Long Slow Affair of the Heart, A

by Ansley, Bruce

  Scarcely had the last word sprung to mind when the Queen went off on her own, as boats do when they feel their crew is growing complacent. The stern made a bid for freedom, swinging away from the pontoon.

  My neighbour sat to attention. The boat spoke to her, along the lines of ‘throw down thy sticks and walk’. She sprang from her wheelchair, grabbed a line and pulled eleven tonnes of steel into its mooring as effortlessly as she’d lifted her glass. Then she settled back into the chair and waved away my thanks.

  I took cover on the after-deck and watched a small boy paddling across the chocolate-brown water of the marina. What might a New Zealand mother or father have done when their small son set sail on a plastic blow-up jet-ski upon waters whose colour suggested that residents of the marina were not on good terms with holding tanks for sewage, the boy armed with a broom as his only means of propulsion? The great New Zealand love of adventure would have come to a screeching halt, the only question being which would have screeched louder, halt or parents.

  Our immediate neighbours were Vielm and Renee. Vielm was an IT consultant. He wrote computer programmes. He wrote them the way composers create music, or novelists weave stories. ‘It is an art,’ he said. ‘Look, I show you.’ He passed his hand over his computer screen smoothly as a conjuror, although the hand was much quicker than the eye, for I was wrecked on the first few … Were they really words?

  Vielm and Renee lived aboard a houseboat. ‘Wrong,’ he said, ‘it is a ship. It has an engine.’ Its controls were pure PlayStation. Little levers and buttons rather than a steering wheel directed it this way and that while a screen told you what you were doing. Instead of anchors it had hydraulic legs which emerged from the ship’s bottom and secured it to the riverbed.

  Gauges, screens, and gyros adorned its insides but still it looked like suburbia-on-sea. It had two bedrooms upstairs and two living rooms down with a kitchen and bathroom from a period which seemed much later in the twenty-first century.

  ‘I love new stuff,’ said Vielm. He drove a new Cadillac four-wheel-drive.

  Renee didn’t say very much at all, except ‘Pouf’, when something distasteful such as Thatcherism, or childbirth, came up in conversation.

  Vielm had left his wife with the St Bernard dog, sold his company, and taken up with Renee four months ago. She’d left god-knew-what, but whatever that was, it hung in the air like the smell of manure that hovered over Holland. She drank tea endlessly.

  Vielm showed us pictures of his holiday in the Maldives. He showed us lots of other pictures too. Computers have replaced photo albums and slide shows, but they’re every bit as boring. His overseas holidays were over, he said. Now he could not take long flights because they did not allow him to smoke. ‘They were talking about halting smoking in cafés,’ he said. ‘In cafés! They might as well ban wine from bars.’

  He rolled himself another. So did Renee. ‘Pouf,’ she said. But less than a year later even France banned smoking in cafés. Pouf!

  During the day we worked on the boat. At first there seemed little to do.

  I looked over Sally’s shoulder as she wrote home: ‘It’s a lovely blue day and the boat is even better than we realised. A good clean, some paint and inside a rub down with teak oil and she, the River Queen, will be nearly as good as new.’

  Something had to be done. Yes, it was a lovely blue day. The Dutch were having an unusually good spring, as they told us almost every day: ‘You are very lucky,’ said Vielm. The best, finest, sunniest spring they’d ever had was developing.

  But that wasn’t the way boats worked was it?

  Here was one of life’s vexing questions. Why do blokes love working on boats but loathe toiling on houses, even if it is exactly the same job? Or, why do women admire blokes working on houses, yet detest them working on boats? The answer, I thought, was because boats symbolised everything men, or some of them, desired: freedom, adventure, simplicity, self-sufficiency, order (not listed among most men’s instincts, but regarded as a desirable option, like airbags on cars), and boats were so shapely too. Most of all, they represented potential — what you might do if only life gave you a shot at it. Houses were the hum-drum, the routine, the intransigent, the grindstone for the nose, the burden (for houses had mortgages, whereas boats possessed only loans). For many unfortunate women, boats were the competition. Fundamental to owning a boat was resolving this tension. Unresolved, it hung over matrimony like the high divorce rate to which it made such a contribution.

