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 an 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 look-out 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 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.” He wrote his bogus novel. Just playing with art. He wrote another – farmers, provincials. 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’Aiglefin 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.’