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

“You lived at Edna O’Brien’s house in Putney.”

“Briefly,” he said. “But Putney wouldn’t do. I want something fashionable.”

He found a flat off Gloucester Road, in a white Victorian canyon of apartment blocks with ornate façades, balconies, and Greek pillars. Queen’s Gate Terrace. It might be bad luck to talk about it, he said. He did not say much more until after he bought it.

“Come for tea,” he said, after he had furnished it.

It was tiny, the smallest habitable space I had so far seen in London. I came to realize that these imposing edifices had been intensively subdivided, so that what he had bought was a small corner — the pantry, the inglenook, the maid’s bedroom — of what had once been a roomy apartment.

The elevator was narrow; only two people could fit inside at a time. “I’ll walk, you ride,” someone would say, if there were three. If voices were audible, the language was Arabic.

“This is a bijou flat,” Vidia said. “This is my luck.”

He liked it for the neighborhood and, perhaps, for its odd shape and size. It was one small, incomplete room — a roomette — that was interrupted by half a wall and an entryway. One more step and you were in the kitchen, a one-person nook. The bedroom was up four stairs in a kind of loft that was filled by the bed. That was it: so small that, inside, you had to assume all sorts of economical postures, sitting compactly, standing with caution, no abrupt moves or you’d hit something. A russet Hokusai print on one wall, some small shelves, a bronze dancing Shiva. Everything had been chosen for its small size; everything fitted. But two people filled the sitting area. Out the one north-facing window were the backs of houses.

Vidia could be the greatest enthusiast. He was often depressed or low, but he was capable — as he said — of enormous happiness. When he had something he liked or had longed for, he was delightful to be with.

“You’ll have to dress fashionably here,” I said. “You’ll really have to change your name to V. S. Nye-Powell.”

“V.S. Nye-Powell, OBE,” he said, and laughed.

Having this home made him hopeful and confident. He said that his spirits were high when he was in the flat — it was his nest, as I saw it, and the way he described it suggested that he saw it that way too. It may have been small, but it was high and hidden. He felt protected. It was quiet. For a writer, any house or apartment is judged by how suitable it is for work. Certain places seem perfect for their silence and their light and for the harder-to-define elements of their feng shui .

“I see myself doing good work here. Something big, something important.”

Meanwhile, I was sitting on a chair so low my knees were under my chin, my hands folded. I was afraid that if I moved suddenly I would knock something over.

“Later, in a few years, if the market moves up as it has done, I will get something bigger.”

Happiness helped him imagine another flat — larger, roomier, just as fashionable — although “fashionable” was a word that always made me smile, because fashion was something the writer (irrational, rebellious, manipulative, innovative, as I saw myself and Vidia) turned his back on, or even attacked, for being the enemy of the creative imagination.

Vidia did not see being fashionable as conformist; he saw it as something else that put him out of reach. Being out of reach—“unassailable” was his word for it — was the most desirable position. He disliked being visible and proximate, within shouting distance. It eased his mind to be remote, a little mysterious and detached, while at the same time remaining at the center of things. It was obviously the reason he had rejected Montana in favor of Kensington. This was not a literary part of London. He knew no one here. That was a plus. It was disconcerting, if not vulgar, to be in a place where he could accidentally bump into people he knew: he had the manipulator’s horror of the sudden and the unplanned.

“I see Patsy giving lunches.” He was still talking about the larger flat he envisioned when he traded up, the one with many rooms. “And I am in my study, working.”

He was setting the scene, which was some years away. He is working on an important book in this big flat, and guests are assembling in the lounge while the table is being laid (by a devoted old woman in mob cap and smock, Wickett, an absolute treasure). Pat is in the kitchen supervising, or is she in the parlor pouring drinks? In any case, it is lunchtime, and Vidia is working in his book-lined study.

“And then”—he made a two-armed gesture of double doors opening, swinging apart, as he buttoned his jacket and made his entrance—“I go through to lunch.”

I wish he had been smiling, but he wasn’t. Nor was I, though at the back of my smiling mind I saw the master summoned from his study to a roomful of expectant and admiring lunch guests. It was the kind of scene I associated with Tennyson at Freshwater, or Henry James at Lamb House, or Maugham at the Villa Mauresque, the category of writer whom Larkin satirized as “the shit in the shuttered château.”

Because of this flat, I saw Vidia more often. That pleased me, because I had so few other friends in London. At the end of my writing day it was pleasant to get out of the house — my arms ached, my back was kinked, my legs were knotted from sitting too long. I rode my bike over Battersea Bridge and kept going north through Chelsea and Fulham to Kensington, where I chained my bike to the black railing outside Vidia’s white apartment block and listened for his voice on the squawk box: “Yes, yes.”

One day I happened to have a paperback jammed into my pocket. He noticed it and asked me what it was.

“ The Go-Between . I’ve never read it before.”

Vidia suddenly remembered something ironic. I could see it in the set of his lips and in his eyes.

“Hartley was mad about the Queen,” he said. “Absolutely adored her. Then the day came — he is offered an OBE. He accepts it at once. His chance to meet the Queen.”

We were drinking tea. Vidia swallowed and smiled at the same time.

“All his preparations are made. He is in Bath. He hires a car and is driven to London in his morning suit — tails, top hat. Filled with excitement. Big day. His work recognized at last. The Queen awaits.”

Now Vidia was nodding, teacup in hand, and his posture suggested this was a moral tale.

“Hartley is at the palace. He is in the queue of people accepting their honors. The Queen approaches. Hartley is very nervous, but grateful. At last he has the Queen’s approval. She stands before him and glances at her note cards and says, ‘Hartley, yes. And what do you do, Mr. Hartley?"’

Vidia put his teacup down and lowered his head and looked humble.

’"A writer, Your Majesty.’”

And he laughed at the absurdity of it.

“As you say, Vidia, people should get their knighthoods and OBEs at the post office.”

“Books of stamps. Buy some each time and stick them into the book.” He made licking and sticking gestures. “Hartley was crushed, and I imagine it was a very long trip back to Bath.”

On another bike ride to Vidia’s flat, a few days after a riot in Clapham, I passed through Clapham Junction and saw boarded-up shop windows and looted shops; there was shattered glass in the street and dented cars. It was much worse than I had been told. The riot had started as a racial incident in Brixton and had spread up the High Road and across the Common to the Junction, where the rioters had converged and spent hours breaking windows and vandalizing cars.

I described the scene to Vidia when I got to his flat.

“That was not a riot,” he said. “That was a disturbance. Frightening, I grant you. But not a riot.”