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

“I don’t care about the house. Why do material things seem so sad just now? I get depressed just being in it.”

“God.”

He was so shocked by my news that I felt awkward pursuing it. I said, “This has become quite a wine cellar. It’s so much bigger than the last time I saw it.”

“These are my clarets,” Vidia said, sounding relieved that I had changed the subject. He indicated bottles on racks and in cut-open cases, the necks protruding. “These are my Burgundies — white Burgundy here, red there. This year’s reds are big fruity wines. My Bordeaux are tannic. I’m laying them down. Last year’s Sauternes are perfect — rich, concentrated.” He picked out a bottle. “This is big.”

I looked at the label: a Bordeaux.

“This is fleshy. I am waiting a bit,” he said. He replaced it. He brought out another bottle. “This is crisp. A little fruity but soft. You’ll like it. It’s classic.”

That word an echo from the Connaught lunch all those years ago. Easy to remember the day, not because we discussed knighthoods but because the bill had cleaned me out and I had gone back to Dorset broke. This classic was also a white Burgundy, each sip a taste of destitution.

“It might be better not to say anything to Patsy,” he said. “About the other thing.”

“She’s not looking well.”

“She’s all right,” Vidia said.

Lunch was the same meal we always had: poached fish, parsleyed potatoes, salad. And the wine, small measures of it. Vidia sipped. He kept the bottle out of my reach. He was the pourer. He ate with precise manipulation of knife and fork, and it was apparent that he was still having trouble with his teeth. Just behind him on the wall was the Hockney etching of the hairy naked man in the rumpled bed.

As at so many other meals with Vidia, I used the occasion to verify stories I had heard: Did you really say that? Did you really do that? And he usually said yes, or he corrected the elaboration that gossip had given a story. I wanted to ask him finally about the Ved Mehta tale, but something held me back, my old wish to believe that every word was true. I asked him about the dinners: Those are not my vegetables , and Those vegetables are tainted . Totally true. A mutual friend had reported Vidia’s saying over and over, I want to be immensely famous! But that was too sensitive an utterance to ask him to verify.

Talk about cricket turned to talk of cricket fans, and then Harold Pinter. Vidia had been to Pinter’s recently; their link was Lady Antonia. Pinter’s son, he said, was very unhappy — and wouldn’t you be, with a case of alopecia as bad as his? Pinter had shown Vidia a photo of the boy as much younger, years before, with all his hair, smiling, the son he had once been, now a fantasy. Vidia found this a telling denial.

“How are your boys?”

“Marcel got a First at Cambridge and is now at Yale. Louis is at Oxford.”

“God.”

We talked about a newspaper owner. Vidia said, “He is a very stupid man. His problem, of course, is that he can’t read. He is a monkey.”

Pat said, “He has done some very good things. Everyone predicted he would fail.”

“His successes mean nothing. He thinks publishing is the same as printing. He might as well be selling bags of rice as newspapers. Or shoes. He has no idea.”

Pat was protesting, and in seconds tears were running down her cheeks. She sobbed, telling Vidia he was unfair, while he continued his meal, using his knife and fork like a lab technician, dissecting the fish.

The first time I had witnessed such a quarrel was in Uganda twenty-five years before, and it had been repeated at various times in the intervening years. It was always a surprise, always upsetting. Tears made me helpless. And to see a woman so obviously ill in tears was much worse, because the tears seemed to arise from a different source, not the petty argument but something deeper that was almost despair.

“I won’t have a row,” Vidia said sternly. “Do stop chuntering.”

“Let’s change the subject,” I said. “Have you been to any art auctions, Vidia?”

“Just to look,” Vidia said, while Pat sniffled. “Christie’s had some delicious botanical things. I’ve changed my mind about all that Company art. I’ve seen so much that’s rubbish.”

He was expert on the subject of Indian art, all periods, from the Moguls to the East India Company to the last years of the raj. He had a large collection. This was not only a safe subject, but also one in which I wanted enlightenment. I had learned from him in the past and had myself bought watercolors and aquatints.

I maintained this conversation until Pat recovered. Even as I sat there, it seemed the basis of a good short story. A man goes to his best friend to tell him of his marital woes and that he will soon be separated. The friend protests — he must stay married, it is the best outcome — but all the while the friend quarrels with his wife in a more acrimonious way than the man has ever done with the wife from whom he is separating. Perhaps he changes his mind…

“Excuse me,” I said.

“It’s at the top of the stairs,” Vidia said, having divined the purpose of my apology.

Heading to the bathroom, passing Pat’s room, I saw on her bedside table Ibn Battuta’s Travels and John Locke’s Two Treatises on Government . I had read Ibn Battuta, one of the world’s greatest travelers, but I did not know the Locke book. If I read it, I thought, I might know Pat better.

She was in the kitchen when I came downstairs.

Vidia said, returning to my troubles, “You will know what to do when the time comes.”

Once before, after a heart-to-heart talk, he had written to say, “The sexual nature of the relationship that is exercising you does, I fear, go with the fatigue and the irritation. The fatigue and the irritation prove the strength of the relationship… You simply have to live with it, as you have lived so far; there is no way now that it can be neatened.”

We had coffee in the living room — Pat, very quiet now, serving; Vidia, thoughtful; and I felt simply desperate. I needed a formula from him, not the old one of “You’ll be all right,” but something subtler.

Pat said, “Why don’t you take Paul for a walk? It will be dark soon.”

“Paul has expressed not the slightest interest in going for a walk.”

“I’d like to go for a walk,” I said.

The last time I visited, I had come by car. Vidia had suggested a drive, and we went up the road to Wilsford Manor. Barmy Stephen Tennant had died and the manor had been sold. It was being torn down and the estate bulldozed to be turned into a housing development. Seeing us surveying the property, a woman approached Vidia and said, “Are you Mr. Naipaul?” Vidia shook his head and said “No.”

The little red Japanese maple I had given him to plant had been on my mind. I sometimes laughed when I thought of it. How was I to have known that he had planted a green garden? A green garden was unheard of, and so was his dictum that large lawns make the viewer feel tired at the thought of all the grass that has to be cut.

We looked at the tree, no longer little but now spreading, with a thickening trunk and strong limbs and spindly branches.

“The leaves start out red, of course, but their final color is green. So that’s lovely.”

We walked behind the house, down the narrow descending track to boggy land and the small swift stream that flowed under the flat wooden footbridge.

“Things will work out,” Vidia said.

“I’ve lost my way.”

“This is a natural thing. It is not a calamity. Look at your life.”

“It doesn’t look like anything. It doesn’t seem to matter.”