Sir Vidia's Shadow (41 page)

He was working on a section of his Australia book, writing about a comical Sinhalese named Tissa, who spoke to him about the futility of male ambition in Sri Lanka. Shiva wrote Tissa's question, “Is it like that on your island as well?” and then he died.

His heart had been weak. It explained everything he said and did, everything he felt. It had taken away his strength; it had made him tired. It was why he panted and perspired, why he was often winded, why everything was so hard for him.

He was found slumped at his desk by his son, just as thirty-three years before, Shiva had found his own father dead.

I wrote to Vidia as tenderly as I could. He wrote back, saying, “I am melancholy in a clinical, helpless kind of way. I get, or am attacked by, these bad dreams just before waking up. In fact they wake me up.”

And he ended the letter, “How nice, in the middle of this, to get your hand of friendship.”

It was as though I were the brother who had survived. But Vidia went on mourning, and when he wrote
The Enigma of Arrival
and dedicated it to Shiva, he said of the book, “Death is the motif.”

14

“A
T OXFORD CIRCUS
, walk north until you come to the church with a spire like a sharpened pencil,” Vidia said, directing me in his precise way to the Indian restaurant where we were to have lunch. But I knew the church.

I was, as always, eager to see him. I needed to know what was on his mind, because he questioned everything, took nothing on faith, saw things differently from anyone else. His talk was unexpected and original. He was contrary and he was often right.

Long before, I had been with him while he listened to Indians in Uganda boasting of their wealth and security. “They are dead men” was Vidia's verdict. Now most of London's newsagents and sub-post offices were run by those same Indians, refugees from Uganda. They comprised almost a whole shopkeeping class in the south of England.

Three years before Shiva died, in 1985, Vidia had been upbeat and funny. “Intellectual pressure” was making his hair fall out, he said. But he was busy and happy. “One seems to be extraordinarily full of affairs.” He was only fifty. He accurately predicted the outcome of the Falklands war, in a characteristic paradox. The Argentines had sworn they would fight to the end.

“When the Argentines say they will fight to the last drop of blood,” he said, “it means they are on the point of surrender.”

And that happened, too. But with Shiva's death he grew sad. He sorrowed quietly; his grieving showed in his writing, in his choice of subject. He wrote of death and dying—his sister had also recently died; intimations of mortality and a sadness crept into his prose, the tones of deeper isolation, because there is a note of loneliness in all elegies—beyond the death, something of departure, a sense that he was being left behind.

It made us firmer friends. Now, after almost twenty years, we depended on one another—each of us could count on the other to listen and be sympathetic. We were chastened by Shiva's death. I realized how precious life was, how brief, how each day mattered.

If we were saddened, we were also vitalized, seeing what a waste it was not to live all we could. Vidia traveled more, but we were able to pick up the thread of friendship after weeks or even months of silence.

That was how I came to be rising from the Oxford Circus tube station to walk north on Upper Regent Street, towards the church with the pencil-like spire that I knew to be All Souls. We met on the sidewalk.

“Yes, yes, yes, Paul.”

Vidia placed a high value on physical characteristics, and especially on radical change. If someone had gotten very fat, or very thin, or pale or pimply, or had begun sporting a silly hat, Vidia took it as a danger sign, a mental lapse, depression, folly, vanity, something deeply wrong.

Watching him size me up swiftly, I could see that he was pleased I had not changed. Nor had he, I told him.

“I'm still doing my exercises every night,” he said.

In the Indian restaurant, the Gaylord, on Mortimer Street, Vidia began staring at the Indian waiter, a bespectacled young man, following him with his eyes around the room as though he had recognized him and was trying to think of his name. At last Vidia raised his hand and called him over.

“Do you know that you look like me?”

The waiter shook his cheeks and squinted, murmuring the question in disbelief. “I am not knowing, sir.”

