Paray-le-Monial was on the pilgrimage circuit.
Here, on 27 December 1673, after a feast which must have been of the kind alarming to neighbours, a nun reported that a vision of Jesus had allowed her to rest her head on his beating heart then urged her to go and tell everyone. No one could refuse an offer like that, so she did, to the great benefit of both herself and the town.
She was promoted to saint.
Paray-le-Monial became famous.
But today the town lay empty as a priest’s promise, mercifully free of the thousands of pilgrims who, centuries after the nun had cocked an ear to the holy breast, still flocked to the scene.
We could see where they’d been. Ranks of white tents were formed up like a crusader’s encampment. Great marquees where pilgrims queued to be fed stood empty. The open-air chapel was taken over by pigeons which, like the pilgrims perhaps, searched for crumbs. Ranks of seats which could have accommodated the crowd at a Super 14 game were deserted.
The chapel where the sainted nun held sway accommodated only tourists cloaked with reverence over their shorts. In the grotto where some overwrought sculptor had given the Madonna’s hand such a flourish she seemed to be flipping the bird to worshippers, there was no one but us.
Beggars were all over the town. Perhaps they’d come to sack and stayed to prey. Pilgrims chastened by such close contact with the Son of God’s organ were evidently a soft touch.
Yet piety had its rewards for dilettantes such as us. Public toilets were everywhere, the tourist office offered free wi-fi, and great baskets of flowers adorned bridges, seats, railings, streets, in fact anything that could wear a begonia or a petunia and not look overdressed.
We sat on the deck, sipped wine and watched a duck swim by with nine ducklings in tow. That was a record. Even the ducks seemed to prosper in Paray-le-Monial. The various French onlookers who always came down to ports for a look at the boats threw baguettes to the duck and her nine offspring. Then they studied our bottle and smiled.
The French loved watching you tipping a bottle. They wished you bonne soirée. They were even happier when they saw you having lunch. They studied the food. They wished you bon appétit, and bonne journée, m’sieur-dame, a handy abbreviation designed to overcome the difficulty of fitting in the long version if you were, say, passing each other at a brisk pace.
For Paray was a fine town. It was both expansive and expensive, its shops selling the kind of gear usually only found in much bigger towns: Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Armani, Prada. Like the beggars, and the ducks, les négociants did well out of pilgrims, and the Basilica now faced stiff competition from Leclercs, the giant supermarket operators.
We biked up a hill to the big new shopping mall and wondered, again, why in France all new shopping developments were always uphill. And why was there a sign on a roundabout announcing ‘Bad Durkheim, 590km?’ I looked it up: Bad Durkheim was on the German wine trail but otherwise undistinguished. Why did citizens of Paray-le-Monial need to know its whereabouts? In that town, not only the Almighty moved in mysterious ways.
Scepticism did me no good at all. The weather stopped messing around. As we moved on, the heavens opened. Within minutes we were drenched. Both of us wore winter gear, poly undershirts, fleece jackets, heavy parkas, and still we froze.
Each new squall arrived in a great gust, usually when we were entering a lock or in the middle of some tricky manoeuvre best executed in complete stillness rather than being picked up bodily and thrown around. The lock-keepers shuffled out of small, comfortless sheds beside their locks, gesturing despairingly at the sky.
Sally went inside, sensibly, and emerged only when we arrived at locks.
But I liked steering from the outside wheel rather than the inside one. The helm on the after-deck gave a better view, which included whatever the sky threw at me. Today, that was quite a lot.
My wide-brimmed hat gave me the illusion of being dry at first. Then its brim began to leak. In the end it gave up the struggle and turned downwards like a Roman emperor’s thumb.
At exactly the same moment my parka, donated to me by my son Simon, who had in turn been given it free by a vodka company at a skiing event, went back to its roots and became a soak. To say I was miserable would hardly diminish the trials of such fellow-sufferers as Captain Oates, although we’d both foolishly stepped outside for a while.
