The Kingdom by the Sea (42 page)

"No," I said.

He looked appalled.

I said, "But I liked the bakeries. The fresh fish. The cheese."

"The bakeries," Mr. Muir said sadly.

I did not go on. He thought there was something wrong with me. But what I liked in Aberdeen was what I liked generally in Britain: the bread, the fish, the cheese, the flower gardens, the apples, the clouds, the newspapers, the beer, the woolen cloth, the radio programs, the parks, the Indian restaurants and amateur dramatics, the postal service, the fresh vegetables, the trains, and the modesty and truthfulness of people. And I liked the way Aberdeen's streets were frequently full of seagulls.

I
T WAS
a mild meadowy coast for seventy miles, from the mouth of the Dee to the mouth of the Tay—Aberdeen to Dundee. I had hoped to walk part of it, keeping to the clifftops and avoiding the deep cuts and gullies and the dark promontories. I liked the way the shaggy grass hung into the coves from the cliff edge. Today that grass was streaming and even the sea was flattened by the falling rain. The storm brightened the stone on the snug coastal cottages and gave it the color of snail shells.

Stonehaven was visibly prosperous, which was odd, because most well-off Scottish towns tried to hide their prosperity. We skirted the town's pretty bay, turned inland for perhaps twenty miles, and then returned to the coast at Montrose, which lay on a landspit in front of a large tidal lagoon, Montrose Basin. Slouching cows searched for grass near the apartment houses at Montrose, and farther south at Lunan Bay a hundred hogs in the field were suddenly illuminated by a gleam of sunshine through the draperies of the downpour. The light also reddened a nearby castle ruin and briefly warmed the sands of the bay.

The gale surged again, with mares' tails off Arbroath, and it swept across the Front. But I imagined it to be a joyless place even in full sunshine. The coast had turned duney. In Scotland it was either black cliffs or gray links, and sometimes for miles it was bleak attenuated golf courses, end to end in the sand. Scottish golf courses were never pretty things: they were windy and lacked topsoil; they were oddly lumpy, scattered with rabbit holes and bomb craters; they looked like minefields. Carnoustie was that way—battlescarred—and so was Barry. And then we came to Monifieth, where three tall swans were swimming in the sea.

I chose to stop at Dundee because it had a reputation for dullness ("possesses little of interest for the tourist"). Such places were usually worth seeing. I had found that in Britain less was revealed by the lovely old town than the ugly new one. Old Dundee had been destroyed, and new Dundee was an interesting monstrosity. It was certainly an excellent example of a hard-edged horror—the prison-like city of stony-faced order—that I associated with the future. Just the word
futuristic
brought to my mind the most depressing images of idle crowds and ugly buildings, unfriendly streets, steel fences, barred windows, and defoliation; and it was bound up with the concept of organized leisure—the intimidating symmetry of group fun. Public swimming pools were futuristic.

There had always seemed to me something uncomfortable and dangerous about public swimming pools. Their tiles had a particularly frightening way of turning a shout into a scream, and this noise and the water and the cold showers and the nakedness could make a swimming pool seem like Auschwitz. Rowdy gangs loved to swim—the atmosphere of a pool brought out a bullying streak in them.

The Dundee Swimming and Leisure Centre had the look of a Russian interrogation headquarters, a vast drab Lubyanka in rain-streaked concrete. Inside were three crowded pools, and one was Olympic-sized. They contained a stew of thousands of screaming kids. The building smelled of human flesh and disinfectant; it steamed like a locker room; it was damp in a sickening way. It had a dark cafeteria and a Therapy Suite containing sunlamps and sauna baths ("OAP's Sauna—80 pence"). There were a number of Ping-Pong tables in one room, but no one was playing. In the lobby there were four electronic games being frantically played—boys feeding money into Space Invaders and Frogger and Moon Landing while the single parents and the pensioners and the unemployed came and went. It was in the metropolitan plan, in a world where there was no work and no money but plenty of time; it was part of the process of life in the years to come.

***

Leuchars Junction was no longer a junction, though the name had stuck. It lay across the Firth of Tay, in Fife. It was as near as I could get by rail to St. Andrews ("perhaps the most fashionable watering place in the country"), and I began walking as soon as I arrived at the station.

