Sir Vidia's Shadow

by Paul Theroux

  When he returned from his Islamic journey, he was devastated by what he had found. He wrote urgently to tell me that Pat was on her deathbed. “It is more than I can bear,” he said. “She has been with me since January or February 1952. I cannot endure the knowledge that in another room of this house she is suffering without any hope of relief, except the very final one.” He implored me to write her obituary, in the form of a reminiscence. He reminded me that I had known her a very long time. He knew of my affection for her. He did not want her to be forgotten. His implication was that he himself was incapable of writing anything about her. Yet it seemed to me that we study the art of writing for, among other things, moments like this.

  Now I understood the quarrels. “We row all the time now,” Vidia had told me. Pat, whose mocking maiden name was Hale, knew she was dying; she was raging—sorrowful, indignant. How unfair that someone who had asked so little of life, who had spent so much time waiting, attending, being silent, speaking ill of no one, constantly apologizing, excusing herself—the very model of intelligence and simplicity; frugal, frail, humble, full of compliments, saying sweetly, I thought of you, and almost the only person on earth who sent me a birthday card; modest, a little timid, always indoors—how unfair that death was stalking her.

  More than anyone, Pat had had the darkest experience of Vidia’s shadow. Even if she had not known about his passion for prostitutes, which Vidia had claimed had lasted into his mid-thirties, she had been painfully acquainted with the facts of his relationship with Margaret, how he had traveled with her and taken her to parties. Everyone knew. Vidia did not conceal his affair with Margaret, and it had lasted as love.

  Why didn’t the Naipauls just split up? Was it purely because Pat allowed him to have a lover, and his lover had not made marriage a condition? But life was more complicated than that.

  In every sense, Pat was left behind. I had suspected this early on, seeing her as a worried woman of an old-fashioned sort who in another century would have been called neurasthenic. Her ill health was the result of the way she lived, as a captive wife, a shut-in, fluttering in whatever cage of a house Vidia devised for her. And of course, because the way she lived made her ill, and her lifestyle never changed, she got worse. “A case of nerves,” a quack would say. She was trembly, she was inward, introverted, a stay-at-home, afflicted with insomnia, a fretful and hesitant sort, and yet in the same room with Vidia she could seem maternal towards him—overprotective, solicitous, weepy, long-suffering. Vidia played the wayward demanding child to this wounded mother.

  Everyone liked her, with an affection that bordered on pity. When Vidia was away—and he was probably with Margaret—Pat ran his affairs. It made me think that Pat was stronger than most people guessed. It was Vidia who could not function alone. What bothered me most about his “travel books” was that he seldom traveled by himself and never revealed his traveling companion. I suspected Vidia’s travel narratives to be extensively varnished, because Margaret was nowhere in them.

  What was the challenge in traveling with a loving woman? To me, all such travel was just a holiday, no matter the destination. There were no alien places on earth for the man who had his lover to cling to at night and tell him he was a genius. I had, always avoided reading about the journey in which Mr. and Mrs. First-Class Traveler were embarked on a satisfying adventure (“My wife found an exquisite carving...”). That sort of vacation interested me only if it truthfully reported the cannibalism in the marital woe of the traveling couple: bitter arguments, jealousy, sex, pettiness, infidelity, unfounded accusations, culture shock, or pained silences.

  If Pat was dismayed to be left out of Vidia’s trips and Vidia’s writing, she never spoke about it to anyone except Vidia. She covered for him. She was the Lady Naipaul the newspapers mentioned. She stuck by him like the steadfast wife of a prominent politician, fulfilling her role as the loyal helpmate, letting no criticism show. Vidia often told me about their quarrels, and I imagined floods of tears, but in spite of that friction, and considering the circumstances, they seemed to get on remarkably well.

