Muffled as it may have been elsewhere, he could still hear the British lion roar. He said, ‘If we’ve made so many mistakes, how come so many people want to come and live here?’ We’d found the subject of immigration usually woke the dogs. His quiet wife retreated below.
Four Americans in the boat on the other side of him had been listening intently. The two boats fell to discussing politics. The Americans complained that the war in Iraq had become a fiasco. ‘No one likes us,’ one complained. ‘Especially not in Europe.’ The Englishman was unrepentant about his country’s role in the war. He said, ‘It would have been cheaper to nuke ’em.’
Sally asked what he thought of Tony Blair. ‘Our politics are different,’ he said. ‘I’m a conservative, and he’s a bull-shitter.’
The Americans were now discussing French cuisine. ‘I’m an offal eater,’ said one. ‘You’re an awful eater?’ asked another. ‘An operator?’ chimed a third. ‘But tripe!’ continued the first. ‘My god.’
And in St Jean de Losne, meeting-place of canals and rivers, we stopped for a few weeks. It was mid-summer. This was the place where we had to decide which way to go. One path led to the south of France and the Mediterranean, the other to Paris.
As we drew close, we saw a familiar shape.
The Chérie.
‘So, at last you stopped,’ I called.
‘No, no,’ yelled Herbert. ‘We have been to Lyon.’ Lyon was 200 kilometres further down the river. ‘Now we are on our way back.’
Liana blew us a kiss. She waved a piece of paper triumphantly. The Plan.
We were not so well organised. We tossed a coin. Tails South of France, heads Paris? A hell of a choice. The coin glittered on the blue carpet. Heads. Paris.
Chapter Eight
Life moved quickly for us in the otherwise slow-moving village of St Jean de Losne.
St Jean was a barge town. Barges, or peniches, lined the banks of the Saône River skirting it. Some were still working. A growing number were not. Sometimes they had been abandoned altogether. More often they had been converted, or were in the process of being made into mobile homes. They were ideal for the job, thirty-eight metres long and five wide and blunt at both ends. They were square-bottomed and with a little added height on deck above the holds they made an easy two storeys.
I went into a converted peniche in the River Seine town of Melun several months later. A double, curved staircase like a Georgian mansion’s led into its depths. Everything was on one floor and the roof was as high as a cathedral’s. Two families lived in the peniche and there was plenty of room, although I’d been living on a boat for most of the year by then and perhaps my frame of reference had shrunk.
Not far above St Jean de Losne a canal branched off the Saône and led up to the Marne River, and eventually to Paris.
The canal leading towards the Swiss border and eventually into Germany led off the Saône at St Symphorien, only a few kilometres above St Jean. The Burgundy canal turned off in the middle of St Jean and led into the famed wine district. Below St Jean, at Chalon, the Canal du Centre headed south, then changed its mind and curved back into the depths of Burgundy; it joined the Seine River in the run to Paris and offered an alternative route, the Canal du Nivernais, for those who wanted something more rustic. The Saône itself became the mighty Rhône below Lyon and rushed off in no-nonsense fashion all the way to the Mediterranean.
St Jean lay square in the middle of this great cobweb of waterways. All roads led to it although, like the previous subject of that saying, the town had had its disappointments. It was once the most important barge centre in all France. Perhaps it still was, although much of the commercial barge traffic had retreated to the north.
St Jean itself hadn’t changed much. Lorries squeezed through a main street designed for horse traffic. A maze of little streets wound through the old part of town. The new part was still a work in progress.
The main harbour, a big sheltered basin divided in two by an island and filled with hundreds of boats, lay behind the old town. On the other side of the first lock into the Burgundy canal converted barges lay four deep. Not all of them were completed homes for the wayward. Many were still dreams. Yes, you could bark your shin on these fantasies, but there was nowhere to lay your head, or make your tea.
They were still rusting shells with a few holes for windows.
Some would be finished; some bore obvious signs of their owners’ dreams turning to nightmares ending one dark night in them sitting upright in bed, mopping the sweat from their brows and thinking my god, what am I doing?
