A situation in which there are absolutely no decisions to make is a cause of high spirits in itself—and there were no decisions to make now. I couldn’t go back to Chichester. It was too far, and the bar at the entrance would be uncrossable. Littlehampton, the nearest port, twelve miles to the north, also had a bar, and there was a firmly deterrent note about it in the pilot: “Entrance dangerous in strong SE winds.” Shoreham earned the same warning. There was nothing at all to do except settle down and enjoy my gale.
It was a fine explosive mixture of air and water, and Gosfield Maid jounced about in it as easily as a corked bottle. John, the trawler owner in Lyme Regis, had looked over her ship-sized oak frames and the long curve of the deck toward her massive bows and said, “She’s a real boat, not like they flimsy yachts—she’ll look after you.” For the first time since I’d set out, the boat was looking after me. Her hull had been built originally for service as a fishing boat in the North Sea off Scotland, and this modest Channel gale was well within her range. She fitted herself into the commotion of the sea, every pitch and roll a strategic adjustment to the changing shape of the water. Her timbers creaked and flexed as she arranged the waves around herself like pillows on a bed.
In the veering wind there was at first no pattern to the water. It heaped up in slabs and collapsed on itself in a loutish show of undirected energy. The shoreline had disappeared. There was just miles of stirred and twisted sea, a mass of meringues. Then, as the hunting wind found its proper strength and direction, the sea began to march in line. Ahead, the waves looked shapeless, each one an indecipherable configuration of ridges and planes; but as they rolled astern, flipping the wheelhouse skyward and making the propellor howl as it came clear of the water for a split second, they revealed themselves as an orderly procession. Behind the boat, the sea was lined with dark troughs; they stretched away out of sight, as closely ruled as harp strings.
Facing the waves, they looked disproportionately small compared with the rearing flights of the boat’s bows as she rode into the continuous wash of foam that dribbled down their faces. They became lordly only when they took their leave of her, giving the odd impression that the sea ahead was far calmer than the sea behind.
For some time I’d caught intermittent glimpses of a cargo ship apparently at anchor. Random bits of it—masts, bows, bridge—would show over the waves for a moment, then get engulfed again. It was, I supposed, waiting for the tide to rise enough for it to get into Littlehampton or Shoreham. It was blotted out by a rain squall, and I lost it for good in the premature blue dusk which followed the rain.
Then, half an hour later, there was another dark squall in the sky, somewhere out to starboard. The squall turned matt black, a new twist in a day full of meteorological curiosities. It was sixty yards off and steaming straight for me when the squall resolved into the coaster, its riveted plates bleeding rust, the twin anchor ports on its bows looking like a bull’s flared nostrils. I passed ahead of the thing by a boat’s length. Neither of us had seen the other in the murk; and it was the coaster which had right of way.
This incident quite failed to dent the mood of placid detachment which had settled on me in the gale. A miss is as good as a mile, I thought, and went on watching waves. It was exactly as if I were very drunk indeed, with the drunkard’s sublime immunity to the hazards of the world. It was not until the wind eased, the sky cleared, the force went out of the sea and the water became suddenly sloppy and innocuous that I came out of the trance.
It was dark now. There were a lot of puddled lights to the north, three or four miles off. Since they all seemed to be winking, it was impossible to tell which were navigation lights and which were neon signs or flashing Star Wars machines. Elbowing my way inshore, I picked out a long illuminated promenade and a couple of onion domes at the root of a pier. I had, apparently, discovered Brighton.
Newhaven was another nine miles on. Too far. After the last few days, I’d sworn that I’d avoid marinas for the rest of the trip, and I rounded the pierhead of Brighton marina with a feeling of resentful disappointment. There had been real splendor in the sea outside; but inside the jaws of the marina, the splendor shriveled. What had I been up to all day? Going boating.
Below, the saloon looked as if it had been burgled. The books on the floor had got on intimate terms with a broken jar of marmalade. The casing of the transistor radio had smashed, and the radio was spilling its innards. Someone had been throwing crockery around the place. I sat in the middle of this depressing mess and tried to pour a slug of Scotch into a tumbler. It wouldn’t go. The neck of the bottle wavered, hit the glass, drew back. Whisky splashed over the floor and into the pages of William the Conqueror by P. G. Wodehouse. I tried again, and poured some whisky into the ashtray on the table. I gave up and sucked the stuff straight out of the bottle, shaking with all the fright I’d failed to feel at sea.
Land-sick, clinging to the railing and planting my feet in a clumsy waltz step, I was making a rough passage of Brighton promenade, where a torchlight procession was overtaking me. There was a whoop-whooping tremolo echo on the PA system which was booming announcements over the sea.
“The Par-par-par Tridge-tridge-Green … Bom-bom-bom-bonfire-fire-fire … So-so-so-societee-ee-ee!”
The bonfire societies of Sussex went marching past with their bedraggled floats, whose bright poster colors had run in the rain and whose lath-and-tarpaper work had been knocked out of shape by the gale. The torchlights were electric and powered by car batteries aboard the floats. They shone on a bewildering assortment of Ancient Britons, Puritans in tall hats, Aztecs, clowns, Red Indians, Elizabethan courtiers and Victorians in frock coats. Each float in the procession was trying to mount an appropriate musical entertainment, but the combined effect of lutes, bongo drums, saxophones, electric guitars, bagpipe chanters, penny whistles, Jews’ harps, mandolins and bugles was not good. I yearned for earmuffs and aspirin.
As the procession and I reached the center of town, we ran into a cacophony of another kind. The poor weather had kept a lot of people away, but there were still a hundred spectators or so, standing in huddles on the pavements, and for every huddle there was another language—a warble of Japanese under a lamppost, a snatch of Cockney on the steps of a hotel, a bit of Idaho, a bit of Rouen, a bit of Frankfurt, a bit of Melbourne, a bit of everything. Cameras flashed in the crowd like buoys at sea. A float of rather damp and cold-looking Regency dandies rounded the corner of Old Steyne and made for the floodlit confection of the Royal Pavilion with its fretted facade and gleaming minarets and turban domes.
The bonfire societies could not have hit on a better spot for their parade of make-believe. It was just what modern Brighton had been designed for. When George IV ordered John Nash to revamp his pavilion, he demanded a mixture of the “Chinese” and “Hindu” styles to liven things up around his favorite bathing beach. What he actually got was perceived as a weird seaside mock-up of the Kremlin. The Guide to Watering Places, published in 1825, two years after Nash had finished work on the Royal Pavilion, is clearly flummoxed:
The whole form and appearance of this splendid building has recently experienced a complete and entire change. Considerable additions have been lately made to the former edifice, and the style of the architecture has been altered so as to imitate the Kremlin of Moscow. This change has at least given novelty to the appearance of the whole, as it exhibits a specimen of the Eastern style, hitherto unknown in Great Britain.
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 tribe
speople 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 w
hat? 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.
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