He liked New York City. He liked New York humor and New York acceptance. No one stared at him in New York. He had once spoken of buying an apartment and living there for several months a year. But he did not act on this.
An islander, a country boy, as he thought of himself — though he had moved from his small rural hometown of Chaguanas to Port of Spain when he was seven — he said certain aspects of the Caribbean made him nostalgic to return: his memory of the cool cocoa plantations, the big shady villas with wide verandahs. The thought of disorder beyond the plantation gates, of the sort he wrote about analytically in “The Killings in Trinidad” and imaginatively in Guerrillas, kept him from ever making this move.
All these places were far from his English addresses: the not very distant county of Wiltshire, and London, which he knew well, having lived as far north of the river as Muswell Hill and as far south as Streatham.
“What did you pay for your house in Clapham?”
I told him.
“And what is it worth now?”
I guessed at its value.
“You see? You’re part of the market, you’re in the housing spiral. All the time I have spent chuntering and dithering I have been losing money. One should have bought something years ago. Just let it quietly appreciate. Then make one’s move. But one dithered.”
He was gloomy, feeling worse than houseless: he was placeless and a little hopeless.
“And you have a place in America?”
“A house on Cape Cod.”
“I don’t want to see it,” Vidia said. “It would just remind me of all the mistakes I have made in my life.”
There were large Victorian houses in Clapham, I told him. The inflated prices of Chelsea had not crossed the river. This made him smile.
“But, you know, one wants something fashionable,” he said. “Uncompromisingly fashionable.”
Kensington or Knightsbridge, he said. They were places that I associated with Arabic graffiti in different colors, and scrawled-upon posters, and no parking spaces, and Arabs dressed in galabiehs as though for the Empty Quarter, and businesses that catered to London Arabs: kebab shops, fruiterers, juice parlors, liquor stores, massage and escort services, and undisguised brothels. Every public phone booth was plastered with the explicit calling cards of prostitutes (“Young buxom blonde at your command”).
Instead of telling him this — which he knew — I made other suggestions.
“What about Chelsea?”
“Pretentious.”
“Lord Weidenfeld lives there.”
“I think you have just proven my point.”
“St. John’s Wood is fashionable, isn’t it?”
“St. John’s Wood, my dear Paul, is suburban.”
“Richmond is lovely. I’d like to live there, by the river.”
“It’s nice. People do live there. But it is suburban. And one would need a monkey wagon.”
The idea of buying a small car and riding up and down in it was just ridiculous to him.
“Mayfair must be the height of fashion.”
“Mayfair is corrupt. It’s a con. It’s full of prostitutes. I know Americans are glamoured by it, but I am sorry, Paul, it is not for me.”
“You’ve lived all over London.”
“Not really. Muswell Hill. The flat had previously been occupied by a Nigerian. It was unspeakable, but Patsy and I managed to disinfect it.” He made a face. “Streatham. I wrote Biswas. That was a wonderful period. Then Stockwell Park Crescent. Very modest accommodation, really. I have been a nomad.”
“You lived at Edna O’Brien’s house in Putney.”
“Briefly,” he said. “But Putney wouldn’t do. I want something fashionable.”
He found a flat off Gloucester Road, in a white Victorian canyon of apartment blocks with ornate façades, balconies, and Greek pillars. Queen’s Gate Terrace. It might be bad luck to talk about it, he said. He did not say much more until after he bought it.
“Come for tea,” he said, after he had furnished it.
It was tiny, the smallest habitable space I had so far seen in London. I came to realize that these imposing edifices had been intensively subdivided, so that what he had bought was a small corner — the pantry, the inglenook, the maid’s bedroom — of what had once been a roomy apartment.
The elevator was narrow; only two people could fit inside at a time. “I’ll walk, you ride,” someone would say, if there were three. If voices were audible, the language was Arabic.
“This is a bijou flat,” Vidia said. “This is my luck.”
He liked it for the neighborhood and, perhaps, for its odd shape and size. It was one small, incomplete room — a roomette — that was interrupted by half a wall and an entryway. One more step and you were in the kitchen, a one-person nook. The bedroom was up four stairs in a kind of loft that was filled by the bed. That was it: so small that, inside, you had to assume all sorts of economical postures, sitting compactly, standing with caution, no abrupt moves or you’d hit something. A russet Hokusai print on one wall, some small shelves, a bronze dancing Shiva. Everything had been chosen for its small size; everything fitted. But two people filled the sitting area. Out the one north-facing window were the backs of houses.
Vidia could be the greatest enthusiast. He was often depressed or low, but he was capable — as he said — of enormous happiness. When he had something he liked or had longed for, he was delightful to be with.
“You’ll have to dress fashionably here,” I said. “You’ll really have to change your name to V. S. Nye-Powell.”
“V.S. Nye-Powell, OBE,” he said, and laughed.
Having this home made him hopeful and confident. He said that his spirits were high when he was in the flat — it was his nest, as I saw it, and the way he described it suggested that he saw it that way too. It may have been small, but it was high and hidden. He felt protected. It was quiet. For a writer, any house or apartment is judged by how suitable it is for work. Certain places seem perfect for their silence and their light and for the harder-to-define elements of their feng shui.
“I see myself doing good work here. Something big, something important.”
Meanwhile, I was sitting on a chair so low my knees were under my chin, my hands folded. I was afraid that if I moved suddenly I would knock something over.
“Later, in a few years, if the market moves up as it has done, I will get something bigger.”
Happiness helped him imagine another flat — larger, roomier, just as fashionable — although “fashionable” was a word that always made me smile, because fashion was something the writer (irrational, rebellious, manipulative, innovative, as I saw myself and Vidia) turned his back on, or even attacked, for being the enemy of the creative imagination.
Vidia did not see being fashionable as conformist; he saw it as something else that put him out of reach. Being out of reach—“unassailable” was his word for it — was the most desirable position. He disliked being visible and proximate, within shouting distance. It eased his mind to be remote, a little mysterious and detached, while at the same time remaining at the center of things. It was obviously the reason he had rejected Montana in favor of Kensington. This was not a literary part of London. He knew no one here. That was a plus. It was disconcerting, if not vulgar, to be in a place where he could accidentally bump into people he knew: he had the manipulator’s horror of the sudden and the unplanned.
“I see Patsy giving lunches.” He was still talking about the larger flat he envisioned when he traded up, the one with many rooms. “And I am in my study, working.”