Sir Vidia's Shadow by Paul Theroux
“Exile is something real to me,” Vidia said. He got up from the sofa and looked out the window, gloomily regarding his seven-foot hedge.
“This house is in a bower,” I said, to change the subject from “Cuffy.”
Halfway down a narrow lane that had no name—just a footpath, really—Dairy Cottage was entirely surrounded by dense shrubbery and low trees.
“Yes. A bower.”
He liked the word, and the idea. It was true. He had planted the shrubs and trees so as to create a blind and hide the house. Going past it on the Salterton road, you saw the newly tiled roof peak and no more.
Vidia threw open the double doors to the terrace, led me outside—probably thinking, Bower, bower—and explained his landscaping scheme.
“What do you notice about the garden?”
“No flowers?”
“Yes, partly. But more than that. It is green, all of it,” he said. “You see? Green.”
No flowers at all, none even in pots or planters. Flowers were a distraction and a nuisance and implied fussy attention. And they were a national obsession. It was an English thing to create a rock garden, an irregular slope of lungworts and fuchsias, pansies and pulmonaria, alyssum and lobelia straggling around mossy boulders. Such a garden as Vidia’s, all green, a mass of leaves, was unknown in the England I knew, and it might well have been unique. Who had ever crowed, “Behold my green garden"?
This monochrome was the opposite of the herbaceous border and the lily pond and the window box, the succession of rose arches, the climbing clematis and wisteria. Yet in spite of the single color, here were numerous different shrubs. Vidia knew each one’s name and characteristics.
“How did you decide to have your garden all the same color?”
“No, Paul,” Vidia said, smiling at my mistake. “Green is not one color. Green is many colors. It ranges from the palest pinkish green to almost black. There is enormous variation here, every possible shade.”
Hardly any grass, however, and no lawn to speak of. I remarked on this.
“True. Very little grass. No lawn. Part of my plan.” He smiled again. “I have a theory that it is exhausting for anyone to look at a large expanse of lawn. The viewer becomes tired reflecting on the effort that goes into cutting all that grass. A lawn is not restful to look at. A lawn represents great labor and noise, hours of rackety lawn mowers. A lawn is exhausting.”
Who would have thought that?
My blunder was in having brought him a wholly unsuitable red-leafed Japanese maple, a dwarf tree, as a housewarming present. Vidia was doubtful but thanked me, and he instructed an aged kindly man he called Budden to put the sapling into the ground. The deep red leaves stood out in all the greenery. How was I to know he had banned all other colors from his garden?
A few months later he reported with pleasure, “Your tree is not red all the time. Late in the season the leaves become greenish.”
Dairy Cottage was on its own, not near any other houses, not in the village, unmarked, no house sign, hardly visible, in its own green bower. To be remote and hidden was, in Vidia’s mind, to be safe.
One of the few snags was the jet aircraft from the fighter squadrons of the RAF base that constantly flew overhead. The planes engaged in surprising maneuvers, flew vertically, stopped in midair, tumbled, descended like helicopters, even flew backwards. Outside Vidia’s double glazing they were ear-splitting.
“I suppose Saudi Arabians and Chinese come down to see the fighter planes put through their paces,” I said. “The defense ministers.”
“No,” Vidia said. “Mr. Woggy doesn’t come down here.”
“But they buy these planes, don’t they?”
“Mr. Woggy stays in London. Mr. Woggy goes to an airfield near London for his demonstration.”
“So you don’t see them?” I could not bring myself to say “Mr. Woggy.”
“Mr. Woggy does not know this exists.”
He meant the meadow, the little river, the farm on the opposite hill, Wiltshire.
Most of Vidia’s possessions, everything except his papers, had been liberated from the warehouse and now furnished Dairy Cottage. Pieces of furniture I had seen years ago in his house in Stockwell had now reappeared, dusted and polished and gleaming, and pictures, and some artifacts from Uganda and India. And with all he owned surrounding him, in the comfort of his home, he returned to the old subject.
“I am an exile,” he said. “You can go home. You have a large, strong country. I have nothing. No home for me. Yes, ‘exile’ seems an out-of-date word. But for me it has a meaning.”
I went on visiting, pedaling from Salisbury station on my bicycle, uphill on the way to Vidia’s, downhill on the return. I kept my bike in the guard’s van and felt freer for having it. I loved taking it out on a spring morning, heading to my friend Vidia’s house past banks of bluebells, or later when the poppies were in bloom. At a certain bend in the road there were always pheasants flying up.
“I had a telephone call from America this morning,” Vidia said. “I picked up the phone and heard the voice. American.”
It was clear from his tone that the call was unwelcome, yet he looked serene.
“I did not say hello. I said, ‘Don’t ever do this again.’”
Vidia looked so pleased with himself, uttering this stern sentence of rebuke, that I started to laugh.
“‘Don’t ever do this again,’ and I put the phone down.”
Pat said, “I knew Paul would like that.”
Yes, because of the sudden hostility of the greeting and also because it interested me to know what anyone’s limits were, and particularly the limits of a friend. It helped to know what was deemed going too far. A stranger’s calling him was unacceptable.
