One of my delights in France was getting up early and going into the village for the morning’s baguettes and croissants. The fragrance, the Thai-silk touch of the long, golden sticks and the joy of the new day.
We’d left Toul through vast locks, big enough for ships, but we were alone in their slimy depths. The countryside bored Sally; it lacked New Zealand’s drama, and the locks both scared and upset her, the last because they were so dirty. Constantly filling and emptying with dirty brown water, the waste of boats and countryside, the oil and grease of passing machinery, they were bound to be a little untidy. Sally hated mess. She looked at the grimy, dripping lock sides as if they would be much the better for a good wipe and a bottle of Jif. She wondered whether the locks would get better. Of course they would, I said, but she didn’t believe me.
Sally’s eyes were beginning to darken. One night she said, ‘I just don’t like the canals, especially the locks. They’re dank and claustrophobic. And boring.’
How could it be?
I’d read the books, and the weblogs, and we’d seen Rick Stein’s television odyssey through the Canal du Midi and thrilled over the romance of it, and we’d watched our close friends Trish and Glenn grow to love the canals as a way of life, and listened to their friends regarding their lives in New Zealand as mere gaps in the real thing on the French waterways. No one had mentioned this.
The locks certainly didn’t bore me; I was still too much on edge. The countryside, forests, the wide, still Moselle in its wooded valley, soothed me. I knew Sally’s mind was made up. Only sheer magic would change it now. I watched her spirits slowly sink in French valleys beaten up by wars and world markets. She longed for the Pacific’s light.
The second to last lock of the day had been back down to intimate proportions. Its cranks and handles were wound by a slatternly woman who obligingly let me do most of the work while she berated Sally for putting her line around a ladder, which you’re not supposed to do but everybody does. In her spare time she argued with her ugly daughter, who looked much older than her mum. We tied to the riverbank, where the last light of the day caught a heron, lighting it like a statue. Tomorrow would be another day and sure enough, it was.
Next morning I heard my first ‘Achtung!’ outside a war comic.
It came from a boat called Chérie, and la chérie was a stern woman watching our approaching bow with the stare of an Alsatian observing a postie coming through the front gate.
We were doing sixteen locks together. This was number one. The day had started badly.
We had arranged with l’éclusier to be at the first lock at eight-thirty a.m., with the Chérie. Both boats were there on the dot. So were two Dutch boats, both of them barges. They were in front of us.
The Chérie’s skipper emerged from the high captain’s chair on his aft deck. He wore a pair of very tight shorts and nothing else. His hair lay as perfectly as a bowling green. His bronzed torso had the shape and colour of a glass of Pilsner. He was tiny. He bounded around his deck haranguing the Dutch boats like a bantam rooster sorting out his chooks.
One of the Dutch boats shouted back. They were booked, yelled the skipper. For eight-thirty. Impossible, shouted the German, eight-thirty was ours. He opened his throttle, passed one of his antagonists and headed for the lock.
The second Dutch boat was too smart for him. It moved into the lock and stopped, half in, half out.
Its crew regarded the Germans implacably. They weren’t going to move. The Germans could bugger off. It promised to be a very long day.
For fifteen minutes the two sides glowered at each other. Then the Germans retreated.
The skipper climbed off his boat and strutted off to have it out with the lock-keepers. His back was full of muscles, every one of which twitched indignantly.
We saw him stalking back. They hadn’t just booked in four boats for eight-thirty, when the lock could only take two at a time, he said. They had booked in six! But he looked relieved. Honour was satisfied. This wasn’t personal. This was just the French doing what they did so well. The French! He was almost smiling.
He and his partner went through the locks like robots. He would bring his boat to a smart halt at the front of the lock, she’d handle the ropes and catch the bollards and she was taking no nonsense from them. Then we fitted in behind.
The locks were mechanical; the gates were wound open and closed with cranks. The convention was to get off your boat and help. The lock-keepers liked it, and New Zealanders liked helping; besides, it was faster.
