I seemed to evaporate. I died. I disappeared. I left London, left my home and family. As the ghost of the man I had been, I traveled across half the world looking for a simpler place and sunshine and no memories. Two years I spent wandering the Pacific. I went back to Africa to look at where my writing life had begun – but before Vidia, before Yomo even – no specific memories, only the reminder of big dusty African plains and dusty faces and mud huts. A slim, quiet girl I had taught in Malawi was now enormous and jolly in a wide loose dress, three of her seven children goggling at me from the door of her hut. I could not find Yomo. In the north of Malawi I saw elephants, a family herd, devouring the bush, chewing on trees. I went to Mexico and Ecuador. I did no writing. I asked myself, Are problems good?
The Pacific drew me back. I paddled a kayak among whales and slipped into the sea to hear them singing. Dawn over the volcano cone on Haleakala; a Trobriand Islander whispering ‘Meesta Boll’; the fragrance of gardenias, the total eclipse of the sun, the taste of honey from my own bees, the heat in my bones from sleeping at noon on the sand at Waimea Bay; birdsong, blue skies. I saw the connections in all this and thought, God is a fish. And so I came back from the dead.
But everything else had ended, not just my other life but – was it my age? – friends and relations began to die. In the past, people fell ill and recovered, but now they got sick, they declined, and the next thing I knew they were dead. Five women from breast cancer, one from leukemia, and my best friend in Hawaii, ailing but saying ‘I’ll be fine,’ and dropping dead. After long illnesses two uncles and two aunts; several neighbors – heart attacks, cancer, and AIDS.
None of these were drownings or road accidents or plane crashes or blunders in the home. They were not preventable. In each case the body failed: it was death as doom, the limit of mortality. I never went to so many funerals. And still I was not prepared for what was to come.
One morning my mother called me in Hawaii to say that my father, who had been frail for some years, had been taken to the hospital on Cape Cod. I had gotten out of bed to answer the phone. She would keep me posted, she said. I lay down again and the piercing fragrance of a gardenia in a dish near my bed sweetened a reverie of my father. It was a real reverie, a dreamlike sequence of images: my father’s face, the aroma like a sunburst of pollen, the perfumed flower (a bouquet of which my mother had held, next to my father, in their wedding portrait), the whiteness of the petals, the fullness of the blossom, the dark green leaves, the sweetness of the dish near me – following the whole sequence of associations from my father to the cut stem.
When I got to the image of the snipped-off stem and ached remembering my father’s sweet nature, I realized that no matter how vital he might seem, he was dying.
The phone rang again, my mother. ‘Come quickly. He hasn’t got much time.’
My father was smiling the day he died. He even laughed proudly. He said, ‘You look good, Paul,’ and seeing the whole family gathered near his bed, grateful at the moment of his death – could anyone be more humble? – he said, ‘What a wonderful reunion.’
I stayed with him to the end, with my brothers Gene and Joe, and after twenty minutes of agonal breathing he drew his last breath, almost on the stroke of nine o’clock. Nothing on earth I had ever seen had filled me with such desolation as watching my father die in his hospital bed in Hyannis.
‘Grief is pure and holy,’ a woman of ninety-seven wrote to me. ‘You will find out that your father has not left you but will continue to live within you and seem to guide you.’
This was accurate. I felt my father’s presence strongly afterwards. But I missed him as a friend. We had had no ‘issues.’ He was proud of me, and I loved him – loved him most of all because he had set me free. When I told him I was going to Africa for two years, he was delighted for me. And: ‘No one owes you a thing.’ He wrote to me often. I was in Africa more than five years. He encouraged me to explore. He had freed me because he was free himself. He had been loved by his parents. He knew how to love.
Vidia wrote. I had sent him my father’s obituary. ‘He sounded an immensely strong man, and his going will create a gap, whatever age he was.’
We were discussing by mail the appearance in The New Yorker of a number of letters Vidia had written me. They were ‘Letters to a Young Writer.’ He reported the reactions. Only two. One letter from a friend. Another from a fool.
He had published A Way in the World. In it was the story about Raleigh, an old man on the Orinoco, under siege by the Spanish, hoping to find gold so that he would not be executed. Vidia had told me this story in New York, that snowy day twenty years before. He said he was planning a new journey for a book. It was to be a sequel to his Islamic travels of 1979 which resulted in Among the Believers – peregrinations in Malaysia, Indonesia, Iran, Pakistan.
