Long Slow Affair of the Heart, A

by Ansley, Bruce

  Sally had caught the Ngatiki on her way to work that morning. The boat had almost reached its berth in Lyttelton port when one of the harbour tugs came pounding out from the wharf, rode up onto the ferry’s cabin and all but crushed it in half, ‘like’, said Chris, ‘a bomb going off.’

  The passengers had seen it coming. They’d lined up in the stern mesmerised by approaching disaster. Sally dove over the side and struck out in the icy green water. The tug’s black hull swept past her, crashed into the ferry, slid back. Sally felt herself being sucked under. Exhausted by fright and cold she fought to the surface, certain she was going to die until she looked up into the face of an Asian seaman leaning over the rail of a freighter. He dropped a lifebuoy beside her, the two of them alone in their universe. She swam for its light, kicked back towards the ferry, still afloat amid the wreckage. A woman grabbed her hand and hauled her onto the boarding platform at the back of the boat.

  I found her in the port’s medical centre, wrapped in blankets and little silver heat pads to fend off hypothermia. She had blood in her hair. It was someone else’s.

  She smiled at me. I felt dizzy with love and relief.

  She was elated, alive. I was distraught.

  The young English doctor came in. He had sailed his boat to New Zealand, liked it, stayed. He said Sally would be fine, and could leave soon, and there was a camera crew outside. Sally didn’t want to talk to anyone. The doctor volunteered and I cravenly ducked out the back way, with Sally.

  We watched the television news that night. Sally was shown being carried away on a stretcher and the sight of her still body terrified me again. She was the only casualty. The media likes heroes and one or two of the passengers volunteered but no one mentioned the Asian sailor.

  Someone from the port company telephoned and said he supposed Sally was angry and anxious to know whose fault it was but she didn’t. She was just happy to be alive. I was angry and anxious. Next day we both went over to the port to thank the sailor who’d saved her life but we weren’t allowed aboard the ship and no one seemed to know who he was.

  We never really settled down after that.

  I’d loved the farm, she’d loved the house on the hill. She’d lost her family home and all the growing up the four of us had done there. I was only losing a dream.

  One of the myriad media legends insists that if a marriage features in the women’s magazines, it is doomed. I’d boasted in the Listener that my relationship with Sally had lasted into its third decade and was beginning to settle down. I offered useful tips on how to do it. Fate immediately took an oblique shot.

  None of the reasons for escaping from the city to the country seemed important any more. We just wanted to live our lives as well as we could.

  I sat on a friend’s verandah beside the bay one night, surrounded by life and ghosts, watching the gold light fade from the hills and the warm nor’wester caressing the darkening sea and thinking how lucky I was to have lived on our farm in that tiny, close community. They’d made me a better person.

  Sally understood change better than I did, though. She knew that journeys may not be the start of something new; they may be the end of something old, and dear. But she came along anyway.

  Chapter Five

  Borders have become virtual within the EU. The striped gates blocking the road, the squitty-eyed customs officers in little grey boxes have long gone, of course. But now there’s not so much as a bureaucrat with a ticket punch. Even EU citizens still had officials in their minds, however.

  Our Belgian friends in Roermond had told us that before entering their country we must first visit the Belgian customs house. In the EU? Yes. We shrugged. They knew best. After all, they were Belgian, and there it was marked on our chart: douanes, customs.

  If we reached the Lanaye lock, they said, we’d gone too far. We reached the lock. We’d gone too far. We looked for the customs house. We could not find it. We turned back from the lock and found a space between barges beside the canal.

  I walked back. Nothing. Only a broken-down clutch of buildings on the outskirts of the last town before the border. I walked into the town. Its inhabitants seemed mystified. I put it down to my bad French. Yet even when they spoke English they knew nothing of customs. They were interested to know what I was doing there. ‘All this way?’ inquired a woman cutting narcissus in her garden. ‘In a boat? Perhaps you are not so lucky. It will rain. It rains a lot in Belgium. Sometimes it rains for weeks.’

