by Paul Theroux
“So this is where you work?”
“This is where I worry, man. This is where I smoke. My work is done. That novel wrecked me. I have the proofs. Will you help me read them?”
I said I would. “Did you get your thousand pounds?” I asked.
He made a face, set his mouth in an expression that meant “almost.” He said he was mentally exhausted, but with his work done he was free.
It was a quiet, tidy house, like a kind of padded box with a tight lid. Vidia said he seldom went out. Pat, who taught history at a girls’ school three days a week, did all the shopping, all the cooking, made all the beds, even did some of Vidia’s research. Most of the cleaning and the laundry was done by a charlady, Mrs. Brown, whom Vidia called Brown.
“Brown will do your laundry. When you leave, you might give her a few pence.”
“Five pounds?”
“Too much. No, no. That would spoil Brown.”
That was my first day. He spent most of the next morning in his pajamas, reading the proofs of The Mimic Men. We had lunch. Vidia was still in his pajamas.
“I dress for dinner,” he said, and laughed—a more bronchial laugh than his East African laugh.
In the next few days he gave me a lightning tour of London, starting from his nearest tube station, Stockwell, on the Northern Line, and heading for Tottenham Court Road. A gasping dusty wind coursed through the station and up the wooden escalator: it was a city of cold dead smells, of rust and damp brick and oil—smells of prosperity and traffic. Being here was an adventure, but I thought: I could never live here, ever. Another thought that stayed in my mind was that we were on an island, a cold island in winter.
From Tottenham Court Road we crossed Oxford Street and walked to the British Museum. Now I understood why Vidia felt there was such ignorance and poverty in Uganda’s place names: London ones were so grand, much grander than the streets and squares they described. Vidia seemed to be following a route he had taken many times before. At the British Museum, as though programmed, he showed me the glass cases containing manuscripts of Byron, Keats, Browning; then onward and downstairs, through the Roman and Greek rooms to the Egyptian artifacts, the mummies and the sarcophagi, some like water troughs, some like cupboards.
“Notice the decadence in this period. They become rubbishy and repetitive with the Roman occupation. This isn’t art. This is just mimicry, man.”
Down the road to Holborn, through an alley, a gateway, into a parklike square: Sir John Soane’s Museum. Without looking left or right, Vidia led me to the Indian miniatures and the Daniell aquatints and Hogarth’s series of four paintings titled The Election. Nearby, at Gaston’s in Chancery Lane, he sold the armful of books he had been carrying—his review books, half price for clean copies. He bought a tin of Player’s Navy Cut pipe tobacco with some of the proceeds. Then we had lunch at Wheeler’s, on Old Compton Street. He had prawns, I had “Sole Walewska.”
Vidia ordered an expensive bottle of wine. He said, “You university lecturers have lots of money, don’t you?”
I didn’t. I had spent all my spare cash on the airline ticket, but I was so grateful for his hospitality I paid for the lunch.
In that restaurant with close-together tables and smoky air we talked about Africa. Vidia was not a mocker anymore. East Africa had affected him. The food was real there, he said—fresh vegetables, lettuce and broad beans, and fish from Lake Victoria, Nile perch from upcountry, the first plantains he had eaten since he was a child. And the light was wonderful. And that sky, all those stars. He worried about the Major at the Kaptagat Arms and the other people whom he had met, whom he liked, some expatriates, some Indians.
“They’re not all infies,” I said.
“Of course not. But they will all be destroyed by Africa.”
“You belong here, I guess.”
“I belong nowhere,” he said. “I have no home.”
He had that disconcerting way of turning chitchat into metaphysics about the human condition.
“Who do you see here?”
He did not answer this. He looked aside and said, “I don’t want to meet new people.”
He looked at his watch and pinched it, the way people do when they are making a point, impatient to go. But no. He said, “My father gave me this watch,” and he looked as though he were stifling tears.
I did not think I could bear his weeping. I said, “Shall we go?”
