
.”

He hurried ahead, perhaps to tell Vidia. He walked in a jaunty way, in his bright red waistcoat with the gold piping, a little clownish, a bit like a circus performer, but eager to please.

“I didn't know Julian was a novelist,” I said.

“He's not,” Lady Antonia said. “But he is awfully sweet.”

My mind was elsewhere. I was considering the thought that the obscene poems of Rochester had aroused me, especially at the point I had seen Lady Antonia smile and shrug. I wanted to tell her how I imagined the two of us on the tropical island. But the day would soon end, and I thought, What's the use? I was just fantasizing. It was the habit of a lifetime.

Back at the house, Pat served tea outside on a little wicker table. Vidia got his air rifle. We took turns shooting at a paper target. Robin scored the highest. She said, two or three times, “I've never even tried this before!” Lady Antonia looked beautiful holding the rifle and squinting when she fired. She was not a shrinking violet; she was a game-for-anything woman. I loved that. Another reason she would be great company on a tropical island. When she raised the rifle again and pressed her lips together, I wanted her to spin around and shoot me.

It was Jebb's turn next. He said, in his American accent, “Okay, drop your guns!” He fired four times and missed the target entirely. He posed with the rifle while Vidia snapped a picture with his Kampala camera.

“Vidia, this has been just the most super treat,” Hugh Fraser said, turning the drinking of the last of his tea into a gesture of farewell. He pulled his car keys from his pocket and raised his hand to signal to Lady Antonia.

I wanted to go back to London with them in their car, to be with her. But it was useless yearning. They did not offer anyone a lift. I had the feeling they were planning to use the return trip to discuss something serious and domestic.

“I'm going to be late,” Jebb said. “Will you call me a taxi?”

Jebb left. I lingered a little. The New Zealanders lingered also. Perhaps Jebb had been a protégé before me—he had a confident, teasing friendship with Vidia that suggested this
might
have been the case. My protégé days were over: I was making a good living now and had a family and another book to finish. Malcolm was perhaps the new protégé, but it seemed to me he would not last; he was too contrary. You got nowhere arguing with Vidia. You needed to listen, to indulge him, not to debate every illogical point, and to remember.
If he said, “The Italians make cheese out of dirt,” you didn't say, “No, milk.” You laughed. You surely did not quote the scatology of Lord Rochester.

“And you're saying I'm mistaken for telling them what to read?” Vidia said to Malcolm.

“No, I only said that the majority of New Zealanders see their national history as a benign colonial model.”

They were reliving a Kiwi encounter. Vidia seemed cross and looked misunderstood. Pat was pale from overwork and sleeplessness and too many luncheon guests.

“I must go,” I said.

“I'll call Mr. Walters,” Pat said.

“We'll talk, we'll talk.” Vidia seemed rattled by something Malcolm had said.

Malcolm and Robin were conferring, looking like foreigners again.

We all left separately, and it was as though, out of sight and separated in the dark, we became much smaller in our destinies; wandering off to be disloyal, to disintegrate, and die. But for that lunch party, a matter of hours, we were bright.

On the train to London, I tried to look out the window, but all I saw was my own reflection, framed by the night, looking in: my other self staring at me for one and a half hours.

“Well, did he ask about me?” my wife said. She smiled and did not wait for a reply, because she knew the answer. It was a trivial question, and she knew it. Time took care of it.

Fiction depends on revelations to make you turn the page. It is often a matter of timing. But this is another sort of narrative, a different shape, unsuspenseful, just a chronicle of a friendship, spanning the years.

Time took care of us too. Lady Antonia left her husband and married the playwright Harold Pinter. Hugh Fraser, sick with sorrow, moved out of the family house and lived with friends, who later said he died of a broken heart. Pat Naipaul was diagnosed with cancer. She had a mastectomy. It did no good. She died too. I left my wife, I lost my family. Jebb committed suicide, with a mixture of vodka and pills. No news of the New Zealanders.

