Long Slow Affair of the Heart, A

by Ansley, Bruce

  And so they were, lining the streets and the bridge, gasping at the fireworks. The Miss Losne contestants entwined themselves around their boyfriends, the grown-ups filled the cafés, the bogans screeched around on little motorbikes, and everyone had a jolly good time until around midnight when, the air still warm as a bath, they began drifting home.

  In the port the Germans parked on their expensive boat next door asked politely if I would look after their space while they went down the river for the evening. They were drinking cocktails, and after a few more they gunned their engine and went off with great dash. Towards midnight they returned.

  The captain backed his boat into its space with panache. There came a huge crash. The entire jetty shook like jelly. People rushed from their boats, at first in alarm, then with the piety unique to boaties everywhere when they see someone else mucking it up.

  The stainless steel ladder on the back of the Germans’ boat was horribly twisted. The jetty was damaged. Eight-year-old Oscar from a neighbouring Kiwi boat itemised everything for anyone who might have missed the details. ‘Look at that! And look underneath! It’s all broken! And that bit over there!’

  We all pretended to be deeply concerned but really, it was the end of a perfect weekend.

  Chapter Nine

  Sally and I had travelled quite a lot. We started young, for travel was compulsory, like sport. You needed a note from your parents to avoid it. If you had not gone overseas in your twenties you could go along to social welfare and get a disability grant.

  Going overseas was a huge adventure then. You had to save, and sacrifice; the air fare would have bought quarter of a house, or a Holden.

  You could still have gone by sea, but voyages to the other side of the world were already becoming whiskery and you were required to spend endless boring weeks on the ocean wave, for this was long before shipping companies took those same endless boring weeks and repackaged them as cruises.

  Besides, we loved the idea of flying. Women dreamed of becoming hosties on international flights but hardly ever got there, because they needed the looks of Sophia Loren and the ambitions of a nun, pregnancy being a certain way to crash and burn.

  Men were not so lucky. Male hosties were unusual. The real male job was pilot, but you might as well aspire to be that other ruler of the heavens. If you wanted to fly it was much easier to scrimp, starve and save for five years or so and buy a one-way ticket — to England of course, where else? England was the start line to the world, where you could get a job, scrimp, starve and save enough to buy an old van and go around Europe, or if you were truly adventurous, down the Kathmandu trail. The British welcomed you, if not with open arms then at least with a separate queue at the immigration desk befitting your superior skill in being born into the British Commonwealth. Even the Americans gave you a visitor’s visa without requiring a strip-search by a marine with hair like a shearer’s comb.

  Flying was luxury beyond earthly dreams. The food! Three courses from a menu the size and style of a Mills and Boon novel. With wine, like meals in the movies! And service from angels who waited on you hand and foot.

  Flights were not just a way of getting there. They were an end in themselves, a season of luxury only dreamed of back home in the flat. To travel hopefully was a better thing than to arrive, said Robert Louis Stevenson, and nothing was more hopeful than Flight TE 471 to London. Men practised the smooth confidence of Sean Connery, women the style of Diana Rigg. I remember asking the startled hostie for a Manhattan, which after a moment she fetched; at least, I think that is what she mixed, for I had no idea what a Manhattan was.

  So, on Sally’s and my very first trip to London in 1972, my second trip overseas and her first, we settled back into our roomy seats in our Air New Zealand jet, talked, read (for there were no movies), ate so many meals we could scarcely believe we’d once got by on a meagre three a day, drank and hoped, and it was huge fun.

  Now flying was simply awful. Even before you climbed on a plane you volunteered to be treated like a criminal, waited endless hours on seats any decent park drunk would despise, wandered aimlessly around shops that sold junk at allegedly cheap prices, and brooded over the metaphysics of messages declaring your flight had been delayed due to operational requirements.

  You were marshalled first into pens then races and finally into seats so small that considerable effort was spent advising you how to reach the other end alive.

  The hosties had morphed into cabin attendants whose anonymous title scarcely disguised their real function, which was to poke plastic packets of various substances at their charges and prevent them from rioting.

