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

For lunch we both had cheese sandwiches in the buffet car. I knew that Vidia ate fish. But to me, at that time, a vegetarian was someone who ate nothing but cheese sandwiches.

Traveling on this train, reading newspapers, was so pleasant I would not have minded going farther. My only other real experiences of trains were the overnighter to Nairobi and the Mombasa express and the gasping steam locomotives of Malawi and Rhodesia. The train soothed and comforted me and stimulated my imagination. It offered me a glimpse of the best of England and provided access to my past by activating my memory. I had made a discovery: I would gladly go anywhere on a train.

Oxford was soon outside the window, first a platform, then a sign, finally the place itself: gray stone buildings, devotional in their contours, a wilderness of churches and cloisters, a town of ecclesiastical stone. There were more walls than steeples and spires, and many narrow streets, every stone seemingly chiseled with a coded message which, when translated, read No Trespassing .

Before we left the station, Vidia went to the timetable on the wall and made a note of the times of the later trains to London. It seemed a wise thing to do. I never would have thought of the precaution — another lesson from Vidia in the importance of having an escape route. Once again I felt like a beginner, but I had Vidia to show me the way.

Leaving the station, I stuffed the newspapers I had read into a barrel. -

“Why did you buy three newspapers?” Vidia asked.

“I don’t know,” I said, because I sensed he disapproved. One had been the Daily Mirror .

“Most of the English press is such rubbish.”

But I had felt starved for news in Uganda. Although we got the English Sunday papers, always late, news in Uganda was by word of mouth, rumor and speculation, just whispers. The Argus was timid, and the government paper, The People , was a mouthpiece. I was stimulated by English papers, the freshness, the frankness, the humor. But what was new to me was stale to Vidia.

We walked up High Street.

“This dampness,” Vidia said. “When I was here I had such terrible asthma that I lay on my bed and Patsy held me — held me in her arms — and warmed me so that I could breathe.”

University College — Shiva’s college, and it had also been Vidia’s — was in High Street, with a large gateway, like the entrance to a cloister. A small window, like that in a tollbooth, framed the ugly face of an older man dressed in black. He stepped into the walkway, scowling, looking cruel.

“Hello, Mr. Naipaul. What brings you ’ere, then?”

It was a thick country accent, sure of itself, and its confidence and strength made the man seem more like a prison guard than a porter.

“Looking for my brother,” Vidia said.

Vidia seem somewhat uneasy; it was the way the man faced him. Vidia needed servants and flunkies to be more humble and respectful than this.

’"Aven’t seen ’im at all. They’ve been told to sign the book, but I don’t suppose he takes a blind bit of notice of what the master says.”

“No. One imagines not. He’s not in his room?”

“Your brother, Mr. Naipaul? He left ’is key. Wasn’t ’ere yesterday, neither.”

“Very well. We will leave a note for him.”

Vidia wrote the note while the porter stood with his arms folded.

“You can put it in my brother’s mailbox.”

“If ’e fucking looks in ’is mailbox, which I doubt.” The porter handled the note as if it were something of no value. “So, ’ow ’ave you been keeping?”

“Yes, quite well, um, latterly, one has been very busy, thank you.”

I had not imagined it: Vidia was uneasy in the presence of this domineering servant. It was as though they had no language in common, which was perhaps actually the case. It was one of the strangest conversations ever — the rough, unapologetic, cursing servant who was in charge, and the oblique, inquiring master at his mercy.

“I shall hand this to your brother personally.”

“Yes. So good of you.”

The telephone jangled in the tollbooth.

“You will excuse me, gentlemen.” The porter stepped inside and shouted into the phone.

Vidia showed me the quad, the buildings, the spire, and in one anteroom a bright white marble statue of Percy Bysshe Shelley, once a resident of University College. The porter was still on the telephone when we left.

Passing Blackwell’s Bookshop on Broad Street, I expressed an interest in browsing and we went in. Vidia waited and looked at books, all the while giving off a signal that indicated that I should hurry up. Vidia’s impatience was a vibration that was almost audible, a distinct high-pitched whine. I saw some first editions of Hemingway and Orwell.

“How much is this?” I showed him the Orwell.

“Twelve shillings. You don’t want that.”

We left the bookstore and soon passed a round tower.

“The Bodleian,” Vidia said.

After a short walk we entered the gateway of another college, with paler, taller spires set beside a wide meadow.

“Where are we?”

“Christ Church.”

Places like this reminded me that I was in many respects an African. I needed a simpler and less demanding world. I was at my happiest in the bush. And it was not merely that the orderly and ancient buildings overwhelmed me; the students also seemed aloof and proprietorial. They were much younger than me, and they looked right at home here. I knew I did not belong, that I would never belong.

Back on High Street, we walked as far as Magdalen Bridge and into Magdalen College itself — more cloisters, another quad, buildings like monasteries. Being a student here seemed to me like my being an actor in a pageant in which I did not know any of my lines, one of those terrible dreams.

I said, “I wonder what happened to Shiva.”

Vidia said, “Seewyn’s problem is that he was raised by women, who adored him. So he takes no responsibility.”

We went to the Ashmolean Museum. As he had done at the National Gallery, the Tate, and the V and A, Vidia made a beeline for certain rooms, for specific paintings, for particular details in those paintings, none of them obvious. He darted to a Watteau, a Whistler, a Hilliard miniature, and always indicated the tiniest features. “Look at this,” and “See how he handles paint.”

I looked for anything of Africa — a mask, a spear, a landscape, anything of the bush. I realized how Ugandans must feel, stuck in Oxford or London after leaving the vast, deep savannah or the slopes of the Mountains of the Moon. And then I saw a painting that reassured me.

It might have been done in Fort Portal or Mubende, with big generous trees and tall elephant grass and flat-topped fever thorns in the distance. There were small figures at the side, some animals — gazelles, impalas, no big game — and rich colors and flowers in the foreground. I did not recognize the artist’s name. I liked this wide green canvas and the accuracy of the view and the easily identifiable plants, the precise leaves, the blossoms, and the dome of sky. Even the scraps of cloud looked right.

I did not call Vidia’s attention to it. I was afraid he might disapprove and spoil a moment that had cheered me. It was not his Africa. My reaction to this painting made me think I should leave England soon. Vidia walked quickly over to me and frowned at the picture.

To distract him I said, “Maybe we should go past Shiva’s college one more time, to see whether he’s come back.”

“No, no.” Vidia turned away from the picture. “He’s on his own now.”

I noticed that he was wearing the heavy shoes he called veldshoen . He had been wearing them that night in Kisenyi, by the shore of Lake Kivu, when he had said, “What that dog needs is a good kick.”