Long Slow Affair of the Heart, A

by Ansley, Bruce

  I pushed the throttle forward.

  Nothing happened.

  The engine maintained its quiet rumble.

  Tried again.

  Nothing.

  I moved the engine nervously out of gear; the thought crossed my mind that perhaps the entire control was jammed, and we’d be doomed to travel in slow circles until we ran out of fuel. Then I remembered how much fuel we carried and cheered myself with the thought that we’d die of old age long before that happened.

  But the engine slipped smoothly enough into neutral. I knew what had gone wrong. Two cables ran from the engine control and one, the throttle cable, had snapped.

  We idled back into our berth. I went into the marina office. Did they know of a mechanic? Certainly, said the man behind the counter. He was a mechanic. He would replace my throttle cable. But not today. Today was Sunday.

  Tuesday? I asked. For the next day, Monday, was Queen Beatrix’s birthday. The queen had messed around with her birthday just as our own monarch did. She’d borrowed her mother Juliana’s, which was just as well, because her own was in mid-winter. They’d moved the day to spring, and of course it was a public holiday.

  Next week was very busy said the mechanic. But he could do it tomorrow, during the Queen’s birthday holiday. I could see the sign flashing in his brain: penal rates.

  So it was. The repair cost 200 Euro, or $400. Almost all of it labour, which for the hour it took him to change the cable would have run to a facelift with a bit of liposuction thrown in. We did not mind, really. It meant an extra two days in this delightful city.

  The work had an unexpected consequence, too. Many of the surrounding boats appeared rooted to the spot. They were beautifully built and equipped, capable of travelling long distances. Oceans would have been no trouble to lots of them. They could have turned on the radar, hitched the Global Positioning System to the automatic pilot, gone back to the margueritas on the sundeck and woken up in Brazil.

  A few of them were making long journeys on canals, and they came by for a chat. The others scarcely stirred from their recliners.

  The presence of an engineer moved them, however. He threw open the cabin door and lifted the living room floor, exposing the engine. It was boatporn, like an aphrodisiac, exciting the blokes. They came over. They peered under the injectors, ogled the exhaust. They smirked among themselves.

  The Belgian couple next door came over for the show too. They invited us back to their place, a leaf-shaped boat pointed at both ends, once a yacht with a lot of hull underneath the water. It looked unsuitable for canals, which most suited straight-sided boats sitting on top of the water. So much for prejudice; Europe had scarcely a waterway unseen by them and their craft. They bent a leery eye upon the Heineken beer we’d brought with us, then lectured us on how beer should really taste, with plenty on hand so they could demonstrate. Belgian beer was the world’s best they said, and after a few of the thick glass bottles of malty brown beer I agreed that with the possible exception of Emerson’s they were right. ‘It’s the one thing we do properly,’ he said. We had a few more to prove it.

  They asked me how they should spend the three weeks’ holiday they planned in New Zealand that Christmas. In the South Island, I said. Maybe on the Taieri where Emerson’s came from.

  We were so busy drinking Belgian beer we missed the Queen’s birthday celebrations. By the time we got into town there were only a lot of people wearing orange milling about in the main square and looking aimlessly happy as people do after a big occasion.

  That evening a young couple lay above us on the harbour wall doing some serious bodily exploration. No one on the boats around took any interest. The couple simply didn’t cut it against a naked DAF diesel.

  And so we said goodbye to lovely Roermond. At a decent hour, for the Belgian beer was rather strong, we settled our bill at the marina office.

  The woman there, so fresh she could have tutored daisies, wished us well.

  We needed every good wish we could get. Faith defied logic, and our trust in the infallibility of our lovely boat had been shaken. Yes, it was only a cable, and the old one had operated properly for some twenty years before deciding to retire, but if one thing could go wrong, so could another, and as we set off for Maastricht we both prayed it would not happen that day.

