Sir Vidia's Shadow

by Paul Theroux

  “Yes.”

  “The English thing,” Vidia said.

  Pat said, “Vidia’s rather impatient with Christmas.”

  “Christmas pudding,” Vidia said. He chewed his pipe stem. “Christmas pudding.”

  The next day was Christmas. London was cold and bright under a clear sky, as blue as an African sky, yet in this unforgiving light the city looked cracked and senile and the streets were bare. I went for a walk up Clapham Road towards the Clapham North tube station. The only other pedestrian was a woman ahead of me pushing a baby carriage, wearing a coat so long its ragged hem dragged on the sidewalk. The wheels of the carriage scraped and squeaked. When I overtook this person, I saw that it was really a shabby man wearing a filthy shawl over his head, and instead of a baby in the carriage there was a dog crouched in a knot of rags and some old shoes and bits of metal and glass bottles.

  “Fuck off,” the man said, because I had come too close to him. His face was damaged, with crusts of dried blood on his cheek. “Get away from me pram.”

  His face had frightened me. An instant later I remembered how Vidia said that ugly people seemed dangerous. I stopped in a pub, and because of the encounter with the tramp, I was very careful to be polite. I drank a beer, telling myself it was Christmas.

  Back in Stockwell, I sensed something was wrong. Vidia’s moods filled the rooms like an odor. But I didn’t ask. I gave Pat a snakeskin purse I had bought from an Indian at the arcade in Kampala. Pat remarked on how real it looked. I took it as a criticism. The crinkled scales were still flaking from it. She gave me a woolen scarf.

  After lunch, which was solemn, Vidia went into his study and lay on his lounge chair and smoked in the dark.

  Pat said softly to me, “Shiva’s not coming.”

  6

  Excursion to Oxford

  WHEN THE KNOCK CAME, the rap of the small hinged horseshoe on the brass plate on the door, Vidia remained silent. We were reading in the front room. He could give the impression of hearing nothing—like an unwelcome sound—as he could give the impression of seeing nothing—like an unwelcome face. The knock came again. Vidia did not hear, or pretended not to. I answered the door.

  Shiva—it had to be him. I remembered about the hair and “Veronica Lake.” He was twenty or so, he looked apologetic, though it might have been simply the sorrowful cast of his face, which was thin, or his eyes, which were hooded and Oriental, not Indian but Asiatic. Those features were appropriate to the only other thing I knew about him: he was studying Chinese.

  Vidia never answered the door and he seldom answered the phone. I once asked him why.

  “One doesn’t like surprises,” he said.

  Stepping through the doorway, Shiva said, “You’re Paul.”

  In the parlor Vidia greeted him, saying, “What did you do with the coat we sent you?”

  “I like this one better.”

  “Yes.” The way Vidia said it, the word stood for a whole pronouncement of contempt.

  Shiva was scruffily dressed, in a student’s way, with a ragged coat and fraying scarf and scuffed and trampled-looking shoes. Pat sighed over him, calling him Seewyn, as Vidia had, and kissed him in her unconfident old-auntie way. Then we had tea.

  Shiva had long and delicate fingers, which made him seem polite when he was picking at the cookies on the plate Pat handed him, and which were expressive when he smoked cigarettes. There was also something in the movements of his hands that suggested languor and fatigue. This tiredness was especially apparent in the droopy way he sat and the way he walked, bent over in a sloping gait, kicking his shoes, dragging his feet. He was round-shouldered, and when he became thoughtful he arranged his long hair with those delicate, smoke-yellowed fingers.

  “We were expecting you yesterday,” Vidia said.

  He was stern with Shiva, much more an uncle than a brother. There was a marked difference in age, thirteen years, and in attitude—crabbed Vidia, college-punk Shiva. But Shiva wasn’t bothered.

  “It’s a long story!” he said, and laughed. He had a delightful laugh that encouraged you to share the hopeless joke, the unconvincing excuse.

  Vidia went to his armchair and sat down. He filled his pipe. He set it alight and puffed it. When Pat left, fussing with the tea things, Vidia said, “Tell him, Paul.”

  “Tell him what?”

  “Tell Seewyn about your African girls.”