He hoped he had the stomach to write the book. He had been visited again by the intimation that he was a has-been. He complained that in his writing life he had had few well-wishers and little practical help. He said that his had been a solitary struggle. ‘I have had to do it all out of my own reserves.’
That last part was inexplicable. Hadn’t he had plenty of encouragement? Not just the literary prizes – every English book prize that was winnable he had won. His friends were distinguished and adoring. His advances were substantial, far outweighing his sales, which were never great. With this prestige he had sold his archives, including hundreds of my letters, to the University of Oklahoma at Tulsa for $640,000.
One of his American acquaintances had said to me, in a reproving way, ‘Vidia wants everything.’
But everything means everything, for when wishes are granted, answered prayers are not sorted into two piles, good and bad, and always there are consequences: you had forgotten that asking for everything in the sack includes the sack itself. Vidia said this was the lesson of Salman Rushdie. He had set out to be original and shocking. He wished for fame. He became the most famous writer in the world, the origin of his fame the price on his head, like a cruel fable of wishes granted.
At this point, Vidia – Sir Vidia – had his wish: he too had everything. He had been very specific. He had wished for a place to call home. He now had three, two flats in London and a house in Wiltshire. He had wished to live in a manner that was ‘uncompromisingly fashionable’ and to be ‘immensely famous.’ He had Kensington and his knighthood. He had wished for a million pounds in the bank. Surely he had his million now.
When he returned from his Islamic journey, he was devastated by what he had found. He wrote urgently to tell me that Pat was on her deathbed. ‘It is more than I can bear,’ he said. ‘She has been with me since January or February 1952. I cannot endure the knowledge that in another room of this house she is suffering without any hope of relief, except the very final one.’ He implored me to write her obituary, in the form of a reminiscence. He reminded me that I had known her a very long time. He knew of my affection for her. He did not want her to be forgotten. His implication was that he himself was incapable of writing anything about her. Yet it seemed to me that we study the art of writing for, among other things, moments like this.
Now I understood the quarrels. ‘We row all the time now,’ Vidia had told me. Pat, whose mocking maiden name was Hale, knew she was dying; she was raging – sorrowful, indignant. How unfair that someone who had asked so little of life, who had spent so much time waiting, attending, being silent, speaking ill of no one, constantly apologizing, excusing herself – the very model of intelligence and simplicity; frugal, frail, humble, full of compliments, saying sweetly, I thought of you, and almost the only person on earth who sent me a birthday card; modest, a little timid, always indoors – how unfair that death was stalking her.
More than anyone, Pat had had the darkest experience of Vidia’s shadow. Even if she had not known about his passion for prostitutes, which Vidia had claimed had lasted into his mid-thirties, she had been painfully acquainted with the facts of his relationship with Margaret, how he had traveled with her and taken her to parties. Everyone knew. Vidia did not conceal his affair with Margaret, and it had lasted as love.
Why didn’t the Naipauls just split up? Was it purely because Pat allowed him to have a lover, and his lover had not made marriage a condition? But life was more complicated than that.
In every sense, Pat was left behind. I had suspected this early on, seeing her as a worried woman of an old-fashioned sort who in another century would have been called neurasthenic. Her ill health was the result of the way she lived, as a captive wife, a shut-in, fluttering in whatever cage of a house Vidia devised for her. And of course, because the way she lived made her ill, and her lifestyle never changed, she got worse. ‘A case of nerves,’ a quack would say. She was trembly, she was inward, introverted, a stay-at-home, afflicted with insomnia, a fretful and hesitant sort, and yet in the same room with Vidia she could seem maternal toward him – overprotective, solicitous, weepy, long-suffering. Vidia played the wayward demanding child to this wounded mother.
Everyone liked her, with an affection that bordered on pity. When Vidia was away – and he was probably with Margaret – Pat ran his affairs. It made me think that Pat was stronger than most people guessed. It was Vidia who could not function alone. What bothered me most about his ‘travel books’ was that he seldom traveled by himself and never revealed his traveling companion. I suspected Vidia’s travel narratives to be extensively varnished, because Margaret was nowhere in them.
What was the challenge in traveling with a loving woman? To me, all such travel was just a holiday, no matter the destination. There were no alien places on earth for the man who had his lover to cling to at night and tell him he was a genius. I had always avoided reading about the journey in which Mr and Mrs First-Class Traveler were embarked on a satisfying adventure (‘My wife found an exquisite carving …’). That sort of vacation interested me only if it truthfully reported the cannibalism in the marital woe of the traveling couple: bitter arguments, jealousy, sex, pettiness, infidelity, unfounded accusations, culture shock, or pained silences.
