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

In the Stockwell house there was a television set in the lounge, but it was seldom on. Having heard that British television was inventive and entertaining, I turned it on, just to see. Vidia entered the room, standing behind me. A commercial with a jingle was on the screen.

“I thought there were no commercials on the BBC,” I said.

“That’s not the BBC, that’s the Monkey.” It was his word for the independent station.

I changed the channel. I found a fashion show. Vidia uttered an awful groan. I changed the channel again. A man I took to be a politician was giving a speech about Rhodesia.

Still standing, Vidia said, “You think he’s smiling? He’s not smiling. That’s not a smile. He’s a politician.”

A heckler in the audience cried out, “Good old Smithy!”

“Hear the infy yelp?”

I turned off the television.

After I went to my room, I took out my new novel. It was about a Chinese grocer I knew, Francis Yung Hok, in Kampala’s Bat Valley. He was the only Chinese citizen of Uganda — the smallest ethnic group in the country, a persecuted minority of one. I called him Sam Fong and titled the book Fong and the Indians . The novel, inspired by Vidia’s urgings to look hard at the absurdities in Uganda, was also my way of testing Vidia’s maxims in narrative technique. I wanted Vidia to see it as a kind of homage to him and his friendship.

When Vidia was out of earshot, Pat asked me about the servants they had left behind. Visitors, part-time residents, and embassy people always talked about servants in a patronizing and possessive way, like little girls monologuing about their dolls. Vidia had felt victimized by the servants and their connections — they were all plotters, looking for work. But Pat regarded them with uncomplicated affection and had seen them as helpers and allies, which they were. She had been kind to them. She said she missed them. She whispered to me that she wanted to be remembered to them.

Pat attended to Vidia in a maternal way, maternal most of all for her sleeping in an adjoining room, in a single bed. Seeing her piteous little bed, I remembered how I had thought of making love to her in Africa. My wild impulse would perhaps be allowable in such a disorderly place as Uganda, but not here. This was different. This was her tidy home; here was her convent-style room; that was her narrow bed, and beside it her nightstand: glass of water, two books, bottle of pills, none of it very tempting, much less an aphrodisiac. I knew that any wooing by me would be an abuse of hospitality, yet I wished for a woman friend.

I soon found someone receptive to my ardor. My one solitary excursion that first week in London was to a publisher that would soon be bringing out a textbook I had coauthored with a British linguist. I had devised this English textbook in Malawi, where all books were in short supply. This one was designed for speakers of Chichewa, which I had learned as a teacher in a bush school. I had been deported from Malawi on a trumped-up political charge, and because I was in bad odor there, my name could not appear on the book. Vidia had just laughed. He said, “Someday you’ll be glad your name isn’t on that book.”

Half the advance on royalties was mine. I had asked that it be paid to me in London, so that I could cash the check and have spending money in sterling. The publisher’s office was in Mayfair, near Grosvenor Square. The day I picked up my check I was introduced to the editor of the textbook division who had commissioned the book. He introduced me to his staff. One of them was a young woman about my own age, named Heather.

While the editor’s attention was drawn by someone needing a decision on a dust jacket, I said to Heather, “Would you like to have a drink later?”

“I’d love to,” she said, and suggested a pub nearby. She would meet me there after work.

Entering the pub in her winter coat, her face framed by the high collar, she seemed even prettier than she had in the office. We talked for a while and drank wine and at last I said, “I’m staying with a friend in Stockwell, so I can’t ask you back there.”

“That’s all right,” she said.

“No. It’s inconvenient,” I said, and solemnly translating from Swahili to English, I added, “Because I want to take you back there and sleep with you.”

What lovely teeth she had — she had thrown her head back and was laughing, and I thought, Oh, well, at least she heard me in the din of this crowded pub. She said nothing more about it. Another hour passed. I told her African stories, about the Pygmies, about the butterflies that gathered and made a white fluttery carpet on the Jinja Road, about the man-eating lion that escaped from its cage at Mityana. I taught her to say Mimi nyama, wewe kisu —I am the meat, you are the knife. I talked so that I could study her pale eyes and pretty face, the way she listened with her lips. Afterwards, in the taxi to Victoria, where she lived, she kissed me, and the kiss meant yes.

It was late when I arrived back in Stockwell. I tiptoed to my room. Vidia was already up reading his proofs when I went downstairs the next morning. He said, “I think you’ve made a friend.”

Pat and I went shopping in Brixton Market for a dinner party she was giving that night. It was a street market, mostly black vegetable sellers and stall holders I took to be West Indians. I saw a woman spanking a child very hard and scolding loudly as the child wailed. I told Pat that I found it upsetting. Children were seldom spanked in Africa. There was little necessity for it; anyway, young children were raised by patient older sisters, practicing to be mommies, and took the place of dolls. Mother was always working in the garden, while Father sat under a tree with his friends, drinking some sort of sour, porridgelike beer. Such was life in a village, a far cry from this flogging.

Pat was smiling. She said, “Vidia would like that. He says that children aren’t spanked enough.”

The dinner party preparations were a strain for Pat. Vidia played no role at all other than supervising the wine. Pat did all the cooking, she worried about the food, she fretted over the seating arrangements. Vidia was serene. He said he was planning to change out of his pajamas and robe.

“I can offer sherry to start off,” he said. “I had a bottle of whiskey, but one of the neighbors came over a month ago and punished it.”

The purpose of the party was for Vidia to introduce me to his friends. They were old friends, he said. He repeated that he did not want to meet new people. The guests were Hugh Thomas, who had published a book on the Spanish Civil War (he had just returned from Cuba); his wife, Vanessa, who was “grand,” Vidia said; Lady Antonia Fraser and her husband, another Hugh, a member of Parliament; and Tristram Powell, who was my age. When they arrived, they were all on such intimate terms that I felt excluded. Their talk startled me; I said very little.

“Paul’s just come from Africa,” Vidia explained.

“I thought he looked a bit stunned,” Hugh Thomas said. “That explains it.”

Instead of replying to that, I complimented him on his book about the Spanish Civil War. A few days before I had found a copy of it in Vidia’s library and had read the first chapter.

Over dinner, Tristram Powell said he was making a film for the BBC. Lady Antonia was writing a book. Her husband, the MP, said that Vidia should visit him at the House of Commons one day when he was free.

Vidia said, “I don’t want to meet new people.”

When it came time for them to leave, Hugh Thomas said to me, “We’re giving a party the day after tomorrow. Come to the dinner beforehand.”

Vidia was pleased for me. He said the invitation was significant. I would meet new people. I would get on. London was not socially static, he said. London was interested in new people.