  “What about the African girls?” Shiva said, smirking.

  “Tell him, Paul.”

  “That I sleep with them?” I said.

  “See? He’s shocked. Seewyn’s shocked.”

  “I am not shocked,” Shiva said.

  But he was. I could see his discomfort, and I could not understand why he was so flustered. He was tapping at his face with his fingertips. He awkwardly lit a cigarette and blew smoke nervously.

  “The big liberal,” Vidia said. “All that Trinidad racial mumbo-jumbo. And he is shocked.”

  The moment was tense, two brothers in a standoff. And I had been put on the spot. Trying to explain, I said, “It’s pretty simple. It would be odd if I didn’t have African girlfriends. I live in Africa.”

  “It would not occur to Seewyn to sleep with a black woman.”

  Shiva laughed and said, “There are no black women at Oxford.”

  The conversation had started to embarrass me, and this argument was being made as much at my expense as at Shiva’s.

  I said, “You don’t know what you’re missing, Shiva.”

  Vidia had been reading a book with the red label London Library on its cover when Shiva had knocked. He put his finger between the pages, preparing to open it.

  “Did you bring some work with you?” Vidia asked.

  “Mencius,” Shiva said.

  “Do you know Sun Tzu?” I asked him.

  He squinted at the name and then verified it, giving it the proper Chinese pronunciation, and said, “The Art of War.”

  “Is it studied? I was reading it in Kampala and want to know more about it.”

  “It’s pretty well known,” Shiva said. “Sun Tzu was a general during the late Tang dynasty. The Chinese have revived the book because Mao praised him.” He turned to Vidia. “Do you have anything to drink?”

  “You’ve just had tea,” Vidia said.

  “I mean a stronger potion,” Shiva said.

  He laughed again. I saw that his laughter, especially the giggly sort, was prompted by embarrassment, his awkwardness in the presence of his brother.

  Vidia scowled. “What about your Chinky book?”

  Shiva tapped his cigarette, flicked his long hair. He said, “I think I’ll go out to a pub. Want to come with me, Paul?”

  I said okay, but I had the feeling that Vidia disapproved of my going.

  The pub in Stockwell was so noisy and dirty I was glad Vidia had not come—anyway, he avoided all pubs. Shiva smoked and we drank pints of beer at a small table. I liked his sudden friendliness, and he had an air of idleness that was a relief from Vidia’s demanding attention. Shiva seemed sad, almost desperate, but forgiving, and so he was easy company.

  “My brother told me all about you,” he said. “Your African adventures.”

  He sounded mocking and envious, but he was just self-conscious, not the words themselves but the gauche way he said them.

  “Everyone says that. Vidia’s my champion.”

  “He means it. He is your friend. He is really proud of you.” Then Shiva laughed sadly. “I’m afraid he’s not very proud of me.”

  To avoid this subject I said, “You should visit Africa sometime.”

  “I don’t think so,” Shiva said. “Do you have any money on you? I need some cigarettes.”

  I gave him a pound note.

  “I’ll pay you back,” he said, with such unnecessary force that I smiled, and when he bought the cigarettes and pocketed the change I knew I would never see the money again.

  I said, “Are you planning to be a writer?”

  He l
aughed his giggly laugh, which meant he was mortified by my question. He said, “I know better than to do that.”

  “Vidia told me that you know his work well.”

  “I memorized The Mystic Masseur. I can actually recite it.”

  So it was true. This amazed me: the novel was two hundred pages long.

  “When my brother came back to Trinidad after it was published, I recited parts of it to him. I was just a little schoolboy. It was my party piece.”

  “What was his reaction?”

  “Vidia didn’t seem to notice. He was very tired all the time. I just remember him sleeping, lying in a bed in the house. He hardly spoke to me or to anyone. No”—Shiva stroked his hair—“there was one thing. He took me out and we bought a dog. The dog was an awful nuisance, not housetrained or anything like that. Vidia said, ‘I think that’s enough of this dog.’ We took him some distance from the house and let him go. ‘Just walk away,’ Vidia said. But the dog followed us. Then we took him really far, and walked away very fast, and hid. That did it. We never saw the dog again.”

