Sir Vidia's Shadow (37 page)

I locked my bike and looked around. No Vidia.

When he arrived at the café a few minutes after me, his face puckered in remorse, the energetic apology he made for his lateness was his way of reminding me that his standard of punctuality was as high as ever. I must not think from this single lapse that he was becoming lax. He still bluntly boasted of never giving anyone a second chance, especially someone who had been otherwise loyal; when a dear friend lets you down once, that must be the end. The relationship had run its course. A single instance of lateness might be all that was needed to fracture it. So I took his “Sorry, sorry, sorry” to be a scolding for both of us.

A smiling woman was with him. She was slim, about my age, thirty-six or so, and wore a fluttery light dress because of the weather. She had some of Pat's features, the paleness, the pretty lips, the same posture and figure, full breasts—a taller Pat, the Pat of ten years before, but far more confident.

“Paul, this is Margaret.”

“I know all about you,” she said. “From Vidia.”

So this was my friend's friend. Had she been a male protégé, like Jebb or Malcolm the New Zealander, I would have compared myself to her; I might have been anxious. But anyway, I was alert. Was she a writer? From your friend's friend you understand your friend better and notice qualities you might otherwise miss—aspects of tenderness, humors, and responses. Always, no matter the sex, it is like meeting a rival lover.

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.

She came to dinner on her own and seemed frailer for being alone.

“Vidia's away,” she said in a faltering voice. “He has taken one of those jobs in America at ... would it be called Wesleyan?”

“Vidia? Teaching?”

“I'm afraid so.” Her smile was a smile of pure worry. “He's awfully good and the people were terribly nice to him. And you know he gets standing ovations when he speaks sometimes—he did in New Zealand that time. But”—she paused and turned her pale eyes away—“he does get ever so cross if the students don't do their work.”

I knew that “ever so cross.” It was purple, tight-faced rage.

“Do you have his number? I have to go to the States in a few weeks.”

 

It was the snowiest day I had ever known in New York, so snowy the city had shut down—stopped cold, brimming with drifts, no cars at all moving down Fifth Avenue, only people in the deep white street. Such conditions always made me think of Vidia's saying, “I love dramatic weather.” He meant hail, high winds, monsoon rain, ice storms, snow like this.

New York was transformed. It was muffled and made natural again, silenced, simplified, made safer even, for in the worst weather villains and muggers stay home in stinking rooms and lie snoring in bed. The soft white city was beautiful and wild, the blurred mist-shrouded skyscrapers like the north face of a mountain range of glaciated canyons and ledges, where icicles drooped like dragon fangs.

Having just come from Vermont, I was dressed for this snow. I trudged to several appointments—though most businesses and offices were closed—and at noon called Vidia at Wesleyan.

A woman answered the phone.

“Vido, it's for you.”

Veedo?

“Yes, yes, yes,” Vidia said in the old way when he recognized my voice. He was glad I had called, he said. He wanted to drive into New York. We could have dinner.

“What sort of car do you have?”

Always finding absurdity in technical description, he clearly enjoyed telling me it was a “subcompact,” and he repeated it twice, chuckling.

“Will it make it through the snow?”

“It will be fine.”

He was never prouder of his punctuality: he made it from the snowdrifts of Middletown, Connecticut, to Manhattan at the appointed time, six o'clock.

“Americans fuss so about the snow,” he said. “It stopped just after you rang. All the roads were sanded and plowed. The road crews are marvelous. People exaggerate the danger. I loved the drive.”

“You drove the whole way?”

“Of course.”

Dressed warmly, he looked more Asiatic, not Indian at all but like one of those tiny, flint-eyed nomadic descendants of the Golden Horde you see hunkered on horses in central Asia. He was alone. His hair was long and, as always when he was tired, his eyes were more slanted and hooded.

“I thought we might go to the Oyster Bar at Grand Central station,” he said. “I'm told it's all right.”

“But let's have a drink first.”

We were at my hotel on Central Park South, in my room. I had been drinking a beer when he arrived. I finished that one and was halfway through another. Vidia noticed.

“It's the heat,” he said, defending me. “You need that beer because you're dehydrated from the central heating. They overdo it here. And American walls are so thin you can always hear someone chuntering.” And he laughed, because I was opening a third beer. “Are you going to drink another one, really?”

I poured him a glass of wine. “How's teaching?”

The tables were turned. Twelve years before, I had been the teacher and he the writer. He had warned me against teaching jobs. It was acceptable to travel to Singapore, but teach there? As you know,
I disapprove of the means
... A writer ought to have no job, no boss, no teacher, no students; ought to follow no one else's routine; ought to have no masters, no servants. The essential point was that writing was not a job at all but, in his own phrase, a process of life.

I knew from eight years of slogging in the tropics that it was not possible for me to teach and also to write well. Many people did it, and some succeeded, but even when the writing was fluent, something was missing, because colleges were so far from the world. Vidia himself had taught me this lesson—Vidia now a poorly paid writer in residence and teacher of creative writing in a snooty college. He had recently given an interview in the London
Sunday Telegraph
in which he had said, “I would take poison rather than do this for a living.”