Sir Vidia's Shadow: A Friendship Across Five Continents

5. Christmas Pudding

JUST BEFORE he left Kampala, Vidia released me. He looked one last time at my much-slashed and — amended essay on cowardice, which was already scheduled to be published. He said that it was finished, though I guessed that it still did not seem quite right to him.

Move on to something new, he said; the new thing would be better for what I had learned from him. I was sorry to see him go. I had come to depend on his reading and his friendly advice. Needing him to put his whole philosophy into a sentence, I mocked myself by thinking of the man who asked Christ, “Good Master, what good thing shall I do that I may have eternal life?” Christ gives him a quick summary of the essentials, beginning with “Do not kill” and ending with “Sell everything you have.”

I found a way of framing the question and managed to stammer it to Vidia.

Vidia’s answer was “Tell the truth.”

And there was his dream, the one I had written down. It went this way.

Vidia and his brother, Shiva, were staying with a family in which there were two other children, a boy and a girl. Shiva hated the boy, and one day when Vidia, his brother, and the boy were on an outing, an argument started. Shiva set upon the boy and killed him.

“Look what you’ve done — you’ve killed him!” Vidia said.

Vidia and Shiva dug a hole and hid the corpse of the boy in it.

Now it so happened that the boy was to have been away for several days; there were no questions or suspicions when Vidia and Shiva returned to the family. They were feeling horribly guilty for the murder, however; they could not screw up their courage sufficiently to tell the truth. They knew that the body would be found and that they would be blamed.

A few days later the newspapers were full of the story of the disappearance, and the body was soon found. During this time the child’s father underwent a severe change — he remembered various petty cruelties he had inflicted on the boy, and he began blaming himself for the crime. He said, “I know what happened… I made him cut his throat.” Naipaul and his brother remained silent — guilty but so far not blamed. They did not speak of the crime, and yet they were not off the hook. End of dream: night sweats, terror, anxiety, guilt.

I was impressed because it revealed so much. It amazed me that a dream that reflected no credit upon him, that showed him as guilty and sneaky, depicting his brother as a killer, was one he told me coldly and in detail.

Vidia was in London, and I was alone in a land that now seemed dustier and flimsier and fictitious. I had grown used to being alone in Africa: the solitude had sharpened my concentration, and this intensity served my writing. But for the first time I was lonely and felt listless with disappointment. Africa had once seemed limitless and powerful and liberating. Vidia had left me with doubts. He had belittled the politicians, ridiculed the currency, sneered at the newspapers, and Africa now seemed tiny, self-destructive, and confining. It was full of crooked opportunists and it was dangerous. It was ruinous and random. Do you notice how they make their own paths everywhere?

In the Senior Common Room and the Staff Club and the Kampala Film Society, the word “infies” rang in my ears. On Sundays I went for long bird-watching walks up the Bombo Road and in the bush. Nothing has a name here — it is always “hill,” “tree,” “river,” “bird.” They don’t differentiate. There is no drama. They don’t see.

My habits were the same: work in the morning in my office, do some teaching, eat lunch at home or at the Hindoo Lodge. After a nap, writing in the afternoon, then into town through the big iron gates under the Makerere motto, Pro Futuro Aedificamus. At the gates and in the road and in Bat Valley and in town I heard: This will go back to bush. The jungle will move in. Look, already it has started.

At the Staff Club people inquired insincerely about Vidia.

“What do you hear from your friend Naipaul?”

Their insincerity was tinged with sarcasm, because for the whole period of Vidia’s stay in Kampala I had been his shadow. He had been my friend, not theirs. They saw it as my abandonment of them — I had rejected them and become Naipaul’s friend. It was true: I had rejected them, but I thought it was my secret. In being Naipaul’s shadow I had revealed myself, revealed my literary ambitions most of all. Until then I had been seen as a village explainer, indulging myself. I knew, even then, that a writer lives in his writing. I suspected I had given myself away, perhaps had shown my ambition, certainly had exposed my wound. That was all right with the Staff Club. It was okay to be a local writer, but in befriending Naipaul it appeared that I was getting above myself, looking to London for approval. Expatriates both hated and hankered for London. I had ignored them. Naipaul had ignored them. They knew his contempt, his indifference; they knew his insulting word for them.

To most of them he was a bird of passage, the most undesirable expatriate: an enigma, a mocker, a complainer, someone who would bolt when things got bad. Some had bolted when the Kabaka fell. People flew in and said all sorts of things about Uganda, and like Vidia even mocked it. When they left, we mocked them. What did they know? This was our home, our place of work, our risk. We lived here because we liked it. It was regarded as bad form to jeer at Africans or to speak slightingly of the students. It was dangerous to laugh at the government. Vidia had broken most of the unspoken rules. No one had openly disagreed with him — indeed, in our hearts many of us agreed — but he was resented for trying to demoralize us. Africans said he was typically English. The English expatriates called him typically Trinidadian. The Indians in Kampala called him a typical Brahmin. A number of people said he was a settler type, which was the worst you could say about anyone.

Naipaul also gave the appearance of being a snob. He ridiculed our beer drinking and our bad wine and the power that our servants had over us. He had no faith in the students. The news had circulated that he had awarded only one prize, Third Prize, to Winston Wabamba, and no one found it funny. Some of his scorning observations were repeated. People said, “I feel sorry for his wife.” “Patrician” was the kindest word I heard used for him. The Staff Club was noted for its foul language, and Vidia was described in the crudest anatomical terms. The local Indians generally felt he had been browbeating them when he had talked about their days being numbered and nagged them about their exit strategy.

Dust devils, those furious little whirlwinds, were common on our roads and in the dry fields. Vidia had appeared like a dust devil, had sternly questioned every received opinion and demanded answers, and then, like a dust devil, he had whirled away — shivered into the distance, leaving a small scoured trail in the earth.

After Naipaul left I had to explain him, and, exposed as someone aspiring to be like him, I was regarded with suspicion, as unreliable, a secret mocker, like him. I would never again be a Staff Club hearty, taking turns as barman.

“I used to like you,” an expatriate woman said to me one night in the club’s bar. Her name was Maureen. She was drunk and truthful. “I don’t like you anymore. I think you’re a shit. So does Brian.”

Brian was her husband, a mathematician who taught Boolean algebra. He also did the Staff Club accounts. Hearing Maureen denounce me, he said, “Fucking Yank.”

He seemed to lose his footing as he spoke, but instead of regaining his balance he kept falling. He was drunk too, and he brought down one of the bar stools with him as he fell. Maureen had not moved; she still glared at me.

“Aren’t you going to help him?” I asked.

“He can’t fall any further,” Maureen said, and raised her glass to her lips.

It was just the three of us in the bar on this hot night, with the cicadas chattering outside. On the bar were the India Pale Ale and Tusker Beer mats, on the wall the clock that said Watney’s, the Guinness for Power sign, the stylish African couple — man in brown suit, woman in frilly dress — on the sign that said Waragi — Uganda’s National Drink!, and stacked to the side were year-old copies of Private Eye.

Maureen pressed her lips together, sloshed the waragi in her mouth, and swallowed it, blinking and smiling. It was terrible stuff, banana gin.

“What the fuck are you doing here?” she said.

The things they said to me were the things they had wanted to say to Vidia.

To console myself, I went to the Gardenia more often. I nearly always took a girl home. It was so simple, always the direct question: “Do you want to come back to my house?” And the greatest satisfaction of the question for me was that the word for house, nyumba, was the same as for mud hut. Usually the answer was yes, or else “Let’s go dancing first.”

“I’m the meat, you’re the knife.” That was my life again.

The expatriates at the Staff Club went on complaining about Vidia long after he had gone. How little they knew of him. “The mob,” Vidia had called them. He had urged me to leave, saying it was dangerous to the intellect to live in such a place. I did not have time to waste, he said. I knew he was thinking of himself.

“I am old and slow,” he had said, and talked about the past in the regretful yearning voice of an elderly man. Things had been different years ago; so much had changed for the worse.

Old-crock expressions were the ones he liked best: “latterly,” “a few pence,” and “some little time.” He called all magazines “papers,” which was perhaps not as quaint as old Duffield, who called them “shinies.” Still, Vidia lamented the age, its scruffiness, its whining low-class people, and its crooked aristocrats. “What is a title?” he would shout. It was just something to impress the Americans. It was meaningless. Literary agents were “idlers” and many publishers were “crummy.”

He was often unwell. His asthma had come back to him in Africa and gagged him. He had insomnia or else bad dreams. He was often low or depressed. Perhaps these afflictions were to be expected in someone so old. He was thirty-four.

As colonials, he had said, he and I had a great deal in common. Was I a colonial? I had never thought so. Never mind. He was my friend. Nor did I question his feeling of being elderly. Perhaps, I thought, when I am in my thirties I will feel that way too. Thirties seemed like middle age, forty was old, fifty was past it, sixty cadaverous.

I was ten years younger than Vidia, which seemed a long time, long enough for someone like me to be transformed into an old man. I had finished my novel and started another. I was confident. What mattered most was that Vidia, a brilliant writer, believed in me.

No one else I had ever known had looked into my face and seen a writer. Vidia did that and more: he said I was a writer of promise, and he marveled at how quickly I worked. I could call him my friend. He paid me the compliment of writing to me regularly after he got to London, and each letter was a lesson.

In his swift, decisive way, in an early letter he analyzed my keeping a journal and rejected the idea. I must abandon it, he said. It was just a way of anthologizing experience. A writer was not a writer because things happened around him. A writer did other things. A diary, more detailed, was worse — I should not even think about it. I ditched my journal, I abandoned my diary for good.

I should consider writing for The New Statesman, he said. I ought to avoid “little magazines": literary journals, university quarterlies, the small-circulation nonpayers.

If I wrote a story, I had to know why my story happened. I had to know why I was writing my novel. He mentioned Miss Lonelyhearts. I had urged him to read it. He disliked it and could not understand my enthusiasm for it. He did not see its point. I did not argue with any of this, though secretly I went on admiring the book for its wicked and wayward satire.

Vidia advised me, also by mail, to settle down with an agent and a publisher in England. American publishers were interested only in a single book; English publishers were interested in a writer — all the work. He would help me find an agent, and I should then look for a good publisher.

If I insisted on staying in Africa, I ought to consider, he said, writing a monthly “Letter from East Africa” for an Indian paper. He would arrange everything. I might get as much as £20 for each piece.

“Aim high,” he said. “Tell the truth.”

The worst thing a writer could say was “I am just a storyteller.” He suggested that it was a form of boasting. Vidia despised the description and disliked the very word “story.” It was a misleading and perhaps meaningless word. He had once told me that many stories did not have an ending. He used the word “narrative” instead. It was vaguer but more helpful. Structure and form were of utmost importance. The notion of style irritated him: it was showing off, a display of ego and inexperience, pretentious and pointless. He said that art was not pretty.

About two months after arriving back in London, he wrote to say that he was reviewing a life of Ian Fleming, the author of the James Bond books. The biography was not important, the review was not long, yet he said the writing was torture. In the piece that was published in The New Statesman, he mentioned in a jeering way that Milton Obote, the Ugandan prime minister, had attended a special screening of a Bond film. Obote’s Rolls-Royce had been parked outside the Rainbow Cinema with Thunderball on the marquee.

In the Staff Club some expatriates who had heard of the review said Naipaul was sneering again, and they trashed him. What was wrong with the PM’s seeing a ruddy film? Better than reading one of Naipaul’s shenzi books! But Obote had been the nemesis of the Kabaka, and he had recently overthrown him, in James Bond style, by attacking the Lubiri palace with commandos firing machine guns. The Kabaka had fired back with a machine gun before fleeing to Rwanda disguised as a woman. It was all Bond.

Vidia mentioned the Kabaka in his letters. He knew the people who were taking care of him in London — wealthy people, some aristocrats and royalists. Although he had no money, the Kabaka lived stylishly in Paddington and had opened an account at the Ritz.

London life flowed through the letters: the lunches with editors, the dinner parties, the weather, the traffic. Vidia even mentioned the objectionable sound of planes going by overhead. He informed me that the best parts of London were on the flight path to Heathrow. Buckingham Palace, for example, was constantly strafed. He complained of taxes. He was busy judging a literary prize. He reported his friends’ reactions to Africa — they took a dim view. He mentioned walking through the rain.

In Africa we never walked through the rain. We sheltered, waiting until the deluge stopped, as it always did after a few minutes.

He urged me to visit London. It would be good for me, he said.

I thought about it, and kept in touch, but I went on living my life. I had students in Kampala, I had responsibilities upcountry. My routine: work, the girls at the Gardenia, my writing.

One night a girl from the coast named Jamila slipped out of my bed to look for the bathroom. She hesitated at the doorway — the lovely scissorlike silhouette of her legs — and took a wrong turn in the hall. I heard the clatter of plopping papers and “Sorry!”

I switched on the light and found her standing naked among the mass of scattered sheets that was a typescript.

“What is it?” Jamila asked, tweaking the sheets of paper with her toes.

“Kitabu,” I said.

A book! She opened her pink mouth and howled with laughter. How could this mess of scrambled papers be a book?

Within a week I bought a ticket to London. I left Uganda just before Christmas.

From the descending plane, London was a blackness overlaid by a map of yellow lights. I had flown from the simple blind night of Africa to the yellow glow of a predawn city picked out in twinkling sulfurous streetlamps. The plane banked, tipping the map upright.

Outside it was cold. The drafty passageway at the plane’s door shocked me, the airport itself, the stinky bus. Early morning in London was still pretty dark, and with the bad big-city smell.

The telephone fooled me. To operate it I prepared my coin, placing a threepenny bit on a slot, and found button A and button B. When the call went through and I heard “Hello, hello,” there was an urgent noise in the receiver — the repeated pips, loudly and awkwardly announcing that I was struggling at a pay phone, becoming rattled. While they sounded I pressed the coin past a resisting barrier in order to complete the call. It took two tries. You had to be quick.

“Vidia?”

“Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.” It was Vidia’s habitual chant of anticipation when he was impatiently pleased. “I am so sorry I couldn’t meet your plane.”

“That’s all right.”

“We don’t have a monkey wagon, you see.”

It was his name for the cheap little cars that crowded the roads.

“I’ll take a taxi. I have some English pounds.”

He gave me directions, assuring me that a taxi driver would know how to get to his house, but if the driver drew a blank, I should mention the South Lambeth Road.

“And how are our infies?”

“I didn’t tell them I was coming.”

Because it was so extravagant, I had kept my London trip a secret from my colleagues at the Staff Club. Visiting Naipaul was also further proof that I was abandoning them. London was a destination for an expatriate on leave, not on holiday. “Going to the coast,” they usually said at Christmas. That meant Mombasa, Malindi, or Zanzibar, Tanga or Bagamoyo, where you could swim without risking bilharzia. London was for the three home-leave months every two years, not a fortnight’s holiday. Were my Christmas visit to become known, the expatriates would say I was getting above myself.

In the taxi, heading through London, I understood Vidia’s idea of order. It was this, the solid buildings and well-swept roads gleaming under the streetlamps. The shops, spiked iron railings, brick terraces, and clusters of chimney pots; the symmetrical spans of the great bridge we were taking over the Thames. London was reliable, built to last, and the whole city looked sealed in black glaze. No wonder Vidia had thought of Kampala as thrown together and ruinous and chaotic, and that it would fall down and return to bush.

But the London dampness and the London cold intimidated me. Even wearing the sheepskin coat that I had bought in Kenya, I was shivering, tired from the flight, feeling fragile in the vast glazed city that was still dark at eight o’clock on this December morning.

The taxi swung left and right and then shot up a side street. I saw some black faces and was reassured. Another corner and the taxi rattled to a halt and kept rattling.

“Number Three Stockwell Park Crescent.”

It was a small gray-brick Georgian house, set back behind a low wall, with a similar but larger house to the right, a poorer one to the left. Number 3 had a newly planted sapling in the front yard.

Vidia had heard the taxi. With a pipe in his mouth he greeted me from the doorway, and before we entered he pointed to the house on the right. “That frightfully grand house belongs to communists, of course. And that one”—the scruffy one on the left—“well, they are home all the time. They don’t work, you see. I thought, Goodness, they are all unemployed. But no, they are being ‘redeployed.’ All this time I thought they were a pack of idlers, but no—’redeployed’!”

I had almost forgotten that work, or the lack of it, could be material for a joke. In Africa there was no point to such a remark, and certainly no humor in it, because there was hardly any paid work in the usual sense; there was subsistence farming. If that work wasn’t done, you starved. It wasn’t funny or sad, it was taken for granted.

Pat kissed me as Vidia shut the door. It was warm in here. Had I not just come from East Africa, I would have said the house was too hot, but I found it perfect. Double glazing, Vidia’s remedy for his hatred of noise, kept the house silent.

While Pat protested his impulsiveness, Vidia showed me around the house, sourly gloating over the blunders the workmen had made — the badly cut corners, the poorly drilled holes, the asymmetrical beading, the slapped-on paint.

His study was off the parlor. A chaise that was a folding chair — like a beach chair — was set up in the middle of the floor. The chair grunted and squawked when he sat down on it and stuck his feet out.

“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 stay 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 should 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.

In the middle of the questions, a stout, hearty man loomed over Vidia and said in a mocking tone, “If it isn’t old V. S.!”

“Hello, Kingsley,” Vidia said, biting his pipe stem, and watched the man sway through the room. It was Kingsley Amis, he said. “He’s drunk. He’s sad. I wonder at the achievement.”

A hollow-cheeked man with deep, close-set eyes spoke earnestly to Vidia. He was not old but he had that gaunt, imprisoned look of someone who was overworked.

“Paul, this is Alan Sillitoe.”

I began to understand how a London party might be full of familiar names, while the faces were unfamiliar and even grotesque. Talking inconsequentially to Sillitoe, I kept thinking how, just a few years before, I first read The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. For their power and directness I regarded them as better than Lawrence, the clearest glimpse I’d had into English life and work — lives and households I had never seen before. But we talked about the rain and Rhodesia.

After Sillitoe drifted away, Vidia said, “He brings news. That is what he does. Brings news from Nottingham, from working-class people. It’s not writing, really. It’s news. Don’t be that sort of writer, bringing news.”

I promised I would not be that sort of writer.

Vidia attracted the notice of other party guests, and he introduced me to them: John Bayley, John and Miriam Gross, and Tom Maschler. Maschler was Paul Bailey’s editor. Vidia told him I was working on a book.

“Send your book to me,” Maschler said.

Vidia was saying to the others, “I don’t want to meet new people.”

It had become another of his old man’s maxims, like the sentences that started “Latterly, one has begun to wonder…”

When we left the Cape party we saw Kingsley Amis again, and again he said, “Good old V.S.!” Vidia simply walked on. He would have said he was “cutting” Amis. He did not see or hear him. For Vidia’s sake I did not refer to Amis, so as not to call attention to his existence.

In the lights of Bedford Square, the falling rain seemed stiffened by brightness and the black street glistened and the puddles were full of plainer light. Vidia was hurrying, looking for a taxi. He hated the expense of taxis, but after a certain hour he felt that London became menacing and unpredictable, and he feared taking the Underground because of the louts, the racists, the disorder; there were irritable tramps who rode the Circle Line continuously, for the warmth, going round and round. The tube was much dirtier at night, too, the cars having grown filthier throughout the day.

In the taxi back to Stockwell, I saw a sign to Victoria and said, “I promised to meet someone. I’ll get out around here.”

“Your friend,” Vidia said.

“Would you like to meet her?”

“No, no. But don’t be offended. It’s just that I don’t want to meet any new people.”

He rapped on the window that separated the driver’s seat from us and told the driver to let me out at Victoria Street. Soon after that I was lying in bed with Heather. As the days had passed there were fewer and fewer preliminaries. That night she opened the door wearing a silk dressing gown, and when she kissed me, I touched her and found she was naked underneath it, and her skin was also like silk.

We hardly spoke until we had made love once, and then, calmed by it, I lay on my back feeling buoyant. She rested her arms against my chest and put her forehead against mine, letting her long hair sweep over my face.

“Tell me about the Pygmies again.”

“Let me tell you about the ‘men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders.’”

“I don’t want to be your Desdemona,” she said.

I kissed her and said, “I like you because you’re lovely and because you know how to read.”

“I know how to do lots of things.”

She kissed me and filled my mouth with her tongue. She ran her hands over my body. Her fingers were cool and my skin was tender, still raw and damp from sex. I tipped her over and parted her legs and breathed in her body’s smell like fresh meat. When we made love a second time it was as if our nerves were exposed and we were peeling the skin from our flesh. The act heated me — more than that, it scorched me, and at her most passionate Heather howled like a cat that I was holding down and stabbing to death, except that they were howls of pleasure, and her only fear was that I would stop too soon. When we were done, we simply died for an hour and woke up still sweating.

“I have to go.” It was after one on the luminous dial of her bedroom clock.

“Stay until morning.”

“My friends expect me to be there at breakfast.”

This was not quite true — we seldom had breakfast — but it seemed rude not to go home.

“Naipaul is supposed to be very clever,” said Heather. “But incredibly difficult.”

“He has been kind to me.”

“That’s the one thing people never say about him.”

“I guess I know his secrets.”

“I guess you do,” she said, stressing “guess” for its being American. “Right. I’ll let you go on one condition — that you come back to me.”

“Tomorrow,” I said.

In the street some minutes later I was amazed by the emptiness of London at night. It wasn’t even two in the morning. As soon as the pubs closed at eleven, the streets were full. By midnight they were empty again. My taxi to Stockwell always traveled down deserted streets, over a solitary bridge, and south through a city that seemed imaginary and antique, without people or other vehicles, just black streets and yellow lamps.

My late nights fascinated Vidia, I could see, but they created distance too: I had another life, another friend, and that friend lived in a different London. Vidia asked oblique questions, but beyond that he did not inquire. I think he detected a greediness in me, something uncontrollable and animalistic — desire that he associated with shame. I remembered how he had said of his sexual urge, “One is ashamed of being a man.”