One boat, a fine British-made barge, nearly new, had been sailed to the south of France by its proud new owner. There it had caught fire. Now it was for sale in St Jean de Losne, its blackened insides with their struts and walls and unidentifiable organs exposed like an accident victim’s autopsy which had discovered a broken heart.
A rusting hull, bare of superstructure or any fitting at all, lay upside down in a yard. Only the marks where engineers were measuring the thickness of its plating showed this was someone’s dream. Months later the amount of progress was invisible to the naked eye. I hoped its owners were young, for they’d certainly be finishing it on their pension.
I watched a woman working on a huge iron wheel. Possibly it was her ship’s steering wheel, for it was imposing enough. She had a length of chain, and she was running it up and down each section of the wheel in turn. A pile of rust lay below the wheel, although her rich red colour said that she’d managed to intercept quite a bit on its way down.
At the back of the boat, out of cursing range I noted, her partner was welding chunks of steel which one day, that day which undoubtedly sparkled in their minds as they crept exhausted into bed each night, would be a nice little saloon, the pretty curtains in its windows left undrawn so passersby could look inside, see the pools of soft light thrown by the brass lamps, sense the air of contentment pervading the ship, and be smothered in envy.
In the meantime she was tired and dirty, he was irritable and half-blinded by welding flashes, this was a lovely Sunday afternoon when people, those lucky souls who were not doing up boats, were strolling around, doing nothing but enjoying the sun and admiring the view which included, of course, the toiling couple.
When you saw a finished conversion, oh joy! This was the vision that drove them on, the pot of gold.
I was admiring the beautiful lines and clever design of a fine Luxemotor, a Dutch barge, on the waterfront when its Australian owners appeared on deck and invited me aboard. We chatted under a white canopy on an after-deck the size of a Pakuranga patio, reclining on plush chairs which might once have graced the Queen Elizabeth II. Then we walked on polished floors through two big bedrooms, two bathrooms, one household-sized shower, a kitchen relegating the term ‘galley’ to real estate agents’ jargon, and a laundry complete with full-sized washing machine and drier. The whole thing would have put a Vaucluse apartment to flight. The Australians had once been part of a syndicate of eight who’d shared the boat in a three-year contract. At the end of it two couples had bought out the others and here they were, strolling their floating estate like graziers.
We parked first on the quay on the Saône itself, below the Café National under an avenue of trees shading seats where townspeople met to chat. And watch.
Eyes that had seen thousands of boats and barges come and go were not to be messed with. We berthed very carefully. Scarcely had we tied up when, to our joy, Glenn and Trish came bounding down the broad steps towards the boat. Their barge, the Johanna Grietje, was in dry dock, being painted shiny deep-sea green and black.
Friends! From home! Much as we’d enjoyed reconstructing ourselves and our lives for the passing parade we’d met on the journey, we longed for these two, who’d shared much of those lives. For an hour we gabbled pure Kiwi, a language distinct from any other. We yarned, boasted, lied, confessed, had lunch, got drunk and repeated all of the above.
Yet in an odd way the conver
sation was constrained. There seemed to be holes in it, no-go areas, an unease we’d never felt in New Zealand. Sally felt she was letting people down. ‘You’re so lucky,’ everyone said. When the whole world wanted to cruise the canals, live in Paris, revel in la vie Française, what was wrong with her? You must be extraordinarily brave to question the mythology of romance. I wanted to spend that year, and the next, on the canals. I knew Sally no longer did. She longed for the light, the freedom of the South Pacific, but she didn’t want to tarnish our friends’ dream. So both of us felt fraudulent in the face of their enthusiasm, their love of canal life. We’d been cooped up in a boat for months, often in the rain. We hoped we’d feel better within their aura.
Our introduction to the expatriate community came the following day.
Expats formed a tight community in St Jean de Losne. They organised evening lectures. Two elegant women ran the most unusual library we’d ever been in. There were no cards, no records, no lending routines. You took as many books as you liked. If you wanted to bring some back, that was fine, but it didn’t matter if you did not. The system, or lack of it, seemed to work. The shelves were full, overflowing into stacks on the floor.
