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

seventy.
    "Seventy-nine, next birthday."
    "I wouldn't have believed it," I said.
    He said, "And I can touch my toes."
    He tried. He couldn't touch them.
    "It's my bally knees!" Mr. Dudlow said. "Usually I can touch my toes without any trouble. I didn't realize I couldn't until just then!"
    I said, "You got pretty close."
    "I always said I'm the fittest man in Folkestone." He was smiling, but he believed it. He said, "Are you married?"
    "Yes," I said, smartly.
    He winced a little and his face stayed stiff with surprise. If I was married, what was I doing on a weekday with a knapsack on my back, walking down the coast alone in these shoes?
    "I mean to say if you weren't married, you'd make a lot of new friends by dancing," Mr. Dudlow said.
    "Anyway, I am married—so dancing's probably not for me."
    Mr. Dudlow shook his head and said, "You think walking down the coast is interesting, but I'll tell you dancing is much better."
    I had told him I was walking down to Littlestone-on-Sea.
    He said, "I go into a dance hall alone and come out with six or seven new friends."
    "What kind of friends are we talking about, Mr. Dudlow? Men or women?"
    "All kinds," he said. "It's my dancing, see."
    Now I noticed that he had kept glancing at his feet. He had small feet and very smooth shoes, and his trouser cuffs were rolled up as if to draw attention to them. He was proud of his feet.
    "I've always danced. You've got to be fit to dance. I've got a dance tonight here and another tomorrow in Dover. I'll go up on the afternoon coach."
    He wanted me to exclaim about his effort so that he could smile and say that dancing kept him young. But I said I wasn't really much of a dancer.
    "Even if you're a loner you'd like it," he said. So that was it: he thought I was a crazy loner. "I mean, it's better than being a loner." He looked from his tidy feet to my brown knapsack.
    I said, "I never thought of dancing, except tap dancing."
    "In that case you might like Modern Sequence," he said. "And what I like about it is there's no rough element. Know what I mean by rough element? Skinheads. Punks. These tough boys. Oh, you never find them in a ballroom."
    We reached the last lawn in the Leas and there, at a stairway to the shore—the village of Sandgate at the bottom step—he said goodbye. But he kept on talking.

3. The Branch Line to Hastings
    S ANDGATE was a pretty, Irish-looking village squeezed between green cliffs and the narrow shore. It was full of antique shops and cottages, and it smelled of furniture wax and hot bread. But it straddled the main coastal road, and this curse meant that, although it was a tiny village, it was hard for any pedestrian to cross the street.
    I walked along the beach. At the far end of the bay, to the southwest, on the tip of what looked like a great rusty sickle of seashore, was the ness—the nose—of the Denge Marsh. The new landscape feature at Dungeness was easily visible from where I was walking, because it was a nuclear power station, with an ugliness and a size peculiar to such constructions. It was not the gigantism that was nasty—the size alone could not be fearsome. But the unnatural look of nuclear power stations was daunting. They could not be prettified. Their horrific aspect, to someone staring at them across a calm bay, was their explosive shapelessness, the random swollen angles, and all those radiating power lines, like orbs of model shock waves. The nuclear power station at Dungeness from fifteen miles away was grotesque—there was nothing near it but the flat sea and the lip of Romney Marsh, which was a long green depression, below sea level.
    There were eighteen nuclear power stations in Britain, and all of them stuck on the coast, perhaps for the same reason that they had shooting galleries and rocket ranges and minefields and dynamite factories on the same coast. If something went wrong, the surf and the sea would take the force of the blast. And it was easier to stand