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

“So you don’t see them?” I could not bring myself to say “Mr. Woggy.”

“Mr. Woggy does not know this exists.”

He meant the meadow, the little river, the farm on the opposite hill, Wiltshire.

Most of Vidia’s possessions, everything except his papers, had been liberated from the warehouse and now furnished Dairy Cottage. Pieces of furniture I had seen years ago in his house in Stockwell had now reappeared, dusted and polished and gleaming, and pictures, and some artifacts from Uganda and India. And with all he owned surrounding him, in the comfort of his home, he returned to the old subject.

“I am an exile,” he said. “You can go home. You have a large, strong country. I have nothing. No home for me. Yes, ‘exile’ seems an out-of-date word. But for me it has a meaning.”

I went on visiting, pedaling from Salisbury station on my bicycle, uphill on the way to Vidia’s, downhill on the return. I kept my bike in the guard’s van and felt freer for having it. I loved taking it out on a spring morning, heading to my friend Vidia’s house past banks of bluebells, or later when the poppies were in bloom. At a certain bend in the road there were always pheasants flying up.

“I had a telephone call from America this morning,” Vidia said. “I picked up the phone and heard the voice. American.”

It was clear from his tone that the call was unwelcome, yet he looked serene.

“I did not say hello. I said, ‘Don’t ever do this again.’”

Vidia looked so pleased with himself, uttering this stern sentence of rebuke, that I started to laugh.

“‘Don’t ever do this again,’ and I put the phone down.”

Pat said, “I knew Paul would like that.”

Yes, because of the sudden hostility of the greeting and also because it interested me to know what anyone’s limits were, and particularly the limits of a friend. It helped to know what was deemed going too far. A stranger’s calling him was unacceptable.

“How did he get your number?”

“I have no idea.”

Vidia’s telephone number was known to only few people. His reasoning was this: a strange voice on the phone had to be someone asking a favor or importuning him.

“I want to be sure when I pick up the phone that the person is someone I know and like,” he said. “I don’t want to hear a strange voice.”

His wine cellar was almost full, and that collection was one of his oddest passions because these days he seldom drank wine, and when he did, it wasn’t much. He said wine gave him a headache. But each time I visited he showed me new crates and filled racks, he told me the vintages, he explained the complex flavors.

Walking past Dairy Cottage’s garage one day I saw a car. A car?

“Vidia, you have a car. What kind is it?”

“I don’t know. One of these little European monkey wagons.”

It was a brand-new Saab. It was green. I never saw him drive it, nor did I ever see it outside the garage.

Time passed. He bought another flat in London, much bigger than the one at Queen’s Gate Terrace. This flat was off the Brompton Road. It was the sort of place that suited his fantasy of the lunch, when he would be summoned from his study to meet his friends and admirers. He kept the little flat in Queen’s Gate Terrace. He continued to live in Dairy Cottage. He paid occasional visits to the new flat, sometimes wearing a floppy tweed hat and carrying a walking stick, and he wondered aloud how it should be furnished. And more than ever he began monologues by saying, with passion and sadness, “The word ‘exile’ has a meaning for me. I am an exile.”

VIDIA WAS PHONING from his flat, the tiny one — I could tell from the squashed acoustics, like a murmuring man trapped in an elevator: “Are you free for a coffee after lunch? There is someone I want you to meet.”

“Someone” meant a friend. Yes, I wanted to meet my friend’s friend.

It was the hot English summer of 1977. Even the London heat did not diminish my happiness, spending days in pure invention, writing my novel Picture Palace . In the voice of a smart old woman, Maude Coffin Pratt, I wrote about the contradictions of writing by describing the life of a photographer. I promised myself that after I finished the book I would take a long trip, as an antidote to the several years I had spent in novel-writing confinement.

Still, it was not easy to write on the hottest days in London. Open windows made it noisy, the slate roofs blazed with glare, the bricks became crumbly and overbaked. The very earth underneath the city shrank, because London is built on thirsty clay. Subsiding houses began to split and crack, jagged seams opened in the pointing, and the masonry over windows collapsed. It was the intense heat.

Londoners cracked too. Unused to the heat, they became skittish and self-conscious and dressed more sloppily, and there were more of them on the street. You saw women in parks stripped to their underwear, sunning themselves, grinning at the sky. Bare-chested men with pink arms competed for space with tourists, who kept saying, “We expected rain!” People were generally merrier, but it was the wrong city for sun: not enough space, too narrow, only a few public pools, and they were dire. The city had been made for work and indoor pleasures and pedestrian exertions in big parks. It was unusual to have so much sunshine, and there was no way to use it — only rented rowboats in the Serpentine, rented deck chairs in the parks at twenty pence an hour, and benches on the Embankment. The sun and swelter would soon become demoralizing, with nothing much to do except sit in it and drink pints of lager.

I saw these people all over; so many turned out that the traffic was affected. I went by bike in order to be on time for punctual Vidia: downhill to the river, uphill to the café near the Green Park tube station, where we had agreed to meet. Piccadilly was crowded with workers on their lunch break, smiling — even the people walking alone were smiling — because of the sunshine. Londoners habitually bowed their heads and hurried in the rain, but walked more slowly and much straighter in the sunshine, holding their heads up on days like this. You had to live through every phase of English weather to know the English traits: so many English moods and turns of phrase could be ascribed to the weather.

I locked my bike and looked around. No Vidia.

When he arrived at the café a few minutes after me, his face puckered in remorse, the energetic apology he made for his lateness was his way of reminding me that his standard of punctuality was as high as ever. I must not think from this single lapse that he was becoming lax. He still bluntly boasted of never giving anyone a second chance, especially someone who had been otherwise loyal; when a dear friend lets you down once, that must be the end. The relationship had run its course. A single instance of lateness might be all that was needed to fracture it. So I took his “Sorry, sorry, sorry” to be a scolding for both of us.

A smiling woman was with him. She was slim, about my age, thirty-six or so, and wore a fluttery light dress because of the weather. She had some of Pat’s features, the paleness, the pretty lips, the same posture and figure, full breasts — a taller Pat, the Pat of ten years before, but far more confident.

“Paul, this is Margaret.”

“I know all about you,” she said. “From Vidia.”

So this was my friend’s friend. Had she been a male protégé, like Jebb or Malcolm the New Zealander, I would have compared myself to her; I might have been anxious. But anyway, I was alert. Was she a writer? From your friend’s friend you understand your friend better and notice qualities you might otherwise miss — aspects of tenderness, humors, and responses. Always, no matter the sex, it is like meeting a rival lover.