‘Hey, waaaaanker,’ came the call from its window. ‘How’s it hanging?’ The couple inside spent the evening tearfully reminiscing over the delights of Tauranga.
Corfu crossed my mind for a moment in St Léger. The silver fern flew from a rental boat. Its crew were from Tauranga also. They had standard Tauranga politics (‘Winston Peters had the right idea about immigration’) but otherwise they were nice people. They seemed so affluent, and comfortable, and happy. ‘I live this lovely life,’ one woman, Linda, said almost guiltily. Once more we heard that famous old expression, and thrilled to it like sheepdogs to a whistle: ‘You don’t know how lucky you are.’ Well, I thought, that showed how far New Zealand had come in thirty years: we do now.
Sandwiched between us and the Johanna Grietje lay another New Zealand hire boat. Silver ferns decorated this one front and back. These were devoted Kiwis without a doubt, although there was no sign of them. Two blokes appeared around five p.m. Evidently they’d had some sort of epiphany.
‘You missed something,’ they called to someone inside their boat. ‘You missed a real fuckin’ experience. It’s so fuckin’ beautiful.’ They vanished into their boat, which for the next hour seemed to gurgle like good stew. Something definitely was brewing or rather, had brewed. I heard a woman talking to Sally: ‘It’s been a bad day. We lost the sailing, we lost the rugby. The boys are back pissed and they’re both pissed off.’
Sally asked the scores. From deep inside their boat something stirred. ‘Where you from?’
‘Christchurch,’ said Sally then, just in case, ‘Crusader country.’
Silence for a moment. Then: ‘You’re not proper people. But I’ll tell you anyway. We lost the rugby. In the sailing they beat us by a few seconds.’
Tormented by scores we set off next morning behind Glenn and Trish. The canal seemed abandoned. The lock-keepers’ cottages lay deserted or barren. Hydraulics swung the lock gates open and closed, without so much as a hint of romance. At one a brown and white duck begged at the gate. Failing to score (we were out of bread) it swam into the lock with us, dived and emerged with a fish in its mouth. I didn’t think ducks fished. This one was a relief. Its cameo performance made up for the canal. Inside the locks little waterfalls sprang from fissures in the concrete, trickling over moss that somehow grew underwater for half its life.
Yet the villages along the way were fresh and lovely. In St Julien-sur-Dheune great slabs of stone marked the boundaries of the tiny port, as if a monastery had been dismembered for the purpose.
A fisherman threw old metal buckets into the canal and dredged its bottom, picking through the mud for worms. A man in a white shirt arrived at the boat and stood politely outside until I realised he wanted something: he was the lock-keeper, and he asked what time we wanted to leave in the morning? We told him we might leave sooner, for St Julien was very quiet.
A heron’s nest stuck out of a dead tree so haphazardly I could not imagine such a large animal landing in it without toppling the lot to the ground. A dead water rat floated by. Did water rats drown?
I studied the patterns of Burgundian roof tiles. Diamonds, crosses, checks in gold and deep Burgundy red and green. A canal museum just outside the village featured a peniche, high and dry. Faded signs announced lost enterprises.
But the church was still alive. Inside, a painted blue sea floated around its walls, bright as a Pacific island. A youthful bearded Jesus in what might have been a lava-lava laid out loaves and fishes. The walls were the colour of sun. It lacked only a barbecue. Fresh flowers sat on white lace, smelling of community, and intimacy. Sally discovered more of that when she walked around the back of the church, into a grassy churchyard enclosed by stone walls.
A young couple were making love. The girl stared at the sky while the boy pumped away. Neither saw her and she stayed for a moment, intrigued as much by their confidence that no one would come to church on a Sunday as by their age, for St Julien seemed some way from the font of youth.
So we left St Julien, and went on up to the summit as the canal crossed the first of three ranges on the journey at Montchanin. It was a beautiful stretch of canal. Purple and yellow flowers lined the banks. The sky was clear blue. Then black thunderstorms flicked lightning and rain, and we were both drenched and hot.