If Pat was dismayed to be left out of Vidia’s trips and Vidia’s writing, she never spoke about it to anyone except Vidia. She covered for him. She was the Lady Naipaul the newspapers mentioned. She stuck by him like the steadfast wife of a prominent politician, fulfilling her role as the loyal helpmate, letting no criticism show. Vidia often told me about their quarrels, and I imagined floods of tears, but in spite of that friction, and considering the circumstances, they seemed to get on remarkably well.
Pat was well educated and extremely well read. She did little but read books. She had had an ambition to write, but the few finished pieces I saw – a visit to Trinidad, an account of a political meeting in London – were not very effective. They were like her, bloodless and a bit pedestrian and terribly nice; she had no guile, not much humor, she was shy. Vidia was the shouter and the prima donna. She was not as weak as she seemed, however, nor was he as strong as he pretended to be. They were mutually dependent. Perhaps he needed her to be at home in the way that some men can be sexual only if they are unfaithful: it was the need to betray Mommy and, in a larger sense, the need for Mommy to know it and permit it.
Pat loved him – loved him without condition – praised him, lived for him, delighted in his success in the most unselfish way. She had lived through each book, and even when Vidia was traveling with Margaret – in the Islamic world and in the American South – she took pride in the books that resulted, Among the Believers and A Turn in the South. She stayed home, she read, she tended to the household – hired painters, oversaw renovations, did donkey work, paid bills – and prepared for Vidia’s return. She awaited him in a way that suggested all the quaint and comforting props of the hearthside: roomy slippers, the favorite cushion, the pipe and hand-knitted comforter, the kettle of vegetable soup simmering on the hob.
In Africa years before, in his disarming fashion, relying on his shocking candor to do the job, Vidia volunteered the fact to me that there was no sex in the marriage. I knew they slept in separate rooms. I did not want to know more than that. But how was it that, knowing what she knew, she still spoke of his books in terms of great praise, and that the marriage had worked for so many years – indeed was still working?
The answer was that she adored him. Possibly there was an element of fear in it – the fear of losing him, the fear of her own futility and her being rejected. More than that, she was unselfish; love sustained her, which was why anyone who pitied her was misled. Pat had strength – that was evident in her ability to be alone. She was discreet. She was kind, she was generous, she was restrained and magnanimous; she was the soul of politeness, she was grateful; she was all the things Vidia was not. It was no accident that they had been married for forty years.
Death does not discriminate, but as the most efficient predators demonstrate – the lion, the hyena, and, most successful of all, the wild dogs of central Africa – victims are chosen for their weakness. Death shadows the innocent, the ones who stumble or look the wrong way. Death, the opportunist, skips past the strong to pounce on the feeble and the unwary.
A death watch began, and soon after that letter sending news of Pat’s illness, Vidia wrote again: ‘Now just five days on, her brain has gone. It can focus on only the most immediate thing.’ Though she was almost a corpse, she seemed to Vidia almost youthful – there was still a brightness in her face. He was remorseful. He said, ‘I took her too much for granted. I am surprised [by] my own grief – even while she is silent and alive in her room.’
That was all it took to make me hurry my piece. Her brain has gone. I wrote and faxed my memory of Pat and told Vidia to give her my love.
Two days later it happened. I read it on the paper headed Dairy Cottage scrolling through my chattering fax machine: Pat had died just a matter of hours before. Vidia had been summoned by the nurse to witness Pat’s final moment of life. ‘It was shattering.’ After that, the funereal functionaries took over – the night nurse, the day nurse, the doctor, and very soon the undertaker’s assistant, who seemed to Vidia ‘Dickensian.’ Vidia did not watch, not even when Pat’s body was taken from the house in the coffin. Only a week before, Pat and he had visited the doctor in Southampton.
‘I felt relieved when she left,’ Vidia wrote. ‘I telephoned some people. I even thought I would start working. But then I felt very tired, and it occurred to me to send this note to you.’
My obituary appeared in the Daily Telegraph, under the heading ‘Lady Naipaul.’
In the many books that V. S. Naipaul has published, Pat Naipaul is mentioned only once, and obliquely (the prologue to An Area of Darkness, where she is referred to as ‘my companion’). But her intelligence, her encouragement, her love and her discernment are behind every book that Naipaul has written.