After a mile or so I came to Guardbridge. Some men were standing in front of the paper mill there. They said they were waiting for a funeral to go past—a man who had worked his whole life at the paper mill was being buried today. The hearse was overdue.

"And I'll tell you something," one of the men said. His name was Gordon Hastie and he was fairly agitated, twisting his cloth cap in his hands as he peered up the St. Andrews Road. "Do you see those flags?"

There were three on the flagpoles in front of the factory—a Union Jack, the Scottish national flag, and what I took to be the paper mill's own flag—all flying at half-mast.

"What a morning it's been," Mr. Hastie said. "A couple of hours ago we had to raise those flags for Queenie. Then after she went by we had to lower them again for Donald."

Donald was the dead man, obviously, but who was Queenie?

"The Queen herself," Mr. Hastie said. "Aye."

"You mean the Queen's here?"

"In St. Andrews," Mr. Hastie said. "Hurry up, you might see her."

Just as I started to run, Donald's hearse went by. I froze. The paper mill men doffed their caps. And then the funeral cars continued down the wet road, and the men went back to work.

It was four miles more to St. Andrews. I walked fast and after a few miles I cut across a field, continuing along the estuary of the River Eden, ending up in the middle of a golf course. There were four golf courses here, but the one I found myself in belonged to the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews, the capital of the golfing world. The course was just as rough and desolate as every other one I had seen in Scotland. Perhaps that was the point of golf?

But there was not a town its size in Britain to compare with St. Andrews, and it was one of the most beautiful towns on the coast, the white stone ruins and the brown stone buildings perched on the rocky cliffs of a wide bay. The golf courses ran into the seafront, and the seafront was part of the playing fields of the university, which was a third of the town; but it was impossible to tell where one ended and the other began. The whole effect was somewhat ecclesiastical, but with fresh air, like a lively cloister with the roof off.

Today the streets were scrubbed, flags flew, the whole town gleamed with flowers and bunting. And there was a heightened hum, a vibration racing in the air, the equivalent in sound of twinkling light, something electric and almost visible. It was genuine. I felt it as soon as I entered the cobbled streets. It was as if the town had been refreshed with a blessing. In a way it had, for that atmosphere was the spirit left by the progress of the Royal Visit. The Queen of England had left just a moment ago.

"What a pity you missed her," Freda Robertson said. Mrs. Robertson owned the largest bookstore in St. Andrews, and she looked dignified and indestructible in her Scottish way, her voice half-inquiry and half-reprimand and full of the precise ironies of a headmistress. She loved books. She recognized me. Did I want a cup of tea?

With her finger tracing upon the sharp panes of her mullioned window, Mrs. Robertson described how Her Majesty rode up here in her Rolls-Royce, and got out there, and walked over there near the barriers.

"I hung out of the window with a pair of binoculars and my camera," Mrs. Robertson said. "I didn't know which one to look through. I'm sure my pictures will have fingers and thumbs on them. But you should have heard the cheers!"

Was this Falklands feeling, I wondered? No, Freda Robertson said, it was for the Queen's being a grandmother. The child had been born when I was in Mallaig, and now he had a name: Prince William. One of the largest St. Andrews signs said, health to
PRINCE WILLIAM.

"What brings you to St. Andrews?" Mrs. Robertson asked.

I said that I was making my way around the British coast, clockwise.

"Aye, so we're on your itinerary."

"And a man in Guardbridge told me that the Queen was here."

It was then that Mrs. Robertson said what a pity it was that I had missed her. "Her Majesty just left for Anstruther."

That was only eight miles away and also on the coast.

I said, "I think I'll go to Anstruther and see her."

"I hope you do see her," Mrs. Robertson said. "This is a great occasion. Do you know that this is the first time the Queen and Prince Philip have ever come to St. Andrews?"

"Ever?"

"Aye," Mrs. Robertson said. "Now I want you to do me one favor, if you will."

"Gladly," I said.

She went on, "As you're traveling around the British coast, so you say, you are seeing a great many places. I have never been to half those places, and I don't suppose I shall. What I want you to do is write me a nonfiction book about traveling around the British coast. I think it would do very well in my shop, but that's not the important thing. I mean to say, I want to read it."

I said I would do my best, and started toward Anstruther, thinking: That was a page, and here's another page, and there's probably a page in Anstruther.

