Long Slow Affair of the Heart, A

by Ansley, Bruce

  Still, I could see Jude and Jackie thought three nights would be quite enough. As they inspected the bathroom the estimate broadened: the three nights would be long ones.

  The boat’s bathroom was airily described as en suite. In fact it was en our faces, for it was separated from our bed in the aft cabin by a narrow alley.

  That space would by entirely occupied by a night-time user who would then have to perform various convoluted acts behind a door with all the soundproofing of a Japanese paper wall.

  This was clearly exercising their minds. I saw them deciding a prolonged bout of constipation might be no bad thing.

  We hung a curtain beside the bunk to give at least an illusion of privacy. No one risked it. In the mornings the two shot out the door towards the port toilets like unplugged balloons. A trip on the river was called for, if only to divert attention.

  Auxonne lay up the river just a couple of hours away. On our way down we’d passed it without stopping.

  So we took them there, affecting nonchalance. Oh dear. Nonchalance was fatal on the waterways.

  In the only lock on the journey I talked idly to Jackie, holding the ropes with what I thought was easy grace, pointing out the ineptness of the boat behind and describing the proper way of doing things.

  Sally yelled a warning. Her end of the boat was neatly secured to the lock.

  Mine, however, was swinging wildly while I nattered on. As the back careered to one side of the lock the front headed determinedly for the other. There came a dull thud, as of steel on concrete, the kind that foretells several hours with a paintbrush and the services of a blacksmith’s hammer.

  With le capitaine chastened, not to mention chastised, we arrived in Auxonne, an ancient town linked to Napoleon Bonaparte. Although we passed on the chance to see his bath we intended a good look at the very old church, Napoleon’s barracks, the fine houses.

  Then something happened which demonstrated the truly fickle nature of tourism even if you were not, strictly speaking, tourists.

  Three elephants strolled out from the church. You did not expect elephants in church, nor in a French village, any more than you’d look at a French menu and imagine the village ducks living happily ever after.

  But these were indubitably elephants, wandering along tail to trunk as elephants did.

  The fine old church, the barracks, houses, market, bath and all were instantly forgotten. An elephant hunt was the go.

  They were not difficult to track. Small town, big elephants. Besides, the middle one, the littlest, had a large appetite for the begonias and geraniums which grew so profusely from flower boxes along the way. Its delicate trunk reached for them as a child’s hand sought sweets, grabbing a bunch and stuffing them quickly into its mouth.

  Pandemonium broke out.

  Shopkeepers rushed to their doors: ‘Non, non!’ Small children squealed: ‘Le petit éléphant steals les fleurs!’

  The keeper beat the offender with his stick and loosed a tirade which the elephant might have understood but chose to ignore. A few steps farther on the trunk nipped out again and a bunch of cyclamen-coloured begonias made the supreme sacrifice. Shouts, yells, oaths faded as the procession shambled back towards a circus on the edge of town.

  We’d quite lost our appetite for antiquity. Elephants carried the day. Jude had sponsored an elephant, along with bears and other endangered species. I felt I should check her suitcase, which I thought quite big enough to hide one of the animals inside.

  So we returned to St Jean de Losne, and cracked a few bottles of Burgundy, since we were in the area and felt under an obligation to pillage the cellars. But this was the thing about drinking French wine in France: you could drink vast quantities of it, and very often did, without falling overboard nor feeling the slightest tap in the cerebral region next morning. (Do try that at home. Expect the hammer blows of remorse.)

  It was odd.

  Lots of things do not travel out of France very well. Pastis does not taste the same in the high latitudes of the South Pacific. Baguettes look the same, should taste the same — after all, they can’t be all that difficult to make, can they? — but they do not. French style is chic in Paris, fussy at home.

  Some still tsk sadly, yet New Zealand has developed its own style, in wine, in food, in clothes. This view of the world divided New Zealanders in France.