In his twenties, with crusted sleepless eyes, dark jowls, thick untidy hair, horn-rimmed glasses, and a scowling smile, he had that fatigued and impatient look of many Indian waiters in London. The news Vidia gave him seemed to unsettle him. It was clear that no one had ever made such an observation to the waiter before. He glanced at Vidia and appeared to be so disturbed by what he saw that he turned away and laughed in a chattering way, his mouth wide, his eyes dead.

“Yes, I look like you,” Vidia said.

He studied the young man's face closely and with such intensity the waiter backed away, giggling in anguish.

“Maybe, sir.”

“But you don't really think so.”

“No, sir.”

“And yet it's true. You look like me.”

This peculiar conversation bothered the waiter but was highly illuminating to Vidia, who seemed to see his younger self before him. The waiter was nervous, contemplating his face as represented by this fiftyish man grinning in satisfaction at him.

“Look in the mirror,” Vidia said. “Go on, you'll see.”

The waiter, who could never have taken much pleasure in staring at his own reflection, waggled his head, Indian fashion, to mean yes he would. But I could tell that any resemblance was the last thing on which he wanted positive confirmation.

And it was all in Vidia's mind. I didn't see much of a likeness.

“All right,” Vidia said. “We'll order, then.”

Over lunch Vidia told me that he had received his first Public Lending Right check, about £1,500. Mine was about the same, and the more popular authors got quite a bit more. This great scheme for compensating authors on the basis of library loans had finally been introduced in Britain. I had asked Vidia to sign a petition to support the PLR bill some years before. He had refused.
I sign nothing
. Now he was crowing over his check.

“Publishers want to cash in,” he said. “But why should they? We're the ones who do the work.”

I said, “That campaign for PLR was quite a struggle. Nothing like it exists in the States. For a long time, no one paid any attention.”

“Really.” He raised himself up slightly from his chair and looked around. “I don't see anyone I know here.”

“Who are you thinking of, Vidia?”

“No one in particular. But it's nice when one sees someone one knows in a restaurant in London.”

“I saw Bruce Chatwin the other day in L'Escargot.”

“Who's Bruce Chatwin?”

It was how Vidia belittled anyone.

“The way he talks,” Vidia said. “All those airs. That name-dropping. He is trying to live down the shame of being the son of a Birmingham solicitor.”

“I don't think he cares about that,” I said. Bruce was a friend of mine, and I suspected this to be the reason for Vidia's dismissing him.

“No. You're wrong. Look at Noel Coward. His mother kept a lodging house. And he pretended to be so grand—that theatrical English accent. All that posturing. He knew he was common. It was all a pretense. And think of his pain.”

He was still scanning the restaurant for a familiar face. Seeing none, he settled into his prawn curry, seeming disappointed, as if he had shown up but no one else had.

“How's your food?”

“It's all right, but lunch—lunch is such an intrusion. It fractures one's day. It takes over, makes the morning hectic, destroys the afternoon, and leaves one no appetite in the evening.”

“What's the answer?”

“One prefers to break the day into three distinct parts. Work in the morning. Light lunch. Something in the afternoon. Exercise. Prepare for the evening—the dinner. Dinner is grander.”

“Grand” was one of those words that Vidia could use in an almost satirical way. But if you smiled he might react, and then you knew he really meant it. “Very grand” sometimes meant pompous and hollow, or it might mean important or powerful.

“Do you know Bibendum?” he asked.

It was a new restaurant in South Kensington, housed in a well-known Art Deco landmark usually referred to as the Michelin building. Bibendum had been started by the entrepreneur Sir Terence Conran, who insisted that people use his tide. Vidia had met him once, and he hated Conran for his brashness and his flaunted knighthood.

“Do try to get a table there next time, Paul, won't you? One would be happier there.”

I said I would. What prevented me was the expense. It was a five-star restaurant. No matter where we went I ended up paying, and so I stayed away from the most expensive places, like Claridges, the Ritz, or the Connaught. I preferred the peacefulness of eating in relatively empty restaurants, which were always the less stylish ones.