My cellphone rang in the small hours of the morning. ‘Look, I’ve told you before …’ carped a Kiwi voice. Still, something was to be said for these wrong numbers winged to France. They cost the callers heaps.
Chapter Ten
Montchanin on Sunday was rather like Upper Hutt on the Sabbath: a little depressing and almost completely shut. The chart showed this to be a mooring, but its bollards had a grassy, unused look about them, as if someone had found them lying about and used them for garden sculptures.
We would not have stopped in Montchanin either, but we were on a mission. The River Queen’s bow-thruster was still not working. We needed a mechanic.
Finding one was not an easy job. The French had plenty of diesel engines. Diesels powered trucks, tractors, combine harvesters, peniches, the smallest of cars. We wished they’d make a tiny version of the mopeds beloved of French youth, painstakingly tuned to wreck an eardrum at five hundred metres.
All of those engines should have equalled lots of mechanics. Yet mechanics were notoriously difficult to track down on canals.
Explaining the problem was trouble enough. The Dutch had warned us that we should get anything that needed to be fixed seen to before we left Holland. ‘In France it is hopeless,’ they said.
Our ship’s surveyor had told us of taking his boat to France and running his batteries flat. It had taken him a night and a day to persuade a French mechanic that what he needed was a jump start; ‘How do you say that in French?’ he asked. I did not know. How did you say ‘bow-thruster’, for that matter?
For no apparent reason the engine on the Johanna Grietje occasionally sped up, and as engines do, it usually chose to misbehave at the most inconvenient moment, such as entering a lock. Then it was best to slow down rather than race towards a chunk of ironmongery expressly designed to emerge from such contests intact. Several mechanics had investigated and all of them had pronounced themselves, in a variety of languages, defeated.
After one troublesome patch, Glenn and Trish had summoned their resident English expert in St Jean de Losne. He was not an engineer, but he’d arranged for a French mechanic to inspect the engine, and explained the problem to him in a language he could understand: French. The mechanic dived into the engine room, rummaged around for a while and surfaced declaring the engine irredeemably stuffed.
This was bad news and Glenn and Trish were inclined to be glum.
Then the Englishman brought his thirty-year experience of such affairs to bear.
Ah, non, he said, the French mechanic owned an identical engine. He desired to sell it. In fact, he wanted to sell it to Glenn who, however, had no need of a new engine; his own suffered only a minor malaise.
Not all of us were lucky enough to have such a sound adviser as the Englishman on call. Instead, we carried lists of English-speaking mechanics to be found on the canals, with phone numbers, and assessments of their capabilities (‘good mechanic’, ‘will travel’, ‘never stops talking’, ‘charges like a horny ram’, etc.).
All of them had washed up in France for reasons of their own. We found them to range from different to eccentric. They had one thing in common, however: they were all creatures of patronage. If you found a good one you cuddled him to your bosom like a hot-water bottle on a July night in Ophir.
One of the mechanics on the list lived at Montchanin. His name was Jeff. Trish had heard he was very good. Others seemed to agree. ‘Tout le monde cherche Jeff,’ said l’éclusier, when he understood our mission in Montchanin.
Everyone might seek Jeff, but not all of us found him.
We scaled a steep, grassy bank to the road above our mooring. Jeff’s address lay in an old inlet accommodating a flotilla of boats
, most of them shabby, some apparently dead. We passed a rumpty barge, a flaking cruiser, a few sad vessels of no known species.
We threaded through ancient caravans and portable cabins, some of them with clothes on the line and children’s toys outside. This place would definitely be visited by social services back home, I thought. Junk lay everywhere.
We came to a house whose fetid depths accommodated engine parts and lots of grease.
I knocked. No one came. I knocked harder.
We heard shuffling deep within, as if we’d prodded something, perhaps a creature that had found a nice dark and smelly place to hibernate, or die of its wounds.
An Englishman appeared. He looked at us suspiciously, as if we were tax inspectors, or immigration officials. He denied being Jeff. He disowned any knowledge of Jeff.
A second Englishman crept out, blinking at the light. He wasn’t Jeff either, he said. Well yes, Jeff did exist. But he wasn’t home.
