Sir Vidia's Shadow (20 page)

“He has long hair,” Vidia said, and indicated with his fingers how it fell on both sides of his face. He pursed his lips and spoke again, sourly. “Like Veronica Lake.”

That night we were invited to dinner at Edna O'Brien's. She lived in Putney, some distance from Stockwell. Vidia said that her house backed onto the river.

“It sounds a nice place to live,” I said.

“Those suburbs fill me with gloom.”

“How are we getting there?”

“Edna is sending a car at seven.”

At just seven o'clock Vidia said, “The car is not here.”

He was so punctilious that he grew agitated as an appointed time approached and regarded anything after the specified minute as late. He was sitting upright, stiff with annoyance, the hardback book on his lap open to its flyleaf. He had written,
To Edna O'Brien from V.S Naipaul
. He seemed to be hesitating over the date.

“What is she like?” I asked, trying to distract him.

He thought a moment, then grimaced and clawed his hair. He said, “She has drunk London to its dregs.”

The thought of this Irish woman guzzling London in this way excited me as much as
I want to be your Christmas pudding
.

Vidia snapped the book shut—it was his
Mr. Stone and the Knights Companion
—and said, “I knew the car wouldn't be here on time.”

“How did you know?”

“I had a vibration.”

Pat was becoming anxious, and she said without any confidence, “I expect the car will be along any minute now.”

But at seven-thirty it still had not come. The three of us remained seated, listening, leaking energy. It was impossible to talk about anything except the car that had not arrived.

Without a word, but biting his pipe stem, Vidia leaned over and put the inscribed book back on the shelf, slotting it angrily and jamming it tight between two fatter books, as though finishing an obscure bit of masonry.

“I don't want to go anymore,” he said. In a frivolous woman's voice he said, “Oh, don't worry, I'll send a car for you.” He chewed his pipe stem. “But there is no car!”

Vidia's eyes went black. His anger resonated in the air like a high-frequency hum of such pitch and intensity that everything in the room seemed fragile, as though at any moment it could all shatter or explode.

“Ring her,” Pat said. “I'm sure it's a mistake.”

More coaxing at last got Vidia on the phone, and he held the heavy receiver against the side of his head like a weapon.

“Edna.” Vidia's voice was stern. “The car has not come.”

There was a pause, the twang of a hurried explanation, and “sorry” repeated over and over. Her apology was as distinct as the call of a particular species of bird.

“I see.” Vidia listened some more, looking grim. “In that case,” he said, “I will see if Rogers will take us.”

Rogers was the minicab driver, although from the way Vidia spoke of him, he sounded like his personal chauffeur. AD such flunkies were for Vidia just surnames, like Brown the charlady. It was after eight when Rogers arrived in his Rover.

“You sit next to the tiger,” Pat said to me.

Vidia was still angry. The angle of his pipe in his mouth told everything. And he had not brought his book. We traveled in silence along cold streets to Putney.

The house, on Deodar Road, was tall, and with a Christmas wreath on the door and all the lights burning it looked festive. Edna O'Brien greeted us with kisses and apologies. Several guests had already arrived, including an American named Coles and the writer Len Deighton. I did not know Deighton's writing, but Heather had a copy of
Horse Under Water
on her bedside table, and I associated this book with our sexual postures, another prop in the love nest, like the little lamp, the ashtray, and the clock face that glowed in the dark. Deighton was a rumpled, soft-spoken man. Coles looked overdressed and agitated.

Edna was pretty, Irish to her fingertips, slim, with a friendly girl's face and red piled-up hair and a lace blouse. She said, “Vidia's told me all about you. Now do sit down—what will you drink? I should warn you, we've just been discussing the American expression ‘credibility gap.' I can't understand it for the life of me.”

Coles said, “It means just what it says. It's the difference between how much you believe and how much you don't.”

“I must be stupid,” Edna said. “I don't get it.”

What made Coles unpersuasive was his beard, which he had just begun to grow, making him look unshaven more than bearded. His bristly face was a distraction and gave him a dubious appearance. He said he was a publisher in New York and was hoping that Edna would write something for him.