But the German wasn’t going to help. He had paid for his vignette. Let them do it.
He watched me impassively each time I marched past him to do my stint on the crank. After six locks I was growing tired. After ten I was cranky myself. I tried to hide my irritation behind a bit of passing conversation.
‘Nice boat,’ I said. ‘Is it an Altena?’ My boat was an Altena. I thought them excellent. The German looked at me contemptuously. ‘This,’ he said, ‘is a Linssen.’ The BMW of boats. I gave up, and we kept to ourselves until we arrived in the town of Epinal.
The town had had a bad press in the cruising guides. It was said to be a dull city, with an ugly yacht basin and nothing except a cartoon museum to commend it.
We were not surprised by the museum. Rural France had lots of museums. Embroidery museums, and museums of felt, weapons, bricks, tiles, foundries, mines; the French government and EU subsidies promoted small town tourism. They scored a fifty per cent success rate on our boat; Sally went to a few, and loved them. I preferred the cafés.
But the short canal leading to Epinal was beautiful. It travelled over a little aqueduct, then wound through trees and fine houses to a yacht harbour we liked at first sight. The city rose behind it as prettily as any guidebook photographer could hope for.
The Germans were already there, in the last remaining spot on the stone quay. I spotted an empty pontoon on the less-favoured side and headed for it. ‘Is better?’ the German shouted across the water. I shrugged. How the hell would I know?
He cast off his lines in a trice and sped after me, taking another vacant pontoon directly behind. We both tied up. A man appeared at the cabin door almost immediately. He was wearing his badge of office, a leather satchel. Quick off the mark, I thought, reaching for the Euros jar, then I realised he had a problem.
‘Your boat,’ he said, ‘was travelling far too fast.’
‘Mon bateau?’
I was amazed. I’d idled across the harbour.
‘Oui,’ he said. ‘The harbour is very shallow, and not only that, the wake bounced off the stone walls, and that makes it worse. You were going too fast,’ he said again.
‘Non,’ I said.
‘Oui,’ he said.
‘Non, non, non.’
‘Oui, oui, oui.’
‘Je ne le croix pas.’ For I didn’t believe it.
‘Moi, je le croix!’
A treacherous thought occurred to me. I pointed to the German boat behind.
‘He,’ I declared, ‘was going faster than I was.’ Which indeed he had been. The Frenchman was undeterred by this crafty attempt to shift the blame, even to a nation so blameworthy.
‘Non,’ he said. ‘You.’
I apologised. Placated, he took the money and went on to the Germans. I watched. Boy, were they going to get it!
The two chatted for a while. The Frenchman gestured in my direction. They both laughed. The Frenchman left. There was no justice, I thought. I went inside and closed the door. Well, said Sally, you probably were going too fast. I sulked. Sally doesn’t sulk, but I do.
A tap on the door interrupted. The German stood outside. He extended his hand. ‘Hello,’ he said. ‘I am Herbert. That is Liana on the boat.’ She waved. ‘We would like to invite you aboard our boat for a drink.’
We climbed onto his immaculate bateau, sat in padded teak chairs on the teak deck.
‘Picon?’ Herbert asked.
We had no idea what Picon was
. But it sounded good. ‘Certainly.’
He fetched two more long glasses. He poured beer into each. Then he added the bright orange liqueur.
‘Santé!’ he said, although we were not so certain of good health. But I thought of what we mixed with beer back in New Zealand — lemonade, raspberry, wine. Couldn’t be worse. In fact, it was better.
‘To Liana,’ said Herbert. ‘It is her birthday.’
‘Herbert has a Plan,’ said Liana. She produced it. The plan was written like a graph. The towns along the way were carefully plotted. Each had a date alongside it. The dates were much closer together than the towns. Herbert was covering a lot of water in not a lot of time.
‘I am going to Lyon,’ he said, ‘and I only have three weeks’ holiday.’
