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

It might have come about, as happens in Britain, because Vidia knew a lord or two. One was the plain Hugh Thomas I had met at Vidia’s house in Stockwell thirty years before; he had been elevated to the Baron Thomas of Swynnerton, and as his peerage showed, he was thick with Thatcher. One of the pleasures of my seventeen years as an alien bystander in Britain was seeing how the ordinary names of familiar people were festooned by titles and sometimes transformed by baronetcies and lordships. Simple Smith or Jones in his brown suit, his knees shiny from his being arse-creeper to the party in power, now bore a title befitting a twelfth-century crusader and became the unapproachable Lord Futtock of Shallow Bowels, waving a banner with a strange device. “You’re just envious,” English people whinnied at me when I shared these skeptical sentiments, and of course I was envious, for while the honorees said it made no difference, it manifestly did. Among other things, a tide assured the bearer an excellent table in a restaurant.

When she knighted Vidia at Buckingham Palace (for reasons he did not explain, Vidia left Pat at home), the Queen bobbled her notes and said vaguely, “Naipaul. You’re in books.”

Dissolve in a flashback to a food-splashed table at the Connaught and the remains of lunch, the last of the wine, bread crusts, sticky spoons, the white bill primly folded in half on a white saucer, Vidia still chewing and saying, A title is nothing… I have the idea that they should sell titles at the post office… You go in, buy some stamps, and paste them into a little book… Three books of stamps would get you an MBE. Six for an OBE. A dozen books of stamps would be worth a knighthood .

“Yes, Your Majesty,” Vidia said, bowing deeply. But Vidia’s cut-price knighthood, by his own calculation, was perhaps worth only eight books of stamps.

The conglobated Sanskritic syllables that made up his almost unpronounceable name did not easily attach to the archaic Anglo-Saxon handle of a knighthood. Nevertheless, he was now Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul. The only precedents of his sort were Indian cricketers and politicians and the oiliest Indian tycoons. It was impossible to know how he would style himself, but after some experimentation he settled on Sir Vidia. Pat was the Lady Naipaul. And it can’t have escaped her sense of the absurd to reflect on how one day she was peeling the sprouts and a little tearful over the stale sponge cake she had bought at Tesco, and the next day, with her name change, she sounded like the heroine of an Arthurian legend.

I was transformed too, or at least I understood the role I had played from my earliest days with Vidia, for in a sense he had always been a knight. I saw that I had always been his squire — driver, sidekick, spear carrier, flunky, gofer; diligent, tactful, helpful — delicately finessing the occasional intervention. Paul, I want you to deal with this . It was my luck. I had never contradicted him; we had never quarreled. Because he was not the perfect knight, I had to be the perfect squire, Sir Vidia’s shadow.

It seemed to me he knew that. When he bought his first computer and got some lessons in using it, he wrote to me, just rambling, to test the printer. He was delighted that he had managed to make it work, another technological triumph for the man who had begun his writing life with a dunk-and-scratch quill pen in a little school in Trinidad.

On the bottom of the crisply printed page of the letter, he wrote in black ink — unbidden, voluntarily, what was he thinking? — Your work is such an example and an encouragement to me .

Hadn’t I many times said or suggested those same words to him? His repeating them back to me was a gift, particularly now, at the moment of his greatest eminence.

“I’d like to visit you,” I said to him on the phone.

I had news. Again I put my bike on the train and rode second class to Salisbury. I had been feeling ill that day, the sense of a wasting disease that depression seems to bring on, a spiritless and leaden feeling that was deepened by the sight of bare branches and wet fields, coots and moorhens toiling frantically across muddy ponds. Hopelessness had robbed me of my strength, and cycling uphill from Salisbury to Salterton just made me feel worse.

“Tell me, tell me, tell me,” Vidia said at the gate of his house. There were no obvious signs of knightliness in his demeanor. “What’s wrong?”

He had the strongest intuition of anyone I had ever known. He was sometimes wrong, but more often he had an unnerving ability to detect my moods, particularly my low spirits. This may have been because they so closely reflected his own moods and matched his own low spirits, his intuition an example of a known echo, perhaps often the case when a person is prescient — prescience being the ringing of a familiar bell. It helped that he was always so solitary. In one of the few works Vidia ever recommended to me, Death in Venice , Thomas Mann had written, “Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous — to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite; to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.” Vidia’s solitude had similarly driven him in both directions.

I parked my bike. I said, “My wife and I are splitting up.”

“God.”

Pat appeared, smiling wanly at the kitchen door. She looked so ill that I could say nothing more about myself. She was like an apparition, ghostly white — white hair, white skin, no color in her lips, and her whiteness was a kind of translucence almost, the papery skin traced with spidery veins like lines in parchment. She was breathless, stoop-shouldered, a tottering insomniac, and she looked at me with colorless eyes. I kissed her and, holding her, I could feel her bones, all her frailty in my hands. The Lady Naipaul.

“How are you, Paul?”

“I’m fine.”

I had just biked fifteen miles and had my health, so what was I complaining about?

In the wine cellar, choosing a bottle while Pat made lunch, Vidia and I talked about my situation. My wife and I had agreed to separate. I would be leaving England.

I said, “I always thought I would stay ten years. Look, it’s almost eighteen now that I’ve been here.”

“Good things have happened to you,” he said. His back was turned. He was looking at the wine bottles in the racks. “Haven’t you felt that people have been kind?”

“Yes,” I said.

People had been kind, yet I had never felt like anything but an alien bystander in their midst. I could not help thinking of all the English people I knew in the States who, in much less than eighteen years, had been accepted and become established. They were bureaucrats, politicians, businessmen, educators, local writers: the bossy Scotsman in his employment agency, the Ulsterman flush with real estate, the pushy Liverpudlian on the planning board, denying me permission to subdivide some land in Massachusetts, where I was born and he wasn’t. I saw them on television, or met them. I knew the accents, they couldn’t fool me — London, Birmingham, the West Country, Cornwall, Wales, the North. They were important in America and part of the system and moaned or boasted like everyone else. When had I ever been part of the English system? I had always been an alien, like almost every other immigrant. The people who had been kind to me had also been waiting for me to leave.

I said some of this to Vidia. He was crouched near the wine racks, hovering over his selection.

“But England has been good to you,” he said.

“Of course. I suppose it’s been the making of me.”

“About the other thing,” he said. He meant the separation. “You don’t have to leave. It’s your house. Your property. You can stay.”