Paul Theroux - Sir Vidia's Shadow - A Friendship Across Five Continents

In the Staff Club some expatriates who had heard of the review said Naipaul was sneering again, and they trashed him. What was wrong with the PM’s seeing a ruddy film? Better than reading one of Naipaul’s shenzi books! But Obote had been the nemesis of the Kabaka, and he had recently overthrown him, in James Bond style, by attacking the Lubiri palace with commandos firing machine guns. The Kabaka had fired back with a machine gun before fleeing to Rwanda disguised as a woman. It was all Bond.

Vidia mentioned the Kabaka in his letters. He knew the people who were taking care of him in London — wealthy people, some aristocrats and royalists. Although he had no money, the Kabaka lived stylishly in Paddington and had opened an account at the Ritz.

London life flowed through the letters: the lunches with editors, the dinner parties, the weather, the traffic. Vidia even mentioned the objectionable sound of planes going by overhead. He informed me that the best parts of London were on the flight path to Heathrow. Buckingham Palace, for example, was constantly strafed. He complained of taxes. He was busy judging a literary prize. He reported his friends’ reactions to Africa — they took a dim view. He mentioned walking through the rain.

In Africa we never walked through the rain. We sheltered, waiting until the deluge stopped, as it always did after a few minutes.

He urged me to visit London. It would be good for me, he said.

I thought about it, and kept in touch, but I went on living my life. I had students in Kampala, I had responsibilities upcountry. My routine: work, the girls at the Gardenia, my writing.

One night a girl from the coast named Jamila slipped out of my bed to look for the bathroom. She hesitated at the doorway — the lovely scissorlike silhouette of her legs — and took a wrong turn in the hall. I heard the clatter of plopping papers and “Sorry!”

I switched on the light and found her standing naked among the mass of scattered sheets that was a typescript.

“What is it?” Jamila asked, tweaking the sheets of paper with her toes.

“ Kitabu ,” I said.

A book! She opened her pink mouth and howled with laughter. How could this mess of scrambled papers be a book?

Within a week I bought a ticket to London. I left Uganda just before Christmas.

From the descending plane, London was a blackness overlaid by a map of yellow lights. I had flown from the simple blind night of Africa to the yellow glow of a predawn city picked out in twinkling sulfurous streetlamps. The plane banked, tipping the map upright.

Outside it was cold. The drafty passageway at the plane’s door shocked me, the airport itself, the stinky bus. Early morning in London was still pretty dark, and with the bad big-city smell.

The telephone fooled me. To operate it I prepared my coin, placing a threepenny bit on a slot, and found button A and button B. When the call went through and I heard “Hello, hello,” there was an urgent noise in the receiver — the repeated pips, loudly and awkwardly announcing that I was struggling at a pay phone, becoming rattled. While they sounded I pressed the coin past a resisting barrier in order to complete the call. It took two tries. You had to be quick.

“Vidia?”

“Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.” It was Vidia’s habitual chant of anticipation when he was impatiently pleased. “I am so sorry I couldn’t meet your plane.”

“That’s all right.”

“We don’t have a monkey wagon, you see.”

It was his name for the cheap little cars that crowded the roads.

“I’ll take a taxi. I have some English pounds.”

He gave me directions, assuring me that a taxi driver would know how to get to his house, but if the driver drew a blank, I should mention the South Lambeth Road.

“And how are our infies?”

“I didn’t tell them I was coming.”

Because it was so extravagant, I had kept my London trip a secret from my colleagues at the Staff Club. Visiting Naipaul was also further proof that I was abandoning them. London was a destination for an expatriate on leave, not on holiday. “Going to the coast,” they usually said at Christmas. That meant Mombasa, Malindi, or Zanzibar, Tanga or Bagamoyo, where you could swim without risking bilharzia. London was for the three home-leave months every two years, not a fortnight’s holiday. Were my Christmas visit to become known, the expatriates would say I was getting above myself.

In the taxi, heading through London, I understood Vidia’s idea of order. It was this, the solid buildings and well-swept roads gleaming under the streetlamps. The shops, spiked iron railings, brick terraces, and clusters of chimney pots; the symmetrical spans of the great bridge we were taking over the Thames. London was reliable, built to last, and the whole city looked sealed in black glaze. No wonder Vidia had thought of Kampala as thrown together and ruinous and chaotic, and that it would fall down and return to bush.

But the London dampness and the London cold intimidated me. Even wearing the sheepskin coat that I had bought in Kenya, I was shivering, tired from the flight, feeling fragile in the vast glazed city that was still dark at eight o’clock on this December morning.

The taxi swung left and right and then shot up a side street. I saw some black faces and was reassured. Another corner and the taxi rattled to a halt and kept rattling.

“Number Three Stockwell Park Crescent.”

It was a small gray-brick Georgian house, set back behind a low wall, with a similar but larger house to the right, a poorer one to the left. Number 3 had a newly planted sapling in the front yard.

Vidia had heard the taxi. With a pipe in his mouth he greeted me from the doorway, and before we entered he pointed to the house on the right. “That frightfully grand house belongs to communists, of course. And that one”—the scruffy one on the left—“well, they are home all the time. They don’t work, you see. I thought, Goodness, they are all unemployed. But no, they are being ‘redeployed.’ All this time I thought they were a pack of idlers, but no—’redeployed’!”

I had almost forgotten that work, or the lack of it, could be material for a joke. In Africa there was no point to such a remark, and certainly no humor in it, because there was hardly any paid work in the usual sense; there was subsistence farming. If that work wasn’t done, you starved. It wasn’t funny or sad, it was taken for granted.

Pat kissed me as Vidia shut the door. It was warm in here. Had I not just come from East Africa, I would have said the house was too hot, but I found it perfect. Double glazing, Vidia’s remedy for his hatred of noise, kept the house silent.

While Pat protested his impulsiveness, Vidia showed me around the house, sourly gloating over the blunders the workmen had made — the badly cut corners, the poorly drilled holes, the asymmetrical beading, the slapped-on paint.

His study was off the parlor. A chaise that was a folding chair — like a beach chair — was set up in the middle of the floor. The chair grunted and squawked when he sat down on it and stuck his feet out.

“So this is where you work?”

“This is where I worry, man. This is where I smoke. My work is done. That novel wrecked me. I have the proofs. Will you help me read them?”

I said I would. “Did you get your thousand pounds?” I asked.

He made a face, set his mouth in an expression that meant “almost.” He said he was mentally exhausted, but with his work done he was free.

It was a quiet, tidy house, like a kind of padded box with a tight lid. Vidia said he seldom went out. Pat, who taught history at a girls’ school three days a week, did all the shopping, all the cooking, made all the beds, even did some of Vidia’s research. Most of the cleaning and the laundry was done by a charlady, Mrs. Brown, whom Vidia called Brown.