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

“There isn’t time to go to the Henge,” he said. “But you’ll come again, won’t you?”

“Oh, yes.”

“We’ll walk to Stoners.”

It was growing dark: the November dusk, which seemed to rise from the ground like the vapor of night, brimming and blackening; not a dying light but a dark tide of mist that made you think you were going blind at three o’clock on an English afternoon in late autumn.

Using the bathroom back at The Bungalow, I saw that, as in London, Vidia and Pat had separate bedrooms. I knew it from glimpses of certain books and clothes. They were the sort of bedrooms that suggested insomnia and loneliness.

“We must go,” I said.

“Please have some tea,” Pat said. “And there’s cake.”

We had tea and plates of fruitcake, and I tried Mrs. Griggs’s apple pie. Vidia speculated about Montana. He said he would be going to Trinidad in the new year. When we put our coats on he said, “It is so good to see you. You’re going to be all right.”

“Come back and see us again,” Pat said.

In the darkness outside, I heard Vidia whimper. Then he said, “I don’t want you to go. I’ll be depressed after you leave.”

“Vidia,” Pat said in a soothing voice.

He looked small and blurred in this rural darkness, and the wall of Wilsford Manor made the darkness greater, like a door closing behind us.

It was dark the whole way — no streetlights on these country roads. My wife was silent, ruminating.

“You said they were so happy,” she said after a while. “I don’t think they’re happy at all.”

“Aren’t you glad we came?”

“Yes. I pity Pat, but I’m glad I saw her. I never want to end up like that.”

She was silent all through Wiltshire and well into Dorset. In the lights of Dorchester she seemed to waken, and she spoke again.

“But he isn’t interested in me.”

“He is.”

“He never once asked me what I did. He didn’t ask about the children. Just you two, the boys, talking about their writing.”

“I think Vidia feels awkward around women.”

“No, not awkward. They irritate him. He dislikes them. He mocked Zelda, and what does he know about her? He mocked feminism. That could mean he’s madly attracted to women but that he hates the thought of it.”

In the six years I had known Vidia, I had never thought about him in this way.

“Never mind,” my wife said. “He’s your friend, not mine.”

Back at The Forge, I buried myself in my novel, Saint Jack . I also wrote several book reviews a week, one for the Washington Post , one for The Times . But the money was poor. I began to live on my small savings. My wife said, “See?” I was hopeful I would sell Saint Jack and be solvent again. I had applied once more for a Guggenheim. A letter to me at The Forge said that I had been turned down. Why did it bother me so much that the Guggenheim Foundation had spelled my name wrong in their letter of rejection? I complained to Vidia.

“Be glad they turned you down,” he said. “Those foundation grants are for second-raters, people playing with art. You don’t need them. You’re going to be all right.”

We spoke by phone. At the age of thirty, I had my first telephone. The Bungalow was a long way by road from The Forge — hours of winding roads and country lanes clogged with tractors, slow drivers, elderly cyclists, and herds of cows. But we were on the same railway line, the Exeter Line to Waterloo. My nearest station, Crewkerne, was just over the county line in Somerset; Vidia’s was Salisbury.

Winter had come. A housing boom in London meant that we would probably never be able to afford a house there. Never mind, I was happy to stay in the countryside, working all day, kids at the nursery school in Beaminster, up at the pub at night playing bar billiards. I marveled at the farm laborers who drank in the pub. They were full of vicious opinions and xenophobia. “I says to the bugger, ’Well, you can fuck off back to where you come from.’” One day there was news that a party of children on a school trip had become lost in a sudden snow squall in the Cairngorms, and seven of them had frozen to death in the snow.

Old Fred, sitting by the Gollop Arms fireplace, said, “Serve ’em right. When I was at school we never went on these fancy trips to Scotland.”

Every two weeks I took the train to London, turned in a review, sold my review copies for cash at Gaston’s as Vidia had done five years before, had lunch, mooched, walked the streets, and got a late train back to Dorset. Dinner on the train: “More roast potatoes, sir?” The lights flying past, villages twinkling in the blackness.

“Let’s have lunch in London,” Vidia said during one of our phone calls.

“What about Wheeler’s?” We’d had lunch there on my first visit to London. It was the only restaurant I knew, and even so I avoided it, because of the expense.

“The Connaught is better,” Vidia said. “Although many of your fellow countrymen eat there, it really is quite satisfactory. Shall we say the Connaught?”

“Fine,” I said.

“You’ll have to book it,” he said.

He met me on the train, boarding the 9:50 to Waterloo, which I had boarded an hour and a half earlier at Crewkerne. Yeovil, Sherborne, Gillingham, Shaftesbury, then Salisbury, where he appeared on the platform, a small, dapper man with thick black hair, wrapped up against the cold — muffler, collar up, gloves — yet looking exotic, almost a spectacle, a small Indian in Salisbury station in 1971, all the English people towering over him and deliberately not seeing him. Nor did he take any notice of them.

Seeing me, he nodded and looked relieved. He slid the compartment door open and took a seat opposite. The other passengers averted their eyes, which made them look even more attentive. A tall man I had seen boarding at Sherborne, probably from the school there, was holding a small faded clothbound book close to his face. He was not reading but listening, for Vidia had already started to speak to me.

“Paul, Paul, you have something on your mind. I can tell.”

“No. I’m fine.”

“Your wife is not happy. I have a vibration.”

“She wants to get a job.”

“Good! Earn a few pence.”

“What about you? How’s things?”

“I have a broken wing,” he said. It was his usual expression for exhaustion and near collapse. But he explained. “For the past fifteen years I have been driven by an enormous tension.” He stiffened and grimaced in illustration, and then he went limp. “I am now so exhausted that the act of creation scares me. I’m tired. I’m idle. Insomnia, man. But look at you. Full of ideas, writing your novels. Tell me, who are you seeing in London?”

I told him.

Vidia said, “But he is no one.”

I mentioned another name.

Vidia said, “Who is he? Is he anybody?”

I told him a third name.

Vidia said, “Bogus, man. All bogus. They do not exist.”

“They’ve been pretty good to me — I mean, giving me work.”

“Of course. You do your work. You are busy. You have ideas. But these people will draw off your energy. After you see them you are very tired, aren’t you?”

“I suppose so.” But what did that prove? After I saw Vidia, I was very tired too, and sometimes my head hurt, my brain feeling nagged at.

“They are sucking your energy.”

At the word “sucking,” the schoolmaster from Sherborne in the corner seat glanced up from his book, then quickly covered his face with it.

“They will destroy you,” Vidia said. “They are playing with art. I’ll tell you a story. The first man you mentioned”—out of delicacy, Vidia did not repeat his name—“he has no gift, yet he wrote a novel. ‘I am a novelist’—the big provincial thing. He is from a rural area. He wrote his bogus novel. Just playing with art. He wrote another — farmers, provincials. But he is in London. He is bringing news. He begins to move in grander circles, still playing with art. His provincial wife is very unhappy. She thinks he is a genius. She doesn’t know he is playing with art. He is caught with another woman. It is his right. He is an artist, a novelist, he can do such things. But his wife is in despair. She kills herself. Why?”