‘She is my heart,’ he told me once. She was also that most valued person in any writer’s life, the first reader.
In Uganda, 30 years ago, in what I considered to be highly unusual circumstances, I met Pat Naipaul and was immediately impressed. The Naipauls had been given a house in the grounds of Makerere University in Kampala, and Vidia was asked by the Building Department how he wished his name to read on the sign. He said he did not want his name on any sign. He was told he had to have something. He said, ‘All right then, letter it “TEAS.”’
As he told me the story, Pat burst out in appreciative isn’t-he-awful? laughter. And then – this is the unusual part – Vidia continued to do what I had interrupted. He was reading to Pat from the last chapter of The Mimic Men, a novel he was just finishing.
I felt privileged to be a part of this intimate ritual. He read about two pages – a marvellous account of a bitter-sweet celebratory dinner shared by the guests in a hotel in south London. Brilliant, I was thinking, when the reading was over.
‘Patsy?’ Vidia said, inquiring because she had said nothing in response. Pat was thinking hard.
Finally she said, ‘I’m not sure about all those tears.’
She was tough-minded and she was tender. For more than 40 years, in spite of delicate health and in latter years serious illness, she remained a devoted companion. It is a better description than wife. (In The Mimic Men, the narrator says that wife is ‘an awful word.’) The Naipauls made a practice of not reminiscing, at least in front of me, but I knew from casual remarks that in those early years they had to put up with the serious inconvenience of a small and uncertain income and no capital; Vidia used to laugh about the only job he had ever held as a salaried employee lasting just six weeks. Pat laughed too, but she had worked for a number of years as a history mistress at a girls’ school.
While she was still in her thirties, she resigned from her teaching post to spend more time with Vidia, which she did as a householder in Muswell Hill, in Stockwell, and in Wiltshire; as a traveler in India, in Africa, in Trinidad, and America. She helped in the research for The Loss of El Dorado, and she became involved in the complex issue that Vidia described in The Killings in Trinidad.
As the first reader, highly intelligent, strong-willed and profoundly moral, Pat played an active part in Vidia’s work. She understood that a writer needs a loyal opposition as much as praise. She enjoyed intellectual combat and used to say, when Vidia and I were engaged on a topic, ‘I love to see you two sparring.’ She always said it in a maternal way, and it touched me.
I loved her for her sweetness and her unselfishness, for the way she prized great writing and fine weather and kind people. She had no time for their opposites. (‘Life’s too short,’ she said.)
I see her always as I first knew her, in the garden of the Kaptagat Arms in up-country Kenya, where Vidia took refuge from our political troubles in Uganda, to finish his novel. Pat sat smiling, reading in the sunshine, sometimes writing, and always alert to – just beyond the hedge of purple and pink bougainvilleas – the sound of typing.
‘Thank you for the lovely and generous note about Pat,’ Vidia wrote. ‘I told her you had sent your love. I will write more later.’
But there were no more letters, only rumors. I dismissed them as outrageous. I should have known better. In the rumors that circulated about Vidia, the most outrageous ones were usually the truest.
A little over two months after Pat Naipaul died, Vidia married again. He had fallen in love. He was unembarrassed about such passions. Even while Pat was alive, he had spoken publicly – in The New Yorker – of his pleasure in having found sexual satisfaction in middle age with Margaret in Argentina. In this same piece he also delivered himself of some choice Naipaulisms: ‘I have an interesting mind’ and ‘I can’t bear flowers’ and ‘I have no more than a hundred months left’ (that was in 1994; in 1979 he had also said he had only a hundred months left) and ‘I can’t stand the sound of women’s voices.’
Margaret was actually named in the New Yorker piece as Vidia’s long-time lover, and was then still in the picture. ‘The sexual ease came quite late to me,’ Vidia said to the interviewer, of Margaret, while Pat toiled in the kitchen making lunch. ‘And it came as an immense passion. Conrad has a lovely line: “A man to whom love comes late, not as the most splendid of illusions, but like an enlightening and priceless misfortune.”’
But the new Lady Naipaul was not Margaret. She was Nadira Khannum Alvi, who had begun life in Kenya, the daughter of two transplanted Pakistanis. More than thirty years before, Vidia and I had encountered a small girl who resembled her on the verandah of a dukawallah’s shop in Nairobi. Vidia had loathed her on sight, but then, he disliked most children.