  I walked back, past the abandoned buildings. Wait a minute. What was that faded sign on one? Douanes, it said. Bugger. Customs were here once but it looked as if only carbon-dating would tell when.

  Back at the boat I heard shouting. A Russian barge wanted our space, demanded it. The woman crew was shrieking at the top of her voice. Sally was trying to explain that she was on her own and could not move. The crew of the neighbouring Dutch barge joined in. Her man is not here, they shouted. Leave her alone. The bargee screamed at them instead. They yelled back. Gestures flew. I arrived at the crescendo, started up, fled. Behind us the fight went on.

  So we left Holland and entered Belgium, at the Lanaye locks. The Lanaye locks lifted boats fourteen metres. The canal boat legend was, the bigger the lock, the easier it was, because the big ones offered easier moorings and less fuss. The story seemed to have been suspended for the Lanaye locks, which were famous. Or notorious.

  They were huge. Passing New Zealanders had fretted over the locks in their weblogs. Canal travellers discussed them and looked glum. Some people said one of the locks wasn’t so bad, because it had floating bollards and you could lie alongside one of them, tie up and sit tight while it rose along with the water level.

  Others said another lock still had fixed bollards, vertically spaced so awfully that only a basketball star crossed with a gymnast and standing on tiptoe on the boat’s roof could free a rope from one bollard and heave it over the next one above. There was a fifty-fifty chance of getting a good lock or the bad one, they said, and we who had never won a raffle in our lives knew just which one we’d finish up with.

  Our voyage through Holland had taken us through big locks, but there were comparatively few of them. The Lanaye locks would be the biggest and meanest we’d been through yet. We were not looking forward to it. Now they loomed ahead. From where we cowered on deck they looked like New York streets, chasms between skyscrapers. We drifted warily into one of them. The lock had floating bollards. Oh relief, oh joy.

  A truly enormous barge and three canal cruisers snuggled alongside them.

  We hitched up to one of the bollards gratefully. We could tie tightly to it, for as the water level rose, you simply ignored the feeling of abyss, and up you went.

  On the other side of the lock beside us lay a German vessel which seemed to have been built from a child’s picture book. The boat was pure fantasy, bright blue, with little steps and varnished decks and bits and pieces everywhere, and very high and narrow like a plank on edge, so it seemed a miracle that it could remain upright.

  Instead of tying onto a bollard the woman crew on the German boat fixed her rope to a ladder. The skipper then held onto his bollard with a boat-hook, a recipe for the disaster which followed.

  I heard a scream; as the water rose the woman’s rope had faithfully stayed where it was, tied to the ladder, and was pulling the little boat under. The man lashed out with a knife; the boat popped up like a cork. I fancied its crew was flung into the air, but it may have been an illusion; arms, legs and whole bodies seemed to fly everywhere.

  The man had now lost his precarious hold on the bollard, of course. Free of any restraint, the boat spun like a ballet dancer while its crew did what any sensible crew would do in the circumstances: he froze and she screamed. As they pirouetted past she frantically proffered a rope; I grabbed it, and tied them on to our boat, which meant poor Sally was now holding two vessels on her own. But she was much better with ropes than I; if it was capable of being tangled, I tangled it, then scrabbl
ed while she spoke sternly. Now she simply tightened up and hung on.

  Safe, and with nothing to do, the German couple found someone in the same fortunate situation to chat to: me. They told me they were going through France then back through Germany, and I wished them luck with even more sincerity than I had prayed for it myself. We met them often over the next month. She always greeted us warmly. He all but ignored us. We reminded him of his ignoble moment.

  The Lanaye lock-keepers glanced through our documents and gave us the papers we needed to travel through their country’s waterways to France. Welcome to Belgium, they said. But the weather, you are not so lucky.

  It started to rain. It rained almost non-stop for two weeks.

  Describing a nation in a few words is stupid, of course, but fun, and that’s why so many do it, like me. We met the Dutch at random: in supermarkets, in towns and villages (we were usually asking the way), as neighbours, sellers, passers-by, functionaries, advisors. Without exception they were a kindly, gentle lot who often went out of their way to help, like the man who actually took us where we wanted to go. They lived by some unspoken social contract: everyone obeyed the rules, written and unwritten, because they believed the rules were good for them all.

