The bill was brought. I paid it, I left the tip. Vidia had not seen it. He did not see bills even when they were brought on the most expensive china and folded like origami and presented to him. It was one of his survival skills that a bill could come and go without ever being visible. Still, he looked disgusted.
“This hotel used to be quite grand,” he said in his pained voice. Perhaps the pain was due to the idea I had just divulged. “Having tea here was once something special. One was glamoured by it.” He made a face. “No longer.”
I took the trip. I left London on September 19, 1973, on the train to Paris. I changed trains and went to Istanbul, changed again for Ankara, for Tehran, and for the holy city of fanatics, Meshed. And onward, through Afghanistan (by bus, no trains) and down the Khyber, up to Simla, down to Madras and to Sri Lanka, on the train and on the ferry. To Burma and Thailand and Singapore, along the coast of Vietnam (heavily bombed and still smoking), up and down Japan, a boat to Nakhodka, and the Trans-Siberian home. My heart was in my mouth the whole time. Out of fear I wrote everything down; in my misery I mocked myself, and a febrile humor crept into the narrative. In January of the following year I returned to London, still feeling miserable. I had missed Christmas. Everyone howled at me, “Where have you been?” I propped up my notebooks and wrote the book, made a single narrative out of all those train trips. The title came from a road in Kanpur: the Railway Bazaar.
Sometimes miracles happen to a writer, Vidia had said. The Great Railway Bazaar was a small miracle. I was not prepared for it. While I was working on it, The Black House was published — the reviews were respectful — and I started The Family Arsenal after I finished the travel book. Even before publication, The Great Railway Bazaar was reprinted three times, to accommodate bookstore demand. It was an immediate bestseller. It was my tenth book. I had known Vidia for ten years. In that time I had published about a million words.
“An agonizing profession,” Vidia said. “But there are rewards.”
All windfalls are relative. I did not become rich with that book, but at last I was making a living. I paid my debts. I had enough to support me in my next book. I was out from under. I never again worried about money — that freedom from worry was wealth to me. No more drudging. I was free. I was thirty-two.
And at last I understood what Vidia meant when he had written, “I have never had to work for hire; I made a vow at an early age never to work, never to become involved with people in that way. That has given me a freedom from people, from entanglements, from rivalries, from competition. I have no enemies, no rivals, no masters; I fear no one.”
10. Lunch Party
“I CAN SEE it all now,” my wife said in a fantasizing voice, though she was not looking at anything except a loose sock on the floor. She snatched at it. “The boys talking about their books. The girls talking about cooking.”
It was Saturday. She was busy with the week’s laundry, moving through the house while I followed her. It was one of those maddening married people’s conversations, one spouse chasing the other with questions, the dialogue shifting from room to room. We had moved to a much bigger house; we had many rooms now. Why didn’t she want to go to Vidia’s lunch party with me?
“Sunday is my only free day. Besides, he’s really your friend.”
Such a discussion was supposed to end when one of the parties stopped pursuing, or the other, pretending to be too busy, hid.
“Hey, I often socialize with your friends.”
Dodging me, dodging the question, seeking more laundry, she said, “I specifically asked whether we could bring the boys. Pat said that Hugh and Antonia Fraser will be there and are not bringing their kids. I took the hint.”
“We can go alone. It’s a lunch party. It might be fun.”
“I don’t think he likes me one bit.” She was shaking out clothes to be washed. “But I don’t take it personally. I doubt that he likes any women.”
“That’s unfair.”
“Look at the women in his books. They disgust him. They’re awful. He’s the man who wrote ‘wife is a terrible word.’”
I laughed at her and said, “There’s a nice woman in The Mimic Men. Lady Stella. Remember sex and fairy tales? ‘Goosey-goosey Gander’?”
“You might know that the only decent woman would be posh… Oh, do go,” she said, looking hardworking and virtuous, burdened with an armload of laundry. “Enjoy yourself. But please don’t ask me to go with you. He won’t miss me. I’ll bet he won’t even ask about me.”
The children, hearing us, crept to the upstairs landing to listen.
“You can take the train,” she said. She called up to the boys. “Dad likes trains, doesn’t he?”
“Dad likes trains!”
Trines, they said, a consequence of our living in London.
The empty ones on Sunday morning going west out of London were the trains I liked best. The Salisbury train from Waterloo racketed through Clapham Junction without stopping, past the very houses and back gardens I had looked at with horror when I first came to London, asking myself, Who could possibly live among these black bricks and broken chimneys and dim lights and gleaming slate roofs and grim gates and the sootiness that crept into the nostrils? The answer was me. I lived in one of those houses. All of them looked dismal except my own.
To the triphammer sound of the train wheels as they tapped the joints of the rails, I read the Sunday papers, looking up from time to time to rest my eyes on the green meadows and the trees, some bare and others with yellowing leaves. The leaves flew up singly like startled birds when the wind strengthened. Autumn made me thoughtful. Four years ago, in just this season, I had arrived and seen the trees like this, the fields sodden and green, mist on ponds, and dead leaves stuck flat to wet roads.
“I’ll send a car for you,” Vidia had said, and he had given me the name of the driver. It was Walters. He was outside Salisbury station, waiting beside his car.
“You must be Mr, Furrow,” he said.
“That’s me.”
We drove to Wilsford in silence down roads with dense drifts and piles of leaves while I reflected on Vidia’s thoughtfulness in sending a car. At The Bungalow, Walters opened the door for me, chauffeur fashion, and said, “That will be four pounds.”
The gravel driveway announced every car with a rolling crunch like a chain being drawn on a pulley. Vidia came out and greeted me. Behind him was a small elfin-faced man wearing tight velvet trousers and a red and gold waistcoat.
“Do you know Julian Jebb?” Vidia asked.
“I’ve heard of you,” I said, shaking the man’s hand.
“People say dreadful things about me. But take no notice,” Jebb said. “I’m mad, bad, and dangerous to know.” He looked aside and in an American accent said, “Hey, that’s enough of that crap!”
He was the sort of Englishman who could express his humorous side only by speaking in an exaggerated American accent. It was not unusual. Many American academics I had known could only theorize in a precise way by using a fake English accent. Parody so often resulted from simple self-consciousness.
“Yes, yes,” Vidia said, looking impatient at Jebb’s foolery. “Come inside. Have something to drink.”
“I was telling Vidia how much I hate his gramophone,” Jebb said, stepping through the door. “Look, isn’t it hideous? It belongs in the V and A. It’s just a silly contraption for distorting sounds.” He put his hands to his cheeks. “I hate it!”