He was planning to go to Fontenoy-le-Château next day. To get there he had to go through forty-eight locks. Most canal travellers agree that ten locks and thirty kilometres makes a good day. We drank to Herbert’s adventure.
‘I am not his wife,’ Liana announced. Perhaps she thought we looked all too formidably married. ‘We have been together eighteen months only. But I love my Herbert.’
Herbert laughed. We drank to love.
‘Now we go to the restaurant,’ said Herbert, pointing to the brasserie on the quay. We could see them across the water, Liana towering over little Herbert even at the table, Herbert firmly in command.
Next morning Liana and I walked to the boulangerie. She told me that her life had been difficult, that she’d been married to an alcoholic for thirty years until she could stand it no longer and left him four years ago, that her husband had since stopped drinking and wanted to come back but she would not have it, no, never, that their son would have nothing to do with his father because of the way he’d treated her, that she did, really, love Herbert now.
I suggested her husband must be very sad, too. She looked at me. ‘Nuh!’
In the course of buying two baguettes she had become entirely human. So had Herbert.
Back at the boat, something had happened. Herbert came over, his face grave. ‘I have a problem,’ he announced. ‘A big problem.’
He had water in his diesel. He stood there with his water hose in his hand. I drew the obvious conclusion. The fuel and water fillers were often close together on boats, and easy to confuse. ‘Ah,’ I said, ‘so easy to do, to put it in the wrong hole.’
‘No, never!’ Herbert was so indignant he refused to let me into his engine room to help, showing he was a shrewd judge of diesel mechanics, not to mention girth.
‘You go on,’ he said. ‘We will catch up.’
Yeah, right, I thought, imagining the long, long line of locks ahead, and confident we would never see Herbert or Liana again. We waved goodbye to Liana. Herbert was down in his engine room. We could hear clanking as we passed.
We went up a long flight of locks with our personal lock-keeper. He was a handsome man with lots of curly dark hair and graceful gestures and Sally voted him cutest lock-keeper in all France.
He saw the silver fern. He loved le rugby. He loved the All Blacks. What did I think of the Wallabies? Mugs? He bounced around the lock with glee. Mugs! he called. Mugs! passers-by called back. Sally loved him.
At last we reached a long, peaceful stretch on the summit. Our lock-keeper went off with arms full of wine.
We were on the second highest canal in France. Graceful trees brushed our cabin-top, villages snoozed in the sun.
We stopped for the night beside the little village of Chamousey, where we bought delicious charlottes: mousse encased in sponge with red and white currants and raspberries on top. They came in little gold boxes. We ate them on the boat, watching three women and a little girl playing statues on a green lawn surrounded by red roses. Their grace delighted us, the warm evening lulled.
Three little boys came to fish. They caught four, the size of herrings, and put them in a bucket of water. They asked politely for a drink of water. Sally poured them some juice. They could speak a little English, which they were learning in school.
How old were they? she asked. They told her: two were eleven and one twelve. ‘Et vous?’ one asked. Sally told them. They looked at each other. ‘Wow,’ they said in French. ‘They are a hundred and sixty years old.’ They offered me a fishing line. We talked about France. We talked about New Zealand. They asked about kangaroos, which they pronounced kung-aroos.
‘Do you like the Vosges?’ one asked. I was startled. The Vosges? I remembered a sign, several locks back. Of course. That was where we were. The Vosges. I’d fallen into the lassitude of tourism, not even certain where I was. But:
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It is very beautiful.’
Sally gave them two Florentines each. They looked at each other.
‘Perhaps you’d like fish for dinner,’ one said. He offered the bucket. Sally was touched. ‘Thank you,’ she said, ‘but we have dinner already.’ She gestured at the kitchen, where vegetables for a salad lay on the table.
The boys looked relieved. They gripped the bucket and set off for home. ‘Au revoir.’
By now it was past seven o’clock. There’d been no anxious calls from home, across the canal. France always seemed safe to us, and the boys’ parents evidently agreed.
