Long Slow Affair of the Heart, A

by Ansley, Bruce

  But her boulangerie was closed. What’s more, it seemed to have been closed for a long time. Its windows were dusty. Perhaps Madame was now collecting her pension, Sally suggested. Or maybe she’d given way to rheumatism caused by exposure, and was sitting in front of a heater in a chenille dressing-gown instead. I could see Glenn felt life had lost a bit of its crust. But he was a stout fellow, and got over it.

  It did not take much to crowd La Chappelle. A peniche was loading logs of wood in front of two huge silos. An odd collection of boats took up the remaining moorings.

  One of them was a Dutch tjalk, original from its mast and bowsprit to the huge swivelling leeboards bolted to its sides. Its peeling varnish and old canvas covers fluttered in the breeze.

  The only place we could find to moor lay across the mouth of a disused dry dock. I tied to the steel of an old gantry. It shuddered precariously.

  A man arrived to help us. His name was Gus. He was an Englishman. He owned the tjalk. He also owned the big new house beside the canal, where he and his wife lived permanently.

  Gus looked and talked like a remittance man. He should have worn a cravat, although he did not. He doubled with laughter when he heard my name. ‘Bruce!’ he chortled. Monty Python has much to answer for in the antipodes. I told him the last Gus I’d met had four legs and mounted anything that came its way.

  When Gus got over this, he said ‘It’s a sort of club here, you see.’

  I did not. He started again. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘It’s nothing official. Do you want water? No? Good. There is none. If you want power, it will be three Euros (six dollars) for the night, and I’ll have to give you a receipt — the more unofficial it is, the more official the receipt has to look, if you see what I mean.’

  Again, I did not. I was mystified. Gus gave up. ‘My wife Ruth will be over to see you shortly,’ he said, and left.

  I called after him. ‘My mooring line seems to be across your path here.’

  ‘Don’t worry old chap,’ he replied. ‘No one ever uses it.’

  Ruth appeared. She fell over the mooring line.

  ‘Oh dear,’ I said, as I helped her to her feet. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  ‘Oh, I’m always doing things like that,’ she said.

  She went back to her house and returned with a length of red plastic tape, the kind the police used around crime scenes. She arranged it around our mooring. She wrote a long, very official-looking receipt. The wind picked it up and deposited it in the mud at the bottom of the dry dock.

  ‘Just climb down and get it will you?’ she asked. ‘It’s perfectly safe.’

  I climbed down. I stepped onto mud. It sucked in my leg with a kind of starved gurgle.

  ‘Oh dear,’ she said. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  We were quits, although I thought the old country was ahead on points.

  A huge dog with the kind of crumpled face that advertises toilet paper lunged from the neighbouring boat and was stopped short by a length of rope on its collar. ‘It’s OK,’ said Ruth. ‘It’s friendly.’

  Remembering the mud, I wasn’t so sure. The animal’s French owner came over and let it off its rope to show me. The dog charged like a hippo. It knocked me over then slobbered over me. I hoped La Charité was worth it.

  Gus came back. ‘See that spot behind my house?’ he pointed to a rise. ‘That’s where Joan of Arc camped before she attacked the town.’

  La Charité grew around a priory built by monks on one of Europe’s main pilgrimage trails, and the church became the second-biggest in France, after Cluny’s, thus the third-largest Christian church in the world. It had been a wealthy place, so rich that the town and priory were protected by a huge wall defended by ten towers.

  The wall, and the winter, defeated Joan of Arc, but over the centuries the place was ruined anyway. The Nôtre-Dame church was restored later, and bits and pieces of the old priory too, and in 1998 was registered on UNESCO’s world heritage list.

  Off we went into town with a long list of instructions from Guy, and the old priory was worth it. It must have been vast, once; it was still big. We wandered along its alleyways, climbed twisty stairs, passed cells.

  But something else was going on. A bike race. It started after some of the interminable speeches French officials go in for on such occasions, while the riders preened.

  They raced round and round the town, headed by a man on a pale-blue Harley Davidson motorbike. A car cut him off as he tried to shunt it out of the riders’ way. He ran into it. Much argument followed.

