It is good luck, while I am feeling out of sorts, to be able to recycle something written long ago for my own amusement.  The model for it and a few others like it (Jean Rhys among them) was the ‘I Once Met’ column in The Oldie and it happens to fit with the concluding lines of my last post:  ‘You only have to live long enough to become of interest because of the people you have known.’  In this case it is the writer V.S. Naipaul.

It had been my good fortune that Naipaul had, albeit briefly, fallen out with his long-time editor, Diana Ahilll, and I had the honour (as he would certainly have considered it) of editing A Bend in the River which arrived during this spat.

So nervous was I of displeasing our most important author that I put everything else aside and read A Bend in the River  in one long sitting. Compared with his early novels and brilliant non-fiction this was dull stuff, but admiration – whether genuine or feigned – goes a long way and when, in the course of the phone call that followed, he heard I was going to be spending a week not far from where he lived, he invited me and my husband to supper.

The evening did not begin well.  It was Vidia who opened the door to us and, all nerves, I thrust the bottle of wine I had bought that morning into his hand.  I had made a special trip to Marlborough to get it and, knowing nothing about wine, just chose one with an appealing label. 

His very first words, as he slid the wine out of its wrapping were:  This isn’t fit to drink.

With the speed of lightning his wife, Pat, took the bottle off him, saying it would be perfect for cooking. Even as she spoke I could see a table laid with three glasses beside each plate and, in the far corner of the room, a stack of Wine Society cartons.   And I had wondered if, as a Hindu, he drank at all . . .

I was soon to find out how wrong I had been as he squatted  in front of me – I was seated by now – and, like an overly concerned nursery-school teacher, proceeded to give me detailed guidance on what to buy, what to pay and what to drink with what.

Amazingly enough, after that inauspicious beginning, and thanks to the presence of my husband, to whom he could not condescend, we had a pleasurable rest of the evening.  When he was not focussed on his own importance, it was enthralling to spend time in his company and, difficult though he was in so many ways, I am left admiring him, not only his own works but also for allowing his biographer a free rein to expose him as the monster he was and knew himself to be.