In the Johanna Grietje ahead I could see Glenn and Trish reclining comfortably in their snug wheelhouse, occasionally sucking on hot coffee, emerging at the locks with the wide breezy smiles of dry people observing wet ones.
They called, ‘Why don’t you go inside?’ Sally called, ‘Why don’t you come inside?’
Why didn’t I? Hair-shirt stubbornness, the notion that you can’t go boating without getting wet, the idea that you take the rough with the smooth, for otherwise how could you tell one from the other, the base fear of being a wuss; in short, male stupidity.
I hate wet clothes. Watching kids swimming in jeans makes me grit my teeth as if someone were screeching fingernails on glass, not because they might drown, but worse, because I can feel the soaking things clinging to my own legs back on shore, stiff and dripping and completely horrible.
The water dripped through my hat, gushed through my parka, soaked my trusty Earth Sea Sky fleece and hit pay-dirt: quivering epidermis. My skin promptly reported to my brain that the very worst had happened and everything lying between it and the elements was now thoroughly wet.
I slunk inside and dripped gloomily on the carpet. Sally put down a towel, without a word.
We passed through Digoin. Sure enough, it was crowded. A notice at the entrance to the Canal de Roanne à Digoin announced that it was closed for repairs. The stories were true.
We stopped at Pierrefitte. A bright old man from York emerged from his cheerful barge. He’d been living in it, in France, with his wife, for eleven years.
Why? we asked.
The bright old man turned dark. The geraniums on his barge drooped. Because, he said, there was nothing in the United Kingdom for them. ‘It’s no good now,’ he said. ‘Everything’s a rip-off. It costs too much to live there. We can afford to live here, and we like the life.’
By now we were used to ageing British expats living on boats and grizzling about home. Curiously, given that Margaret Thatcher had executed the reforms which rendered their home uninhabitable, most of them were Thatcherites. Their ideas had stalled in the eighties, and grown hairy, like a Southland policeman’s moustache.
We wondered what would happen to the couple from York when one of them died. Would he or she cling on alone? How would the survivor survive? Creatures of their home town fable, they’d marched up to the top of the hill, and marched down again, and now there was nowhere left to go. Not even Pierrefitte, we thought.
The old château near what used to be the town centre was fine, but looked barely maintained; the gatehouse, now a garage, sat broken-windowed, the magnificent gates locked with rusty chains. Some second-storey shutters were open, revealing a nursery with a row of teddy-bears and dolls.
It was a gently mouldering paradise. The houses in many French villages were shuttered, secret, silent, impenetrable to outsiders and tourists alike, hoarding the French way of life like museums, forever mysterious. Pierrefitte seemed to be on its uppers, the boulangerie closed, the bar up for sale, the only store inhabited by a fierce species of shop-keeper not conducive to human life.
Diou was better. A cruiser arrived, full of varnished wood and white leather, captained by a handsome Dutchman flying a Swiss flag. He vectored into the women with all systems locked on. He boasted of his house in Monte Carlo, of his wealth, of the new hotels he was building in Vietnam.
‘I have to go now,’ he said. ‘I must chill the wine for dinner.’
When he’d gone I foolishly noted that his boat was rather small, exposing myself to much female jeering. The New Zealand blokes voted him a champion bull-shitter. Sally and Trish thought him charming.
Sally wanted to see the new stained glass in the chapel but an old monk guarding the gate refused to let us in. Instead he sold us fig and port jam. He turned around and bent over to pick it up from a stack. To my horror I found myself looking up his habit. Force of habit, I supposed. I could report that what old monks wore beneath their robes was not worth reporting, although he sported a fine pair of long woolly socks under his sandals.
I tried out my French on a younger monk. If we really wanted to see the chapel, he said, we could return at six p.m. and pray with them. Alternatively we could go to the flash new salle des expositions, through much exposed wood and white plaster, and watch a video on the monastic life.
The film showed monks getting up at three a.m. I may have been biased, but their day only seemed to get worse.