  ‘Whatever you do, don’t break down on the Julianakanaal,’ Mr Benny had warned us. The way to Maastricht lay along the Julianakanaal, and it did not take very long to get Mr Benny’s drift. The canal was an ominously ordinary stretch of water, long and straight, boring as a drain, grim as a motorway. It was named after Queen Juliana. She must have taken a look at it and wondered what her subjects thought of her, truly.

  Its function was to get canal traffic from one place to another as efficiently as possible and it did its job admirably. Great barges bore down, threatening to mince us against the steel canal-sides with sheer indifference. Each time one went by we were astonished; perhaps Londoners felt the same way when they heard the whistle of a bomb above their shelter and found themselves alive after the explosion.

  The barges catching us up from behind were worse. They were like those nightmares when you can’t get away no matter how hard you run. The River Queen began ignoring the speed limit entirely of her own volition. Breaking down on this canal would be like running out of petrol on the southern motorway during rush hour. You could expect minimum help and less sympathy.

  We did not break down. Instead, we were confronted by the first of three locks, two of them lifting us thirteen metres. Horizontally you could take thirteen metres with a skip and a jump. Vertically, you prayed for Scotty to beam you up. Especially when the height was marked off in slimy concrete whose progress through life was measured in chips and scuffs and dashes of scraped paint.

  We’d developed a new system for these locks. When we nuzzled up to the lock wall Sally would take her line from the post at the middle of the boat and loop it around a bollard on the lock wall. We could then hold the boat on just one rope, with me attaching a second as a back-up. She felt more secure there and we passed through all four locks without trouble, although always I remembered a bit of advice about public appearances from a seasoned after-dinner speaker: you should never lose your nervousness. It kept you on your toes.

  We reached Maastricht a little after four p.m. We wanted to moor in the old port, the Bassin in the middle of the ancient city. The Bassin was guarded by its own lock, in a narrow entrance leading off the river. The lock was operated by a nautical gent in crisp whites topped by a perfectly-trimmed beard. My, he said eyeing the silver fern, another New Zealand boat. ‘We’ve had two of them in here. One stayed all winter.’

  We were to meet those people much later. Had it been cold, we asked? Not a bit, they said. They’d loved living in the old city. The others, we supposed, had been the Templeton two, who had been rushing to get down to the south of France. We’d seen them on the river, shepherding a cruiser whose engine had broken down. They’d looked disconsolate. They must have passed us while we were in Wanssum.

  Our guide told us to take any berth we wanted and left with a farewell proving he’d even taken the time to learn our language: ‘See yous.’

  We tied up next to a Dutch boat named, ominously, My Way. A young, fit-looking woman emerged to take our lines then went back to join her husband. He was in a wheelchair, with a lift to take him up and down the companionway steps.

  Their boat was not big, and for a while we wondered whether they were completely happy in it, for we’d hear whimpering from somewhere in its bowels. Then one day out sprang a couple of bull terriers big enough to need a boat of their own: preferably, given their rather evil disposition, towed well behind.

  We were to see a lot of them over the next few months, once sharing locks for a day. He’d steer the boat into the lock, she’d take a line from the bow back to a bollard, he’d keep the engine running and the propeller turning, and the boat would lie neatly against the lock wall, no hands. S
he’d return to the after-deck and light a cigarette, darting a quick, pleased look at us messing around with two ropes and lifting them from bollard to bollard. The dogs slavered.

  Commercial barges used the same trick. Why didn’t we all? The convention was that you turned off your engine in locks, especially French ones. The practice, however, was much honoured in the breach.

  Safely tied up in Maastricht, we looked around. A lot of money had been spent around the Bassin. Old warehouses had been converted to cafés, restaurants, apartments and galleries, with a promenade running its length.

  Yet the port accommodated only a dozen boats. Most voyagers went on to a modern marina a few kilometres up the river, easier to get into and much cheaper, for the Bassin charged almost $40 a night.

  We didn’t worry about the money. We were in the middle of Maastricht, which vies with Nijmegen as oldest city in the Netherlands and lies at the bottom of the tongue. The entire ancient splendour of it lay a moment’s walk from our mooring.

