Perhaps I’d become an old fart. I didn’t care. I was filled with self-loathing and bored to boot. My neck was the wrong demographic. And I was getting … older.
I’d discovered that the only copy of Elizabeth Jane Howard’s Casting Off in the local library was in large print. That might seem unimportant. But a large print book is not the same as a normal print edition. It might as well contain a different story. Perhaps an eye scanned a whole page before it started on the particular, the reason you could always spot the letter Z on a page. That would explain why reading stories on the internet was unsatisfying. Large print took up so much space that you could only scan half as much and the anticipation was much reduced, but the real issue was this: reading an Elizabeth Jane Howard novel in large print was like, well, not saying ‘like’ in every sentence. It signalled senility. An Elizabeth Jane Howard in large print was the Zimmer frame of literature.
Oh dear, life was so elliptical.
As kids we’d spent much of our time trying to look older, to impress partners, to be cool, to get into bars, to buy cigarettes from the local dairy. Looking eighteen was one thing, although now I couldn’t believe anyone was eighteen; I wouldn’t have sold any of them so much as a can of Pepsi.
Looking twenty-one was something else. That took much more than a dark night and a scowl. And if you couldn’t look twenty-one you might as well give up and join the Guides.
After thirty you headed off in the opposite direction and spent the next three decades trying to look younger. Men wore their shirts over their trousers instead of inside them as god intended. Women fretted over body shapes which added up to a whole lot more than the figure eight.
David Round, a former neighbour in the tiny Banks Peninsula community of Port Levy, claimed to be thirty-seven for several years (and looked it, moreover) until one day he took the gullible by surprise and threw a fiftieth birthday party. I knew a woman in Wellington who was the longest-serving forty-two-year-old in the history of the capital city, although almost certainly not the nation.
Middle age became life’s longest period. It lasted a great deal longer than any other era, every bit as long as the golden age of Byzantium. It ran from around forty-five, which everyone knew as more or less the end of adolescence, until the mid-eighties or even longer if you could still tell lies without losing your teeth. In the process it eclipsed the second-longest period of your life, the mid-fifties, which could stretch from fifty-four until you picked up the pension.
The chronologically-challenged, however, might suffer a setback in their early sixties. They were torn between vanity and frugality, swept this way and that by ego on one side and outright meanness on the other.
What did you say, for example, when you bought a movie ticket and were handed a half-price one for seniors? Indignation was not only pointless, but costly.
The previous autumn we’d called at the Maruia hot springs deep in the passes that divide east and west coasts of the South Island. Sally bought two tickets, a full-priced adult ticket for herself and a discount, senior one for me, although I was a good five years short of the mark. I maintained a craven silence throughout this transaction.
Far, far worse, the woman behind the counter, whom I judged to have been of the bewitching age, glanced at me incuriously. Did she object? Did she threaten to call the police and complain of dishonesty, even of fraud? She did not. She handed over the tickets, took the money and ordered us to have a nice day. She might even have helped me down the steps had I asked. A stitch in time saved, well, five dollars in this case.
But the real cost of buying time was far, far higher. I’d met people who, like Glenn and Trish, spent much of their time living on canals in Europe. They were well into the so-called third age. But they were fit, and active, and they loved the adventure of what they were doing, and they not only looked young, but expectant. Life no longer owed them; it was paying.
One day my doctor was talking to me in that distracted way while hacking away at his computer. I asked what he was doing. He said he was drawing up a risk list for me. He said that given my own and my family’s medical histories, there were a few issues in my life. He seemed to have been typing for a long time. Tolkien could have whacked out a couple of chapters by the time he finally looked up. Come and see me again in three months, he said. Over my dead body, I thought. Then, given the circumstances, changed it to, I’m not going down that path if I can help it.
But life was adding up for me.
The calculation — family, health, job and everything else — came out to this: from now on I paid for my mistakes in the most valuable currency of all, time. I had to make a break for it.
