Sir Vidia's Shadow (55 page)

“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.

Watching Vidia scuttle up the road towards Hyde Park, I noticed something amazing. On this bright day in April, the sun slanting into Gloucester Road, Vidia was very small, and shrinking fast, and it was as if he would vanish before he reached Kensington Road—so tiny, indeed, he cast no shadow. Without a shadow he seemed even smaller than he was, and darker, as though he had no substance. As though he
were
the shadow.

Take it on the chin and move on
. It was, as always, challenging advice. But he talked tougher than he looked, because really he looked like Sir Vidia Nye-Powell.

Marcel was saying, “What a wally!”

I was dazed, because I was liberated at last. I saw how the end of a friendship was the start of an understanding. He had made me his by choosing me; his rejection of me meant I was on my own, out of his shadow. He had freed me, he had opened my eyes, he had given me a subject.

Before we got to Cromwell Road I had begun this book in my head, starting at the beginning. That is everything.

N
OT LONG AFTER
Sir Vidia's Shadow
was sent to the printer, I was fossicking among some papers and found an old notebook labeled “Diary,” with a date, and as a sort of title, “When I Was Off My Head.” This was an unexpected discovery because, except for some letters and a detailed one-page dream I had written down in a notebook that contained material for a novel, I had depended on memory alone for my Naipaul book. Here, I thought, was a chance to verify my memory.

Thirty-two years ago, in Africa, V. S. Naipaul had made me promise never to keep a diary. Such an activity, he said, was an obstacle to the workings of the imagination. Except for the exhaustive notes I made in diaristic travel journals, for the purpose of converting them into travel books, I had more or less kept my promise. In the year or so it took to write my book about our friendship, I was amazed by how clearly conversations and scenes returned to me. I started each day with a period of meditation, shutting my eyes and pressing my fingers to my temples, like an overacting clairvoyant. By degrees I could hear and see Naipaul. And the activity of writing an episode helped too, since all writing is itself a memory jogger.

Another mechanism aided my memory. It was Vidia's very personality: demanding, judgmental, fastidiously attentive; he had kept me alert, not to say self-conscious. Being with him, always just this side of nervous, fearing I would be wrong-footed, I was given something bordering on total recall. In the neurology of memory there had to be something animal, related to survival, in the way anxiety helped one remember sights and sounds. So I was able to write my book almost without notes.

When I finished, I had two shocks. The first was that the friendship kept unspooling in my mind. I had developed such intense habits of concentration, of remembering and sifting, I found I could not switch off my active memory. In these afterthoughts were snippets of conversation or whole speeches I had not included in the book. I belatedly recalled Vidia's ritually pronouncing, “I am going to open an account with him,” meaning he would settle someone's hash; and “Women of sixty think of nothing but sex"; and how, as I was driving with him in Kampala, he once said, “They call those [speed bumps] ‘sleeping policemen' in Trinidad.”

Some of these memories comprised whole episodes rather than one-liners. There was a tea party at which a book reviewer Vidia thought I should meet (“He's very civilized; his wife is incredibly rich”) played a coarsely comic phonograph record that was loudly lavatorial, causing Vidia to make a frowning face and leave abruptly. And there was a long lunch in London with one of my relatives that did not surface into my consciousness until it was too late to include in the book. That the latter was a fairly disastrous meal a Freudian would put down to repression on my part.

Another vagrant memory concerned Vidia's friend Colin MacInnes (1914–1976), who was a roving journalist in London in the 1950s and a novelist
(City of Spades, Absolute Beginners)
. Vidia used to say how spending just a short time with Maclnnes would draw off all his energy: “He took away my vitality. He sapped my strength. I was exhausted when he went away.” Vidia frequently had this same effect on me. Many of these afterthoughts were trivial, yet in the detail that makes up a friendship, almost everything matters.

Then there was the diary. The many closely written pages in this newly disinterred notebook contained the feverish and wide-ranging garrulity that afflicts me when I am in a state of funk, as well as the busy sentences of a troubled mind. That I had forgotten having kept the diary was not odd, in my experience. My diary-keeping is rare and nearly always associated with distress. Far from being an aid to memory, a diary has often been my way of forgetting. The consigning of anxious thoughts to a notebook is akin to dumping them into a barrel—the obscurity of a trash barrel rather than the potentially more stimulating cracker barrel.

The self-mocking suggestion of derangement in the label, “When I Was Off My Head,” framed in saner handwriting than the screwball scribble in the notebook, referred to a time of uncertainty in my life that occupied the best part of a year, one of those nonwriting periods when I was penetrated to my soul with a sense of being superfluous. I hardly existed; I had nothing to do; I was a wraith, a wisp, a leftover; I did not matter. At such times I could do no work, and I was not reassured when my older son, Marcel, a Russian speaker, said to me, “That's nothing new. It's a recurring theme in nineteenth-century Russian literature.
Lishnii chelovek
. The Superfluous Man, Dad!”

Was that why this diary had a Russian texture and tone, a bleakness composed of cold streets, late nights, littered rooms, dusty answers, and the irrefragable “What is to be done?” I am smiling as I write this, seeing my disturbed other self as a version of a bulimic Oblomov, but I wasn't smiling then. The irony was that although I had made a solemn promise to Naipaul not to keep a diary, this notebook was full of accounts I had written of having spent evenings either dining with him or talking to him on the phone.

If keeping a diary was my technique for forgetting, then I had been successful. Here in the notebook, described over four pages, was a dinner Naipaul and I had had in Kensington that I had utterly forgotten. The dialogue was good and true. Naipaul had sat down and at once told me that he was having problems with his agent.

“I want you to help me with my business problem, and then I'll listen to your sentimental problem.”

His concern was money. He was being undervalued, he felt, sold short. He had a book idea. He was looking for a contract.

“Will you write to someone?” he asked me.

All this was before we even had a menu in our hands. I liked his directness and said I would send a letter, offering the idea—a trip he planned—to my own publisher. Then I told him my dilemma.

His advice was for me to go away—drop everything, leave the country, begin a new life. He was very certain about this, so certain that there was no discussion. He ignored my two cents' worth and pressed on, talking about his reading. He said (so I saw in this diary) that he was fascinated by Somerset Maugham. He wanted to write something about Proust's critical study “Contre Sainte-Beuve”
and Maugham, contrasting the two writers' aesthetics. I said that although I liked Maugham's travel,
The Gentleman in the Parlor
especially, and
Ashenden
, and some of his short stories, I had found much of Maugham unreadable.

Vidia said snappishly, “I'm not interested in the work, I'm interested in the man.”

In a sudden, panicky non sequitur, seeking advice, I said I was thinking of seeing a psychiatrist.

Naipaul said, “No, no, no, no, no.”

“Then what's the solution to my problem?”

“You will never solve it. There is no solution. You will always be divided.”

The next day (and this is the great thing about diaries, the punctilious chronology), he called me in the afternoon and asked whether I had written the letter to my publisher on his behalf. I told him truthfully that I was at that moment writing the letter. He sighed and asked me what he should do about his agent's dereliction. “This is very bad. He has let me down.”