Long Slow Affair of the Heart, A

  ‘Klaus is a great planner,’ said Mick. ‘He loves it.’ He’d take the old boat on the trip he’d planned, all the way to Spain, fly back to Germany, collect his car and the boat’s trailer, drive to Spain and haul the boat back home again. No problem. ‘A wonderful journey,’ and Klaus’s laughter boomed over the quiet water.

  We’d met him a few days earlier, when the lock-keeper, for his own esoteric reasons, had signalled both of us past two waiting Dutch boats. ‘I’m really sorry,’ I called to them as we passed. ‘Who cares?’ cried Klaus. ‘They are only Dutch.’ It was a joke, I hoped. But Klaus was so full of life he could be forgiven anything.

  We were talking, and laughing, and pouring champagne to celebrate Klaus’s splendid day on the water when twin horns echoed around the anchorage. It was the Chérie. Herbert and Liana waved happily from their deck. ‘Hello again,’ said Liana. ‘Ho,’ said Herbert. They tied up beside us. How could they have caught us up, so soon? ‘We have done many, many locks,’ said Liana.

  ‘C’est impossible,’ I said.

  ‘No it isn’t,’ said Liana. ‘The engine problem messed up Herbert’s Plan. We must catch up.’

  Herbert brandished his Plan. ‘Tomorrow we come with you. Tomorrow I will catch up.’

  What had been wrong with his fuel? Sally asked.

  Herbert’s face grew very grave. ‘We had to drain the tank,’ he said. ‘It had a lot of water.’

  ‘But how did it get in there?’

  Herbert looked even darker. ‘There could only be one way,’ he said. ‘Someone must have done it.’

  ‘Sabotage? While you slept?’

  Herbert nodded sagely.

  ‘But who would do that?’

  ‘The Dutch do not like us,’ he said obliquely, then used a description we were to hear often — usually from Dutch people talking about Germans. ‘They are polite in their own country, but outside it …’

  Outside, Dutch voyagers moved gently around their boats, checking their lines, and ours, asking if we wanted them to buy our baguettes from the van that came by from the baker’s in the morning and save ourselves the walk. They seemed unlikely saboteurs.

  Next morning we were shaken by Herbert’s stentorian roar. ‘The lock lights!’ he cried. ‘They are on. We go, now!’ We were off, a full half-hour before we expected. Herbert threw off his lines and was already speeding down the river.

  We raced through the automated locks. Herbert went in first, fixed his lines as Liana ran to the operating cord and yanked it while we frantically sorted ourselves out ahead of the closing gates.

  It still wasn’t fast enough for Herbert. After four locks he put Liana ashore on her bike. She was to pedal down the river and use her remote control to open the locks for us.

  ‘No waiting,’ Herbert shouted triumphantly.

  ‘I have changed my canal trip,’ Liana whispered, on one of the few occasions we saw her again. ‘Now it is a cycle trip.’

  We had done double the number of locks we usually aimed for when we pulled into our own anchorage for the night at Fontenoy-le-Château.

  Herbert sped by, honking. Liana stopped on her bike. ‘Bye!’ she cried. ‘We must go on. Herbert has his Plan!’

  Mick climbed off Klaus’s boat and set up a barbecue beside the water.

  His easy manner suggested an Australian doing what he did best. He produced a couple of steaks. The Danish owner of the boat next door looked on sourly. ‘It is not necessary to do that here,’ he said, in German. Mick pretended not to understand such an un-Australian sentiment.

  Fontenoy-le-Château was full of past glories. The castle it was named after sat atop a hill. A circular tower, a few stone stairs and a shape marked on the ground by the stumps of walls were all that remained, the rest quarried by townspeople over the centuries for building stones.

  An embroidery museum lay below the ancient church. Sally went in and was seized by the curator, who seemed short of customers. The curator had hit a lode. Sally was fascinated by what had once been the most important embroidery centre in all Europe. Some 700 skilled embroiderers had once worked here. They’d produced trousseaux for Princess Margaret and Grace Kelly. In the 1950s and sixties their work graced Europe’s top fashion houses. A single survivor silently embroidered in a corner of the museum.

