Coasting (27 page)

Chinese, Hindoo, Russki, Roundhead, Punk—they were all one on the caterwauling floats. I ducked out of the cavalcade and took shelter in a restaurant which had a single table left after nearly all the rest had been jammed together to accommodate a coachload of roaring German tourists. I looked out the window beside me: the torches and glad rags of the bonfire societies formed a crazy piebald frieze as they flounced and jigged their way across the glass, their music drowned by German jokes and German laughter.

Nowhere outside Africa, I thought, were the tribespeople
so willing to dress up in “traditional” costumes and caper for the entertainment of their visitors. The season was just beginning now; by June and July, it would be hard to stop at an English village without running into tabarded medieval knights in armor preparing for a joust, carfuls of Cavaliers about to refight some old battle in the Civil War, Elizabethans hogging themselves at a Banquet, or prancing Morrismen in bells. The thing had become a national industry. Year by year, England was being made more picturesquely merrie.

These bucolic theatricals were a very new fad. Even the Morris dancers, whose claim to stretch back through the mists of time was strongest, were new. Their dances and costumes had been researched and revived by Cecil Sharp, the folklorist, in the 1890s. A federation of Morris clubs had been set up in the 1920s. But it wasn’t until the late 1950s that the movement really got underway. Now every village worth its salt had a Morris “side” to go with its cricket team, and the dancers themselves were firmly of the belief that they were the inheritors of an unbroken British tradition.

As industries go, the merrying business was a steal. It was like chain letters or picking money off trees. It brought in the yen and the marks and the dollars, but no wages bill was involved. People made their costumes at home and fought, danced and paraded for the love of it. Until a few years ago, Amateur Dramatics had meant a scatter of relatives and friends of the performers sitting on hard chairs in the village hall through an excruciatingly long evening of J. B. Priestley. Now a Saturday junket on the green could draw coachfuls of prosperous foreigners who actually
wanted
to watch. Forget
Time and the Conways
—bring on the knights and the Morrismen!

On the way home to the boat, I passed a pair of Puritans snogging energetically in a bus shelter. A little farther on, I heard a Victorian in a tailcoat and stovepipe hat inquiring of an Ancient Briton in woad, “Where was that fuckin’ pub we was in last year, then?”

The next morning I made a couple of telephone calls from the marina office, then spent a hasty hour tidying the saloon and polishing the brasswork on the wheel. I found a hiding place for my notebook in a drawer in the forecabin, under a pile of socks.

At noon, I spotted my visitor a hundred yards away across the catwalks. Focusing on him with the binoculars, I saw he was wearing an elegant miniature pair of binoculars himself. In his Papa Doc tinted spectacles and an L. L. Bean duck hunter’s camouflage shirt, with a little brown backpack hoisted on his shoulders, Paul Theroux was on his travels.

“Hi—how you doing?”

Ten years before, Paul and I had been friends and allies, but the friendship had since somewhat soured and thinned. Nor had either of us been best pleased when each had discovered that the other was planning a journey, and a book, about the British coast. It was too close a coincidence for comfort. Paul was working his way round clockwise, by train and on foot, while I was going counterclockwise by sea. At Brighton, the two plots intersected briefly and uneasily aboard
Gosfield Maid
.

It took Paul less than five minutes to sum up the boat. He hunted through the saloon, inspecting pictures, books, the charcoal stove, the gimbaled oil lamps, the new, lavender-smelling gleam of the woodwork.

“Yeah,” he said; “it’s kind of … 
tubby
 … and … 
bookish.”

The phrase rattled me. I rather thought that somewhere I had written it down myself.

“You making a lot of notes?”

“No,” I lied. “I seem too busy with things like weather and navigation to notice anything on land. What about you?”

“No,” Paul lied. “There’s nothing to write about, is there? I don’t know whether there’s a book in this at all. I may turn out to have just spent the summer walking. Still, it keeps you fit—”

He came up into the wheelhouse, where he looked over the open pages of the log. They were innocent of any small talk except for details of courses steered, winds, compass
bearings, barometric pressures and a crinkly, tongue-shaped spill of red wine.

“What’s that?”