  I could see Vidia’s frowning face and hear him saying Just walk away.

  I said, “You know, that business about sleeping with African girls ... It’s not a big deal. I had a Nigerian girlfriend when I met your brother.”

  “He teases me,” Shiva said.

  He said that he had hoped to go to Trinidad in a few days but that he didn’t have the money and couldn’t decide whether it was worth pressing Vidia for the airfare. It was a dilemma. He wanted to go—he had not seen his mother or sisters for a year.

  “We should go back to the house,” I said.

  “Do you mind buying me another drink?”

  I agreed, though I feared that it was going to make us late for dinner, and it did. Back at the house, Vidia was at the table making a point about punctuality: he had started eating. Pat was flustered. Shiva hardly noticed, but I could tell that I was out of favor, having contributed to Shiva’s dereliction.

  That night, after Pat and Vidia went to bed, Shiva and I talked about Mencius and Africa and his airfare dilemma. At ten or so, Pat appeared in her robe and slippers, looking sleepless and harassed. She said, “Vidia wants you to please stop talking. You’re keeping him awake.”

  Apart from Vidia, the only other writer I knew in London was a young novelist named B. S. Johnson, who was notorious for being hot-tempered and unstable. He was a big boisterous man who lived with his wife, Ginny, in an apartment in Myddleton Square. His baby son he called Sausage. He was poetry editor of The Transatlantic Review and had printed some of my poems, the poems with “lots of libido.” I had phoned Johnson before Christmas, on the day Vidia ditched me, cross that I had made him wait under an awning in Great Russell Street. I phoned Johnson again.

  “Come to a preview of my film,” he said.

  There were screenings all the time, he said. It was an experimental film, called You’re Human Just Like the Rest of Them. He had written several novels, one about Gypsies, called Traveling People, and one about a teacher, Albert Angelo. His newest novel, The Unfortunates, was sold unbound, just loose pages in a box that could be read in any order.

  I mentioned that I was staying with Vidia.

  “Naipaul is a prick,” Johnson said.

  “No, he’s all right,” I said.

  “You’re a bloody Yank. What do you know about the fucking English class system?”

  This was not a debating point—he sounded, if not paranoid and deranged, then aggressively energetic. His books had that crazy, selfish energy. Albert Angelo especially had an arresting narrative structure, beginning as a po-faced novel in the third person and becoming a first-person confession.

  Fearing a confrontation between Vidia and Johnson, I invited Shiva to go with me to the screening. The theater was in Soho. Johnson was lingering in the doorway with a young Pakistani man. I introduced Shiva.

  “Zulfikar Ghose,” the Pakistani said, and stuck out his hand.

  The film was short and unfinished-looking, with abrupt, irrational cutaways and a stuttery soundtrack. The main character was a teacher. The action centered on a class of nasty-minded students. I had the feeling that Johnson approved of the way these unruly students baited their teacher. The film was inventive, but it went nowhere. Mostly it seemed outraged, but it did not present enough information for me to share the outrage, and anyway it was a mess.

  “It’s great,” I said to Johnson afterwards. “It’s fabulous.”

  “Everyone will hate it,” Johnson said. He seemed pleased at the thought. “They’ll say it needs work.”

  That was exactly what I would have said if I had had the nerve.

  Shiva smiled and said, “Yes, it’s got something.”

  We all went to Zulfikar Ghose’s house for tea. Ghose’s wife was Portuguese. When she greeted us, Zulfikar said, nodding to Shiva, “Guess whose brother this is?”

  “Leave it out,” Johnson said. “Who the fuck cares?”

  I was thinking that perhaps this was a lesson in the English class system, since, having met Vidia’s upper-class admirers—Lady Antonia, Hugh Thomas, Sir Hugh Eraser—I was now meeting his proletarian detractors.

  We talked some more about the film. Shiva said, “I take it to be a comment on the comprehensive-school system.”

  “Among other things,” Johnson said. With force he added, “I’ll never turn my back on the working class.”

  “Everyone’s saying good things about the film,” Zulfikar said.

  “I want to show it to Samuel Beckett,” Johnson said.

