Sir Vidia's Shadow (47 page)

“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.”

He was staring at the stream. “All that water, rushing. It simply gathers here. There are good-sized fish in it.”

I said, “I feel dreadful. I shouldn't have come.”

“No,” Vidia said. “You have something on your mind. Very well, leave her.”

“He was relieved,” Vidia used to say after he had given someone advice like this: “Don't ever write again,” or “Go away from Uganda,” or “Leave her.” He wanted me to say I was relieved. What had at first seemed a depressing possibility had, with his encouragement, become an act of liberation.

“You will gain perspective,” Vidia said.

I thought,

 

Sometimes you hear, fifth hand,

As epitaph:

He chucked up everything

And just cleared off
,

And always the voice will sound

Certain you approve

This audacious, purifying,

Elemental move.

 

We were walking along a path beside the dark, greasy-looking stream. I wondered whether my presence had provoked his quarrel with Pat, for Pat felt weak and needed witnesses. Perhaps she felt overpowered when she was alone with him.

Vidia walked ahead. I had the sense I would never see him again, never see Pat, would never come back. The English had been right to keep me at arm's length. I was unreliable, uncommitted, hideously skeptical, a mocker. And now I was bolting.

On the riverbank I remembered walking with him in Africa in places like this—sodden, untidy grass flopped over and flattened; twisted trees and a brimming river gurgling past—like the highlands of Kenya and those walks on the Rwanda trip and in fields outside Kampala, up the Bombo road. We had grown older and closer in age, the way middle age converges, and now never talked about writing. He hated hearing about writers and books, and I did too.

Out of the blue I said, “I have never had a worse problem than this.”

Vidia said, “Problems are good. You're a writer. You'll do something with them.”

“I'd rather not have them,” I said. Something in me was protesting.

“Problems are good,” he said again, and kept walking through the damp grass.

I took this to mean he did not want to hear about it. I did not blame him. It was not that he had refused to offer a solution. There was no solution, except for me to go.

“Leave her,” he said. “You know my rule.”

His rule was: Never give anyone a second chance. It had been explained by his narrator Ralph Singh, in
The Mimic Men
. It stated that if someone let you down—failed you, offended you, broke a promise—you sent the person away. It was over. And if the person who let you down had been a dear friend or lover or a great employee, there was even more reason to end the relationship, because there had been so much more at stake. Friends were the last people who should fail you and so were the last people to whom you should give another chance.

Vidia seemed preoccupied, or perhaps he was being cautious. I was uncertain of his mood and somewhat wary. We were now, twenty-five years later, still strangers to each other in some respects—still had secrets. That kept us watchful and a little remote when we were alone with each other.

I said, “I like the way your trees are filling in. It's beautiful.”

“That was my plan. To hide the house with some shrubs and trees and that high hedge.”

Hiding was what all of us did, so that we could work. I had lived here once, not far away, in Dorset. That was the past. I had visited him with the sense of something beginning for me, and on this last visit my life here was ending.

Cake had been cut for us at the house, apportioned on plates, with tea and a tray. Pat poured and apologized, a white-faced old lady now, whom I had once desired in the garden of the Kaptagat Arms, long ago in Africa.

Vidia showed me some slides he had taken on the Rwanda trip. I had never seen them before. One showed me in my horn-rimmed glasses and tweed jacket, when I had scorned travelers in Africa who wore desert boots and safari khakis. I was twenty-something, among the Virunga volcanoes.

Vidia said, “It is an amazing image, not only for the background, but also because you have changed so little.”

That proved one of his theories, that I was truthful and still had all my marbles. If I had gotten fat or changed physically in any other way, it would have showed I was morally weak.

“Don't be sad,” Vidia said when I left, wheeling my bike to the gate. “You'll be all right.”

But as I went down the country lane at dusk, I thought: Problems are not good. I don't need them. I don't want them. I have had enough problems.

There was something so melancholy on this dark afternoon. It was me, a big man on his bicycle, trying to lull myself with the faint click inside the axle as I pedaled alongside the battered briars and hedgerows and black trees, under a sky like cat fur. At the same curve in the road a pair of pheasants flew up, and this time they frightened me. I uttered a cry, and a pain creased my heart. But just after that I saw the birds flying. I felt better and a little hopeful.

17

I
SEEMED TO EVAPORATE
. I died. I disappeared. I left London, left my home and family. As the ghost of the man I had been, I traveled across half the world looking for a simpler place and sunshine and no memories. Two years I spent wandering the Pacific. I went back to Africa to look at where my writing life had begun—but before Vidia, before Yomo even—no specific memories, only the reminder of big dusty African plains and dusty feces and mud huts. A slim, quiet girl I had taught in Malawi was now enormous and jolly in a wide loose dress, three of her seven children goggling at me from the door of her hut. I could not find Yomo. In the north of Malawi I saw elephants, a family herd, devouring the bush, chewing on trees. I went to Mexico and Ecuador. I did no writing. I asked myself, Are problems good?

The Pacific drew me back. I paddled a kayak among whales and slipped into the sea to hear them singing. Dawn over the volcano cone on Haleakala; a Trobriand Islander whispering “Meesta Boll"; the fragrance of gardenias, the total eclipse of the sun, the taste of honey from my own bees, the heat in my bones from sleeping at noon on the sand at Waimea Bay; birdsong, blue skies. I saw the connections in all this and thought, God is a fish. And so I came back from the dead.