  Maastricht had survived the centuries but not the age. Some of its fine old churches had been converted into a bookshop, a café, even a hotel, whose clientele enjoyed far more privacy than the congregation of the neighbouring Basilica of St Servatious, which as the oldest church in the Netherlands was flooded with tourists.

  Outside the Basilica, an old lady getting along with the help of a walking frame smiled in the sun, admiring the warmth of the stones and the elegant forms they’d made ten centuries before.

  Then her walking frame went over a kerb. She fell backwards trying to save herself, first on her bottom then, in very slow motion, her head hitting the cobbles with an awful soft thunk.

  We were right beside her but already she was trying to struggle upright. She was dazed, but not too much to know we were speaking to her in English. ‘I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,’ she said to us. A small man came out of the crowd, and two women. They seemed to know her and took charge. At least, they offered her more comfort than we could. She scrabbled behind her in a panic: her pills. Sally handed them to her. ‘Thank you, she said, ‘oh thank you.’ She wanted to vanish into the crowd.

  We walked away, both of us near tears. Both our mothers would have said the same: so sorry to have caused you trouble, for being a nuisance, for creating a spectacle. The humility of another generation, the self-effacement of the old.

  Maastricht soon swallowed us all, bustling, lively, alive. We stayed four days, and felt as those other New Zealanders must have, that four months would not have been enough.

  Slowly we began coming to terms with another fact of canal travel: you lived a life, you lived it often in small villages and rural areas where tourists were unknown, by necessity you lived part of the life of its inhabitants, shopping in the same markets, finding your way around, working out the best way of doing the many things that needed to be done. You travelled at not much more than a walking pace, but you were still a bystander, part of the passing parade, not quite a tourist but not all that far removed from one either.

  Sally was unhappy. The locks scared her. She keyed herself up for each of them. She dealt with routine locks and near disasters alike. But each of them seemed to sap a little bit of her soul. I could see her steeling herself for each new hurdle, determined not to make a mistake. Yet only one thing was constant about locks: there was always another.

  Escapes had been hard on Sally.

  Not long after we’d married we went to London. I got a job in Fleet Street and Sally headed a drug addiction unit until we discovered she was pregnant. As the months went by, something seemed odd. ‘I think there are too many bumps,’ said her cousin, a doctor. He gave her a scan, not then a common procedure, at least in the part of London we lived in. He looked at the screen for a moment and announced, ‘Twins!’ Our sons Sam and Simon were born a few days later, three weeks prematurely, their tiny chests heaving as they fought for air in their incubators. One of them struggled for his life, too. Solemn nurses advised us to have him christened immediately so that he could flee his brief, innocent time on earth in a proper state of grace. We declined, but prayed for him anyway, and called him Sam because the nurses said every Sam survived there. We thought them so beautiful we could scarcely bear looking at them. Alone, far from home, Sally cried, and hoped, and one wonderful morning the nurses told us the tide had turned.

  Of course, our lives changed forever. Children strip away dross, and the imminent loss of one of our babies seemed to fuse us into a single entity.

  We began thinking of the clean air and the freedom and the good state schools back home. So when they were eighteen months old we loaded our VW motor caravan, Sally and the boys onto an Italian cruise ship in Genoa and they sailed to Auckland while I flew to Christchurch and got a job. When they arrived we sold the van at a handsome profit and used the money for a deposit on a beautiful Hurst Seager house looking over the sea at Sumner, where the magic mountain on the end of the Kaikouras showed its white tip on clear nor’west days.

  Sally was completely happy there. We thought life could be no better than this and we were probably right. Even in the grabbing scrabbling culture of the thirty-somethings we knew these were halcyon days.

  We restored the house. I went back to university and completed a degree, wrote a newspaper column and laboured over scripts for David McPhail’s TV comedy A Week of It. The kids started school, Sally slowly went back to work, first at high school, then at polytechnics.