  We watched from a café. The waitress served us coffee then marched up and down the pavement shouting to the riders: ‘Allez! Allez! Allez!’ In between laps she turned on pedestrians. ‘Allez!’ she shouted. A woman with a kitten draped around her neck like a stole promenaded up and back.

  We returned to the River Queen and found two people, Karen and Paul, wandering around the dry dock. She was a chef. He worked as a ship’s engineer, month on, month off, then he hurried home for dinner. ‘I’ve never had the same meal twice,’ he said. ‘She’s good in bed too.’

  She blushed. ‘Oh, you.’

  The two of them lived on their luxurious barge. They were thinking of buying the old dry dock and basing a marine engineering business there.

  We all drank too much wine. We wondered what Karen did for a whole month in France on her own. She spoke little French. They told us how cold it became in winter, how even the fog seemed to freeze, so then we wondered if we were doing the right thing, not leaving until mid-November.

  We sailed on, past mansions slumbering by the canal, and farms with so many outbuildings they looked like hamlets.

  In Herry we had dinner at Herry’s Bar, of course. I don’t think Humphrey Bogart would have recognised the place. We were ushered to the special dining room on a dais at the back. While the locals ate on the floor below, the four of us sat alone in a space as well-preserved and as little lived in as a Winton front room. Madame would not hear of us moving: we were her guests. So we sat regally, eating pizza.

  Trish talked of the sea and the beaches back home. Tears began rolling down Sally’s face. She longed for the clear water and golden beaches of the Bay. Trish and Glenn felt only the magic of France.

  Sally said, ‘If you follow your dreams you can lose your heart; everyone needs a place of the heart.’ Dreams are full of romance and beauty, or they would not be dreams. Beauty stands alone, but romance takes two. I felt my own dream dulling, cold breath on a mirror. I wondered whether it was a dream too far.

  I’d gone back to Fiordland a couple of years before. Officially I was writing a story on going as far south in New Zealand as you could go, then as far west.

  They were places few people ever saw. The weather could be terrifying, I wrote, and there were no shops. Really, though, I’d wanted to feel the magic of those lonely days when every cell pined for Sally.

  Bruce Connew, the Wellington photographer, shared the cost of hiring the fishing boat Argus taking us there. He wanted to photograph muttonbirds. Colin Gavan was the captain. He had a long face and long curly hair. The captain’s chair was done in tattered red velvet and when he sat on its shaky pedestal he looked like a Victorian rake on a bad night out. When the boat rolled the chair rocked and Gavan orbited around the wheel with his long curls shaking in the aureole from his smoke. He’d lost a leg after an oil rig accident and in his home port of Riverton they’d started calling him Collywobbles then shortened it to Wobbles in deference to the way he walked. He and his crew, Mark Eramiha, grooved along to Creedence Clearwater Revival.

  We set off down the east coast of Stewart Island. According to the weather forecast the barometer was falling like a stone but the mixture was too heady for worry, the beaches and bush forming an intricate coastline, cape pigeons and blue penguins circling the boat. The first great clouds of sooty shearwaters appeared, the titi or muttonbirds, dark on top with slashes of light beneath their thin wings, wheeling a few centimetres above the waves.

>   We sailed along a coastline where even the rocks had names: here the Sisters, there the Orphan; then Eramiha went up front with his torch picking up a black cliff streaked in foam as waves crashed against it with a sinister grumble then everything went quiet and we were in a narrow hallway cut out of the rock, in still water, picking around islets in the dark and coming to rest in a cove deep within Port Pegasus and just about to run off the end of New Zealand.

  In the morning the coast was different, rock smoothed by seas meeting their first land mass on the long roll from the Antarctic. South Cape appeared ahead. It was an anticlimax: a low headland, a lump of rock in the grey mist of morning.

  We threaded past the Titi Islands. The spell of the place settled on the boat. The tupari and dracophyllum scrabbled for a living in the peat. Wires for the gutbuckets carrying the muttonbird chicks’ innards to the sea in the short autumn season webbed the rocky faces.