I was not ashamed. I was delighted to have a girlfriend who was uninhibited and intelligent and as free as I was. But I could see the end was coming. No sooner had we met than she began saying, “You’re going to leave soon and go back to Africa, and I’m going to be miserable.”

This was too gloomy a thought for me to respond to.

She said, “I want you to be miserable too.”

“I will be.”

“I don’t believe you.”

Heather was more annoyed the night of Hugh Thomas’s party. I went to her apartment afterwards and we made love and she begged me to stay. I said I couldn’t.

“You’re always running back and forth to your friend Naipaul.”

It was true. I never spent the whole night with her. But I was fond of her and I knew I would miss her. I even wondered what sort of wife she would be. Maybe she would visit Kampala. She said she might. As for Naipaul, this friendship I now realized was as strong as love. He was my friend, he had shown me what was good in my writing, he had drawn a line through anything that was false. I was inspired by his work and his conviction. I wanted always to be his friend.

“I had an Indian boyfriend at Oxford,” Heather said.

“I don’t want to hear about him,” I said.

All this took a week: the dinner party, the Cape party, Hugh Thomas’s party, the nights with Heather. Christmas was a few days away. Heather invited me to spend Christmas with her family in the country.

“I can’t. The Naipauls have plans,” I said. They had not mentioned any plans, but I was sure they had them. All Vidia had said was that his brother, Shiva, was coming to stay but that he was unreliable — so Vidia had said — and had not confirmed it. “I can’t let them down.”

Heather said, “I wanted to be your Christmas pudding.”

Why did that silly statement arouse me so much? Perhaps because it was silly and because it also meant something.

The day before Christmas, Vidia said we might go to an Indian restaurant, Veeraswami’s, on a lane off Regent Street. But when we got there, he sulked. He said it was suburban. He could not eat his meal. He crunched a papadam into flakes on the tablecloth with his forefinger and grumbled about Shiva, whom he called Seewyn.

“He has long hair,” Vidia said, and indicated with his fingers how it fell on both sides of his face. He pursed his lips and spoke again, sourly. “Like Veronica Lake.”

That night we were invited to dinner at Edna O’Brien’s. She lived in Putney, some distance from Stockwell. Vidia said that her house backed onto the river.

“It sounds a nice place to live,” I said.

“Those suburbs fill me with gloom.”

“How are we getting there?”

“Edna is sending a car at seven.”

At just seven o’clock Vidia said, “The car is not here.”

He was so punctilious that he grew agitated as an appointed time approached and regarded anything after the specified minute as late. He was sitting upright, stiff with annoyance, the hardback book on his lap open to its flyleaf. He had written, To Edna O’Brien from V.S Naipaul. He seemed to be hesitating over the date.

“What is she like?” I asked, trying to distract him.

He thought a moment, then grimaced and clawed his hair. He said, “She has drunk London to its dregs.”

The thought of this Irish woman guzzling London in this way excited me as much as I want to be your Christmas pudding.

Vidia snapped the book shut — it was his Mr. Stone and the Knights Companion—and said, “I knew the car wouldn’t be here on time.”

“How did you know?”

“I had a vibration.”

Pat was becoming anxious, and she said without any confidence, “I expect the car will be along any minute now.”

But at seven-thirty it still had not come. The three of us remained seated, listening, leaking energy. It was impossible to talk about anything except the car that had not arrived.

Without a word, but biting his pipe stem, Vidia leaned over and put the inscribed book back on the shelf, slotting it angrily and jamming it tight between two fatter books, as though finishing an obscure bit of masonry.

“I don’t want to go anymore,” he said. In a frivolous woman’s voice he said, “Oh, don’t worry, I’ll send a car for you.” He chewed his pipe stem. “But there is no car!”

Vidia’s eyes went black. His anger resonated in the air like a high-frequency hum of such pitch and intensity that everything in the room seemed fragile, as though at any moment it could all shatter or explode.

“Ring her,” Pat said. “I’m sure it’s a mistake.”

More coaxing at last got Vidia on the phone, and he held the heavy receiver against the side of his head like a weapon.

“Edna.” Vidia’s voice was stern. “The car has not come.”

There was a pause, the twang of a hurried explanation, and “sorry” repeated over and over. Her apology was as distinct as the call of a particular species of bird.

“I see.” Vidia listened some more, looking grim. “In that case,” he said, “I will see if Rogers will take us.”

Rogers was the minicab driver, although from the way Vidia spoke of him, he sounded like his personal chauffeur. AD such flunkies were for Vidia just surnames, like Brown the charlady. It was after eight when Rogers arrived in his Rover.

“You sit next to the tiger,” Pat said to me.

Vidia was still angry. The angle of his pipe in his mouth told everything. And he had not brought his book. We traveled in silence along cold streets to Putney.

The house, on Deodar Road, was tall, and with a Christmas wreath on the door and all the lights burning it looked festive. Edna O’Brien greeted us with kisses and apologies. Several guests had already arrived, including an American named Coles and the writer Len Deighton. I did not know Deighton’s writing, but Heather had a copy of Horse Under Water on her bedside table, and I associated this book with our sexual postures, another prop in the love nest, like the little lamp, the ashtray, and the clock face that glowed in the dark. Deighton was a rumpled, soft-spoken man. Coles looked overdressed and agitated.

Edna was pretty, Irish to her fingertips, slim, with a friendly girl’s face and red piled-up hair and a lace blouse. She said, “Vidia’s told me all about you. Now do sit down — what will you drink? I should warn you, we’ve just been discussing the American expression ‘credibility gap.’ I can’t understand it for the life of me.”

Coles said, “It means just what it says. It’s the difference between how much you believe and how much you don’t.”

“I must be stupid,” Edna said. “I don’t get it.”

What made Coles unpersuasive was his beard, which he had just begun to grow, making him look unshaven more than bearded. His bristly face was a distraction and gave him a dubious appearance. He said he was a publisher in New York and was hoping that Edna would write something for him.

“You live in London?” he asked me.

“No. Just visiting. I live in Uganda. I’m at the university.”

“So what are you studying?”

“I’m a teacher.”

“Pretty dangerous down there, isn’t it?”

“No. It’s wonderful. New York is dangerous.”

“That’s bullshit,” Coles said.

Pat Naipaul winced as he said this. She did not understand that when I was with Americans I tried to provoke them, or even be offensive. I would not have dared do this with an English person, but I resented Coles’s complacency. This sort of older man would expect me to join the U.S. Army and be sent to Vietnam so that he could sit and grow his ridiculous beard in New York City.

“Dad, I broke my watch strap.”

A small boy was tapping Coles on the shoulder. He wore a school uniform and had a whining English accent. Dad? It could only have been Coles’s son. Coles did not introduce him. In fact he seemed slightly embarrassed by the boy, who was making a whiffling complaint in his prissy English accent to his gruff New Yorker father who took little notice of him.

Another boy entered the room, one of Edna’s sons, dressed in sneakers and jeans and a sweatshirt. Like the other boy, he was about ten. He said, “I’m going to do a magic trick. Does anyone have a pound note?”

I gave him one. He inserted it between the rollers of a little machine and it disappeared. Everyone groaned, to encourage him. Then, just as I had abandoned any thought of getting it back, he made the pound note reappear.

“I need help carving the turkey,” Edna said.

“Vidia’s no use,” Pat said, glancing at Vidia, who looked horror-struck, as though he had just remembered something.

“I have some salmon for Vidia,” Edna said, and Vidia relaxed. “Come help me in the kitchen, Paul.”

She handed me the carving knife and a long fork and the platter for the meat. The turkey gleamed in its wrapper of roasted skin. Edna seemed so pleasant and hospitable that it struck me as unfair that Vidia had left the dedicated book behind.

She said, “Have you been to the Congo?”

“Twice,” I said. “It’s an amazing place. It looks just the way you expect it to — green and colorful and violent, and that big muddy river.”

“I’d love to see it. It has Irish connections, you know. Roger Casement.”

“Oh, yes, that’s right.” But it was a meaningless name to me. I said, “I’ll meet you in Leopoldville. We’ll go up the river in a steamer. We’ll penetrate the Congo and drink it to its dregs.”

Vidia’s phrase for her had bewitched me.

“Oh, get on with you,” she said with affection, and she touched me tenderly. She put her face close to mine and made a fish mouth. “Carve the turkey.”

I helped serve it. We ate in the dining room. Vidia’s salmon was presented to him like a prize he had won.

Len Deighton said, “The painter Sidney Nolan lives over the road.”

“I don’t want to meet any new people,” Vidia said.

The American, Coles, was talking about Vietnam, what a mess it was, but what else could we do? It was the sort of line that made me recklessly offensive.

“I think Wallace is right,” Vidia said. “The problem is with the pointy-headed intellectuals.”

Coles said, “George Wallace?”

“That’s the man. He has an awful lot of common sense.”

Deighton said, “I am more interested in the case of that colored cricketer from South Africa. Did you see the write-up in today’s paper?”

“The important thing to remember,” Vidia said, “is that he is a slave.”

Coles was scratching at his half-grown beard. He said, “I don’t get any of this. Are you serious?”

Edna said, “Now I have to make Irish coffee. If anyone watches me pouring the cream in over a spoon, I’ll make a mess of it and it’ll sink.”

Vidia was not listening. He was facing Coles. “When you understand that he is a slave, you will be able to discuss him.”

Edna served the coffee with the cream floating on top, and we drank it in the lounge. Coles, bewildered by Vidia on the subject of slavery and South Africa, once again began to talk about the Vietnam War. He spoke in such a futile way, I remembered why I had decided to stay in Africa, and I longed to be back in Uganda.

It was snowing when we left. Edna kissed me and said that I could come back anytime. Putney was the first part of London I had seen that I felt I would be able to live in. I liked the wide black Thames behind her house, the way the river sucked and eddied at the end of her garden.

Rogers had been huddled in his minicab, waiting. In the car, Vidia said, “That obnoxious American and his son. Did you notice the way the son spoke? So precise. Such an English schoolboy. The father was embarrassed.”

Pat challenged him, though it was what I had felt.

Vidia said, “I had a vibration.”

Pat said to me, “Are you going to see your friend?”

“No. She’s spending Christmas with her folks in the country.”

“The English thing,” Vidia said. “Did she invite you?”

“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 laughed 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.

Vidia smiled at it. He said, “Have I told you my joke? I would put a comma after ‘Britain.’”

It was my first experience of British Rail. I was reassured in the big warm bosom of this friendly monster, sitting on a cushion in a corner seat, watching Berkshire go by, and the lovely fields, still green in an English winter, and the solid houses and the clumps of woods that bordered meadowland. I had not realized how disoriented I had been in black, labyrinthine London until I saw the open countryside. English people in Africa boasted of everything, but I had never heard any of them boast of the beauty of these green fields and pretty hills and indestructible-looking villages. They never spoke about such things.

I mentioned this to Vidia.

“Because they’re infies,” he said.

A little later, I said, “You must have done this many times, taken this train.”

“Oh, God.”

I was asking about The Mimic Men but without saying so. He gave nothing away, he seldom reminisced, but he set great store by faces — how much they told; and by expressions — what a grimace revealed. So I knew that his experiences on this London-to-Oxford line had been painful and possibly bitter. He often spoke of poverty, of the misery of having no money. His version of his past was one of turmoil and deprivation. He looked back all the time, as his writing showed, but he did not talk about it.

For lunch we both had cheese sandwiches in the buffet car. I knew that Vidia ate fish. But to me, at that time, a vegetarian was someone who ate nothing but cheese sandwiches.

Traveling on this train, reading newspapers, was so pleasant I would not have minded going farther. My only other real experiences of trains were the overnighter to Nairobi and the Mombasa express and the gasping steam locomotives of Malawi and Rhodesia. The train soothed and comforted me and stimulated my imagination. It offered me a glimpse of the best of England and provided access to my past by activating my memory. I had made a discovery: I would gladly go anywhere on a train.

Oxford was soon outside the window, first a platform, then a sign, finally the place itself: gray stone buildings, devotional in their contours, a wilderness of churches and cloisters, a town of ecclesiastical stone. There were more walls than steeples and spires, and many narrow streets, every stone seemingly chiseled with a coded message which, when translated, read No Trespassing.

Before we left the station, Vidia went to the timetable on the wall and made a note of the times of the later trains to London. It seemed a wise thing to do. I never would have thought of the precaution — another lesson from Vidia in the importance of having an escape route. Once again I felt like a beginner, but I had Vidia to show me the way.

Leaving the station, I stuffed the newspapers I had read into a barrel. -

“Why did you buy three newspapers?” Vidia asked.

“I don’t know,” I said, because I sensed he disapproved. One had been the Daily Mirror.

“Most of the English press is such rubbish.”

But I had felt starved for news in Uganda. Although we got the English Sunday papers, always late, news in Uganda was by word of mouth, rumor and speculation, just whispers. The Argus was timid, and the government paper, The People, was a mouthpiece. I was stimulated by English papers, the freshness, the frankness, the humor. But what was new to me was stale to Vidia.

We walked up High Street.

“This dampness,” Vidia said. “When I was here I had such terrible asthma that I lay on my bed and Patsy held me — held me in her arms — and warmed me so that I could breathe.”

University College — Shiva’s college, and it had also been Vidia’s — was in High Street, with a large gateway, like the entrance to a cloister. A small window, like that in a tollbooth, framed the ugly face of an older man dressed in black. He stepped into the walkway, scowling, looking cruel.

“Hello, Mr. Naipaul. What brings you ’ere, then?”

It was a thick country accent, sure of itself, and its confidence and strength made the man seem more like a prison guard than a porter.

“Looking for my brother,” Vidia said.

Vidia seem somewhat uneasy; it was the way the man faced him. Vidia needed servants and flunkies to be more humble and respectful than this.

’"Aven’t seen ’im at all. They’ve been told to sign the book, but I don’t suppose he takes a blind bit of notice of what the master says.”

“No. One imagines not. He’s not in his room?”

“Your brother, Mr. Naipaul? He left ’is key. Wasn’t ’ere yesterday, neither.”

“Very well. We will leave a note for him.”

Vidia wrote the note while the porter stood with his arms folded.

“You can put it in my brother’s mailbox.”

“If ’e fucking looks in ’is mailbox, which I doubt.” The porter handled the note as if it were something of no value. “So, ’ow ’ave you been keeping?”

“Yes, quite well, um, latterly, one has been very busy, thank you.”

I had not imagined it: Vidia was uneasy in the presence of this domineering servant. It was as though they had no language in common, which was perhaps actually the case. It was one of the strangest conversations ever — the rough, unapologetic, cursing servant who was in charge, and the oblique, inquiring master at his mercy.

“I shall hand this to your brother personally.”

“Yes. So good of you.”

The telephone jangled in the tollbooth.

“You will excuse me, gentlemen.” The porter stepped inside and shouted into the phone.

Vidia showed me the quad, the buildings, the spire, and in one anteroom a bright white marble statue of Percy Bysshe Shelley, once a resident of University College. The porter was still on the telephone when we left.

Passing Blackwell’s Bookshop on Broad Street, I expressed an interest in browsing and we went in. Vidia waited and looked at books, all the while giving off a signal that indicated that I should hurry up. Vidia’s impatience was a vibration that was almost audible, a distinct high-pitched whine. I saw some first editions of Hemingway and Orwell.

“How much is this?” I showed him the Orwell.

“Twelve shillings. You don’t want that.”

We left the bookstore and soon passed a round tower.

“The Bodleian,” Vidia said.

After a short walk we entered the gateway of another college, with paler, taller spires set beside a wide meadow.

“Where are we?”

“Christ Church.”

Places like this reminded me that I was in many respects an African. I needed a simpler and less demanding world. I was at my happiest in the bush. And it was not merely that the orderly and ancient buildings overwhelmed me; the students also seemed aloof and proprietorial. They were much younger than me, and they looked right at home here. I knew I did not belong, that I would never belong.

Back on High Street, we walked as far as Magdalen Bridge and into Magdalen College itself — more cloisters, another quad, buildings like monasteries. Being a student here seemed to me like my being an actor in a pageant in which I did not know any of my lines, one of those terrible dreams.

I said, “I wonder what happened to Shiva.”

Vidia said, “Seewyn’s problem is that he was raised by women, who adored him. So he takes no responsibility.”

We went to the Ashmolean Museum. As he had done at the National Gallery, the Tate, and the V and A, Vidia made a beeline for certain rooms, for specific paintings, for particular details in those paintings, none of them obvious. He darted to a Watteau, a Whistler, a Hilliard miniature, and always indicated the tiniest features. “Look at this,” and “See how he handles paint.”

I looked for anything of Africa — a mask, a spear, a landscape, anything of the bush. I realized how Ugandans must feel, stuck in Oxford or London after leaving the vast, deep savannah or the slopes of the Mountains of the Moon. And then I saw a painting that reassured me.

It might have been done in Fort Portal or Mubende, with big generous trees and tall elephant grass and flat-topped fever thorns in the distance. There were small figures at the side, some animals — gazelles, impalas, no big game — and rich colors and flowers in the foreground. I did not recognize the artist’s name. I liked this wide green canvas and the accuracy of the view and the easily identifiable plants, the precise leaves, the blossoms, and the dome of sky. Even the scraps of cloud looked right.

I did not call Vidia’s attention to it. I was afraid he might disapprove and spoil a moment that had cheered me. It was not his Africa. My reaction to this painting made me think I should leave England soon. Vidia walked quickly over to me and frowned at the picture.

To distract him I said, “Maybe we should go past Shiva’s college one more time, to see whether he’s come back.”

“No, no.” Vidia turned away from the picture. “He’s on his own now.”

I noticed that he was wearing the heavy shoes he called veldshoen. He had been wearing them that night in Kisenyi, by the shore of Lake Kivu, when he had said, “What that dog needs is a good kick.”

On the way back to London on the train, Vidia said, “I wonder whether any of my books will last?”

I said that I thought A House for Mr. Biswas was a masterpiece that would last as long as people read books.

“You’re so kind,” he said. He seemed to consider the word “masterpiece.” Then he said, “One hopes so. It’s a big book.”

We talked about the book. Vidia said that although he had never reread it, he had put everything into it — his family, his island, everything he knew. Even small things in the book pleased him. He smiled at a memory.

“There are three Negro workmen in the book — just simple fellows, with shovels. Do you remember them? They only have first names, Edgar, Sam, and George.”

“They work on Biswas’s house.”

“Yes, yes.” But he was already laughing. “Edgar Mittelholzer, Samuel Selvon, and George Lamming,” he said, naming three black novelists from Trinidad.

He almost gagged laughing at this private joke, but after a while, still talking about the novel, we discussed Mr. Biswas’s views on typefaces. Vidia became animated again. With his mouth close to the window of the train, he exhaled on the glass.

“This is Times.” He sketched a letter with his finger, then added embellishments and more letters. “This is sans serif. And this”—he was still adding letters to the steam-clouded glass—“is Bodoni. I like this.”

He was intent, still sketching with his finger, still describing.

I said, “Sometimes they put that information on the last page of a book. I never know what to make of it.”

“I love it,” he said.

“And this,” he said, working his finger on the window, “this is Caslon. Notice the difference?”

The letters seemed to fade. But no, they remained on the glass. As soon as we got near London they were lit again by the city’s lights, all those different letters.

The day before I left, there were workmen in Vidia’s house. They were hammering in his bedroom, fixing some shelves that Vidia considered badly built. It was a Saturday. I called Heather and asked if we could meet. She said yes but suggested a pub, not her apartment. She knew I was leaving. At the pub, she complained that I cared more about Vidia than about her.

“He’s my friend,” I said.

“Thanks,” she said.

Seeing I had hurt her, I said, “You’re my friend too, of course you are.”

I could not explain how Vidia mattered, and how his friendship was different from anyone else’s. I knew he loved Shiva, but he seemed to depend on me so much more than he did on his brother, and he knew more about my writing ambition than I had ever dared tell my own family.

Heather and I went on drinking. We did not make love that day. The omission made it more final a farewell.

Vidia looked grief-stricken when I got back that night. Pat was on the parlor sofa. He was sitting in his armchair, an expression of sorrow on his face, but when he began to speak to her, he sounded like a small child who had been wronged.

“I can’t sleep in that bed,” he said. “It’s tainted. Why did he do it? The foolish, ignorant man!”

He was disgusted and near to tears.

“What happened?” I asked.

“One of the workmen in Vidia’s bedroom was explaining something,” Pat began. But she seemed too frightened to continue.

His face twisted in nausea, Vidia said, “And he sat on my bed, Patsy. He put his bottom on my bed.”

The next morning, Vidia was still seated in his armchair in the parlor. He looked grim. Fatigue made his skin grayish. He had not slept. It would be a long day, and I could not begin to comprehend how the bed that the workman had tainted by sitting on it would ever be purified. Violation by a workman’s bottom was one of those problems that were unique to Vidia. Only he understood the problem, and so only he had the solution.

He looked weary. He said he was sorry I was leaving, and he meant it — he looked as though he needed to be propped up. Pat was fretful and weepy, but I could not tell whether my departure was the cause.

As always, Vidia said, “You’re going to be all right.”

7. Air Letters: A Correspondence Course

VIDIA CLAIMED that handwriting spoke volumes. Even if you could not read the words, the way they were written, just the loops and slants and how a t was crossed, told you what you needed to know. He had taught me to read the moods in his handwriting, for which he always used a fountain pen and black ink. Large and loopy meant he was idle and calm, regular squiggles indicated concentration, small meant anxious, tiny meant fearful and overworked, and at its most minuscule he was at his wits’ end. It was perhaps some consolation that, graphologically inclined, he knew what his own handwriting told him.

For the next five years, we conversed by airmail over long distances. I was in Africa and later in Singapore; Vidia was in and out of England. He usually wrote me on blue air-letter forms from the post office, the ones with preprinted stamps on the front. They unfolded to narrow lengths of paper that seemed Chinese to him, he said. He used them vertically, cramming them with his handwriting.