  If you were foolish you ended your trip at Heathrow; if downright stupid, you finished at Los Angeles. The Americans forced you to wait for hours in subservient silence, for otherwise you risked being shot, or imprisoned, or both. The British merely subjected you to lengthy suspicion from persons who looked like fish, then they lost your luggage.

  On our first trip to Britain Sally became pregnant, not just with child, but with two of them.

  She gave up her work in drug rehabilitation. I quit my job as an ice-cream packer, where I’d dressed in Arctic gear to spend thirty minutes loading refrigerated trucks from freezers followed by thirty minutes thawing out and eating the evidence, ice-cream from cartons dropped by numbed if sticky fingers. The job had been better than its predecessor, however. Then, I’d worked for a famous cosmetics company whose television commercials showed men in white coats measuring out rare and precious essences by the dram. In reality they became scruffy individuals such as myself wearing dirty overalls, dumping sacks of chemicals into huge vats according to a handwritten recipe pinned to the wall, and staying one step ahead of the dole.

  We were both only too happy to chuck the work and use our remaining free time ahead of parenthood to climb into our VW van and head for Europe on the assumption (wrong, as it proved) that once the twins were born our travelling days would be over.

  The van’s hold on life was precarious. I bought it cheap, from a man who professed to be selling it reluctantly only because he was going overseas. That was probably the only truth he told, for as the true character of the vehicle was revealed, I had no doubt he left just as soon as he cashed the cheque.

  We fitted it out extravagantly with a double mattress and a gas cooker but the engine went from whimsical to cantankerous. I took it out and presented it to a man who claimed he could recondition it extraordinarily cheaply and when I found out neither claim was true he had evidently joined his countryman in urgent business overseas.

  The engine haemorrhaged oil in a particularly dodgy way. Underway, it was well-behaved, but when I switched off the engine a solid stream of black stuff would pour onto the tarmac until the engine cooled.

  Oil was not as expensive then as it is now, but it still took a chunk out of our budget. We couldn’t afford to have our progress through Holland, Germany, Greece, France and so on charted by a series of oil puddles, so I devised a cunning plan.

  Whenever we stopped, Sally would take a container, crawl under the van and place it beneath the leak. When all was ready, she’d call out, or at least give a strangled cry, and I would switch off the motor. The oil would pour into the container. When the engine had cooled, I would pour the oil back into it. Simple in conception, efficient in effect, but like all brilliant strategies this one had its drawbacks.

  First of all, Sally did not like her side of it one bit. Crawling around under a dirty car was not her idea of having a good time en France, especially when the oil leak was not quite where she thought it would be, so that instead of pouring into the container it gushed over her. This was not strictly my fault but as every bloke knows, when the belle tolls, she tolls for thee.

  Second, as her pregnancy advanced, it became harder for her to fit under the car.

  And third, as a result of the above we stopped as little as possible, so that Marseille might pass in a whiff of exhaust or whoops, was that Venice?

/>   You might think that all of these problems might have been resolved simply by me climbing underneath the car and Sally manning the key. But Sally was not at one with anything mechanical. In her hands a toaster endangered the staff of life, a remote control was capable of launching a nuclear weapon several oceans away. She chose not to turn the key on the grounds that it might blow us up.

  The consequences were lasting. We never bought another dunger, I never again was party to any indignity on her part, and our twins were born with flat spots.

  All right, none of that was true. But we developed a lifelong abhorrence for tripping, the kind of thing where you cover long distances stopping for only a day or two, the two-week tiki tour of Europe, the ‘It’s Tuesday, this must be Paris’ school of travel. Air travel also, for us, became a means to an end and was otherwise to be avoided at all costs, barring business class.

  From the sale of the van onwards we would never again hop from place to place, we decided. Instead, we would stop, live, sniff the begonias, join the library, quaff local wine, befriend villagers and know the names of their children, vote for mayor, live in a farmhouse with a local woman to dust the heavy oak furniture and chat merrily about villagey doings, graciously receive the townspeople’s thanks for adding so much to their life and culture, and never, ever crawl under a car again.