  Shiva said, “Do you actually know Beckett?”

  “I see him when I’m in Paris,” Johnson said, looking into the middle distance with his bulbous blue eyes. He had a puffy face and an adenoidal way of speaking. “I’ve shown him quite a bit of my fiction. I acknowledge him as a major influence on my work. I told him, ‘I hear your rhythms in my head.’ Beckett understood. He said to me, ‘I hear Joyce’s rhythms in my head.’”

  Vidia would have said, What rubbish. I listened with Vidia’s ears and saw with his eyes. Johnson uttered this pretentiousness with such pompous defiance that he killed the conversation.

  At last Zulfikar said to me, “What are you writing?”

  “A novel,” I said, thinking of my Chinese-grocer book.

  “You should be writing poetry,” said Johnson. It was a stern instruction. “Remember that you are first a poet.”

  After we left, walking through Myddleton Square to the Angel tube station, Shiva said, “Do you write poems?”

  “Not anymore.”

  I had abandoned poetry for the way it brought out affectation in my writing. It made me self-conscious, and the form limited me to saying so little. The fault was with me, of course, not with poetry. The sort of poetry I wrote forced me to be a miniaturist. Also, Vidia’s remark “lots of libido” had demoralized me.

  Shiva was smiling, probably at the thought of the silliness of writing poetry.

  At the Angel—London seemed full of ugly structures with beautiful names—I called Heather from a public phone to see whether she had returned from Christmas with her parents. She answered and, hearing my voice, said, “Come right over. I want to show you my Christmas presents.”

  I said to Shiva, “I’ll be back late.”

  When Heather opened the door of her apartment she was wearing a white vinyl raincoat and high boots, also white and shiny, that were just becoming stylish. Her blond hair was braided, two strands framing her face, and she was holding a tube of pink lipstick between newly painted purple fingernails—her lips gleamed. I sniffed her sweet perfume.

  “Christmas presents,” she said, and opened one flap of the raincoat by putting one hand on her hip. She was naked underneath.

  Nine hours later, I took a taxi back to Stockwell. I was scorched and chafed: sex for Heather was both suffering and pleasure, and she was an active scratcher with those purple nails. During sex, she howled like someone being punished,
but when I stopped she demanded more. In the darkness afterwards she said, “Next time I want you to spank me.”

  It seemed to me that the taxi driver and I were the only people awake in the city. Creeping into Vidia’s house and past Shiva’s room, I felt that everyone except me was tucked in bed, sensible and virtuous. I felt like a dog again.

  I woke late. Vidia was in his armchair, reading the bound proof of The Mimic Men. He read with such concentration that his face, dark and tight, looked completely shut. He did not appear to notice me enter the room. I sensed something wrong, that he was tensely trying to control his agitation.

  I sat for a while smoking, saying nothing.

  “Shiva left,” he said at last, looking up from the proof. “I never saw him.”

  I gathered there had been a crisis. Vidia often spoke about how he felt vibrations. I believed him, because he also gave off vibrations. I knew when something was on his mind long before he said anything about it.

  “Shall we go to Oxford?” he asked, and answered himself, “Yes, I think we should go to Oxford.”

  I knew the Oxford train from my close reading of the Mimic Men proofs. The book’s narrator was a womanizer. His ardor struck me because Vidia seemed uninterested and sometimes hostile towards women. “There were always women to be picked up at the British Council,” the narrator said, speaking of his student days in London and not sounding at all like Vidia. But the next sentence was pure Vidia: “Those halls could be disagreeable with acrid-scented Africans.”

  The Oxford train figured in the narrator’s womanizing, for after it drew out of Paddington and the conductor asked for tickets, he noted the young women who held excursion tickets to be punched. That meant they were foreign tourists on a day trip and thus easy prey. The narrator is watchful: “When one is in vein, as the French say, when dedication and commitment are total, mistake is rare.” Four weeks in a row he buttonholes a woman on the Oxford train and ends up in bed with her.

  Vidia and I took the train late in the morning from Paddington. I did not mention The Mimic Men. Passing through Uxbridge I saw, clearly lettered on a brick embankment by a bridge, the sign Keep Britain White.