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

“I have written about that,” Vidia said. He went to a bookshelf, picked out a leatherbound copy of The Mimic Men , and read the concentrated paragraph about the fable “The Niger and the Seine.”

As soon as he began speaking — and he spoke clearly and well, knowing just how to emphasize each word, knowing what was coming, timing his pauses — the lunch guests stopped talking. Vidia sat upright, holding the book straight, his thumb in the gutter of the spine, and read on, carefully, as if giving a lesson in recitation to Malcolm, who had blurted out the rude Lord Rochester stanzas. When Vidia was done, he shut the book like a vicar shutting a Bible after a homily.

“You see?”

We went for a walk behind The Bungalow so that Vidia could show us the water meadows and the trees.

Robin and Malcolm were walking together, wife reassuring husband, who still looked flustered. Pat went over to them, to walk along with them — it was only now, outside, that it was obvious there had been a scene at lunch; Pat was being a pleasant peace-making hostess. I jostled onward to walk next to Lady Antonia.

We talked about nothing — the delightful woods, the overhanging branches, the thicknesses of ivy.

“Your fantasy is my fantasy,” I finally said. “A hot island and idleness, clear sky and a blue lagoon.”

“I am so glad you agree with me. Everyone thinks I’m absolutely mad.”

“No, no.” I could see the white dress, the parasol, the hat — and the thrashing legs and damp flanks.

Hugh Fraser was walking up front with Vidia, both men talking about a weighty matter — I could see it from the way they held their heads, tilted at an angle that indicated seriousness.

“I also like your ‘seize the day’ lines of Rochester,” I said.

“That’s so sweet of you to say,” Lady Antonia said. “What are you writing at the moment?”

“A novel, set in London.”

“I am sure it will be a great hit. Vidia is so proud of your success.”

I wanted to hug her and bury my face against her neck — she looked so soft and warm, her lips so pretty. I wanted to clutch her shepherdess costume. She skipped slightly to avoid stepping on muddy ground.

For that brief orderly moment we were eight people moving down a path by an old water meadow, a path so narrow that most of the time we followed in single file. It seemed to me that it was no more than a live-long minute of harmony and vitality, a happy convergence, all of us different people together, like dancers around a Maypole.

Jebb fell in with us, and he turned to me and said, “I’ve got a tide for my novel at last. Want to hear it?” He spread his hands before him, laying it out in the air. “I’m going to call it Light .”

He hurried ahead, perhaps to tell Vidia. He walked in a jaunty way, in his bright red waistcoat with the gold piping, a little clownish, a bit like a circus performer, but eager to please.

“I didn’t know Julian was a novelist,” I said.

“He’s not,” Lady Antonia said. “But he is awfully sweet.”

My mind was elsewhere. I was considering the thought that the obscene poems of Rochester had aroused me, especially at the point I had seen Lady Antonia smile and shrug. I wanted to tell her how I imagined the two of us on the tropical island. But the day would soon end, and I thought, What’s the use? I was just fantasizing. It was the habit of a lifetime.

Back at the house, Pat served tea outside on a little wicker table. Vidia got his air rifle. We took turns shooting at a paper target. Robin scored the highest. She said, two or three times, “I’ve never even tried this before!” Lady Antonia looked beautiful holding the rifle and squinting when she fired. She was not a shrinking violet; she was a game-for-anything woman. I loved that. Another reason she would be great company on a tropical island. When she raised the rifle again and pressed her lips together, I wanted her to spin around and shoot me.

It was Jebb’s turn next. He said, in his American accent, “Okay, drop your guns!” He fired four times and missed the target entirely. He posed with the rifle while Vidia snapped a picture with his Kampala camera.

“Vidia, this has been just the most super treat,” Hugh Fraser said, turning the drinking of the last of his tea into a gesture of farewell. He pulled his car keys from his pocket and raised his hand to signal to Lady Antonia.

I wanted to go back to London with them in their car, to be with her. But it was useless yearning. They did not offer anyone a lift. I had the feeling they were planning to use the return trip to discuss something serious and domestic.

“I’m going to be late,” Jebb said. “Will you call me a taxi?”

Jebb left. I lingered a little. The New Zealanders lingered also. Perhaps Jebb had been a protégé before me — he had a confident, teasing friendship with Vidia that suggested this might have been the case. My protégé days were over: I was making a good living now and had a family and another book to finish. Malcolm was perhaps the new protégé, but it seemed to me he would not last; he was too contrary. You got nowhere arguing with Vidia. You needed to listen, to indulge him, not to debate every illogical point, and to remember. If he said, “The Italians make cheese out of dirt,” you didn’t say, “No, milk.” You laughed. You surely did not quote the scatology of Lord Rochester.

“And you’re saying I’m mistaken for telling them what to read?” Vidia said to Malcolm.

“No, I only said that the majority of New Zealanders see their national history as a benign colonial model.”

They were reliving a Kiwi encounter. Vidia seemed cross and looked misunderstood. Pat was pale from overwork and sleeplessness and too many luncheon guests.

“I must go,” I said.

“I’ll call Mr. Walters,” Pat said.

“We’ll talk, we’ll talk.” Vidia seemed rattled by something Malcolm had said.

Malcolm and Robin were conferring, looking like foreigners again.

We all left separately, and it was as though, out of sight and separated in the dark, we became much smaller in our destinies; wandering off to be disloyal, to disintegrate, and die. But for that lunch party, a matter of hours, we were bright.

On the train to London, I tried to look out the window, but all I saw was my own reflection, framed by the night, looking in: my other self staring at me for one and a half hours.

“Well, did he ask about me?” my wife said. She smiled and did not wait for a reply, because she knew the answer. It was a trivial question, and she knew it. Time took care of it.

Fiction depends on revelations to make you turn the page. It is often a matter of timing. But this is another sort of narrative, a different shape, unsuspenseful, just a chronicle of a friendship, spanning the years.

Time took care of us too. Lady Antonia left her husband and married the playwright Harold Pinter. Hugh Fraser, sick with sorrow, moved out of the family house and lived with friends, who later said he died of a broken heart. Pat Naipaul was diagnosed with cancer. She had a mastectomy. It did no good. She died too. I left my wife, I lost my family. Jebb committed suicide, with a mixture of vodka and pills. No news of the New Zealanders.

But all that was much later. The lunch was the most minute interval in this, just one sunny day.

VIDIA’S JOKE, early on, was that he would one day Anglicize his name, from Naipaul to Nye-Powell, and stride around Kensington wearing a floppy tweed hat and Norfolk jacket, brandishing a walking stick. Heigh-ho, I say! Jolly fine day, what?

“V.S. Nye-Powell,” he repeated, as though announcing a distinguished guest. He pronounced Powell “Pole,” in the manner of Anthony Powell, whom he knew well, and kept in touch with, and relentlessly patronized, in spite of the vast difference in age and class and (so Vidia believed) literary ability.