The Kingdom by the Sea Read Free Page A

to be something like the British character: it was a British-like miasma up there, hovering and doing things to you.
    We talked about the weather, this miasma. The man shared the English relief that spring had come. It had been a hard snowy winter; the country had seized up. So this was the annual gift, but it was unimaginable. It was impossible to anticipate the beauty of springtime in England. It was sudden, mild, fragrant, and full of color—magic rising out of the mud.
    Then he said, "American?"
    "Yes," I said, but did not elaborate. I said, "I've always wanted to go to Margate."
    "You should go to Canterbury instead."
    They always said that, the natives. They sent you to traipse around the sights—the ruins, the churches, the hot streets—and they went to a simple lovely place and had a beer under a tree.
    "Full of history," he was saying. "Lovely town, beautiful old cathedral. You could change at Sittingbourne."
    No, I thought. No sightseeing; no cathedrals, no castles, no churches, no museums. I wanted to examine the particularities of the present.
    I said, "Where are you going?"
    I guessed that his name was Norman Mould. It was one of my small talents to be able to tell a person's name by looking at him. Those old people up front—they were the Touchmores. The little girl drinking the Tizer—Judith Memery. The man behind the
Express
—Roger Cockpole. And so forth.
    Mr. Mould said, "Ramsgate," and that was the first indication I had had—his flicker of satisfaction and his willingness with the word and the way he said it, "Ramsgit"—that Ramsgate was probably posher than Margate. But I also thought: That's another reason I don't want to go to Canterbury, Norman. I want to go where everyone else is going.
    "It's like this Falklands business," Mr. Mould was saying, but now he was talking to the woman next to him, his wife, Nancy Mould, who was reading a newspaper.
    In the next few weeks that was to be a common phrase. Politics would come up, or sometimes it was race or religion, and then someone would say,
It's like this Falklands business...
    The war had not yet started. The Falklands had been overrun by Argentine troops, and British ships had encircled the islands and had declared an exclusion zone for a radius of two hundred miles. No shots had been fired, no men had been killed; there was little news. Most people assumed this was bluster and bluff and counter-bluff, and that after a period of time the Argentines would climb down. Two nights before this, the American President had smiled at a British journalist on a BBC telecast and said, "I don't see why there should be any fighting over that ice-cold bunch of rocks down there."
    Mr. Mould, across the aisle, had turned away from me. Our conversation had ended, and now I saw why: he was eating. He had taken out a bag of sandwiches and a thermos jug, and he and his wife had covered their laps with the newspaper ( BRITISH CONVOY IN WAR READINESS OFF FALKLANDS ) and were sharing lunch. The English become intensely private and rather silent when they eat; their gestures are guarded and economical and precise. They are tidy and self-conscious. Suddenly, eating, they are alone.
    It was then that the door at the end of the car banged open and I heard the tramp of heavy boots and laughter and shouts.
    "I fucking will do 'im if he don't fank me next time!"
    "You fucking won't, you wally!"
    "Fuck off—I will!"
    They were loud—earsplitting—but the picnicking English people across the aisle, and the elderly people, and each young family in its own pew, did not hear a thing. The picnickers went on eating in their tidy way, and everyone else became silent and small.
    "—because I fucking said I would!"
    I had seen their heads at Chatham passing by the windows of this car. I hoped they would move on to another car, and they had. But they were loud and violent and could not sit still, and now that we were past Gillingham ("...the