“Aren’t you going to help him?” I asked.
“He can’t fall any further,” Maureen said, and raised her glass to her lips.
It was just the three of us in the bar on this hot night, with the cicadas chattering outside. On the bar were the India Pale Ale and Tusker Beer mats, on the wall the clock that said Watney’s, the Guinness for Power sign, the stylish African couple — man in brown suit, woman in frilly dress — on the sign that said Waragi — Uganda’s National Drink!, and stacked to the side were year-old copies of Private Eye.
Maureen pressed her lips together, sloshed the waragi in her mouth, and swallowed it, blinking and smiling. It was terrible stuff, banana gin.
“What the fuck are you doing here?” she said.
The things they said to me were the things they had wanted to say to Vidia.
To console myself, I went to the Gardenia more often. I nearly always took a girl home. It was so simple, always the direct question: “Do you want to come back to my house?” And the greatest satisfaction of the question for me was that the word for house, nyumba, was the same as for mud hut. Usually the answer was yes, or else “Let’s go dancing first.”
“I’m the meat, you’re the knife.” That was my life again.
The expatriates at the Staff Club went on complaining about Vidia long after he had gone. How little they knew of him. “The mob,” Vidia had called them. He had urged me to leave, saying it was dangerous to the intellect to live in such a place. I did not have time to waste, he said. I knew he was thinking of himself.
“I am old and slow,” he had said, and talked about the past in the regretful yearning voice of an elderly man. Things had been different years ago; so much had changed for the worse.
Old-crock expressions were the ones he liked best: “latterly,” “a few pence,” and “some little time.” He called all magazines “papers,” which was perhaps not as quaint as old Duffield, who called them “shinies.” Still, Vidia lamented the age, its scruffiness, its whining low-class people, and its crooked aristocrats. “What is a title?” he would shout. It was just something to impress the Americans. It was meaningless. Literary agents were “idlers” and many publishers were “crummy.”
He was often unwell. His asthma had come back to him in Africa and gagged him. He had insomnia or else bad dreams. He was often low or depressed. Perhaps these afflictions were to be expected in someone so old. He was thirty-four.
As colonials, he had said, he and I had a great deal in common. Was I a colonial? I had never thought so. Never mind. He was my friend. Nor did I question his feeling of being elderly. Perhaps, I thought, when I am in my thirties I will feel that way too. Thirties seemed like middle age, forty was old, fifty was past it, sixty cadaverous.
I was ten years younger than Vidia, which seemed a long time, long enough for someone like me to be transformed into an old man. I had finished my novel and started another. I was confident. What mattered most was that Vidia, a brilliant writer, believed in me.
No one else I had ever known had looked into my face and seen a writer. Vidia did that and more: he said I was a writer of promise, and he marveled at how quickly I worked. I could call him my friend. He paid me the compliment of writing to me regularly after he got to London, and each letter was a lesson.
In his swift, decisive way, in an early letter he analyzed my keeping a journal and rejected the idea. I must abandon it, he said. It was just a way of anthologizing experience. A writer was not a writer because things happened around him. A writer did other things. A diary, more detailed, was worse — I should not even think about it. I ditched my journal, I abandoned my diary for good.
I should consider writing for The New Statesman, he said. I ought to avoid “little magazines": literary journals, university quarterlies, the small-circulation nonpayers.
If I wrote a story, I had to know why my story happened. I had to know why I was writing my novel. He mentioned Miss Lonelyhearts. I had urged him to read it. He disliked it and could not understand my enthusiasm for it. He did not see its point. I did not argue with any of this, though secretly I went on admiring the book for its wicked and wayward satire.
Vidia advised me, also by mail, to settle down with an agent and a publisher in England. American publishers were interested only in a single book; English publishers were interested in a writer — all the work. He would help me find an agent, and I should then look for a good publisher.
If I insisted on staying in Africa, I ought to consider, he said, writing a monthly “Letter from East Africa” for an Indian paper. He would arrange everything. I might get as much as £20 for each piece.
“Aim high,” he said. “Tell the truth.”
The worst thing a writer could say was “I am just a storyteller.” He suggested that it was a form of boasting. Vidia despised the description and disliked the very word “story.” It was a misleading and perhaps meaningless word. He had once told me that many stories did not have an ending. He used the word “narrative” instead. It was vaguer but more helpful. Structure and form were of utmost importance. The notion of style irritated him: it was showing off, a display of ego and inexperience, pretentious and pointless. He said that art was not pretty.
About two months after arriving back in London, he wrote to say that he was reviewing a life of Ian Fleming, the author of the James Bond books. The biography was not important, the review was not long, yet he said the writing was torture. In the piece that was published in The New Statesman, he mentioned in a jeering way that Milton Obote, the Ugandan prime minister, had attended a special screening of a Bond film. Obote’s Rolls-Royce had been parked outside the Rainbow Cinema with Thunderball on the marquee.
In the Staff Club some expatriates who had heard of the review said Naipaul was sneering again, and they trashed him. What was wrong with the PM’s seeing a ruddy film? Better than reading one of Naipaul’s shenzi books! But Obote had been the nemesis of the Kabaka, and he had recently overthrown him, in James Bond style, by attacking the Lubiri palace with commandos firing machine guns. The Kabaka had fired back with a machine gun before fleeing to Rwanda disguised as a woman. It was all Bond.
Vidia mentioned the Kabaka in his letters. He knew the people who were taking care of him in London — wealthy people, some aristocrats and royalists. Although he had no money, the Kabaka lived stylishly in Paddington and had opened an account at the Ritz.
London life flowed through the letters: the lunches with editors, the dinner parties, the weather, the traffic. Vidia even mentioned the objectionable sound of planes going by overhead. He informed me that the best parts of London were on the flight path to Heathrow. Buckingham Palace, for example, was constantly strafed. He complained of taxes. He was busy judging a literary prize. He reported his friends’ reactions to Africa — they took a dim view. He mentioned walking through the rain.
In Africa we never walked through the rain. We sheltered, waiting until the deluge stopped, as it always did after a few minutes.
He urged me to visit London. It would be good for me, he said.
I thought about it, and kept in touch, but I went on living my life. I had students in Kampala, I had responsibilities upcountry. My routine: work, the girls at the Gardenia, my writing.
One night a girl from the coast named Jamila slipped out of my bed to look for the bathroom. She hesitated at the doorway — the lovely scissorlike silhouette of her legs — and took a wrong turn in the hall. I heard the clatter of plopping papers and “Sorry!”