We could hop on the Métro at the nearby station and stroll anywhere in Paris, and we did. One of the Paris markets was two minutes’ walk away. We bought big red prawns and peaches, and bottles of wine whose labels were torn and disfigured, covered in dust as if they’d lain in a cellar for half a century. Much discussion between buyers and sellers flowed, little understood by the eavesdropper moi. I picked a bottle at random. I can report no more than it was red.
We became strollers, les flâneurs. All of this cost $56 a night. It was the dearest mooring in France, in both senses, and the cheapest way we knew of staying in Paris without joining the tent encampments of homeless along the Seine. We spent hours in the Horseshoe Bar in the Marais watching the world go by at full tilt, eating the canapés of ham and olives and avocado and talking about nothing very much. Glenn and Trish left to sail down the Marne River then the Canal de la Marne to the Saône River and back to St Jean de Losne where they were leaving their boat for the winter. They loved life on the canals so much they were framing their future around it. They offered nothing but support, forming a solid substance we leaned against. The day they left I thought the filthy old lock was gurgling even more than usual. The Arsenal seemed dead without their laughter, and now Sally and I were without buffers.
We went down to our favourite bar on the Rue du Lappe, a few minutes’ walk from the Arsenal in a less fashionable part of town, at least for tourists. The barman saw us coming, filled two glasses the size of mugs with rich red Bordeaux, and had them waiting by the time we’d found a seat. Happy hour, he said, 4 Euros ($8) a go.
The tiny bar was always crowded, smoky, noisy, friendly. They squeezed up to make room for us to watch France play England. We got marks for being New Zealanders. We were the favourites for le World Cup. We owned the secret of life. I tried to live up to it, making knowing remarks about tackling and rucks and the ref’s bullshit. Bullshit, they agreed, and everyone laughed. La France had not the chance of a meringue in a maul, they said. They were playing badly.
There was a pause. Wait, said our companion at the next table. Wait. A huge long-haired man ran onto the field. Any number of old Biblical epics could have used his stern beard and fierce eyes. A tatt peeped below his shorts. The bar was delirious. C’est le bear! they shouted. C’est le caveman. It was the first we’d seen of Sebastien Chabal. He scored the winning try. Drinks were on the house.
Our son Simon and his partner Sarah came over from London for a weekend and when they left we felt dark in the city of light. We went aboard the Australian boat nearby. The owner, a retired doctor, lived aboard with a couple of nurses. It used to be a partnership boat, he said, but one partner died, one divorced, one went to jail and one went bankrupt. He didn’t say which partner he was, but he was the sole survivor. His boat had sunk five times, he said with considerable pride, and he pointed to brand-new carpet as evidence of the latest misfortune.
On the wide stone walkways other boat-owners were taking their cats for walks, on leads.
Sally loved staying in one place, especially when the place was Paris. She devised a Le Corbusier tour of her favourite architect’s work in the city, putting together a circuit of buildings she wanted to see. Off we went on our bikes. French drivers ran true to form: they treated us with respect and courtesy, and never honked once.
First on the list was a Salvation Army hostel buried deep in a street of tenements. The concierge welcomed us. We made a change from the flow of African refugees, he said. Himself, his father was Spanish and his mother Moroccan. He would visit us in New Zealand at the earliest opportunity, he said, and he must have our address.
He was proud of his building. He showed us the offices, and the cafeteria. Sally asked if Le Corbusier had also designed the stylish seats. No, he said, they were for Africans. Sally tried again. She pointed to the architect’s name on the commemoration plaque. Ah, he said. He’d never noticed that before. Le Corbusier? Was he French? His workaday life of stress and wreckage had no room for the finer points of architecture. The architect probably would have approved.
Chastened, we went to an artist’s studio with a flaking facade and two Japanese students who evidently got sick of just looking from the outside. They rang the bell, took fright and fled like naughty kids, leaving us to take the rap. There was no response from within.
Then another set of studios, like a wedge, in a private street full of the prettiest houses I’d ever seen; and the Brazilian students’ accommodation at the International University, painted in bright primary colours with an attached house Sally photographed from every angle in case she could ever replicate it back home.