  I knew all this because I had owned quite a few boats.

  Sally asked which was the best book I’d ever read. South Sea Vagabonds, I said. I read it when I was twelve and it influenced my life forever. John Wray, the author, got the sack for dreaming on the job. What was he to do? He had no money, for it was about the time of the Great Depression. So he borrowed a boat, went out on the Hauraki Gulf, collected old kauri logs from beaches, towed them home, sawed them up and made his own boat. He picked tar off roads, scrounged spars and sails from a wreck, made fastenings out of No. 8 fencing wire, picked an old engine out of a paddock. From all of these he created a boat so fine that it was still as new more than seventy years later. He named it the Ngataki, and set sail for the Pacific Islands with his mates.

  He began with:

  … this book is written primarily for dreamers … for the man who works in a city office and dreams about sparkling blue waters and coconut palms and white sails bellying to the warm trade winds … I was a dreamer once, but now my dreams have come true, and I am satisfied and happy.

  What boy could resist something like that? The book was almost a parody on New Zealanders, or at least New Zealand men. Yet it fixed in me a quintessential love of country, self-sufficiency, the notion that you could do whatever you wanted, adventure, laughter, light-heartedness, the Kiwi belief that things were only dangerous for people from other countries. It even showed me how to pronounce ‘Ng’, which Wray believed every New Zealander knew; but obviously he’d never visited the South Island.

  I spent the next three years scouring the beaches of Pegasus Bay and Kaikoura, searching for old kauri logs. I had no idea what one looked like, and as one piece of driftwood is very similar to the next, I was disappointed all of the time. Only the thought that such minor setbacks would never have deterred Wray kept me going, until someone pointed out that kauri didn’t grow naturally this far south, and even if it did, and people were careless enough to let logs float out to sea, they would be carried north by the current.

  My search for No. 8 wire was much more successful. There was a lot of wire in the South Island, even after I’d taken quite a bit of it, and several farmers must have stroked their grizzled chins over mysterious gaps in their fences and muttered about townies.

  Vessels do not sail on No. 8 wire alone, however, and it took me quite a long time first to understand then acquire that fundamental, essential ingredient of boats: money. But this raised another cruel maritime trick. Usually you worked to make money to spend. But with boats it was the other way round. You spent money to work.

  We had five boats at home: two sea kayaks, a small dinghy, an open sailing boat, and the old motor-sailer. The kayaks were excellent vessels. They represented adventure, even though no one took them much further than the nearby lagoon. The point was, they were capable of much longer voyages, and with a little proper dreaming, they could be envisaged cruising the cerulean waters of the Abel Tasman National Park, or exploring the islands of the Gulf. More immediately, they were made of plastic, so when they’d finished roaming for the day (the trip to the other side of the lagoon and back, damned tide) they could be left entirely alone.

  The little dinghy bustled to and fro and made no demands on anyone. The bigger sailing dinghy was used for everything: dredging for scallops, fishing for snapper (a grandiose term for hopelessly, happily, heaving a line over the side), rowing energetically, even sailing. It cost $1,500 complete with trailer and in terms of dollars per hours used must have represented
the best value in the history of boating, certainly in my own.

  Which puzzled Sally. Why, she asked, would I then spend endless hours working on my venerable motor-sailer, which hardly ever got used and chewed money like an alligator? Naturally, if I had a good answer I’d have trotted it out. Nothing sprang to mind.

  I mentioned that it was allegedly a motor-sailer. This implied that it sailed. Yet the verb hardly suited the ponderous way it heaved through the ocean, not so much cleaving the seas as chopping them into little pieces and flinging them all over the place. Someone once described its motion as that of a brick dunny under sail. I felt such insults keenly, and anyway, the dear thing hardly ever sailed, for it was always being worked upon.

  No sooner was one part of it painted than another demanded attention by shedding the paint painstakingly and recently applied. It differed from the Sydney Harbour Bridge in two respects: the painters of that structure actually finished at one end before they had to start again at the other, and the bridge sailed better.

