Herman’s wife was much more fun. She stopped for long conversations, especially with Sally, who hurdled language barriers as if they weren’t there. She understood what Herman’s wife was saying, and vice versa. And she let Herman’s dog be itself: a drooling, clumsy mutt.
Now Herman and his brother shoved boats here, pulled them there, then grabbed our lines and levered us in sideways before any of them could spring back.
‘Ho ho ho,’ said Herman, which exhausted his English, and we slapped each other on the back (which exhausted my German) then went our separate ways.
I made coffee.
Herman brought out a vast hunting horn and blasted a volley over the port.
A faint note sounded in reply.
In a little while another man appeared. The two were obviously old friends. They ran towards each other and hugged. The effect was rather like two beach balls in a stiff breeze, as even Herman’s paunch was eclipsed by his friend’s tribute to steins beyond count. The two vanished downstairs and soon we heard the happy clink of glasses.
So this was Decize, we thought, looking around. Beside us, high-rise apartments loomed over the countryside. Alongside those was a new-ish hospital whose architect had tried for something different and come up with a collection of swoops and boxes which may well have worked, from the inside.
On the other side was one of the huge supermarkets we’d come to rely on for everything from terrine de canard to diesel. The first we carried in heavy plastic bags which we’d bought and re-used dozens of times, for the French were wisely discouraging that confetti of plastic bags flung out by supermarkets back home.
The second we carted in a black twenty litre jerrycan which fitted neatly onto the carrier of my bike and made riding it interesting, for the front wheel tended to lift off the road and the whole collection wobbled in a crazy top-heavy fashion. That was the New Zealand way, though: better risk your life than pay another fifty cents a litre at the canal side.
Decize itself lay over the River Loire, on a hill, with its church at the centre and remnants of its old fortified wall dotted around. Green parks ranged alongside the river, where jaunty boaties tied their rental craft and young people lay in the sun.
It was the weekend, and Decize staged the biggest vide grenier (literally, clear the attic) we’d ever seen.
Trish was our expert on brocante, second-hand stuff, or junk, and the vide grenier. When she came into a town with one or the other, she’d point like a setter, and off we’d go to a brocante shop and scour piles of furniture, clothes, pots, pans, vases, plates, tools, posters, models, hats, pictures, washing machines, fishing gear, football boots, radios, calendars, motorbikes, windows, wheels, scythes.
We loved those dusty old sheds. Trish was expert at excavating stuff, nondescript junk until she delicately picked it out and it lay in her hand like treasure: a woman’s keepsakes poignant with tickets to balls; invitations to weddings; an old postcard whose sender had written of lost love in a fine, exact hand. In Montargis, where there was a hypermarché of junk, she bought a card of very old but perfect magenta buttons and a little album of photographs from a village concert in the fifties, each act carefully recorded in a single photograph on each page so that when you flipped through them quickly the album had the jerky movement of a silent movie.
In a vide grenier, people set up stalls in the town streets and Decize’s was le plus grand. Stalls upon stalls wound around every corner, filling streets and alleyways: hectares of old tools and bad paintings. They’d even set up restaurants in a local hall, for who could survive such a day without cafés? I fancied a post-war Mobylette moped, full of struts and curves, but couldn’t imagine how to get it home as hand-baggage.
Sally disappeared into the ocean of junk like a seal, emerging every now and then to frolic with some morsel before submerging again.
This time, she scored. She slithered through the crowd towards me waving a heavy, square-cut vase which looked like sea when you peered into its depths. ‘Murano,’ she said triumphantly. So it was: a fine piece from the Venetian island glassmakers. It cost $40. She bore it back to the boat with the air of a Viking looter, along with a white china dove, and fretted over the Miró print she’d left behind.
In the evening Alan and Lonnie came over for a drink. They were wine-makers from California, so they brought the drink. I shoved the supermarket wine out of sight, although together with a bottle of red Sancerre they had a good bottle of Maçon white which I later found on the supermarket shelves for $6 and almost kept the $5 rule afloat.
