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

This was too gloomy a thought for me to respond to.

She said, “I want you to be miserable too.”

“I will be.”

“I don’t believe you.”

Heather was more annoyed the night of Hugh Thomas’s party. I went to her apartment afterwards and we made love and she begged me to stay. I said I couldn’t.

“You’re always running back and forth to your friend Naipaul.”

It was true. I never spent the whole night with her. But I was fond of her and I knew I would miss her. I even wondered what sort of wife she would be. Maybe she would visit Kampala. She said she might. As for Naipaul, this friendship I now realized was as strong as love. He was my friend, he had shown me what was good in my writing, he had drawn a line through anything that was false. I was inspired by his work and his conviction. I wanted always to be his friend.

“I had an Indian boyfriend at Oxford,” Heather said.

“I don’t want to hear about him,” I said.

All this took a week: the dinner party, the Cape party, Hugh Thomas’s party, the nights with Heather. Christmas was a few days away. Heather invited me to spend Christmas with her family in the country.

“I can’t. The Naipauls have plans,” I said. They had not mentioned any plans, but I was sure they had them. All Vidia had said was that his brother, Shiva, was coming to stay but that he was unreliable — so Vidia had said — and had not confirmed it. “I can’t let them down.”

Heather said, “I wanted to be your Christmas pudding.”

Why did that silly statement arouse me so much? Perhaps because it was silly and because it also meant something.

The day before Christmas, Vidia said we might go to an Indian restaurant, Veeraswami’s, on a lane off Regent Street. But when we got there, he sulked. He said it was suburban. He could not eat his meal. He crunched a papadam into flakes on the tablecloth with his forefinger and grumbled about Shiva, whom he called Seewyn.

“He has long hair,” Vidia said, and indicated with his fingers how it fell on both sides of his face. He pursed his lips and spoke again, sourly. “Like Veronica Lake.”

That night we were invited to dinner at Edna O’Brien’s. She lived in Putney, some distance from Stockwell. Vidia said that her house backed onto the river.

“It sounds a nice place to live,” I said.

“Those suburbs fill me with gloom.”

“How are we getting there?”

“Edna is sending a car at seven.”

At just seven o’clock Vidia said, “The car is not here.”

He was so punctilious that he grew agitated as an appointed time approached and regarded anything after the specified minute as late. He was sitting upright, stiff with annoyance, the hardback book on his lap open to its flyleaf. He had written, To Edna O’Brien from V.S Naipaul . He seemed to be hesitating over the date.

“What is she like?” I asked, trying to distract him.

He thought a moment, then grimaced and clawed his hair. He said, “She has drunk London to its dregs.”

The thought of this Irish woman guzzling London in this way excited me as much as I want to be your Christmas pudding .

Vidia snapped the book shut — it was his Mr. Stone and the Knights Companion —and said, “I knew the car wouldn’t be here on time.”

“How did you know?”

“I had a vibration.”

Pat was becoming anxious, and she said without any confidence, “I expect the car will be along any minute now.”

But at seven-thirty it still had not come. The three of us remained seated, listening, leaking energy. It was impossible to talk about anything except the car that had not arrived.

Without a word, but biting his pipe stem, Vidia leaned over and put the inscribed book back on the shelf, slotting it angrily and jamming it tight between two fatter books, as though finishing an obscure bit of masonry.

“I don’t want to go anymore,” he said. In a frivolous woman’s voice he said, “Oh, don’t worry, I’ll send a car for you.” He chewed his pipe stem. “But there is no car!”

Vidia’s eyes went black. His anger resonated in the air like a high-frequency hum of such pitch and intensity that everything in the room seemed fragile, as though at any moment it could all shatter or explode.

“Ring her,” Pat said. “I’m sure it’s a mistake.”

More coaxing at last got Vidia on the phone, and he held the heavy receiver against the side of his head like a weapon.

“Edna.” Vidia’s voice was stern. “The car has not come.”

There was a pause, the twang of a hurried explanation, and “sorry” repeated over and over. Her apology was as distinct as the call of a particular species of bird.

“I see.” Vidia listened some more, looking grim. “In that case,” he said, “I will see if Rogers will take us.”

Rogers was the minicab driver, although from the way Vidia spoke of him, he sounded like his personal chauffeur. AD such flunkies were for Vidia just surnames, like Brown the charlady. It was after eight when Rogers arrived in his Rover.

“You sit next to the tiger,” Pat said to me.

Vidia was still angry. The angle of his pipe in his mouth told everything. And he had not brought his book. We traveled in silence along cold streets to Putney.

The house, on Deodar Road, was tall, and with a Christmas wreath on the door and all the lights burning it looked festive. Edna O’Brien greeted us with kisses and apologies. Several guests had already arrived, including an American named Coles and the writer Len Deighton. I did not know Deighton’s writing, but Heather had a copy of Horse Under Water on her bedside table, and I associated this book with our sexual postures, another prop in the love nest, like the little lamp, the ashtray, and the clock face that glowed in the dark. Deighton was a rumpled, soft-spoken man. Coles looked overdressed and agitated.

Edna was pretty, Irish to her fingertips, slim, with a friendly girl’s face and red piled-up hair and a lace blouse. She said, “Vidia’s told me all about you. Now do sit down — what will you drink? I should warn you, we’ve just been discussing the American expression ‘credibility gap.’ I can’t understand it for the life of me.”

Coles said, “It means just what it says. It’s the difference between how much you believe and how much you don’t.”

“I must be stupid,” Edna said. “I don’t get it.”

What made Coles unpersuasive was his beard, which he had just begun to grow, making him look unshaven more than bearded. His bristly face was a distraction and gave him a dubious appearance. He said he was a publisher in New York and was hoping that Edna would write something for him.

“You live in London?” he asked me.

“No. Just visiting. I live in Uganda. I’m at the university.”

“So what are you studying?”

“I’m a teacher.”

“Pretty dangerous down there, isn’t it?”

“No. It’s wonderful. New York is dangerous.”

“That’s bullshit,” Coles said.

Pat Naipaul winced as he said this. She did not understand that when I was with Americans I tried to provoke them, or even be offensive. I would not have dared do this with an English person, but I resented Coles’s complacency. This sort of older man would expect me to join the U.S. Army and be sent to Vietnam so that he could sit and grow his ridiculous beard in New York City.

“Dad, I broke my watch strap.”

A small boy was tapping Coles on the shoulder. He wore a school uniform and had a whining English accent. Dad ? It could only have been Coles’s son. Coles did not introduce him. In fact he seemed slightly embarrassed by the boy, who was making a whiffling complaint in his prissy English accent to his gruff New Yorker father who took little notice of him.