  Changing fashions and the new order had done for the lot of them, as it had for the town’s other big industry, cutlery. The town once accommodated thousands. We imagined them thronging the narrow streets. Now it was down to 700 inhabitants.

  Houses sported hand-written For Sale signs. My hammer hand twitched. Doer-uppers! Shops lay empty. Signs over abandoned cafés, charcuteries, drogueries dotted the streets. One of them sported a dead three-legged horse in its window. We wiped a hole in the dusty windows and discovered that it had been stuffed as part of the set for a French film. All of it — shop, fittings, film posters, horse — was for sale.

  A short ride rising steeply through forest countryside, past a huge, abandoned factory, lay Bains-les-Bains, whose hot pools once added lustre to local attractions.

  We took our togs, for it was a fine Sunday afternoon. The town was full of people strolling its streets, and we should not have been surprised that the hot pools in their fine new building were closed. Instead we sat in a café and ate purple cassis ice-cream, the best we’d ever tasted.

  Yet we loved Fontenoy. Its intimate streets invited us to stroll, do nothing other than revel in the strength of the old stones, the simplicity of the architecture. Faded pink and cream houses lined the bottom of the cliff above the river. The town’s only statue was of Gilbert, a poet. Perhaps there had not been enough bronze for its other famous son, Arsène Remonal, the colosse Jurassien, locally famous for tipping the scales at 314.5 kilograms (not, despite local belief, a world record).

  In the mornings I’d wait with half a dozen townspeople for the boulangerie to open its doors. Then we’d file inside where Madame stood behind the counter, bright as the rising sun. ‘Bonjour!’, she say. ‘Bonjour, Madame,’ we’d chorus, like a class of schoolchildren.

  Each would then talk to her in turn, about the weather, their plans for the day, who had done what only yesterday, what a fuss there had been when … We stayed for a bit.

  We ate eggs from a lock-keeper whose chooks roamed around his lock alongside five barking dogs and two dispirited magpies in a cage. Then we lay under leafy trees and gasped in their shade. The heat!

  And a head came into view.

  It belonged to Beni, a Welshman.

  ‘I have someone from New Zealand aboard,’ he said, and we sat up to view the émigré. Gillian was from Waiheke Island. When Beni’s crew defaulted, she’d stepped into the breach, a position she seemed to be regretting.

  Beni had spent six days crossing the Andes on horseback with a taciturn guide, riding through gullies and mud by day, terrified by night, then being apprehended by the army at the end of it all for not telling the police in advance. Instead of being thrown in irons they’d sat him down to a dinner of wild boar.

  Beni clearly thought the pig the highlight of his trip, which made me think he’d have been better just going to a good restaurant. Then it turned out he’d owned one of those, with a bed and breakfast, in Spain, where he’d also done up haciendas for sale, and restored an old olive mill.

  He’d built a twelve metre racing yacht in steel. In another boat he’d sailed across the Pacific, whisked by the trade winds, visited the Galapagos, the Marquesas, all the way to New Zealand.

  He seemed to me a prize bull-shitter, although we later learned it was all true, and that he’d done much more. Yet he seemed not a happy man. He drank a lot of Calvados, although anything would do. He’d fill a glass with the instruction, ‘Get that down your neck,’ and he said such things as, ‘You’ve got lot of class. Trouble is it’s all third class.’

  We talked to each other through a red and yellow thong hanging triumphantly from his lamp. Not Gillian’s, she said. He claimed to be an ad
roit boatman constantly let down by his crew, and he shouted at Gillian often. ‘For fuck’s sake catch the rope,’ he yelled as he berthed behind us. ‘You can do that can’t you?’

  ‘Trouble is,’ he said to me, ‘it’s so hard on my tod.’ She said nothing. I marvelled at her forbearance and was not surprised to hear she’d quit a few days later.

  By then, we’d sailed on to Corre. The days had turned hot. We sweated in forty degrees. Trees made a tunnel of the canal. Even the herons were too languorous to fly away at our approach. A dog barked at us, but made no noise except a faint huff, as if its voice had evaporated.

  Corre looked dusty and tired, but to us it was celebratory. It was the end of the long, long run of locks, so numerous and whimsical that the most dedicated canal travellers were relieved to arrive at its rather desolate waterfront.