  Pat was well educated and extremely well read. She did little but read books. She had had an ambition to write, but the few finished pieces I saw—a visit to Trinidad, an account of a political meeting in London—were not very effective. They were like her, bloodless and a bit pedestrian and terribly nice; she had no guile, not much humor, she was shy. Vidia was the shouter and the prima donna. She was not as weak as she seemed, however, nor was he as strong as he pretended to be. They were mutually dependent. Perhaps he needed her to be at home in the way that some men can be sexual only if they are unfaithful: it was the need to betray Mommy and, in a larger sense, the need for Mommy to know it and permit it.

  Pat loved him—loved him without condition—praised him, lived for him, delighted in his success in the most unselfish way. She had lived through each book, and even when Vidia was traveling with Margaret—in the Islamic world and in the American South—she took pride in the books that resulted, Among the Believers and A Turn in the South. She stayed home, she read, she tended to the household—hired painters, oversaw renovations, did donkey work, paid bills—and prepared for Vidia’s return. She awaited him in a way that suggested all the quaint and comforting props of the hearthside: roomy slippers, the favorite cushion, the pipe and hand-knitted comforter, the kettle of vegetable soup simmering on the hob.

  In Africa years before, in his disarming fashion, relying on his shocking candor to do the job, Vidia volunteered the fact to me that there was no sex in the marriage. I knew they slept in separate rooms. I did not want to know more than that. But how was it that, knowing what she knew, she still spoke of his books in terms of great praise, and that the marriage had worked for so many years—indeed was still working?

  The answer was that she adored him. Possibly there was an element of fear in it—the fear of losing him, the fear of her own futility and her being rejected. More than that, she was unselfish; love sustained her, which was why anyone who pitied her was misled. Pat had strength—that was evident in her ability to be alone. She was discreet. She was kind, she was generous, she was restrained and magnanimous; she was the soul of politeness, she was grateful; she was all the things Vidia was not. It was no accident that they had been married for forty years, but the marriage was a great strain on her health.

  Death does not discriminate, but as the most efficient predators demonstrate—the lion, the hyena, and, most successful of all, the wild dogs of central Africa—victims are chosen for their weakness. Death shadows the innocent, the ones who stumble or look the wrong way. Death, the opportunist, skips past the strong to pounce on the feeble and the unwary.

  A death watch began, and soon after that letter sending news of Pat’s illness, Vidia wrote again: “Now just five days on, her brain has gone. It can focus on only the most immediate thing.” Though she was almost a corpse, she seemed to Vidia almost youthful—there was still a brightness in her face. He was remorseful. He said, “I took her too much for granted. I am surprised [by] my own grief—even while she is silent and alive in her room.”

  That was all it took to make me hurry my piece. Her brain has gone. I wrote and faxed my memory of Pat and told Vidia to give her my love.

  Two days later it happened. I read it on the paper headed Dairy Cottage scrolling through my chattering fax machine: Pat had died just a matter of hours before. Vidia had been summoned by the nurse to witness Pat’s final moment of life. “It was shattering.” After that, the funereal functionaries took over—the night nurse, the day nurse, the doctor, and very soon the undertaker’s assistant, who seemed to Vidia “Dickensian.” Vidia did not watch, not even when Pat’s body was taken from the house in the coffin. Only a week before, Pat and he had visited the doctor in Southampton.

  “I felt relieved when she left,” Vidia wrote. “I telephoned some people. I even thought I would start working. But then I felt very tired, and it occurred to me to send this note to you.
”

  My obituary appeared in the Daily Telegraph, under the heading “Lady Naipaul.”

  In the many books that V.S. Naipaul has published, Pat Naipaul is mentioned only once, and obliquely (the prologue to An Area of Darkness, where she is referred to as “my companion”). But her intelligence, her encouragement, her love and her discernment are behind every book that Naipaul has written.

  “She is my heart,” he told me once. She was also that most valued person in any writer’s life, the first reader.

  In Uganda, 30 years ago, in what I considered to be highly unusual circumstances, I met Pat Naipaul and was immediately impressed. The Naipauls had been given a house in the grounds of Makerere University in Kampala, and Vidia was asked by the Building Department how he wished his name to read on the sign. He said he did not want his name on any sign. He was told he had to have something. He said, “All right then, letter it ‘TEAS.’”