“How did he get your number?”
“I have no idea.”
Vidia’s telephone number was known to only few people. His reasoning was this: a strange voice on the phone had to be someone asking a favor or importuning him.
“I want to be sure when I pick up the phone that the person is someone I know and like,” he said. “I don’t want to hear a strange voice.”
His wine cellar was almost full, and that collection was one of his oddest passions because these days he seldom drank wine, and when he did, it wasn’t much. He said wine gave him a headache. But each time I visited he showed me new crates and filled racks, he told me the vintages, he explained the complex flavors.
Walking past Dairy Cottage’s garage one day I saw a car. A car?
“Vidia, you have a car. What kind is it?”
“I don’t know. One of these little European monkey wagons.”
It was a brand-new Saab. It was green. I never saw him drive it, nor did I ever see it outside the garage.
Time passed. He bought another flat in London, much bigger than the one at Queen’s Gate Terrace. This flat was off the Brompton Road. It was the sort of place that suited his fantasy of the lunch, when he would be summoned from his study to meet his friends and admirers. He kept the little flat in Queen’s Gate Terrace. He continued to live in Dairy Cottage. He paid occasional visits to the new flat, sometimes wearing a floppy tweed hat and carrying a walking stick, and he wondered aloud how it should be furnished. And more than ever he began monologues by saying, with passion and sadness, “The word ‘exile’ has a meaning for me. I am an exile.”
12
My Friend’s Friend
VIDIA WAS PHONING from his flat, the tiny one—I could tell from the squashed acoustics, like a murmuring man trapped in an elevator: “Are you free for a coffee after lunch? There is someone I want you to meet.”
“Someone” meant a friend. Yes, I wanted to meet my friend’s friend.
It was the hot English summer of 1977. Even the London heat did not diminish my happiness, spending days in pure invention, writing my novel Picture Palace. In the voice of a smart old woman, Maude Coffin Pratt, I wrote about the contradictions of writing by describing the life of a photographer.
Still, it was not easy to write on the hottest days in London. Open windows made it noisy, the slate roofs blazed with glare, the bricks became crumbly and overbaked. The very earth underneath the city shrank, because London is built on thirsty clay. Subsiding houses began to split and crack, jagged seams opened in the pointing, and the masonry over windows collapsed. It was the intense heat.
Londoners cracked too. Unused to the heat, they became skittish and self-conscious and dressed more sloppily, and there were more of them on the street. You saw women in parks stripped to their underwear, sunning themselves, grinning at the sky. Bare-chested men with pink arms competed for space with tourists, who kept saying, “We expected rain!” People were generally merrier, but it was the wrong city for sun: not enough space, too narrow, only a few public pools, and they were dire. The city had been made for work and indoor pleasures and pedestrian exertions in big parks. It was unusual to have so much sunshine, and there was no way to use it—only rented rowboats in the Serpentine, rented deck chairs in the parks at twenty pence an hour, and benches on the Embankment. The sun and swelter would soon become demoralizing, with nothing much to do except sit in it and drink pints of lager.
I saw these people all over; so many turned out that the traffic was affected. I went by bike in order to be on time for punctual Vidia: downhill to the river, uphill to the café near the Green Park tube station, where we had agreed to meet. Piccadilly was crowded with workers on their lunch break, smiling—even the people walking alone were smiling—because of the sunshine. Londoners habitually bowed their heads and hurried in the rain, but walked more slowly and much straighter in the sunshine, holding their heads up on days like this. You had to live through every phase of English weather to know the English traits: so many English moods and turns of phrase could be ascribed to the weather.
I locked my bike and looked around. No Vidia.
When he arrived at the café a few minutes after me, his face puckered in remorse, the energetic apology he made for his lateness was his way of reminding me that his standard of punctuality was as high as ever. I must not think from this single lapse that he was becoming lax. He still bluntly boasted of never giving anyone a second chance, especially someone who had been otherwise loyal; when a dear friend lets you down once, that must be the end. The relationship had run its course. A single instance of lateness might be all that was needed to fracture it. So I took his “Sorry, sorry, sorry” to be a scolding for both of us.
A smiling woman was with him. She was slim, about my age, thirty-six or so, and wore a fluttery light dress because of the weather. She had some of Pat’s features, the paleness, the pretty lips, the same posture and figure, full breasts—a taller Pat, the Pat of ten years before, but far more confident.
“Paul, this is Margaret.”
“I know all about you,” she said. “From Vidia.”
So this was my friend’s friend. Had she been a male protégé, like Jebb or Malcolm the New Zealander, I would have compared myself to her; I might have been anxious. But anyway, I was alert. Was she a writer? From your friend’s friend you understand your friend better and notice qualities you might otherwise miss—aspects of tenderness, humors, and responses. Always, no matter the sex, it is like meeting a rival lover.
We talked about tennis. Wimbledon was in full swing.
“I hate Wimbledon,” Vidia said. “I loathe tennis. It’s nonsense.”
“He doesn’t mean that. I taught him how to play,” Margaret said, and I thought she was pretty feisty to oppose him.
“I play sometimes,” I said.
“But you don’t make a fetish of it like these other people,” Vidia said.