“You live in London?” he asked me.

“No. Just visiting. I live in Uganda. I'm at the university.”

“So what are you studying?”

“I'm a teacher.”

“Pretty dangerous down there, isn't it?”

“No. It's wonderful. New York is dangerous.”

“That's bullshit,” Coles said.

Pat Naipaul winced as he said this. She did not understand that when I was with Americans I tried to provoke them, or even be offensive. I would not have dared do this with an English person, but I resented Coles's complacency. This sort of older man would expect me to join the U.S. Army and be sent to Vietnam so that he could sit and grow his ridiculous beard in New York City.

“Dad, I broke my watch strap.”

A small boy was tapping Coles on the shoulder. He wore a school uniform and had a whining English accent.
Dad
? It could only have been Coles's son. Coles did not introduce him. In fact he seemed slightly embarrassed by the boy, who was making a whiffling complaint in his prissy English accent to his gruff New Yorker father who took little notice of him.

Another boy entered the room, one of Edna's sons, dressed in sneakers and jeans and a sweatshirt. Like the other boy, he was about ten. He said, “I'm going to do a magic trick. Does anyone have a pound note?”

I gave him one. He inserted it between the rollers of a little machine and it disappeared. Everyone groaned, to encourage him. Then, just as I had abandoned any thought of getting it back, he made the pound note reappear.

“I need help carving the turkey,” Edna said.

“Vidia's no use,” Pat said, glancing at Vidia, who looked horror-struck, as though he had just remembered something.

“I have some salmon for Vidia,” Edna said, and Vidia relaxed. “Come help me in the kitchen, Paul.”

She handed me the carving knife and a long fork and the platter for the meat. The turkey gleamed in its wrapper of roasted skin. Edna seemed so pleasant and hospitable that it struck me as unfair that Vidia had left the dedicated book behind.

She said, “Have you been to the Congo?”

“Twice,” I said. “It's an amazing place. It looks just the way you expect it to—green and colorful and violent, and that big muddy river.”

“I'd love to see it. It has Irish connections, you know. Roger Casement.”

“Oh, yes, that's right.” But it was a meaningless name to me. I said, “I'll meet you in Leopoldville. We'll go up the river in a steamer. We'll penetrate the Congo and drink it to its dregs.”

Vidia's phrase for her had bewitched me.

“Oh, get on with you,” she said with affection, and she touched me tenderly. She put her face close to mine and made a fish mouth. “Carve the turkey.”

I helped serve it. We ate in the dining room. Vidia's salmon was presented to him like a prize he had won.

Len Deighton said, “The painter Sidney Nolan lives over the road.”

“I don't want to meet any new people,” Vidia said.

The American, Coles, was talking about Vietnam, what a mess it was, but what else could we do? It was the sort of line that made me recklessly offensive.

“I think Wallace is right,” Vidia said. “The problem is with the pointy-headed intellectuals.”

Coles said, “George Wallace?”

“That's the man. He has an awful lot of common sense.”

Deighton said, “I am more interested in the case of that colored cricketer from South Africa. Did you see the write-up in today's paper?”

“The important thing to remember,” Vidia said, “is that he is a slave.”

Coles was scratching at his half-grown beard. He said, “I don't get any of this. Are you serious?”

Edna said, “Now I have to make Irish coffee. If anyone watches me pouring the cream in over a spoon, I'll make a mess of it and it'll sink.”

Vidia was not listening. He was facing Coles. “When you understand that he is a slave, you will be able to discuss him.”

Edna served the coffee with the cream floating on top, and we drank it in the lounge. Coles, bewildered by Vidia on the subject of slavery and South Africa, once again began to talk about the Vietnam War. He spoke in such a futile way, I remembered why I had decided to stay in Africa, and I longed to be back in Uganda.

It was snowing when we left. Edna kissed me and said that I could come back anytime. Putney was the first part of London I had seen that I felt I would be able to live in. I liked the wide black Thames behind her house, the way the river sucked and eddied at the end of her garden.

Rogers had been huddled in his minicab, waiting. In the car, Vidia said, “That obnoxious American and his son. Did you notice the way the son spoke? So precise. Such an English schoolboy. The father was embarrassed.”

