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

“I love those hot islands,” she was saying to Pat as my temperature went up. “I love doing nothing.”

“You’re the busiest woman I know,” Pat said. She had gotten up to pass the plates for the second course, poached fish and buttery leeks and salad.

Lady Antonia was protesting, but I didn’t care. I had already eloped with her, and I was barefoot on the verandah in my planter’s shorts and straw hat, living out my fantasy of bliss in a coconut paradise.

“How is your wine?” Vidia asked me.

“You were right. Fleshy. Round. Smooth.”

Jebb said, “Are you talking about Princess Margaret?”

“Afterwards we’re all going to try some snuff,” Vidia said, cutting him off.

“Harold Macmillan took snuff,” Hugh Fraser said. “One was perpetually badgered to try.”

“I won’t badger you,” Vidia said.

“I want to try,” Lady Antonia said eagerly.

On our tropical verandah she was always saying yes to my wild suggestions, and she needed only to sigh and twitch her dress with her fingers for me to say yes. I looked up and saw Mrs. Griggs collecting the plates and realized that my fantasy had possessed me so completely, lunch was over.

“I’ll have a go,” Malcolm said. “Robin?”

Robin nodded, yes, she would try some snuff.

“What a pathetic lot of sheep,” Jebb said. “I will not put that vile substance up my nose. I’d rather have a fag. Oh, look at Paul! He’s so shocked.”

I said, “I know ‘fag’ means cigarette, Julian.”

“But I mean the other kind of fag,” Jebb said. He laughed at me, and in his American accent said, “Faggot.”

The correct response, I knew, was to let yourself be teased and not get riled, and then merely smile in pity at the teaser to make him feel childish. Or else to say, You may well be right!

“That snuff just vanishes up Vidia’s nose,” Pat said.

“Aren’t you supposed to sneeze?” Robin asked.

“Vidia never sneezes,” said Pat.

“I love to sneeze,” Lady Antonia said. “I wonder why that is.”

This was my chance. I said, “The reason it’s so pleasurable is that there is erectile tissue in the nose — even a woman’s. The nose is also a sexual organ. It’s very sensitive. I mean, it can become aroused and swollen. There are some people who can’t breathe through their nose when they’re sexually excited.”

Everyone stared at me.

“It says so in Krafft-Ebing,” I went on, blabbing. “ Psychopathia Sexualis . Sneezing and sex.”

Lady Antonia smiled, but her husband was frowning in contemplation at his big hands, and his face was darker as an uneasy silence descended on the table. I had probably said too much, but I didn’t mind. I was thinking of nakedness on a hot island.

“That sounds like the voice of experience, Paul,” Jebb said.

“If it sounds that way it’s because I am boasting,” I said. “But haven’t you been told you have a virile nose?”

“All the time, but fortunately for me I am impotent,” Jebb said. “I am ‘The Maimed Débauché.’”

Malcolm put his elbows on the table, and his pink face grew pinker as he recited:

So when my days of impotence approach,

And I’m by pox and wine’s unlucky chance

Forced from the pleasing billows of debauch

On the dull shore of lazy temperance…

“That sounds so lovely spoken in New Zealandish — is that right?” Jebb was puffing energetically and blowing smoke. “Or do I say ‘Kiwi’?”

“That verse is terribly familiar,” Lady Antonia said. She was dabbing her pretty lips.

“John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester,” Malcolm said.

“Malcolm’s doctoral dissertation was about the Augustans and court wits,” Robin said. “I typed every word, so I should know.”

“Rochester is delightful,” Lady Antonia said. “Do you still read him, Vidia?”

Before Vidia could answer, Malcolm stuck his pink face into Antonia’s pale one and said, “‘Delightful’ is a strange word for porno.”

“I don’t find Rochester in the least pornographic. You New Zealanders must be rather easily shocked.”

I liked that. We would read Rochester on our verandah, Lady A. and I. Instead of giving her a direct reply, Malcolm propped himself up on his elbows again, a beaky Kiwi in the throes of pedantry, proving his point to the Poms, and declaimed:

By all love’s soft yet mighty

powers It is a thing unfit

That men should fuck in time of flowers

Or when the smock’s beshit.

“I think you’ve just proved my point — you’ve certainly revealed something about your own shockability,” Lady Antonia said. “Rochester is a moralist, really, and very funny for being a wee bit naughty.”

“A wee bit naughty!” Malcolm cried. Speaking in his New Zealand accent he could not make much of a point; he sounded as if he were satirizing himself. He angrily recited again:

You ladies all of merry England

Who have been to kiss the Duchess’s hand,

Pray, did you lately observe in the show

A noble Italian called Signor Dildo?

“‘Naughty’ is precisely how I would describe that,” Lady Antonia said.

Vidia was fidgeting, made uncomfortable by the turn in the conversation. I knew he was impatient to leave the table and end this talk. He had taken out his pipe and was smoothing it and sticking his thumb in the bowl.

“Malcolm can go on all night,” Robin said, and patted her husband’s rigid arm.

“Rochester is all foreplay,” Jebb said. “Who was it who said foreplay is terribly middle class?”

Malcolm’s eyes were glassy with rage, and I guessed it was because Lady Antonia was smiling and turned slightly away from him, her hands primly in her lap. Malcolm set his jaw at her and said:

So a proud bitch does lead about

Of humble curs the amorous rout

Who most obsequiously do hunt

The savory scent of salt-swollen c—

“Language, I hear!” Jebb shouted in glee, and then, “Your New Zealand accent lends piquancy and incredible nuance to Augustan poetry.”

“Shall we have coffee?” Pat said.

“Is this another branch of the awful study of English?” Vidia said.

Jebb said, “My grandfather hated that poetry. Do you know my grandfather?”

I said, “No. Do you know mine?”

“Mine was Hilaire Belloc. Who was yours?”

Lady Antonia was smiling directly at Malcolm now. He looked fussed and breathless and indignant. She put her lisp to dramatic advantage as she said,

Then talk not of inconstancy,

False hearts and broken vows;

If I, by miracle can be

This live-long minute true to thee,

’Tis all that heaven allows.

“Rochester wrote that as a lame excuse, because he found it impossible to be faithful,” Malcolm said.

“I think it’s lovely and lyrical,” Lady Antonia said. “I don’t know those poems you’re quoting. But maybe that’s because we invent the writer we want. I know why I think Vidia is brilliant. I’m sure you could quote something against him. But Rochester is for me a lyric poet with heaps and heaps of charm.”

The dispute was probably less about Lord Rochester than it was about class and accents. It created a staleness in the air around the lunch table and an awkwardness for all that remained unspoken. Vidia got up, Malcolm and Robin whispered to each other in a wound-licking way, and Jebb giggled. Hugh Fraser was frowning as though listening for an echo that would reveal a meaning. At that point I heard Lady Antonia sneeze, and saw tawny snuff-dust around her nostrils. She smiled at me with watery eyes. I wanted her to ask me about erectile tissue.

“I have just thought of it, Vidia,” Hugh Fraser said, returning to an interrupted conversation. “It’s that odd racial contradiction you get with so much intermarriage. Black becomes white and white becomes black.”