“He’s simply being contrary,” Margaret said.
“When everyone was cheering Francis Chichester, Vidia wanted him to drown,” I said.
“Did I?” Vidia said, pleased to be reminded. “Did I really?”
“Who is Francis Chichester?” Margaret asked.
From that remark, and her slight accent, which I could not place, I gathered that she might not be English, yet she certainly looked English. I studied her accent as we talked about the weather—the sunshine, the heat. Vidia said it brought out the rabble. We ordered coffee at the bar and stood there, Vidia enumerating the errands he had to run that afternoon.
“I very much liked the piece you wrote about Vidia in the Telegraph,” Margaret said.
It was a portrait. I had thought: I will do what Vidia would do, write the truth, be impartial, let the peculiarities speak for themselves. He was an original, but it was annoying to read that word over and over. Better to be anecdotal and set down aspects of his originality. Some people had come to like him on the basis of the piece, others had said they found him insufferable, on the same evidence.
“I recognized him in it,” she said. “I have read so many pieces about him and never recognized him. They don’t ring true. But yours—even Vidia’s mother said she recognized him.”
Vidia was smiling a bit impatiently, perhaps because of this mention of his mother. He was devoted to the memory of his father, Seepersad, who had died relatively young, but had more complicated feelings towards his mother, matriarch of many Naipauls and still alive, a tenacious Indian widow in Trinidad.
I liked the praise, but I was still baffled by Margaret’s accent, the rhythm and intonation of her speech: the careful way she gave weight to each syllable, the manner in which her voice trailed off, the insistent, almost Latin way she spoke. Maybe she was Welsh-speaking? I didn’t ask.
“Your review of Guerrillas in the New York Times was also very good. Vidia was pleased.”
This embarrassed me. Vidia and I never spoke of the reviews I had written of his books. There was no need to. A review was not an act of friendship; it was a literary matter, an intellectual judgment. As Vidia himself said, writing a review meant having to reach a conclusion about a book, something the casual reader seldom did.
I said, “That novel really frightened me. It doesn’t happen often. But I was also scared by ‘The Killings in Trinidad’—the Michael X piece.”
“It’s scary stuff, man,” Vidia said.
“I thought it was too long,” Margaret said.
“What was too long?” I asked. It seemed a strange and even audacious way to describe the piece. I would not have dared say this. But she was his friend.
“Those articles. The New York Review should have made them a bit shorter.”
I glanced at Vidia. He was sipping his coffee, yet he had heard.
“And the woman in Guerrillas. She was so naive. I thought she was awful.”
“I think maybe that was the point,” I said.
She had dragged out the word, making it sound even worse: awwwwwwfool. Vidia didn’t blink, and I did not dare to smile.
Vidia said, “I won’t be a moment,” and headed for the rear of the café.
“So where are you from, Margaret?”
“The Argentine.”
“You live there?”
“Yes. In B.A.,” she said.
“I’d love to go there.”
“You must. Vidia’s a bit unfair about it, all this business about ‘a whited sepulcher.’ Really!” She had a beautiful laugh. “And you live here in London?”
“At the moment. I’m working on a book. I’ll be heading for the States as soon as my kids get out of school,” I said.
“The school year is so long here. In B.A. it’s much shorter.”
“You have children?”
“Three. But—” She was going to say something more, and thought better of it. She lost her smile and looked into the middle distance.
I said, “The place I like best is Dorset. I lived there when I first came to England. Do you know it?”
“No. Just from books. Thomas Hardy.”
“You’re pretty well
“Not at all. Vidia says, ‘You know nothing!’ And it’s true. What else do I read? Mills and Boon!”
“Sometimes Hardy is Mills-and-Boonish.”
“I don’t think so,” Margaret said.
“There’s that passage in Jude the Obscure where the heroine laments her fate.”
Margaret shook her head, smiled again, but in confusion. The conversation was moving too fast for her. She looked in the direction that Vidia had gone.
I said, “She says, ‘To be loved to madness—such was her great desire. Love was the one cordial which could drive away the eating loneliness of her days.’ Something like that.”
Margaret had begun to look closely at me.
I said, “And it ends—”
“It ends with a prayer,” Margaret said. And she said the prayer, enunciating it prayerfully in her foreign-sounding accent, clasping her hands: “‘O deliver my heart from this fearful gloom and loneliness: send me great love from somewhere, else I shall die.’”
“You know it.”
“It’s The Return of the Native, not the other one you said.”
“We must go,” Vidia said when he got back to us. He hesitated a moment, perhaps realizing he had reappeared at an important moment, yet he had no idea what had been said. He looked as if he wanted to leave, in order to separate us. He said, “Are you all right, Paul?”
“I’m fine. Working on a novel.”
“He’s full of ideas,” Vidia said to Margaret.
But the idea in my mind was linked to the long-ago letter in which he had written that a girl he’d met in Argentina had copied out two pages from The Return of the Native.
Back home, I got the novel out and read the passage again. It was longer than I remembered. I had marked the pages the day I received Vidia’s letter about the “coldest and meanest kisses ... at famine prices.” They had meant little to me. They meant much more to me now.