  As he told me the story, Pat burst out in appreciative isn’t-he-awful? laughter. And then—this is the unusual part—Vidia continued to do what I had interrupted. He was reading to Pat from the last chapter of The Mimic Men, a novel he was just finishing.

  I felt privileged to be a part of this intimate ritual. He read about two pages—a marvellous account of a bitter-sweet celebratory dinner shared by the guests in a hotel in south London. Brilliant, I was thinking, when the reading was over.

  “Patsy?” Vidia said, inquiring because she had said nothing in response. Pat was thinking hard.

  Finally she said, “I’m not sure about all those tears.”

  She was tough-minded and she was tender. For more than 40 years, in spite of delicate health and in latter years serious illness, she remained a devoted companion. It is a better description than wife. (In The Mimic Men, the narrator says that wife is “an awful word.”) The Naipauls made a practice of not reminiscing, at least in front of me, but I knew from casual remarks that in those early years they had to put up with the serious inconvenience of a small and uncertain income and no capital; Vidia used to laugh about the only job he had ever held as a salaried employee lasting just six weeks. Pat laughed too, but she had worked for a number of years as a history mistress at a girls’ school.

  While she was still in her thirties, she resigned from her teaching post to spend more time with Vidia, which she did as a householder in Muswell Hill, in Stockwell, and in Wiltshire; as a traveler in India, in Africa, in Trinidad, and America. She helped in the research for The Loss of El Dorado, and she became involved in the complex issue that Vidia described in The Killings in Trinidad.

  As the first reader, highly intelligent, strong-willed and profoundly moral, Pat played an active part in Vidia’s work. She understood that a writer needs a loyal opposition as much as praise. She enjoyed intellectual combat and used to say, when Vidia and I were engaged on a topic, “I love to see you two sparring.” She always said it in a maternal way, and it touched me.

  I loved her for her sweetness and her unselfishness, for the way she prized great writing and fine weather and kind people. She had no time for their opposites. (“Life’s too short,” she said.)

  I see her always as I first knew her, in the garden of the Kaptagat Arms in up-country Kenya, where Vidia took refuge from our political troubles in Uganda, to finish his novel. Pat sat smiling, reading in the sunshine, sometimes writing, and always alert to—just beyond the hedge of purple and pink bougainvilleas—the sound of typing.

  “Thank you for the lovely and generous note about Pat,” Vidia wrote. “I told her you had sent your love. I will write more later.”

  But there were no more letters, only rumors. I dismissed them as outrageous. I should have known better. In the rumors that circulated about Vidia, the most outrageous ones were usually the truest.

  A little over two months after Pat Naipaul died, Vidia married again. He had fallen in love. He was unembarrassed about such passions. Even while Pat was alive, he had spoken publicly—in The New Yorker—of his pleasure in having found sexual satisfaction in middle age with Margaret in Argentina. In this same piece he also delivered himself of some choice Naipaulisms: “I have an interesting mind” and “I can’t bear flowers” and “I have no more than a hundred months left” (that was in 1994; in 1979 he had also said he had only a hundred months left) and “I can’t stand the sound of women’s voices.”

  Margaret was actually named in the New Yorker piece as Vidia’s long-time lover, and was then still in the picture. “The sexual ease came quite late to me,” Vidia said to the interviewer, of Margaret, while Pat toiled in the kitchen making lunch. “And it came as an immense passion. Conrad has a lovely line: A man to whom love comes late, not as the most splendid of illusions, but like an enlightening and priceless misfortune.’”

  But the new Lady Naipaul was not Margaret. She was Nadira Khannum Alvi, who had begun life in Kenya, the daughter of two transplanted Pakistanis. More than thirty years before, Vidia and I had encountered a small girl who resembled her on the verandah of a dukawallah’s shop in Nairobi. Vidia had loathed her on sight, but then, he disliked most children.