He was silent on the way to the National Gallery, and then among the paintings he brightened. The specific circuit he made in the galleries—bypassing some rooms, lingering in others, selecting one painting in certain rooms—told me that he had unshakable habits and preferences. He moved so quickly I could hardly keep up with him. He hurried past twenty pictures to get close to one, to put his face against particular details on that canvas. One was a Matisse with a daub of red, like the simplest Chinese character stroke, splashed near the center of the landscape.
“Look. Come close. It’s nothing. It is utterly meaningless.”
He poked his finger at the eyebrow-shaped splosh of a brush stroke. Then he dragged me back like an agitated teacher provoking a response and urged me to look again.
“See? Now it’s a person. It has life. It has shape and meaning. It even has emotion—all that from a brush stroke. Matisse knew exactly what he was doing when he touched his brush here.”
It was conversation in the form of a lesson, but I did not mind this teacher-student relationship with him because I was learning so much. His attention to me made me surer of myself. He was right: the random-looking swipe of paint was a daring experiment in form.
We went to the Victoria and Albert Museum. In the taxi, going through Parliament Square, he saw me looking at the statue of Abraham Lincoln standing before a chair.
“That’s called ‘The Hot Seat,”’ Vidia said.
There was another statue just past it, of Jan Smuts, also standing but canted forward like a skater.
“And he’s skating,” I said.
“On thin ice,” Vidia said.
At the V and A, again he followed his own route, ignoring most of the rooms, concentrating on the Indian pictures, the Mogul paintings, the miniatures, the bronzes. I was following; he saw my concentration flag.
“What do you want to see?” he asked.
“Henry Fuseli. Salvador Dali.”
“They’re at the Tate.”
He stood aside at the Tate Gallery while I looked at Fuseli’s nightmares and Dalí’s Autumn Cannibalism, and then he introduced me to the Turners—another lecture on the subtle technique of brushwork—and the Blakes and the Whistlers.
Back at home in Stockwell, he put on his pajamas and read the proofs of The Mimic Men. And he asked what I had been writing. I told him my book was about the dusk-to-dawn curfew in Uganda, the strangest and most telling episode I had known in Africa. I had the typescript with me.
“I think you should offer it to André.”
We went the next morning to André Deutsch Ltd. Vidia instructed me to leave the typescript with his editor, Diana Athill. Vidia stayed outside, puffing his pipe under an awning in Great Russell Street, while I asked for Miss Athill. Hearing my name, she invited me into her office and we talked awhile. She said she was eager to read the book. I was hopeful when I left, but when I saw Vidia he lunged at me and began shouting.
“Where have you been!” he said. He made stabbing gestures with his pipe. He looked furious. He looked betrayed. He had been standing all this time under the awning. “What have you done?”
I could not understand his anger. He knew where I had been, talking with Miss Athill.
“You said—”
“The man must never precede the work!” he shouted. In the fifteen minutes I had been absent, he had gone from being the soul of kindness to the embodiment of pure rage. “Do you hear me? The man must never precede the work.”
He said that he had to go home, that he had work to do and no time to waste, but that I should sta
y out and enjoy myself. He descended the steps to the Northern Line, biting the stem of his pipe. I walked the streets, feeling wronged. When I returned to Stockwell, Vidia was in his study, sitting in the chaise, smoking in the dark.
Each night we read the Mimic Men proofs. He had one copy, I had another. I skipped ahead and looked for Africa in it, for any indication that the last part of it had been written at the Kaptagat Arms in western Kenya. It was an elliptical story of a West Indian politician, his rise and fall, his love affairs, his flight to England, his exile in a London hotel. It was, subtly, about power, money, friendship, and failure, about a small fragile country, a Third World island. Perhaps he had been influenced by Africa after all. I looked for, and found, “wise old negro” in the sentence “he had created for himself the character of the wise old negro who knew the ways of the white world.” So Pat had prevailed.
In the Stockwell house there was a television set in the lounge, but it was seldom on. Having heard that British television was inventive and entertaining, I turned it on, just to see. Vidia entered the room, standing behind me. A commercial with a jingle was on the screen.