I tried to hitchhike in order to get to Anstruther in time to see the Queen, but no one picked me up. I fell in with a farm laborer on the road. He was coming from St. Andrews. He had gone there for the Royal Visit.

"I saw the Queen," he said, and he winced, remembering.

"How did she look?"

He winced again. His name was Dougie. He wore gumboots. He said, "She were deep in thought."

Dougie had seen something no one else had.

"She were preoccupied. Her face were gray. She weren't happy."

I said, "I thought she was happy about her new grandson."

Dougie disagreed. "I think she were worried about something. They do worry, you know. Aye, it's a terrible job."

He began to walk slowly, as if in sympathy for the hard-pressed Queen.

I said, "Being Queen of England has its compensations."

"Some compensations and some disadvantages," Dougie said. "I say it's half a dream world and half a nightmare. It's a goldfish bowl. No privacy! She can't pick her nose without someone seeing her."

Dougie said this in an anguished way, and I thought it was curious, though I did not say so, that he was pained because the monarch could not pick her nose without being observed.

He then began to talk about television programs. He said his favorite program was "The Dukes of Hazzard," which concerned hijinks in a town in the American South. This Scottish farm laborer in Fifeshire said that he liked it because of the way the character Roscoe talked to his boss. That was very funny. American humor was hard to understand at times, he said, but every farm laborer in Scotland would find Roscoe funny for his attitude.

At last a bus came. I flagged it down. It was empty. I said I wanted to go to Anstruther to see the Queen.

"Aye. She's having lunch there," the driver said.

I wondered where.

The driver knew. "At the Craw's Nest. It's a small hotel on the Pittenweem Road."

He dropped me farther along and I followed the bunting into Anstruther, sensing that same vibrant glow that I had felt at St. Andrews—the royal buzz. It was a holiday atmosphere. The schools were out. The shops were closed. The pubs were open. Some men were wearing kilts. People were talking in groups, seeming to remind each other of what had just happened—the Queen had already gone by, to the Craw's Nest.

I cut across the harbor sands and went up the road to what seemed a very ordinary hotel—but freshly painted and draped in lines of plastic Union Jacks. There were more men in kilts here—they had such wonderfully upright posture, the men in kilts: they never slouched and hardly ever sat down.

"She just left," one said. His name was Hector Hay McKaye.

But there was something of her still here, like perfume that is strongest when a woman leaves suddenly. In the Queen's case it was like something overhead—still up there, an echo.

Mr. McKaye turned to his friends and said, "They had two detectives in the kitchen—"

"Do you want to see the flowers?" Mrs. Hamilton said.

Everyone was whispering excitedly.

It seemed to me that if the Queen and Prince Philip had eaten here, the food might be good. I seldom had a good meal in my traveling, not that it mattered much: food was one of the dullest subjects. I decided to stay the night at the Craw's Nest. And this hotel, which had just received the blessing of a Royal Visit, was a great deal cheaper than any hotel in Aberdeen.

"She never had a starter," the waitress Eira said. "She had the fish course, haddock Mornay. Then roast beef, broccoli, and carrots. And fresh strawberries and cream for dessert. Our own chef did it. It was a simple meal—it was good. The menu was printed and had bits of gold foil around it."

Much was made of the good plain food. It was English food—a fish course, a roast, two boiled vegetables, and fruit for the sweet course. The middle-class families in Anstruther—and everywhere else—had that every Sunday for lunch.
She's just like us,
people said of the Queen;
of course, she works a jolly sight harder!

What was difficult for an alien to see was that this was essentially a middle-class monarchy. Decent philistines, the royal couple liked animals and country-house sports and variety shows. They never mentioned books at all, but they were famous for preferring certain television programs. Newspapers had published photographs of the Royal Television Set: it had a big screen and a sort of shawl on the top, but it was just like one you could hire for two quid a week up the High Street. Over the years the Queen had become shrewder-seeming, an even-tempered mother-in-law and a kindly gran. Prince Philip was loved for being irascible. He was noted for his grouchy remarks. He used the word
bloody
in public, and after that it was hard for anyone to find fault with him. The Queen was his opposite, growing smaller and squashier as he seemed to lengthen and grow spiky—the illusion had sprung out of his having become vocal. The Queen and the Prince were well-matched, but it was less the sovereign and her consort than the double-act that all successful middle-class marriages are.