Books in the library were often aging gracefully, rather as their borrowers imagined themselves. Sally picked one out and flicked through it. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘it’s by P.G. Wodehouse.’ A nearby Englishman leapt on this colonial gaffe. ‘Actually,’ he said, with a kindly look, ‘it’s pronounced ‘Woodhouse.’ Sally, who knew that, said ‘I know.’ The Kiwi translation was fuck off. But I could foretell his anecdote at dull dinner parties.
Next morning Sally set forth with the walking group. I would have gone too, but I had other things to do, such as lying on the settee reading.
I watched them walking along the opposite riverbank, quite a lot of them, engrossed in conversation: Americans, English, Australians, New Zealanders, some of them canal boaties, some expats; but no French.
That very afternoon I was introduced to the inner circle, the British expat community. It was our first real encounter, and I was staggered: not by how curious they were, but how incurious. Not only did the British live in a group that had been portrayed and satirised in books and plays everywhere, and knew little about the people they lived among, the French, but they didn’t want to know.
I found many expat Poms to be, well, not attractive. They loved the French way of life, and although they weren’t prepared to live it completely, they all agreed on one thing: it was better than home.
France was full of English people disappointed in home. Their views ranged from critical to apocalyptic, the last from an apoplectic gent in his seventies who echoed Enoch Powell’s elderly ‘rivers of blood’ speech from a neighbouring boat: ‘The bricklayer, the man on the shop floor, they’ve had enough, it’ll only be a year or two before they rise up and there’ll be blood everywhere.’
Only if there was nothing on TV, I thought, although as the BBC at that moment was once more being eviscerated, that seemed likely. But enough of what? Immigration, mainly.
The French, on the other hand, seemed unlikely to rise up and leave blood on anything, at least nothing edible. They were content with their way of life, indifferent to any faint criticism, in love with their country and polite to visitors, as opposed to beating and robbing them. They were poor tourists themselves; they saw no need to go somewhere else. Everything they wanted was right here, or if needs must, in some other part of la belle France.
My neighbour had had his boat custom-built in England, although getting it finished had involved much time, many threats of court action and promises of physical violence. He was very proud of it in a conquering sort of way, the same sort of way William must have looked upon dead Saxons; he’d beaten the hordes to get where he was today.
I could hear arteries throbbing when he discovered I was cooking dinner.
‘I thought New Zealanders were supposed to be he-men. He-men don’t cook.’
‘Yes they do,’ said Sally, ‘and you should see what he’s like in an apron, naked.’ Our neighbour clearly felt he should not see any such thing. He retreated below decks to his sports channel in a rush of limp-wristed gesturing, perhaps to watch the All Blacks from a whole new perspective.
We hadn’t been in St Jean very long before there was a tap at the door.
The Major. He had a clipped way of talking and a one-sided conversational style: you were there as the audience, not as a participant. For all that, I liked something about him, although it took some time to realise that it was his vulnerability.
The Major sat to attention in the wicker chair and told us precisely why he’d abandoned England eleven years ago for his little village near St Jean de Losne, deep in France. ‘Too much of the ay-u,’ he said.
The ay-u? The British way of addressing him, he said: ‘’ey, you!’ He didn’t like being spoken to like that. French manners were perfect. They treated him as an individual. France was a country of order. He liked order.
Perhaps he wasn’t a major. He didn’t use the title, but he fitted it perfectly. His manner was upright. His legs were smooth as a boy’s below his shorts, although he was at least seventy. Perhaps he shaved them. His moustache (‘in French, it’s feminine, la moustache’, he said with great satisfaction) curled and twirled in a thicket above his upper lip. If a ferret had stuck its head out of it and looked around, I would not have been surprised.
He would never return now. His wife? He watched the postie go by on her bright yellow Vespa scooter. Here even the rubbish collectors wore designer uniforms. ‘If something happened to me,’ he said, ‘my guess is that she would stay.’
