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

Another boy entered the room, one of Edna’s sons, dressed in sneakers and jeans and a sweatshirt. Like the other boy, he was about ten. He said, “I’m going to do a magic trick. Does anyone have a pound note?”

I gave him one. He inserted it between the rollers of a little machine and it disappeared. Everyone groaned, to encourage him. Then, just as I had abandoned any thought of getting it back, he made the pound note reappear.

“I need help carving the turkey,” Edna said.

“Vidia’s no use,” Pat said, glancing at Vidia, who looked horror-struck, as though he had just remembered something.

“I have some salmon for Vidia,” Edna said, and Vidia relaxed. “Come help me in the kitchen, Paul.”

She handed me the carving knife and a long fork and the platter for the meat. The turkey gleamed in its wrapper of roasted skin. Edna seemed so pleasant and hospitable that it struck me as unfair that Vidia had left the dedicated book behind.

She said, “Have you been to the Congo?”

“Twice,” I said. “It’s an amazing place. It looks just the way you expect it to — green and colorful and violent, and that big muddy river.”

“I’d love to see it. It has Irish connections, you know. Roger Casement.”

“Oh, yes, that’s right.” But it was a meaningless name to me. I said, “I’ll meet you in Leopoldville. We’ll go up the river in a steamer. We’ll penetrate the Congo and drink it to its dregs.”

Vidia’s phrase for her had bewitched me.

“Oh, get on with you,” she said with affection, and she touched me tenderly. She put her face close to mine and made a fish mouth. “Carve the turkey.”

I helped serve it. We ate in the dining room. Vidia’s salmon was presented to him like a prize he had won.

Len Deighton said, “The painter Sidney Nolan lives over the road.”

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

The American, Coles, was talking about Vietnam, what a mess it was, but what else could we do? It was the sort of line that made me recklessly offensive.

“I think Wallace is right,” Vidia said. “The problem is with the pointy-headed intellectuals.”

Coles said, “George Wallace?”

“That’s the man. He has an awful lot of common sense.”

Deighton said, “I am more interested in the case of that colored cricketer from South Africa. Did you see the write-up in today’s paper?”

“The important thing to remember,” Vidia said, “is that he is a slave.”

Coles was scratching at his half-grown beard. He said, “I don’t get any of this. Are you serious?”

Edna said, “Now I have to make Irish coffee. If anyone watches me pouring the cream in over a spoon, I’ll make a mess of it and it’ll sink.”

Vidia was not listening. He was facing Coles. “When you understand that he is a slave, you will be able to discuss him.”

Edna served the coffee with the cream floating on top, and we drank it in the lounge. Coles, bewildered by Vidia on the subject of slavery and South Africa, once again began to talk about the Vietnam War. He spoke in such a futile way, I remembered why I had decided to stay in Africa, and I longed to be back in Uganda.

It was snowing when we left. Edna kissed me and said that I could come back anytime. Putney was the first part of London I had seen that I felt I would be able to live in. I liked the wide black Thames behind her house, the way the river sucked and eddied at the end of her garden.

Rogers had been huddled in his minicab, waiting. In the car, Vidia said, “That obnoxious American and his son. Did you notice the way the son spoke? So precise. Such an English schoolboy. The father was embarrassed.”

Pat challenged him, though it was what I had felt.

Vidia said, “I had a vibration.”

Pat said to me, “Are you going to see your friend?”

“No. She’s spending Christmas with her folks in the country.”

“The English thing,” Vidia said. “Did she invite you?”

“Yes.”

“The English thing,” Vidia said.

Pat said, “Vidia’s rather impatient with Christmas.”

“Christmas pudding,” Vidia said. He chewed his pipe stem. “Christmas pudding.”

The next day was Christmas. London was cold and bright under a clear sky, as blue as an African sky, yet in this unforgiving light the city looked cracked and senile and the streets were bare. I went for a walk up Clapham Road towards the Clapham North tube station. The only other pedestrian was a woman ahead of me pushing a baby carriage, wearing a coat so long its ragged hem dragged on the sidewalk. The wheels of the carriage scraped and squeaked. When I overtook this person, I saw that it was really a shabby man wearing a filthy shawl over his head, and instead of a baby in the carriage there was a dog crouched in a knot of rags and some old shoes and bits of metal and glass bottles.

“Fuck off,” the man said, because I had come too close to him. His face was damaged, with crusts of dried blood on his cheek. “Get away from me pram.”

His face had frightened me. An instant later I remembered how Vidia said that ugly people seemed dangerous. I stopped in a pub, and because of the encounter with the tramp, I was very careful to be polite. I drank a beer, telling myself it was Christmas.

Back in Stockwell, I sensed something was wrong. Vidia’s moods filled the rooms like an odor. But I didn’t ask. I gave Pat a snakeskin purse I had bought from an Indian at the arcade in Kampala. Pat remarked on how real it looked. I took it as a criticism. The crinkled scales were still flaking from it. She gave me a woolen scarf.

After lunch, which was solemn, Vidia went into his study and lay on his lounge chair and smoked in the dark.

Pat said softly to me, “Shiva’s not coming.”

WHEN THE KNOCK CAME, the rap of the small hinged horseshoe on the brass plate on the door, Vidia remained silent. We were reading in the front room. He could give the impression of hearing nothing — like an unwelcome sound — as he could give the impression of seeing nothing — like an unwelcome face. The knock came again. Vidia did not hear, or pretended not to. I answered the door.

Shiva — it had to be him. I remembered about the hair and “Veronica Lake.” He was twenty or so, he looked apologetic, though it might have been simply the sorrowful cast of his face, which was thin, or his eyes, which were hooded and Oriental, not Indian but Asiatic. Those features were appropriate to the only other thing I knew about him: he was studying Chinese.

Vidia never answered the door and he seldom answered the phone. I once asked him why.

“One doesn’t like surprises,” he said.

Stepping through the doorway, Shiva said, “You’re Paul.”

In the parlor Vidia greeted him, saying, “What did you do with the coat we sent you?”

“I like this one better.”

“Yes.” The way Vidia said it, the word stood for a whole pronouncement of contempt.

Shiva was scruffily dressed, in a student’s way, with a ragged coat and fraying scarf and scuffed and trampled-looking shoes. Pat sighed over him, calling him Seewyn, as Vidia had, and kissed him in her unconfident old-auntie way. Then we had tea.

Shiva had long and delicate fingers, which made him seem polite when he was picking at the cookies on the plate Pat handed him, and which were expressive when he smoked cigarettes. There was also something in the movements of his hands that suggested languor and fatigue. This tiredness was especially apparent in the droopy way he sat and the way he walked, bent over in a sloping gait, kicking his shoes, dragging his feet. He was round-shouldered, and when he became thoughtful he arranged his long hair with those delicate, smoke-yellowed fingers.