  We’d wondered whether we’d ever get this far. We were 773 kilometres and more than 200 locks from Alem.

  A group of young people picnicking on the bank spotted the silver fern at our bow and took up a chant: All Blacks! All Blacks! Some held their thumbs up. Some held them down. Either way, we didn’t care. We thought, my god! Wasn’t there anything else we were known for?

  Not for our boat-handling skills, despite the America’s Cup

  I’d started taking our silver fern flag in at night. After all, it had become a valuable souvenir. The All Blacks were currency. We set off next morning in a perfectly-executed manoeuvre — for the sea.

  In Corre’s shallow port, it just kicked up a fuss.

  Mud roiled to the surface. The wake bobbed boats up and down where they had no depth of water to bob up and down in. It brought the Dutch onto their decks in an instant. ‘Nay nay nay,’ they said.

  Hire boaties had a chance to get their own back for some of the indignities heaped on them by proper boat people, for bad habits such as scaring them in locks and passing at speed and never, ever helping with lines in a port. They presented stony faces.

  We did not much care. At last we were on the wide and welcoming Saône River, where locks were to become rare. Water lilies composed themselves into delicate patterns at the water’s edge. Charolais looked clean as schoolchildren in the morning light. Fields of green wheat rose to wooded hills. The roofs of churches were patterned in richly-coloured Burgundy tiles, zig-zagged like the jerseys our mums used to knit for us. They rose above houses that might have been forever readying themselves for postcards. Fish plopped in the still water, lightning flashed and thunder grumbled and only a few fat drops of rain fell on us. Four old university friends from Switzerland in their rental boat lazed along the river on their annual get together.

  In Port-sur-Saône we bought cheese cut from huge rounds. A keeper came out of her rose-covered house at the first lock with a rich red cherry tart whose crisp pastry, smelling like honey, was still warm from her oven; and fresh eggs, and she cut a plump lettuce from her garden and passed that across too.

  We went through the long Savoyeux tunnel in eerie mist and emerged into bright sunlight and at the next lock we bought a bottle of rosé and a jar of pale golden honey, smooth as oil. Bottles of pinot noir and vin de pays lined lock-keepers’ sheds, their cottages now beautifully-kept, their gardens ornate, roses red as a royal riband.

  Lizards sunbathed on the warm stones, church bells rang out, the Saône stretched before us soft as silk. Hawk-like black kites hunting for prey drifted over fields filled with yellow and mauve wildflowers dotted with scarlet poppies.

  In lovely, old Seveux we bought cakes from the pâtisserie, one of them light sponge filled with chantilly with a dribble of red and yellow liqueur and topped with strawberries, the other chocolate mousse crowned with chocolate liqueur and nuts. The cakes sat on lace doilies in boxes decorated with idyllic summer scenes and tied with gold ribbons. We looked away from the empty factories, deserted houses, the charcuterie and boucherie now open mornings only, although the port was brand-new. It offered eighty berths and its signs boasted of local government initiative.

  We travelled with the four Swiss whose shared youth seemed to have served them well, all of them sleek and prosperous and now in their late fifties. They were personable souls, taking turns at steering their boat, laughing at each other’s efforts, calling to us over the water. As boys do they bought lots of wine from lock-keepers and decided it was best drunk while still fresh. The boat took to wobbling but all ran smoothly, oiled as they were, until the last lock before the town of Gray.

  We went first, stopped and were busy with our lines when we heard a crash behind us, the sort of crunching noise that echoes merrily around the boardrooms of repair firms.

  Three good old boys were hanging over the bow. There was a lot less to look at than there had been formerly. Where much of the bow had been, a large hole now featured. The lock gate had a smug look, as if it had lunched on rental boats before and this one wasn’t bad, as an hors d’oeuvre.

  The helmsman was doing his best to look indignant; he’d done his job all right, why hadn’t the other three done theirs? And what was the lock gate doing there anyway?

  The crew looked at the damage, discussed it with serious faces, then they shrugged and went on, water lapping gently into the hole. We wished them bon voyage, although we thought it might be a short one.