“The depth-sounder.”

“Okay.”

Wary, protective of our separate books, we dealt with each other at strained arm’s length. For a moment, I saw us as Britain and Argentina meeting on neutral ground in Peru.

“Lunch?”

“Yeah,” Paul looked at his watch. “But I’ve got to be getting along this afternoon.”

“Where are you heading?”

“Oh …” Paul was evidently wondering whether this was going to give too much away, and deciding that it wasn’t. “Bognor Regis. Know Bognor?”

“We lived just outside, when I was nine, ten. When my father was at theological college at Chichester.”

“Ah huh,” he didn’t pursue the matter of Bognor.

We took the miniature railway from the marina to the pier. Passing the nudist beach, Paul made a rapid note in his book, which he quickly tucked away. I thought, I’d better take a closer look at the nudist beach on my way back, I may have missed something apart from the obvious goose-pimples and sagging bums.

At the pier, we pushed our way through the lazy crowd; two men at work, impeded by idlers. As we waited for the traffic to give us an opening on the promenade, a lean and dingy man in a flapping thrift-shop overcoat detached himself from the crowd. He had a camera and a monkey, and there was a helplessly eager look in his eye as he made a beeline for Paul in his hiking gear. After hours of searching, at last he’d found an American Tourist; he was shoveling his monkey onto Paul’s shoulder and fiddling with the controls on his camera.

“Take your picture, sir?”

The monkey was scrawny and gray, the size of a rat. It was clinging to Paul’s hair and grinning with fright.

“Get that monkey off my back,” Paul said. It was a clipped and military instruction. The man responded with a monkey
grin and raised the viewfinder to his eye. “Get that monkey off my back! Will you get that goddamn monkey off my back?” Paul raised his hand to pull the creature out of his hair; the man leaped forward, grabbed his monkey and cuddled it resentfully. Paul shook out his shoulders and strode off through the traffic. I caught up with him a minute later.

“… sonofabitch,” Paul was saying.

“Poor guy—you were the first American tourist he’d seen all morning,” I said, and immediately wished I’d kept my mouth shut.

We lunched at Wheeler’s. It was, to begin with at least, stiff going. Guarding our hands close to our chests, we played a sort of conversational
misère
, each aiming to lose the trick by finessing a story out of the other. How was Lymington? Oh, dull. Very dull. Nothing worth seeing there. And Margate? Gangs of skinheads and bikers—much what you’d expect, you know.

The condition of England was too prickly a subject for either of us to manage. America was a little easier. We talked of Paul’s last holiday on Cape Cod, when he’d tried to talk his teenage sons into enrolling for two weeks in the local high school.

“They wouldn’t play along,” Paul said, pleased at their resilience. “ ‘Who wants to be a guinea pig for your research?’ they said. They gave me a lecture on
ethics
. They weren’t going to sweat along in high school just so they could figure in a goddamn
story.”

“The young frighten hell out of me,” I said. “Their principles always seem so much higher than mine ever were.”

“Yeah,” Paul said; “they don’t open other people’s letters.” He concentrated on the busywork of scissoring the flesh away from the bone of his Dover sole.

Suddenly, apropos of nothing, he came to life—my old friend. He was describing a hill in Massachusetts, just outside Boston, where he’d gone tobogganing as a child. “It was an
alp
, you know? You could slide a mile down it, with the snow sizzling by your ears.” The winter before, he’d driven his sons, Marcel and Louis, to this famous place. “All
the way, in the car, I was building it up—’You wait till we get there—’ I was more excited than the boys were. ‘Aw, shut up, Dad.’ ‘Paul always exaggerates—’ You know, all that stuff. Then we got there. You know what? It was like
this.”
He laid his forearm flat on the table between his glass of mineral water and my half-bottle of Muscadet. “It wasn’t even a
hill
. It was
nothing.”

“You’re describing my voyage,” I said. “I went back to the village outside Lymington where—” but the Italian waiter got in the way of the story. When next left to ourselves, we took refuge in a formal little seminar on a home-revisited story by V. S. Pritchett.