  The Francophiles were by far the majority. They loved France, and everything about it. Most had only a rudimentary grasp of the language and the sad fact was that they did not know much about the inner workings of the country. So they loved what they saw and France to them was romantic, chic, a people who had unlocked the secret of life. Good luck to them all, I thought, for a little knowledge here was not so much a dangerous thing as the whole secret of romance. Nothing kills magic like analysis.

  New Zealand usually fared badly in these comparisons; a curl of the lip, a dismissive laugh about the way things were done back home. The old cultural cringe never went away; it just morphed into a more sophisticated form. Yet from here, our way of life seemed to me bright, open, free.

  St Jean de Losne, meeting place of waterways, housed many nationalities. Americans lived on huge barges converted for living; or, like Toby and George, on ex-hire boats. Toby was blue-eyed and direct, George ruggedly handsome in a marine hero sort of way. In 1991 Toby had found she had breast cancer. She said, ‘It was such a huge shock. I stopped everything next day.’ They left their business and sold it a few years later. They built a house in Hartford, Connecticut, which they still owned although now they spent their year living aboard either a houseboat in the Bahamas or their canal boat in France.

  ‘We love it,’ said Toby.

  ‘Wow,’ said George.

  Others lived on service pensions, or by undisclosed means, although all by New Zealand standards seemed flush.

  Murray spent four years in the Israeli Army, was an expert in martial arts, and a jeweller. Ian was a Canadian architect, now ninety, and spent much of his time piloting his big converted barge. The Dutch were usually retired, although many of them seemed too young: fifty-five was a good age to stop work. Germans too; but canal cruisers of those two nationalities were in France for a few weeks, or a few months, and usually voyaged with determination, so weren’t really members of the club.

  New Zealanders and Australians were members by right of birth; we were the perennial travellers. And Brazilians, South Africans, Norwegians and a dozen other nationalities. But seldom the French.

  A few years ago, the story went, you seldom found the French cruising their own canals. I could believe it. The international urge to live near water — any kind of water with the possible exception of sewage farms, although they do quite well in Christchurch — seemed to have eluded the French. Except for fishermen and women — mainly men, lots of them — the French turned their backyards on the canals, no matter how picturesque those quiet stretches of water. Now more French were cruising canals; French flags were not common, but no longer rare either, although as few spoke anything but French they generally didn’t join the club either.

  Jude and Jackie went home. I set about some maintenance on the River Queen. I changed the engine oil, cleared the filters, cleaned the water tank, scraped and painted bilges, greased everything that needed greasing. Everything was running perfectly, as it had since we left Alem in Holland. We both touched wood, just in case.

  There was plenty of wood in the boat to touch. The cabins were lined in teak. The furniture was built of it. Evidently no one had given a thought to the rainforests in 1987, when it was built. But a bloke always needs more wood. There were a couple of things I needed to make and I went off to the timber yard.

  Timber yards were the same the world over. You went in, you were ignored for a decent interval. At last you attracted someone’s attention. They appeared to be deaf, stupid, and have no command of any known language. You explained what you wanted. You got a blank look. You ran through it again. The blank look changed to
one suggesting that you might just be the dumbest fellow the yardworker had met this week and boy, that was really saying something. To save further humiliation you settled for the closest thing you could find to what you actually wanted, went home, tried to make it fit, threw it away and went to another timber yard fully expecting the same to happen, as it did.

  Except in St Jean de Losne.

  The French seemed to be great do-it-yourselfers. They had New Zealanders beaten hands-down, although Kiwis believed they were DIY world champions. Their bricolage supermarkets sold everything you might need to build a house, and most of the French shopping there on Saturday mornings seemed intent on doing just that.

  They loaded giant supermarket carts with doors, electrical cable, spouting and downpipes, heaters, sinks, hot water cylinders, four-by-twos and cheap power tools, and pushed them into long queues at the checkouts, where they chatted to someone on one side about rewiring a house and to someone else on the other about the best way of installing a swimming pool, then discussed the pros and cons of a sabre saw with the woman at the till. You could spend an hour in those queues, and I sometimes did.