Nadira was now forty-two, a divorced mother of two teenagers. Vidia had met her at a dinner party at the home of the American consul-general in Lahore, Pakistan, in October 1995, as Pat lay dying in Wiltshire.
As with many stories about Vidia, at least two versions of their meeting existed. The first described Mrs Alvi as an admirer of his work who approached him at the party and said, ‘Can I kiss you?’
‘I think we should sit down,’ Vidia said.
Three weeks later they decided to get married. It only remained for Pat to die before the marriage date could be fixed. In the event, it was to be April 15, 1996.
All this – the place, the name of the woman, the admiration, and ‘Can I kiss you?’ – I read in the Daily Telegraph, which published an account by a reporter, Amit Roy, of the wedding lunch in London. The piece was neither corrected nor contradicted, something the scrupulous and insistent Vidia would have done if he had been misrepresented, so I took it as a record of facts, until someone who had been at the party in Lahore, the man who had brought them together, told me the second version.
‘I introduced them at the US consul’s dinner,’ he said. ‘I wanted Naipaul to meet some characters for his book. I saw Nadira sitting at another table. I went up to her and said, “Guess who is here?” and “I want to introduce you to him.” She told me she did not know the name V. S. Naipaul and had never read anything by him. I then accompanied her to meet him. She went up to him at the dinner table where he was serving himself, and as I introduced them, she said, “How fantastic” and “What an honor” and “I know your work” and then plonked a big kiss on his cheek. He blushed, but he was taken. They were together for the whole evening. The very next day he phoned me and said, “I don’t need your help because Nadira is taking me around and we are leaving for Bahawalpur.” Nadira was with Naipaul in the hotel when he phoned me.’
The marriage lunch was at an Indian restaurant in South Kensington. Vidia and his new wife sat holding hands at the table. This was a new Vidia. I had never seen him hold Pat’s hand. This was a smitten Vidia, a far cry from the man who once said to me that he turned away if he saw two people kissing on television. He was also a reticent Vidia. The new Lady Naipaul did most of the talking, and her talk sounded very similar to what Vidia always referred to as ‘chuntering.’
‘It was amazing for him to have a woman in an Islamic country walk up and kiss him,’ Nadira said, explaining her unorthodox manner of introduction. ‘I astounded a lot of people, but I tend to do that a lot in Pakistan anyway.’ (This kiss received further revision two years later in an interview in London’s Sunday Times of May 10, 1998, in which Nadira was quoted as saying, ‘My kiss was not some silly bimbo, fluff-headed thing … It was an act of reverence.’) Going on to describe their travels in Pakistan after they met, she said, ‘I think we fell terribly in love with each other.’
Nadira was a bit surprised by the suddenness. ‘There can be dichotomy between the writer and the person, someone you don’t want to meet again. I found the writer was the person. Here I had met a combination of a wonderful man and a man who had a vision, tremendous compassion, someone who reminded me of my past. He was my soul-mate. He was someone I had always looked for. I am madly in love with him. I think I shall always be madly in love with him.’
There was more. But knowing Vidia, this was the moment for him to cry, ‘Stop chuntering!’
Instead, Vidia said to the man from the Telegraph, ‘Do you know about Nadira, her reputation and her work? She is very famous.’
During the wedding lunch Nadira clutched Vidia’s hand and whispered, ‘I want you,’ as the guests tucked into King Prawn Curry and Chicken Badami Korma. Among them were his agent, his old Oxford tutor, a couple of literary critics, a fellow whom Vidia unfailingly referred to as ‘that epicene young man,’ and Harold Pinter and Lady Antonia Fraser. I was ten thousand miles away, on the slopes of Mount Haleakala.
Vidia and I had often talked about Philip Larkin. We had both bought High Windows when it was published, in the summer of 1974. Larkin’s poetry – mordant, sour, funny, right wing, cynical, elegiac, mocking, contemptuous of fame, fearful of death – matched exactly many of Vidia’s moods. In ‘The Whitsun Weddings,’ Larkin had written of the faces at weddings,
… each face seemed to define
Just what it saw departing: children frowned
At something dull; fathers had never known
Success so huge and wholly farcical;
The women shared
The secret like a happy funeral …
Vidia had referred to Nadira’s ‘reputation and her work,’ and had said, ‘She is very famous.’ But surely Nadira’s celebrity was similar to that which I had enjoyed when I had been famous in Kampala and in Bundibugyo. Nadira had been famous in Bahawalpur, a small town on the Sutlej River about two hundred miles south of Lahore. She wrote a ‘Letter from Bahawalpur,’ which appeared each week in The Nation (Lahore). Her picture accompanied the column, a passport-quality full-face halftone of a vague, unsmiling woman with bobbed hair and dark raised brows like diacritical marks over her staring eyes.
