“No,” he said. Never mind that it was a worthy cause. He hated petitions. And he could not bear to see his name on something he had not written. “I sign nothing.”
The push of his dignity, the force of his friendship, made me think of him vividly whenever I wrote anything. He hovered over my desk; he was the reader over my shoulder. His criticism had nothing to do with friendship. He might approve, but he was almost impossible to impress. Now and then he quoted a poem, but these were single lines. Really, there was not a living writer he praised, nor any dead ones he acknowledged as exemplars. I had mentioned his uniqueness, the apparent absence of influences, in my book about him, and was criticized for this by scholars and other writers. Perhaps I should have said his influences were minimal, and internalized to the point of their being untraceable. After a time, Vidia acknowledged his father’s writing as a strong influence. But he always said: You’re on your own.
Even knowing that he probably would not read what I had written, still he was the reader I had in mind whenever I framed a sentence. It gave me confidence to have his approval, but his approval was anything but casual. He hated inattention and intellectual laziness and received opinion. In conversation, he often said sharply, “What do you mean by that?” to the most offhand remark. When we were together I had his full attention, which was a demanding scrutiny. Usually I listened: I was Boswell, he was Johnson. I was still learning. I knew that I had to be at my best whenever I was with him, and that I got much more out of him as a listener than when I interrupted to argue with something he said. Challenge only infuriated him, so what was the use? He could be uncannily prescient, if not psychic, in some matters; at other times he was wrong and unfair and frighteningly intolerant.
Vidia tended to have something on his mind, always. While in England, as a householder, he did not get out much or see many people. He hardly talked on the phone. He ruminated when he was not working. World events and public people nagged at his solitary mind. In any encounter, he first fretted and explained what he had been thinking, whatever pent-up issue he had been worrying over during his long nights of insomnia. “This nonsense about South Africa,” he would say, and after that, with the matter ventilated, he could talk more easily. In his presence, my concentration was complete. Working alone, I was also intensely aware of his intelligence, and did not write a word without wondering what he would say about it, nor a paragraph without imagining his pen point striking through it (“I’m brutal, you know”) — even now, this one for example, ragged as it is.
“I am an exile,” he always said. In his own prim little flat in Queen’s Gate Terrace he said it more often, as though the flat were visible proof of the absurd delusion — and the settled belief of many foreigners in England — that owning property was the same as belonging. The more he became a householder, the stronger his sense of alienation.
Living precariously in rented places, his earthly possessions in a warehouse, he did not speak so often of exile; and traveling in India, the United States, the Caribbean, and frequently to Argentina, he did not seem to have the time to mention exile, either. He was on the move. But with a tidy and secure place in central London, and some of his goods at last out of storage — favorite prints and books, comfy chair, dancing Shiva — he said with more force and greater solemnity, “I have no country to call my own. I am placeless.”
Out of politeness, I did not mention that he was the one with the British passport, while I carried an Alien Registration Card. I drank my tea and encouraged him to go on.
“Exile is not a figure of speech to me. It is something real. I am an exile.”
After tea we sometimes went over to the V and A, a ten-minute walk, to look at the Mogul paintings. Vidia pointed out how some of those small lozenge-shaped portraits looked like the miniatures of Nicholas Hilliard.
I still visited him in the country, at The Bungalow. One day he showed me an estate agent’s flier: a tiny snapshot of a brick house, some specifications (“in need of modernization”), and “To be sold at auction.” It was not far away, in Salterton, on the way to Old Sarum, nearer Salisbury, and seemed from the picture to be no more than a semi-derelict cottage.
“Pat’s going to bid on it.”
Auctions made Vidia anxious, even the picture auctions in London. I liked them for their surprising bargains. In his mind they were frenzied free-for-alls; the intensity unnerved him. It was so easy in bidding to get in over your head. Someone else always did the bidding for him.
But he did not want to talk about the house auction for another reason. Talk might jinx his chances.
Pat went and bid and was successful, getting the place for a relatively modest price. A long period followed during which the house was renovated. This was a real house, set in a sloping meadow. Vidia added a brick terrace with a balustraded stone wall, gave it a new tiled roof, a garage, a wine cellar, and new windows, double glazed so that he would never hear the cows mooing in the meadow or the overflying jets from the RAF base on Salisbury Plain. He landscaped it, enclosed it in high hedges, gave it a gravel drive and a steel gate. It was late Victorian, possibly Edwardian, very pretty, and because it was not at all grand, it looked like a home. It was called Dairy Cottage.
“People use the term ‘exile’ all the time,” Vidia said. ‘"Robert Lowell is an exile.’ But Robert Lowell is not an exile. The airfare from London to New York is a few hundred pounds. He is an American. He has a substantial house in New York. What does ‘exile’ mean in a world of cheap airfares? He can go home!”
Vidia was sitting on his sofa at Dairy Cottage, his legs crossed, smoking his pipe, the sun streaming through the windows. Crows in the sky were framed by the windows, an Emperor Jahangir portrait on one wall, another wall of books, a Hockney etching of a hairy naked man in bed.
“But I can’t go home,” Vidia said. “I have no home.”
India I understood to be an area of darkness for him, and England — well, no one became English, though they might acquire a British passport. But what about Trinidad?
“Trinidad, man — Trinidad!”
He had recently been there to write a series of articles about the trial of Michael X, a Black Power advocate convicted of murdering a number of members of his motley commune, including his white girlfriend. The plot was violent, race-driven, full of deception and sexual ambiguity and double-crossing.
“Cuffy has taken over Trinidad. Cuffy doesn’t want me.” He puffed his pipe. “But does Cuffy really know what he wants?”
This “Cuffy” was a curious word, obsolete, found in the older travel books in which blacks were in the background, and based on the name Kofi, a Ghanaian (Akan) word for Friday, given to a male child born on that day.
“Exile is something real to me,” Vidia said. He got up from the sofa and looked out the window, gloomily regarding his seven-foot hedge.
“This house is in a bower,” I said, to change the subject from “Cuffy.”