We’d met them days before; they were travelling in a hire boat with a former fireman called Vinnie. Lonnie had run an advertisement asking for someone to supply grapes to their small winery. Vinnie answered. He grew grapes for fun.
They all made cabernet sauvignon together and decided that if the wine was good, they could make a pretty fine holiday too. So they had, although the laughter floating from their boat in the evenings might have owed as much to the wine as friendship.
Hire boats, or bumper boats as the real boaties called them, provided much entertainment. They went aground, crashed into locks, wobbled and zig-zagged. That was all very well, as long as you were not doing any grounding, crashing, wobbling etc. yourself, for then not only would you be given yet another lesson in humility, but the hire boaters would rush across with help and advice.
Lethal or not, they were more popular in the locks than we were. They bought the lock-keepers’ wine, usually at a premium, and tipped the lockies handsomely.
How much did he tip? I asked Alan. Oh, he said, only a couple of Euros. The arithmetic was simple: at two Euros a lock, our lock bill for the trip would be way over 750Euros, or $1500, considerably more than the vignette, which was supposed to pay for everything in France.
So we tipped lockies only when they went out of their way, or were exceptionally helpful, which did not include these Burgundy éclusiers who merely went out of their way to fit the picture, being colourful and entertaining. One had an ornate organ which ground out music for gypsies to dance to even if there were only four Kiwis looking appreciative but tip-free. We voted him the showiest lockie in all France.
The hire boat crews bought the expensive wine from the vintners in the pretty villages, took the tours, filled the restaurants and cafés. We bought cheap wine from supermarkets, biked everywhere and ate on our boats. They were an important part of the local economy, we were as critical to the local economy as economists. And, they were endlessly entertaining.
We sat under a big tree beside the River Queen. Alan told me he’d voted for President George W. Bush not once, but twice. I fetched a bottle of supermarket wine. Wine-maker he might be, but I wasn’t going to waste good wine on a Bush voter. And I needed a drink. Lonnie was different. Unlike every other American we’d met on the waterways, she had voted Democrat, although she wasn’t sure she could vote for Hillary Clinton. Neither could Alan, but he wasn’t voting for the Republicans either. ‘It was a terrible mistake,’ he said, and repeated the mantra of former Bush supporters: ‘Iraq is such a mess.’
Sally wanted to talk about it but the subject seemed just too fraught. Yet the world turned on just such nice people as these. ‘I was wrong,’ Alan said, and laughed, as if he’d just bought a dodgy brand of soap at the supermarket.
Were these people blindfolded, earplugged and gagged? If deep in the South Pacific, in Christchurch New Zealand — in fact, everywhere in our home country — we’d figured Iraq was going to be such a mess even before Bush fired the first shot, why hadn’t Alan and his fellow converts? He was an intelligent man, although quantifiably not as bright as his wife.
I mulled over the mystery as we pulled the cork from another bottle of wine (Bordeaux, $5.60), and watched the anglers watching their lines, catching nothing as usual and occasionally passing a quiet remark or two.
‘Les poissons are not biting, Jacques.’
‘D’accord, Pierre, they never do.’
‘Then what are we d
oing here, Jacques?’
‘C’est une good question, Pierre.’
Fishermen remained a mystery to us.
They did not catch very much. When they did, the fish seemed to have been on their way home from a crèche.
We watched one man unhooking a creature the size of a Euro coin (although it would have cost far, far more to catch it) and sliding it into his bucket as if it were a marlin.
If they had caught something, and occasionally we saw very big fish in the canals, what might they have done with it? Hugh McKnight’s Cruising French Waterways listed a restaurant that served fish caught locally. We made a careful note of it, so that we would not make a mistake and go there. By now we knew what went into the canals. We would never swim in the water, but the fish had little option; they were fish, that’s what they did.
Yet every angler we saw seemed lost in happy contemplation of his, and very occasionally her, lot. One, two or even four rods were set up on little steel racks and their bright floats bobbed below, watched by their owners with the same fascination some people, late in the evening when the day is gone and the next one looms, considered the fire in the living room grate while they unwound the secret of life.