To verify Vidia’s high opinion, I got hold of a sequence of Nadira’s dispatches from Bahawalpur.
In ‘Pardon Sir, Your Slip Is Showing!’ she wrote, ‘Words are wonderful things. They are extremely useful, even indispensable at times; you can use them to communicate, to beguile, to frustrate, to berate, to admire, to flatter, to fool …’ And she ended, ‘If words loose [sic] their meaning, life looses [sic] its meaning.’
‘Remembering the Old of the Sadiqians’ was Nadira’s lament for the fact that the retired teachers of Sadiq Public School in Bahawalpur had small pensions or none at all. Conclusion: ‘No wonder our education system is in shambles.’
A week later, in ‘Computer Blues,’ Nadira deplored the rise of computer technology. Her then husband made an appearance in this piece: ‘The early days of his computer mania were quite a strain on our marriage.’ Nadira hated her computer. Nothing worked as it should – disks, printer, fonts, spell checker; power outages in Bahawalpur did not help. Also, ‘I keep loosing [sic] articles from the disks, sometimes loosing [sic] the disks,’ and so on.
Lovable, ungrammatical, clumsy, audacious – had such pieces turned Vidia’s head? Nadira had been married to a man who was living the more or less feudal existence of a wealthy Pakistani farmer-landlord. That sort of life – you see it in India also – is like a glimpse of old Russia, something Tolstoyan in the landlord’s experimental farm, with his many peasants and tenants and his money, for this man lived on the same premises with Nadira and his first wife, a German woman, and the children from both marriages.
The rest of the story, too, is like a Russian novel. Nadira acquires some local fame as a columnist. She revolts. She leaves for Lahore. She is squired around town by several men, who woo her but stop short of being suitors. She has no money except for the insignificant fees for her ‘Letter from Bahawalpur,’ and she no longer lives in her town. On her divorce, it is said that her husband does not even return her dowry. She is living precariously when she receives an invitation to meet Sir Vidia Naipaul.
She says to my friend in Lahore, ‘Who is he? Has he written anything?’
It is impossible not to admire her pluck.
Later, people said, ‘Have you heard about Vidia? He got married.’
Vidia had sounded happy in the piece describing his wedding curry lunch. It did not surprise me that I hadn’t been invited. I was in Hawaii, half a world away, and I had still not gotten over the death of Pat or the sad news that there had been only a handful of people at her funeral.
A month after Vidia’s wedding, I had a call from Bill Buford, the literary editor of The New Yorker, telling me that the magazine was sponsoring an event at Hay-on-Wye, a well-known literary festival, in a pretty part of the Welsh border country.
‘We want you and Vidia to appear,’ Buford said. ‘Do a sort of literary dialogue.’
‘Vidia hates literary festivals,’ I said. ‘He has never been to one. And they seem like dog shows to me. Have you asked him?’
‘We were hoping that you would, Paul.’
‘Never. He’ll just scream.’
‘He’s been very mellow since he got married. It’s a new Vidia, honestly.’
‘He won’t do it,’ I said.
‘We figure he might if you ask him. He’ll listen to you. You’re his friend.’
‘Believe me, he does what he wants.’
‘Salman Rushdie will be there.’
‘That’s no incentive to Vidia. He laughed when the ayatollah announced his fatwa. I tell you, he won’t want to go.’
‘But Vidia’s new wife might.’
‘I don’t know Vidia’s new wife.’
‘Paul, if you ask Vidia to attend it will mean a lot to us.’
‘He’ll want to be paid.’
‘We’ll pay him. Within reason, of course. Will he want a lot?’
‘Yes.’
‘Paul, please …’
I cannot bear it when people plead with me. Perhaps they know that. Pleading always has the intended effect.
It was a deep-voiced woman who answered the telephone at Dairy Cottage. I knew just where she was: on the white sofa by the window, which gave onto the western side of the hedge, the green shrubs, the green trees, the red maple. It was where Pat always sat, because Vidia disliked answering the phone.
‘And who is speaking?’ she asked.
I told her my name.
As she passed the phone to Vidia, I heard her say, ‘It’s Paul Theroux. I want to meet him.’
I should have known that would be enough, but even then, I was not certain that Vidia would say yes to the festival.