Sally however did not. She had had the sense to leave her job as a department head in a polytechnic several years before. She gave up work completely. Her life had been bountiful ever since. She was a happy woman, a living, smiling advertisement for throwing away a life she did not want for a life she did. She did not need a new one. Yet without so much as an audible sigh she abandoned peace and tranquillity and went along with me.
We drove to our little bach in Golden Bay and thought about it. We swam in the clear green sea, lay on the sand. We walked in the bush, stood under white waterfalls with the noise of cold water scouring our minds.
The hardest part of escaping was what to escape to. Sally wanted to grow lavender; if, that was, we needed to do anything at all. Imagine, she said, the fields of purple running down to the stream; although we had no fields, and no stream, and experience had taught us both that romance was the first to flee from dreams which involved working the land. We discussed, mulled, argued and at the end of that summer we were no closer to deciding what we wanted to do.
One wet Saturday in autumn I sat before my computer pretending to work. I was searching the internet for a quote on the weather, one of those platitudes about silver linings or what follows the rain, which in a Christchurch autumn is usually the cold.
I thought of Glenn and Trish, who lived in a shippy old house over the hill in the port of Lyttelton. They were more than canal boating enthusiasts. They were evangelists. I thought it would be a fine idea if they went into business with us, on the French canals. Thirty seconds of earnest research on the internet turned up the ideal vessel, a huge Dutch barge divided into two apartments. We could rent one of them to canal travellers and live in the other, see? Glenn did not.
For a start, he said, he had this job, teaching photography at Canterbury University, and Trish worked as a Family Court counsellor, and they both liked their work, and their house likewise, and he wasn’t about to chuck everything away and trip around after some flake with a life crisis.
Actually, he was much too nice to say any of that. A man of succinct vocabulary, he summed my plan up in a word: no. But he sent me a clutch of websites. They were all in Dutch, but I got the drift. They offered boats for sale. Thousands of them. I opened one of the sites and everything fell into place. We’d buy a canal boat, live la vie Française amid splendid villages and smooth water and baguettes and berets. It would be an affair of the heart. And we’d come back and live in Golden Bay for two or three months in the New Zealand sun when in Europe the cold winds blew.
I wasn’t the rat leaving the sinking ship. I was the rat looking for a new one. I felt like the Grinch at Christmas, getting his incredibly good idea. I explained it to Sally as Thomas might have explained the electric light to Mrs Edison. Sally had the money, her mother’s legacy, enough to buy the boat and live on it for the first year. Or enough to do all sorts of things she might have thought worthwhile, other than her husband’s current neurosis.
‘Great,’ she said. ‘Let’s do it.’
We sat with Glenn and Trish in their house above the harbour, talking it over in the evening quiet. A comfy smell of roast chicken filled the room.
Mate, he said, you’ll love it.
They’d invited a friend around for dinner. The friend had bought a canal boat and kept it in France. Mate, said the fri
end, you’ll love it.
Sally grilled Trish. ‘Will I like it?’
‘Mate,’ said Trish, ‘you’ll love it.’
The wood fire made us content, for a storm was brawling outside. We watched from the warm as it hurled across the harbour. The grey sky shrouded the hills until only the lights of Diamond Harbour told us of people in their own living rooms, perhaps dreaming their dreams too, and I felt satisfied that everything was in its proper place, all right.
Chapter Three
We’d been in Holland two weeks when we became the proud new owners and de facto skippers of the River Queen. I felt vaguely Bogartish. Sally felt … well, the way you feel when your partner wakes up one day wanting to throw away the weekly pay cheque, leave your beloved house and abandon your family, friends and country for as far ahead as you could see.
We weren’t even sure where we’d be going, except that it was a long way: a giant loop to Paris would cover three countries, 1,560 kilometres and 376 locks. Or we might go down to the south of France and the Mediterranean, fewer locks but breathtaking. Who knew? We only had to ready the River Queen and the journey would begin.
We loaded our expanding baggage into the little Peugeot, said goodbye to the lovely Schoorl, and took up our new address in the Jachthaven de Maas, Alem.
