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

“Careful, gentlemen, the plates are very hot,” he said, positioning my trout in front of me and serving Vidia his quenelles. He then made a business of serving us four different vegetables, working two spoons in his fingers like tongs.

When he was gone, Vidia began eating. I waited for him to say something about the food. He said nothing.

“I have the idea that they should sell titles at the post office,” he said. “You’d pay for it the way you’d pay for a television license. You go in, buy some stamps, and paste them into a little book. Save up. Buy some more stamps. Fill up books. Three books of stamps would get you an MBE. Six for an OBE. A dozen books of stamps would be worth a knighthood.”

“That’s what it’s worth?”

“That’s what it’s worth.”

We went on eating and Vidia went on denouncing the Honours List over the food-splashed table.

The waiter returned to whisk our plates away and hand us the dessert menu, which was also Frenchified: Pêche Melba, Glaces, Framboises, and a selection of Fromages.

“I won’t,” Vidia said.

“Coffee?”

“Black,” Vidia said.

A child began to cry in the foyer, the cries diminishing as the child descended the staircase in someone’s arms. I was touched by hearing a child’s wailing amid all this pomposity.

“God,” Vidia said, “who would bring a child here?”

“In Italy they bring children to restaurants.”

“A low peasant habit,” Vidia said, and he ranted. But I knew this rant, about all the articles that were written about children. Why didn’t someone write a piece about people who, like Vidia, had made a conscious decision never to have children?

I shrugged, but I felt like a coward for not telling him how fiercely I loved my children. Just before I had left The Forge, Marcel, my older son, had said, “Buy me a Ladybird book in London!” and his brother, Louis, had echoed him, “Book!” Just thinking about them in the restaurant, I felt a pang. I missed them.

“A workman came the other day.” Vidia was smiling at the thought of what he was about to say. “He told me that when he is at work he misses his children. Can you believe that?”

“Yes. I miss my children now.”

“Really.”

While he had been talking, the waiter had approached and put a white plate on the edge of the table. On this white plate was the bill, folded in half. It now lay between us. Vidia’s “Really” had produced a silence — such apparent interest on his part always indicated its opposite: disbelief, incomprehension, boredom — and in that silence I poked at the bill with my fingers and tweaked it open.

Seeing me looking at it, Vidia became preoccupied. He sat back, his expression altered to a glow of serenity. He was lost in his thoughts.

“Seventeen pounds and sixty-four pence,” I said.

Vidia was smiling. He was deaf. He heard an American at a nearby table saying, “I’d be happy to pay you for it. It’s just that my wife saves menus from all the foreign places we eat, especially when we’re traveling in Yerp.”

“You see? One of your fellow countrymen.”

I took out four five-pound notes from my wallet. Only two one-pound notes remained.

“Oh, good,” Vidia said.

“What about the tip?”

“That’s plenty,” he said, meaning that the twenty would cover it. “That will make him very happy. Anthony Burgess is frightened of waiters and tips them extravagantly. Taxi drivers, too.”

My twenty pounds was carried away on the plate by the now deferential waiter. I had bus fare and enough left over for a pint of Double Diamond on the train. But dinner was out of the question, and so was the Ladybird book.

“Shall we go?” Vidia said.

We walked through Berkeley Square to Piccadilly, talking about books some more. I listened without hearing or understanding. I felt that peculiar weakness, almost a frailty, familiar to me whenever I lost a bet or discovered an overdraft. This time it was the effect of having spent all my money on lunch. Vidia was sprightly, for the opposite reason: I was broke, but he was restored. He was actually energized, and it was almost worth what it had cost me to see him so bright and to hear him.

“Don’t worry about your book,” he said. He was chatty and encouraging. “You won’t know what it is about until you finish it.”

He was jaunty, but this was also his old intense teaching method, which had helped me in Africa. He was well fed, he had drunk most of the white burgundy, it had cost him nothing. His chatter was a form of gratitude.

“Each day you will make breakthroughs as you write. You’ll make discoveries all along the way. When you finish you’ll be amazed to see where you’ve got to — you’ll probably have to go back and fix the first part of your book, because you’ll have discovered what your subject really is.”

At Duke Street, near Fortnum & Mason, he turned and urged me to go partway down the hill, where an art dealer had two Indian prints in his shop window.

“I want you to come back here sometime and look at these pictures. Buy some when you have the money. They are Daniells, aquatints of India. Aren’t they delicious?”

But I could not concentrate. I still felt weaker, lamer, frailer, even slightly deaf, the loss of twenty pounds like an amputation.

“What are your plans, Vidia?”

“I am going to the London Library. It’s just round the corner in St. James’s Square.”

“I mean future.”

“Trinidad,” he said. “Queen-beeing it there. Then South America. Argentina.”

He went glum and uncertain, looking ahead, seeing nothing discernible in the mist.

“I would like to write nothing. I feel I have said all I wished to say.”

Taxis clattered down Duke Street as we stood on the narrow sidewalk. An auction had just ended at Christie’s down the street, Vidia said, and there was a commotion, like an audience leaving a theater, a sudden mob, dressed alike.

“I may fall silent,” Vidia said.

He looked at the pair of aquatints. One showed the Union Jack flying in an Indian landscape: a handsome building, like a pavilion, with Indians, Europeans, and horses around it. The Assembly Rooms on the Race Grounds, Near Madras .

“Yes, I may fall silent.”

“I’ll be in Dorset,” I said. My fists were jammed into my empty pockets.

“You’re going to be all right, Paul.”

“If I don’t see you…”

I put out my hand, but Vidia was preoccupied with the possibility of falling silent. Anyway, he seldom shook hands, and when he did his grip was limp and reluctant, as though fearing a taint.

“I’m going down this way,” he said.

“I’ll hop a taxi to The Times .”

That was bluster on my part — I didn’t have the money. I took a bus to Blackfriars and turned in my review, and then I walked from Blackfriars to Waterloo along the Thames, to save my bus fare. With no money for dinner, I took an early train to Dorset so that I could eat at home. It puzzled me that I had spent so much on lunch. I hated having to think about such things. That single lunch had cost me the equivalent of one month’s rent.

Back to The Forge and my lovely clamoring family, back to my room upstairs, back to my novel. Vidia was right. I wanted to finish the book to discover what it was about.

But that night, without the new Ladybird book, I lay between my children and read them a story from one of their older books of fairy tales, this one by Hans Christian Andersen. Outside, the wind from the sea at the end of the road tore at the bare boughs of our black oaks.

With the children snuggled against me, I read, “‘You don’t understand the world, that’s what’s the matter with you. You ought to travel.’ And so they traveled, the shadow as master and the master as shadow, always side by side.”