  We learned to trust them: not easily, for New Zealanders believe the rest of the world is intent on robbery. We found that when they said they’d do something, they did it, so after a while we simply took them at their word. And so organised! Every kilometre of their canals was marked, every direction, depth, height.

  Belgium seemed so much less prosperous, despite accommodating the world’s biggest bureaucracy in Brussels. Its income from the manufacture of grey suits alone should have spread largesse upon the land.

  At first we travelled through heavy industrial scenery. Factories groaned and clanked, poured dusty substances into barges moored alongside. Others lay abandoned in a mess of girders, ironworks; peeling buildings showing their innards. Deserted coalmines lay all about.

  Liege looked unpromising, but was not. The city was bright, and lively, and its narrow streets, some closed to traffic, enticed us. But after only a night we had to go.

  Why? I’m not sure, now. Belgium simply did not figure in our plans. We’d thought of it as a nondescript nation so uncertain of itself its people scarcely knew which language to speak — a choice piece of arrogance, for most chose to speak English to us.

  We were foolish, of course. Any nation which produced Georges Simenon, not to mention The Singing Nun and Tintin deserved much more respect. But to us, then, Belgium was simply a corridor between Holland and France, to be traversed as quickly as possible, and the sheer momentum of that stupid notion had us on the move first thing next morning.

  We steamed to Huy, where prejudices could put on their slippers, stretch and sigh contentedly. Perhaps Huy had been named by travellers who had passed through the grotesque and derelict landscape, for it was pronounced like a good spit. We tied up in the shade of a nuclear power station.

  I sat on the deck that night, looking at the view, aka steam belching from the cooling towers and turned boiling red by its lights, rather as I imagined hell might look, although I thought I knew how hell felt.

  We’d stayed in Endeavour Inlet, Fiordland, in that past age, fixing the trouble that had caused our return then waiting for the weather to clear, for it was awful again. Puysegur Point, the southwest corner of New Zealand, was the Winston Peters of weather; if there was a storm to be had, the point found it, and we were anchored right under the lighthouse.

  Days went by, then weeks. Sally had no idea where I was, except that I wasn’t where I was supposed to be, getting ready for our wedding. I became alarmed, then desperate, then frantic.

  Just as I’d given up hope of getting married, the weather broke. We shot off through Foveaux Strait, towing my only pair of jeans behind the boat to clean them, until — as the second night at sea approached — we could see Otago Peninsula rising from the twilight ahead. We passed under Taiaroa Head with great Pacific waves beating against the basalt. Unloaded the crayfish at Port Chalmers in the dark, went on to Dunedin Harbour, tied up, went to bed.

  I awoke next morning to a cold clear autumn day, too anxious for breakfast. My jeans had set to the consistency of concrete. I mounted them and walked stiffly into town with no real idea where I was going.

  I hadn’t known Sally very long or very well before we left. She’d moved, but I didn’t know where to. I hadn’t spoken to her for months, hadn’t received so much as a letter in that lonely place, for the postie didn’t call in Fiordland and the radio wasn’t up to it.

  It never occurred to me that she might have been sensible and called it off.

  Automatically I headed for George Street and the first person I met that day was her sister Donna. She said, ‘Sally has found a flat for you. Here’s the address. Don’t forget the wedding. It’s on Saturday.’ My jeans crackled as I tore up to Union Street and knocked on the door. Sally answered. I’d never seen anyone so lovely. She had never seen anyone so …

  She was more beautiful than I remembered. And immaculate. And, I thought, a little puzzled.

  ‘It’s me,’ I said helpfully. She hugged me, perhaps a little awkwardly.

  ‘What’s that smell?’ she asked. ‘And who made your jeans? A blacksmith? And what have you done to your face?’