But all that was much later. The lunch was the most minute interval in this, just one sunny day.

 

 

 

 

PART THREE

11

V
IDIA'S JOKE
, early on, was that he would one day Anglicize his name, from Naipaul to Nye-Powell, and stride around Kensington wearing a floppy tweed hat and Norfolk jacket, brandishing a walking stick. Heigh-ho, I say! Jolly fine day, what?

“V.S. Nye-Powell,” he repeated, as though announcing a distinguished guest. He pronounced Powell “Pole,” in the manner of Anthony Powell, whom he knew well, and kept in touch with, and relentlessly patronized, in spite of the vast difference in age and class and (so Vidia believed) literary ability.

I loved hearing Vidia's jokes. His laughter was a sign of health. It mattered more than anything that after ten years we were still friendly enough to swap jokes, or anything else. I could say what I wanted to him.
What are friends for?

He also said, “People who see one as a little brown Englishman are making the biggest mistake of all. One reads it. One hears it. One is somewhat appalled.”

But what was he? Loathing self-definition, and especially hating the description “West Indian writer,” he wished to be appreciated for his gifts—who doesn't?—but as an ethnic Indian it was his fate to be one out of many (the title of one of his stories): owing to his racial coloration, he was indistinguishable from the billion or so Indians in the world. Most Indians in Britain, a new class, lived simple, humble lives. Vidia on a London street was less likely a Nobel Prize candidate than a shopkeeper, the very
dukawallah
he despaired of: a London newsagent hurrying from the bank back to his shop, where he hawked cigarettes, chewing gum, and the daily newspapers, keeping the tit-and-bum magazines on the top shelf. That place was now a national institution, known throughout Britain as “the Paki shop.”

The most maddening thing for any Indian in England was that they were not called Indians but “Pakis”—short for Pakistani. Just as few English people troubled to make serious distinctions when they saw a brown face, Indians did the same when they saw a white one. Vidia celebrated himself as unique. He once spoke of his pleasure, years ago, in standing out and seeming exotic on an English street (“Recognition of my difference was necessary to me”). That was before the deluge. Now, purely on the basis of his physical characteristics, Vidia was no one—that is to say, just a Paki.

The idea of an address—a place of his own—preoccupied him, sometimes to the point of obsession. Not owning a house made him yearn for one. He always said he had no home, owned nothing, belonged nowhere. I surmised that his satisfactory but chaotic childhood—he is Anand in
A House for Mr. Biswas
, the novel that is the chronicle of his family—had given him no firm footing in Trinidad, and he often suggested that the Indians had been disenfranchised on the island.

His return addresses on letters were usually care-ofs and the poste restantes of publishers and agents. Sad, I thought. For years he had seen The Bungalow as temporary. He hoped for better, and he kept most of his belongings in a warehouse. But time passed and still he did not have a house. He was Anand in the book, but more and more he resembled Mohun Biswas, his hero, who longed for a place he could call his own.

I had bought and sold two houses in London, and so these days we talked more of real estate than of books. I was a property owner and he liked the solid practicality of that: no more hand-to-mouth living, the rented flat, the rented TV. Anyway, he seldom talked about books and was especially reticent about the one he happened to be writing, except to nod and say confidentially, but with noticeable astonishment, “I think what I am writing now is very important and has never been said.”

That he never mentioned my work I took as approval, not indifference. He now said, “You're all right. You see?”

But property was on his mind. Place, too.

“Some snowy place. I see a cabin, a log fire. Boots.” He smiled at the thought. “I love the snow.”

He had written about the snow, always with the dreamy hyperbole of a person from a tropical island for whom snow is decoration—like icing on a cake—if not magic, weightless, crystalline, never having to be shoveled or driven through. But he had gone to several snowy places and had not liked them. Cross “snowy places” off the list.

For a few years he had fantasized about Montana. He liked the name; he imagined big skies, high mountains, dense forests. He did not know the “badlands” image. But he decided without ever going there that Montana was not for him.