  I told the story to a group of canal boaties later. Each one of them topped it with one of their own, the best being the crew of drunken Australians who’d steered their boat full tilt into a bridge buttress. The boat had not faltered. It went straight to the bottom, all standing.

  We found ourselves in a big town again, full of bustle and traffic and people with work to do. We ate salmon steaks seared in a little oil and balsamic vinegar with sliced tomatoes and Madame’s cherry tart for dessert. Sally bought cheese from a market. A small piece cost $25. It was delicious. We ate it reverently.

  A couple from Havelock North came aboard for drinks. The man told us they were lucky to be alive, for on their second day out their rental boat had been on the very brink of bursting into flame from an electrical fault. Was he upset? Was he suing the rental boat company for nearly killing both of them? Was he asking for extra time to make up for the company spoiling part of a very expensive holiday?

  Not a bit of it. In true New Zealand fashion he was pleased he’d been able to stop the fire and save the boat, grateful to the company for putting things right with only one lost day.

  The woman asked Sally, ‘How can you spend all that time aboard a boat, with a man?’ Sally took to her immediately. The temperature reached forty-four degrees in the cabin.

  In the mornings we breakfasted on ficelles, baguettes so thin you could pick your teeth with them.

  We admired a British narrowboat scarcely wider than the baguette but we were getting used to British eccentricity on the canals. In Toul we’d seen a huge British-owned French peniche, or barge, pushed along by a Yamaha outboard clamped to its rudder while its crew picked their way around decks cluttered as a scrapyard. In Mouzon we’d met an English couple who lived, permanently, in a craft which looked as if it had started out as a packing case on a dinghy. It was painted with ornate reeds and wildflowers, so now it looked like a chocolate box instead. A yacht in Charmes was hung with so much impedimenta it was scarcely possible to believe it could float, much less cross the Mediterranean where it was bound for. Vegetables, herbs and flowers grew in boxes on its deck. The more ridiculous the boats, the more grandiose their names. Catherine of St Arnaud and Bullivant of Arvin were as cranky as Ditherer of Doncaster.

  You could stop anywhere on the French canals, as long as it was not in a lock approach, or in spots likely to endanger others. Most boats carried long steel spikes they walloped into the canal or riverbank, for mooring to trees was forbidden; the ropes would booby-trap the towpaths, popular with walkers and cyclists.

  Our spikes merely used up space in a cupboard. We liked the convenience and company of the little ports, not to mention the electricity, water and shower blo
cks they usually offered. More often than not they charged for these services although it was never very much, usually around $20 a night.

  Perhaps because of the cost, love of solitude, or because they just wanted to rough it in that peculiar way of theirs, many of the British would not only sail in strange boats, they’d moor them in odd places: in tiny creeks, or against forbidding walls, or in the case of the packing case boat, on a wrecked pontoon abandoned next to a car park while on the other side of the river we tied to sound pontoons, plugged in our power cords, and used the showers, this time free.

  I had to catch up with our emails in Gray. Off I went on the eternal quest for an internet connection. This large town boasted only one public facility, so slow it took half an hour to send a single email. I gave up and went across to the Office de Tourisme for help. Its director loved canal boats. She talked about them endlessly. She offered me her computer while she talked to Sally.

  I wrote emails on her French keyboard, full of misspellings, exclamation marks and asterisks, like comic-book swearing. Meanwhile she talked for almost two hours scarcely pausing for breath. She told us she often travelled in passing canal boats, once for several weeks.

  Weeks? She was nice, but I would have been looking speculatively at the river after mere hours. She asked where we were berthed, and could she come by? For the rest of our stay we peered furtively from our cabin, ready to duck. She turned up again months later. She’d hitched a ride.

  In Pontailler an Englishman in a rental boat boasted of his exploits in Hong Kong where by his account he’d been the sole bulwark against the evil Chinese, and deeply resented being forced to hand over the colony. But he’d made up for it back home, where lifeboat services up and down the country had succeeded in daring rescues through their good fortune in securing his services.

  Now he was employed as a delivery skipper and was in great demand because of his courage and skill in bringing his customers’ boats home undamaged, usually through hurricanes.