Perhaps. In Corre we’d met a Belgian woman who’d married a Frenchman. She’d lived in the village for thirty years. ‘I’m still an outsider,’ she said. ‘I have made no real friends here. If Jean died I’d go back home tomorrow.’
You heard people saying the same thing about Waipawa or Waimate: twenty years and still not a local. Rural France was like that: tight. Polite, but closed to strangers.
The couple were caught in the expat Brits’ dilemma. We were to see it more often from then on. They’d sold their homes, perhaps under the influence of the dozens of television programmes waxing on the delights of buying real estate abroad: A Place in France, No Turning Back, Home or Away and many others. They’d bought houses in France, or poured their money into a home-sized barge.
Back home the houses they’d sold were worth far more now. In some cases their value had doubled.
Their homes in France had not. The French did not treat their houses as commodities. Houses were to be lived in, often by generations of the same family. They tolerated the British buying into their towns and villages, but with a wariness that went beyond the traditional aloofness between the two nations.
Meanwhile the British had fallen out of their market back home. They’d literally made their beds in France, and now they had to lie in them. Perhaps the Major’s widow would have no option: their house, he told us sadly, had not increased very much in price, while houses in their home county had gone through the roof.
In the walking group that morning he’d promised Sally cherries and true to his word, arrived with a brown paper bagful. They were so bright and sharp they had to be eaten by morning or they’d go bad. So we ate them, and thought of the Major and his wife, and we felt sad, and lucky.
Visitors arrived. Jude, an old friend from Christchurch and her mate Jackie, whom we’d met once or twice. Their train pulled into the station at thirty-three minutes past the hour exactly. Trains ran to the minute in France. I watched a man in a peaked cap flag the train away and asked him to call us a taxi. ‘D’accord,’ he said, and did. Don’t try this at home, I thought.
I saw Jude’s and Jackie’s faces fall as they inspected the boat. Let’s face it, boats were small, unless you wanted to hump a load of steel the size of a steam locomotive around the canals. Our alleged double bed was, well, chummy. Canal cruisers were li
ke messing around in playhouses. You had to get used to living on them and even then they got no bigger.
Men loved it.
Women did not.
Sally and I had lived on a boat in Westhaven in Auckland for a while, after our children had moved to the queen city. The boat seemed big at first, although it was not as large as the River Queen. The way it shrank was amazing, like a woollen jersey someone had left too long in water. In the rain it shrivelled even faster, and rain is not unknown in Auckland.
You needed to be neat in your habits on boats.
I was not neat. I was messy. What’s more, I was clumsy. If there was something to trip over, I’d trip, and if something was available to drop, then crash, down it would go.
These peccadilloes went unnoticed when you were on a boat with other blokes. They regarded mess as wildebeest treat mud, something to wallow in rather than worry about.
Sally cleaned up after me, although no man would be surprised that I was surprised I’d left anything that needed cleaning up. Little things, the odd puddle of soup, the occasional pungent grundies, the tea-towel put to good use on the oil dipstick — heavens, I’d only used a corner of it — seemed to assume unusual significance on a boat.
Boats had remarkable numbers of sharp objects: sills, stairs, controls, latches, rails, doors which were always shut when you wanted them open, and open when you expected them to be shut, and lots and lots of edges.
I bashed and crashed around them. Sally merely stumbled occasionally but there was a difference: I did not bruise, but she did.
She bruised badly. She’d brush against something and next day a great purply bruise would mark the spot. She whacked her arm and the bruise was still visible when we returned to New Zealand. After a particularly hard day on the canals she’d be the colour of grapes and was not mollified when I said she had the tint of exceedingly fine pinot noir. I was relieved we weren’t at home. Someone would have called the police.
We’d bought our boat with guests in mind. The accepted formula for visitors on boats was six for drinks, four for lunch and two overnight but everyone wanted friends aboard, and we longed for them.
Long Slow Affair of the Heart, A Page 15