  By and large we stuck to it, although as in all of life’s ambitions certain areas remained unfulfilled; perhaps the letter of thanks was in the mail.

  Wouldn’t a canal boat be just another form of van? asked Sally. Wasn’t travelling by boat just another way of tripping from place to place? asked Kathryn Ryan.

  Good gracious no, I replied grandly to both. Life on the canals would be slow. We would stop often, for very long periods. We would find congenial towns and villages and live in them, possibly for months at a time. We would discover the best place to buy wine, patronise the finest boulangeries, stroll around in the evenings amid surroundings we knew intimately. Our boat would be as a snail’s shell, a handy place to duck into when the day’s slow doings had been done.

  At least one of the above was true. We knew how the snail felt: at home but a little constrained if it wanted to swing a cat.

  Otherwise, well, mistakes have a way of creeping up, and when at last you hear their slither they are waiting with a four-by-two.

  So far we had been rather hurried. We had spent our time in rural France, which seldom heard the whine of a Nikon. Canal travellers might not know much about the big picture, but they were on intimate terms with the little one.

  We had seen a lot of towns and villages and decided most of them were closed. Actually, many were. The thirty-five hour week, which we’d admired from a distance, meant that opening hours were quixotic at best, especially in small businesses with few staff. When business was already slow, the short working week seemed to sap energy from a town, choking whatever industry was left after foreign competition, a grudging economy and an inexorable drift to bigger towns and cities had taken their toll.

  Many houses looked as if they had not been inhabited for a very long time. The rest kept their shutters closed.

  They were romantic, of course. They’d huddled amid their streets for centuries. The great stones and those lollipop shades of blue and pink and yellow spoke of generations of lives lived. Their silent mystery seemed more comforter than shroud. Still, sometimes when we wanted to chat we could not find anyone to chat to outside the lock-keepers and Madame in the boulangerie.

  As with all canal travellers, our community tended to move along with us in boats. When we’d explained our philosophy of canal travel to Glenn and Trish, they’d smiled; being good people, they were still smiling when we joined them, although by then smirks would have been quite in order.

  For we’d dashed right along. We’d nipped through three countries, Holland, Belgium and France, and we still had no idea where Mademoiselle was, much less Armentières. Parlez-vous? Mais non.

  Now we were making a sprint for Paris.

  Glenn and Trish had limited time for the trip. If we wanted to go with them we had to keep up. And we did want to go with them. Oh well. In Paris, we promised ourselves, we’d stop.

  We set out one morning with the Saône River lumpy as our throats, for a cold wind was blowing and we’d liked staying in St Jean de Losne, and meeting our friends there. Now, though, we were heading for adventure with our mates.

  It was late June, and the cuckoos had stopped their clocks. We pulled in beside the big fuel barge moored on the river near the entrance to the Canal de Bourgogne and filled our tanks with diesel, cheap at around $2.20 a litre. Madame topped us up smartly then summoned us into the barge’s wheelhouse to watch her write what seemed to be a book, which she then handed over to us in the form of a receipt. ‘Au revoir,’ she said, and ‘Bonne journée m’sieur.’

  We would certainly have a good day, we thought, for what could be nicer than embarking for Paris via the famous wine villages and vineyards of Burgundy in the company of friends?

  We had three possible routes to choose from.

  The Canal de Bourgogne ran through Dijon, whose churches, cathedrals and palaces nodded above narrow streets thronged with people, possibly including those same citizens whose closed houses hunched amid rank grass in the more rural villages. It led through the Pouilly Tunnel, running four kilometres below a rocky ceiling so low it would scarcely let our boat pass, and promising a kind of diversion we had not so far met.

  The Burgundy canal was not the most popular route. Lots of people didn’t like it. Carla and Paul had gone that way. They texted us. Unusually for them, for they delighted in wherever they went, they seemed a little disappointed. It was beautiful, they said, but not as fine as the Canal du Centre.