These letters were for me a source of wisdom and strength and amounted to a correspondence course in creative writing; from Vidia I learned the reality of being a writer. During this period I had no telephone, I had no other close friends, I did not leave the Equator. The mail was everything. Face to face, anyone can say he is your friend and can promise to write faithfully, but the test of friendship is the letters themselves, the fondest proof that you are remembered. I did not want to be forgotten, for once again I was buried in Africa.

It bewildered me when the first letter I received from him was cold. Worse than cold: somewhat offensive. That curfew book I had given to his editor Diana Athill, at André Deutsch, had been turned down. Her letter had discouraged me in what I had thought was a great idea: a book about Africa in the form of a chronicle about a violent curfew. I had complained to Vidia of her indifference.

In his letter, a Lebanese stamp on the envelope, written on the stationery of the Bristol Hotel in Beirut, Vidia stood by his editor. He said her judgment was sound. He would not give me any further advice about publishing. He suggested that I was patronizing him in the language of my letter, that I misread Africa, that I did not understand Martial’s epigrams, and he wished me well in my journalism. This seemed belittling to the fiction I was trying to write. He closed with a mention of Francis Chichester, at that moment sailing his Gipsy Moth IV solo around the world. He wrote, “I hope he drowns.”

It was a bad-tempered letter, written in one of his moods. I could have guessed that when I saw his handwriting. Though he was in Beirut, he did not refer to it, except by using the hotel’s ornate letterhead — I suspected him of ostentation. He did not say where he was going, or why. It was a grand gesture, his letter from Lebanon, a romantic and cosmopolitan place that was on the itinerary of a successful writer.

In fact he was on his way to India, Pat wrote, in a letter I received a week later. She called his trip “a journalistic assignment” and said he would be in India two months, for a long article. His dismissive mention of my journalism, which had rankled, perhaps also explained why he had not said he was going to be a journalist in India.

They were terrible letter writers, all of them, Pat said. Shiva did not even write home. I should not expect too much, and yet she said that it had pleased her to see that we were exchanging letters regularly — it was uncharacteristic of Vidia to write so often.

She reported Vidia’s comings and goings like a doting mother. He had been living in the Kent town of Sandwich, in a loaned house, while Pat had commuted by train every few days from her teaching duties. Running on the beach—running on the beach? I had to read the sentence three times — Vidia had sprained his ankle, but he had looked so comic falling down and gesturing that Pat had not taken it seriously. A swollen ankle was the upshot, and, as a fellow athlete (the man had once water-skied to France), the doctor was sympathetic.

Pat Naipaul’s affectionate letter lifted my spirits and explained Vidia’s mood. He was much sweeter, his old encouraging self, when I heard from him again, on his return from India two months later. He praised me, he praised my letters — I was gifted; he complained that he was dull, he was slow, and that he often gave offense without meaning to.

Here were some examples, he said. Shiva had gotten married. Vidia had offended him and offended his wife. He had also offended his editor in New York. The answer was to acknowledge one’s limitations and as a letter writer to write the simplest, most businesslike notes, so that they could not be misconstrued.

I need not have feared that he would be businesslike with me. He described how, at the house of Anthony Powell, he had seen an advertisement for my novel — my first novel — in a New York magazine. He talked about the way Israel, a place he had been bored by, was being praised while the Arabs were being scorned. He recalled how noble the stereotype of the Arabs had once been: “fine gentlemen, romantic desert folk, fair in battle, unconquerable in love”—no more!

After all his travels and all his work, he had insomnia again. His life was a monotony. He welcomed the birds’ singing in the morning. Sleeping pills made him asthmatic. He had lost weight — he was down to 120 pounds. This suffering was an omen: “It is time I set up house in another country.”

He had started his Port of Spain book, a history, which he would eventually title The Loss of El Dorado. Doing research, reading everything on the subject, he stumbled across oddities of scholarship, such as the Spaniard who had devoted his life to proving that Columbus, Cervantes, and Saint Theresa were Jewish.

In an aside in one letter he mentioned that I seemed very happy. That was astute of him. I was happy. I had fallen in love. This was about three months after returning to Uganda. I told Vidia about it and that I planned to get married to this woman, a teacher in Kenya whom I had met in Kampala. She was from London. He congratulated me, said he was delighted. He was also pleased to hear that his magazine pieces about India — the journalism — had been reprinted in Nairobi. I admired his confidence in saying, “It was a good piece of work, and I think one of the best things I have written.” He was putting India aside for good. He had no interest in writing about it ever again, he said.

To cheer himself up, he took a trip to Denmark. But the place depressed him — all the conformity, and the prison cells of houses, the high taxes. Vidia found Danes to be bored and lonely and solitary. To lighten their hearts they drank themselves silly on booze cruises, called “spirit boats,” but ended up more depressed. The saddest expression of Danish solitude was their pornography, which was mere exhibitionism, without innovation: women with “legs wide apart” or men sitting naked on steps “so that the genitals hang visibly down.” He now hated the very word “Scandinavian” as “full of ice and death and sullen coitus.”

A brilliant phrase like “sullen coitus” made me glad I knew him, and also glad to be in Africa, where coitus was never sullen. By the way, Vidia said, the Carib Indians worshiped a devil god called Mah-boya, who probably resembled his namesake, the Kenyan politician Tom Mboya, whose name Vidia always mispronounced.

Still collecting gossip and hearsay for my study of rumors in Africa (their strangeness and their speed of travel), I reported to Vidia a story that involved Tom Mboya. A year before, Mboya’s infant son had mysteriously died. The death was mentioned in the newspapers, but without giving any details. According to the rumor, Mboya had murdered his own son because he had discovered the baby to be half white, the love child of Mrs. Mboya and the U.S. ambassador, William Attwood. This rumor, totally false, was circulating in the British expatriate community in Nairobi.

Any day now, Vidia said, he was going to fly to the West Indies and the United States, to finish his book. But he did not go. His book continued slowly. The next time I heard from him, six weeks later, he was still in London. All his plans had changed.

I had to promise, he insisted, that I would say nothing about a scoop he had just been offered by a magazine that had assigned him to do a profile-interview, in utmost secrecy, with Jacques Soustelle, a French intellectual and political renegade. I had never heard of the man. I had finished my Chinese-grocer novel and had started another; I was now spending all my free time in Embu, in upcountry Kenya, with my fiancée, who taught in an African school. I knew no one who was interested in Vidia’s secret.

I wondered what to make of the journalism he was doing. He had told me once that he did such work for the money. His assignments meant foreign travel. They meant breaking off work on his book — a hard thing to do. I was teaching every day and also working on a novel, so it consoled me to hear about his interruptions.

He asked in one letter whether he should call his West Indian history The Quest and the Question. The book was about two related stories separated by many years: the quest for El Dorado, the golden land, and the question of torture involving a notorious case in Trinidad. I timidly suggested that it seemed a weak and mechanical title and that El Dorado was such an evocative name, couldn’t that be part of it? To ingratiate myself, I told him I was also having a title problem with my new novel.

He was scrapping his tide, he said in reply, and was glad to hear about my novel. Returning to his role of teacher, he asked me whether my novel had arisen out of “a still centre.”

He went on, “Every good book suggests that the writer, however painful its subject, has arrived at some inward peace about it, some inner resolution, even of anger and despair, even though this peace and resolution is purely temporary. So that you know where a man stands.”

That perception had come from the magazine work he was doing. He was opinionated, he had a strong personality, and magazine editors liked this kind of writer. He was being given many assignments. He also wrote pieces for American magazines. One was entitled, “What’s Wrong with Being a Snob?” In it, he made a case for the snob, as though snobs were a victimized minority.

I had never met a snob who was not also a liar, and that was what was wrong about snobbery. But I did not say so to Vidia. His snobbery, like his article (which he never reprinted), seemed to be harmless posturing and pulling rank and, as I had seen, fueled mostly by fear.

I got married in Kampala at the end of 1967. Vidia wrote to congratulate me and mentioned that he himself had been married for thirteen years. In closing, he asked me to buy him an ivory cigarette holder (elephants were still being recycled into such items then). And how about a big yellow meerschaum pipe? Could he have one of those too?

Vidia was in the midst of change. He had decided to sell his house — the house he seemed so fond of. He was selling it for £12,000 to Tristram Powell, whom I had met at the dinner party at Vidia’s. It was actually worth £14,000, but this way Vidia would not need to pay an agent’s commission or have to deal with delays.

He wanted to go to the United States. He wondered whether my older brother, Eugene, could help him find a house to rent in order for him to finish his book. After his book was done, he would be a journalist for a while, just for the money. When he had some money he would start a new book. He suggested that he had an idea for one.

My writing about Africa stimulated him, he said. He too had been thinking of writing about Africa. He sent his love.

In the middle of 1968, in his tiniest handwriting, an effect of concentrated writing and worry, he reflected on the paradoxes of being a writer. He was in Scotland, a houseguest at a baronial mansion. He complimented me on my letters to him.^* They reminded him of Scott Fitzgerald’s, which he had been reading. Fitzgerald had written many letters to his daughter, Vidia said, all about writing. It was the sort of obsession that writers developed about their art. The origin of this was that we all started by wishing to be writers and by mimicking what we had read. Through work we eventually arrived at another level, doing a sort of writing we didn’t really understand. We became lost and questioned the point of writing. It was a problem both the schoolboy and the older writer had to solve.

There was a strong, almost Buddhist element in writing, he said, in that good writing canceled out what had existed before. Even the second half of a book canceled out the first half, and each book canceled out the previous one and existed as a reincarnation of the earlier work.

In this meditation in the Scottish mansion, Vidia reflected on the vanity of fame and posterity, because all the books in the library there seemed so dated. They no longer mattered; fame was nothing. Writers were steadily canceling themselves out, the new replacing the old. The paradox was that the better they were, the more likely they were to be rejected, for they created a standard that would be revised and superseded. That was the saddest part. “Really how unfair we are today to writers who educated us when we were young and sharpened our minds and gave us a new way of looking at the world and made us want to be writers.”

Maugham was almost unreadable now, Vidia said, yet Maugham had once been important in shaping his sensibility. The worst aspect of the study of literature was that it dealt with the past, because literature was alive and mattered, or else it was nothing.

He urged me to consider the notion of time and tradition in relation to two prodigies of nineteenth-century English writing, Charles Dickens and Rudyard Kipling. They had each been immensely successful, yet in their writing they had described a much older version of their culture. This version had been ignored because lesser writers — copycats, missing the point — had simply gone on working in a literary tradition. For example, Kipling wrote about an India that was twenty years out of date, but Kipling’s contemporaries were still imitating Dickens, who himself had set his own books in an earlier period.

With this wise lesson in literature, Vidia sent his love.

I was encouraged to have him as a friend, and what he said was helpful to me, because I felt cut off in my house in Uganda, writing my third novel. The implication I drew from his air letter was that he saw me as a promising modernist, at a frontier in Africa, writing about what I knew. He was encouraging me; he wanted me to understand the paradoxes.

I needed the help. It was June 1968. My first novel, Waldo, had gotten good reviews. Fong and the Indians was about to appear. I was at work on another novel with an African setting, Girls at Play. My first child, a son, had just been born. I had resigned from my job in Uganda and had been hired to teach in Singapore. I was flying by the seat of my pants.

Departing from the blue Chinese-style air-letter forms, Vidia wrote across two sheets of note paper to congratulate us on our new baby. He also congratulated me on leaving Africa after more than five years. He frankly disapproved of the fact that I was going to Singapore to teach English literature, and he claimed never to have heard of the course I was to teach: Jacobean literature — Shakespeare’s contemporaries in the age of James I. But — and here came a Naipaul curve ball—“perhaps you might get me out there as a visiting idler.”

It was just like Vidia to scorn the job I had taken in desperation, and to repeat his contempt for the study of literature, but at the same time to ask me to find him a slot as a visiting writer of the sort he had been, disastrously, in Uganda. It was a paradox he himself admitted. He tried to be high-minded, yet he was the first to confess his contradictions. The example of his candor was his greatest lesson.

Knowing that I needed to establish myself in England, he suggested to the literary editor of The Times that I become a regular reviewer. The money was not the point — I would get £10 for each review — it was, rather, the chance to become part of the London reviewing and writing coterie. I had to be seen as someone who was serious, who had judgment and wit, who was not above reviewing books.

Vidia said that he was traveling, leaving London, but not sure where he was going. He had sold his house. He still wanted to go to the United States. He repeated his request for my brother to find him a house, somewhere in rural America. He still had some journalism to do.

My wife and I moved from Uganda to Singapore with our baby son. This was in the autumn of 1968. I resumed teaching. I wrote some short stories and published them. I began reviewing books for The Times. My third novel was done, and I had an idea for another, more ambitious novel, about life in an African dictatorship. I still had no money. But it was not only poverty that kept me from returning to the States; it was also my curiosity about Southeast Asia — the echo of the gunfire from Vietnam, the effects of the war on nearby countries. And I found that I could teach and write. Teaching was not difficult; I found Shakespeare’s contemporaries illuminating and undemanding, and the violent vengefulness in the plays made sense to my Chinese students, some of whom were ardent supporters of the Cultural Revolution.

Even in Singapore I had regular air letters from my friend Naipaul, who believed in me.

“What lovely Bongo-Wongo addresses you are picking up on the way!” he wrote in a letter with my exotic Singapore street address. A Trinidad stamp on that letter looked equally exotic to me.

In the past, when he was feeling frail from having worked hard, he said, “I feel like a bird with a broken wing.” Now his broken wing was healing, he said. He was in Port of Spain. He had finished his historical narrative, pleased with it for being so contemporary. Even Pat had liked it. He implied that she was often one of his worst detractors. After two years, The Loss of El Dorado was done, and when it appeared it would explain a great deal about the modern world, in which race and class were primary issues. “The book is good.”

From Trinidad, he was embarking on some journalistic assignments in the United States. Needing a visa, he had gone to the U.S. consulate in Port of Spain and been treated with lavish courtesy and deference. He said to me, “Guilt will make my hand shake if I ever write an unkind word about the U.S.”

He had been greeted at the consulate as an important writer. He was granted two visas: one to enter the country, the other to work as a journalist for four years — he underlined the four. The visas had been presented with style, the consul-general emerging from his office to extend his congratulations, the whole consulate staff beaming. “The natives goggling on their benches.”

It mattered a lot to him that he had been singled out from the other islanders and treated with respect. He did not take it for granted. He said he left the consulate feeling weak.

He reported that the literary editor of The Times liked my work and was using the reviews regularly, in spite of having to send the books all the way to Singapore. But the Washington Post was doing the same thing. What with my teaching and my short stories and the novel I had started, I had never worked so hard for so little money. My wife got a job at the Chinese university to keep us afloat, but still we had no savings.

Money was on Vidia’s mind. He complained of high taxes and low standards in Trinidad. He would soon be leaving for New York City. A few months later, in March 1969, he wrote me from the New York apartment of Robert Lowell, where he was a houseguest. Lowell, he said, was the only writer in New York who had read his work. One of his bits of journalism was an interview with Lowell.

Vidia felt awkward being in New York, where no one cared about his work. He said. “It makes me feel an intruder.”

He was out of sympathy with the writers and intellectuals he met in New York: Baldwin, Bellow, Roth, Trilling. He had no patience with their views. He saw them as obsessed and, ultimately, trivial- minded. Half the time he had no idea what they were writing about. They were publicity seekers, he said; their writing was Teutonically wordy. It was better to grow slowly as a writer and to build a reputation book by book. He meant himself, and I guessed it was also a hint to me.

There were aspects of New York that he liked. The wine was good and inexpensive. The city had energy. He envisioned making a life in New York, buying an apartment and spending part of every year there. Indians — not “dot Indians” but “feather Indians”—were on his mind. “I alternate between great happiness and great rage at the violence done to the American Indians,” he said. “I feel the land very much as theirs at dusk, the sky high above Central Park.”

I had told him that I was getting on in Singapore; in spite of the financial narrowness, it was a new place with new people, and it gave me the chance to travel in Burma and Indonesia. I had begun to write Jungle Lovers. Fong had appeared — a small advance, good reviews, but no steady income. I said to myself, If I write a book every year for the next ten years, I am sure I can make a living. I could not think beyond ten years.

Vidia wrote back from New York to wish me well. He said he had been thinking fondly about my wife and son. That touched me at a time when I felt burdened and overworked. I lived in a small, hot semidetached house and wrote in an airless upstairs room. I could write only after my lectures had been delivered, my papers marked, and my wife and child were contented. After eight months in Singapore I had settled into a routine, but this, I swore, would be my last job. I fantasized about quitting, but I had no place to go. I had no plans, except that I was embarked on my fourth novel. My third, Girls at Play, was about to be published in England.

Vidia had plans, he said. He had written a piece for the Telegraph in London and another for The New York Review of Books, about Anguilla. He was planning to spend the spring and summer in the United States and then travel back to London in September, when The Loss of El Dorado came out — not return for his own sake but to give some moral support to his publishers. Then, after London, perhaps Spain, to work on a book — he did not say what he had in mind — because Spain would be inexpensive.

He took an oblique and somewhat credulous interest in astrology and palmistry. The lines on my palm had impressed him. In New York he had met an astrologer who, noting that Vidia was a Leo, gave him a reading and predicted unending travel, both mental and physical. Vidia welcomed the prophecy. He was eager for a phone call that would send him abroad. The astrologer had said that no sooner would Vidia put his suitcase down than he would pick it up again.

Accompanying Norman Mailer in his campaign to be mayor of New York had occupied some weeks of Vidia’s time. That was another piece of journalism. Vidia found Mailer energetic and attractive. He was reading Mailer’s book about the political conventions, Miami and the Siege of Chicago. Mailer had called it “a bazaar of metaphors.” Vidia corrected this: surely Mailer meant similes. Nevertheless, Vidia liked the book, and he liked Mailer. It was strange to hear Vidia praising a living writer and a new book. I had never heard him do this before.

By the way, he wondered, had I read Henry James’s study of Hawthorne? I immediately got it out of the library and read it with pleasure. I wrote back, thanking him for the suggestion. He was still my teacher, my friend.

A month later, he read my new novel and praised me extravagantly. This was the middle of 1969. The book had just appeared in London, but a copy had been sent to Vidia in New York. Girls at Play was a dark book, set in a girls’ school in upcountry Kenya. Though I denied the fact for legal reasons, the school was based on the one where my then fiancée had taught in Embu, in the bush about eighty miles northeast of Nairobi.

Vidia told me he had pounced on the book, and he congratulated me and said it was “very very good”—all this in the first two lines of his air letter.

He had praised me before, but this was different — he said that the book was wonderful and liberating to him. He praised details — that was the best of it, his close reading. In Singapore on hot buggy nights with the ceiling fan croaking, I needed this encouragement. I had written a few chapters of what I expected to be a long novel. I was still writing short stories. I was doing book reviews. I was teaching. How was it possible to work so hard and earn so little?

Never mind, my book was good. V.S. Naipaul said so. He was even grateful to me for having written it — that sounded odd — but he said he would explain this gratitude some other time. He promised that I would get good reviews.

I had managed to please the one person who mattered. And he was more than pleased. He was impressed by its fluency, the transparency of the prose, the dialogue, the opening paragraphs — nearly all of it he found arresting and powerful.

Music to my ears. And there was more: “Above all, this is the work of a man who has come to a resolution about a particular experience… There is an attitude that comprehends and absorbs all the experience that is given.”

This seemed the greatest praise possible. He explained the point about resolution, which he said was an understanding of experience. Knowing what one was doing was an insight — so he said — that Norman Mailer did not have. He had apparently changed his mind about Mailer. He now said he found Mailer’s writing supremely egotistical. I had gone beyond my ego to a stronger objectivity, “the true artist’s detachment — which is not unconcern, far from it.”

He liked the passion, the humor, the nuances, the peculiar characters, the aspects of English decline and African strangeness, the landscape, the emotion. Because he was so positive, he said, he was confident that he could tell me what was less successful. He singled out the confessions. He said they were “stagey.”

I reread his letter. It was the best review I had ever had, from a wise man, who knew me, the man who always said, “Are you sure you want to show this to me? I’m brutal, you know.” Not only brutal but stingy and snobbish. Yet this was Vidia at his best, a subtle and generous man.

“Many congratulations again and again” was his way of signing off.

In the Singapore heat, on my low salary, battling with a new novel and feeling old at the age of twenty-eight, I was very happy. The letter lifted my spirits and sustained me for the next two years in Singapore. I worked with a will. I had been told I was doing the right thing.

I had written Girls at Play off my own bat, without a contract, starting it in Africa, finishing it in Singapore. Here I was, still in Singapore on publication day. Vidia’s letter prepared me for good reviews, and over the following months I got them — praise in the London papers first, then in the provinces, and finally in the United States. The sales were modest, not substantial enough to liberate me from teaching, but it was all a good omen.

His next air letter came from Canada and was dated August 18. It was the day after his thirty-seventh birthday, but he didn’t mention it. Again he had money on his mind. He didn’t have enough, he wanted more, he was insulted when a fee was low. Money was a theme with him, which was fine with me — I needed consolation on that score too. He had invested a small amount in the stock market, but he failed to make a killing. “What I need now is a lot of money,” he said, explaining that if he became rich he would not have to write ever again.

For Vidia, as for me, journalism was money; fiction had to be supported by other work. We were paid for our books, but that money represented only a year’s income at best. I had been turned down by the Guggenheim Foundation, I won no prizes, my advances were low—£250 for Girls at Play in England, a few thousand dollars from my American publisher. I published a book-length novella, Murder in Mount Holly, but that had not earned me much. Therefore, I needed my teaching job and my hack work.

Vidia was the soul of sympathy. He had no cash either. I put some money into stocks and they crashed. I moaned to Vidia. He said that the stock exchange underpinned Western civilization. You had to invest, but you needed to be wise. He analyzed the market, he denounced taxes, he described the fickleness of stocks, he deconstructed inflation, he cursed the necessity to spend.