Living in marinas was one of my passions. I loved the gentle movement, the clinking, slapping, gurgling sound of boats at rest, the ranks of them lined up for inspection while their owners were absent and so unable to look indignantly from portholes as I prowled around.
The Jachthaven de Maas was unusual. Foreigners had lived there before, but so few of them they were all known by name, and people at the marina could recount their sailing history, or where in the world they could be found at this very moment.
The marina lay in a pool at the end of a branch off the River Maas, some forty kilometres south of Utrecht. It was owned by the Bosma family. Mrs Bosma, dark, attractive, looked after the office, wielded power saws and paintbrushes, and in her spare time crewed on a fast, open sailing boat. Mr Bosma, dark, attractive, floated hither and yon, and in his spare time skippered an extremely fast open boat full of laughing passengers on the River Maas. The two of them lived on a brightly painted tugboat reached by a winding path and rustic bridge.
Carlos, the younger son, was studying to be a barge captain. He lived on a small converted barge with his girlfriend, who was a waitress in the café floating on a huge pontoon in the marina. Ricardo, the older, lived with his girlfriend on a much bigger barge, immaculately kept, moored beside his parents. He spent much of his time with the red-haired Patric, who was about his age, twenty-three, and was mechanic and general fix-it man. The two got along in the way young men do.
Patric drove an old Citröen limousine, Ricardo a Mercedes.
Ricardo: I like his car. Pity it’s French.
Patric: If I want to drive in a Mercedes, I take a taxi.
The Jachthaven de Maas lay below an imposing church in the tiny village of Alem, whose industrial pottery museum hinted at a former life. Now it was quiet, so still that walking in its streets in the evenings we’d be startled by the appearance of a human being. Even the church door seemed permanently locked. Apart from the marina the village had only two functioning businesses when we got there. One, the grocery store, closed down the day after we arrived, leaving the other, the local pub. This seldom opened and when it did, accommodated some event or another, such as a male choir, or a flower show. It too had been about to close its doors forever, until a local man took it over and saved it. He had a job in another town, so it opened only two or three nights a week, and sometimes at weekends.
The job of entertaining locals fell to the marina café. Except for lunchtimes on fine days, the pickings seemed to be slim, until we discovered that it didn’t really start to spark until after ten p.m. Then, the various inhabitants of the marina would go for schnapps and a chat, for the yachthaven had quite a lot of permanent residents.
Some lived on luxurious motor launches which would have fitted right into the Riviera. One couple spent weekends aboard a huge white fibreglass construction with curved glass and engines which blasted the peace of Saturday mornings and suggested great speed, although on the slow rivers and canals of the Netherlands its pace obviously reverberated only in the minds of its owners.
She was bright blonde, one of those thin Dutch woman so youthful we suspected they were trophy brides until close up they proved to be as carefully maintained as, in this case, the immaculate cruiser. He also was older than his apparent years; he dressed in tight white pants and yellow T-shirts, which he shed as the sun came up to reveal a sunbed tan and a finely-shaped little paunch. The white leather banquettes on their vessel’s sundeck were reserved for their two ferocious Alsatians, whose black snouts hung over the rails as we passed, snarling and barking and delighting their owners. They were our introduction to European dogs. Most European boats kept dogs.
Dogs smell and the boats were small. Most of them reeked. Once I knew a man who lived on a boat in the Lyttelton marina, with a cocker spaniel. He locked his dog in the cabin when he went to work, and in the evenings when he returned home he’d unlock the cabin door and exclaim, ‘Oh, you dirty dog, oh, you filthy mutt, oh, oh, oh.’ Everyone sided with the dog, whose options were limited. Canal boaties would have agreed, then invited you in to admire the mess. Rover was so tidy, they’d say. Always behind the chair.