  The engine might once have powered a charabanc but always started first go and chugged away happily. It splashed muck around its engine room like a pig in a sty, and took far, far longer to clean up. Then there was the deck to be re-caulked, and the compressor to be overhauled, and the steering to be renewed, and the toilet to be put right for oh, the thousandth time, and none of these jobs were brief, because no matter how simple they appeared the boat somehow converted them into advanced callisthenics. All of this meant many happy hours spent covered in paint, or oil, or substances only boat-owners knew about.

  Countless hours for me, for blokes, of course, didn’t count. Sally counted, in both senses. Why, she asked? Like most of life’s great questions, there was only one answer. Dunno.

  So did the River Queen need only a mop and a sponge? Improbable. No, impossible. I was sure I could do better than that. Yep, here was a little rust poking through the paint. Underneath the floor were a few jobs the surveyor reckoned needed to be done.

  Around and about were things that needed attention, for the very best maintenance reasons of course, or even renewed, because as Ricardo said, often, better it was done here in Holland than … France. He made that country sound like the black hole of boat maintenance, where the simplest task turned nasty and complicated under the twin obstacles of French intransigence and a language only the cunning natives could speak. And if it were done in Holland, best it were done right here in the Jachthaven de Maas, of course. Our bill at the yard’s chandlery grew alarmingly: paint, brushes, rollers, ropes, fenders, new engine hoses, oil, grease, a new fridge control, fuel, a dozen other items. The hardware store in the neighbouring town soon knew me by name, Bruis.

  Ricardo told me how to paint in the rain, an essential Dutch ploy: you threw a bucket of water over the wet paint, he said. That way the rain didn’t pit the paint, and it would dry off all right. I cringed at the thought.

  We didn’t have to paint in the rain, though. The weather stayed fine. ‘You are very lucky,’ said Ricardo.

  In the evenings we drank dark Bordeaux or rode the bicycles we’d bought from a repair shop under the big railway station in S-Hertogenbosch where commuters stacked thousands of bikes on racks each day. We jammed them into the tiny Peugeot, a task so unlikely a suspicious old man called the politie. The cops arrived promptly but we must have seemed impossible thieves, for they merely eyed us from the car windows and left.

  We pedalled around the streams and rivers under avenues of trees along with cavalcades of Dutch on the solid upright bikes ridden by everyone from the very young to the quite old. It was very peaceful.

  Dutch living rooms with soft lights and plump furniture lay open to the street. ‘They are intended for you to look inside,’ said Vielm, ‘but you should not look too long. It is not polite.’

  We bought blue and white china, bowls for fruit, vases for flowers. Sally bought a nubile white Asiatic orchid in a pot and pink begonias in a blue bowl. They became our good friends.

  Stern grey herons watched the water intently from the banks. We saw a stork eating a frog with its arms and legs spread out like a baby’s. Sally tripped and fell hard against a companionway step, bruising her shin badly. It hurt a lot. She felt depressed and a little homesick.

  We went into S-Hertogenbosch and bought foam rubber to soften our mattress. It was expensive. We bought it from a little upholstery shop in a cellar. It seemed down at heel, but when the owner learned we needed the foam rubber for a boat he showed us a picture of his own: a very costly classic launch whose polished woodwork reflected the sunlight.

  The surveyor came to check that the work he’d recommended, quite minor, had been done properly. His name was Coen, and he was in his late twenties. ‘Some think I am too young,’ he said.

  Well, he was gnarly on the inside. He had inspected the boat so closely he found a hidden hose clip whose tightening screw might have damaged the adjacent exhaust cover. Later I searched for an hour before I found it again. He found a nut under the engine that needed tightening. Ricardo couldn’t find that one at all.

  We had coffee in the café. Coen told us a story about a beautiful old tug lying amid a clutch of ancient ships just outside the marina. They’d had trouble with a boat they were inspecting and found themselves with buckets-full of dirty oil. Where should they put it? They spotted the old tug, then marked for demolition, sneaked alongside and poured the oil through a porthole, confidently expecting the whole business to be towed away and scrapped.