Knowing of his interest in graphology, I showed him a page from a letter I had received that week. It was handwritten with black ballpoint on a yellow legal-sized sheet. There was no salutation, no signature, just a page of writing. I said, “So what do you think?”

“Oh, God. Oh, God. Oh, God.” Vidia's face became a mask representing suffering and torment. He made passes with his fingers over the page. “This man is in trouble.”

“It's from John Ehrlichman, the Watergate man. He sent me this from prison. He's writing a book.”

We finished lunch. I paid. Leaving the Gaylord, we walked towards All Souls Church, in Langham Place, near Broadcasting House. Vidia pointed out the Langham, once a hotel, then a BBC building, where parts of the Overseas Service had had offices.

“I had an office there,” Vidia said. “I started writing there, in the Freelance Room. God!”

“What were you doing?”

“Caribbean Service. I did programs. One called
Caribbean Voices
. Went mad wondering whether I could write a book. I began writing
Miguel Street
there.”

Though I knew he had worked there, it was surprising to hear him mention it. He disapproved of a writer's working a regular job and was proud of the fact that he had worked only ten weeks on salary, as a copywriter for a company that sold cement. That, as his whole salaried career, was bound to have distorted his view of the working world.

“Such a lovely church,” he said as we entered Langham Place.

“All Souls,” I said. “Thomas Nash.”

“It is Nash's only church,” Vidia said. “So strong. Look what he does with the simplest lines. They ridiculed it when it was built in the 1820s. No one approved.”

“Kipling got married here,” I said.

Vidia smiled. He loved sparring.

“That was just before he went to America,” he said. “Of course, his wife was American.”

“Henry James was his best man,” I said.

“And then Kipling came back to England, moved into a grand house, and wrote nothing,” Vidia said.

“He wrote some great short stories.”

“Nothing as great as
Plain Tales from the Hills
.”

“The late stories are much subtler,” I said.

“Everyone tells me that,” Vidia said. He shook his head. “I have been seriously wondering about fiction. What is it now? What can it be?”

“What it has always been,” I said. “A version of the truth. And I think that's what nonfiction is, too.”

“Yes, yes, yes,” Vidia said. He thought that was apt. “But I am still wondering. I think the novel as we know it is dated.”

And so we walked along, up to Regents Park and along the footpaths by the flower beds, until it was time for his dental appointment in Harley Street, where we parted.

It seemed cruelly ironic that Vidia's developing interest in stylish restaurants coincided with serious dental problems—gum disease, a gingivectomy, and painful extractions. I sometimes met him at his dentist's office. He was one of the few people in England I knew who had a private dentist; most people made do with the impatient National Health Service dentists, who gave them fifteen minutes of attention every four months and, in their incompetent haste, were lax in detecting the sort of gum disease that was afflicting Vidia.

At another lunch, Vidia wincing with each bite from his sore teeth, we talked about money. We usually talked about money, as writers do—the futility of making it, the punishing British tax system, the way people presumed on writers by trying to underpay them, the fatuity of wealth, and could we have some more money, please?

“I know the solution—my solution,” Vidia said.

“Please tell me.”

“I want a million pounds in the bank,” he said. “Not the equivalent of a million in real estate. Not valuables. Not stocks. I want a million in my account.”

“I suppose that's possible,” I said, so as not to discourage him. In fact, I had no idea how one would accumulate that amount.

“But you have a million, Paul.”

“You're joking.”

“You got a million for the
Mosquito Coast
film, surely.”

“Nowhere near it. Maybe a fifth of that.”

“Really.” He was surprised, even shocked.

“And I bought a house with it, so now it's gone.”

“Actors get paid in the millions, surely.”

“Yes,” I said. “But not writers.”

“I will get my million,” he said, as I paid the bill for lunch.

After yet another lunch, we walked to the offices of his publisher so he could sign three hundred copies of
A House for Mr. Biswas
, one of the titles in a series of signed books that were part of a book-club offer. I stood by him, opening them to the half-title page, and he wrote his signature. As always, he used a fountain pen and black ink.