  I needed only a single piece of timber in St Jean de Losne. I braced myself for the ordeal. I was the only customer in the yard and sure enough, everyone had urgent business elsewhere.

  I finally pinned one down. He beamed, as if I was the one he’d been waiting for all day and, moreover, this was the most delightful task he’d had to perform in his entire timber yard career. I told him what I wanted, in French. He caught on so quickly I thought I might try French back home in New Zealand too, since English never seemed to work. He fetched my piece of wood.

  I went into the office to pay for it. Again I was the only customer. Six clerks filled every seat behind the counter. Every one of them was engaged in work of national importance. They peered into their computer screens anxiously. Finally I caught an eye and held on to it. I was charged $8, which bought a knot-hole in a bit of boxing-grade pine in New Zealand.

  Naturally, I’d miscalculated. I needed another piece to finish the work. I went back. Found the same man who saw me instantly this time, for we were now friends. We shook hands. We chatted a bit. The weather was fine. Would it hold? Until the end of the week perhaps.

  I told him what I needed. The same as this morning. He fetched it. We shook hands again. I went into the office. Caught the same eye, without delay. Now, I was known. Charged $16.

  What should I do? I could complain that I’d paid half that amount in the morning. But as an experienced shopper I knew he was as likely to add an extra $8 to this afternoon’s bill as halve it. And $16 was still cheap. I paid up. We wished each other merci and au revoir and bon journée.

  The next day was the blessing of the barges, an annual ceremony in St Jean.

  We were turned out of our mooring on the waterfront for the occasion, and moved into the big marina behind the town.

  The greetings changed. We heard ‘hello’ more often than ‘bonjour.’

  I went down pier B, full of permanent boat-dwellers rather than mere passers-by such as the River Queen, and on my way back met a woman at the top of the access ramp. She was staring meaningfully into the distance. I realised she was demonstrating immense patience and polite restraint as she waited for the interloper to clear out of her way. And her dog’s way too, for an overfed beast sniffed asthmatically around her feet.

  ‘Bonjour,’ I said.

  ‘Hello’, she said. Then, to her dog, ‘Oh come along, do.’ The animal drooped off behind her.

  In the nearby square housing the supermarket, the Office de Tourisme and the library, a troop of schoolchildren appeared, marching in twos. They appeared to be demonstrating against something, for several held banners. They seemed very young to be protesting, we thought. They were very young. Their placards insisted upon tidiness. What did they want? They demanded that rubbish be cleaned up. When did they want it? Now!

  They stacked their placards and banners neatly against a wall, then set to picking up all the rubbish in the square, supervised by their teacher in designer work gear, tight camo pants and fitted yellow roadworker’s jacket.

  The French took an enlightened attitude towards rubbish. They didn’t want it spoiling their streets and countryside. They recycled everything. They put out huge bins for glass, paper, plastic, even run-of-the-mill garbage. The bins were everywhere within easy reach. They were collected by men wearing bright green overalls with white stripes.

  At my brother’s house in Brittany, in a tiny hamlet as remote and rural as anywhere in France, they’d arrive in the early hours of the morning and empty the rubbish bin so the sun rose once more on a litter-free landscape.

  Roadsides, beaches, parks, streets were kept spic, span and rubbish free.

  France was as clean as Britain was not. Over the channel England had begun experimenting with once-fortnightly rubbish collections. The level of garbage in the streets, already alarming, rose to dangerous levels. So did the wails of the British expat community in France. ‘The country’s going to the dogs,’ they cried of their former home. In this case literally.

  Meanwhile, France — the nation that abhorred Thatcherism, refused to live according to the current economic ideology, and broke all the rules — like the bumblebee flew on regardless.

  The French lived by their own code.

  Rob and Jo were New Zealanders from Nelson. They’d been away from home for several years, living part of the time in England earning enough money to spend the rest of it in France on their little steel boat.

