“The school year is so long here. In B.A. it’s much shorter.”
“You have children?”
“Three. But—” She was going to say something more, and thought better of it. She lost her smile and looked into the middle distance.
I said, “The place I like best is Dorset. I lived there when I first came to England. Do you know it?”
“No. Just from books. Thomas Hardy.”
“You’re pretty well read if you know Hardy.”
“Not at all. Vidia says, ‘You know nothing!’ And it’s true. What else do I read? Mills and Boon!”
“Sometimes Hardy is Mills-and-Boonish.”
“I don’t think so,” Margaret said.
“There’s that passage in Jude the Obscure where the heroine laments her fate.”
Margaret shook her head, smiled again, but in confusion. The conversation was moving too fast for her. She looked in the direction that Vidia had gone.
I said, “She says, ‘To be loved to madness — such was her great desire. Love was the one cordial which could drive away the eating loneliness of her days.’ Something like that.”
Margaret had begun to look closely at me.
I said, “And it ends—”
“It ends with a prayer,” Margaret said. And she said the prayer, enunciating it prayerfully in her foreign-sounding accent, clasping her hands: “‘O deliver my heart from this fearful gloom and loneliness: send me great love from somewhere, else I shall die.’”
“You know it.”
“It’s The Return of the Native, not the other one you said.”
“We must go,” Vidia said when he got back to us. He hesitated a moment, perhaps realizing he had reappeared at an important moment, yet he had no idea what had been said. He looked as if he wanted to leave, in order to separate us. He said, “Are you all right, Paul?”
“I’m fine. Working on a novel.”
“He’s full of ideas,” Vidia said to Margaret.
But the idea in my mind was linked to the long-ago letter in which he had written that a girl he’d met in Argentina had copied out two pages from The Return of the Native.
Back home, I got the novel out and read the passage again. It was longer than I remembered. I had marked the pages the day I received Vidia’s letter about the “coldest and meanest kisses… at famine prices.” They had meant little to me. They meant much more to me now.
After the sentences about kisses, it went on, “Fidelity in love for fidelity’s sake had less attraction for her than for most women: fidelity because of love’s grip had much. A blaze of love, and extinction, was better than a lantern glimmer of the same which should last long years.” It continued, evoking Eustacia Vye’s yearning to be loved, and ended, “she desired it, as one in a desert would be thankful for brackish water.”
The passage was like another of Vidia’s lessons in literature. The first time I read it, I thought only of Thomas Hardy; the second time, I thought only of Margaret in Argentina.
A year went by, and no Vidia, or very little Vidia. But in friendship, time is meaningless and silences insignificant, because you are sure of each other. Not at all weakened by the insecurities of a love affair, you pick up where you left off. And I was also Boswell, listening to Dr. Johnson say, “Do not fancy that an intermission of writing is a decay of kindness. No man is always in a disposition to write, nor has any man at all times something to say.”
He was away, then I was away. I saw Pat sometimes, and she apologized for Vidia’s absence, apologized for showing up alone; and I labored to reassure her that I liked seeing her, my old almost lover. She was more easily confused these days, got flustered over insignificant things she had forgotten, and she would struggle and sigh with something as small as extracting the right coins from her purse. The insomnia that had taken hold of her like a virus that would not let her sleep made her pale and gave her sunken eyes. Her face was lined and her hair had gone totally white. In her forties she became a little old lady and had all the fret and frailty of someone afflicted with a chronic illness. No matter how little her handbag or the parcel she was carrying — it could be as simple as a book — she looked overburdened, seeming to lug whatever thing was in her hand.
She came to dinner on her own and seemed frailer for being alone.
“Vidia’s away,” she said in a faltering voice. “He has taken one of those jobs in America at… would it be called Wesleyan?”
“Vidia? Teaching?”
“I’m afraid so.” Her smile was a smile of pure worry. “He’s awfully good and the people were terribly nice to him. And you know he gets standing ovations when he speaks sometimes — he did in New Zealand that time. But”—she paused and turned her pale eyes away—“he does get ever so cross if the students don’t do their work.”
I knew that “ever so cross.” It was purple, tight-faced rage.
“Do you have his number? I have to go to the States in a few weeks.”
It was the snowiest day I had ever known in New York, so snowy the city had shut down — stopped cold, brimming with drifts, no cars at all moving down Fifth Avenue, only people in the deep white street. Such conditions always made me think of Vidia’s saying, “I love dramatic weather.” He meant hail, high winds, monsoon rain, ice storms, snow like this.
New York was transformed. It was muffled and made natural again, silenced, simplified, made safer even, for in the worst weather villains and muggers stay home in stinking rooms and lie snoring in bed. The soft white city was beautiful and wild, the blurred mist-shrouded skyscrapers like the north face of a mountain range of glaciated canyons and ledges, where icicles drooped like dragon fangs.
Having just come from Vermont, I was dressed for this snow. I trudged to several appointments — though most businesses and offices were closed — and at noon called Vidia at Wesleyan.
A woman answered the phone.
“Vido, it’s for you.”
Veedo?
“Yes, yes, yes,” Vidia said in the old way when he recognized my voice. He was glad I had called, he said. He wanted to drive into New York. We could have dinner.
“What sort of car do you have?”
Always finding absurdity in technical description, he clearly enjoyed telling me it was a “subcompact,” and he repeated it twice, chuckling.
“Will it make it through the snow?”
“It will be fine.”
He was never prouder of his punctuality: he made it from the snowdrifts of Middletown, Connecticut, to Manhattan at the appointed time, six o’clock.
“Americans fuss so about the snow,” he said. “It stopped just after you rang. All the roads were sanded and plowed. The road crews are marvelous. People exaggerate the danger. I loved the drive.”
“You drove the whole way?”
“Of course.”
Dressed warmly, he looked more Asiatic, not Indian at all but like one of those tiny, flint-eyed nomadic descendants of the Golden Horde you see hunkered on horses in central Asia. He was alone. His hair was long and, as always when he was tired, his eyes were more slanted and hooded.
“I thought we might go to the Oyster Bar at Grand Central station,” he said. “I’m told it’s all right.”
“But let’s have a drink first.”
We were at my hotel on Central Park South, in my room. I had been drinking a beer when he arrived. I finished that one and was halfway through another. Vidia noticed.
“It’s the heat,” he said, defending me. “You need that beer because you’re dehydrated from the central heating. They overdo it here. And American walls are so thin you can always hear someone chuntering.” And he laughed, because I was opening a third beer. “Are you going to drink another one, really?”