One poor fisherman the following day was doing just that.
Chapter Eleven
The day seemed to get up in the morning and dress for a special occasion. Its skirt flowed in the summer breeze and its lipstick was perfect. The trees and the flowers, the dragonflies and squirrels, the swans and the herons bowed to its passage.
They composed themselves into one magnificent tableau, in the midst of which an angler posed. His floral shirt enfolded his girth in its own garden of Eden. He sat under a striped umbrella on a little yellow folding stool, his varnished tackle box, his red bucket, his wicker lunch basket laid out beside him. His four rods pointed over the water as if ready to fire a ten-round salute.
Everything in the assemblage whispered tranquillity. The angler was at peace with human nature, the entire world.
Imagine his shock, then, when they conspired against him.
A large white hire boat popped out of the nearby lock. The skipper pulled into the bank in order, as it proved, to await his friends in two following hire boats. He ran aground. He did so with such speed that the boat reared out of the water and lay panting like a stranded whale.
He shouted. The engine roared. The propeller thrashed the water into a thickshake. His wife shrieked like a klaxon.
The angler started from his reverie. He got to his feet for a better look. He muttered imprecations. Merde, mad boaties.
The lock doors opened again and ejected the two other rental boats. They screeched to a halt beside their beached friends. Ropes snaked across the water. One slithered on to freedom, its handler having failed to secure it at either end.
Three engines now roared in unison, three propellers beat the water into submission, three crews squawked and ululated. Slowly the marooned vessel slid back into the canal with a noise signalling that not every bit of it would continue on down the canal that day. Then, with the mad gaiety of a dog loosed from its chain, it leapt off down the side of the canal.
The angler spied it bounding along.
‘Non, non, non,’ he cried.
‘Oui, oui, oui,’ responded every fibre of the boat’s being.
It scythed through the first rod without so much as a shiver. Rods two, three and four lined up for execution. Click, clonk, cluck, they went. ‘Putain,’ screamed the angler, who now took a dim view of human nature and indeed of the entire world. ‘Fou, bâtard, brute.’
The rental boat made its getaway, the crew ducking as if expecting bullets. Bits and pieces of fishing debris bobbed in its wake.
The fisherman observed them. He took off after the boat on foot. He waved. He screeched. He howled. He disappeared around a bend.
After quite a long time he returned, cutting a dismal figure.
He keened over the wreckage.
He spied us watching him from our mooring on the other side of the canal.
He identified us as members of the rogue breed.
He sprang along the bank. ‘Putain,’ he bawled. ‘Fou, bâtard, brute.’
We protested innocence.
He ignored us.
We left, quickly.
Wails chased us along the water, growing fainter until they drifted off into the trees and disappeared, and we were left alone with the hiss of a swan and the angry buzz of a dragonfly.
We were caught behind a fully-loaded peniche, so deep in the water only the bow and the wheelhouse seemed afloat. Passing on the narrow canals was fraught. Often the edges of canals hid rocks and pieces of concrete which could make a mess of your boat and even, in the case of an Australian vessel, stop it dead in its tracks. The Australian told us that for weeks afterwards he’d awake sweating in the small hours and could not sleep until he’d inspected his entire boat for leaks.
The peniche was going dead slow for fear of grounding, and in turn it had been caught behind l’éclusier’s Sunday lunch. Our funereal procession had arrived at his lock at 11.45 a.m. but the lock-keeper would not open up. Madame aboard the peniche explained his shortcomings to him but it made no difference. Lunch was lunch and that was that. We all sat there for an hour.
The day wore on.
A few locks on the lunchiest lockie in all France gave way to the slowest.
He was a pantomime of inaction. My new Olympus with its super-fast shutter speed struggled to catch him in action.
