Even as he was approaching 80 years old, there was still a great deal within him that was raw and undiscussable. Although he allowed the letters between himself and his father to be published, he had not read them since the early 1950s, when they were sent. He left Trinidad for Oxford University 68 years ago. His father knew he would one day become a great writer. Vidia, even then, as a 17-year old student in a foreign land, seemed certain of it too, but he wanted also to encourage his father to do better—to stop making excuses and forge ahead with his own writing career. “The essential thing about writing is writing,” he wrote from Oxford. “You are the best writer in the West Indies, but one can only judge writers by their work.” Sir Vidia later acknowledged that his father “shaped my life, my views, my tastes,” but the two men were never to meet again. Naipaul was too poor to be able to afford a return to Trinidad before his father’s sudden death, in 1953. “He was the best man I knew,” he wrote to his mother after receiving the news. “Everything I owe to him. I had always looked upon my life as a continuation of his—a continuation, which I hoped, would also be a fulfillment. It still is . . . but I have to get the strength to stand alone.”

My questions had served as sharp reminders of that distant, unsettled past. I asked Sir Vidia to elaborate on the statement that his life was a continuation of his father’s. “I never wrote that,” he replied with a glacial stare. Subject closed.

Then Sir Vidia, deciding perhaps that an interview was uncongenial after all, retrieved his discarded script. He read it aloud, but quietly, for the rest of the session.

Before the interview began, as I walked Sir Vidia through the writers’ tent at Hay-on-Wye, we were suddenly sprung upon by the novelist Paul Theroux and what seemed like a pre-planned ambush of paparazzi. Theroux had been Sir Vidia’s friend of 30 years until they fell out over a woman and an inscribed book. Naipaul had accused Theroux of trying to seduce his first wife, and he had then put one of Theroux’s books, with its personal inscription from the author, up for sale for £1,500. When Theroux complained, Naipaul told him to “take it on the chin and move on.” Instead, Theroux wrote about the bust-up of the friendship in a memoir called Sir Vidia’s Shadow. They had not spoken for 15 years. I remember Paul Theroux coming to stay in the old days with my father—a smooth, handsome, dark-haired fellow who knocked back cocktails with strange slurping sounds in the kitchen—but he had changed over the years, and neither Sir Vidia nor I recognized him. The photographers flashed away, and all the next day’s papers ran with the story: an old literary hatchet had been finally buried. In point of fact, Sir Vidia was not at all sure to whom he was talking, believing only that he was mollifying some newly met, and possibly lunatic, fan. “I have missed you,” Theroux said. “And I have missed you too,” Sir Vidia replied. They shook hands, but the meeting between the two writers lasted only a minute, and when it was later explained to Sir Vidia who it was that had greeted him, he said only that he was glad, as he saw no point in feuds. Afterward, the two writers exchanged friendly letters.

The next time I visited the Naipauls’ Dairy Cottage, I went as a friend. This was the time that a blanket pall enveloped the house: Sir Vidia could think of little else but his departed cat. Nadira told me that he would be annoyed when he discovered that their housemaid had planted, on her own initiative, a wooden cross on the little mound in front of the house where Augustus had been laid to rest. “I must take it away before Vidia notices it,” she said. There was already a stone carving in place—for some reason, it depicts an otter—a benefaction from a sympathetic neighbor. Sir Vidia’s breathing seemed a little better than it had been, and I mentioned to him that maybe he had been allergic to Augustus. “Yes, my doctor suggested that, too, but I told him I would rather have Augustus and wheeze than breathe freely without him.” Sir Vidia said that he had always believed Augustus would outlive him, and that he had made generous provision for the cat in his will. I asked what it was that made Augustus so special: “He knew the land and the garden. He recognized the house and everything in it. He knew me. Therefore he cannot be replaced.” Augustus had been anointed king of Dairy Cottage on the day of his arrival from a cats’ home. He was so named because it was clear from the start that he would rule the household. Life for the Naipauls would never be the same without him, though it would be wrong to assume that this fierce little tragedy had extinguished the light entirely. When the Naipauls were restless, they talked in animated tones about moving permanently to Portugal, but they never did. England would always remain their home. Sir Vidia told me that for the first time in his life, he felt financially secure. His agent had said to him, “Just go out and spend. I will find the money.” It was not easy to guess what he might choose to spend his money on. Sir Vidia told me that he wanted a treadmill to bring the strength back to his legs, “but Nadira says I can’t have one”—a striking admission from a man known for his forceful and peremptory character.

The slow machinery of his muse, which once seemed to have ground to a standstill, was coming back into motion. I asked him what he planned to write. He said, “I intend an extended essay on grief, which will center on the death of Augustus.” The subject seemed at once haunting and ironic. I egged him on, but I don’t think he ever started it.

I left early in the morning before the Naipauls had arisen. At breakfast the housemaid filled me in on the couple’s plans. “They are having to go abroad to recover, you know,” she said, “and they’re planning a memorial service for Augustus on their return.” Later she told Lady Naipaul that my fly buttons had been undone the whole time that she was talking to me—as no doubt they remained undone when I passed out of the house and drove by the little shrine to Augustus, leaving Sir Vidia, still in bed, to marshal his thoughts on the profound, personal, and universal complexities of grief.

Sir Vidia Naipaul passed away on August 11, 2018 at age 85.