Sir Vidia's Shadow (27 page)

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.