Now he began to evince that enthusiasm we recognised as a prelude to discouraging news. Jeff was on holiday. He would not be back for a week. At least.
The man warmed to his theme. Jeff might be a lot longer. In fact, he might stay where he was. Where was that? The man wasn’t saying, but his smirk implied a lot of sun and not many clothes.
No, he knew of no one within hundreds of kilometres who could fix my bow-thruster. Jeff alone was my man. No, he could not give me his mobile number. His tone suggested that I’d only use it to make obscene calls.
But, I said, the man was a mechanic, wasn’t he? In business?
‘Jeff,’ he declared, now with immense satisfaction, ‘keeps very much to himself these days.’
‘I reckon he’s buried in the garden,’ said Glenn as we walked away. Trish said that anyway, Jeff always looked to her as if he had Asperger’s. I said it looked to me as if his mates had Tourette’s.
Only the bow-thruster remained silent.
Temporarily defeated, we descended the other side of the hill to Montceau-des-Mines.
The countryside fell softly. When I dreamed of canal boating, wafting gentle as a feather on gleaming waters, and saw in my sleep the delicious mixture of spires and stones and green, green depths, I might have awoken in the canals around Montceau.
Yes, the locks were being converted to hydraulics. When each became automated its soul fled, as if it had died. But the remaining mechanically-operated gates were opened and closed by huge wheels, like a ship’s. You yanked the spokes, pulling ancient chains whose grease seized its chance to see more of the world by transferring itself to any parts of your person which had strayed too close.
They were mediaeval but engaging. The lock-keepers were cheerful as their cottages. One was helped by his young sons. Glenn tipped them cans of Coke. Perhaps the French will declare a national day of mourning when progress overtakes the last of the mechanical locks.
Montceau had been, of course, a mining town, and everyone from Nightcaps to Waihi knows what that meant. Mining had kicked the guts out of the place, then abandoned it.
Montceau should have been stuffed, but was not. It had refused to lie down. Now it was a working town, if not an elegant one.
The main street was lively. It ran to an Otago rugby shop selling clothes with Māori motifs. Māori were sparser than mines in Montceau. Still, Māori art was fashionable. Robbie Williams sported it on various parts of his body. Terry Darlington prepared for the canal journey he recorded in his book Narrow Dog to Carcassonne by getting a Māori tattoo on his arm. He wanted it to mean he was well above average in sexual prowess and fortunately the British tattooist must have been proficient in Māori, for he said that was exactly what his tattoo meant.
I found something even more useful in Montceau. Unusually, the port had wi-fi. You might say, what did you expect? This after all was rural France, where even in the sixties people were bathing in basins. But when I returned to New Zealand I found that Takaka in Golden Bay, a lot smaller than Montceau, had five public internet places and I could hook up to a wi-fi network in my remote inlet. Probably they were bathing in basins in Takaka in the sixties, too, that being the kind of lifestyle alternative many of the locals then preferred.
In fact, the internet was not the channel of preference for canal news. Canal boaters preferred gossip. Gossip was much more interesting. Ports were always full of it. The French were getting tough on boaties’ driving licences. The VNF, the French waterways’ managers, were closing such and such a lock and the canals were blocked. Jean and Brian had done this, or that. Brian had hit that, or this. Jean had put laxative in the soup, or Brian had gone off for a sex change operation.
It didn’t matter how much was true. The joy was in the telling, and listening, and re-telling. It was the currency of canals. The more you had to tell, the richer you were. If you were the first in with a story, you could take the throne, until someone else broke another news flash and deposed you.
We’d scarcely tied up than a Dane, his face red with excitement, hastened over. Had we heard? No. The red deepened to magenta.
One side of the Canal de Roanne à Digoin, the short no-exit length of waterway which ran off from the canal we were on and headed south, had fallen down. The water had drained out.
A friend of his had awoken to find his beautiful boat stranded on the mud bottom. He would have to remain there until the canal was repaired and refilled. God knew how long that would take. The VNF evidently did not. They said a few weeks. A few weeks? Phew! The French would not even have finished talking about it by then, much less organised the machinery. Meanwhile boats were trapped in Roanne, at the end of this short canal, a favourite wintering-over spot. Were we going to stop in Digoin? Some chance! Digoin was full of boats that had been on their way to Roanne when this disaster overtook them all.