  The house was all Sally wanted and we both vowed not to leave. Then I became restless and joined the Listener and we moved to Wellington until I persuaded the editor that the magazine needed a South Island office and we drove past Tapuaenuku down the Kaikoura coast, past the rock with the hole where my dad and I used to fish, all the way back to our house on the hill, our souls full of freedom, the huge skies of the south, the sense of coming home.

  But soon I was lusting after another old white house on the vestiges of an ancient farm in Port Levy on Banks Peninsula.

  I wanted change. I couldn’t go and work for anyone else. Television was too flaky. Besides, there wasn’t much space for short, fat, balding guys. Paul Holmes had already grabbed the short spot and it was only OK to be bald if you could talk about rugby, although television being what it is the fat spot was still vacant. But all three in one? You’d do better applying for a seat in Cabinet, where short, fat and balding were job qualifications.

  Radio? If I’d wanted to sum up my world in two sentences I would have become an All Black. That left newspapers, and I’d already left them.

  I began casting around for other ways to make a living. Lots of money in advertising, but I couldn’t stand the suits. Public relations paid well too, and offered refugee status to runaway hacks, but having to be so unrelentingly nice to everyone, particularly those hacks who hadn’t had the good sense to run away; well, let’s say I’d rather live on rolled oats.

  Sally was by now head of a department at the polytechnic. Her job demanded every bit of time and attention she could give it. She had other things on her mind than her partner’s mid-life crisis. Yet she took me seriously.

  On long walks on the beach we thought, we reasoned, we envisaged, we explored. In the end The Darling Buds of May appeared on television and David Jason looked so happy in his country idyll we made an entirely rational decision. We’d go farming.

  Of course I had all sorts of fears and reservations. Sally said, ‘Let’s just do it.’ So we did, and Sam and Simon sobbed when we sold the house we said we’d never sell with its huge bay windows and vast rooms and all the ornate mouldings and skirtings and panelling we’d stripped and varnished and the work and hopes and dreams and peace and satisfaction.

  Sally didn’t cry. She just clutched our hands hard as we left, and never looked back at the place she’d loved more than any of us had.

  That winter’s day we drove through snow over the high pass to Port Levy.

  The new house was full of people I didn’t know. A log fire warmed th
e kitchen. People carried beds up stairs, filled bookshelves. One new neighbour brought pikelets, another pork bones. As a beginning I could scarcely have scripted it better, but the first act was tougher, filled with loss for Sally.

  Port Levy was too remote for two young men at university. ‘We’re supposed to leave home,’ they said. ‘Home isn’t supposed to leave us.’ They stayed longer and longer in the city each week, and finally moved into a flat. The farm cost Sally the companionship of her sons, and it almost cost her life too.

  Each morning I drove her over the pass separating Port Levy from the world, and she took the ferry from Diamond Harbour across Lyttelton Harbour and caught the bus on the other side. And one day an out-of-control port tug hit the badly-driven ferry and almost sank it.

  That morning I was scarcely back at my desk in the old farmhouse when the telephone rang. Chris Moore, who made the journey with Sally each morning, said, ‘Don’t worry.’ Are there more worrying words in the English language? I panicked immediately. ‘There’s been a rather nasty collision between the ferry and a tug,’ said Chris, ‘and Sally is … don’t worry, she’s all right.’

  Lurking chaos had caught up with me and overtaken Sally. I’d spent decades shoring up the palisades but here it was. Education, possessions, the solid keepsakes of middle New Zealand, were all swept into the chasm I saw before me. Chris had survived the crash, coped with his own fear, but it meant nothing to me at that moment. I cared only about Sally, and the entity that had surpassed anything I could have been alone: she and I.

  The ferries had been running for at least one lifetime. As Wolf Cubs we used to catch them to Diamond Harbour, a sparkling little bay encircled by volcanic cliffs. They were no more than old wooden launches really. One had carried a framed placard boasting of an ocean rescue long before: ‘’Twas the Onawe that braved the stormy seas …’