I had nothing against dogs. We’d owned a few. A golden Labrador, which could dive for rocks, and dig to Spain, and my favourite, a border collie named Tim which wanted to work sheep, usually when no one wanted him to. They were real dogs. We’d also looked after my son Sam’s black pug Lulu and, like many European dogs we encountered, we weren’t sure whether the pug was a dog at all. She had started as a tiny ball with bug eyes on the sides of her head, and as she grew bigger her eyes moved to the front. We were surprised to see she had legs. She wore a collar studded with diamonds, fake we hoped, and ran around on our wooden floors sounding like a legion of fairies in high heels. She refused to sleep in a separate room, wanted to climb into bed with us and even kept to her own end of it, sometimes.
She made us laugh, until I discovered things had changed in the world of dogs; when we took her for a walk we were expected to pick up doggy-do and store it in plastic bags, under pain of censure by the beady-eyed. On the spot I resolved never to own another. She was a great licker — her mouth wasn’t big enough for her long tongue, so a bit of it always hung out — and a vibrant snorer, but if you told her to shut up, she’d stop snoring and start licking, which was just as noisy. I should have been fully prepared for European dogs, but I was not. Soon I longed for a New Zealand cockie with a back-country voice and a big stick.
Only a few yards along a pontoon from the fabulous white fibreglass confection in the Jachthaven de Maas, a couple of old men lived in a rowing boat. At least, they seemed to live in it, for they were there in the mornings when we got up, and still there when it grew dark. In between those times, and probably outside them too, they fished. They sat with flasks and food stacked between them, talking amiably and catching nothing all day, and when it rained, as it seldom did that fine spring (‘You are so lucky,’ they said), they hoisted a makeshift canopy above their heads and fished on.
The first person we met in the marina was an elegant man from Luxembourg. He was slim and his English was perfect. He was kindly and talkative, in his late sixties and like so many men and women of that age we met on the canals, he looked fit, healthy and happy. Everything about his boat was immaculate, its paintwork unmarked, covers like new, equipment ready for the ocean crossing he told us he’d never made. The boat’s name was Benny. Their dog was named Benny too. We called them Mr and Mrs Benny.
They’d drive from Luxembourg, some four hours away, and live in the marina for a week or two at a time, sitting on their little back deck in complete harmony. Mr Benny had been born in Alem, and this was the closest h
e’d got to coming home.
Benny the dog dictated the tempo. He was a foul-tempered arthritic beast whose origins lay somewhere between spaniel and springer. One morning I met them on the jetty and went to pat the dog. ‘No, no!’ screamed Mrs Benny. ‘Is not possible!’ The dog looked disappointed. Probably it had been looking forward to a piece of me.
On Saturdays the Dutch owners of the tjalks and barges and old patrol boats and tugs and cruisers climbed aboard their vessels and hosed and mopped and cleaned then arranged furniture on the decks or the pontoons and spent the rest of the weekend chatting to visitors and friends. Occasionally they would even take their boats out onto the river, handling them with the ease the Dutch do, watched critically by their neighbours. Like creatures from The Wind and the Willows they simply liked being on the water, or in it, and they would have chirruped agreement with Ratty: there was nothing, absolutely nothing, half so much worth doing as simply messing around in boats.
On the next pontoon lay a small cruiser whose owners, he short and friendly, she in a wheelchair, appeared punctually on Saturday mornings and scrubbed inside and out. Then they sat on the jetty and entertained. She presided from her chair.
One morning I finished scrubbing the side of the River Queen and turned it around to work on the other side. Casual tasks could be fatal, I found, if you took them casually. Today I did. I threw off the lines and began manoeuvring.
The boat wouldn’t respond. Each time it left the pontoon it wanted to spring back in again. It felt as if it was on an elastic band. It was.
My neighbour had been watching with as much forbearance as she could manage. She could stand no more. Her aluminium stick tapped sharply on my stainless steel rail. ‘The cable!’ Her voice rapped briskly as her stick. We were tethered by our power cord. Sheepishly I unplugged and set off again. I turned the boat end for end, backed into its space. I was doing well, I thought; no, brilliantly.
Long Slow Affair of the Heart, A Page 4