  My father had loved muttonbirds but the greasy, fishy, rancid smell of them made me sick. The house would stink of muttonbirds for weeks after he’d return from a trip down south. To the southerners the stench enhanced the delicacy, like the aroma of vintage cheese. ‘Oh, I can feel the fat running down my chin,’ said Eramiha.

  In the morning’s calm the waves rolled gently against cliffs, perfect white fading to aqua then to deep-sea blue. The sun struck sheets of pale-grey rock on Gog and Magog on Stewart Island, giving them the glitter of snow.

  The Argus steamed northwest, towards the entrance to Foveaux Strait guarded by the mysterious Solander Islands.

  The southernmost Alps loomed, then reefs.

  A little to the north was West Cape, least remarkable of the capes marking the four points of the compass. At North Cape you can feel the spirits fly. East Cape looks innocent but is malevolent. South Cape has the vile temper of a small beast. West Cape was just a point on the map, another forested spur dropping into the sea amid ranks of headlands so similar that the westernmost point of the land was almost indistinguishable.

  The sea stilled and we were in Preservation Inlet. In this dark wilderness we nosed up the sound to a tiny cove. For me it was like coming home.

  The sun set down a winding silver channel lined with layer upon layer of headlands and islets and, as a change from blue cod, we ate crayfish with asparagus for dinner. I thought of Sally, the desperation and eagerness and hope of decades before. Connew sat on the boat’s rail and contemplated the wilderness. ‘What I’d really like,’ he said ‘is a soy latté.’

  I didn’t think much had changed. Love caressed and cut. We were both more bewildered than angry about what was happening to us over such a simple difference: I liked living on the canals, she did not. All those years, all that love, all at risk over a boat trip? Yet dissonance was turning into something fiercer. That night I slept in the front cabin, alone.

  But, as Gone with the Wind’s Scarlett O’Hara once observed in circumstances I thought not nearly as serious as my own — after all, what was a lost home, a dead child, and a truculent partner? — tomorrow was another day.

  So it was, for it started to rain. Mist curled through the vineyards. Rows of grapes appeared on a flowing hillside and vanished. It was like looking at the world through lace curtains rustling in a breeze. Sometimes the curtains opened to reveal the fabled town of Sancerre high above us on its hill, commanding the countryside.

  We passed under a bridge and ahead the Johanna Grietje turned sharply, its long, low hull angling across the canal. It disappeared into a hole in the bank. We followed.

  We slid under a low bridge and passed into another escape tunnel leading to a world of curious boats. Peniches, ancient vessels of no known origin, a fine old wooden cruiser dreaming of its hey-day in the fifties, all lined the banks, some of them works in progress, some like old actors resting.

  We passed a beautifully varnished cruiser and next to it a man covering his boat in sheets of clear corrugated plastic, turning the whole assembly into a floating garden shed.

  We were in St Thibault.

  The marina owner, François, operated a taxi shuttle service running up the hill to Sancerre. The rental boat crews took it. Even Sally and Trish did, for the hill was very steep. Over the centuries it had made whole armies work hard for conquests.

  Glenn and I biked, of course. Halfway up we wavered. Three-quarters of the way we wondered who’d want to conquer the place anyway. Up there, at last, we decided that armies marched on their stomachs and repaired to a café for a long rest.

  Sancerre was famous for its sauvignon blanc and fumé blanc. As South Islanders we were sauvignon blanc experts. We agreed that the French had made a worthy attempt at keeping up.

  Once, this place had commanded the countryside. It was sacked and the locals slaughtered in the great war of 1563. It was still open for sacking by tourists, but now locals did the slaughtering. We watched a haughty British quartet loading their BMW with cartons of wine then we went and bought a bottle each and sat on a seat overlooking the Burgundy country, fields and vineyards and villages gently laid on soft hills, the kind of picture we’d seen in children’s books but could never quite fit into New Zealand’s raw landscape.

  Then we flew down the hill on our bikes, yelling like little boys.

  In the dangerous hours of the early morning my cellphone rang. I thought about throwing it overboard; but it might have been important, so I picked it up instead. The caller said she was from an Auckland garage. Just a reminder, she said; my Mercedes Benz was booked for service tomorrow. I didn’t have a Mercedes Benz, I said, and I was not in Auckland, I was in France. Nice place, she said, pity about the car.