He had just been in California, writing about John Steinbeck’s Monterey. He doubted that I would like California. San Francisco was atmospheric but no match for New York. He had decided that New York was for him. He loved living in great cities — he was frank in his liking for the nightlife, the dinner parties, famous friends. The word “glamour” was used approvingly throughout his Mailer-for-Mayor piece. He found New York humor profoundly amusing. He put one such exchange into the article.

“I was talking to an old Jew in Brooklyn yesterday,” a Mailer staffer says. “I told him about Mailer. He said, ‘Isn’t he the guy stabbed his wife?’ Nine years, and he’s talking about it like he’d read it in the paper that morning.”

“He probably gets his papers late,” another staffer says.

Vidia said, “New Yorkers protest too much about their problems; in fact it is their problems that give the city its special life and tone.”

Vidia’s Mailer piece appeared in the Telegraph Magazine. He had written a dozen such articles since I had met him, mostly long, discursive pieces of intense analysis. He had traveled in India, the West Indies, Japan, Canada, and the United States. He had published seven novels and three works of nonfiction. Although he had published in the United States, he was hardly known there and his books soon went out of print. Even Vidia admitted he was nowhere — poor and overworked, like me. This was late in 1969.

With Vidia’s plight in mind, I combed through the University of Singapore library’s reference section. I found bound sets of The Spectator and The New Statesman, in which there were scores of book reviews Vidia had written. They were hugely funny, some wickedly so. He was brutal, as he always said; he turned the books inside out, and he was harshest on West Indian authors. He had been writing book reviews since 1957. I read all these uncollected and obscure reviews and as many articles as I could find.

I decided to write a book about his work and proposed the idea to him in an air letter. He welcomed the proposal by opening his heart and telling me that he felt lost, he felt sad. I had to understand this, he said: he had come from nowhere, from nothing. He had been a “barefoot colonial.”

“Think of it like this,” he said. “Imagine the despair to which the barefoot colonial is reduced when, wanting to write, and reading the pattern books of Tolstoy, Balzac et al., he looks at his own world and discovers that it almost doesn’t exist. Hemingway? The barefoot colonial in Paris? Where the Hemingway adventure for him? Try to understand this and see the effort to make art out of this destitution and alienation.”

Writing on his air letter in small script, his return address a loaned house in Gloucestershire, he was experiencing a personal crisis, he said. It related to his being in that house. He was feeling like an exile. All his old uncertainties about nationality, passport, and home had returned to him in this period of inactivity. That his books were so personal was another cause for uncertainty, because he was from a small and incomplete world — not quaint or colorful, but destitute and dangerous to itself — with “spiritual blight.” His world was a fragment, and the people in it indulged themselves in make-believe and fantasy.

He had written honestly about this little world, but was it possible, he wondered, to turn something so private into art or literature? Also — just as important — would it sell?

He felt miserable. He wanted to buy a house but did not know where, “what physical area of the earth.” He wanted to write a book but his sense of crisis told him it would never find its audience. He felt that no one really cared about his dilemma.

I had dilemmas of my own: no money, a book in progress, the plays and poems of Shakespeare’s contemporaries to teach, an awful house with no air conditioning on a Singapore back street. My son was almost two; my wife was pregnant again and wondering whether she had the strength to go on working. As if I didn’t have enough to worry about, the vice-chancellor of the university, Dr. Toh Chin Chye, stopped me outside the library one day and told me my hair was too long.

I was in the right mood to explicate Vidia’s deepening sense of exile. Vidia agreed: he said it was opportune that I had suggested a book about his work. It eased his mind to know that I was eager to write something. In talking about his island, his sadness, his sense of exile, his uncertainty, he was preparing me. He was saying plainly that I had to know his background or else I would misinterpret him.

I took this as encouragement to write a book about his work. I made a bibliography. I read everything he had written, including all the incidental pieces — his 1958 review of Gustie Herrigel’s Zen in the Art of Flower Arrangement, his profile of Graham Greene, pieces in Vogue and Punch, his many London Letters in the Illustrated Weekly of India. Even his journalism sparkled.

In another air letter from Gloucestershire, Vidia stressed how temporary his residence was, how he was shuttling around. He also urged me to get out of Singapore and find a place that was intellectually congenial. He saw me having to endure in Singapore the sort of second-rate society he had known in Trinidad. He was interested that we were having a second child — he seemed a trifle dubious. He said he was pleased that I was writing a new book (“you really are a worker”). He looked forward to my study of his work. He gave me total freedom to criticize, deplore, dismiss anything I wished.

“You must give me the pleasure of seeing what I look like,” he said. “It would be like hearing one’s own voice, seeing oneself walk down the street. Show me!”

Did he want me to be brutal? I didn’t think so. I had told him how much I had liked The Loss of El Dorado. The Italian historian Benedetto Croce had said, “All history is contemporary,” that the present was part of all history that was written. So Vidia’s book explained much of what was going on in the year of its publication, 1970: the issues of race and violence and colonialism. A colony was by its very nature dependent and inferior. Vidia believed that a colony did not have the intelligence or concentration to rebel, which was why colonials had a self-destructive instinct for chaos.

He had been proven right about East Africa. Idi Amin had taken over and threatened to expel the Indians. “What will you do when the crunch comes?” Vidia had asked almost five years before. The crunch was coming in Uganda.

The reviews of El Dorado had been good, though Graham Greene had reservations, finding the prose “airless.” Vidia was unmoved. Reviews did not really help a book, nor did publicity matter. If a book was good it would sell, and it would last.

“The only consolation of the writing profession is that it is fair,” Vidia said in another air letter to me. This was his watchword, that literary excellence was always rewarded, in spite of everything.

He then explained something that he had not had time to go into when he first mentioned it in an air letter almost a year before: how he had been grateful to me for having written Girls at Play. He said that my confidence and forthrightness in the book had encouraged him to think seriously about setting a novel in Africa. It had been something he felt was impossible for him.

Five months after reading my African novel, he had started an African novel of his own. He was happy with its progress. It was a short novel. Writing it, he said, he thought constantly of me.

That was a great compliment: something I had written about Africa had had a positive influence on Vidia. The result was In a Free State, which would not be published for another year.

Around this time I had word from London that B. S. Johnson (“Remember, you’re first a poet”) had committed suicide. In a fit of depression he had sat before a mirror, slashed his wrists, and watched himself bleed to death. He had been just a few years older than me and one of the most optimistic writers I knew. I never found out what went wrong.

Vidia kept me confident, and he filled me with such hope that I began to think of leaving Singapore, taking my wife and two children — my second son, Louis, had been born in Singapore in 1970—somewhere and never again working for a salary, never having a boss or employees. Vidia had always emphasized the freedom of a writer. It was something I badly wanted. I finished Jungle Lovers and decided to take off for a few weeks, to get on a ship to Borneo and climb Mount Kinabalu. My wife said, “If that’s what you want…”

So I went to Borneo by sea. In the town of Kota Kinabalu I hired a Malay man to guide me. We went up and down the mountain without any technical equipment, hiking through jungles and upwards through forests of ferns and carnivorous plants. The pitcher plants were pitcher-sized, and purple orchids hung in clusters from wet trees. We spent several nights in mountainside shelters. On my way home I decided to give Singapore one more year and then re-sign.

I asked Vidia where I should go.

Think carefully about what you are planning, he said in his next air letter. I had mentioned the English countryside, but he said I was too young to retreat there. I needed to have connections to society. I should not cut myself off. “Life appears very long; but no one does much creative work of a new sort after fifty; and the next twenty years are of great importance to you.” I was twenty-nine.

He doubted that England was a good place to live. It was sterile; there was no intellectual debate; English writers were cliquey. A writer had to be a part of the world if his work was to matter. “Hemingway, Fitzgerald and the others, who were outside the world, are bad writers, for their inability to see beyond their careers as ‘writers.’”

It was only possible, he said, to live in the English countryside if I had a book to write. Otherwise it was dreary and pointless. In any case, I would need to go to London once a week to see people, buy books, keep in touch. He advised me not to buy a house but simply to see what England was like. I should not commit myself, because essentially a house in the country was a place to write, a retreat. The world was elsewhere. He had been living in Gloucestershire for ten months, but as soon as he finished In a Free State he was getting out, he said, “to see the world again.”

A month later there was another air letter. He had been brooding over my expression “cottage in Dorset,” which was what I had in mind. He satirized my words, saying that I was thinking in clichés about the English countryside—“milk maids, spring mornings, polite rural greetings,” and also the absurd daydream of writing in the bosom of England on a sunny day behind the bright mullioned windows of my library.

Yet I had no fantasies of this kind. I was looking for an inexpensive house in a rural setting because I had a book to write. I had finished with Africa. I was making notes for a new novel, set in Singapore, about a man who becomes stuck there, working for a cruel Chinese boss (“Get a haircut”) — my nightmare — and how he survives by pimping. Vietnam was to be part of it, since American soldiers came to Singapore all the time on R and R. I mentioned Dorset as a possibility because my in-laws now lived there and were looking for a house we might rent. I was itching to quit my job; I longed to spend my whole day writing.

In Singapore I was the last of the Mohicans: all the other expatriates in my department had left. The new policy was to hire only Chinese lecturers. I was asked when I would be leaving; they wanted to replace me with an ethnic Chinese person.

“I’m staying,” I said, just to annoy them. Privately I vowed to leave as soon as I could.

It was not merely that I felt overworked. I was also sick of Staff Club drunks, grousing expats, rude Singaporeans, high humidity, and monsoon rain. I hated our house, the stinks from the storm drain, the way my pen slipped through my perspiring fingers. There was no hinterland in Singapore. To cure myself of this sense of confinement, I traveled, taking turns with my wife in looking after the two children. But I had the better of it. I took the train from Singapore to Bangkok, then went to Burma, to Bali, and hiked in northern Sumatra, among the Batak people. In Bali late in 1970, I seriously considered dropping out, disappearing with my family, taking to the hills. But that was the effect of a brief experiment in smoking heroin. I was soon back at my desk.

When In a Free State was done, Vidia said in an air letter from London, “This book will be of special interest to you: you and you alone, for reasons you will understand when you read it, are able to say certain things about it.”

He is my friend, I thought. I have a friend. I was a part of his writing life now, and he was certainly part of mine. In the dedicated diaristic activity of letter writing, I reported my progress — and he praised it; I sought his advice — and he obliged me; and we talked about the world. He was right about his book. I read it with special interest. I recognized many faces and landscapes.

Vidia went to Jamaica early in 1971. He sent me an air letter from Kingston to say that he had found some of his early articles back home in Trinidad and was struck by how hard he had worked and how quickly time had passed. He said, “I had the curious feeling that I was looking over the relics of a dead man.”

He urged me to press on with the book about his work. He listed all the obscure magazines he had written for, including The Illustrated Weekly of India, The Economic Weekly (Bombay), and London Life, Twentieth Century, and Queen. He wanted me to succeed with my book. He was sure there was a market for it. Still he was nowhere in the United States, and in spite of the prizes he had won in Britain, his sales were small.

In the middle of May 1971, he reported in an air letter that he was at a very low ebb. He had retreated to Wiltshire, to a bungalow on a large estate. The bungalow was another borrowed address that made him feel like an exile. He had been sick and depressed for five months and had not written anything and so had earned nothing, which he underlined.

“A terrible intimation of age, failing powers, mortality. I suppose I fell ill because I have been deeply depressed these past two and a half years, after the mind-bending labor of El Dorado.” In a Free State had been “a great triumph of will” but had exhausted him. He felt “a very deep fatigue and a great anxiety about the future.” He was thirty-nine.

I did not understand, though I was sympathetic. I had handed in my resignation in Singapore and given six months’ notice. I also felt anxiety about the future and had no idea where I should go. I was determined to live by my writing. I had two tiny children and no savings. My wife gamely said that she would get a job, but still I was uneasy. My novel Jungle Lovers was about to appear in Britain.

Vidia reported from his bungalow: “Marvelous reviews!”

What a pal, I thought, passing on this great news. All the reviews were good — he included the quotes, he underlined the praise, he said that though writing was agony, such reviews were its reward. He was happy for me. “I cannot tell you how your success delights me.”

My novel was taken seriously by the critics. Such a reception boded well for its U.S. publication a few months away. I was heartened, on the verge of leaving Singapore for good. Another piece of news was that we had found a house to rent in Dorset, not in a village (“polite rural greetings”) but in the depths of the countryside, an old forge on a back road.

Vidia said the place was not far from his Wiltshire bungalow. He looked forward in the autumn to our visiting him and walking to Stonehenge. When I visited him we could have “an editorial discussion,” he said. In researching my Naipaul book, I had told him I had found many essays and pieces that would comprise a collection of his nonfiction. The countryside was “ridiculously Hardyesque.” One day while out walking he had come upon a sheep-shearing ceremony, which he described in detail: giant shearer, farm laborers, intimidated sheep, cluttered shearing shed, masses of wool grease, ritualistic wrapping of fleece. He made it sound like act 4, scene 3 of The Winter’s Tale. And he concluded, “So many things survive even in our polluted world.”

Not long after this, I nervously disengaged myself from Singapore. My wife encouraged me. She had helped locate the house in Dorset. We left Singapore on November 1, 1971, exactly three years after arriving there. In that time I had not left Southeast Asia, nor had I made a single phone call — no phone. But then I had not had a phone in Africa either. Eight years without a telephone had sharpened my letter writing. I had published five novels.

The disorienting experience of going halfway around the world with two young children — overnight in Karachi, a delay in Beirut, the fireworks and bonfires on our arrival in London on Guy Fawkes Day — left me with a sense of vertigo — dizziness and a feeling that I was falling down, my legs liquefying under me. In London my older son, who was three, begged to be carried. I picked him up and he puked on my shoulder.

London was cold and damp, black streets, black buildings. I had not been cold for eight years. I was distracted, and in the confusion of Waterloo station, heading for the train to Dorset, burdened with boxes and suitcases, the children pale and limp with fatigue, I was approached by a porter pulling an iron baggage cart. He was black, some of the travelers were black, the sweepers I saw were black.

“Jambo, kitu gani?” I said, because the porter had hesitated.

He drew back further and did not greet me in return.

“Mimi nataka mipagazi awiri,” I went on. “Sasa hivi.”

He did not seem to care that another porter was needed right now, as my boxes and cases were tottering.

“Kasha ume anguka,” I said, drawing his attention to a tipped-over box, and wishing for him to fasten them all on his cart, I directed him, “Fungo mizigo hii.” But where was my umbrella? “Mwavulo uko wapi?”

The man was smiling, not helping, not moving.

“Jina lako nani?” I asked, because it sometimes helped if you knew a porter’s name.

But he said nothing. The children began to fuss. My wife was tugging my arm. At that point I lost it and decided to tell him to bugger off.

“Twende,” I said. “Let’s go.”

“Are you out of your mind?” my wife said.

Only then did I realize that I had been mumbling to the man in Swahili. Not out of my mind, but out of my element.

A three-hour train ride brought us to the depths of the countryside. It was visibly different from and preferable to the parklike countryside nearer London. Here the hills were rougher, higher, and continuous; the trees were taller, the stone walls wider and more tumbled. Nothing was manicured. In our stone house a fire was burning in the fireplace. I found a room to write in at the top of the house. The wind pressed on the window glass, and when it came from the south it had the tang of the sea, which was seven miles away. Big bare oak trees, sodden green fields, muddy lanes, a low sky of tufty clouds. It was hardly three o’clock and already dark.

I thought: We can stay here about ten years. Then go home.

A week later, a note from Vidia, not an air letter but a thick white envelope. Please telephone, he wrote, and, frugal as ever, he added, “It’s cheap at weekends and after 6 P.M.”

8. The 9:50 to Waterloo

HIS BUNGALOW he called The Bungalow, though many years after I first saw it, I discovered that its real name was Teasel Cottage. The truth was important to Vidia, but who could blame him for suppressing the fact of that silly name?

Small and squat and bad for his asthma, The Bungalow was the sort of contrived structure he usually called bogus and hated for its distressed flint and its quaintness — and here he was living in one. But this bungalow was on the grounds of a famous estate, Wilsford Manor, which I suspected Vidia liked for its old-fashioned glamour and its history of house parties. Wilsford’s owner, known as an eccentric — as wealthy lunatics are always described — was so completely crazy that the manor house was little more than an asylum in which he was the sole inmate.

The manor house of the estate was a expensive fraud, made to look ancient but actually fairly new, built around 1900 by Lord Glenconner and anticipating Disneyland fakery in its late-seventeenth-century style of checkered flint and stone. It had ornate gables, and even the sort of mullioned windows that Vidia had scorned in an air letter. It was surrounded by made-to-look-old walls and phony gates, and it was secluded, on a side road that looked more like a lane, near Amesbury, outside a village called Lake (the mythical home of Sir Launcelot). There was no lake but there was a river, the Avon — another Avon, one of very many, for “avon” in Old English means river.

The river ran through Wilsford Manor. Earlier generations who had lived on the land had created water meadows in the low boggy ground near the river. In full daylight the sky was a high and wide dome over Salisbury Plain, and Stonehenge was an hour’s walk through farmers’ fields. “Stoners,” Vidia called it, and sometimes “the Henge.” What was striking about Wilsford Manor were its trees, nearly all of them dead, having been throttled by dense climbing ivy, clumps and clusters of it. From the windows of The Bungalow these dead black trees were visible, strangled but still standing, thickly bandaged with ivy.

“He loves to look at ivy,” Vidia said. “He doesn’t care that it kills the trees.”

Stephen Tennant, he meant, the lord of Wilsford Manor. Teasel Cottage had been built for him but he had never used it. Tennant had various hearty ancestors and a few well-known relatives, some of them having titles. He himself was “The Honorable,” which was decisive proof that Vidia was right when he guffawed over “crooked aristocrats” and mocked English titles as meaningless.

Tennant had been out of his mind for years. “I am the Prince Youssoupoff of England!” he sometimes screamed. His hair was dyed purple, and sometimes hennaed. He put on makeup every morning, crimson lipstick, rouge for his cheeks, and eye shadow — he was said to have sixty-six shades of eye shadow. He never went anywhere without his teddy bear and his toy plush monkey. Though he seldom stirred outside his house, he was not a recluse; he sometimes traveled to Bournemouth to buy cosmetics, and now and then went to London and even New York. He wrote bad poems. Before he went completely off his head, he had been a socialite. He had known Willa Cather and E. M. Forster, and one of his lovers had been the war poet Siegfried Sassoon. He also painted. His childishly hyperbolic pictures were of cartoonish men, sailors mostly, lascars, matelots, with the faces of lecherous cherubs, big biceps, and improbable bulges in their trousers, some like cucumbers and some like cantaloupes.

An idle, silly queen, Stephen Tennant was upper class and rich, so people laughed at his jokes and called him marvelous. He was looked after by a couple, Mr. and Mrs. Skull—“the Skulls,” Vidia called them, always referring to John and Mary Skull as a pair. In protecting Tennant and attending to him, the Skulls, kindly and long-suffering, had become the sort of English servants who were indistinguishable from masters. They had power — nanny power, butler boldness, “Begging your pardon, sir, but…”—and they stood between sad, giggling Stephen and the world. Were anyone to attempt to remove the strangling ivy from the trees on the estate, the Skulls would put a stop to that, smartish, as they might say. “We’ll have none of that here.”

But the black ivy made the place spooky and gave the trees an asymmetrical shape. The density and damage of the ivy obscured the varieties and species of the trees. They had the starkness of gallows, all standing in the soggy water meadows.

After almost nine years in the tropics, I could not believe how dark and unfriendly this landscape looked. Haunted was a perfect word for it. It seemed to me the weirdest place I had ever been. I felt a stronger sense of alienation than I had ever known in Bundibugyo. I looked at the dead and decaying trees and thought of Tennant.

The oddest thing was that Vidia had not set eyes on Tennant. In the event, after fifteen years Vidia had only a glimpse of the man, and he never spoke to him. Of all the strange places Vidia had lived, this was by far the strangest. But The Bungalow was cheap: Vidia paid his nominal rent to Lord Glenconner, Stephen’s brother Christopher Tennant, and Vidia became the writer at the bottom of the garden, living within shouting distance of a crackpot who often said, “Some people think I’m a genius.”

The Bungalow was poorly lit, with a low ceiling and thick cold walls and small windows. The flatness of Wiltshire was unlike anything in the west of Dorset, the neighbor county, where we lived. We were seventy miles away, in the rugged hills at the lip of Marshwood Vale, among the hedgerows, hardly hedgerows, sportive briars, and crumbling rock walls and earthworks. Near our house, called The Forge, there were old hill forts and small dark churches. The nearest church, in the village of Stoke Abbott, had been built in the eleventh century. The Forge had five rooms. I sat in the smallest one upstairs, writing my novel Saint Jack. Singapore and sunlight and mischief on my inky pages; and outside my window dark skies, wet lumpy fields, and black leafless trees, all oaks, which howled when the salt wind tore through their branches.

Please telephone, please visit, Vidia had written.

“You are phoning at the most expensive time of day!” he said when I spoke to him. It was eleven in the morning. I was not extravagant but careless. I was eager to see him again. We agreed on a day.

Vidia had prepared me for the social rituals of English life, the stages of getting acquainted, which started with a cup-of-coffee meeting and progressed, as the friendship ripened, to drinks at five and then the greater commitment of lunch. Dinner was the highest level of intimacy. “Dinner is grand,” Vidia said. “Dinner is important.” Meals and rituals meant a great deal to him. He always insisted on choosing the wine, though he seldom paid for it. (“People enjoy paying. I don’t want to spoil their pleasure.”) He noticed the quality of the food, even if he did not eat much. He judged people by what they offered him — the restaurant, the meal, the wine, the conversation, even the way that people dressed. If they were badly dressed he was insulted. He took everything personally. Your shoes not shined? That was a comment on him. Your scruffiness was rudeness.

