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

“Sherry?”

Vidia was pouring and also describing the merits of this particular sherry, a suggestion of walnuts and oak.

“I always feel like Alice here,” Jebb said, and then he laughed and made a monkey face. “Of course, I feel like Alice in lots of places!”

In his overloud laugh there was a scream of disturbance, yet he was funny and much friendlier than the others.

“Stephen Tennant is the March Hare and the Red Queen rolled into one,” Jebb said, and cupped his hand close to his mouth and whispered in my ear in his affected American accent, “Faggot.”

Jebb’s breath against my head made me so uncomfortable I said, “He’s a recluse, isn’t he?”

“I don’t know whether I would call someone who goes to America as much as he does a recluse. He loves Bournemouth. He never misses the Christmas pantomime. Stephen is savagely peripatetic compared to Vidia, the true recluse.”

“This is a fantastic place,” Lady Antonia said. “It’s like a cottage in an enchanted forest.”

She was dressed like a shepherdess, her soft skin set off by a frilly lavender blouse and a velvet peasant skirt with brightly embroidered bib and shoulder straps. Her greenish-blue eyes were beautiful, as was her somewhat tousled blond hair. With her big soft lips she seemed half girl, half woman, laughing as she disagreed.

“If I lived here I would never leave,” she said. “You talk such rubbish, Julian.”

“About Stephen?” Julian pretended to be indignant, puffing pompously on his French cigarette. “I am probably the only person in this room who’s met him. I think of him as a sort of Oriental potentate. He greets all his visitors by lying on a lovely couch, draped in silk shawls. Something terribly Oriental about that — and of course something frightfully epicene too,” he said, cackling.

“There is something magical here,” said Lady Antonia.

“Stephen had the cottage built for himself,” Jebb said. “He never set foot in it. He’s just over there, you know, giggling over something very naughty.”

I wondered whether Vidia would tell Lady Antonia why the ivy-strangled trees were dead, but he said nothing. He had heard more guests arrive — the gravel again in the driveway. He was alert to the crunching. This was a taxi.

“Yes, yes,” he said, and went to the door. A young couple entered, and Vidia introduced them as Malcolm and Robin, visiting from New Zealand. Vidia had met them there on a lecturing visit. Malcolm had dark hair and a face so ruddy it looked like a higher form of embarrassment, the kind of color only English farm boys and some Scotsmen had — a naturally pale person’s rude health. Robin was sweet and square-shouldered, wearing a soft, unnecessary hat, as New Zealanders seemed habitually to do.

“Beaut book, Paul,” Malcolm said to me. “When we met Vidia in Auckland, I told him that it was a dream of mine to meet you when we came to England. So this is a pleasure.”

Jebb said mockingly, “A real fan!”

I ignored him. Being a pest was part of his humor. “My pleasure. Are you a writer?”

“I do some writing. I’m on the English faculty at the uni. I took Vidia around when he visited. Sort of smoothed the way.”

He was younger than me, and I knew exactly what his role had been, because it was the role I had played ten years before. I saw him as a Vidia protégé and seemed to be looking at my younger self, when I had visited England and Vidia had rewarded me for smoothing the way for him in Africa.

“It gets dark so early here,” Robin said. “And listen to that wind.”

If I had not heard New Zealand in her nasalized dahk I would surely have heard it in her weend . But I had made the same observation of English weather when I had first arrived.

“Quite right,” Hugh Fraser said, but he was speaking about something else to Vidia. He had stood up. His head was near the ceiling. He looked awkward in the room’s smallness, but then he probably looked uncomfortable in most rooms. “I knew him well,” Fraser said. “I would have given anything to work with him again. He always showed up in these sort of marvelous suits. ‘Got it in India,’ he’d say. ‘Made from the chin hairs of a certain goat in Kashmir.’”

“I felt I could eat that cloth,” Vidia said.

Who were they talking about? But I didn’t ask. Parties in England were full of remarks like these, about colorful people you’d never heard of.

“Instead, why don’t you eat some food?” Pat said, emerging from the kitchen. She greeted everyone and apologized for being preoccupied with the meal. She looked harassed, but I could see that she had help, a woman in a brown sweater and apron ladling soup into bowls.

Vidia poured the wine, saying, “I think you’ll like this. It’s balanced, it’s firm, perhaps a bit fleshy, but smooth and, I think you’ll agree, round.”

“We are taking no notice of Vidia’s diet today,” Pat said. “This is Mrs. Griggs’s oxtail soup.”

Vidia was served a plate of smoked salmon, which he had to himself, and I knew when I saw it that everyone else at the table would have preferred it to the brown soup.

Jebb said, “Vidia is such an absolute fanatic about food. There’s a new restaurant in London called Cranks, for vegetarians. I always think of Vidia when I go by. I’m usually cottaging in that area — see, no one even knows what it means!”

“One is thinking of buying a car,” Vidia said, abruptly changing the subject. “Tell me, what car should one buy?”

“I’m car-blind,” Jebb said. “I can’t tell them apart. I can’t even drive. I hate them, really. I’m car-bored, rather.”

“We once made the finest motorcars on earth,” Hugh Fraser said. His voice was solemn and slow. We waited for more. “And no doubt we shall again.” He paused and added, “Perhaps you should wait until then, when these paragons of British workmanship are once more rolling off the assembly lines.”

“How do you like your Jaguar?” I asked.

“It’s a bit of a tired old warhorse,” he said. “Like its owner.”

“Except when you’re out on the road and speeding and calling out, ‘Eat my dust!’” Jebb said, slipping into an American accent again. Then Jebb said to Malcolm with intense interest, “Isn’t there a fabulous native name for New Zealand?”

“I think you mean Maori.”

“I suppose one does,” Jebb said. He was smoking at the table, while everyone else was eating.

“Aotearoa,” Malcolm said. “It means, The Land of the Long White Cloud.”

“Or, The Land of the Wrong White Crowd, more like,” Jebb said. He turned his back on the New Zealanders and smiled at Lady Antonia, who hadn’t heard.

“There is nothing I would love more than living on one of those islands,” Lady Antonia was saying to Pat Naipaul. But they weren’t talking about New Zealand. They were engaged in a separate conversation, about the West Indies. “I would adore being absolutely idle.”

“You’d get tired of the heat.”

“I’d adore the heat.”

“You would be so bored.”

“Not at all,” Lady Antonia said. “I would love it. Flowers. Heat. The sun. The sea. It’s my idea of heaven.”

This lovely woman, naked under a loosely fitting white dress with frilly sleeves and a big floppy bonnet and a white parasol, came smiling towards me in a tropical garden while I sat on the verandah of a yellow stucco plantation house at a table set with tea things, including marmalade made from my own oranges. A jovial parrot squawked in a big cage and sunlight blazed from the blue sky, showing the veins in the large green leaves of my anthuriums and Lady Antonia’s body silhouetted in her thin lacy dress. I was pouring tea for her and she was utterly at peace and fragrant with pheromones. Heat, idleness, and contentment were the combination that produced sensuality.