The peniche minded, but we did not. We were on the canals to go slow, not to water-ski. Besides, the non-start action took place against a cottage which would have graced any calendar, with a garden filled to overflowing with geraniums, dahlias, roses, gladioli and begonias. Obviously it absorbed most of the lockie’s energy and in our opinion he’d got his priorities right.
The mooring at Pagny which on the charts offered every facility proved hopeless. Half of it was decrepit and the other half occupied by a rental boat company whose staff forbade us to stop with that classic French gesture, a stiff forefinger prescribing a horizontal arc. So on we went to Le Guétin.
Le Guétin was reached by an aqueduct followed by two deep locks joined together.
On this fine Sunday afternoon we were the entertainment. Crowds on the footpath escorted us across the aqueduct leading into the town, the Johanna Grietje leading the parade, the River Queen behind. Then they lined the edges of the locks and waited for the show to begin.
This was a double lock. Both were deep, and made even deeper by their sides, which sloped from front to back. The lockie had to lower a hook on the end of a rope, pull up our own ropes and take them around a bollard. Even before the water level began to drop our mooring lines were at an acute angle, not best designed for holding the boats in one place. When you were the spectacle, you carried a heavy responsibility not to stuff up. Plenty could go wrong. With the two boats firmly enclosed in the arena, the crowd awaited the lions.
L’éclusier took on the demeanour of ringmaster. He strutted before the assembly. He explained what was going to happen with many a gesture, all of them closely studied by ourselves; a single chop and we’d, well, something would be said.
The crowd laughed and clapped. Far below we prayed like Paray pilgrims and, bless me, it worked: first one then the second lock dropped both boats to the bottom of a vast concrete pit then spewed us back into the canal. Everyone cheered mightily. Shutters clicked. They pointed to our silver ferns and shouted, All Blacks! We honked our horns, waved, laughed.
One of the men asked Sally to marry him. I thought I saw her consider the offer briefly but hell, after one husband, who needed another? Everyone had a good time.
There was a good mooring beside the canal and we tied up quickly, while we were still on a roll. The crowd followed us down to wish us bonne soirée, and as we pulled out cheese and wine, bon appétit too. Each following boat was announced to us by a cheer from the crowd. The gat
es would open in the way the curtain lifted on a stage, and a new crew would be ushered forth.
One of them was a hotel boat we’d first met in Fontenoy-le-Château months earlier, with its crew of three: Robin, a former IT consultant who’d thrown in his drawing-board and converted a rundown Luxemotor barge into the hotel boat; Keith the chef, and Jo the general hand. They were an eccentric crew, but their passengers liked the atmosphere. Robin had found a gap in the hotel boat market: his cruises, he claimed, cost about half the going rate. They took six or seven people at a time, depending on where Robin slept. Ever since Fontenoy we’d been running across them.
Now Jo came along for a drink. Was it a good life? Jo was ambivalent. Only if the punters were good sorts, she said. Mostly they were, but one of the guests on this trip had called her a chambermaid. Jo was offended; she was a university graduate. She’d been to New Zealand. She’d been going to marry a Taranaki farmer. It didn’t work out.
We wanted to stop at La Chappelle next day not because it was much of a place — it was not — but it was close to La Charité-sur-Loire, which was. Or at least, it was said to be. La Charité was a heritage town, pretty as every one of the millions of pictures taken of it.
We watched as the sun came up over the Loire, a perfect sphere in the mist. Shafts of gold pierced the silver river. An old Labrador wearing a red scarf hopped along the bank in little clouds of steam.
We passed through Marseilles-les-Aubigny on the way. We did not mean to keep going. We wanted to pause at Marseilles; for here, said Glenn, lived the most wonderful woman in all France, the one who presided over her boulangerie in a negligée.
I had a fair idea that women in negligées would be banned from New Zealand bakeries as health risks. Perhaps that was why French bread was better; and if it was not, who cared? Glenn had told us all about Madame la boulangère. We felt we should support her. We wanted to buy baguettes, and croissants, and pâté en croute, and éclairs and, oh, anything else she happened to be selling that day.
Long Slow Affair of the Heart, A Page 21