“I thought there were no commercials on the BBC,” I said.
“That’s not the BBC, that’s the Monkey.” It was his word for the independent station.
I changed the channel. I found a fashion show. Vidia uttered an awful groan. I changed the channel again. A man I took to be a politician was giving a speech about Rhodesia.
Still standing, Vidia said, “You think he’s smiling? He’s not smiling. That’s not a smile. He’s a politician.”
A heckler in the audience cried out, “Good old Smithy!”
“Hear the infy yelp?”
I turned off the television.
After I went to my room, I took out my new novel. It was about a Chinese grocer I knew, Francis Yung Hok, in Kampala’s Bat Valley. He was the only Chinese citizen of Uganda—the smallest ethnic group in the country, a persecuted minority of one. I called him Sam Fong and titled the book Fong and the Indians. The novel, inspired by Vidia’s urgings to look hard at the absurdities in Uganda, was also my way of testing Vidia’s maxims in narrative technique. I wanted Vidia to see it as a kind of homage to him and his friendship.
When Vidia was out of earshot, Pat asked me about the servants they had left behind. Visitors, part-time residents, and embassy people always talked about servants in a patronizing and possessive way, like little girls monologuing about their dolls. Vidia had felt victimized by the servants and their connections—they were all plotters, looking for work. But Pat regarded them with uncomplicated affection and had seen them as helpers and allies, which they were. She had been kind to them. She said she missed them. She whispered to me that she wanted to be remembered to them.
Pat attended to Vidia in a maternal way, maternal most of all for her sleeping in an adjoining room, in a single bed. Seeing her piteous little bed, I remembered how I had thought of making love to her in Africa. My wild impulse would perhaps be allowable in such a disorderly place as Uganda, but not here. This was different. This was her tidy home; here was her convent-style room; that was her narrow bed, and beside it her nightstand: glass of water, two books, bottle of pills, none of it very tempting, much less an aphrodisiac. I knew that any wooing by me would be an abuse of hospitality, yet I wished for a woman friend.
I soon found someone receptive to my ardor. My one solitary excursion that first week in London was to a publisher that would soon be bringing out a textbook I had coauthored with a British linguist. I had devised this English textbook in Malawi, where all books were in short supply. This one was designed for speakers of Chichewa, which I had learned as a teacher in a bush school. I had been deported from Malawi on a trumped-up political charge, and because I was in bad odor there, my name could not appear on the book. Vidia had just laughed. He said, “Someday you’ll be glad your name isn’t on that book.”
Half the advance on royalties was mine. I had asked that it be paid to me in London, so that I could cash the check and have spending money in sterling. The publisher’s office was in Mayfair, near Grosvenor Square. The day I picked up my check I was introduced to the editor of the textbook division who had commissioned the book. He introduced me to his staff. One of them was a young woman about my own age, named Heather.
While the editor’s attention was drawn by someone needing a decision on a dust jacket, I said to Heather, “Would you like to have a drink later?”
“I’d love to,” she said, and suggested a pub nearby. She would meet me there after work.
Entering the pub in her winter coat, her face framed by the high collar, she seemed even prettier than she had in the office. We talked for a while and drank wine and at last I said, “I’m staying with a friend in Stockwell, so I can’t ask you back there.”
“That’s all right,” she said.
“No. It’s inconvenient,” I said, and solemnly translating from Swahili to English, I added, “Because I want to take you back there and sleep with you.”
What lovely teeth she had—she had thrown her head back and was laughing, and I thought, Oh, well, at least she heard me in the din of this crowded pub. She said nothing more about it. Another hour passed. I told her African stories, about the Pygmies, about the butterflies that gathered and made a white fluttery carpet on the Jinja Road, about the man-eating lion that escaped from its cage at Mityana. I taught her to say Mimi nyama, wewe kisu—I am the meat, you are the knife. I talked so that I could study her pale eyes and pretty face, the way she listened with her lips. Afterwards, in the taxi to Victoria, where she lived, she kissed me, and the kiss meant yes.
