Long Slow Affair of the Heart, A

by Ansley, Bruce

  Sally, caught as she was disembarking, had to long-jump across the widening stretch of water between wharf and boat, landing on a pontoon which wobbled so dangerously we both thought she’d be pitched in. It would not have mattered much, for we were both drenched. But if you’ve travelled all day cold and wet, and within grasp of sanctuary you were threatened with ignominy too … well, I crossed my fingers and hoped for the best.

  The most insensitive bloke would have sensed disaffection in Sally that day, although it was difficult to wrench frozen facial muscles into an expression of sympathy. She was fed up with the canals. Where were the ones she’d seen in pictures, with all the flowers and colourful boats which had never been belted against concrete walls, and jolly crews who lazed in the sun with little umbrellas in their drinks, rather than being drenched to the marrow and all but chucked into a cold brown river?

  She wanted to stay in Namur two nights, at least, to rest, look around, drink some wine, eat some good food. After all, that was the whole idea of a canal cruise.

  Before we left New Zealand I’d talked to Kathryn Ryan on her morning show Nine to Noon on National Radio. Surely, she’d asked, this was just another way of tripping around, another form of tourism?

  I’d hoped not. Sally and I had spent a lot of time on the subject. We’d already been around Europe three times in a van, once on our own, once when our sons were babies, the third time when they were twelve. In vans you zipped through some towns, stopped at others, took in a cathedral here, a castle there, found some semblance of community with other van travellers amid deep discussions about the best places to park, where to get cheap petrol, how to score a free breakfast. You’d stop for a while, perhaps even for a couple of days, but soon you’d want to move on to the next town because there was so much to see, although every place along the way somehow lost a bit of its lustre in the rush.

  We’d talked about that a lot before we decided to live on the canals. We’d decided that the important word was ‘live’. Both of us abhorred tourism, the vacant business of wandering from place to place picking up tiny snatches of misinformation, bereft of experience and knowledge, collecting items as currency for retailing back home. Tourists always looked as if their pulse rate were nearing zero, like people watching TV, the only difference being that they were passing the picture instead of the other way round. An awful lot of trouble would have been saved if the world had been made inside out so tourists could sit in the middle and watch it revolve around them rather than vice versa.

  The Japanese were the world’s best tourists, because they recognised the truly stupid nature of what they were doing and had refined their techniques accordingly: they spent their days asleep in buses, waking only to take the photographs of the next attraction for the folks back home, or to shop, or to file into their hotels for the night and go to sleep again.

  No, we wouldn’t be tourists. Nor would we trip about from place to place. We would live on the canals, move at a walking pace, know where we were, live the way of life. Yep.

  So I should have been warned when we reached Namur. Yes, we were anxious to get to France, but we’d cracked through Holland, and now we’d nipped over Belgium at such a pace we’d allowed five days and four nights for an entire nation. How indifferent was that?

  Constantly being on the go made Sally cold, miserable, exhausted. I was simply cold and miserable. Why were we moving? Why were we moving so fast? In the rain? It was spring; the weather might be better tomorrow. We had a whole year, possibly two.

  Looking back now, the answer is clear: I don’t know.

  We should have stopped right there, talked about the trip and how it was going, gone back to the basics, re-evaluated, but it was all so new to us, living so long on the boat, confronting fresh challenges each day.

  Ahead of us lay France and literally hundreds of locks rather than the handful we’d been through so far. Our plans lay in front of us. We were confronting the truth of modern travel: we were concerned with the future, not the present.

  Yet here we were in a very fine part of Belgium. From here the country changed, the river carving through the deep valleys of the Ardennes. Huge trees shaded our mooring in Namur. Flowers bloomed in brilliant bands of colour, waiting to be smelled. People idled by and stopped to chat. A little town lay on our side of the river and a much bigger town on the other, both of them so steeped in history it leaked from every street and alleyway. Cafés beckoned. Not 200 metres from the boat was a bar full of welcoming eccentrics. We could get wi-fi, a wireless computer hook-up, from the boat. What more did we want?