  But the tug wasn’t demolished. It was historic. A fund was got up to save it. The man I bought the River Queen from, Leen Bakker, was one of the group formed to preserve it. Some time later Coen asked Leen how the restoration work was going. ‘Slowly,’ said Leen. ‘The inside was filthy. For some reason it was covered in old oil.’

  Coen felt the burden of a protective state lying heavily on his shoulders.

  ‘There are too many people who live on welfare here. Young people like me must pay for it. We pay taxes, taxes, taxes.’

  You heard the same in every country, I suggested, sensing even from this distance the moans of those New Zealanders who firmly believed they were among the most heavily-taxed nations in the world, an opinion easily held if they’d never been further than a Bali resort.

  Coen shrugged. ‘Here it is different.’

  I paid for the coffee.

  Then we ran the boat up the river at full speed. We ran it down again. Coen pronounced himself satisfied. ‘You have a DAF engine,’ he said. ‘They are very good.’ (The DAF was Dutch-built). ‘Your boat is good. You should just go.’

  ‘Yes,’ Sally said. ‘Let’s just go.’

  Just … go?

  That was the thing about Sally. She made up her mind and went for it. If you were to throw in your job etc., etc., a partner like Sally was very handy. I was dodging the potholes and peering down the abyss but Sally took them all in one great leap of faith.

  I was not a decisive man. When I wanted to do something, usually I couldn’t decide what it was I wanted to do. When it eventually came to me, anxiety kicked in. I was an anxious man. I worried up a storm on Sunday evenings, when the past week seemed a waste of time and the coming one impossible. On Sunday evenings I would sit in my little puddle of gloom, knowing that disaster was dusting itself off, dressing up and cleaning its teeth ready for tomorrow.

  Sally believed my anxiety was groundless, a stupid quirk that complicated the proper business of life, which was living as happily as possible. She was brought up in a neat little family — mum, dad and two daughters — whose enjoyment of life was undisturbed by the crises that regularly struck my own. If I now feared disaster would strike at any moment, it was with good reason: growing up, disaster did strike at any moment, sometimes saving all the to-ing and fro-ing and just hanging around for a while.

  Six kids, the beach, assorted vehicles ranging from mopeds to hot rods, never enough money, always far too much exuberance: this was disaster’s home,
and I was surprised it ever left to go anywhere else. Life was chaotic, always; injuries were so common only broken bones won any attention and then only if you needed crutches. Disappearances were routine, once resulting in two nationwide searches for one of my brothers; and you could never, never find anything.

  So I and my brothers and sister grew up with the certainty that sooner or later we’d wind up living under the bridge, if only we could find it.

  All of us married orderly people. Sooner or later we found partners who liked clean houses; paid power bills on time; insisted on mealtimes; never drove unregistered cars nor ran out of toilet paper; threw away underpants with holes in them; knew which day of the week it was; answered the telephone; never spent money they didn’t have, and always, always flushed the toilet. They kept chaos at bay, and when it dared make an appearance they made it wipe its feet and sit on the sofa, and after a while it looked at its watch, muttered politely about the time and left.

  One look at Sally and I knew chaos didn’t stand a chance.

  We met while she was still at university and I was working for the Otago Daily Times. A friend had entrusted his wife to me, to escort to a Dunedin party.

  His wife was attractive and I was busy doing what any good friend would do in the circumstances: I plotted to make off with her just as soon as I could swing it. Anything less would have been an insult to the lady, my friend’s taste in women, and the behaviour expected of a young reporter, even if the dear old ODT ran more to sobriety than sleaze.

  ‘I hope you’re going to talk to me,’ said a voice at my elbow, ‘because I told that guy over there I had to go and say hello.’ I was inclined to sulk, but you did not ignore Sally. When she came by for a chat, you chatted, or at the very least mumbled until your testosterone-clouded vision cleared enough to change targets. When it did I noticed that the interloper wasn’t too dusty herself. In fact, as I warmed to the task, I thought she was stunning. She was nicely tanned, with short dark hair and a wonderful smile and hazel eyes with sparks in them. She wore a short blue dress with white spots. My ego swelled like a third-grade rugby player’s bladder at an away game.