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

We talked about tennis. Wimbledon was in full swing.

“I hate Wimbledon,” Vidia said. “I loathe tennis. It’s nonsense.”

“He doesn’t mean that. I taught him how to play,” Margaret said, and I thought she was pretty feisty to oppose him.

“I play sometimes,” I said.

“But you don’t make a fetish of it like these other people,” Vidia said.

“He’s simply being contrary,” Margaret said.

“When everyone was cheering Francis Chichester, Vidia wanted him to drown,” I said.

“Did I?” Vidia said, pleased to be reminded. “Did I really?”

“Who is Francis Chichester?” Margaret asked.

From that remark, and her slight accent, which I could not place, I gathered that she might not be English, yet she certainly looked English. I studied her accent as we talked about the weather — the sunshine, the heat. Vidia said it brought out the rabble. We ordered coffee at the bar and stood there, Vidia enumerating the errands he had to run that afternoon.

“I very much liked the piece you wrote about Vidia in the Telegraph ,” Margaret said.

It was a portrait. I had thought: I will do what Vidia would do, write the truth, be impartial, let the peculiarities speak for themselves. He was an original, but it was annoying to read that word over and over. Better to be anecdotal and set down aspects of his originality. Some people had come to like him on the basis of the piece, others had said they found him insufferable, on the same evidence.

“I recognized him in it,” she said. “I have read so many pieces about him and never recognized him. They don’t ring true. But yours — even Vidia’s mother said she recognized him.”

Vidia was smiling a bit impatiently, perhaps because of this mention of his mother. He was devoted to the memory of his father, Seepersad, who had died relatively young, but had more complicated feelings towards his mother, matriarch of many Naipauls and still alive, a tenacious Indian widow in Trinidad.

I liked the praise, but I was still baffled by Margaret’s accent, the rhythm and intonation of her speech: the careful way she gave weight to each syllable, the manner in which her voice trailed off, the insistent, almost Latin way she spoke. Maybe she was Welsh-speaking? I didn’t ask.

“Your review of Guerrillas in the New York Times was also very good. Vidia was pleased.”

This embarrassed me. Vidia and I never spoke of the reviews I had written of his books. There was no need to. A review was not an act of friendship; it was a literary matter, an intellectual judgment. As Vidia himself said, writing a review meant having to reach a conclusion about a book, something the casual reader seldom did.

I said, “That novel really frightened me. It doesn’t happen often. But I was also scared by ‘The Killings in Trinidad’—the Michael X piece.”

“It’s scary stuff, man,” Vidia said.

“I thought it was too long,” Margaret said.

“What was too long?” I asked. It seemed a strange and even audacious way to describe the piece. I would not have dared say this. But she was his friend.

“Those articles. The New York Review should have made them a bit shorter.”

I glanced at Vidia. He was sipping his coffee, yet he had heard.

“And the woman in Guerrillas . She was so naive. I thought she was awful.”

“I think maybe that was the point,” I said.

She had dragged out the word, making it sound even worse: awwwwwwfool . Vidia didn’t blink, and I did not dare to smile.

Vidia said, “I won’t be a moment,” and headed for the rear of the café.

“So where are you from, Margaret?”

“The Argentine.”

“You live there?”

“Yes. In B.A.,” she said.

“I’d love to go there.”

“You must. Vidia’s a bit unfair about it, all this business about ‘a whited sepulcher.’ Really!” She had a beautiful laugh. “And you live here in London?”

“At the moment. I’m working on a book. I’ll be heading for the States as soon as my kids get out of school,” I said.

“The school year is so long here. In B.A. it’s much shorter.”

“You have children?”

“Three. But—” She was going to say something more, and thought better of it. She lost her smile and looked into the middle distance.

I said, “The place I like best is Dorset. I lived there when I first came to England. Do you know it?”

“No. Just from books. Thomas Hardy.”

“You’re pretty well read if you know Hardy.”

“Not at all. Vidia says, ‘You know nothing!’ And it’s true. What else do I read? Mills and Boon!”

“Sometimes Hardy is Mills-and-Boonish.”

“I don’t think so,” Margaret said.

“There’s that passage in Jude the Obscure where the heroine laments her fate.”

Margaret shook her head, smiled again, but in confusion. The conversation was moving too fast for her. She looked in the direction that Vidia had gone.

I said, “She says, ‘To be loved to madness — such was her great desire. Love was the one cordial which could drive away the eating loneliness of her days.’ Something like that.”

Margaret had begun to look closely at me.

I said, “And it ends—”

“It ends with a prayer,” Margaret said. And she said the prayer, enunciating it prayerfully in her foreign-sounding accent, clasping her hands: “‘O deliver my heart from this fearful gloom and loneliness: send me great love from somewhere, else I shall die.’”

“You know it.”

“It’s The Return of the Native , not the other one you said.”

“We must go,” Vidia said when he got back to us. He hesitated a moment, perhaps realizing he had reappeared at an important moment, yet he had no idea what had been said. He looked as if he wanted to leave, in order to separate us. He said, “Are you all right, Paul?”

“I’m fine. Working on a novel.”

“He’s full of ideas,” Vidia said to Margaret.

But the idea in my mind was linked to the long-ago letter in which he had written that a girl he’d met in Argentina had copied out two pages from The Return of the Native .

Back home, I got the novel out and read the passage again. It was longer than I remembered. I had marked the pages the day I received Vidia’s letter about the “coldest and meanest kisses… at famine prices.” They had meant little to me. They meant much more to me now.

After the sentences about kisses, it went on, “Fidelity in love for fidelity’s sake had less attraction for her than for most women: fidelity because of love’s grip had much. A blaze of love, and extinction, was better than a lantern glimmer of the same which should last long years.” It continued, evoking Eustacia Vye’s yearning to be loved, and ended, “she desired it, as one in a desert would be thankful for brackish water.”

The passage was like another of Vidia’s lessons in literature. The first time I read it, I thought only of Thomas Hardy; the second time, I thought only of Margaret in Argentina.

A year went by, and no Vidia, or very little Vidia. But in friendship, time is meaningless and silences insignificant, because you are sure of each other. Not at all weakened by the insecurities of a love affair, you pick up where you left off. And I was also Boswell, listening to Dr. Johnson say, “Do not fancy that an intermission of writing is a decay of kindness. No man is always in a disposition to write, nor has any man at all times something to say.”

He was away, then I was away. I saw Pat sometimes, and she apologized for Vidia’s absence, apologized for showing up alone; and I labored to reassure her that I liked seeing her, my old almost lover. She was more easily confused these days, got flustered over insignificant things she had forgotten, and she would struggle and sigh with something as small as extracting the right coins from her purse. The insomnia that had taken hold of her like a virus that would not let her sleep made her pale and gave her sunken eyes. Her face was lined and her hair had gone totally white. In her forties she became a little old lady and had all the fret and frailty of someone afflicted with a chronic illness. No matter how little her handbag or the parcel she was carrying — it could be as simple as a book — she looked overburdened, seeming to lug whatever thing was in her hand.