  Grown a beard was what I’d done, and I thought the sun had done a nice job of bleaching it and my hair too. But I was ready for compromise. I shaved off the beard. Then a strip of white skin stretched from one ear, around my chin to the other. She screamed. ‘You look like a peppermint stick,’ she said.

  So there I stood, reeking of fish, which of course I couldn’t smell, dressed like a bag-man and coloured like a carousel.

  But we were married in the little stone church in Sumner, Christchurch, with our friends and family, and Sally’s hair black against her white dress, and me like a sunset in a rented suit.

  When we awoke the first morning back in Dunedin and Sally was getting dressed for her post-graduate teaching course she asked, ‘What are you going to do now?’

  I’d like to say I thought for a moment, but I didn’t. Instead: ‘The boat’s down at the wharf. It’s all ready to go. We’ve fitted a toilet specially for you. We’ll get it tidied up a bit and we’ll be off.’

  Now there was a pause. She seemed surprised. ‘You mean,’ she began, ‘you think I’m going to live on that boat for months on end? Drop teaching for fishing? Live in the most faraway place in New Zealand, if not the world?’

  ‘Yup, it’s a great life all right isn’t it?’ I said.

  ‘No,’ she said.

  She picked up her bag and left the house, and that was that, really. I went back to work at the Otago Daily Times for a few months then helped start Radio Otago. We leased the boat, and it sank, and the insurance left nothing over, and we began our marriage flat broke, and scarcely knowing each other, except that we each believed the other could be a little unreasonable at times.

  The remarkable thing was that through all of those months Sally never wondered whether I’d turn up; nor, when I did, did she wish that I hadn’t. We’d stayed in love since.

  Now we had been married for thirty-seven years. Henry had lived until he was seventeen. He was so old the dog ranger declared an amnesty. Our two sons had finished four university degrees between them and were starting their first business.

  I’d become smug. I’d begun dispensing anodyne advice.

  I felt that somehow we’d discovered the secret, even if we had not a clue what it was. I wrote about the ingredients of a happy marriage: love, labour, luck, lust, laughter. Yet love, I’d found, took many forms. Most lit my life. As for the rest, I just ducked.

  Huy was home to an armada of high-powered rigid inflatable boats (RIBs), those overpowered inner tubes you saw dashing after America’s Cup yachts in great clouds of spray. Which they did on the River Meuse too before entering the little port and disgorging the
ir passengers, crowds of excited children. This, the harbourmaster told us, was the annual outing for disadvantaged children.

  I asked how you qualified as disadvantaged in Belgium.

  ‘You know,’ he said. ‘Disadvantaged.’

  How nice to live in a country, I thought, where you could put things right with an Evinrude.

  Rain was falling in great, wet drops when we set off for Namur in the morning. The first of the two locks was all right. We went through on our own. The second was named L’Ecluse des Grandes-Malades, or lock of the very sick. We should have been warned, even if the lock was named for a nearby cliff rather than the terminally ill. It was horrible.

  We went in but the doors did not close behind us. In his control room high above, the keeper was invisible. We waited in the rain, growing colder and more depressed by the minute. A barge finally hove into view. It came into the lock. The doors closed. Then opened again. Another barge. Now we had to move to make way for it. We could scarcely hold the boat against the wind funnelling through the chamber. Our hands were sore from rope burns. The gates closed again and finally we were through, to face the port.

  In Namur the Sambre river branched off the Meuse and headed straight for Paris the quick way. A procession of barges turned off the Meuse to make the point.

  But we were going the slow way. We could always turn off for Paris later, if we wanted to.

  In the meantime we stuck to the Meuse and passed the little blue German boat tied up under a bridge. Her crew waved to us rather forlornly, as streams of water poured onto her from the railings above. It was wet, cold, windy.

  Namur was lovely, even in the rain. The river took us past grand old houses and under a bridge and ahead lay the little port nestling below trees on one side and a huge fortress on the other.

  First the wind caught as we came alongside, angling us so awkwardly I backed into the stream for another try. Then, when we lay beside the pontoon at last, I made a mess of the stern rope and the back of the boat drifted rapidly away.