“I’m going to be late,” Jebb said. “Will you call me a taxi?”
Jebb left. I lingered a little. The New Zealanders lingered also. Perhaps Jebb had been a protégé before me — he had a confident, teasing friendship with Vidia that suggested this might have been the case. My protégé days were over: I was making a good living now and had a family and another book to finish. Malcolm was perhaps the new protégé, but it seemed to me he would not last; he was too contrary. You got nowhere arguing with Vidia. You needed to listen, to indulge him, not to debate every illogical point, and to remember. If he said, “The Italians make cheese out of dirt,” you didn’t say, “No, milk.” You laughed. You surely did not quote the scatology of Lord Rochester.
“And you’re saying I’m mistaken for telling them what to read?” Vidia said to Malcolm.
“No, I only said that the majority of New Zealanders see their national history as a benign colonial model.”
They were reliving a Kiwi encounter. Vidia seemed cross and looked misunderstood. Pat was pale from overwork and sleeplessness and too many luncheon guests.
“I must go,” I said.
“I’ll call Mr. Walters,” Pat said.
“We’ll talk, we’ll talk.” Vidia seemed rattled by something Malcolm had said.
Malcolm and Robin were conferring, looking like foreigners again.
We all left separately, and it was as though, out of sight and separated in the dark, we became much smaller in our destinies; wandering off to be disloyal, to disintegrate, and die. But for that lunch party, a matter of hours, we were bright.
On the train to London, I tried to look out the window, but all I saw was my own reflection, framed by the night, looking in: my other self staring at me for one and a half hours.
“Well, did he ask about me?” my wife said. She smiled and did not wait for a reply, because she knew the answer. It was a trivial question, and she knew it. Time took care of it.
Fiction depends on revelations to make you turn the page. It is often a matter of timing. But this is another sort of narrative, a different shape, unsuspenseful, just a chronicle of a friendship, spanning the years.
Time took care of us too. Lady Antonia left her husband and married the playwright Harold Pinter. Hugh Fraser, sick with sorrow, moved out of the family house and lived with friends, who later said he died of a broken heart. Pat Naipaul was diagnosed with cancer. She had a mastectomy. It did no good. She died too. I left my wife, I lost my family. Jebb committed suicide, with a mixture of vodka and pills. No news of the New Zealanders.
But all that was much later. The lunch was the most minute interval in this, just one sunny day.
PART THREE. SIR VIDIA’S SHADOW
11. The Householder
VIDIA’S JOKE, early on, was that he would one day Anglicize his name, from Naipaul to Nye-Powell, and stride around Kensington wearing a floppy tweed hat and Norfolk jacket, brandishing a walking stick. Heigh-ho, I say! Jolly fine day, what?
“V.S. Nye-Powell,” he repeated, as though announcing a distinguished guest. He pronounced Powell “Pole,” in the manner of Anthony Powell, whom he knew well, and kept in touch with, and relentlessly patronized, in spite of the vast difference in age and class and (so Vidia believed) literary ability.
I loved hearing Vidia’s jokes. His laughter was a sign of health. It mattered more than anything that after ten years we were still friendly enough to swap jokes, or anything else. I could say what I wanted to him. What are friends for?
He also said, “People who see one as a little brown Englishman are making the biggest mistake of all. One reads it. One hears it. One is somewhat appalled.”
But what was he? Loathing self-definition, and especially hating the description “West Indian writer,” he wished to be appreciated for his gifts — who doesn’t? — but as an ethnic Indian it was his fate to be one out of many (the title of one of his stories): owing to his racial coloration, he was indistinguishable from the billion or so Indians in the world. Most Indians in Britain, a new class, lived simple, humble lives. Vidia on a London street was less likely a Nobel Prize candidate than a shopkeeper, the very dukawallah he despaired of: a London newsagent hurrying from the bank back to his shop, where he hawked cigarettes, chewing gum, and the daily newspapers, keeping the tit-and-bum magazines on the top shelf. That place was now a national institution, known throughout Britain as “the Paki shop.”
The most maddening thing for any Indian in England was that they were not called Indians but “Pakis”—short for Pakistani. Just as few English people troubled to make serious distinctions when they saw a brown face, Indians did the same when they saw a white one. Vidia celebrated himself as unique. He once spoke of his pleasure, years ago, in standing out and seeming exotic on an English street (“Recognition of my difference was necessary to me”). That was before the deluge. Now, purely on the basis of his physical characteristics, Vidia was no one — that is to say, just a Paki.
The idea of an address — a place of his own — preoccupied him, sometimes to the point of obsession. Not owning a house made him yearn for one. He always said he had no home, owned nothing, belonged nowhere. I surmised that his satisfactory but chaotic childhood — he is Anand in A House for Mr. Biswas, the novel that is the chronicle of his family — had given him no firm footing in Trinidad, and he often suggested that the Indians had been disenfranchised on the island.
His return addresses on letters were usually care-ofs and the poste restantes of publishers and agents. Sad, I thought. For years he had seen The Bungalow as temporary. He hoped for better, and he kept most of his belongings in a warehouse. But time passed and still he did not have a house. He was Anand in the book, but more and more he resembled Mohun Biswas, his hero, who longed for a place he could call his own.
I had bought and sold two houses in London, and so these days we talked more of real estate than of books. I was a property owner and he liked the solid practicality of that: no more hand-to-mouth living, the rented flat, the rented TV. Anyway, he seldom talked about books and was especially reticent about the one he happened to be writing, except to nod and say confidentially, but with noticeable astonishment, “I think what I am writing now is very important and has never been said.”
That he never mentioned my work I took as approval, not indifference. He now said, “You’re all right. You see?”
But property was on his mind. Place, too.
“Some snowy place. I see a cabin, a log fire. Boots.” He smiled at the thought. “I love the snow.”
He had written about the snow, always with the dreamy hyperbole of a person from a tropical island for whom snow is decoration — like icing on a cake — if not magic, weightless, crystalline, never having to be shoveled or driven through. But he had gone to several snowy places and had not liked them. Cross “snowy places” off the list.
For a few years he had fantasized about Montana. He liked the name; he imagined big skies, high mountains, dense forests. He did not know the “badlands” image. But he decided without ever going there that Montana was not for him.
California attracted him. He asked me for names, addresses, and telephone numbers of Californians who might show him around and also treat him to meals. He was a conscientious looker-up of people. He liked being met, enjoyed occupying the place of honor — where, of course, he belonged. My contacts served him. But he disliked California. He found that Californians cultivated the body but not the mind; he saw them as selfish and materialistic and smug.