Still, it was not easy to write on the hottest days in London. Open windows made it noisy, the slate roofs blazed with glare, the bricks became crumbly and overbaked. The very earth underneath the city shrank, because London is built on thirsty clay. Subsiding houses began to split and crack, jagged seams opened in the pointing, and the masonry over windows collapsed. It was the intense heat.
Londoners cracked too. Unused to the heat, they became skittish and self-conscious and dressed more sloppily, and there were more of them on the street. You saw women in parks stripped to their underwear, sunning themselves, grinning at the sky. Bare-chested men with pink arms competed for space with tourists, who kept saying, “We expected rain!” People were generally merrier, but it was the wrong city for sun: not enough space, too narrow, only a few public pools, and they were dire. The city had been made for work and indoor pleasures and pedestrian exertions in big parks. It was unusual to have so much sunshine, and there was no way to use it — only rented rowboats in the Serpentine, rented deck chairs in the parks at twenty pence an hour, and benches on the Embankment. The sun and swelter would soon become demoralizing, with nothing much to do except sit in it and drink pints of lager.
I saw these people all over; so many turned out that the traffic was affected. I went by bike in order to be on time for punctual Vidia: downhill to the river, uphill to the café near the Green Park tube station, where we had agreed to meet. Piccadilly was crowded with workers on their lunch break, smiling — even the people walking alone were smiling — because of the sunshine. Londoners habitually bowed their heads and hurried in the rain, but walked more slowly and much straighter in the sunshine, holding their heads up on days like this. You had to live through every phase of English weather to know the English traits: so many English moods and turns of phrase could be ascribed to the weather.
I locked my bike and looked around. No Vidia.
When he arrived at the café a few minutes after me, his face puckered in remorse, the energetic apology he made for his lateness was his way of reminding me that his standard of punctuality was as high as ever. I must not think from this single lapse that he was becoming lax. He still bluntly boasted of never giving anyone a second chance, especially someone who had been otherwise loyal; when a dear friend lets you down once, that must be the end. The relationship had run its course. A single instance of lateness might be all that was needed to fracture it. So I took his “Sorry, sorry, sorry” to be a scolding for both of us.
A smiling woman was with him. She was slim, about my age, thirty-six or so, and wore a fluttery light dress because of the weather. She had some of Pat’s features, the paleness, the pretty lips, the same posture and figure, full breasts — a taller Pat, the Pat of ten years before, but far more confident.
“Paul, this is Margaret.”
“I know all about you,” she said. “From Vidia.”
So this was my friend’s friend. Had she been a male protégé, like Jebb or Malcolm the New Zealander, I would have compared myself to her; I might have been anxious. But anyway, I was alert. Was she a writer? From your friend’s friend you understand your friend better and notice qualities you might otherwise miss — aspects of tenderness, humors, and responses. Always, no matter the sex, it is like meeting a rival lover.
We talked about tennis. Wimbledon was in full swing.
“I hate Wimbledon,” Vidia said. “I loathe tennis. It’s nonsense.”
“He doesn’t mean that. I taught him how to play,” Margaret said, and I thought she was pretty feisty to oppose him.
“I play sometimes,” I said.
“But you don’t make a fetish of it like these other people,” Vidia said.
“He’s simply being contrary,” Margaret said.
“When everyone was cheering Francis Chichester, Vidia wanted him to drown,” I said.
“Did I?” Vidia said, pleased to be reminded. “Did I really?”
“Who is Francis Chichester?” Margaret asked.
From that remark, and her slight accent, which I could not place, I gathered that she might not be English, yet she certainly looked English. I studied her accent as we talked about the weather — the sunshine, the heat. Vidia said it brought out the rabble. We ordered coffee at the bar and stood there, Vidia enumerating the errands he had to run that afternoon.
“I very much liked the piece you wrote about Vidia in the Telegraph,” Margaret said.
It was a portrait. I had thought: I will do what Vidia would do, write the truth, be impartial, let the peculiarities speak for themselves. He was an original, but it was annoying to read that word over and over. Better to be anecdotal and set down aspects of his originality. Some people had come to like him on the basis of the piece, others had said they found him insufferable, on the same evidence.
“I recognized him in it,” she said. “I have read so many pieces about him and never recognized him. They don’t ring true. But yours — even Vidia’s mother said she recognized him.”
Vidia was smiling a bit impatiently, perhaps because of this mention of his mother. He was devoted to the memory of his father, Seepersad, who had died relatively young, but had more complicated feelings towards his mother, matriarch of many Naipauls and still alive, a tenacious Indian widow in Trinidad.
I liked the praise, but I was still baffled by Margaret’s accent, the rhythm and intonation of her speech: the careful way she gave weight to each syllable, the manner in which her voice trailed off, the insistent, almost Latin way she spoke. Maybe she was Welsh-speaking? I didn’t ask.
“Your review of Guerrillas in the New York Times was also very good. Vidia was pleased.”
This embarrassed me. Vidia and I never spoke of the reviews I had written of his books. There was no need to. A review was not an act of friendship; it was a literary matter, an intellectual judgment. As Vidia himself said, writing a review meant having to reach a conclusion about a book, something the casual reader seldom did.
I said, “That novel really frightened me. It doesn’t happen often. But I was also scared by ‘The Killings in Trinidad’—the Michael X piece.”
“It’s scary stuff, man,” Vidia said.
“I thought it was too long,” Margaret said.
“What was too long?” I asked. It seemed a strange and even audacious way to describe the piece. I would not have dared say this. But she was his friend.
“Those articles. The New York Review should have made them a bit shorter.”
I glanced at Vidia. He was sipping his coffee, yet he had heard.
“And the woman in Guerrillas. She was so naive. I thought she was awful.”
“I think maybe that was the point,” I said.
She had dragged out the word, making it sound even worse: awwwwwwfool. Vidia didn’t blink, and I did not dare to smile.
Vidia said, “I won’t be a moment,” and headed for the rear of the café.
“So where are you from, Margaret?”
“The Argentine.”
“You live there?”
“Yes. In B.A.,” she said.
“I’d love to go there.”
“You must. Vidia’s a bit unfair about it, all this business about ‘a whited sepulcher.’ Really!” She had a beautiful laugh. “And you live here in London?”
“At the moment. I’m working on a book. I’ll be heading for the States as soon as my kids get out of school,” I said.