The evening fell into slumberous dark. We were alone, for the town had only a single mooring.
New Zealand seemed light-years away, and just as remote when we reached Forges d’Uzemain.
The village had all but disappeared. No matter how small the place, it could usually boast four essentials: a boulangerie, a café/bar, a beauty parlour and a chemist.
Only the green neon cross of a pharmacy shone from what had been the main street of Forges d’Uzemain; the village had been honed down to its bones and in a nation notorious for over-prescribing (although the French thought it was just right), and an ageing rural population, the chemist could always count on repeat business.
It was a hot day, and a long one, and one lock had not been working, or rather had worked too well: its gates would open, the lights would turn green; but before we could enter, the gates would close and the lights turn red. The lock would empty without us, and repeat the performance on the other side: the gates would open, the lights turn green, then red, etc.
A Swedish yacht on one side of the lock, and the River Queen on the other, circled for an hour, cursing the thing as it filled and emptied, until an éclusier showed up, pressed a button and fixed it in a trice.
The wide, shady pool at Forges was as welcome as the bottle of cool Mâcon white which we lost no time in opening. A couple of fishermen dipped their lines. The village was so quiet it might have been uninhabited. Even the bread came by van.
A voice called in the silence. ‘Ah, you start without me.’ It was Klaus.
Klaus was a huge, tanned German who looked twenty years younger than his age, sixty-seven. He was jockeying a speedboat barely disguised as a cabin cruiser, taking it from Germany to Spain, where he had a house.
His boat, Anne, was named after his wife. The boat was fibreglass. It was only seven metres long. Every slicked-back line of its hull, each flame-shaped window, all the soft tucks in its white upholstery and both of its powerful rumbling petrol engines suggested a boat not really suited to the canals.
He was travelling so slowly that his twin engines kept fouling their spark plugs, a condition I imagined extended to Klaus himself. Klaus longed for the Saône River and a stretch of water where he could hit sixty kilometres per hour instead of six, and feel the wind in his long, golden hair.He seemed designed for the Costa Brava too.
But Klaus was configured for anything. He enjoyed his life. The heat, the frustrations of that day; they were all part of it. He threw his head back and roared, ‘I have had a wonderful day.’
His crew was his son-in-law Mick, an Australian who wore surf shorts with Billabong inscribed in large letters over the backside. Mick had been a fitter and turner in Melbourne and of course had been made redundant in th
e early nineties. He had retrained as a mechanical engineer but could not find a job. His German wife, whom he’d met and married in Australia, had suggested they go and live in Germany for a while. So they had; Australia, as New Zealand had done so often, lost a well-trained young man, probably forever, since he now had a good job and was embedded in his new country. He lived in a house next door to his father-in-law, Klaus.
I asked if he wanted go back home. He looked wistful.
But Klaus looked happy with the arrangement. He telephoned a local farm restaurant. Madame arrived promptly in a van and whisked them off, sat them outside and cooked them a dinner of home-cured ham and fried potatoes. I got the feeling Klaus was used to getting what he wanted.
He’d headed a motorcycle company and still rode a huge Harley-Davidson. When his only daughter had announced she was marrying an Australian, Klaus had sent a friend to check out her intended. The report had come back positive; luckily for Mick, I thought.
Family and friends were taking turns to join him along the way to Spain, a week or so at a time. Not his wife Anne, however. ‘She does not like being so far from a beauty parlour,’ said Klaus.
‘Ah,’ said Sally. ‘This is a bloke’s pastime.’
Klaus’s hand flapped, as if swatting away the kiss of death.
Klaus had a problem too. Just as he was leaving he had seen the boat of his dreams in an advertisement, and had bought it sight unseen. He had put his own boat up for sale, and to his surprise he had sold it immediately.
Klaus had meticulously planned his trip to Spain through France. But the boat’s new owner wanted it back in Germany; Klaus’s new boat was already in Spain. What to do? Simple, he reasoned.
Long Slow Affair of the Heart, A Page 13