We separated on the Old Steyne, Paul on the Bognor trail, I to catch the toy railway to my boat. He turned and called, “Watch out for the Goodwin Sands! They’re
really
dangerous. I’ve seen them. They’re all over wrecks.”

“I’ve got the charts,” I shouted back, lamely, unwilling to allow the last word to Paul’s maddening American know-how.

When the train stopped at the nudist beach, and a group of overweight people in their late middle age got off for a spell of health and efficiency under the overcast sky, I scrutinized the beach, the signboard on its edge, the pallid nudists. What the hell had Paul seen there?

His book,
The Kingdom by the Sea
, came out a year later, in 1983. I read it avidly and with mounting anxiety. It had only one seriously flat patch, I thought—his account of our meeting in Brighton. There wasn’t a single start of recognition for me in his two pages: what he described was not at all what I remembered. But then, memory, as Paul had demonstrated with his forearm lying flat on the table at Wheeler’s, is a great maker of fictions.

I sailed for Rye in a pacific offshore wind which was doing no more than crimp and tease the sea. In the immediate vicinity of the boat, the sunshine was hard and bright, the small, neat waves were razor-edged and the water was a bold powder-blue. It looked as if one should be able to see
for miles and miles; yet headlands which were marked on the chart as quite near at hand kept on vanishing cleanly away behind me into an empty sky. I counted off the scalloped chalk busts of the Seven Sisters as they strolled past on the port beam, and made them nine.

The boat was sailing herself. There was nothing to do except count cliffs, brood over the compass card as it shivered in its bowl and keep an eye out for vagrant trawlers on the shoals. There was time to sit out on the patio of the cockpit, smoke a pipe, potter about making elevenses and read the papers that I’d bought before leaving the marina.

After three weeks of phony war and fizzled peace initiatives, the Falklands expedition was at last coming to some sort of climax. Today, May 1, the maritime exclusion zone which had been drawn round the islands, two hundred miles offshore, came into force. The first ships from the Task Force were expected to enter it later in the day.

The
Sun
was squealing with infantile excitement at the prospect of the atrocities to come:

I doubted whether the newspaper’s grisly enthusiasm for the war was shared by many of its readers. Whenever I put my own ear to the wall, I heard a good deal of vociferous support for the Task Force expressed by members of the tweedy and choleric classes; but the people whom I met on quaysides and in pubs seemed surprisingly indifferent to the adventure. There were some easygoing “Argie” jokes, as when a man excused himself from the circle at the bar to go to the lavatory, saying that he was going “to make some Argie beer and sandwiches.” A few minutes later in the same
pub, the latest dispatch from the Task Force came up on television; the proprietor immediately changed channels to a darts match, with paunchy gorillas chucking innocent missiles at treble-twenties. The
Sun
headlines—I
NTO
B
ATTLE!
F
ULL
A
HEAD FOR
W
AR!
D
EADLINE
T
ONIGHT
. H
IGH
N
OON!
Y
ANKS A
M
ILLION!
—contrived to suggest that all over Britain men and women were going wild with patriotic fervor, but I saw very few signs of it in the seaside towns where
Gosfield Maid
took up lodgings.

The entrance to Rye Harbour is a hidden door in a monotonous low coastline of hillocks, dunes and tufty trees. You need to have blind faith in your compass to find it, and it only shows at just the moment when you’ve decided that the chart is telling you lies, that Rye Harbour doesn’t exist, and that you are within two hundred yards of shipwreck in the breakers on a deserted beach. You squeeze through an aperture in the sand no wider than a country lane, and find yourself, Alice-like, in a looking-glass land full of water; marshy, silvered, painfully brilliant on the eye.

Beyond the timber wharf, with its screaming chainsaws and its oily stink of pine dust, the surface of the glass was littered with the hulks of fishing boats and barges, their rib cages doubled in reflection. Rye itself was two miles off—a dense pyramid of red roofs, towers and castle battlements, rising improbably out of the wide lake made by the flooding tide. It glowed too richly for England; it was too pretty, too all-of-a-piece. English towns do not, under normal circumstances, float on pure light and ripple brightly in the sky. Rye did, and I steered for it cautiously, not wishing to run aground inside an optical illusion.