I had bought a bottle of wine in our market town of Bridport, on the river Brit, and set off with my wife, leaving plenty of time for the trip, knowing Vidia to be an obsessive timekeeper. Lateness was also rudeness.

Preparing for such a visit, I was always reminded of his once saying about someone, “You see? He is afraid he is going to do something wrong and therefore he does everything wrong. Anxious about failing, he fails. It is almost deliberate.”

But Vidia was also my friend. The last time we had been together, I was in Uganda and had published nothing. Five years had passed. I had published Waldo, Fong and the Indians, Girls at Play, Murder in Mount Holly, Jungle Lovers. I was done with V. S. Naipaul: An Introduction to His Work. I had just received an advance copy of my collection of short stories, Sinning with Annie. I was half done with Saint Jack. Eight books: I was thirty.

My advances had been small, my sales modest; still, I knew I had done the right thing in chucking my Singapore job and striking out on my own. I had done it with Vidia’s encouragement. He had insisted there was no middle way. A writer had to be a free man. Anyone with a salary and a boss and office obligations was not free.

This subject came up on the way to Vidia’s.

“I want to get a job,” my wife said. She had an Oxford education, she was intelligent, and to her — to many women at that time — a job represented a sort of freedom.

“What will you do in Dorset?”

“We’ll have to move to London. There are no jobs here.”

But I liked Dorset, liked its darkness most of all — I wanted to write about it. This remote part of Dorset had pagan roots, witch stories, and on its prettiest churches ugly-faced gargoyles known locally as hunky-punks; it was deeply rural, snug and distant and cozy. The rent was low, and the hinterland was full of dropouts, potters and painters, farm laborers, rat catchers, and farriers. I met them at the pub, playing darts and skittles and bar billiards, at the Gollop Arms in South Bowood, which was not even a hamlet, just a crossroads. Up the road, at Four Ashes, another crossroads, there was a haunted house, called The Black House.

We traveled east on the road to Vidia’s, talking about jobs; from Powerstock to Evershot and Wynford Eagle and Toller Porcorum and Puddletown near Tolpuddle, and onward past East Coker, where T. S. Eliot was buried.

“This is so beautiful,” I said.

“I’d rather be in London,” she said.

The thought of sooty bricks and filthy air and sour faces in London only depressed me, and in this mood of disagreement we arrived at Wilsford Manor and rolled up to The Bungalow. Vidia, who was a keen receptor of vibrations, definitely sensed the unresolved conflict, a sense of static and clatter in the air. I could tell, because he was so solicitous. He also knew a thing or two about marital quarrels. He was chirping, glad to see us.

“Before we go in — look. You see that wall?”

It was a thick cracked battlement near The Bungalow.

“It’s not real,” Vidia said. “One is supposed to see it from the window, but up close — look! It is just a folly. It tricks the eye.”

Pat emerged, chafing her red hands, looking harassed, always the nervous cook: she was obviously flustered in her cooking.

“This is for you, Vidia.” I gave him the bottle of Beaune and my advance copy of Sinning with Annie, inscribed To Vidia and Pat, with love, Paul.

“Paul, Paul.” He glanced at the label. His phrase for such a gesture was “swiftly assessed.” He saw everything in a flash. The wine passed. He commented on the car, a Singer, and on my shirt, my jacket.

“How well you look,” Vidia said. “So young, and you are working so hard.”

“Such a long way,” Pat was saying to my wife in her purring voice as she led her into the house. Women with women, men with men.

“Vidia, you have something on your nose.”

I did not want to say “in your nostrils,” but his fingers went to his nostrils.

“Snuff,” he said. “I’m passionate about it. Want to try some?”

The snuff was in small tins that looked like pillboxes. Vidia had five or six of them — different flavors. But this was not the time for snuff; that was for after lunch. He was tapping the containers of snuff and puffing his pipe as Pat finished setting the table, my wife helping. Vidia and I, the men, were kicking our heels, waiting to be fed. I felt awkward doing nothing, but Vidia chatted happily about snuff. He always converted an enthusiasm into a study. Last year it had been muesli, next year it would be vintage port or the stock market or his garden.

“Do sit down,” Pat said.

We had soup, then poached salmon and potatoes and brussels sprouts. There was a green salad in a bowl that went untouched. Pat was too frazzled and anxious to meet the implacable demands of a kitchen, too unconfident to juggle cookbooks. An insecure person is lost in front of a stove. Cooking requires confident guesswork and improvisation — experimentation and substitution, dealing with failure and uncertainty in a creative way. And Vidia was a challenge: a vegetarian food snob who could not cook and who never helped. He sat and was served.

“I want you to try some of this, Paul.”

He poured. I sipped.

“Hold it in your mouth. There — do you taste the almonds, the peaches? It’s a complex finish, oaken with a hint of chalk. Do you get it? Isn’t it delicious? It must be savored.”

He tipped some into my wife’s glass.

“I won’t have any,” Pat said.

He sipped from his own glass. “And just the slightest hint of rose petals.”

“It’s very good,” my wife said.

“Have some salad,” Pat said. “Vidia is so difficult. He won’t eat salad. Just fusses.”

Vidia shrugged. He was fastidious, unyielding, always on the lookout for any sign of meat. Meat disgusted him. It was flesh, it was sinew, it reduced the eater to the level of a cannibal. I always had the sense that he was talking about much more than meat when he was talking about meat. Gravy was just as bad, for the way it tainted vegetables. “Tainted” was a favorite word.

“Do you get up to London much?” my wife asked.

“When I need a haircut,” Vidia said.

“But you must miss your London house,” I said.

“It’s over. I have been paid. It’s in the bank. My ‘house money,’ I call it.”

“We’d love to move. All our things are in storage,” Pat said.

That explained the starkness of The Bungalow, the small bookcase, the few pictures, the bed-sitter atmosphere.

“Where to live?” Vidia said. He raised his arms in the Italian way. “Where?”

My wife said, “Swinging London.”

“London does not swing for me,” Vidia said. “This is serious, man. Where can one live? Tell me, Paul. Do you think I should live in America?”

“You might like it. You said you liked New York City.”

“I have been thinking of something wild, someplace rugged. Mountains. Large tracts of land.”

“Montana?”

“Montana! I shall go to Montana.”

“Cold winters,” I said.

“Lovely.”

“Snow. Ice storms. Blizzards.”

“I adore snow. I adore dramatic weather.”

“What about me?” I asked. “Where should I go?”

Vidia was never flippant. He frowned, he thought a moment, he stopped eating. “You must make your name here,” he said. “Forget America for the moment. It’s just depressing. The display of ego. The Mailer business. Roth — the sour grapes of Roth. And what these people don’t understand when they praise Hemingway and Fitzgerald is that Hemingway and Fitzgerald are bad writers, man. Bad, bad!”

My wife said, “I quite like Tender Is the Night.”

“Bogus emotion. Bogus style. All forced. His letters to his daughter are excellent — no bogus display there. Just a father addressing his daughter. But his novels say nothing. And all this nonsense about his wife.”

“Zelda,” my wife said.

“She was crazy,” Vidia said. “Out of her mind.”

“Oh, Vidia,” Pat said, beginning to scold.

“I am explaining to Paul why he will find a greater degree of appreciation of his work in England. He does not indulge in bogus displays of ego.”

“I am not talking about that,” Pat said.

“Can I pass anyone the salad?” I said.

“Zelda,” Vidia said. “I am so bored with the self-dramatization of the female soul. It is really just a way of pleasuring the body.”

“She wrote a novel, Save Me the Waltz,” my wife said.

“I am speaking in general, not about any particular book. I am speaking about this bogus feminism, the way it makes women trivial-minded.”

My wife said quietly, “Women are trying to liberate themselves from traditional roles that have confined them. That’s why a job—”

“Women long for witnesses, that is all,” Vidia said. “Witnesses to their pleasure or their distress.”

“Vidia, do stop,” said Pat. “You are being such a bore.”

He smiled and said, “Why are women so obsessed with their bodies? Men are like that in adolescence, but these women are adults.”

“A lot of women are unhappy, I suppose,” I said.

“No, no. Deep down they are very happy. Give them their witnesses and they will be even happier.”

My wife had fallen silent.

Pat said, “I have a lovely apple pie that Mrs. Griggs made.”

Vidia said, “Where is Griggs? I haven’t seen her today.”

“She’s got the brasses today at the church. There’s a christening, one of her nieces. She’s polishing the brasses.”

“I won’t have any pie, thank you,” my wife said.

“Coffee then,” Pat said. “Now Vidia, go into the parlor. I won’t have you ranting.”

“What are you chuntering on about?” Vidia got up from the table. “Paul, let’s try some snuff.”

Again I was acutely aware that Pat and my wife had been left behind to clear the table and make coffee. I made an attempt to help, but Pat waved me away. She said, “Vidia has been dying to see you.”

He showed me how to take snuff. I tried several flavors, tapped some on the back of my hand and snorted it, and I sneezed explosively.

Vidia did not sneeze. The snuff vanished into his nose. He could not explain the anticlimax. He just laughed. Then he and I went for a walk to the old water meadows, and he explained how they had been made. He had become acquainted with the shrubs, he knew the names of the wildflowers, the different grasses, and even the trees that were dead and covered with ivy. He knew which were oaks and which were yews and which were ash. He talked a bit about his landlord, but in the most respectful way; he mentioned the Skulls.

“There isn’t time to go to the Henge,” he said. “But you’ll come again, won’t you?”

“Oh, yes.”

“We’ll walk to Stoners.”

It was growing dark: the November dusk, which seemed to rise from the ground like the vapor of night, brimming and blackening; not a dying light but a dark tide of mist that made you think you were going blind at three o’clock on an English afternoon in late autumn.

Using the bathroom back at The Bungalow, I saw that, as in London, Vidia and Pat had separate bedrooms. I knew it from glimpses of certain books and clothes. They were the sort of bedrooms that suggested insomnia and loneliness.

“We must go,” I said.

“Please have some tea,” Pat said. “And there’s cake.”

We had tea and plates of fruitcake, and I tried Mrs. Griggs’s apple pie. Vidia speculated about Montana. He said he would be going to Trinidad in the new year. When we put our coats on he said, “It is so good to see you. You’re going to be all right.”

“Come back and see us again,” Pat said.

In the darkness outside, I heard Vidia whimper. Then he said, “I don’t want you to go. I’ll be depressed after you leave.”

“Vidia,” Pat said in a soothing voice.

He looked small and blurred in this rural darkness, and the wall of Wilsford Manor made the darkness greater, like a door closing behind us.

It was dark the whole way — no streetlights on these country roads. My wife was silent, ruminating.

“You said they were so happy,” she said after a while. “I don’t think they’re happy at all.”

“Aren’t you glad we came?”

“Yes. I pity Pat, but I’m glad I saw her. I never want to end up like that.”

She was silent all through Wiltshire and well into Dorset. In the lights of Dorchester she seemed to waken, and she spoke again.

“But he isn’t interested in me.”

“He is.”

“He never once asked me what I did. He didn’t ask about the children. Just you two, the boys, talking about their writing.”

“I think Vidia feels awkward around women.”

“No, not awkward. They irritate him. He dislikes them. He mocked Zelda, and what does he know about her? He mocked feminism. That could mean he’s madly attracted to women but that he hates the thought of it.”

In the six years I had known Vidia, I had never thought about him in this way.

“Never mind,” my wife said. “He’s your friend, not mine.”

Back at The Forge, I buried myself in my novel, Saint Jack. I also wrote several book reviews a week, one for the Washington Post, one for The Times. But the money was poor. I began to live on my small savings. My wife said, “See?” I was hopeful I would sell Saint Jack and be solvent again. I had applied once more for a Guggenheim. A letter to me at The Forge said that I had been turned down. Why did it bother me so much that the Guggenheim Foundation had spelled my name wrong in their letter of rejection? I complained to Vidia.

“Be glad they turned you down,” he said. “Those foundation grants are for second-raters, people playing with art. You don’t need them. You’re going to be all right.”

We spoke by phone. At the age of thirty, I had my first telephone. The Bungalow was a long way by road from The Forge — hours of winding roads and country lanes clogged with tractors, slow drivers, elderly cyclists, and herds of cows. But we were on the same railway line, the Exeter Line to Waterloo. My nearest station, Crewkerne, was just over the county line in Somerset; Vidia’s was Salisbury.

Winter had come. A housing boom in London meant that we would probably never be able to afford a house there. Never mind, I was happy to stay in the countryside, working all day, kids at the nursery school in Beaminster, up at the pub at night playing bar billiards. I marveled at the farm laborers who drank in the pub. They were full of vicious opinions and xenophobia. “I says to the bugger, ’Well, you can fuck off back to where you come from.’” One day there was news that a party of children on a school trip had become lost in a sudden snow squall in the Cairngorms, and seven of them had frozen to death in the snow.

Old Fred, sitting by the Gollop Arms fireplace, said, “Serve ’em right. When I was at school we never went on these fancy trips to Scotland.”

Every two weeks I took the train to London, turned in a review, sold my review copies for cash at Gaston’s as Vidia had done five years before, had lunch, mooched, walked the streets, and got a late train back to Dorset. Dinner on the train: “More roast potatoes, sir?” The lights flying past, villages twinkling in the blackness.

“Let’s have lunch in London,” Vidia said during one of our phone calls.

“What about Wheeler’s?” We’d had lunch there on my first visit to London. It was the only restaurant I knew, and even so I avoided it, because of the expense.

“The Connaught is better,” Vidia said. “Although many of your fellow countrymen eat there, it really is quite satisfactory. Shall we say the Connaught?”

“Fine,” I said.

“You’ll have to book it,” he said.

He met me on the train, boarding the 9:50 to Waterloo, which I had boarded an hour and a half earlier at Crewkerne. Yeovil, Sherborne, Gillingham, Shaftesbury, then Salisbury, where he appeared on the platform, a small, dapper man with thick black hair, wrapped up against the cold — muffler, collar up, gloves — yet looking exotic, almost a spectacle, a small Indian in Salisbury station in 1971, all the English people towering over him and deliberately not seeing him. Nor did he take any notice of them.

Seeing me, he nodded and looked relieved. He slid the compartment door open and took a seat opposite. The other passengers averted their eyes, which made them look even more attentive. A tall man I had seen boarding at Sherborne, probably from the school there, was holding a small faded clothbound book close to his face. He was not reading but listening, for Vidia had already started to speak to me.

“Paul, Paul, you have something on your mind. I can tell.”

“No. I’m fine.”

“Your wife is not happy. I have a vibration.”

“She wants to get a job.”

“Good! Earn a few pence.”

“What about you? How’s things?”

“I have a broken wing,” he said. It was his usual expression for exhaustion and near collapse. But he explained. “For the past fifteen years I have been driven by an enormous tension.” He stiffened and grimaced in illustration, and then he went limp. “I am now so exhausted that the act of creation scares me. I’m tired. I’m idle. Insomnia, man. But look at you. Full of ideas, writing your novels. Tell me, who are you seeing in London?”

I told him.

Vidia said, “But he is no one.”

I mentioned another name.

Vidia said, “Who is he? Is he anybody?”

I told him a third name.

Vidia said, “Bogus, man. All bogus. They do not exist.”

“They’ve been pretty good to me — I mean, giving me work.”

“Of course. You do your work. You are busy. You have ideas. But these people will draw off your energy. After you see them you are very tired, aren’t you?”

“I suppose so.” But what did that prove? After I saw Vidia, I was very tired too, and sometimes my head hurt, my brain feeling nagged at.

“They are sucking your energy.”

At the word “sucking,” the schoolmaster from Sherborne in the corner seat glanced up from his book, then quickly covered his face with it.

“They will destroy you,” Vidia said. “They are playing with art. I’ll tell you a story. The first man you mentioned”—out of delicacy, Vidia did not repeat his name—“he has no gift, yet he wrote a novel. ‘I am a novelist’—the big provincial thing. He is from a rural area. He wrote his bogus novel. Just playing with art. He wrote another — farmers, provincials. But he is in London. He is bringing news. He begins to move in grander circles, still playing with art. His provincial wife is very unhappy. She thinks he is a genius. She doesn’t know he is playing with art. He is caught with another woman. It is his right. He is an artist, a novelist, he can do such things. But his wife is in despair. She kills herself. Why?”

Now the schoolmaster was frankly gaping and so was I.

“Because he played with art.”

Green fields, greener than the summer fields of Africa, and clumps of trees moved past the windows, a bouncing belt of scenery. Crows flew up.

“Don’t play with art.”

We stopped at Andover. No one got off. The last seat in our compartment was taken by a woman who seemed startled when I spoke.

“I’ll keep that in mind,” I said. “I see In a Free State everywhere.”

“Do you? I’m afraid I have no interest in that.”

“It’s sure to be shortlisted for the Booker Prize.”

“Prizes are such a con. I think the Americans have the right idea. Sell the book, don’t go looking for prizes.”

“I mean, you were so prescient about the East African Indians being thrown out.”

“The book is important.”

“I wonder what they made of it in Africa.”

“Tommy McCoon wouldn’t like it.”

The man in the corner seat looked up again.

“But it’s a big book.”

A large, neat sign lettered Stop Coloured Immigration was painted on the stonework under a bridge near Basingstoke.

Vidia stared straight ahead. “And you booked a table at the Connaught. Oh, good.”

At Waterloo the compartment emptied fast, and as we were leaving I saw on the seat the faded book the man I had taken to be a schoolmaster had been reading. Yes, I had been right in guessing he was a schoolmaster. The book was Cicero’s Select Orations, a Latin text, no name on the flyleaf but many pencil marks in the margins.

“We’ll take it to Lost Property,” Vidia said.

On the way to Lost Property, Vidia recited an imagined dialogue between the book’s owner and someone else. It’s gone, I’m sure of it. Then, Have a look at Lost Property. Someone might just have turned it in. And, Couldn’t possibly. Then, Do let’s look. There’s just a chance…

We left the book with the clerk who sat among all the umbrellas and sinister-looking parcels.

Vidia had books to sell. We made the circuit: a taxi to Gaston’s, the tobacconist for Player’s Navy Cut, the newsagent, then a taxi to the Connaught, in Carlos Place. It puzzled me slightly that I had paid for both taxis.

The doorman at the Connaught was dressed in a top hat and a dark caped ulster with green piping at the seams. He had a red face and side-whiskers. The porter was mustached and alert; he wore a frock coat and striped trousers. There were fresh flowers in a vase near the entrance. The etched mirrors gleamed. All these Dickensian touches were distinct signs that the Connaught was expensive.

We were met at the entrance to the Grill Room and shown to a table. The waiter was subservient in the bossy English way — that was a bad sign too. We were given menus. Vidia asked for the wine list. He pinched his glasses to get the right angle and looked at the list with serious concentration for a full minute. Seeming to have found the right bottle, he looked up at me.

“You will do well here,” he said. “Michael Ratcliffe is very pleased with your reviews.”

Ratcliffe was the literary editor of The Times.

I said, “I hate doing them.”

“They force you to make a judgment on a book. It’s important to reach conclusions. Most people have no idea what they think of a book after they’ve read it.”

The sommelier came over to us. He was dressed in black and wore a chain around his neck and could have passed for a mayor wearing the gold insignia of his office. He saw Vidia with the wine list.

“Have you made a choice, sir?”

Vidia said to me, “Let’s get a real wine. Let’s get a classic. A white burgundy.” He put his finger on his selection. “Number seventy-eight.”

“Very good, sir. An excellent choice. Shall I bring it now?”

Vidia nodded. The sweating silver bucket was set up and the bottle opened, the cork sniffed. It was a Puligny-Montrachet. Vidia sipped some and worked it around his teeth.

“It’s good,” he said. “So many flavors. The roots of these vines go very deep. It gives complexity — taste the chalk?”

I sipped it. Was that what chalk tasted like?

“What was that name again?” I asked. I picked up the wine list and, pretending to examine the name, I glanced at the price. It was eleven pounds. The review I was about to turn in would net me ten pounds.

“The roots of your California vines are much shallower, because of the rainfall. It’s not bad — different virtues. Savor their differences. These French wines have deep roots.” He sipped again.

A beef trolley was wheeled over. It contained the Thursday “luncheon dish,” boiled silverside. Vidia waved it away. Thinking that it might offend him if I chose meat, I looked at Poissons. The menu was mostly in French.

“The English recruit people,” Vidia said. “That is not widely understood. They often take on new people. They make room. It is not exclusive — it is selective.”

He was ignoring the waiter who hovered near him. The man was making me nervous.

My finger was on Truite Grillée ou aux Amandes. I said, “I’ll have the grilled trout.”

“Something to start with?”

“Bisque d’Homard.”

As the waiter noted this, Vidia said, “That’s a nice idea. I will also have the bisque, followed by Quenelles d’Haddock Monte-Carlo.”

“Any vegetables? Shall I make up a selection?”

“That will be lovely,” Vidia said. He sipped some more wine, sucked it past his gums, and said, “For a writer like yourself, even an American, there is a kind of recruitment, and you will be part of it. You will be coopted. I think it has started already for you. Your name is growing. What happens next is up to you.”

“Did that happen to Robert Lowell?”

“I think Lowell is fraudulent, don’t you?”

This was not the moment to mention that he had been Lowell’s houseguest in New York; Lowell’s was the return address on a number of Vidia’s letters to me. And Vidia had interviewed him for The Listener. In researching my book I had read the interview.

“His poems are very good,” I said. “Lord Weary’s Castle. Life Studies.”

“I am sure I am a very bad judge of American poetry,” Vidia said, which was his way of saying he disliked Lowell’s poems. But he had not said so in his interview.

Our lobster bisque was served. Swallowing some, I said, “But Lowell’s crazy, isn’t he?”

“That’s the one thing he’s not.”

“You think it’s a con.”

“Total con, total con.” Vidia was concentrating on his soup, which he ate neatly, his spoon at a studied angle.

I said, “He goes to mental hospitals, gibbering.”

