Sir Vidia's Shadow (32 page)

 

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

“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.