By the time he’d finished he was thoroughly expansive. He had just set forth after two years living in Paris. He’d loved it. And now this! Could anything be finer?
I began to wonder if we should move, immediately, although we were nowhere near the damaged canal, Digoin was still eighteen locks away, and Montceau itself had only ten boats in its large port. But we must be sitting ducks, mustn’t we?
The Dane looked at the sky. He said, ‘It’s going to rain.’
It did. And the side of the Canal de Roanne à Digoin had indeed fallen out. Others soon rushed to tell us the same news, just as we hastened straight over to Glenn and Trish with the tidings. Everyone now knew someone who had been trapped by the disaster, although some played a trump by knowing people who had just escaped it.
Poor Montceau. It seemed depressed by the news, for now Roanne was all the go. In the market beside the port people huddled under the awnings in the wet. Never rained but it poured.
That night Karen and Chris came over for a drink. They were both from the United States. Karen looked at us expectantly. She said, ‘Perhaps you recognise me.’
Perhaps we did. We’d seen her often enough before, a blonde woman in her fifties wearing tight white pants and inhabiting the sundeck of a large, expensive boat. Lots of them were to be found looking like their partners: sleek, a little lost, slightly irascible, as if life had treated them so well they could not believe it had thrown such a curly one as age.
‘I was on the news in New Zealand,’ Karen said. ‘In nineteen seventy-six. I was cycling around the world with my husband. We were on our honeymoon.’
We looked at Chris. He must have put on a bit of weight.
‘Not him,’ said Karen. ‘My first husband was murdered.’
‘Well, not …’ said Chris.
‘The guy’s doing life for it,’ Karen interrupted firmly.
Chris subsided. I sympathised. You couldn’t compete with a former husband like that.
Much later I looked them up. Round-the-world cyclists in 1976 were Americans Jack and Karen Lambie, who had circumnavigated on a tandem, on their honeymoon. Jack had died some seven years ago, although the cause of death was not specified. He’
d been a pioneer hang-glider pilot.
Chris, however, was in the fire safety business. They spent four months in France, the rest of the year in Los Angeles, and as far as I could determine no time at all on bikes, probably to Chris’s great relief.
Like many Americans they wondered about the hostility they’d encountered in France. Names would never hurt them, the name-callers being misguided, but those sticks and stones might indeed break their bones, and some had had rocks thrown at them.
They seemed puzzled. We were puzzled that they seemed puzzled. Karen said she could never vote for Hillary Clinton, although we did not discover whether that was because Clinton was a Democrat, or a woman, or just Hillary. Probably they were Republicans, we decided, like every American but one we met on the canals. Both of them were disparaging about President Bush, but every American we met reckoned Bush had been a disaster. Why had they voted for him? God knew. Yes He did, really.
Perhaps talking about Bush soured our mood, but we were both sombre that night. Sally said she wished she was somewhere else, such as Brittany. Let’s try and make this work first, I said. I am, she said. Yeah, right, I said. I said ten positive things yesterday, she said. I only counted six, I said. It was a mistake to come, she said. Yes, I said, I think it was. Yet I couldn’t see why. I’d imagined the journey as beautiful, and romantic, and gentle, and perhaps that was the trouble; when those things go wrong who can fix them? I should have thought more about what could be fixed, stopped in a pretty town, set a table under the trees where we could talk and laugh and watch the world go by rather than having it watch us. Instead I thought about writing a manual on how to live in boats and save your marriage, but I didn’t know how it would end.
It was still raining when we set out next day for Paray-le-Monial but Montceau held one last delight. To leave, we had to pass under two lifting bridges. The bridge-keepers stopped the traffic and huge, shiny hydraulic rams hoisted the bridges into the sky — and Montceau had painted its drawbridges mauve and purple. They opened before us like rainbows.
Long Slow Affair of the Heart, A Page 19