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

they paint their lovers, alone, naked; they paint and eat; they paint and listen to the radio. It is a soothing way of doing your job.
    It seemed to me that this was how the painters passed the time on the steep streets of Hastings. Mick was painting Indian restaurant scenes; Bratby was doing portraits of the living in anticipation of Armageddon; Gus Cummins was doing green skulls; his wife, Angie, was doing lovers reclining in front of mirrors; and others were doing the fishermen at Old Town and the sea monsters at nearby Fairlight. They were all good friends and boon companions, living cheaply in large decaying houses with lots of children and cats. They had plenty of talent and some success, but this was England, after all, where no one—least of all a good painter—was really rewarded or punished; in England, whatever your profession, you made your own life.
    The painters brightened Hastings, and it seemed to me full of energy and industry and good humor, just the sort of place to recommend to a sensitive friend or relation with an artistic bent. All this and salubrious air, from Cliff End to Bulverhythe!
    I was eating two pigeons in a restaurant with Rooney and praising the town one night, when at the mention of a person I had found particularly good-natured, Rooney looked doubtful.
    "You may be right," Rooney said, implying that I was completely mistaken.
    "Sarah Milverton—that lady you introduced me to—she seemed just the sort of secure fulfilled person—"
    "Don't," Rooney said. "Her husband died a week ago. Cancer. And he'd been manic for eight years."
    "How manic?"
    "Doing his nut—that's how manic. He heard voices for eight years. That's a lot of voices. Sarah's had a terrible time."
    I said, "What about that guy telling the jokes—Orlock?"
    He said, "You noticed no one laughed at the jokes?"
    This was true, and now that I thought of it, Orlock had seemed a trifle frenzied in his joke-telling. But it had been a drunken meal, confirming my impression of Hastings as an artists' colony full of optimistic romance and spirited intimacy.
    "You noticed his bandage?"
    No, I had not seen Orlock's bandage.
    "It was on his arm—his whole arm. Seventeen stitches," Rooney said. He looked at me as though at a child, pitying my innocence, smiling despairingly at what he had to tell me, regretting that the subject had come up. "Orlock tried to kill himself this morning with a razor."
    But I still liked Hastings, and I would have stayed longer, except that I had as yet seen very little of the British coast. There was so much of it ahead of me that I sometimes had the urge to cut and run—simply get on an express train and make a dash for Wales, or fly to Scotland and forget Ulster. But I had vowed to make my way slowly around the whole coast, and so one rainy morning Rooney walked east with me along the Promenade.
    If Hastings had been richer, all these Victorian buildings would have been torn down. The town was too poor to be vulgar, and it had enough friendly artists to avoid being philistine. And was I right in thinking that painters liked being near the sea—something to do with the light? Rooney thought there might be something in this. Painters and fishermen seemed to go together. At the fish market in Hastings, Rooney said, you could find fish that you wouldn't see anywhere else in Britain—squid, octopus, and cuttlefish. And the sole was the best in the country. At the tall Scandinavian-looking net sheds, made out of black planks, the fishermen sat with basins of fish, mending nets, saying very little. Rooney said they were impenetrable men and had their own customs. For example, if they saw a priest or nun in the early morning, they would not go out fishing that day.
    "You can imagine what they'd do if they saw the Pope!" he said.
    As a matter of fact, the Pope was expected in Britain within a month, the first papal visit ever.
    At Queen Victoria's statue in Warrior Square, where