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

“A terrible intimation of age, failing powers, mortality. I suppose I fell ill because I have been deeply depressed these past two and a half years, after the mind-bending labor of El Dorado.” In a Free State had been “a great triumph of will” but had exhausted him. He felt “a very deep fatigue and a great anxiety about the future.” He was thirty-nine.

I did not understand, though I was sympathetic. I had handed in my resignation in Singapore and given six months’ notice. I also felt anxiety about the future and had no idea where I should go. I was determined to live by my writing. I had two tiny children and no savings. My wife gamely said that she would get a job, but still I was uneasy. My novel Jungle Lovers was about to appear in Britain.

Vidia reported from his bungalow: “Marvelous reviews!”

What a pal, I thought, passing on this great news. All the reviews were good — he included the quotes, he underlined the praise, he said that though writing was agony, such reviews were its reward. He was happy for me. “I cannot tell you how your success delights me.”

My novel was taken seriously by the critics. Such a reception boded well for its U.S. publication a few months away. I was heartened, on the verge of leaving Singapore for good. Another piece of news was that we had found a house to rent in Dorset, not in a village (“polite rural greetings”) but in the depths of the countryside, an old forge on a back road.

Vidia said the place was not far from his Wiltshire bungalow. He looked forward in the autumn to our visiting him and walking to Stonehenge. When I visited him we could have “an editorial discussion,” he said. In researching my Naipaul book, I had told him I had found many essays and pieces that would comprise a collection of his nonfiction. The countryside was “ridiculously Hardyesque.” One day while out walking he had come upon a sheep-shearing ceremony, which he described in detail: giant shearer, farm laborers, intimidated sheep, cluttered shearing shed, masses of wool grease, ritualistic wrapping of fleece. He made it sound like act 4, scene 3 of The Winter’s Tale . And he concluded, “So many things survive even in our polluted world.”

Not long after this, I nervously disengaged myself from Singapore. My wife encouraged me. She had helped locate the house in Dorset. We left Singapore on November 1, 1971, exactly three years after arriving there. In that time I had not left Southeast Asia, nor had I made a single phone call — no phone. But then I had not had a phone in Africa either. Eight years without a telephone had sharpened my letter writing. I had published five novels.

The disorienting experience of going halfway around the world with two young children — overnight in Karachi, a delay in Beirut, the fireworks and bonfires on our arrival in London on Guy Fawkes Day — left me with a sense of vertigo — dizziness and a feeling that I was falling down, my legs liquefying under me. In London my older son, who was three, begged to be carried. I picked him up and he puked on my shoulder.

London was cold and damp, black streets, black buildings. I had not been cold for eight years. I was distracted, and in the confusion of Waterloo station, heading for the train to Dorset, burdened with boxes and suitcases, the children pale and limp with fatigue, I was approached by a porter pulling an iron baggage cart. He was black, some of the travelers were black, the sweepers I saw were black.

“ Jambo, kitu gani? ” I said, because the porter had hesitated.

He drew back further and did not greet me in return.

“ Mimi nataka mipagazi awiri ,” I went on. “ Sasa hivi .”

He did not seem to care that another porter was needed right now, as my boxes and cases were tottering.

“ Kasha ume anguka ,” I said, drawing his attention to a tipped-over box, and wishing for him to fasten them all on his cart, I directed him, “ Fungo mizigo hii .” But where was my umbrella? “ Mwavulo uko wapi? ”

The man was smiling, not helping, not moving.

“ Jina lako nani? ” I asked, because it sometimes helped if you knew a porter’s name.

But he said nothing. The children began to fuss. My wife was tugging my arm. At that point I lost it and decided to tell him to bugger off.

“ Twende ,” I said. “Let’s go.”

“Are you out of your mind?” my wife said.

Only then did I realize that I had been mumbling to the man in Swahili. Not out of my mind, but out of my element.

A three-hour train ride brought us to the depths of the countryside. It was visibly different from and preferable to the parklike countryside nearer London. Here the hills were rougher, higher, and continuous; the trees were taller, the stone walls wider and more tumbled. Nothing was manicured. In our stone house a fire was burning in the fireplace. I found a room to write in at the top of the house. The wind pressed on the window glass, and when it came from the south it had the tang of the sea, which was seven miles away. Big bare oak trees, sodden green fields, muddy lanes, a low sky of tufty clouds. It was hardly three o’clock and already dark.

I thought: We can stay here about ten years. Then go home.

A week later, a note from Vidia, not an air letter but a thick white envelope. Please telephone, he wrote, and, frugal as ever, he added, “It’s cheap at weekends and after 6 P.M.”

HIS BUNGALOW he called The Bungalow, though many years after I first saw it, I discovered that its real name was Teasel Cottage. The truth was important to Vidia, but who could blame him for suppressing the fact of that silly name?

Small and squat and bad for his asthma, The Bungalow was the sort of contrived structure he usually called bogus and hated for its distressed flint and its quaintness — and here he was living in one. But this bungalow was on the grounds of a famous estate, Wilsford Manor, which I suspected Vidia liked for its old-fashioned glamour and its history of house parties. Wilsford’s owner, known as an eccentric — as wealthy lunatics are always described — was so completely crazy that the manor house was little more than an asylum in which he was the sole inmate.

The manor house of the estate was a expensive fraud, made to look ancient but actually fairly new, built around 1900 by Lord Glenconner and anticipating Disneyland fakery in its late-seventeenth-century style of checkered flint and stone. It had ornate gables, and even the sort of mullioned windows that Vidia had scorned in an air letter. It was surrounded by made-to-look-old walls and phony gates, and it was secluded, on a side road that looked more like a lane, near Amesbury, outside a village called Lake (the mythical home of Sir Launcelot). There was no lake but there was a river, the Avon — another Avon, one of very many, for “avon” in Old English means river.

The river ran through Wilsford Manor. Earlier generations who had lived on the land had created water meadows in the low boggy ground near the river. In full daylight the sky was a high and wide dome over Salisbury Plain, and Stonehenge was an hour’s walk through farmers’ fields. “Stoners,” Vidia called it, and sometimes “the Henge.” What was striking about Wilsford Manor were its trees, nearly all of them dead, having been throttled by dense climbing ivy, clumps and clusters of it. From the windows of The Bungalow these dead black trees were visible, strangled but still standing, thickly bandaged with ivy.

“He loves to look at ivy,” Vidia said. “He doesn’t care that it kills the trees.”

Stephen Tennant, he meant, the lord of Wilsford Manor. Teasel Cottage had been built for him but he had never used it. Tennant had various hearty ancestors and a few well-known relatives, some of them having titles. He himself was “The Honorable,” which was decisive proof that Vidia was right when he guffawed over “crooked aristocrats” and mocked English titles as meaningless.