  The Canal du Bourgogne was also strong on locks. Its 242 kilometres had 189 locks, or 1.3 locks a kilometre. We’d have at least fifty more of them than we would through the Canal du Centre.

  Locks were part of canal cruising. Locks and canals went together like, well, love and marriage, although not even death did them part.

  Some enthusiasts loved locks. Glenn did. Others did not.

  We were more or less neutral on the subject; that is, I rather liked them, Sally rather did not, so one balanced the other. Still, they said ten locks a day were enough for anybody, and our route already called for more than that; why tempt fate?

  The Canal du Centre was shorthand for several canals. It became the Canal Lateral à la Loire, then the Canal de Briare, then the Canal du Loing before it finally poured its contents into the Seine. First it looped down until it was about level with Lyon, and at its lowest point dribbled off on a false start to the Mediterranean before ending abruptly at Roanne.

  On the way up it passed the Canal du Nivernais, which was our third way of getting to Paris. The Nivernais was narrow, shallow and eccentric, but cute. Some people said it was the most beautiful canal in all France and worth the risk of grounding, or banging into something. Glenn did not agree. The people who said that, Glenn said, had never lived in New Zealand. The Nivernais was countryside. You might as well go to Te Kuiti.

  Glenn’s opinion regarding the Nivernais had to be respected, because usually he loathed countryside. He made an exception for the French countryside. The French countryside, he said, was beautiful in a way the New Zealand one could never be, if it lived to be a thousand. He loved the French countryside. So if Glenn reckoned the Nivernais was boring, his was the kind of scientific assessment that had to be taken note of.

  On the other had, Glenn and Trish had already travelled up, and down, the various Canals du Centre. They reckoned them to be beautiful beyond compare, the towns delightful, the croissants the most delicious in all France, served up by delectable Mesdames so stunning of visage it would be all we could do to stagger from their boulangeries and brace ourselves for the day’s voyaging. One in particular, he insisted, would serve her customers only if she was properly dressed in a negligée. And the wine! We’
d never find finer Burgundy in a supermarket anywhere.

  The last argument swung us completely. Almost as many epicures back home had visited the vineyards and wineries of Burgundy as had hired boats on the canals. They desired us to visit this vineyard or that winery. Their earnest expressions would grow an overlay of nostalgia as they urged us to visit the wonderful little place at St Léger-des-Vignes, or their favourite vintner near Santenay.

  As our average price for a bottle was somewhere between $5 and $6, I wanted to be in a position to match these connoisseurs palate to palate: you simply must visit this little supermarket just out of St Thibault, I’d say, you’d find it quite delightful.

  So the Canal du Centre it was.

  The Saône was sullen that spring morning when we set out. The Johanna Grietje had gone ahead while we filled up and we were alone on a brown river. Herons hunched like private soldiers forced on barracks drill. Swans swam out to us and hissed. Fishermen stared moodily at floats which stayed still as a dead carp.

  We went through a lock and the bow-thruster gave a sad croak and died.

  Luxuries on New Zealand boats, bow-thrusters were standard on Dutch cruisers. They were little motors turning a propeller set in a tunnel running across the bow of the boat below the waterline. When you worked a lever like a PlayStation’s, it would push the front of the boat to one side or the other.

  At first the River Queen’s had remained idle, for I decided they were props for people who could not properly handle boats. Oh well, perhaps just a tweak here, because it was a tight space to squeeze into after all. And, might as well try a burst there, just to get the front of the boat lined up properly without mucking around. Then, wouldn’t a decent blast of the bow-thruster with the helm over unglue us nicely from the side of the lock? Well, yes.

  After a while I could no longer imagine a world without bow-thrusters. I pitied New Zealand boaties. They knew not what they did not have. I used ours all the time. When it expired I grieved, giving dismal tweaks of the lever every now and then as if trying to resuscitate a pet I could not quite believe had dropped off the perch.