Next day it was clear that our own day was getting better. The sun came out. The clouds turned to silver. Grass sparkled, trees shook themselves like puppies and smiled. It was the kind of day when nothing could go wrong.
One of the lock-keepers spoke perfect English, probably to save himself from tortured conversations about the weather with people like us. He proved to be the unhappiest lock-keeper in all France. He’d moved to this remote place from Paris and although he was married he and his wife lived with his mother and father. When his parents moved from Paris to a house near his lock, he moved with them. This he regarded as just a fact of life if he was to get along in a world where jobs were scarce. ‘I had no choice.’ He did not elaborate and although I wanted to ask why, I did not.
‘Why are you in France?’ he asked.
‘Because we love it.’
‘I do not love it. I do not even like it.’
We left him morosely turning his handles and churned along the canal.
At first we thought we were being raced by a moorhen. Two tiny wings stuck out of the water. They kept pace ahead of our bow. Boy, that moorhen was determined, we told each other.
Slowly we closed in on it. The form took on a familiar shape.
It was not a bird. The wings were not wings. They were ears. They belonged to a tiny fawn.
We were horrified. We’d seen dead fawns drifting in the canals, along with dead rabbits, cats, dogs, a fox, even the water rat. Most had probably slipped into the canal and couldn’t climb its banks. The canal sides here were lined with steel, often for kilometres at a time, and the smooth vertical surface offered no hope of footholds for a panicking beast.
The walls were also very hard on a boat’s paint if a skipper got too close, but that seemed not to matter much as we tried to rescue the poor animal.
I sped up, passed it and nosed into the bank to cut it off. Clunk, went steel against steel. The fawn panicked. It all but climbed out of the water, sensed the escape route behind it and with huge effort, launched itself out and away. I tried again, with the same result.
I knew how quickly an exhausted fawn could die. Two had died in my arms back on the farm as I untangled them from fences. This one could have few reserves left. Perhaps it would find its way to a section of unlined bank, maybe on the same side its mother was no doubt hiding even now; climbing out on the wrong side would just be another death sentence.
Reluctantly we left the terrified creature to itself, just in time for the occupants of an English barge to round a corner, spot the fawn and give chase in the same forlorn spirit. Imagining the tiny thing slowly drowning cast a pall over the shiny morning.
For Beaulon was beautiful. Pierrefitte had been lovely too, but in a decadent sort of way, whereas Beaulon was the picture-book village. Its château was superb, with no sign of struggling owners. It sat pristine on perfect lawns. Fat frogs plopped into the water as we strolled the riverbank. The lock-keeper dead-headed his petunias. Pale green spiky plants like toetoes lined the canal. It was a tiny paradise. At any moment we expected Beatrix Potter to pop out, pluck the deer from the water and chastise us for spoiling the picture.
We dozed in the warm sunny afternoon, which turned into a scented evening. We watched old men playing boules, envying their easy companionship and sense of timeless community.
The night turned easily into a sunny morning as we set off for Decize.
The locks were alive with flowers, pink gladioli and paler pink dahlias, fiery geraniums and exuberant clumps of lavender. Wisteria was so in love with life it was well into a second flowering.
Four locks short of Decize we stopped. Clive worked here. Clive was on the list of English-speaking mechanics we carried next to our hearts. We tied beside a trim lawn and Glenn and I went searching for him.
We found him in a back room of the rental boat company he managed, having coffee and talking in animated French. He was long-haired and looked piratical, an appearance I hoped would not influence his bill.
Typically English, I thought.
His manicured companion watched through lowered lids and burst into a long reply with many complicated gestures. Typically French, I thought.
‘Vous êtes Clive?’ I ventured to the typical Englishman.
‘Non,’ he said.
Instead: ‘Je m’appelle Clive,’ replied the typical Frenchman. ‘I’m English. My friend here’ — he waved a hand — ‘is French. He speaks no English.’
I told Clive we’d heard he was an excellent mechanic, perhaps the best in all France. He repeated this to his friend. The friend laughed, not ironically I hoped.