  Rob had the ultimate French lunchtime experience.

  Despite everything, lunchtimes often took us by surprise. To the French they were more sacred than Sundays, and they bent their knees just as reverently as they sat down to eat. Lunchtime as much as anything defined the French: doing things their own way, living their lives they way they wanted in defiance of modern economic demands and most of all, of course, both loving and respecting eating.

  We’d gnash our teeth as we arrived at supermarkets or gas stations a few minutes late and find ourselves confronted with a two-hour wait. But lunchtime was an essential part of the French way of life. It was an easy habit to fall into. On the River Queen a long lunch followed by a siesta became ingrained. I feared it would lead to serious culture clash back home.

  Rob needed a mobile telephone to use in France.

  He went along to the telephone shop in plenty of time, he thought, to emerge fully fitted out for the modern age of communications by lunchtime. He bought a prepay SIM card for the new phone. He could not get it to work. The shopkeeper couldn’t get it to work either. The man became agitated, not so much because he was selling Rob a dud as because of the time. Lunchtime approached. He wanted to close the shop. He had better things to do. He wanted Rob to leave, taking his new phone with him.

  Rob wouldn’t go. Quite reasonably, if you weren’t French and this wasn’t lunchtime, he argued that he had bought a telephone whose prime object was to talk to other people, in which area it was a complete failure. The discussion grew heated on one side and impatient on the other.

  Finally the shopkeeper could stand the sacrilege no longer. He marched to the door. He went out. He closed the door behind him and turned the key.

  Rob was locked in. He thought of various emergency numbers but his phone wouldn’t work. He yelled. No one came for, of course, this was lunchtime.

  An hour and a half went by before the shopkeeper reappeared. Perhaps he’d made a special concession for Rob, and had knocked half an hour off his lunchtime.

  He was not alone. The gendarmes came with him. They listened to both points of view. They deliberated. They had no Consumer Guarantees Act to guide them in the matter, but they had the ties of nationhood which were almost as good, at least if you were the shopkeeper. Rob was elected loser. The shopkeeper looked gratified. Oh well. Rob went back to his boat, found his old mobile and fitted the new SIM card. It worked.

  In the e
vening I went along to the meeting called to sort out details of the ceremony for blessing the barges. It was held at the Café National, on the waterfront, where people sat decorously under parasols on the riverbank and ate cheap, good, food. The café degenerated as you penetrated its inner recesses; by the time you reached the bar you were among drinkers as dedicated as West Coast regulars, and glimpses of the rooms behind showed the kind of confusion which made newspaper headlines when someone died and trucks were needed to cart away the rubbish.

  Murray told me that of course my name was Bruce, coming from New Zealand. I laughed politely at the warty old joke. Expat Poms turned up.

  The one who tried to seize control of the meeting and like a deputy head prefect get everyone in order was called Caroline, of course. She was dressed all in mauve except for a cream pashmina.

  The café owner appeared, smoking a pipe the size of a tuba. The head of the bargees’ association arrived. He was dressed in a cape of emerald green with cobalt linings and he wore a gold chain around his neck. The Bishop accompanied him, and the Master of Ceremonies. They talked rapidly in French. Surprisingly, we all understood: the big boys and girls were to go first and everyone else was to keep out of the way.

  The blessing of the boats went perfectly.

  The Mayor made a speech, the Bishop conducted a long, long service.

  With one thing and another it took all day. The MC blasted away for eight hours, the Miss Jean de Losne pageant chose a modestly-dressed winner who said nothing about world peace. Coloured lights flashed on the merry-go-round.

  The boats were covered in flags and bunting. The barges were blessed. They went down the river in convoys, followed by a flotilla of lesser craft. We watched from Ian’s barge. Someone said it was all a little boring. ‘This is a village of two thousand people,’ Ian said sharply, ‘and they’re enjoying themselves.’