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

“He was generous in other ways.”

Stepping out of the elevator, Marcel said, “I remember when he came to the house. ‘And what are you studying, little man?’”

“Was that the last time you saw him?”

“No. You asked me to deliver something to him. A manuscript. A big parcel.”

“ The Enigma of Arrival .”

“He asked me a lot of questions. He was actually quite nice to me. I was at Westminster, my second year. It was winter. He gave me tea.” We were at the hotel entrance, at the top of a flight of stairs. “I started that book. It’s bollocks. Which way shall we go, left or right?”

Left meant the park and Gloucester Road, right was Kensington High Street and teashops. It had to be left: my first morning in London and left was on one of my ticcy routes, like a circuit printed on my nerves.

“Left,” I said. “We’ll head for Chelsea. The Kings Road is full of places to eat.”

“I think Labour’s going to romp,” Marcel said as we stopped at the crosswalk on Kensington Road, waiting for the light to change.

I said, “If only he would write to me. Then I would know whether he was aware of this whole stupid business. It’s amazing. The last time he wrote was after Pat died, over a year ago. This new woman thinks she’s Jane Carlyle—”

“Dad!”

“Just listen to me. Don’t shush me, I can’t stand that. I don’t know why this is bothering me.” Maybe it was my being in England again that was bringing it all back and making me short of breath. I had successfully ignored the whole thing in Hawaii. Nothing rang bells there, but London rang bells like mad. “Maybe she’s burning all his bridges, and he’ll wake up one morning with no friends.”

As he walked just behind me, I knew that Marcel was gritting his teeth, hating this monologue, but I could not help it. I was grateful I had a listener, even if he was unwilling. I was roused to talk.

“On the other hand, I know he’s working on his Islam book, so he is probably closeted with it while she runs his life. It seems so unfair, though. Her letter.”

Down Gloucester Road I was hunched over and ranting, turning from time to time to say, “Know what I mean? More than thirty years! It’s a friendship.”

“You used to say you had no friends.”

“I had a few. What about Jonathan? Vidia was another.”

“You could ring him.”

“Vidia doesn’t answer the phone.”

“Write him a letter.”

“I did that. If I do it again I’ll look pathetic. If only he—”

We had come to the crooked and perilous part of Gloucester Road where all the accidents happen, the dogleg that makes an almost blind curve where cars hurtle head on into each other, always a sprinkling of broken glass in the gutters. But I was already going numb.

On the word “he,” Vidia had appeared in that curve, his nigrescent face fixed and stony, walking fast towards me on the sidewalk. He was the scowling, strutting creature from my apprehensive dreams. All my talk had babbled him into being as, in a’séance, the murmurs of the medium produce a blob of acceptable ectoplasm that passes for the departed soul or the summoned-up loved one. It was Vidia, looking crazy, which was why I doubted that he could be real, for he was as unlike the man of a year ago as it was possible to be. He was G. Ramsay Muir.

What disconcerted me was that I stopped and he kept walking. He had not seen me. It was one o’clock on a Sunday afternoon, in blazing sunshine. He was thirty feet away.

I said to myself, in a fearful mutter, “What do we have here?”

Being conscious of the stagy line only made me more nervous, for it was like a line in a play that is spoken in a panicky situation. It does not advance the plot; it focuses and freezes the moment.

Still Vidia did not recognize me, nor see me, evidently. He had to be a vaporous apparition, and yet he seemed solid enough. His face was black, the rest of him looked gray. It was his newly grown beard, salt-and-pepper bristles. He was striding, thrashing the pavement with a walking stick; he wore a fruity little hat, floppy brim and all, a tweed jacket, a turtleneck. He was Ramsay Muir, a little old soldier marching madly north towards Hyde Park. But Marcel and I were on the same stretch of sidewalk. What the—?

Seconds had passed. Not even seconds — hundredths of seconds. He glanced in my direction, not at me, and turned from a little English veteran into a little Indian. Into Ganesh Ramsumair.

Small solitary Indians on London streets have a hunted vulnerable look. They know they are the prey of brutes and skinheads. And who will come to their aid should they be thumped? The littlest Indians were picked on and mocked. And so Ganesh did not make eye contact. To a frightened Indian, my son and I were two swaggering Paki-bashers, almost filling the sidewalk, threatening to lamp him.

Vidia! It was he. In a city of seven and a half million, our paths had miraculously crossed. He was fearful, looking at me — more than fearful, something as profound as horror, for he saw a dangerous double, a grim echo. And just a moment before, what had he been thinking? Undoubtedly his Ganesh paranoia had seen all the taunting faces: the Monkey, hairy book-hating beast; Mr. Woggy in his robes and sandals; Cuffy, the West African with the purple face, the ornamental scars, and the big dong; the infies up from the Home Counties to howl, “You write dishonest books!” Drunks and National Fronters and Mosleyites and immigrant-haters and the man who smacked him on the head on this very road at the time he was writing The Enigma of Arrival —all the creatures in his personal demonology who threatened his notion of civilization. He had been terrified. Now these wicked twins, bower boys and Paki-bashers, taking long strides towards him, to boot him up the arse with their Doc Martens.

“Vidia?”

“Paul!” It was a groan coming out of tired and smoke-tortured lungs.

He looked up at Marcel and almost lost his hat from the angle of his head, for Marcel was twice his size.

“And this is your son!”

“Marcel,” my son said, sticking out his hand.

“Where are you going?” I asked.

“I just had my lunch. I’m taking a little walk in the park,” he said in a prissy, nervous voice.

As he spoke he started to move forward again. I had last seen him almost a year before, but he seemed eager to keep going — agitated, anyway.

To detain him I said, “How is your book going?”

“One more month, one more month,” he said, and took a breath and seemed to strain forward. “It has been a tremendous labor.”

“I’ve heard it’s good,” I said, inventing a remark, clinging verbally, wanting him to pause so that I could think. I had something to say, but what was it?

“I must go. My walk…”

I was hot, I was nerved and trembly, I could hardly breathe. I stammered, saying, “Vidia, did you get a fax from me?”

“Yes. Now I must—”

“Do we have something to discuss?”

“No.” He had almost broken away. He was moving crabwise, crouching a bit, cramming his hat down.

“What do we do, then?”

He drew his mouth back. His face went darker. His mouth twisted down. It was the look of helpless suffering he wore the very first time I saw him in Uganda. His fingers on his cane went pale and prehensile.

“Take it on the chin and move on.”

The word “scuttled” came to mind as he moved. He was off, the mimic man personified. He was fearful and he was in a hurry.

He knew. It was over. It never occurred to me to chase him. There would be no more. And I understood the shock of something’s being over, like being slapped — hurt as the blood whipped through my body. “Like being hit by a two-by-four,” my friend had said when Vidia insulted her in Oregon.