Pat challenged him, though it was what I had felt.

Vidia said, “I had a vibration.”

Pat said to me, “Are you going to see your friend?”

“No. She's spending Christmas with her folks in the country.”

“The English thing,” Vidia said. “Did she invite you?”

“Yes.”

“The English thing,” Vidia said.

Pat said, “Vidia's rather impatient with Christmas.”

“Christmas pudding,” Vidia said. He chewed his pipe stem. “Christmas pudding.”

The next day was Christmas. London was cold and bright under a clear sky, as blue as an African sky, yet in this unforgiving light the city looked cracked and senile and the streets were bare. I went for a walk up Clapham Road towards the Clapham North tube station. The only other pedestrian was a woman ahead of me pushing a baby carriage, wearing a coat so long its ragged hem dragged on the sidewalk. The wheels of the carriage scraped and squeaked. When I overtook this person, I saw that it was really a shabby man wearing a filthy shawl over his head, and instead of a baby in the carriage there was a dog crouched in a knot of rags and some old shoes and bits of metal and glass bottles.

“Fuck off,” the man said, because I had come too close to him. His face was damaged, with crusts of dried blood on his cheek. “Get away from me pram.”

His face had frightened me. An instant later I remembered how Vidia said that ugly people seemed dangerous. I stopped in a pub, and because of the encounter with the tramp, I was very careful to be polite. I drank a beer, telling myself it was Christmas.

Back in Stockwell, I sensed something was wrong. Vidia's moods filled the rooms like an odor. But I didn't ask. I gave Pat a snakeskin purse I had bought from an Indian at the arcade in Kampala. Pat remarked on how real it looked. I took it as a criticism. The crinkled scales were still flaking from it. She gave me a woolen scarf.

After lunch, which was solemn, Vidia went into his study and lay on his lounge chair and smoked in the dark.

Pat said softly to me, “Shiva's not coming.”

6

W
HEN THE KNOCK CAME
, the rap of the small hinged horseshoe on the brass plate on the door, Vidia remained silent. We were reading in the front room. He could give the impression of hearing nothing—like an unwelcome sound—as he could give the impression of seeing nothing—like an unwelcome face. The knock came again. Vidia did not hear, or pretended not to. I answered the door.

Shiva—it had to be him. I remembered about the hair and “Veronica Lake.” He was twenty or so, he looked apologetic, though it might have been simply the sorrowful cast of his face, which was thin, or his eyes, which were hooded and Oriental, not Indian but Asiatic. Those features were appropriate to the only other thing I knew about him: he was studying Chinese.

Vidia never answered the door and he seldom answered the phone. I once asked him why.

“One doesn't like surprises,” he said.

Stepping through the doorway, Shiva said, “You're Paul.”

In the parlor Vidia greeted him, saying, “What did you do with the coat we sent you?”

“I like this one better.”

“Yes.” The way Vidia said it, the word stood for a whole pronouncement of contempt.

Shiva was scruffily dressed, in a student's way, with a ragged coat and fraying scarf and scuffed and trampled-looking shoes. Pat sighed over him, calling him Seewyn, as Vidia had, and kissed him in her unconfident old-auntie way. Then we had tea.

Shiva had long and delicate fingers, which made him seem polite when he was picking at the cookies on the plate Pat handed him, and which were expressive when he smoked cigarettes. There was also something in the movements of his hands that suggested languor and fatigue. This tiredness was especially apparent in the droopy way he sat and the way he walked, bent over in a sloping gait, kicking his shoes, dragging his feet. He was round-shouldered, and when he became thoughtful he arranged his long hair with those delicate, smoke-yellowed fingers.

“We were expecting you yesterday,” Vidia said.

He was stern with Shiva, much more an uncle than a brother. There was a marked difference in age, thirteen years, and in attitude—crabbed Vidia, college-punk Shiva. But Shiva wasn't bothered.

“It's a long story!” he said, and laughed. He had a delightful laugh that encouraged you to share the hopeless joke, the unconvincing excuse.