The Kingdom by the Sea by Paul Theroux Read Free Book Online

tunnel. I changed my seat and sat opposite a harmless-looking man who was reading the full page of Falklands news in the
Daily Telegraph.
Was it around here, I asked, that the Channel tunnel was started?
    He said yes—hardly yes, just nodded.
    I said it seemed such a good idea, I could not understand why it had been abandoned.
    "No money," the man said, a little crossly. He was Wing Commander R. G. H. Wraggett (Ret'd). "This isn't a rich country. We can't do things like that anymore. The Japanese have all the money now, and the Germans and these Arabs."
    I was going to say that the Japanese had just this year dug a thirty-six-mile tunnel under the Tsugaru Straits, from Honshu to Hokkaido. But if I had said, "Courage can make you prosperous," he would have replied, "Nips!" The English hated the Japanese for being rich overachievers, for being guiltless racists, for eating raw fish, for working like dogs, and for torturing their prisoners during the war. "They despised us for surrendering in Singapore. They thought we should have done the decent thing—cut our bowels out and committed mass suicide." So I didn't mention the Japanese tunnel and I didn't say that the Channel tunnel seemed to me one of the most important engineering works of our century. Britain's future might depend on it. But the effort had collapsed.
    Wing Commander Wraggett said, "We've got to learn how to tighten our belts."
    His "we" meant everyone else, of course.
    He returned to his paper. I changed my seat again and saw that we were arriving in Folkestone. I thought: To talk to that man I had to go back to the person I was eleven years ago, when it seemed all right to ask a stranger here a serious question. But how could I take this trip with my mouth shut? On the days when I did not speak to anyone I felt I had lost thirty pounds, and if I did not talk for two days in a row I had the alarming impression that I was about to vanish. Silence made me feel invisible.
    I had seen Folkestone only once before, on a cold September afternoon, from the window of the boat train to France. Now, in May sunshine, it looked elegant, with mansions and hotels like the most luxurious hospitals. There was a whisper of illness all over Folkestone, something about the white faces at the windows on this fine day, and you could not look at a flower bed without thinking of a sickroom. The old people there did not seem to walk so much as pace. But it was a stately town, with a Victorian face of red brick and a mile of grassy lawns, called the Leas, on the flat cliff above the seashore.
    From here France was close and had the same kind of cliffs, like the far bank of a great river. I could see the fissures in the chalk cliffs of Pointe Cambertin and Audresselles above Boulogne; and Cap Gris-nez and Cap Blanc-nez. Calais was just around the corner. It was not an optical illusion, but there was not the slightest tincture of Frenchness here. Some people water-skied to France when the weather was pleasant.
    In Folkestone I met old Walter Dudlow as I was crossing the Leas, heading west. He asked me the time, but I could tell he wanted to talk. He was trembling to tell me things. He had once been a gardener up here on the Leas. That's why he was here now—he still liked looking at them. Most places in England changed, but Folkestone hadn't changed a bit. His wife had died; his dog was gone. He had fallen down, slipped on a patch of ice last winter, and hurt his knees. That was very bad. It had affected his dancing. Now he was dancing only two or three nights a week.
    "How many nights did you dance before that?"
    "Five or six," Mr. Dudlow said. "There's never any dancing on a Sunday, and even if there was I wouldn't go in for it, as a practicing Christian."
    I asked him what kind of dancing.
    "Old Time and Modern Sequence," he said. "How old do you think I am? Go ahead and guess."
    Old people were forever asking me this—perhaps they asked everybody? I said about