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

“But I am not interested in meeting any more new people,” he said.

Heather had invited me to dinner the night of the Hugh Thomas party and was annoyed when I called her to say that I had to go out with my friend and his wife.

“Who is this friend?”

“Do you know the writer V. S. Naipaul?”

“He’s a friend of yours? He’s famous,” she said. “Okay, what about tonight?”

“There’s a publisher’s party. Jonathan Cape.”

“You’re doing all right for an African,” Heather said.

“Maybe I can meet you afterwards.”

“You know where to find me.”

I loved hearing that. I loved her address — Ashley Gardens, Victoria — and it excited me to know that after the party I would find her waiting for me in her warm room.

It was a Christmas party at the Cape offices and also a book launch for a young novelist, Paul Bailey, whose book, At the Jerusalem , was already being praised. Bailey was a slim, sweet-faced boy with blush patches on his smooth cheeks. He looked shy, even fearful, but he was poised. When Vidia asked him whether he earned a living with his pen — a Vidia expression — Bailey said no, he worked at Harrods. “Tell me, tell me, tell me,” Vidia said. In which department did Bailey work? How did he answer the telephone? How were staff instructed to address the customers? He asked Bailey to verify every rumor he had ever heard about the rituals at Harrods. Bailey obliged him with answers, his face reddening, yet he spoke with extreme politeness, as though this were Harrods and he a clerk and Vidia a customer. Vidia did not mention Bailey’s novel.

In the middle of the questions, a stout, hearty man loomed over Vidia and said in a mocking tone, “If it isn’t old V. S.!”

“Hello, Kingsley,” Vidia said, biting his pipe stem, and watched the man sway through the room. It was Kingsley Amis, he said. “He’s drunk. He’s sad. I wonder at the achievement.”

A hollow-cheeked man with deep, close-set eyes spoke earnestly to Vidia. He was not old but he had that gaunt, imprisoned look of someone who was overworked.

“Paul, this is Alan Sillitoe.”

I began to understand how a London party might be full of familiar names, while the faces were unfamiliar and even grotesque. Talking inconsequentially to Sillitoe, I kept thinking how, just a few years before, I first read The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning . For their power and directness I regarded them as better than Lawrence, the clearest glimpse I’d had into English life and work — lives and households I had never seen before. But we talked about the rain and Rhodesia.

After Sillitoe drifted away, Vidia said, “He brings news. That is what he does. Brings news from Nottingham, from working-class people. It’s not writing, really. It’s news. Don’t be that sort of writer, bringing news.”

I promised I would not be that sort of writer.

Vidia attracted the notice of other party guests, and he introduced me to them: John Bayley, John and Miriam Gross, and Tom Maschler. Maschler was Paul Bailey’s editor. Vidia told him I was working on a book.

“Send your book to me,” Maschler said.

Vidia was saying to the others, “I don’t want to meet new people.”

It had become another of his old man’s maxims, like the sentences that started “Latterly, one has begun to wonder…”

When we left the Cape party we saw Kingsley Amis again, and again he said, “Good old V.S.!” Vidia simply walked on. He would have said he was “cutting” Amis. He did not see or hear him. For Vidia’s sake I did not refer to Amis, so as not to call attention to his existence.

In the lights of Bedford Square, the falling rain seemed stiffened by brightness and the black street glistened and the puddles were full of plainer light. Vidia was hurrying, looking for a taxi. He hated the expense of taxis, but after a certain hour he felt that London became menacing and unpredictable, and he feared taking the Underground because of the louts, the racists, the disorder; there were irritable tramps who rode the Circle Line continuously, for the warmth, going round and round. The tube was much dirtier at night, too, the cars having grown filthier throughout the day.

In the taxi back to Stockwell, I saw a sign to Victoria and said, “I promised to meet someone. I’ll get out around here.”

“Your friend,” Vidia said.

“Would you like to meet her?”

“No, no. But don’t be offended. It’s just that I don’t want to meet any new people.”

He rapped on the window that separated the driver’s seat from us and told the driver to let me out at Victoria Street. Soon after that I was lying in bed with Heather. As the days had passed there were fewer and fewer preliminaries. That night she opened the door wearing a silk dressing gown, and when she kissed me, I touched her and found she was naked underneath it, and her skin was also like silk.

We hardly spoke until we had made love once, and then, calmed by it, I lay on my back feeling buoyant. She rested her arms against my chest and put her forehead against mine, letting her long hair sweep over my face.

“Tell me about the Pygmies again.”

“Let me tell you about the ‘men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders.’”

“I don’t want to be your Desdemona,” she said.

I kissed her and said, “I like you because you’re lovely and because you know how to read.”

“I know how to do lots of things.”

She kissed me and filled my mouth with her tongue. She ran her hands over my body. Her fingers were cool and my skin was tender, still raw and damp from sex. I tipped her over and parted her legs and breathed in her body’s smell like fresh meat. When we made love a second time it was as if our nerves were exposed and we were peeling the skin from our flesh. The act heated me — more than that, it scorched me, and at her most passionate Heather howled like a cat that I was holding down and stabbing to death, except that they were howls of pleasure, and her only fear was that I would stop too soon. When we were done, we simply died for an hour and woke up still sweating.

“I have to go.” It was after one on the luminous dial of her bedroom clock.

“Stay until morning.”

“My friends expect me to be there at breakfast.”

This was not quite true — we seldom had breakfast — but it seemed rude not to go home.

“Naipaul is supposed to be very clever,” said Heather. “But incredibly difficult.”

“He has been kind to me.”

“That’s the one thing people never say about him.”

“I guess I know his secrets.”

“I guess you do,” she said, stressing “guess” for its being American. “Right. I’ll let you go on one condition — that you come back to me.”

“Tomorrow,” I said.

In the street some minutes later I was amazed by the emptiness of London at night. It wasn’t even two in the morning. As soon as the pubs closed at eleven, the streets were full. By midnight they were empty again. My taxi to Stockwell always traveled down deserted streets, over a solitary bridge, and south through a city that seemed imaginary and antique, without people or other vehicles, just black streets and yellow lamps.

My late nights fascinated Vidia, I could see, but they created distance too: I had another life, another friend, and that friend lived in a different London. Vidia asked oblique questions, but beyond that he did not inquire. I think he detected a greediness in me, something uncontrollable and animalistic — desire that he associated with shame. I remembered how he had said of his sexual urge, “One is ashamed of being a man.”

I was not ashamed. I was delighted to have a girlfriend who was uninhibited and intelligent and as free as I was. But I could see the end was coming. No sooner had we met than she began saying, “You’re going to leave soon and go back to Africa, and I’m going to be miserable.”