Sir Vidia's Shadow (36 page)

 

“I am an exile,” he always said. In his own prim little flat in Queen's Gate Terrace he said it more often, as though the flat were visible proof of the absurd delusion—and the settled belief of many foreigners in England—that owning property was the same as belonging. The more he became a householder, the stronger his sense of alienation.

Living precariously in rented places, his earthly possessions in a warehouse, he did not speak so often of exile; and traveling in India, the United States, the Caribbean, and frequently to Argentina, he did not seem to have the time to mention exile, either. He was on the move. But with a tidy and secure place in central London, and some of his goods at last out of storage—favorite prints and books, comfy chair, dancing Shiva—he said with more force and greater solemnity, “I have no country to call my own. I am placeless.”

Out of politeness, I did not mention that he was the one with the British passport, while I carried an Alien Registration Card. I drank my tea and encouraged him to go on.

“Exile is not a figure of speech to me. It is something real. I am an exile.”

After tea we sometimes went over to the V and A, a ten-minute walk, to look at the Mogul paintings. Vidia pointed out how some of those small lozenge-shaped portraits looked like the miniatures of Nicholas Hilliard.

I still visited him in the country, at The Bungalow. One day he showed me an estate agent's flier: a tiny snapshot of a brick house, some specifications (“in need of modernization”), and “To be sold at auction.” It was not far away, in Salterton, on the way to Old Sarum, nearer Salisbury, and seemed from the picture to be no more than a semi-derelict cottage.

“Pat's going to bid on it.”

Auctions made Vidia anxious, even the picture auctions in London. I liked them for their surprising bargains. In his mind they were frenzied free-for-alls; the intensity unnerved him. It was so easy in bidding to get in over your head. Someone else always did the bidding for him.

But he did not want to talk about the house auction for another reason. Talk might jinx his chances.

Pat went and bid and was successful, getting the place for a relatively modest price. A long period followed during which the house was renovated. This was a real house, set in a sloping meadow. Vidia added a brick terrace with a balustraded stone wall, gave it a new tiled roof, a garage, a wine cellar, and new windows, double glazed so that he would never hear the cows mooing in the meadow or the overflying jets from the RAF base on Salisbury Plain. He landscaped it, enclosed it in high hedges, gave it a gravel drive and a steel gate. It was late Victorian, possibly Edwardian, very pretty, and because it was not at all grand, it looked like a home. It was called Dairy Cottage.

“People use the term ‘exile' all the time,” Vidia said. ‘"Robert Lowell is an exile.' But Robert Lowell is not an exile. The airfare from London to New York is a few hundred pounds. He is an American. He has a substantial house in New York. What does ‘exile' mean in a world of cheap airfares? He can go home!”

Vidia was sitting on his sofa at Dairy Cottage, his legs crossed, smoking his pipe, the sun streaming through the windows. Crows in the sky were framed by the windows, an Emperor Jahangir portrait on one wall, another wall of books, a Hockney etching of a hairy naked man in bed.

“But I can't go home,” Vidia said. “I have no home.”

India I understood to be an area of darkness for him, and England—well, no one
became
English, though they might acquire a British passport. But what about Trinidad?

“Trinidad, man—Trinidad!”

He had recently been there to write a series of articles about the trial of Michael X, a Black Power advocate convicted of murdering a number of members of his motley commune, including his white girlfriend. The plot was violent, race-driven, full of deception and sexual ambiguity and double-crossing.

“Cuffy has taken over Trinidad. Cuffy doesn't want me.” He puffed his pipe. “But does Cuffy really know what he wants?”

This “Cuffy” was a curious word, obsolete, found in the older travel books in which blacks were in the background, and based on the name Kofi, a Ghanaian (Akan) word for Friday, given to a male child born on that day.

“Exile is something real to me,” Vidia said. He got up from the sofa and looked out the window, gloomily regarding his seven-foot hedge.

“This house is in a bower,” I said, to change the subject from “Cuffy.”

Halfway down a narrow lane that had no name—just a footpath, really—Dairy Cottage was entirely surrounded by dense shrubbery and low trees.

“Yes. A bower.”

He liked the word, and the idea. It was true. He had planted the shrubs and trees so as to create a blind and hide the house. Going past it on the Salterton road, you saw the newly tiled roof peak and no more.

Vidia threw open the double doors to the terrace, led me outside—probably thinking, Bower, bower—and explained his landscaping scheme.

“What do you notice about the garden?”

“No flowers?”

“Yes, partly. But more than that. It is green, all of it,” he said. “You see? Green.”

No flowers at all, none even in pots or planters. Flowers were a distraction and a nuisance and implied fussy attention. And they were a national obsession. It was an English thing to create a rock garden, an irregular slope of lungworts and fuchsias, pansies and pulmonaria, alyssum and lobelia straggling around mossy boulders. Such a garden as Vidia's, all green, a mass of leaves, was unknown in the England I knew, and it might well have been unique. Who had ever crowed, “Behold my green garden"?

This monochrome was the opposite of the herbaceous border and the lily pond and the window box, the succession of rose arches, the climbing clematis and wisteria. Yet in spite of the single color, here were numerous different shrubs. Vidia knew each one's name and characteristics.

“How did you decide to have your garden all the same color?”

“No, Paul,” Vidia said, smiling at my mistake. “Green is not one color. Green is many colors. It ranges from the palest pinkish green to almost black. There is enormous variation here, every possible shade.”

Hardly any grass, however, and no lawn to speak of. I remarked on this.

“True. Very little grass. No lawn. Part of my plan.” He smiled again. “I have a theory that it is exhausting for anyone to look at a large expanse of lawn. The viewer becomes tired reflecting on the effort that goes into cutting all that grass. A lawn is not restful to look at. A lawn represents great labor and noise, hours of rackety lawn mowers. A lawn is exhausting.”

Who would have thought that?

My blunder was in having brought him a wholly unsuitable red-leafed Japanese maple, a dwarf tree, as a housewarming present. Vidia was doubtful but thanked me, and he instructed an aged kindly man he called Budden to put the sapling into the ground. The deep red leaves stood out in all the greenery. How was I to know he had banned all other colors from his garden?

A few months later he reported with pleasure, “Your tree is not red all the time. Late in the season the leaves become greenish.”

Dairy Cottage was on its own, not near any other houses, not in the village, unmarked, no house sign, hardly visible, in its own green bower. To be remote and hidden was, in Vidia's mind, to be safe.

One of the few snags was the jet aircraft from the fighter squadrons of the RAF base that constantly flew overhead. The planes engaged in surprising maneuvers, flew vertically, stopped in midair, tumbled, descended like helicopters, even flew backwards. Outside Vidia's double glazing they were ear-splitting.

“I suppose Saudi Arabians and Chinese come down to see the fighter planes put through their paces,” I said. “The defense ministers.”

“No,” Vidia said. “Mr. Woggy doesn't come down here.”

“But they buy these planes, don't they?”

“Mr. Woggy stays in London. Mr. Woggy goes to an airfield near London for his demonstration.”

“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.”

12

V
IDIA 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.