California attracted him. He asked me for names, addresses, and telephone numbers of Californians who might show him around and also treat him to meals. He was a conscientious looker-up of people. He liked being met, enjoyed occupying the place of honor - where, of course, he belonged. My contacts served him. But he disliked California. He found that Californians cultivated the body but not the mind; he saw them as selfish and materialistic and smug.

He liked New York City. He liked New York humor and New York acceptance. No one stared at him in New York. He had once spoken of buying an apartment and living there for several months a year. But he did not act on this.

An islander, a country boy, as he thought of himself—though he had moved from his small rural hometown of Chaguanas to Port of Spain when he was seven—he said certain aspects of the Caribbean made him nostalgic to return: his memory of the cool cocoa plantations, the big shady villas with wide verandahs. The thought of disorder beyond the plantation gates, of the sort he wrote about analytically in “The Killings in Trinidad” and imaginatively in
Guerrillas
, kept him from ever making this move.

All these places were far from his English addresses: the not very distant county of Wiltshire, and London, which he knew well, having lived as far north of the river as Muswell Hill and as far south as Streatham.

“What did you pay for your house in Clapham?”

I told him.

“And what is it worth now?”

I guessed at its value.

“You see? You're part of the market, you're in the housing spiral. All the time I have spent chuntering and dithering I have been losing money. One should have bought something years ago. Just let it quietly appreciate. Then make one's move. But one dithered.”

He was gloomy, feeling worse than houseless: he was placeless and a little hopeless.

“And you have a place in America?”

“A house on Cape Cod.”

“I don't want to see it,” Vidia said. “It would just remind me of all the mistakes I have made in my life.”

There were large Victorian houses in Clapham, I told him. The inflated prices of Chelsea had not crossed the river. This made him smile.

“But, you know, one wants something fashionable,” he said. “Uncompromisingly fashionable.”

Kensington or Knightsbridge, he said. They were places that I associated with Arabic graffiti in different colors, and scrawled-upon posters, and no parking spaces, and Arabs dressed in galabiehs as though for the Empty Quarter, and businesses that catered to London Arabs: kebab shops, fruiterers, juice parlors, liquor stores, massage and escort services, and undisguised brothels. Every public phone booth was plastered with the explicit calling cards of prostitutes (“Young buxom blonde at your command”).

Instead of telling him this—which he knew—I made other suggestions.

“What about Chelsea?”

“Pretentious.”

“Lord Weidenfeld lives there.”

“I think you have just proven my point.”

“St. John's Wood is fashionable, isn't it?”

“St. John's Wood, my dear Paul, is suburban.”

“Richmond is lovely. I'd like to live there, by the river.”

“It's nice. People do live there. But it is suburban. And one would need a monkey wagon.”

The idea of buying a small car and riding up and down in it was just ridiculous to him.

“Mayfair must be the height of fashion.”

“Mayfair is corrupt. It's a con. It's full of prostitutes. I know Americans are glamoured by it, but I am sorry, Paul, it is not for me.”

“You've lived all over London.”

“Not really. Muswell Hill. The flat had previously been occupied by a Nigerian. It was unspeakable, but Patsy and I managed to disinfect it.” He made a face. “Streatham. I wrote
Biswas
. That was a wonderful period. Then Stockwell Park Crescent. Very modest accommodation, really. I have been a nomad.”

“You lived at Edna O'Brien's house in Putney.”

“Briefly,” he said. “But Putney wouldn't do. I want something fashionable.”

He found a flat off Gloucester Road, in a white Victorian canyon of apartment blocks with ornate façades, balconies, and Greek pillars. Queen's Gate Terrace. It might be bad luck to talk about it, he said. He did not say much more until after he bought it.

“Come for tea,” he said, after he had furnished it.

It was tiny, the smallest habitable space I had so far seen in London. I came to realize that these imposing edifices had been intensively subdivided, so that what he had bought was a small corner—the pantry, the inglenook, the maid's bedroom—of what had once been a roomy apartment.