“He’s playing,” Vidia said. “Hospitals are wonderful places for people to act out their fantasies of infantilism. I think Lowell adores being in a hospital.”

“His hospital poems are pretty scary.”

“I don’t know them. Should I read them?”

“It’s up to you. What about his wife, Lady Caroline?”

Vidia rested his spoon, leaned over, and said, “I was sitting next to her a month ago at a dinner.” He made his disgusted face, and his features were so distorted it looked like a Kali mask. “She pongs!”

I laughed out loud, but Vidia was still frowning and sniffing.

“The title means a lot to Lowell,” he said. “What is it about titles? Americans are so glamoured by titles.”

“That’s because we don’t have them,” I said. “Anyway, it’s a big deal, isn’t it?”

“A title is nothing,” Vidia said.

The waiter was listening, and it was hard to tell whether he approved. He was obviously torn because, being a flunky in such a classy place, he had been trained to admire something that was for him unattainable.

“Careful, gentlemen, the plates are very hot,” he said, positioning my trout in front of me and serving Vidia his quenelles. He then made a business of serving us four different vegetables, working two spoons in his fingers like tongs.

When he was gone, Vidia began eating. I waited for him to say something about the food. He said nothing.

“I have the idea that they should sell titles at the post office,” he said. “You’d pay for it the way you’d pay for a television license. You go in, buy some stamps, and paste them into a little book. Save up. Buy some more stamps. Fill up books. Three books of stamps would get you an MBE. Six for an OBE. A dozen books of stamps would be worth a knighthood.”

“That’s what it’s worth?”

“That’s what it’s worth.”

We went on eating and Vidia went on denouncing the Honours List over the food-splashed table.

The waiter returned to whisk our plates away and hand us the dessert menu, which was also Frenchified: Pêche Melba, Glaces, Framboises, and a selection of Fromages.

“I won’t,” Vidia said.

“Coffee?”

“Black,” Vidia said.

A child began to cry in the foyer, the cries diminishing as the child descended the staircase in someone’s arms. I was touched by hearing a child’s wailing amid all this pomposity.

“God,” Vidia said, “who would bring a child here?”

“In Italy they bring children to restaurants.”

“A low peasant habit,” Vidia said, and he ranted. But I knew this rant, about all the articles that were written about children. Why didn’t someone write a piece about people who, like Vidia, had made a conscious decision never to have children?

I shrugged, but I felt like a coward for not telling him how fiercely I loved my children. Just before I had left The Forge, Marcel, my older son, had said, “Buy me a Ladybird book in London!” and his brother, Louis, had echoed him, “Book!” Just thinking about them in the restaurant, I felt a pang. I missed them.

“A workman came the other day.” Vidia was smiling at the thought of what he was about to say. “He told me that when he is at work he misses his children. Can you believe that?”

“Yes. I miss my children now.”

“Really.”

While he had been talking, the waiter had approached and put a white plate on the edge of the table. On this white plate was the bill, folded in half. It now lay between us. Vidia’s “Really” had produced a silence — such apparent interest on his part always indicated its opposite: disbelief, incomprehension, boredom — and in that silence I poked at the bill with my fingers and tweaked it open.

Seeing me looking at it, Vidia became preoccupied. He sat back, his expression altered to a glow of serenity. He was lost in his thoughts.

“Seventeen pounds and sixty-four pence,” I said.

Vidia was smiling. He was deaf. He heard an American at a nearby table saying, “I’d be happy to pay you for it. It’s just that my wife saves menus from all the foreign places we eat, especially when we’re traveling in Yerp.”

“You see? One of your fellow countrymen.”

I took out four five-pound notes from my wallet. Only two one-pound notes remained.

“Oh, good,” Vidia said.

“What about the tip?”

“That’s plenty,” he said, meaning that the twenty would cover it. “That will make him very happy. Anthony Burgess is frightened of waiters and tips them extravagantly. Taxi drivers, too.”

My twenty pounds was carried away on the plate by the now deferential waiter. I had bus fare and enough left over for a pint of Double Diamond on the train. But dinner was out of the question, and so was the Ladybird book.

“Shall we go?” Vidia said.

We walked through Berkeley Square to Piccadilly, talking about books some more. I listened without hearing or understanding. I felt that peculiar weakness, almost a frailty, familiar to me whenever I lost a bet or discovered an overdraft. This time it was the effect of having spent all my money on lunch. Vidia was sprightly, for the opposite reason: I was broke, but he was restored. He was actually energized, and it was almost worth what it had cost me to see him so bright and to hear him.

“Don’t worry about your book,” he said. He was chatty and encouraging. “You won’t know what it is about until you finish it.”

He was jaunty, but this was also his old intense teaching method, which had helped me in Africa. He was well fed, he had drunk most of the white burgundy, it had cost him nothing. His chatter was a form of gratitude.

“Each day you will make breakthroughs as you write. You’ll make discoveries all along the way. When you finish you’ll be amazed to see where you’ve got to — you’ll probably have to go back and fix the first part of your book, because you’ll have discovered what your subject really is.”

At Duke Street, near Fortnum & Mason, he turned and urged me to go partway down the hill, where an art dealer had two Indian prints in his shop window.

“I want you to come back here sometime and look at these pictures. Buy some when you have the money. They are Daniells, aquatints of India. Aren’t they delicious?”

But I could not concentrate. I still felt weaker, lamer, frailer, even slightly deaf, the loss of twenty pounds like an amputation.

“What are your plans, Vidia?”

“I am going to the London Library. It’s just round the corner in St. James’s Square.”

“I mean future.”

“Trinidad,” he said. “Queen-beeing it there. Then South America. Argentina.”

He went glum and uncertain, looking ahead, seeing nothing discernible in the mist.

“I would like to write nothing. I feel I have said all I wished to say.”

Taxis clattered down Duke Street as we stood on the narrow sidewalk. An auction had just ended at Christie’s down the street, Vidia said, and there was a commotion, like an audience leaving a theater, a sudden mob, dressed alike.

“I may fall silent,” Vidia said.

He looked at the pair of aquatints. One showed the Union Jack flying in an Indian landscape: a handsome building, like a pavilion, with Indians, Europeans, and horses around it. The Assembly Rooms on the Race Grounds, Near Madras.

“Yes, I may fall silent.”

“I’ll be in Dorset,” I said. My fists were jammed into my empty pockets.

“You’re going to be all right, Paul.”

“If I don’t see you…”

I put out my hand, but Vidia was preoccupied with the possibility of falling silent. Anyway, he seldom shook hands, and when he did his grip was limp and reluctant, as though fearing a taint.

“I’m going down this way,” he said.

“I’ll hop a taxi to The Times.”

That was bluster on my part — I didn’t have the money. I took a bus to Blackfriars and turned in my review, and then I walked from Blackfriars to Waterloo along the Thames, to save my bus fare. With no money for dinner, I took an early train to Dorset so that I could eat at home. It puzzled me that I had spent so much on lunch. I hated having to think about such things. That single lunch had cost me the equivalent of one month’s rent.

Back to The Forge and my lovely clamoring family, back to my room upstairs, back to my novel. Vidia was right. I wanted to finish the book to discover what it was about.

But that night, without the new Ladybird book, I lay between my children and read them a story from one of their older books of fairy tales, this one by Hans Christian Andersen. Outside, the wind from the sea at the end of the road tore at the bare boughs of our black oaks.

With the children snuggled against me, I read, “‘You don’t understand the world, that’s what’s the matter with you. You ought to travel.’ And so they traveled, the shadow as master and the master as shadow, always side by side.”

9. “I Must Keep Some Secrets”

VIDIA SPOKE about finding me, yet my conceit was that I had discovered him. Both could have been true. Friendship is often a case of mutual rescue. The previous year, in Singapore, I had written a book about his work because he was unknown in the United States. He had no American publisher; his American editions were out of print; there had never been paperbacks. I was grateful to him for his help in my writing, but I also thought he could use my help. And publishing my book in the States might bring both of us to the attention of readers. So V. S. Naipaul: An Introduction to His Work was a labor of love, done out of friendship, but like many gifts it was also self-serving.

The book was accepted by Vidia’s publisher. The advance was small, surprisingly small — say, four lunches at the Connaught. I was counting on my novel Saint Jack to restore me to solvency.

Writing to me at The Forge from Trinidad, Vidia expressed his pleasure that the book about him was to be published. In spite of the tiny advance, he said, his publisher would stand by the book. If it sold well I would benefit; if it was a good book, it would cause many things to happen. A worthy book made its own way, and a gifted author never failed to be rewarded. And, sometimes, miracles happened.

I had complained to him that I was working too hard, combining work on my novel with writing book reviews. He said he understood my dilemma.

“You need to appear more often in the English papers, to broaden the base of your reputation,” he said. Practical as always, sound advice. “But they do pay appallingly.”

On the subject of drudging as a freelance, Vidia knew what he was talking about. He had trodden this same road, hacking away on Grub Street, twelve years before: the small rented house, tight money, the weekly review, hack work and honorariums. I knew from the bibliography I had made that he had reviewed many books while writing A House for Mr. Biswas. If he could write a masterpiece and review books at the same time, surely I could follow his example. He was sensitive to this burden, which was part of a writer’s independence. Writers in residence never faced it, salaried magazine staffers and writers on fat contracts were oblivious of it, but for the freelance writer it is a constant dilemma, because the freelancer hates to say no to any request, for fear that the requests will vanish. At the same time, the freelancer knows that the true meaning of “hack” is “workhorse.”

A similar sort of problem had just arisen in Vidia’s writing life. He intended to go to South America, on assignment for The New York Review of Books. But its rates were low. He wanted to write about Argentina — and the Review would print anything he cared to write — yet he felt there was no profit in it. So he was inclined to remain in Trinidad, at his sister’s, queen-beeing it, so he said.

His usual discursive medical report was appended to this letter. He tended to go into minute detail when the subject was money or health. He anatomized insomnia, and his dealings on the stock market were another sort of fever chart. Writing exhausted him. Each time he finished a book he was close to collapse. He said he had been working steadily from 1965 to 1971, and he felt depleted by The Mimic Men, The Loss of El Dorado, and In a Free State, as well as by all the journalism — enough to fill another book. The potted history of his physical effort was just the inspiration I needed, though I was alarmed by the consequences he described: extreme torpor, fatigue, dizzy spells in public places, frayed nerves—“the mind, rather than the body, calling for rest and still more rest.”

In this burned-out state he stopped writing, and I remembered his saying, “I may fall silent.” I still wrote to him in Trinidad. I had more time now. I had finished Saint Jack and sold it to The Bodley Head in London. It had not solved my problems. My English advance was £250, half on signature, half on publication. For my year’s work on the novel I now had £125, minus the agent’s ten percent — five meals at the Connaught. “We wish it were more,” my editor had said. So did I.

All these tiddly, trifling numbers — but they mattered to me at the time because my life depended on them.

“And you say you don’t want me to get a job?” my wife said. But she did not recriminate; she was gentle. This was a delicate subject.

She got a job with the BBC and we moved to London, wrenched from Dorset in the clammy English spring, with a damp summer looming. Instead of rural poverty, which I found bearable for its downrightness and sufficiently dignified for the amount of space we had — a whole house, the surrounding woods and meadows — we were now plunged into a dreary inner suburb, in a small apartment. It was nasty and uncomfortable, narrow, dirty, mean, and noisy. It smelled, it was cold. The seedy grumbling neighbors, the big cars flashing loudly past on the main road — every bit of it was like a reminder of failure.

I wanted to start another novel. I had a good idea, based on a ghost story I had been told in Dorset by an old man in the Gollop Arms. My first impression of Dorset was of a weird landscape. I wanted to write about that, a place darker and stranger than anything I had known in Africa. Beyond the ghost story, the germ of my idea was of an English anthropologist who has thrived in Africa and then retires and returns home to this haunted place.

But in London I had no place to work. We lived in two rooms in a noisy, much subdivided house. I tried to write on a table in the bedroom but was disturbed by all the ambiguous memories and associations: a bedroom is charged with dreams and slumber and sex, and this one had all the residue of its previous tenants. It stank, too, as bedrooms in rented houses often do.

It was at ground level, and from where I sat, with my back to the room, I could see beyond the weedy front yard to Gordon Road, Ealing, under a gray sky. My two children were in the other room, staring at the rented television set. I could not work. I felt idle. I complained of this idleness to Vidia. His response was friendly and wise.

“The essence of the freelance life is freedom,” he wrote. And he spoke of indolence as an aspect of freedom, one that I should accept. He said that any freelancer needed the confidence to believe that in spite of occasional setbacks, everything was going to be fine in the end. But of course that was a problem. “This faith your friends cannot give you: it is something you have to discover in yourself.”

He went on to speak approvingly of my wife’s job with the BBC World Service, which he listened to all the time. This second letter from Trinidad was more allusive than any I had received from him lately. He seemed refreshed by his trip to Argentina — he had taken the assignment after all. He had been back in Port of Spain for only two days and he was making plans. He would first write his pieces, one on the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, the other on Argentina itself, Evita and Peronism figuring strongly. After that, he had to choose whether to go to Brazil (for £400) or New Zealand (for £500), or head straight back to The Bungalow. He had recently turned down trips to Canada and Nigeria.

Perversely, being in demand reminded him of rejection. The very fact of this friendly attention and the many invitations gave him a gloomy vision of his future, when he would get no attention, nor any invitations. He could not contemplate acceptance without anticipating his being superfluous. In this mood he regarded goodwill as a curse and praise as the Evil Eye.

Preparing the collection of pieces that he was planning to call The Overcrowded Barracoon and Other Articles, he was opposed by Pat on his intention to include his pieces about India. She said that no one would be interested in them. The reviewers would use those pieces to attack the book for its monotonous insistence on Indian subjects, Indian elections, Indian deficiencies. Pat was correct, India was his obsessive subject, but the act of writing was obsessive and often irrational. So he resisted. He felt that in the end he would be all right. He often said so.

That was his greatest strength, his unwavering belief that writing was fair — that a good book cannot fail, that it will ultimately be recognized as good; that a bad book will eventually be seen as junk, no matter what happens in the short run. Only the long run mattered. There was justice in writing. If you failed, you deserved to fail. You had to accept your failure.

This belief was both armor and a sword, and by repetition he instilled this belief in me and made me strong. It was a little early to tell whether we would be rewarded for our work. The external signs were still ambiguous. He was living in a room at his sister’s house, in 3 Woodlands Road, Valsayn Park, Port of Spain, Trinidad; and I inhabited, with my family of four, a pair of narrow rooms in 80 Gordon Road, Ealing, West London, with someone’s radio playing and a child crying upstairs. It helped that I believed in my writing, and it helped as much — perhaps more — that he believed in me.

Even his asking favors was a form of giving me confidence. He wondered whether I would be willing to look over the proofs of his collection of articles. If anything dismayed me, I should tell him. This was the book I had suggested to him after I read all his magazine pieces in Singapore. I had made a list. He used some from the list but in the end did not include any of the book reviews I had found. That was another lesson. He said that book reviews served their purpose but had no lasting value, except for the jokes. “Too bad we can’t keep the jokes and get rid of the rest.” He chose long, solid pieces. He had put enormous effort into his journalism, bringing to it the intensity of fiction writing. In this period, as he put it, no novel offered itself to him.

He had no ideas for a novel. “Creatively, I continue barren.” He was healthier than he had felt for a while, but he feared the future. He maintained that my most productive years and best work were ahead of me — I had that to look forward to. That promise excited me. As for himself, “At forty, I have the sickening sensation that my work is behind me.”

The very sight of his books irritated him. He hated talking about them. He felt like a fraud. He was pretty gloomy, he said. “In this profession, is satisfaction ever attained?”

The words were harsher than the tone he used in the rest of the letter. He seemed energetic, like a mountaineer cheerfully grumbling about the steepness of the ascent as he skipped from ledge to ledge. He even sounded hopeful. “If I write again, though, I think it will be a new man writing.” Up till then, writing had been his “therapy.” It had given him confidence, he said. Now he suggested that he was starting over.

Already he seemed like a new man. No novel, true, but he had pieces to write and travel plans. And he was full of insights. He said that a girl he had met in Argentina had copied two pages from a Thomas Hardy novel in which a heroine reflects on the melancholy of her life and situation. One of the Hardy lines, “meanest kisses were at famine prices,” was frightening, Vidia said, commenting on the shocking juxtaposition of “famine” and “prices” and “kisses.”

He did not quote more than this, and he gave me only the tide of the novel, The Return of the Native, but I found the pages and, moved by what I read, marked several paragraphs with a red pen.

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. And she seemed to long for the abstraction called passionate love more than for any particular lover.

She could show a most reproachful look at times, but it was directed less against human beings than against certain creatures of her mind, the chief of these being Destiny, through whose interference she dimly fancied it arose that love alighted only on gliding youth — that any love she might win would sink simultaneously with the sand in the glass. She thought of it with an ever-growing consciousness of cruelty, which tended to breed actions of reckless unconventionality, framed to snatch a year’s, a week’s, even an hour’s passion from anywhere while it could be won. Through want of it she had sung without being merry, possessed without enjoying, outshone without triumphing. Her loneliness deepened her desire. On Egdon, coldest and meanest kisses were at famine prices; and where was a mouth matching hers to be found?

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. On this head she knew by prevision what most women learn only by experience: she had mentally walked round love, told the towers thereof, considered its palaces; and concluded that love was but a doleful joy. Yet she desired it, as one in a desert would be thankful for brackish water.

She often repeated her prayers; not at particular times, but, like the unaffected devout, when she desired to pray. Her prayer was always spontaneous, and often ran thus, “O deliver my heart from this fearful gloom and loneliness: send me great love from somewhere, else I shall die.”

“So I feel about love and writing,” Vidia wrote to me. Waxing uncharacteristically lyrical, he said he needed passion and comedy and relief from the past. If he were not vitalized, he feared he would die at a time when he was capable of writing brilliantly.

This astonished me — the sudden outburst, the yearning, the passion, the appeal. It sounded like the fear of unrequited love. He then quoted some lines from Derek Walcott. He had quoted Walcott before; the man was a neighbor islander, a man close to his own age. He said the words had scared him in 1954 when he had first read them: “But my talent grew bad and my wit turned stale /—but I sprang from my mind—”

I reread the lines. I reread the Hardy: “meanest kisses.” Vidia closed, saying, “See how this jolly letter has turned out. Strange things happen when a writer sits down on an off day to write to a friend.”

That was like a poem (“See how…”). Vidia’s lines were more mellifluous and rhythmic and meaningful than Walcott’s, with its weak second line. Once again, by his using the word “friend” and his affirmation of friendship, I was bucked up. That same day, in spite of the radio and the squawking child and my debts, I had the confidence to work. I began plotting my next novel, The Black House.

One other thing I noticed. His letter had been tampered with. He had done the tampering, had torn off half a page. He explained it in a teasing parenthesis: “Last half of that first page censored. I must keep some secrets.”

When Pat wrote a month later from Trinidad to say that she liked my book about Vidia’s work, I was pleased; and she added, “Vidia cannot be detached from it. He read with great absorption and smiled or laughed often,” which delighted me.

Yet I continued to worry about what was to become of me. My strategy had been to write and survive that way; my strategy was not working. A novel, a book of criticism, scores of book reviews, a collection of short stories — this in less than a year had produced such a paltry income that I was grateful to my wife for getting a job. Now I was at work on my seventh novel, and still doing journalism, and it did not seem as though I could make a living. All this in spite of burning the midnight oil and getting wonderful reviews.

In this profession, is satisfaction ever attained?

I thought, Yes. I was satisfied, but I had no money. It was all the more important that I had Vidia as a friend.

Pat said she saw the love and understanding in my book V. S. Naipaul, and the depth of this feeling had given me unusual insights into Vidia’s work. She confessed that she had thought of writing something personal about Vidia. During the writing of In a Free State, he had read a biography of Tolstoy and a book about Dorothy Wordsworth and other writers’ lives. Literary biography was something Vidia often read, as if peering through a window to compare his life with the lives of fellow sufferers. Listening to him read aloud from the diaries of Dorothy Wordsworth and Sonya Tolstoy, Pat Naipaul marveled at the perceptions, and she thought she might do something similar.

She began making notes, describing Vidia’s progress on his book, keeping a diary, writing down his comments. But she lost heart. She had never been strong, and it was hard to write in a household where the central figure was V.S. Naipaul. She felt she lacked profundity and passion; she suspected that she was trivial. There was something wrong about her — Vidia’s wife — using him as the subject for a candid or intimate portrait. It was intrusive and bordered on vulgarity.

That was why, she said, my book meant so much to her, because I expressed many of her own feelings about Vidia’s work. She said she was delighted I had done the book, since she was so similarly affected by his writing.

Another success, another good review, but I had no income. I was angry and bewildered. I had not asked for much, only a simple living. I did not dare think about getting rich. I wanted to get by, nothing more.

In the midst of my bewilderment, a letter was pushed through the letter slot of this rented place, asking me if I would consider being a writer in residence at the University of Virginia, starting in two months. I said yes. If I went alone and lived like a monk, I could finish my novel and pocket most of my salary. I would be away four months, the first semester.

My wife said, “I’ll miss you.”

She understood. She was happy working at the BBC, and this fulfillment made her sympathetic about my frustration. But there was something especially galling about returning to a university a year after quitting my Singapore job and saying I would never teach again. I should have been consoled by my grandiose job title, writer in residence, but it mocked me. A writer was supposed to be free of any employer — Vidia had said so.

In Virginia, living my monkish life, I received a letter from Vidia describing his trip to New Zealand. He was back at The Bungalow. He had passed through Trinidad again, visited Argentina again, finished writing his pieces. He had read my book and wanted to reread it, because he had been distracted by work. He had also felt self-conscious, being written about. He was his usual paradoxical self: “But I don’t think it matters what I think (and I don’t know what I think),”

He wanted to meet, to talk about England and how I was adapting. Was I disappointed? After my eight years in the tropics, what did I think of this “industrial reality"?