  Nadira was now forty-two, a divorced mother of two teenagers. Vidia had met her at a dinner party at the home of the American consul-general in Lahore, Pakistan, in October 1995, as Pat lay dying in Wiltshire.

  As with many stories about Vidia, at least two versions of their meeting existed. The first described Mrs. Alvi as an admirer of his work who approached him at the party and said, “Can I kiss you?”

  “I think we should sit down,” Vidia said.

  Three weeks later they decided to get married. It only remained for Pat to die before the marriage date could be fixed. In the event, it was to be April 15, 1996.

  All this—the place, the name of the woman, the admiration, and “Can I kiss you?”—I read in the Daily Telegraph, which published an account by a reporter, Amit Roy, of the wedding lunch in London. The piece was neither corrected nor contradicted, something the scrupulous and insistent Vidia would have done if he had been misrepresented, so I took it as a record of facts, until someone who had been at the party in Lahore, the man who had brought them together, told me the second version.

  “I introduced them at the U.S. consul’s dinner,” he said. “I wanted Naipaul to meet some characters for his book. I saw Nadira sitting at another table. I went up to her and said, ‘Guess who is here?’ and ‘I want to introduce you to him.’ She told me she did not know the name V.S. Naipaul and had never read anything by him. I then accompanied her to meet him. She went up to him at the dinner table where he was serving himself, and as I introduced them, she said, ‘How fantastic’ and ‘What an honor’ and ‘I know your work’ and then plonked a big kiss on his cheek. He blushed, but he was taken. They were together for the whole evening. The very next day he phoned me and said, ‘I don’t need your help because Nadira is taking me around and we are leaving for Bahawalpur.’ Nadira was with Naipaul in the hotel when he phoned me.”

  The marriage lunch was at an Indian restaurant in South Kensington. Vidia and his new wife sat holding hands at the table. This was a new Vidia. I had never seen him hold Pat’s hand. This was a smitten Vidia, a far cry from the man who once said to me that he turned away if he saw two people kissing on television. He was also a reticent Vidia. The new Lady Naipaul did most of the talking, and her talk sounded very similar to what Vidia always referred to as “chuntering.”

  “It was amazing for him to have a woman in an Islamic country walk up and kiss him,” Nadira said, explaining her unorthodox manner of introduction. “I astounded a lot of people, but I tend to do that a lot in Pakistan anyway.” (This kiss received further revision two years later in an interview in London’s Sunday Times of May 10, 1998, in which Nadira was quoted as saying, “My kiss was not some silly bimbo, fluff-headed thing ... It was an act of reverence.”) Going on to describe their travels in Pakistan after they met, she said, “I think we fell terribly in love with each other.”

 
Nadira was a bit surprised by the suddenness. “There can be dichotomy between the writer and the person, someone you don’t want to meet again. I found the writer was the person. Here I had met a combination of a wonderful man and a man who had a vision, tremendous compassion, someone who reminded me of my past. He was my soul-mate. He was someone I had always looked for. I am madly in love with him. I think I shall always be madly in love with him.”

  There was more. But knowing Vidia, this was the moment for him to cry, “Stop chuntering!”

  Instead, Vidia said to the man from the Telegraph, “Do you know about Nadira, her reputation and her work? She is very famous.”

  During the wedding lunch Nadira clutched Vidia’s hand and whispered, “I want you,” as the guests tucked into King Prawn Curry and Chicken Badami Korma. Among them were his agent, his old Oxford tutor, a couple of literary critics, a fellow whom Vidia unfailingly referred to as “that epicene young man,” and Harold Pinter and Lady Antonia Fraser. I was ten thousand miles away, on the slopes of Mount Haleakala.

  Vidia and I had often talked about Philip Larkin. We had both bought High Windows when it was published, in the summer of 1974. Larkin’s poetry—mordant, sour, funny, right wing, cynical, elegiac, mocking, contemptuous of fame, fearful of death—matched exactly many of Vidia’s moods. In “The Whitsun Weddings,” Larkin had written of the faces at weddings,

  ...each face seemed to define

  Just what it saw departing: children frowned