Would Clive look at my bow-thruster? Clive frowned. Yes, he said, but not immediately, for he was very busy. Perhaps later in the afternoon.
We retreated to the boat and made coffee. Scarcely was it poured than Clive appeared. I’d forgotten the English insistence on appointments. We couldn’t expect him to down tools and come immediately even if he carried no tools to down. We had to give proper notice.
Now that the formalities had been observed, Clive warmed to the task. Coffee? He looked at his watch with a worried frown. Well, yes.
Clive told us about his life. He’d been in France for seven years. Ah, Trish guessed — correctly — a broken relationship.
He told us about it. He had another cup of coffee. Now he lived in Gannay-sur-Loire, a village not far from his work, but so quiet! A visitor would imagine it deserted. Clive lived there and often he imagined it deserted. Sally and Trish went into Gannay and returned saying the only sign of life was a funeral.
Worse, said Clive, there was one unattached woman in his age range — I guessed late thirties — for every fifteen unattached blokes. All the rest were either sixteen or sixty (a little indrawn breath here from the two women).
Gannay was inhabited entirely, said Clive, by generations of families. The town’s bar was like the lounge in a family home.
But Clive preferred it to England. He would never return there. His only family there now was his father, who lived in a town near Brighton. It cost $1000 to get there and back. Clive visited only once a year.
He put down his third cup of coffee. ‘Well,’ he said briskly, ‘can’t sit here talking all day. Let’s have a look at this bow-thruster.’
He picked up a box of tools and complicated instruments. He unscrewed this, tested that. He pulled, poked and prodded. He scratched his head.
‘There’s nothing wrong with it,’ he said.
‘Except that it doesn’t work,’ I said.
‘I reckon there must be something stuck in it outside,’ Clive said. ‘A stick or something.’
I looked at the canal. I wasn’t going to dive under that water, even for my bow-thruster.
Clive considered.
‘Let’s run it up the slipway,’ he said, pointing to a ramp. ‘We’ll be able to stand on the concrete and feel if there’s anything there.’
I thought of eleven tonnes of steel crunching onto concrete.
I thought of the bashi
ng the anti-fouling was going to get.
I thought of getting the boat off the slipway again.
I thought of having no bow-thruster for quite a long time.
‘OK,’ I said.
‘That bow-thruster looks just like a big starter motor to me,’ said Glenn.
‘That’s just what it is,’ said Clive. ‘A big starter motor.’
‘I had a Ford 10 once,’ said Glenn. ‘When the starter motor wouldn’t work I just belted it with a hammer.’
‘I was just about to suggest doing the same thing,’ said Clive.
He went into his shed and returned with a blacksmith’s hammer and a piece of wood.
He belted the bow-thruster. It started immediately, and never played up again.
Decize was an important canal town. It lay at the junction of the Canal Lateral à la Loire, along which we were travelling, and the Canal du Nivernais. The Loire River threaded through the junction, the whole thing forming a knot of waterways.
A wide port basin lay guarded by locks at either end. It was crowded, for this was both a popular stopping place and a rental boat base.
We looked at the jammed jetties. The Johanna Grietje was longer than the River Queen, but shallower, and squeezed into a space by a bank. For us, there didn’t seem enough room to park a Mini.
Suddenly we heard a familiar shout. Herman the German was waving at us from a pontoon.
We’d been tracking Herman, his wife and brother ever since Revin, he in his big converted barge, his brother in a cruiser as small as he was. We’d dubbed him Herman, of course, only because it rhymed. We never knew his real name, for our grasp of German and his of English ran only to the occasional word, one of which he used now.
‘Here,’ yelled Herman, pointing at a space big enough for a dinghy.
We were flattered. Herman was famous for being brusque. In Verdun a Dutchman had wanted to raft up to him on the crowded quay. Herman had turned him away. He had complained that the Dutchman would spoil his view. At least, that is what the Dutchman said.
Long Slow Affair of the Heart, A Page 20