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

Now the schoolmaster was frankly gaping and so was I.

“Because he played with art.”

Green fields, greener than the summer fields of Africa, and clumps of trees moved past the windows, a bouncing belt of scenery. Crows flew up.

“Don’t play with art.”

We stopped at Andover. No one got off. The last seat in our compartment was taken by a woman who seemed startled when I spoke.

“I’ll keep that in mind,” I said. “I see In a Free State everywhere.”

“Do you? I’m afraid I have no interest in that.”

“It’s sure to be shortlisted for the Booker Prize.”

“Prizes are such a con. I think the Americans have the right idea. Sell the book, don’t go looking for prizes.”

“I mean, you were so prescient about the East African Indians being thrown out.”

“The book is important.”

“I wonder what they made of it in Africa.”

“Tommy McCoon wouldn’t like it.”

The man in the corner seat looked up again.

“But it’s a big book.”

A large, neat sign lettered Stop Coloured Immigration was painted on the stonework under a bridge near Basingstoke.

Vidia stared straight ahead. “And you booked a table at the Connaught. Oh, good.”

At Waterloo the compartment emptied fast, and as we were leaving I saw on the seat the faded book the man I had taken to be a schoolmaster had been reading. Yes, I had been right in guessing he was a schoolmaster. The book was Cicero’s Select Orations , a Latin text, no name on the flyleaf but many pencil marks in the margins.

“We’ll take it to Lost Property,” Vidia said.

On the way to Lost Property, Vidia recited an imagined dialogue between the book’s owner and someone else. It’s gone, I’m sure of it . Then, Have a look at Lost Property. Someone might just have turned it in . And, Couldn’t possibly . Then, Do let’s look. There’s just a chance …

We left the book with the clerk who sat among all the umbrellas and sinister-looking parcels.

Vidia had books to sell. We made the circuit: a taxi to Gaston’s, the tobacconist for Player’s Navy Cut, the newsagent, then a taxi to the Connaught, in Carlos Place. It puzzled me slightly that I had paid for both taxis.

The doorman at the Connaught was dressed in a top hat and a dark caped ulster with green piping at the seams. He had a red face and side-whiskers. The porter was mustached and alert; he wore a frock coat and striped trousers. There were fresh flowers in a vase near the entrance. The etched mirrors gleamed. All these Dickensian touches were distinct signs that the Connaught was expensive.

We were met at the entrance to the Grill Room and shown to a table. The waiter was subservient in the bossy English way — that was a bad sign too. We were given menus. Vidia asked for the wine list. He pinched his glasses to get the right angle and looked at the list with serious concentration for a full minute. Seeming to have found the right bottle, he looked up at me.

“You will do well here,” he said. “Michael Ratcliffe is very pleased with your reviews.”

Ratcliffe was the literary editor of The Times .

I said, “I hate doing them.”

“They force you to make a judgment on a book. It’s important to reach conclusions. Most people have no idea what they think of a book after they’ve read it.”

The sommelier came over to us. He was dressed in black and wore a chain around his neck and could have passed for a mayor wearing the gold insignia of his office. He saw Vidia with the wine list.

“Have you made a choice, sir?”

Vidia said to me, “Let’s get a real wine. Let’s get a classic. A white burgundy.” He put his finger on his selection. “Number seventy-eight.”

“Very good, sir. An excellent choice. Shall I bring it now?”

Vidia nodded. The sweating silver bucket was set up and the bottle opened, the cork sniffed. It was a Puligny-Montrachet. Vidia sipped some and worked it around his teeth.

“It’s good,” he said. “So many flavors. The roots of these vines go very deep. It gives complexity — taste the chalk?”

I sipped it. Was that what chalk tasted like?

“What was that name again?” I asked. I picked up the wine list and, pretending to examine the name, I glanced at the price. It was eleven pounds. The review I was about to turn in would net me ten pounds.

“The roots of your California vines are much shallower, because of the rainfall. It’s not bad — different virtues. Savor their differences. These French wines have deep roots.” He sipped again.

A beef trolley was wheeled over. It contained the Thursday “luncheon dish,” boiled silverside. Vidia waved it away. Thinking that it might offend him if I chose meat, I looked at Poissons. The menu was mostly in French.

“The English recruit people,” Vidia said. “That is not widely understood. They often take on new people. They make room. It is not exclusive — it is selective.”

He was ignoring the waiter who hovered near him. The man was making me nervous.

My finger was on Truite Grillée ou aux Amandes. I said, “I’ll have the grilled trout.”

“Something to start with?”

“Bisque d’Homard.”

As the waiter noted this, Vidia said, “That’s a nice idea. I will also have the bisque, followed by Quenelles d’Haddock Monte-Carlo.”

“Any vegetables? Shall I make up a selection?”

“That will be lovely,” Vidia said. He sipped some more wine, sucked it past his gums, and said, “For a writer like yourself, even an American, there is a kind of recruitment, and you will be part of it. You will be coopted. I think it has started already for you. Your name is growing. What happens next is up to you.”

“Did that happen to Robert Lowell?”

“I think Lowell is fraudulent, don’t you?”

This was not the moment to mention that he had been Lowell’s houseguest in New York; Lowell’s was the return address on a number of Vidia’s letters to me. And Vidia had interviewed him for The Listener . In researching my book I had read the interview.

“His poems are very good,” I said. “ Lord Weary’s Castle. Life Studies .”

“I am sure I am a very bad judge of American poetry,” Vidia said, which was his way of saying he disliked Lowell’s poems. But he had not said so in his interview.

Our lobster bisque was served. Swallowing some, I said, “But Lowell’s crazy, isn’t he?”

“That’s the one thing he’s not.”

“You think it’s a con.”

“Total con, total con.” Vidia was concentrating on his soup, which he ate neatly, his spoon at a studied angle.

I said, “He goes to mental hospitals, gibbering.”

“He’s playing,” Vidia said. “Hospitals are wonderful places for people to act out their fantasies of infantilism. I think Lowell adores being in a hospital.”

“His hospital poems are pretty scary.”

“I don’t know them. Should I read them?”

“It’s up to you. What about his wife, Lady Caroline?”

Vidia rested his spoon, leaned over, and said, “I was sitting next to her a month ago at a dinner.” He made his disgusted face, and his features were so distorted it looked like a Kali mask. “She pongs! ”

I laughed out loud, but Vidia was still frowning and sniffing.

“The title means a lot to Lowell,” he said. “What is it about titles? Americans are so glamoured by titles.”

“That’s because we don’t have them,” I said. “Anyway, it’s a big deal, isn’t it?”

“A title is nothing,” Vidia said.

The waiter was listening, and it was hard to tell whether he approved. He was obviously torn because, being a flunky in such a classy place, he had been trained to admire something that was for him unattainable.