  Chatillon-sur-Loire lay six hours up the canal. We moored under trees. We climbed to the top of the hill to visit a kind of brocante supermarché. Not even Christchurch’s Supershed, that great hall of junk diverted from the city dump, could match this one.

  A rambling old warehouse was packed with tools, prams, books, glorious rubbish. We spent a happy hour there and bought nothing, of course, one of the characteristics of brocante being that it was too big and heavy to take home, except if you were Trish, whose fine eye could pick a gem.

  In Briare there was to be a huge vide grenier stretching for almost a kilometre along the canal bank. I liked some old photographs of the 1948 Tour de France, the riders with their young-old faces and their desperation. One mysterious picture showed a woman dressed to kill and looking as if she might, for she was holding a revolver as she embraced a cyclist whose patronising smile marked him as a winner; or perhaps he just hadn’t spotted the gun.

  Chatillon was pleasantly unremarkable.

  We stopped near two Canadians. They’d bought their boat in Holland, as we had, but unlike us had hired a broker to find it for them. It sounded as if the broker had seen them coming. The boat had been expensive. It cost them about $350,000. By the time they reached Belgium a few hundred kilometres away they were having major engine troubles.

  We planned a big night, for it was Sally’s birthday. I gave her a little red leather handbag I’d bought in Sancerre. She liked it. I made veal in a creamy shallot, garlic and thyme sauce. Glenn and Trish made a birthday cake with a candle which played ‘Happy Birthday’ when you lit it.

  The Canadians came over and stayed for dessert. They loved the life. He was an academic on a year’s leave; she’d stopped working in preparation for their future life on the waterways.

  They were astonished when Sally told them we’d sell the boat after only one year. I was only slightly less surprised, not so much because Sally was going public but because Glenn and Trish did not seem surprised at all. I thought of that commonplace about divorce, the way people could get there without really knowing how, or why. It was like ageing, perhaps: you didn’t notice you were getting older until something happened to make it obvious, such as discovering hair in all the wrong places.

  Why were we giving up canal life? asked the Canadians. Because Sally was homesick, said Trish.

  If onl
y that were completely true. Homesickness was simple. You could cope with homesick. It hung around like a headache and you fixed it with a dose of something interesting. Sally’s unhappiness had seized the common ground of decades and left a blank space. She felt alone and lonely, and for once, so did I. We retreated into the desolation of two people who once knew each other well and suddenly did not.

  We were sombre as we left for Briare next morning. It was a short trip of two hours. We’d booked our moorings, but even so we thought we’d better get there early, just in case. Briare was popular, although to reach its port on an old length of canal you had to turn off the main route and go through two sharp little locks, or three if your berth was inside the inner basin.

  The trip took us over the most beautiful aqueduct in all France. Lions threaded with serpents guarded its ends. Vines entwined its lampposts. Far below, the Loire glistered like gold then left us, winding away in the direction of Orléans until it was no more than a mind’s gleam. We wanted to stop for a while in the tight little harbour in the middle of such a splendid town and we did, for it was the weekend of the fourteenth of July, Bastille Day, and nothing moved.

  The cabin temperature rose to 42 degrees. We lay in our patches of shade panting like the fat black Labrador which sat on the bank, wagging its tail. A sign around its neck said, in three languages, ‘Do not feed me. I have a heart condition.’ Its body language said, ‘Ignore this sign. Feed me. I want to die happy.’

  I had a flat tyre on my bike and no one had a pump. The port captain told me there was a pump at the Champion supermarket. It was only a short walk away. Très facile, he said, which should have warned me, for the walk took thirty minutes and when I got there the pump was out of order, en panne, and when I got back the port captain produced a pump after all. Je suis désolé, he said, sorry.

  The wind blew softly through the flowers.

  Lamp posts carried so many blooms they looked like blossom trees. The little arched bridges all around us seemed bowed under their loads of colour, so thick that they seemed in danger of collapsing into one great kaleidoscope.