The Kingdom by the Sea Read Online Free PDF Page B

bar stool, with a small glass of lager.
    "I was drinking gin," this other woman said. Her name was Mrs. Feeley. She was Irish, and though she was speaking with Mrs. Sneath, she kept looking at me in a friendly way and seemed always to be on the verge of asking me where I was from, and then saying that she had wanted to go there her whole life.
    "I was on shorts," Mrs. Sneath said. "I thought that band were smashing, and all that food. Gillows did the catering. I stuffed myself with smoked salmon and those bits of ham rolled around the pineapple chunks with the toothpick through them. Rum don't give you a hangover, and I always drink lots of water. Don't gin make you cry?"
    "Only sometimes," Mrs. Feeley said.
    "I hadn't been to a wedding for ages," Mrs. Sneath said.
    "They don't get married as much as they used to. They just seem to live together until they get sick of each other." Mrs. Feeley smiled at me, but she was still addressing Mrs. Sneath. "We had a marvelous wedding, Jerry and me. I was paralytic. They don't do that anymore. It's the pill."
    Mrs. Sneath did not reply. She was staring at me and compressing her cigarette in her yellow lips. "You're in nineteen. Top of the stairs, last door on the right. The loo is down the hall. Breakfast's at nine."
    "I wanted to be away at eight," I said.
    "Bloody crack of dawn," she said.
    "I'm walking to Dover," I said.
    "Dover's lovely," Mrs. Feeley said in her friendly way. She was fleshy and full of encouragement. She said, "But it used to be much prettier than it is now."
    "Breakfast's at nine," Mrs. Sneath said and wrung the sweat from her palms by clutching her filthy shift. She blinked the smoke out of her eyes and gave me an Eskimo squint and said, "If I made exceptions I'd be doing breakfasts all the morning. It's a proper cooked breakfast, see, that's why I'm not cheap."
    She handed me a baton—a stick of wood with a key wired to it.
    "Nineteen. Top of the stairs."
    I walked through Deal that night. It was only a few streets, but they were pleasant streets, and on the Front I could hear the sea lifting the smooth stones on the beach and then draining through them with a swallowing sound. At a dark patch of seafront a girl and boy stopped me. "Hey." I thought they were going to ask me directions. They were each about eighteen years old. The girl said, "Give me forty-five pence, will you?"
    I could not imagine why she was asking me for this exact sum, which was about a dollar. I said no.
    "It's not much," she said. "It's nothing."
    They were neatly dressed and both of them were smoking cigarettes.
    "He's a poof," the girl said, and they both laughed.
    ***
    They sat in the dark watching television with still, blue faces. Mrs. Sneath and her husband, Will, and Mrs. Feeley and Jerry, and a deranged-looking drifter, named Yerby, and Mrs. Sneath's father, Charlie Wensum, from Skegness. "Skeggy," he called it. He loved the coast. Mr. Wensum was a man of perhaps seventy-five, though it was hard to say for certain in that dark room. His skin was blue from the television. I had the impression from their silence and the way they sat, with their feet up and squashing cushions, that they did this every night. A sign on the door said TV LOUNGE—RESIDENTS ONLY .
    The news was on. I could hear Yerby breathing hard. No one spoke. The screen showed a map of the Falklands, two small rags of land.
    Mrs. Sneath said, "What do you think of this Falklands business?"
    I said it seemed reasonable to fight for what was yours.
    "People say they can't see the point of it," Jerry Feeley said. "Can you see the point of it?"
    I said I didn't know anything except that so far it was a war without any casualties, and if it stayed that way it would be easier to reach an agreement with Argentina.
    "No casualties he says." This from Yerby.
    The news was terrible. An Argentine battleship had been sunk with twelve hundred men aboard. Most of the men were feared drowned. This ship was the
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