It was late when I arrived back in Stockwell. I tiptoed to my room. Vidia was already up reading his proofs when I went downstairs the next morning. He said, “I think you’ve made a friend.”
Pat and I went shopping in Brixton Market for a dinner party she was giving that night. It was a street market, mostly black vegetable sellers and stall holders I took to be West Indians. I saw a woman spanking a child very hard and scolding loudly as the child wailed. I told Pat that I found it upsetting. Children were seldom spanked in Africa. There was little necessity for it; anyway, young children were raised by patient older sisters, practicing to be mommies, and took the place of dolls. Mother was always working in the garden, while Father sat under a tree with his friends, drinking some sort of sour, porridgelike beer. Such was life in a village, a far cry from this flogging.
Pat was smiling. She said, “Vidia would like that. He says that children aren’t spanked enough.”
The dinner party preparations were a strain for Pat. Vidia played no role at all other than supervising the wine. Pat did all the cooking, she worried about the food, she fretted over the seating arrangements. Vidia was serene. He said he was planning to change out of his pajamas and robe.
“I can offer sherry to start off,” he said. “I had a bottle of whiskey, but one of the neighbors came over a month ago and punished it.”
The purpose of the party was for Vidia to introduce me to his friends. They were old friends, he said. He repeated that he did not want to meet new people. The guests were Hugh Thomas, who had published a book on the Spanish Civil War (he had just returned from Cuba); his wife, Vanessa, who was “grand,” Vidia said; Lady Antonia Fraser and her husband, another Hugh, a member of Parliament; and Tristram Powell, who was my age. When they arrived, they were all on such intimate terms that I felt excluded. Their talk startled me; I said very little.
“Paul’s just come from Africa,” Vidia explained.
“I thought he looked a bit stunned,” Hugh Thomas said. “That explains it.”
Instead of replying to that, I complimented him on his book about the Spanish Civil War. A few days before I had found a copy of it in Vidia’s library and had read the first chapter.
Over dinner, Tristram Powell said he was making a film for the BBC. Lady Antonia was writing a book. Her husband, the MP, said that Vidia shou
ld visit him at the House of Commons one day when he was free.
Vidia said, “I don’t want to meet new people.”
When it came time for them to leave, Hugh Thomas said to me, “We’re giving a party the day after tomorrow. Come to the dinner beforehand.”
Vidia was pleased for me. He said the invitation was significant. I would meet new people. I would get on. London was not socially static, he said. London was interested in new people.
“But I am not interested in meeting any more new people,” he said.
Heather had invited me to dinner the night of the Hugh Thomas party and was annoyed when I called her to say that I had to go out with my friend and his wife.
“Who is this friend?”
“Do you know the writer V. S. Naipaul?”
“He’s a friend of yours? He’s famous,” she said. “Okay, what about tonight?”
“There’s a publisher’s party. Jonathan Cape.”
“You’re doing all right for an African,” Heather said.
“Maybe I can meet you afterwards.”
“You know where to find me.”
I loved hearing that. I loved her address—Ashley Gardens, Victoria—and it excited me to know that after the party I would find her waiting for me in her warm room.
It was a Christmas party at the Cape offices and also a book launch for a young novelist, Paul Bailey, whose book, At the Jerusalem, was already being praised. Bailey was a slim, sweet-faced boy with blush patches on his smooth cheeks. He looked shy, even fearful, but he was poised. When Vidia asked him whether he earned a living with his pen—a Vidia expression—Bailey said no, he worked at Harrods. “Tell me, tell me, tell me,” Vidia said. In which department did Bailey work? How did he answer the telephone? How were staff instructed to address the customers? He asked Bailey to verify every rumor he had ever heard about the rituals at Harrods. Bailey obliged him with answers, his face reddening, yet he spoke with extreme politeness, as though this were Harrods and he a clerk and Vidia a customer. Vidia did not mention Bailey’s novel.