  We decided to stay three nights in Namur instead of the one we’d planned. Sure enough, the sun came out. We put the sun umbrella on the after-deck, set up the chairs and the table, sat in the warm and drank red wine.

  We studied the ancient fortress rising above us on the V formed by the Meuse and the Sambre. It looked impregnable. Part of it was designed by the famous strategist Vauban. He’d made a nice solid job of it. Its vast ramparts stretched for hectares. Whole armies had hidden there in chambers and tunnels now open to tourists.

  Yet it had been overrun so often its stone stairs were worn down with all the dashing hither and thither. The Belgian army made a stand there in World War One, probably feeling as safe as their forbears had. The Germans took the place in a couple of days. We climbed its steps, peered over its walls and into mysterious tunnels, marvelled, then went back to our current conflict with a contemporary adversary, just as mighty: American Express.

  We’d opened a Euros account in New Zealand then discovered there were only two ways of carrying Euros to Europe without the bank account we didn’t have there: cash or travellers’ cheques. We didn’t like the thought of carrying a year’s cash. We’d have to divide it between us. Sally was safe as a vault. My own worry wasn’t theft. I’d forget where I’d put it, or I’d lose it.

  Yet travellers’ cheques were obsolete, weren’t they? The bank assured us they were not. In fact, in these days of card theft and electronic mishap, they were regaining their old popularity. So they said. They outfitted us with lots of American Express travellers’ cheques.

  When we reached Holland I checked the internet. American Express said I could cash them at such and such a bank. The bank said I could not. I rang American Express in Amsterdam. Sorry, said an American voice. All right, I said, I’ll come to your office and cash them there. Sorry, he said again. The office was no longer open to the public. But, but, but, I said, this was ridiculous. Go to a money changer in the Damstrak, he said. But they charged like angry heifers, I said. Go to Potsbank, he said, they would do it for 1.75 per cent.

  So they did. I gritted my teeth as I took the money. Although 1.75 per cent wasn’t much, it piled up over the thousands of Euros we needed to outfit the boat and stake the first weeks of our journey.

  The American Express website had better news for Belgium. We could cash our cheques free at a couple of named banks. We went to the first. Go away, they said. On to the second. Bugger off, they said.

  Sally and I joined forces and advanced on the bank’s main branch in Namur. Sorry, said the teller. Try somewhere else. New York perhaps.

  I demanded to see the manager.

  Amazingly, he arrived. He spoke English too. I explained the problem. ‘Of course we will cash them,’ he said. ‘We are obliged to. The other places? They are just small branch offices. They did not know.’

  We exchanged the maximum amount we could that day, went back the next and did it again. The day after that the bank was closed for the weekend.

  The next town, Dinant, was smaller. I anticipated trouble. Obviously, so had the bank manager in Namur. ‘Tell them,’ he’d said, ‘that they must cash your cheques. It is compulsory. Threaten to ring this number.’ He wrote it down, on his bank’s letterhead, and attached his card for good measure.

  When we sailed off to Dinant, I went to the bank, presented the cheques. ‘We cannot,’ said the teller. ‘You can,’ I said. Sh
e fetched the manager. A pleasant, placatory man arrived. He studied the cheques with a puzzled look. I told him what the Namur manager had said. He shrugged. He telephoned. He cashed the cheques. ‘I am sorry,’ he said. ‘This is the first time for us.’

  In France, American Express promised that every post office would cash their cheques, free. I approached the first post office with trepidation and very little anticipation of success. I’d rehearsed my line. ‘Je voudrais,’ I said, ‘à changer les cheques des voyages Américain Express.’ The teller looked at them. She cashed them. And that was that.

  As we left Namur Sally told me she thought she was married to a good man, a better man than I thought I was, and that she’d lived a sweet life. I left the town in high spirits. A little praise beat boring analysis every time.

  The final lock of the six we tackled that day had a Tunisian operator. He was the first Belgian lock-keeper we’d seen. Always before they had been invisible behind tinted glass windows high in their control towers above the locks. This one descended from the skies and held the gates while he told us his story. He was effectively a refugee, he said. He hated Moslems and Tunisia wouldn’t let him back. He’d taught himself English. He was proud of his command of the language. He was Belgian now. Tunisia could get stuffed.

