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

Fearing a confrontation between Vidia and Johnson, I invited Shiva to go with me to the screening. The theater was in Soho. Johnson was lingering in the doorway with a young Pakistani man. I introduced Shiva.

“Zulfikar Ghose,” the Pakistani said, and stuck out his hand.

The film was short and unfinished-looking, with abrupt, irrational cutaways and a stuttery soundtrack. The main character was a teacher. The action centered on a class of nasty-minded students. I had the feeling that Johnson approved of the way these unruly students baited their teacher. The film was inventive, but it went nowhere. Mostly it seemed outraged, but it did not present enough information for me to share the outrage, and anyway it was a mess.

“It’s great,” I said to Johnson afterwards. “It’s fabulous.”

“Everyone will hate it,” Johnson said. He seemed pleased at the thought. “They’ll say it needs work.”

That was exactly what I would have said if I had had the nerve.

Shiva smiled and said, “Yes, it’s got something.”

We all went to Zulfikar Ghose’s house for tea. Ghose’s wife was Portuguese. When she greeted us, Zulfikar said, nodding to Shiva, “Guess whose brother this is?”

“Leave it out,” Johnson said. “Who the fuck cares?”

I was thinking that perhaps this was a lesson in the English class system, since, having met Vidia’s upper-class admirers — Lady Antonia, Hugh Thomas, Sir Hugh Eraser — I was now meeting his proletarian detractors.

We talked some more about the film. Shiva said, “I take it to be a comment on the comprehensive-school system.”

“Among other things,” Johnson said. With force he added, “I’ll never turn my back on the working class.”

“Everyone’s saying good things about the film,” Zulfikar said.

“I want to show it to Samuel Beckett,” Johnson said.

Shiva said, “Do you actually know Beckett?”

“I see him when I’m in Paris,” Johnson said, looking into the middle distance with his bulbous blue eyes. He had a puffy face and an adenoidal way of speaking. “I’ve shown him quite a bit of my fiction. I acknowledge him as a major influence on my work. I told him, ‘I hear your rhythms in my head.’ Beckett understood. He said to me, ‘I hear Joyce’s rhythms in my head.’”

Vidia would have said, What rubbish . I listened with Vidia’s ears and saw with his eyes. Johnson uttered this pretentiousness with such pompous defiance that he killed the conversation.

At last Zulfikar said to me, “What are you writing?”

“A novel,” I said, thinking of my Chinese-grocer book.

“You should be writing poetry,” said Johnson. It was a stern instruction. “Remember that you are first a poet.”

After we left, walking through Myddleton Square to the Angel tube station, Shiva said, “Do you write poems?”

“Not anymore.”

I had abandoned poetry for the way it brought out affectation in my writing. It made me self-conscious, and the form limited me to saying so little. The fault was with me, of course, not with poetry. The sort of poetry I wrote forced me to be a miniaturist. Also, Vidia’s remark “lots of libido” had demoralized me.

Shiva was smiling, probably at the thought of the silliness of writing poetry.

At the Angel — London seemed full of ugly structures with beautiful names — I called Heather from a public phone to see whether she had returned from Christmas with her parents. She answered and, hearing my voice, said, “Come right over. I want to show you my Christmas presents.”

I said to Shiva, “I’ll be back late.”

When Heather opened the door of her apartment she was wearing a white vinyl raincoat and high boots, also white and shiny, that were just becoming stylish. Her blond hair was braided, two strands framing her face, and she was holding a tube of pink lipstick between newly painted purple fingernails — her lips gleamed. I sniffed her sweet perfume.

“Christmas presents,” she said, and opened one flap of the raincoat by putting one hand on her hip. She was naked underneath.

Nine hours later, I took a taxi back to Stockwell. I was scorched and chafed: sex for Heather was both suffering and pleasure, and she was an active scratcher with those purple nails. During sex, she howled like someone being punished, but when I stopped she demanded more. In the darkness afterwards she said, “Next time I want you to spank me.”

It seemed to me that the taxi driver and I were the only people awake in the city. Creeping into Vidia’s house and past Shiva’s room, I felt that everyone except me was tucked in bed, sensible and virtuous. I felt like a dog again.

I woke late. Vidia was in his armchair, reading the bound proof of The Mimic Men . He read with such concentration that his face, dark and tight, looked completely shut. He did not appear to notice me enter the room. I sensed something wrong, that he was tensely trying to control his agitation.

I sat for a while smoking, saying nothing.

“Shiva left,” he said at last, looking up from the proof. “I never saw him.”

I gathered there had been a crisis. Vidia often spoke about how he felt vibrations. I believed him, because he also gave off vibrations. I knew when something was on his mind long before he said anything about it.

“Shall we go to Oxford?” he asked, and answered himself, “Yes, I think we should go to Oxford.”

I knew the Oxford train from my close reading of the Mimic Men proofs. The book’s narrator was a womanizer. His ardor struck me because Vidia seemed uninterested and sometimes hostile towards women. “There were always women to be picked up at the British Council,” the narrator said, speaking of his student days in London and not sounding at all like Vidia. But the next sentence was pure Vidia: “Those halls could be disagreeable with acrid-scented Africans.”

The Oxford train figured in the narrator’s womanizing, for after it drew out of Paddington and the conductor asked for tickets, he noted the young women who held excursion tickets to be punched. That meant they were foreign tourists on a day trip and thus easy prey. The narrator is watchful: “When one is in vein, as the French say, when dedication and commitment are total, mistake is rare.” Four weeks in a row he buttonholes a woman on the Oxford train and ends up in bed with her.

Vidia and I took the train late in the morning from Paddington. I did not mention The Mimic Men . Passing through Uxbridge I saw, clearly lettered on a brick embankment by a bridge, the sign Keep Britain White .

Vidia smiled at it. He said, “Have I told you my joke? I would put a comma after ‘Britain.’”

It was my first experience of British Rail. I was reassured in the big warm bosom of this friendly monster, sitting on a cushion in a corner seat, watching Berkshire go by, and the lovely fields, still green in an English winter, and the solid houses and the clumps of woods that bordered meadowland. I had not realized how disoriented I had been in black, labyrinthine London until I saw the open countryside. English people in Africa boasted of everything, but I had never heard any of them boast of the beauty of these green fields and pretty hills and indestructible-looking villages. They never spoke about such things.

I mentioned this to Vidia.

“Because they’re infies,” he said.

A little later, I said, “You must have done this many times, taken this train.”

“Oh, God.”

I was asking about The Mimic Men but without saying so. He gave nothing away, he seldom reminisced, but he set great store by faces — how much they told; and by expressions — what a grimace revealed. So I knew that his experiences on this London-to-Oxford line had been painful and possibly bitter. He often spoke of poverty, of the misery of having no money. His version of his past was one of turmoil and deprivation. He looked back all the time, as his writing showed, but he did not talk about it.