Africa was on his mind, because the Indians had been thrown out of Uganda by Idi Amin. As he had predicted so often, he said, Uganda was turning into a jungle. He blamed the white expatriates, who would take no responsibility for Amin — yet they had created the situation that had produced Amin. In the end they would go away and allow Uganda to become a forgotten horror.

I had not heard Vidia denounce a situation so thoroughly for years, but his anger was doubtless deepened by the fact that all his dire warnings had been fulfilled. He had predicted the rise of the dictatorship, the expulsion of the Indians, the bolting of the whites, the decline of Kampala into bush.

“It is an obscene continent, fit only for second-rate people. Second-rate whites with second-rate ambitions, who are prepared, as in South Africa, to indulge in the obscenity of disciplining Africans.” You either stayed away or you remained, with a whip in your hand. Uganda proved that the only survivors in Africa were second-raters and savages, masters and slaves.

This was the most severe condemnation he had ever made. He was raging as eighty thousand Indians — men, women, and children — were being loaded onto planes, their valuables being snatched from them by African soldiers. They were losing homes and land and businesses, and in many cases their life savings. Most were allowed into Britain, but they really did not want to live in a cold and hostile climate. They had few defenders in Britain and the United States; they had none in Africa. Africans heckled them, and the white expatriates, as Vidia had said, stood by and watched.

“The melancholy thing about the world is that it is full of stupid and common people; and the world is run for the benefit of the stupid and the common.”

As for plans, Vidia had none. He had been back in England for only four days, and he felt he was living through an uncertain, purgatorial period. He spoke of his four years without a house. He feared a stock market crash. He wanted to write a book but had no ideas. It was his old feeling of emptiness and insecurity, of his life’s being over, the dusty intimation of the scrap heap.

He was low and feeling adrift. It was his alienated mood of What country? What passport? He was placeless in The Bungalow and this was another reason he wanted to talk about England with me. He wanted to find out what I liked and didn’t like. He saw me as another wanderer.

But I was in Virginia, dreaming of my wife and two children, like a sailor in a storm at sea, vowing that I would never do this again. Vidia spoke of going back to Trinidad to cover the violent murders that had taken place at a Black Power commune.

His verdict on my book about his work was just what I wanted. He said he had read it “with amazement, delight and great humility. It seems marvelously responsive and humane; it reminds me and informs me of things that I had forgotten and perhaps had never realized.” He spoke of my generosity and thoroughness. Reflecting on so much labor in the past (“gone, gone”), he became apprehensive about the future. He was sad and fearful, he said.

He had won the John Llewelyn Rhys Memorial Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award, the Hawthornden Prize, the W. H. Smith Award, and, with In a Free State, the Booker Prize. Already he was being spoken of as the greatest living writer in the English language. Yet it was little comfort to him to know that his reputation was formidable. He pined for better sales and more money.

While he regarded his life as over, mine had, I felt, hardly begun. He made a few corrections in my book, small ones, all of them factual. He talked about In a Free State, how “tightly constructed” it was. He wrote about a dream the main character had that he decided to leave out. “I dreamed all the dreams myself, for him, during the writing.” The book had possessed him; he had been “deeply immersed — almost to the point of neurosis” in it.

I had felt so close to In a Free State that I could not evaluate it. In the book I recognized Haji Hallsmith and the besieged African king; I knew some of the Africans; Vidia’s Colonel was the Major of the Kaptagat Arms — the same man, the same shouting; the waiters were his waiters, and, as Vidia had remarked at the time, “The boy was big and he moved briskly, creating little turbulences of stink.” The roads were the roads we had traveled down; the well-marked sign the same Beware of Fallen Rocks; the coming-of-age boys I had seen myself. I had been frightened by those same dogs barking. Much of it was our safari in Rwanda, but made into a quilt: I saw the stitches, and what another reader would see as a large, harmonious design seemed to me a mass of patches. But that is what happens when you have a writer for a friend and you travel the same road.

He said, “I do hope that your book will show you some reward for your great sensitivity, labor and love.”

My reward was his saying that. I had begun the book as a labor of love, a favor to him, a lesson for me. I learned a great deal in the writing, but there was no material gain. Perhaps it interested some people in his work and found him new readers. But I suspected that in many ways Vidia’s life was even more interesting than his work. He had made this observation about Somerset Maugham, how Maugham’s life was complex and rich, even though the old man always denied it. As for V. S. Naipaul: An Introduction to His Work, it hardly sold and was not reprinted. Twenty-five years later it was still out of print. The advance was spent the day I received it. There were no royalties in twenty-five years, nor did I ever get a sales statement from the publisher. I never discovered how many copies were printed. A few thousand, perhaps. It met the worst fate that can befall a book: it became a collector’s item, pretty much unread and uncirculated, celebrated only for its scarcity.

Vidia also needed money at this time, so he said. He had no assets apart from his manuscripts and papers, an entire record of his career to date. He had gone to the British Museum and discussed the matter, mentioning a figure of £40,000, which would include letters, manuscripts, pictures, mementos, maps, sketches, notebooks, everything in his paper-rich life. It was quite a large stack, for he had told me he was superstitious and never threw away a piece of paper with his handwriting on it, as one might keep nail parings or locks of hair. It was possible that after his gathering up all his papers, the British Museum would change its mind and not pay even the agreed-upon minimum. He needed a backup plan.

Would I please, therefore, spread the word that he was thinking of selling his archives? An American university would be convenient because he wished to consult them in the future. In a cardboard box in Trinidad he had found letters and notes he had written in the distant past: “penciled notes I made in the PAA aeroplane as soon as I got off the ground in July, 1950.” Rereading the many letters had suggested to him that he might write an autobiography. But what if the papers were destroyed in a riot (“not unlikely in Trinidad”)? He needed them to be in a safe place.

Also, the money. He wanted to convert the papers into a flat in central London.

The chairman of the English Department at the University of Virginia was also a friend. He was the man who had offered me the writer-in-residence job. I asked his advice. He said I should see the university’s librarian. The librarian was the assiduously orderly sort of person — more orderly than intellectual — you find running libraries. He had the peculiar baldness that went with an orderly disposition; he was close-shaven, with pink cheeks, and so tidy and well turned out that I doubted he was much of a reader.

“I wonder if you’d be interested in buying the archives of V.S. Naipaul,” I said.

“I know that name,” the librarian said. “He wrote The Man-Eater of Malgudi.”

“That was R. K. Narayan,” I said. So I was right: this clean, clear-eyed man was really thick. I listed Vidia’s book tides, none of which rang a bell, though the man kept smiling.

“What is he selling?”

“Everything. Every piece of paper he has. Letters, books, manuscripts, pictures, the lot.”

“Would he have any interesting letters from well-known writers? Those are usually pretty valuable.”

I felt this conversation was not going well, and I was glad that Vidia was being spared the indignity of explaining that he was not R. K. Narayan.

“I’m sure he has lots of letters of that kind. Anthony Powell is one of his closest friends.”

The librarian smiled, but not with pleasure. It was the uneasy smile that indicates incomprehension, as if I had slipped unconsciously into a foreign language.

“What sort of figure does he have in mind?”

“Forty thousand pounds.”

“How much is that in real money?”

“Maybe ninety grand.”

“You’re joking.”

I said nothing. The librarian clamped his jaw shut and bit on his teeth. The university didn’t have that kind of money, he said. I sensed his triumphant smile grimly heating my back as I left his office.

Surely other libraries or universities would be interested. I wrote letters. I made phone calls. Sometimes I mentioned the price, other times I solicited a price. There were no takers. Many people I spoke to were only dimly aware of the name Naipaul. How was this possible? It did not surprise me that Vidia was little known in the United States; it was the reason I had written my book about his work. But I was astounded that academics and librarians were so clueless.

I broke the news gently to Vidia, but perhaps it was my delicacy and tact that made it obvious I had been rebuffed. Sensitive to rejection, Vidia took it badly. He sent a brief note and lapsed into silence.

Judging from my classes at the University of Virginia, American universities were vastly inferior to Makerere University and the University of Singapore. My Charlottesville students had read little — hardly any of them had read the short stories of Joyce or Chekhov, but they wanted to write short stories themselves. Sometimes they handed in work they had done the previous year, for another course. Usually they handed in nothing. They were pleasant but intellectually lazy. Some were graduate students. When I gave them low marks they objected.

“Hey, Paul. You don’t get it. I need a B in this course,” one grad student said to me.

I told him that his C was generosity on my part. He was in the master’s program. He had done very little work.

“Look, I need a B,” he said in the snarling voice of someone demanding my wallet.

This was new to me: teachers who did not read, students who could not write. One semester of this was enough. I took my savings and went back to London.

We moved from west London to south London. We had a whole house in Catford, but the area was much grimmer than Ealing. It was full of lawbreakers — petty burglars, pickpockets, car thieves, bag boosters, second-story men, muggers, and hoisters of all description. But Catford was so poor these villains had to take a train to other boroughs or up to the West End, the more salubrious parts of London where the pickings were better, to commit their crimes.

In the spring of 1973, having finished The Black House, I cycled to Waterloo, put my bike on the train, and went to Salisbury, cycling from there to Wilsford Manor. Vidia could see that my finances were as miserable as ever, but I told him why I had left the University of Virginia.

“You had said you’d never teach again,” Vidia said. “You broke your own rule. If you make a rule, keep to it.”

We walked to Stonehenge, through the fields, and he explained the water meadows once more.

“You’d like Virginia,” I said. “The countryside is beautiful — rolling hills and meadows.”

“I’m afraid that America is not for me. I don’t think I could live in a rural setting.”

“In some ways it’s a bit like this.”

But I was thinking: It is much more beautiful than this funny fenced-off part of Salisbury Plain, with a highway running alongside this weird ancient monument, belittling it.

“I have to stick with what I have,” Vidia said. “It’s too late for me to transfer to another country.”

We kept walking towards the big biscuit-colored cromlech that lay on the other side of the whizzing cars on the motorway.

“So what’s the plan?”

“I’m still looking for money,” he said.

“Are you serious about buying a place in London?”

“Yes. I think it’s just what I need.”

“I’m sure you could get something for less than forty thousand.”

He said, “No. I want something uncompromisingly fashionable.”

He said this while looking at the sky.

A few days after I returned to London, my editor at The Bodley Head, a cigar-smoking Scotsman and sometime poet named James Michie, invited me to lunch at the Chez Victor. He said he wanted to discuss The Black House. He was very friendly when I met him, but it seemed ominous that we had finished the first course and most of the bottle of wine before he mentioned my book, and then he told me he did not like it at all.

“I’m afraid I can’t publish it,” Michie said.

“You mean you’re turning it down?” I could not believe this.

“It will hurt your reputation,” he said.

“I have no reputation.”

“I think if you reread the book you will agree with me,” he said.

“I don’t have to reread the book. I wrote the book. If I thought it was no good I wouldn’t have submitted it.”

My voice was shrill, and I think that surprised him. I was hurt and angry. Probably he thought he was softening the blow, because Londoners are such eager lunchers, but it seemed callous to turn lunch into an occasion for such a rejection. And why was I being rejected? The novel was good, surely?

“I let William Trevor look at it. He agreed with me.”

Trevor was one of his authors, a talented one, I thought.

I said, “My last novel got great reviews. You paid me two hundred and fifty pounds. I assumed you’d give me the same for this. You’d be getting it for a pittance.”

“It’s the principle of the thing,” he said. He had lit a cigar and, feeling defensive, he had stopped eating. “I don’t believe in the book. I can’t publish something I don’t believe in.”

“You publish lots of crappy books,” I said.

I guessed he saw the truth of this, because he hesitated, at least looked uncertain.

I said, “If you turn this down you’ll lose me as an author. I’ll go to another publisher. I’ll never let you publish another book of mine. And all it’s costing you is two hundred and fifty quid. This lunch is costing you thirty!”

Michie was bald but he had a hank of hair that grew from the side of his head that he arranged over his pate to give the semblance of hair. This damp, fussed-with strand had slipped down and hung by the side of his ear like a strange Hassidic sidecurl. It made him look desperate.

“If you twist my arm, I’ll publish it,” he said.

“That’s it, then. That’s all. Forget it — I want my manuscript back.”

Feeling ill, I finished my meal and walked back to his office, wishing the whole way I could push him in the path of a car. He gave me the typescript and still seemed surprised and somewhat embarrassed by my anger.

I found another publisher, but in the meantime seriously wondered how I would ever make a living as a writer. I told Vidia. He invited me to tea at the Charing Cross Hotel.

“You should have shown the book to me. Why didn’t you?” he said.

“I didn’t want to bother you with my problems.”

“That’s what friends are for,” Vidia said.

He could not have said anything truer or kinder. After eight years he was still on my side, still a well-wisher.

“He gave it to William Trevor to read. Apparently Trevor didn’t like it either.”

“Who is William Trevor?”

That was what I needed, the old corrosive contempt.

“He is no one,” Vidia said coldly. “Something similar happened to me when I was starting out. Deutsch told me to put the book aside. It was Miguel Street. He didn’t know what to do with it. And one still gets the odd foolish remark about one’s work.”

“Why do they do it?”

“They do it because they are common, lying, low class, and foolish. That is why they do it.”

He was so angry he could not continue the conversation. He sipped his tea, looking around at the other tables. He saw a heavily pregnant woman moving slowly across the shabby room, bracing herself by resting on chairs and with one hand pressed for balance on the small of her back.

“To me, one of the ugliest sights on earth is a pregnant woman.”

This astonished me. I did not know what to say. He turned away from the woman.

“I have an idea for a book,” I said.

“Tell me.”

“A long railway trip.”

I explained how, in Virginia, I had read Mark Twain’s Following the Equator, an obscure and out-of-print travel book, but lovable for its geographical non sequiturs and incidental mishaps. I liked the spirited jokes and the long journey. It was about nothing but his trip. A lot of it was dialogue. Twain did not pretend to be knowledgeable about the countries he passed through — Australia, India, and South Africa, among many others.

“I checked the maps,” I said. “I can leave Victoria Station and go to Paris, to Istanbul — to the border of Afghanistan. Then there’s the Khyber Pass, and trains all through India. Burma has railways, so does Thailand. Even Vietnam has trains. I would travel around Japan and come home on the Trans-Siberian, and then write about it.”

“That’s a lovely idea,” Vidia said. He was seriously concentrating on it, looking for a flaw or something suspect. But it was too simple an idea to have a flaw. Taking trains from London to Japan and back: it was surprising that no one had done it before.

“I’m thinking of leaving in September,” I said. “I would be in India in October. What’s the weather like then?”

“Delicious.”

He seemed distracted; he was still thinking about my book, my trip. He saw something I did not see — I could tell from his reaction. He knew it was a good idea, but he saw something more. He saw a hugely successful book.

“Who do you think I should visit in India?”

He thought a moment. He frowned. “You’ll find your way.”

For the first time in the years I had known him, I sensed a reluctance on his part to help me. Only a few minutes before he had said, “That’s what friends are for.”

“Isn’t there anyone you could introduce me to?”

He had been to India six or seven times recently and had lived there for a year. He had written about it many times. It was his obsessive subject. He knew India intimately.

“I don’t know. You might see Mrs. Jhabvala when you’re in Delhi.”

As he was speaking, giving me the name with such reluctance, I vowed that I would not visit Ruth Prawer Jhabvala.

“You’ll be all right,” he said. But this time the statement was tinged with self-pity, almost resentment, a feeling I had never detected in him before. It was as though I were abandoning him. And why? This train-riding idea I had conceived out of sheer desperation, in the urgency to have a book to write and money from a publisher.

The bill was brought. I paid it, I left the tip. Vidia had not seen it. He did not see bills even when they were brought on the most expensive china and folded like origami and presented to him. It was one of his survival skills that a bill could come and go without ever being visible. Still, he looked disgusted.

“This hotel used to be quite grand,” he said in his pained voice. Perhaps the pain was due to the idea I had just divulged. “Having tea here was once something special. One was glamoured by it.” He made a face. “No longer.”

I took the trip. I left London on September 19, 1973, on the train to Paris. I changed trains and went to Istanbul, changed again for Ankara, for Tehran, and for the holy city of fanatics, Meshed. And onward, through Afghanistan (by bus, no trains) and down the Khyber, up to Simla, down to Madras and to Sri Lanka, on the train and on the ferry. To Burma and Thailand and Singapore, along the coast of Vietnam (heavily bombed and still smoking), up and down Japan, a boat to Nakhodka, and the Trans-Siberian home. My heart was in my mouth the whole time. Out of fear I wrote everything down; in my misery I mocked myself, and a febrile humor crept into the narrative. In January of the following year I returned to London, still feeling miserable. I had missed Christmas. Everyone howled at me, “Where have you been?” I propped up my notebooks and wrote the book, made a single narrative out of all those train trips. The title came from a road in Kanpur: the Railway Bazaar.

Sometimes miracles happen to a writer, Vidia had said. The Great Railway Bazaar was a small miracle. I was not prepared for it. While I was working on it, The Black House was published — the reviews were respectful — and I started The Family Arsenal after I finished the travel book. Even before publication, The Great Railway Bazaar was reprinted three times, to accommodate bookstore demand. It was an immediate bestseller. It was my tenth book. I had known Vidia for ten years. In that time I had published about a million words.

“An agonizing profession,” Vidia said. “But there are rewards.”

All windfalls are relative. I did not become rich with that book, but at last I was making a living. I paid my debts. I had enough to support me in my next book. I was out from under. I never again worried about money — that freedom from worry was wealth to me. No more drudging. I was free. I was thirty-two.

And at last I understood what Vidia meant when he had written, “I have never had to work for hire; I made a vow at an early age never to work, never to become involved with people in that way. That has given me a freedom from people, from entanglements, from rivalries, from competition. I have no enemies, no rivals, no masters; I fear no one.”

10. Lunch Party

“I CAN SEE it all now,” my wife said in a fantasizing voice, though she was not looking at anything except a loose sock on the floor. She snatched at it. “The boys talking about their books. The girls talking about cooking.”

It was Saturday. She was busy with the week’s laundry, moving through the house while I followed her. It was one of those maddening married people’s conversations, one spouse chasing the other with questions, the dialogue shifting from room to room. We had moved to a much bigger house; we had many rooms now. Why didn’t she want to go to Vidia’s lunch party with me?

“Sunday is my only free day. Besides, he’s really your friend.”

Such a discussion was supposed to end when one of the parties stopped pursuing, or the other, pretending to be too busy, hid.

“Hey, I often socialize with your friends.”

Dodging me, dodging the question, seeking more laundry, she said, “I specifically asked whether we could bring the boys. Pat said that Hugh and Antonia Fraser will be there and are not bringing their kids. I took the hint.”

“We can go alone. It’s a lunch party. It might be fun.”

“I don’t think he likes me one bit.” She was shaking out clothes to be washed. “But I don’t take it personally. I doubt that he likes any women.”

“That’s unfair.”

“Look at the women in his books. They disgust him. They’re awful. He’s the man who wrote ‘wife is a terrible word.’”

I laughed at her and said, “There’s a nice woman in The Mimic Men. Lady Stella. Remember sex and fairy tales? ‘Goosey-goosey Gander’?”

“You might know that the only decent woman would be posh… Oh, do go,” she said, looking hardworking and virtuous, burdened with an armload of laundry. “Enjoy yourself. But please don’t ask me to go with you. He won’t miss me. I’ll bet he won’t even ask about me.”

The children, hearing us, crept to the upstairs landing to listen.

“You can take the train,” she said. She called up to the boys. “Dad likes trains, doesn’t he?”

“Dad likes trains!”

Trines, they said, a consequence of our living in London.

The empty ones on Sunday morning going west out of London were the trains I liked best. The Salisbury train from Waterloo racketed through Clapham Junction without stopping, past the very houses and back gardens I had looked at with horror when I first came to London, asking myself, Who could possibly live among these black bricks and broken chimneys and dim lights and gleaming slate roofs and grim gates and the sootiness that crept into the nostrils? The answer was me. I lived in one of those houses. All of them looked dismal except my own.

To the triphammer sound of the train wheels as they tapped the joints of the rails, I read the Sunday papers, looking up from time to time to rest my eyes on the green meadows and the trees, some bare and others with yellowing leaves. The leaves flew up singly like startled birds when the wind strengthened. Autumn made me thoughtful. Four years ago, in just this season, I had arrived and seen the trees like this, the fields sodden and green, mist on ponds, and dead leaves stuck flat to wet roads.

“I’ll send a car for you,” Vidia had said, and he had given me the name of the driver. It was Walters. He was outside Salisbury station, waiting beside his car.

“You must be Mr, Furrow,” he said.

“That’s me.”

We drove to Wilsford in silence down roads with dense drifts and piles of leaves while I reflected on Vidia’s thoughtfulness in sending a car. At The Bungalow, Walters opened the door for me, chauffeur fashion, and said, “That will be four pounds.”

The gravel driveway announced every car with a rolling crunch like a chain being drawn on a pulley. Vidia came out and greeted me. Behind him was a small elfin-faced man wearing tight velvet trousers and a red and gold waistcoat.

“Do you know Julian Jebb?” Vidia asked.

“I’ve heard of you,” I said, shaking the man’s hand.

“People say dreadful things about me. But take no notice,” Jebb said. “I’m mad, bad, and dangerous to know.” He looked aside and in an American accent said, “Hey, that’s enough of that crap!”

He was the sort of Englishman who could express his humorous side only by speaking in an exaggerated American accent. It was not unusual. Many American academics I had known could only theorize in a precise way by using a fake English accent. Parody so often resulted from simple self-consciousness.

“Yes, yes,” Vidia said, looking impatient at Jebb’s foolery. “Come inside. Have something to drink.”

“I was telling Vidia how much I hate his gramophone,” Jebb said, stepping through the door. “Look, isn’t it hideous? It belongs in the V and A. It’s just a silly contraption for distorting sounds.” He put his hands to his cheeks. “I hate it!”