  We moored in Dinant, admired the fine town as we sat on the deck in another warm evening. Next day we rose on the last of Belgium’s locks and crossed a border marked only by a long hose snaking down to the water from the back door of a grocery shop. This was the last place we could buy Belgium’s cheap fuel. In fact, it was the first place, because the era of cheap fuel in Belgium was over. The news did not seem to have reached the border, however.

  We paid 55 Euros for eighty-one litres, all we could cram into our tanks. That worked out at 68 cents, or $NZ1.38 a litre, by far the cheapest we found in Europe, and less than half the price charged by many places in France that year. Then we started the engine and crossed into France.

  Chapter Six

  Givet was a border town once known for the suspicion of its customs officers and its lack of gaiety. The reputation didn’t worry us. We were from Christchurch, whose customs officers may once have been the most baleful in the country — although it was a close-run thing — and ten o’clock in the same era was bedtime. If Christchurch could turn itself around, so could Givet.

  As it happened, formalities in the French town were slight. The EU had delivered the coup de grâce to les douaniers, suspicious or not. The paperwork now centred upon the vignette, the ticket which, hung in our front window, gave access to canals, waterways and locks. We filled out forms for a year’s use of the locks and got a remote control to work them. ‘C’est tout?’ I asked l’éclusier at the end of it all. ‘Isn’t it enough?’ the lock-keeper replied in English. Thank God for the EU. The vignette was delivered smartly. Welcome to France, the lock-keepers said gaily.

  The vignette cost 377 Euros, around $750, best value of any piece of paper we’ve acquired from any bureaucracy anywhere.

  The canals in France were slowly being abandoned by commercial traffic, and sustained by a surge in pleasure boating. Some 8,500 kilometres of waterways were now being maintained largely for people like us.

  Every lock was a masterpiece of ingenuity, some more than others; each one was different. Some were operated by remote controls like a television set, others by hidden cameras, others by long handles hanging over the canals which you turned, or pulled. Some were opened by hand, by crank handles, or by spoked wheels and chains. Some had easy-to-reach bollards close to the edge, designed so the ropes slipped off easily, some had bollards a long way back from the edge so you became acrobat and contortionist all at once, some had bollards resembling a bullock’s head — but harder to lassoo.

  Lock-keepers still flourished on parts of the route. In places we had our own lock-keeper for the day. He or she travelled alongside us, opening and closing the locks as we went, and at the end of the day handed us on to another lock-keeper for the next stretch.

  Most asked where we wanted to go next day, and at what time we intended to leave, so they could have the first lock ready for us. Some even lived in beautifully-kept, flower bedecked lock-keepers’ cottages, just like the ones in the tourist posters. More often, now, the cottages were lived in by people with no connection to the locks, who sometimes put up signs asking you not to bother them; or the cottages were abandoned and slowly falling into disrepair, usually in fully automated sections of canal where you saw an éclusier only if something went wrong.

  All of this you got for your $750, depending on the size of your boat. Some grizzled at the cost. To us, it was a bargain.

  We didn’t know any of this in Givet. We were beginners. Besides, it was hard to discuss the intricacies with your mouth full. It was Sunday afternoon, but unusually a shop was still open. We fell upon the baguettes, the Roquefort, lapin pâté and the $5 Bordeaux as if we’d been in training for this moment since we’d left home. In a way we had, for we’d found the food so far sustained life without necessarily encouraging it. Besides, everyone told us we’d soon lose weight on the canals, and it was true. All the springing about, chasing ropes, squeezing up and down steps inside and outside the boat and getting around either on foot or on bicycles was paring us down. A few extra calories could make no difference; after all, look at what they did for the French, who scoffed fat as we did green-top milk and stayed irritatingly half our size.

  Why did two nations of bakers, the Dutch and Belgians, produce not a decent loaf of bread between them? Apple turnovers and eggy rice tarts were all very well, but quite hard to fit into the toaster.

