Sir Vidia's Shadow (54 page)

It made him a blamer. He blamed society. He blamed the educational system. He blamed “stupid and common people,” people in general. He indulged himself in being fawned over and flattered. He became a regular at dinner parties and powerful American embassies.

This was the fierce-faced friend I saw now, but it was a mute vision. I neither wrote nor spoke about it: Vidia remained a vaguely menacing blur. But the world to me was clearer. Without his response—he didn't answer my letters, he didn't call, I was too far away to provide him any help—I was better able to understand my progress, from being his student to becoming his equal. In my heart, I suspected he was now much weaker and needier than me, which was why he valued my friendship.

Though I did not look into the future, I recalled his saying, “To all relations, every encounter, there's always a time to call them off. And you call them off.”

After twenty-nine years he had left his publisher, André Deutsch. It is not unusual to change publishers, but it is rare to leave without some sort of farewell. He said nothing to Deutsch, who complained, “Not even a postcard!” And that was much more than an author-publisher relationship. It was a close collaboration and a friendship. Vidia told me he admired Deutsch for being tough, intelligent, and entrepreneurial, and for having the panache to send suspected dud bottles of wine back in restaurants. After the break with Deutsch, Vidia talked about him very differently.

And speaking of “you call them off,” what of the mysterious Margaret, who had dropped from view? She and Vidia had met in 1972. I had been introduced to her in 1977, and saw her again in 1979. Vidia had publicly celebrated their love affair and professed his ardor in
The New Yorker
in 1994. Pat had been upset, if not desolated, by Vidia's enthusiastic candor and his telling the world of a sexual relationship that was, after two decades, still crackling away.

Margaret, his shadow wife, had accompanied him on trips while Pat stayed home. “His lady love,” Pat once said sadly, with a lump in her throat, of Margaret, who went to parties with Vidia. Margaret kept him company on his literary quests. I had not seen her for years, but I heard about her all the time. Because Vidia stayed on the American diplomatic circuit, I was always being told of his appearances. “Saw your friend Naipaul the other evening,” a diplomat would say. “We gave a little party for him.” And usually, “His friend Margaret was with him.”

That was the oddest part. I had heard this talk when he was writing his second Islam book,
Beyond Belief
. Twenty-four years later and he was apparently still passionate, still traveling with Margaret. Then he met Nadira: no more talk about Margaret. I had no idea how that had ended, except that it had to have been swift, and it must have been recent. Pat died. Margaret vanished. Vidia married Nadira. Margaret was in the shadows. An Indian friend of Vidia's, Rahul Singh, wrote in an Indian magazine that Margaret was “an Argentinian companion” who “was devastated when he married Nadira.”

To all relations ... there's always a time to call them off
. I took “all” to be his usual hyperbole for everyone but me. We were still friends. As for his silence, well, he was famous for his silences. All that had happened was that I had received a crazy letter from his excitable new wife. He probably knew nothing about it.

One thing in Nadira's letter puzzled me: her mention of Vidia's forthcoming biography. This as an imminent possibility had never occurred to me. I knew that Vidia had interviewed several prospective biographers but that nothing was settled. The project seemed inauspicious, for who but a masochist would take on the thankless and unrewarding job of being anyone's official biographer? Access to letters had entertainment value—they had, to use a Vidia phrase, “horror interest.” But that sort of book always verges on hagiography.

The subtext of her letter was: Don't write about him. This offended me. I had become a writer to be a free man, in Vidia's own terms, not to take direction. And yet, when people asked me to write about him, I said no. I had no enthusiasm to write a biography. Until I received Nadira's letter I had not even considered using Vidia as the subject of a book. I would pass my memories and letters to the designated Boswell and let that person do the work. Vidia was my friend. A book about such a friendship was an attractive idea, but it was impossible. Friendship had its rules.

And there was no model: such a portrait had never been done. In literary history no books that I knew about detailed this sort of friendship—say, young Samuel Beckett writing a book about his years with the older James Joyce. The subject of protégés and apprenticeship was one that had fascinated me since my earliest days with Vidia in Uganda. Henry James had written of his friendship with Turgenev in Partial Portraits, in the course of which he mentioned Flaubert in a way that brought Vidia to mind.

“But there was something ungenerous in his genius,” James wrote. “He was cold, and he would have given everything he had to be able to glow ... Flaubert yearned, with all the accumulations of his vocabulary, to touch the chord of pathos. There were some parts of his mind that did not ‘give,' that did not render a sound. He had had too much of some sorts of experience and not enough of others. And yet this failure of an organ, if I may call it, inspired those who knew him with a kindness. If Flaubert was powerful and limited, there is something human, after all, and even rather august in a strong man who has not been able to express himself.”

Young Gorky, also something of a protégé, wrote about old Tolstoy, saying, “Although I admire him, I do not like him ... He is exaggeratedly preoccupied, he sees nothing and knows nothing outside himself.”

So, speaking strictly of writers, such a book had never been done. Anyway, how could one write a book about a friendship in progress? One of Vidia's acquaintances urged me to, saying, “Not the authorized book, but a shadow biography.” I said no. As friends, our story was incomplete. Vidia himself had said, “One must write every book as though it is the final work, the summing up.”

“I would never write a book about Vidia,” I said. “He is my friend. It is impossible to write about him and remain in touch. Vidia himself said that a book must be written from a position of strength. A book celebrates an ending, a finale. When the friend, or the friendship, is dead. It needs a conclusion. It needs a death. I haven't got one.”

20

S
OMETIMES
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.