Just then we heard the serious and sudden crunch of the driveway, a thoroughly satisfying sound that reminded me now of molars and nuts. This continuous grinding was caused by the broad tires of a brown Jaguar. Closer, it even sounded like a big-pawed animal hungrily padding through gravel.

“Hugh and Antonia,” Vidia said. “Yes. Yes. Yes.”

Jebb went to greet them. His voice was teasing and friendly but growly from his chain-smoking. He smoked French cigarettes from a blue pack.

The Frasers were introduced to me. I said, “I met you almost ten years ago, around Christmas.”

“I distinctly remember you,” Lady Antonia said.

I loved her lisp on the word “distinctly.” She had beautiful eyes and pale skin, and when she spoke, her tongue and teeth, slightly out of alignment, made her awkward, and sexier, and drew attention to her pretty mouth.

“Your book has done so well,” she said. “I’ve given copies of it away as presents.”

Hugh Fraser, hearing this, turned to me. He was very tall and slow in his movements, with a large, thoughtful face that looked both apprehensive and domineering. His shoulders were lopsided, one higher than the other, which gave him a weary posture. It was a letter from Hugh Fraser that Vidia the graphologist had once shown me, saying of his handwriting, “Look, even upside down it’s still tormented.”

“The Welsh are the only people who bring out my racial prejudice,” Jebb was saying to Lady Antonia.

Hugh Eraser’s bigness and aura of helpless authority filled The Bungalow. He was a Conservative member of Parliament, and he made me wonder why anyone so judicious and reflective had wanted to go into politics. I could not imagine him giving speeches or stumping for votes. He represented Stafford and Stone, in the Midlands. I knew those places from the train window, the stops before Crewe and Stoke, on the way to Liverpool. His was a safe Tory seat and the towns looked dreary, but that could have been misleading: riding trains in England was an experience of the back yards and open windows you rarely saw. And if you said to an English person that a certain place was dreary, he’d respond, with an indulgent chuckle, “Oh, the Potteries,” as if its dreariness were irrelevant.

“Sherry?”

Vidia was pouring and also describing the merits of this particular sherry, a suggestion of walnuts and oak.

“I always feel like Alice here,” Jebb said, and then he laughed and made a monkey face. “Of course, I feel like Alice in lots of places!”

In his overloud laugh there was a scream of disturbance, yet he was funny and much friendlier than the others.

“Stephen Tennant is the March Hare and the Red Queen rolled into one,” Jebb said, and cupped his hand close to his mouth and whispered in my ear in his affected American accent, “Faggot.”

Jebb’s breath against my head made me so uncomfortable I said, “He’s a recluse, isn’t he?”

“I don’t know whether I would call someone who goes to America as much as he does a recluse. He loves Bournemouth. He never misses the Christmas pantomime. Stephen is savagely peripatetic compared to Vidia, the true recluse.”

“This is a fantastic place,” Lady Antonia said. “It’s like a cottage in an enchanted forest.”

She was dressed like a shepherdess, her soft skin set off by a frilly lavender blouse and a velvet peasant skirt with brightly embroidered bib and shoulder straps. Her greenish-blue eyes were beautiful, as was her somewhat tousled blond hair. With her big soft lips she seemed half girl, half woman, laughing as she disagreed.

“If I lived here I would never leave,” she said. “You talk such rubbish, Julian.”

“About Stephen?” Julian pretended to be indignant, puffing pompously on his French cigarette. “I am probably the only person in this room who’s met him. I think of him as a sort of Oriental potentate. He greets all his visitors by lying on a lovely couch, draped in silk shawls. Something terribly Oriental about that — and of course something frightfully epicene too,” he said, cackling.

“There is something magical here,” said Lady Antonia.

“Stephen had the cottage built for himself,” Jebb said. “He never set foot in it. He’s just over there, you know, giggling over something very naughty.”

I wondered whether Vidia would tell Lady Antonia why the ivy-strangled trees were dead, but he said nothing. He had heard more guests arrive — the gravel again in the driveway. He was alert to the crunching. This was a taxi.

“Yes, yes,” he said, and went to the door. A young couple entered, and Vidia introduced them as Malcolm and Robin, visiting from New Zealand. Vidia had met them there on a lecturing visit. Malcolm had dark hair and a face so ruddy it looked like a higher form of embarrassment, the kind of color only English farm boys and some Scotsmen had — a naturally pale person’s rude health. Robin was sweet and square-shouldered, wearing a soft, unnecessary hat, as New Zealanders seemed habitually to do.

“Beaut book, Paul,” Malcolm said to me. “When we met Vidia in Auckland, I told him that it was a dream of mine to meet you when we came to England. So this is a pleasure.”

Jebb said mockingly, “A real fan!”

I ignored him. Being a pest was part of his humor. “My pleasure. Are you a writer?”

“I do some writing. I’m on the English faculty at the uni. I took Vidia around when he visited. Sort of smoothed the way.”

He was younger than me, and I knew exactly what his role had been, because it was the role I had played ten years before. I saw him as a Vidia protégé and seemed to be looking at my younger self, when I had visited England and Vidia had rewarded me for smoothing the way for him in Africa.

“It gets dark so early here,” Robin said. “And listen to that wind.”

If I had not heard New Zealand in her nasalized dahk I would surely have heard it in her weend. But I had made the same observation of English weather when I had first arrived.

“Quite right,” Hugh Fraser said, but he was speaking about something else to Vidia. He had stood up. His head was near the ceiling. He looked awkward in the room’s smallness, but then he probably looked uncomfortable in most rooms. “I knew him well,” Fraser said. “I would have given anything to work with him again. He always showed up in these sort of marvelous suits. ‘Got it in India,’ he’d say. ‘Made from the chin hairs of a certain goat in Kashmir.’”

“I felt I could eat that cloth,” Vidia said.

Who were they talking about? But I didn’t ask. Parties in England were full of remarks like these, about colorful people you’d never heard of.

“Instead, why don’t you eat some food?” Pat said, emerging from the kitchen. She greeted everyone and apologized for being preoccupied with the meal. She looked harassed, but I could see that she had help, a woman in a brown sweater and apron ladling soup into bowls.

Vidia poured the wine, saying, “I think you’ll like this. It’s balanced, it’s firm, perhaps a bit fleshy, but smooth and, I think you’ll agree, round.”

“We are taking no notice of Vidia’s diet today,” Pat said. “This is Mrs. Griggs’s oxtail soup.”

Vidia was served a plate of smoked salmon, which he had to himself, and I knew when I saw it that everyone else at the table would have preferred it to the brown soup.

Jebb said, “Vidia is such an absolute fanatic about food. There’s a new restaurant in London called Cranks, for vegetarians. I always think of Vidia when I go by. I’m usually cottaging in that area — see, no one even knows what it means!”

“One is thinking of buying a car,” Vidia said, abruptly changing the subject. “Tell me, what car should one buy?”

“I’m car-blind,” Jebb said. “I can’t tell them apart. I can’t even drive. I hate them, really. I’m car-bored, rather.”

“We once made the finest motorcars on earth,” Hugh Fraser said. His voice was solemn and slow. We waited for more. “And no doubt we shall again.” He paused and added, “Perhaps you should wait until then, when these paragons of British workmanship are once more rolling off the assembly lines.”

“How do you like your Jaguar?” I asked.

“It’s a bit of a tired old warhorse,” he said. “Like its owner.”

“Except when you’re out on the road and speeding and calling out, ‘Eat my dust!’” Jebb said, slipping into an American accent again. Then Jebb said to Malcolm with intense interest, “Isn’t there a fabulous native name for New Zealand?”

“I think you mean Maori.”

“I suppose one does,” Jebb said. He was smoking at the table, while everyone else was eating.

“Aotearoa,” Malcolm said. “It means, The Land of the Long White Cloud.”

“Or, The Land of the Wrong White Crowd, more like,” Jebb said. He turned his back on the New Zealanders and smiled at Lady Antonia, who hadn’t heard.

“There is nothing I would love more than living on one of those islands,” Lady Antonia was saying to Pat Naipaul. But they weren’t talking about New Zealand. They were engaged in a separate conversation, about the West Indies. “I would adore being absolutely idle.”

“You’d get tired of the heat.”

“I’d adore the heat.”

“You would be so bored.”

“Not at all,” Lady Antonia said. “I would love it. Flowers. Heat. The sun. The sea. It’s my idea of heaven.”

This lovely woman, naked under a loosely fitting white dress with frilly sleeves and a big floppy bonnet and a white parasol, came smiling towards me in a tropical garden while I sat on the verandah of a yellow stucco plantation house at a table set with tea things, including marmalade made from my own oranges. A jovial parrot squawked in a big cage and sunlight blazed from the blue sky, showing the veins in the large green leaves of my anthuriums and Lady Antonia’s body silhouetted in her thin lacy dress. I was pouring tea for her and she was utterly at peace and fragrant with pheromones. Heat, idleness, and contentment were the combination that produced sensuality.

“I love those hot islands,” she was saying to Pat as my temperature went up. “I love doing nothing.”

“You’re the busiest woman I know,” Pat said. She had gotten up to pass the plates for the second course, poached fish and buttery leeks and salad.

Lady Antonia was protesting, but I didn’t care. I had already eloped with her, and I was barefoot on the verandah in my planter’s shorts and straw hat, living out my fantasy of bliss in a coconut paradise.

“How is your wine?” Vidia asked me.

“You were right. Fleshy. Round. Smooth.”

Jebb said, “Are you talking about Princess Margaret?”

“Afterwards we’re all going to try some snuff,” Vidia said, cutting him off.

“Harold Macmillan took snuff,” Hugh Fraser said. “One was perpetually badgered to try.”

“I won’t badger you,” Vidia said.

“I want to try,” Lady Antonia said eagerly.

On our tropical verandah she was always saying yes to my wild suggestions, and she needed only to sigh and twitch her dress with her fingers for me to say yes. I looked up and saw Mrs. Griggs collecting the plates and realized that my fantasy had possessed me so completely, lunch was over.

“I’ll have a go,” Malcolm said. “Robin?”

Robin nodded, yes, she would try some snuff.

“What a pathetic lot of sheep,” Jebb said. “I will not put that vile substance up my nose. I’d rather have a fag. Oh, look at Paul! He’s so shocked.”

I said, “I know ‘fag’ means cigarette, Julian.”

“But I mean the other kind of fag,” Jebb said. He laughed at me, and in his American accent said, “Faggot.”

The correct response, I knew, was to let yourself be teased and not get riled, and then merely smile in pity at the teaser to make him feel childish. Or else to say, You may well be right!

“That snuff just vanishes up Vidia’s nose,” Pat said.

“Aren’t you supposed to sneeze?” Robin asked.

“Vidia never sneezes,” said Pat.

“I love to sneeze,” Lady Antonia said. “I wonder why that is.”

This was my chance. I said, “The reason it’s so pleasurable is that there is erectile tissue in the nose — even a woman’s. The nose is also a sexual organ. It’s very sensitive. I mean, it can become aroused and swollen. There are some people who can’t breathe through their nose when they’re sexually excited.”

Everyone stared at me.

“It says so in Krafft-Ebing,” I went on, blabbing. “Psychopathia Sexualis. Sneezing and sex.”

Lady Antonia smiled, but her husband was frowning in contemplation at his big hands, and his face was darker as an uneasy silence descended on the table. I had probably said too much, but I didn’t mind. I was thinking of nakedness on a hot island.

“That sounds like the voice of experience, Paul,” Jebb said.

“If it sounds that way it’s because I am boasting,” I said. “But haven’t you been told you have a virile nose?”

“All the time, but fortunately for me I am impotent,” Jebb said. “I am ‘The Maimed Débauché.’”

Malcolm put his elbows on the table, and his pink face grew pinker as he recited:

So when my days of impotence approach,

And I’m by pox and wine’s unlucky chance

Forced from the pleasing billows of debauch

On the dull shore of lazy temperance…

“That sounds so lovely spoken in New Zealandish — is that right?” Jebb was puffing energetically and blowing smoke. “Or do I say ‘Kiwi’?”

“That verse is terribly familiar,” Lady Antonia said. She was dabbing her pretty lips.

“John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester,” Malcolm said.

“Malcolm’s doctoral dissertation was about the Augustans and court wits,” Robin said. “I typed every word, so I should know.”

“Rochester is delightful,” Lady Antonia said. “Do you still read him, Vidia?”

Before Vidia could answer, Malcolm stuck his pink face into Antonia’s pale one and said, “‘Delightful’ is a strange word for porno.”

“I don’t find Rochester in the least pornographic. You New Zealanders must be rather easily shocked.”

I liked that. We would read Rochester on our verandah, Lady A. and I. Instead of giving her a direct reply, Malcolm propped himself up on his elbows again, a beaky Kiwi in the throes of pedantry, proving his point to the Poms, and declaimed:

By all love’s soft yet mighty

powers It is a thing unfit

That men should fuck in time of flowers

Or when the smock’s beshit.

“I think you’ve just proved my point — you’ve certainly revealed something about your own shockability,” Lady Antonia said. “Rochester is a moralist, really, and very funny for being a wee bit naughty.”

“A wee bit naughty!” Malcolm cried. Speaking in his New Zealand accent he could not make much of a point; he sounded as if he were satirizing himself. He angrily recited again:

You ladies all of merry England

Who have been to kiss the Duchess’s hand,

Pray, did you lately observe in the show

A noble Italian called Signor Dildo?

“‘Naughty’ is precisely how I would describe that,” Lady Antonia said.

Vidia was fidgeting, made uncomfortable by the turn in the conversation. I knew he was impatient to leave the table and end this talk. He had taken out his pipe and was smoothing it and sticking his thumb in the bowl.

“Malcolm can go on all night,” Robin said, and patted her husband’s rigid arm.

“Rochester is all foreplay,” Jebb said. “Who was it who said foreplay is terribly middle class?”

Malcolm’s eyes were glassy with rage, and I guessed it was because Lady Antonia was smiling and turned slightly away from him, her hands primly in her lap. Malcolm set his jaw at her and said:

So a proud bitch does lead about

Of humble curs the amorous rout

Who most obsequiously do hunt

The savory scent of salt-swollen c—

“Language, I hear!” Jebb shouted in glee, and then, “Your New Zealand accent lends piquancy and incredible nuance to Augustan poetry.”

“Shall we have coffee?” Pat said.

“Is this another branch of the awful study of English?” Vidia said.

Jebb said, “My grandfather hated that poetry. Do you know my grandfather?”

I said, “No. Do you know mine?”

“Mine was Hilaire Belloc. Who was yours?”

Lady Antonia was smiling directly at Malcolm now. He looked fussed and breathless and indignant. She put her lisp to dramatic advantage as she said,

Then talk not of inconstancy,

False hearts and broken vows;

If I, by miracle can be

This live-long minute true to thee,

’Tis all that heaven allows.

“Rochester wrote that as a lame excuse, because he found it impossible to be faithful,” Malcolm said.

“I think it’s lovely and lyrical,” Lady Antonia said. “I don’t know those poems you’re quoting. But maybe that’s because we invent the writer we want. I know why I think Vidia is brilliant. I’m sure you could quote something against him. But Rochester is for me a lyric poet with heaps and heaps of charm.”

The dispute was probably less about Lord Rochester than it was about class and accents. It created a staleness in the air around the lunch table and an awkwardness for all that remained unspoken. Vidia got up, Malcolm and Robin whispered to each other in a wound-licking way, and Jebb giggled. Hugh Fraser was frowning as though listening for an echo that would reveal a meaning. At that point I heard Lady Antonia sneeze, and saw tawny snuff-dust around her nostrils. She smiled at me with watery eyes. I wanted her to ask me about erectile tissue.

“I have just thought of it, Vidia,” Hugh Fraser said, returning to an interrupted conversation. “It’s that odd racial contradiction you get with so much intermarriage. Black becomes white and white becomes black.”

“I have written about that,” Vidia said. He went to a bookshelf, picked out a leatherbound copy of The Mimic Men, and read the concentrated paragraph about the fable “The Niger and the Seine.”

As soon as he began speaking — and he spoke clearly and well, knowing just how to emphasize each word, knowing what was coming, timing his pauses — the lunch guests stopped talking. Vidia sat upright, holding the book straight, his thumb in the gutter of the spine, and read on, carefully, as if giving a lesson in recitation to Malcolm, who had blurted out the rude Lord Rochester stanzas. When Vidia was done, he shut the book like a vicar shutting a Bible after a homily.

“You see?”

We went for a walk behind The Bungalow so that Vidia could show us the water meadows and the trees.

Robin and Malcolm were walking together, wife reassuring husband, who still looked flustered. Pat went over to them, to walk along with them — it was only now, outside, that it was obvious there had been a scene at lunch; Pat was being a pleasant peace-making hostess. I jostled onward to walk next to Lady Antonia.

We talked about nothing — the delightful woods, the overhanging branches, the thicknesses of ivy.

“Your fantasy is my fantasy,” I finally said. “A hot island and idleness, clear sky and a blue lagoon.”

“I am so glad you agree with me. Everyone thinks I’m absolutely mad.”

“No, no.” I could see the white dress, the parasol, the hat — and the thrashing legs and damp flanks.

Hugh Fraser was walking up front with Vidia, both men talking about a weighty matter — I could see it from the way they held their heads, tilted at an angle that indicated seriousness.

“I also like your ‘seize the day’ lines of Rochester,” I said.

“That’s so sweet of you to say,” Lady Antonia said. “What are you writing at the moment?”

“A novel, set in London.”

“I am sure it will be a great hit. Vidia is so proud of your success.”

I wanted to hug her and bury my face against her neck — she looked so soft and warm, her lips so pretty. I wanted to clutch her shepherdess costume. She skipped slightly to avoid stepping on muddy ground.

For that brief orderly moment we were eight people moving down a path by an old water meadow, a path so narrow that most of the time we followed in single file. It seemed to me that it was no more than a live-long minute of harmony and vitality, a happy convergence, all of us different people together, like dancers around a Maypole.

Jebb fell in with us, and he turned to me and said, “I’ve got a tide for my novel at last. Want to hear it?” He spread his hands before him, laying it out in the air. “I’m going to call it Light.”

He hurried ahead, perhaps to tell Vidia. He walked in a jaunty way, in his bright red waistcoat with the gold piping, a little clownish, a bit like a circus performer, but eager to please.

“I didn’t know Julian was a novelist,” I said.

“He’s not,” Lady Antonia said. “But he is awfully sweet.”

My mind was elsewhere. I was considering the thought that the obscene poems of Rochester had aroused me, especially at the point I had seen Lady Antonia smile and shrug. I wanted to tell her how I imagined the two of us on the tropical island. But the day would soon end, and I thought, What’s the use? I was just fantasizing. It was the habit of a lifetime.

Back at the house, Pat served tea outside on a little wicker table. Vidia got his air rifle. We took turns shooting at a paper target. Robin scored the highest. She said, two or three times, “I’ve never even tried this before!” Lady Antonia looked beautiful holding the rifle and squinting when she fired. She was not a shrinking violet; she was a game-for-anything woman. I loved that. Another reason she would be great company on a tropical island. When she raised the rifle again and pressed her lips together, I wanted her to spin around and shoot me.

It was Jebb’s turn next. He said, in his American accent, “Okay, drop your guns!” He fired four times and missed the target entirely. He posed with the rifle while Vidia snapped a picture with his Kampala camera.

“Vidia, this has been just the most super treat,” Hugh Fraser said, turning the drinking of the last of his tea into a gesture of farewell. He pulled his car keys from his pocket and raised his hand to signal to Lady Antonia.

I wanted to go back to London with them in their car, to be with her. But it was useless yearning. They did not offer anyone a lift. I had the feeling they were planning to use the return trip to discuss something serious and domestic.

“I’m going to be late,” Jebb said. “Will you call me a taxi?”

Jebb left. I lingered a little. The New Zealanders lingered also. Perhaps Jebb had been a protégé before me — he had a confident, teasing friendship with Vidia that suggested this might have been the case. My protégé days were over: I was making a good living now and had a family and another book to finish. Malcolm was perhaps the new protégé, but it seemed to me he would not last; he was too contrary. You got nowhere arguing with Vidia. You needed to listen, to indulge him, not to debate every illogical point, and to remember. If he said, “The Italians make cheese out of dirt,” you didn’t say, “No, milk.” You laughed. You surely did not quote the scatology of Lord Rochester.

“And you’re saying I’m mistaken for telling them what to read?” Vidia said to Malcolm.

“No, I only said that the majority of New Zealanders see their national history as a benign colonial model.”

They were reliving a Kiwi encounter. Vidia seemed cross and looked misunderstood. Pat was pale from overwork and sleeplessness and too many luncheon guests.

“I must go,” I said.

“I’ll call Mr. Walters,” Pat said.

“We’ll talk, we’ll talk.” Vidia seemed rattled by something Malcolm had said.

Malcolm and Robin were conferring, looking like foreigners again.

We all left separately, and it was as though, out of sight and separated in the dark, we became much smaller in our destinies; wandering off to be disloyal, to disintegrate, and die. But for that lunch party, a matter of hours, we were bright.

On the train to London, I tried to look out the window, but all I saw was my own reflection, framed by the night, looking in: my other self staring at me for one and a half hours.

“Well, did he ask about me?” my wife said. She smiled and did not wait for a reply, because she knew the answer. It was a trivial question, and she knew it. Time took care of it.

Fiction depends on revelations to make you turn the page. It is often a matter of timing. But this is another sort of narrative, a different shape, unsuspenseful, just a chronicle of a friendship, spanning the years.

Time took care of us too. Lady Antonia left her husband and married the playwright Harold Pinter. Hugh Fraser, sick with sorrow, moved out of the family house and lived with friends, who later said he died of a broken heart. Pat Naipaul was diagnosed with cancer. She had a mastectomy. It did no good. She died too. I left my wife, I lost my family. Jebb committed suicide, with a mixture of vodka and pills. No news of the New Zealanders.

But all that was much later. The lunch was the most minute interval in this, just one sunny day.