  We were moored in a mysterious kind of marina (we later found others like it here and there as we went through the Ardennes): a port whose floating pontoons, with power and water laid on — presumably partly paid for with EU and government subsidies encouraging small-town enterprise — were falling apart. With about eighty berths, this one was largely barred by the kind of tapes used around accident sites. We ignored them, tied up, and became one of two boats staying free in the port overnight, for ashore the capitainerie housing the harbourmaster was deserted.

  As for lack of gaiety, how could anyone say such a thing when there was a concert to be held in the town auditorium that very evening?

  The concert would celebrate the arrival of spring. Rain dripped on us as we went along to the theatre, where the municipal choir was performing under the direction of a lady whose modest walk spoke of much local acclaim.

  ‘Bonsoir,’ Sally greeted the woman in the caisse, in her best French. The single word alerted the woman immediately.

  ‘Where are you from?’ she asked.

  ‘Nouvelle-Zélande.’

  We could see her counting the kilometres in her head.

  Then: ‘You are music-lovers?’

  More starved for community actually, although we did not say so. The Mayor read a speech which was easy to follow, as it merely thanked a very long list of people in the international mayoral tradition. Then the choir struck up with ‘Sweet Adeline Rose’. Altogether you might have been in Waipukurau but for one big difference: the theatre was packed.

  The audience put on the real performance. The concert started thirty minutes late, as people came in, greeted everyone in their row, all of them standing up for the occasion no matter how often it happened, kissed each cheek two, three, four times, discussed sons (a resigned shrug), daughters (what can you do?) and grandchildren (absolument charmants), then brought up to date the auditorium at large.

  They were an appreciative audience. Madame la Conductrice got a standing ovation and a huge bunch of flowers and we got our $20 worth and went off home amid a laughing crowd.

  Next morning off we went, past the huge citadel that guards the Meuse over Givet and into the deep river valley. The great press of people, the tombstones of doomed enterprise and the scars of those still working, gave way to the quiet peace of forests, the clear birdsong that follows r
ain, the grebes and swans on still water no longer brown, but green. Yellow irises sparked its edges, water lilies yet to flower. Cattle — creamy Charolais, of course, what else would fit the picture? — watched us idle by. Fishermen waved — although later in the canals they were sometimes to become surly — from tiny cribs on the water’s edge.

  We stopped at Revin and tied up to a little Dutch cruiser accommodating an obliging man, a charming woman and a Jack Russell whose mission was to nip at our heels every time we crossed their deck to get ashore.

  Flowers covered the quay. They flowed from baskets, beds, anything that would hold enough soil to plant a begonia or petunia. The mass of colour stayed in our retinas when we closed our eyes, like looking at the sun.

  Even the commonplaces of living were romantic, in their own way.

  Revin’s crowded port accommodated a one-size-fits-all shower block.

  Everything was more or less in the same room. To get to the men’s and women’s showers you had to pass the men’s open urinal; or from my side of the porcelain, to have a pee you had to be prepared to go public. Men and women dressed and undressed in a common space outside the shower cubicles. The squeamish might have found it difficult yet it all worked out well enough; that is, no one was so hideously embarrassed by the amenities they refused to use them.

  We needed gas. But the EU had yet to sweep everything into the same basket, and gas had so far escaped the broom.

  ‘Non, non, non, non,’ said the woman at the gas depot when I hove into view with my Dutch gas bottle.

  ‘Pourquoi non?’ I asked. Why not?

  ‘Non,’ she repeated firmly.

  I could see no difference. Both bottles held the same gas. But I bought a new bottle anyway, and lugged it back to the boat, where it proved to be five millimetres greater in diameter than the old bottle. Five millimetres was a tiny amount but enough to stop it going down the hole in my deck, built to fit Dutch bottles exactly. Serious steelwork would be needed to accommodate the French bottle and I wanted to avoid that at all costs, for I suspected all costs would certainly be the outcome. I took the bottle back. Earnest negotiations followed, for I had broken the seal. But my money was refunded and, joy, I spotted a new lightweight plastic bottle, much smaller, which would fit, but held the wrong sort of gas. When would the right sort arrive?