But everything else had ended, not just my other life but—was it my age?—friends and relations began to die. In the past, people fell ill and recovered, but now they got sick, they declined, and the next thing I knew they were dead. Five women from breast cancer, one from leukemia, and my best friend in Hawaii, ailing but saying “I'll be fine,” and dropping dead. After long illnesses two uncles and two aunts; several neighbors—heart attacks, cancer, and AIDS.

None of these were drownings or road accidents or plane crashes or blunders in the home. They were not preventable. In each case the body failed: it was death as doom, the limit of mortality. I never went to so many funerals. And still I was not prepared for what was to come.

One morning my mother called me in Hawaii to say that my father, who had been frail for some years, had been taken to the hospital on Cape Cod. I had gotten out of bed to answer the phone. She would keep me posted, she said. I lay down again and the piercing fragrance of a gardenia in a dish near my bed sweetened a reverie of my father. It was a real reverie, a dreamlike sequence of images: my father's face, the aroma like a sunburst of pollen, the perfumed flower (a bouquet of which my mother had held, next to my father, in their wedding portrait), the whiteness of the petals, the fullness of the blossom, the dark green leaves, the sweetness of the dish near me—following the whole sequence of associations from my father to the cut stem.

When I got to the image of the snipped-off stem and ached remembering my father's sweet nature, I realized that no matter how vital he might seem, he was dying.

The phone rang again, my mother. “Come quickly. He hasn't got much time.”

My father was smiling the day he died. He even laughed proudly. He said, “You look good, Paul,” and seeing the whole family gathered near his bed, grateful at the moment of his death—could anyone be more humble? - he said, “What a wonderful reunion.”

I stayed with him to the end, with my brothers Gene and Joe, and after twenty minutes of agonal breathing he drew his last breath, almost on the stroke of nine o'clock. Nothing on earth I had ever seen had filled me with such desolation as watching my father die in his hospital bed in Hyannis.

“Grief is pure and holy,” a woman of ninety-seven wrote to me. “You will find out that your father has not left you but will continue to live within you and seem to guide you.”

This was accurate. I felt my father's presence strongly afterwards. But I missed him as a friend. We had had no “issues.” He was proud of me, and I loved him—loved him most of all because he had set me free. When I told him I was going to Africa for two years, he was delighted for me. And: “No one owes you a thing.” He wrote to me often. I was in Africa more than five years. He encouraged me to explore. He had freed me because he was free himself. He had been loved by his parents. He knew how to love.

Vidia wrote. I had sent him my father's obituary. “He sounded an immensely strong man, and his going will create a gap, whatever age he was.”

We were discussing by mail the appearance in
The New Yorker
of a number of letters Vidia had written me. They were “Letters to a Young Writer.” He reported the reactions. Only two. One letter from a friend. Another from a fool.

He had published
A Way in the World
. In it was the story about Raleigh, an old man on the Orinoco, under siege by the Spanish, hoping to find gold so that he would not be executed. Vidia had told me this story in New York, that snowy day twenty years before. He said he was planning a new journey for a book. It was to be a sequel to his Islamic travels of 1979 which resulted in
Among the Believers—
peregrinations in Malaysia, Indonesia, Iran, Pakistan.

He hoped he had the stomach to write the book. He had been visited again by the intimation that he was a has-been. He complained that in his writing life he had had few well-wishers and little practical help. He said that his had been a solitary struggle. “I have had to do it all out of my own reserves.”

That last part was inexplicable. Hadn't he had plenty of encouragement? Not just the literary prizes—every English book prize that was winnable he had won. His friends were distinguished and adoring. His advances were substantial, far outweighing his sales, which were never great. With this prestige he had sold his archives, including hundreds of my letters, to the University of Oklahoma at Tulsa for $640,000.

One of his American acquaintances had said to me, in a reproving way, “Vidia wants everything.”

But everything means everything, for when wishes are granted, answered prayers are not sorted into two piles, good and bad, and always there are consequences: you had forgotten that asking for everything in the sack includes the sack itself. Vidia said this was the lesson of Salman Rushdie. He had set out to be original and shocking. He wished for fame. He became the most famous writer in the world, the origin of his fame the price on his head, like a cruel fable of wishes granted.

At this point, Vidia—Sir Vidia—had his wish: he too had everything. He had been very specific. He had wished for a place to call home. He now had three, two flats in London and a house in Wiltshire. He had wished to live in a manner that was “uncompromisingly fashionable” and to be “immensely famous.” He had Kensington and his knighthood. He had wished for a million pounds in the bank. Surely he had his million now.

When he returned from his Islamic journey, he was devastated by what he had found. He wrote urgently to tell me that Pat was on her deathbed. “It is more than I can bear,” he said. “She has been with me since January or February 1952. I cannot endure the knowledge that in another room of this house she is suffering without any hope of relief, except the very final one.” He implored me to write her obituary, in the form of a reminiscence. He reminded me that I had known her a very long time. He knew of my affection for her. He did not want her to be forgotten. His implication was that he himself was incapable of writing anything about her. Yet it seemed to me that we study the art of writing for, among other things, moments like this.