We saw the Eiffel Tower from la Place de Mexico near a Le Corbusier house. The tower was perfectly framed at the end of a street, for Paris knows the secret of space. From there it looked clean and pure. The winding line of tourists below it was invisible.
In the bar in the Rue du Lappe that night we drank a couple of buckets of red wine then went next door for a Thai meal.
The weeks went by happily enough although in the end we knew little more about Paris. How did you unlock a city like this? You did not. Adam Gopnik, author of Paris to the Moon still floated on its surface after five years and a small son, children being the best way we knew of getting under a place’s skin. In the end, though, I didn’t care very much; we lolled in the beauty, thawed in its warmth.
I could live on a boat forever. Perhaps I’d have to. Ashore, I hated small rooms, little houses, things to trip over. On a boat I loved them all: the order, the easy way one thing flowed into the next — the spartan order of the deck into the glow of cabins below — the neatness, the place for everything and everything in its place. I could lie in bed and admire the joinery, the way the designer had fitted everything in, the sheen of wood in the yellow light.
Sally simply thought it small. She needed to step out of the boat, feel the grass and trees around her, go into town and buy food without having to ask the way.
I’d thought seriously about selling the boat when we reached St Jean de Losne. She’d thought about flying home, but knew that if she did, I would be stranded without a crew. So she’d persevered, and I’d hoped that when we reached St Jean de Losne and our friends and their contagious love of the canals it would get better. It did, for a while.
Sally loved some of the towns and cities: Verdun, Gray, Fontenoy-le-Château, Briare, Montargis, Moret-sur-Loing, Paris. But it wasn’t enough, and we lopped off the second year of our planned life on the canals as you’d prune a diseased limb. We sold the boat to a group of New Zealanders who were to take it over when we laid it up for the winter.
Sally said, ‘If you think I’m coming out of this with any sense of righteousness, or victory, you’re wrong. I have nothing but a sense of failure. I wish we hadn’t done this. It’s just too hard. But that’s what they said about childbirth. I hope next year I’ll look back on the bits I liked, living in Holland, the villages, friends, being with Glenn and Trish and Simon and Sarah, Paris.’
Later, she said she thought the rest of the trip might be salvageable. If she thought so, I said, I’d work hard at it. The trip might be salvageable, she said.
We left Paris as summer ended. We watched jousting at St Mammes, where peniches were drawn up waiting for work in ranks ranging from hopeful on the outside to hopeless on the inside.
Two opposing crews wearing black and yellow shirts and looking like bumblebees planted their most stalwart members in body armour in the bows of punts, one red, one blue. The jousters mounted platforms, brandished their poles and struck poses while their mates made chicken noises from the bank and girlfriends called for care. Then the two boats revved their outboard motors and belted towards each other and the knights levelled their poles. To much shouting (Allez!) each set about knocking the other from his perch.
This was serious business. St Mammes on Sunday was quieter than Bulls and this was not only the best game in town, it was the only one. No one laughed except me and soon, not
even me.
Once 24,000 vessels a year had passed through this town, most of them the smaller peniches. But other forms of river transport, including giant bulk carriers, had changed all that. At last count, several years before, the number was down to 16,000, only 6,700 of them peniches.
George owned the boat tied next door. He was an ex-policeman from Liverpool. He quit the force, couldn’t get a job, went to university, got a psychology degree, became a hypnotherapist and was waiting for his wife to join him in taking his yacht to the Mediterranean where he hoped to offer jaded executives sailing cruises with therapy thrown in.
George was mild and surprisingly liberal for an ex-cop but yes, fed up with the UK. It was too hard to live there he said, the taxes, the crime, the government he once supported but which now disgusted him because it had changed nothing and because it was shedding nurses from hospitals and his wife was a nurse.
We went back to Moret-sur-Loing for a few weeks. Red squirrels chased each other through copper trees. Two of our oldest friends, Anne and David McPhail, still waving from the shore decades after they’d farewelled me at Taiaroa Head, joined us there.
An odd community of expats gathered. George and Toby arrived. They intrigued me with their air of completeness. They met when they were very young, they’d been married for around half a century. For years they’d lived between the Bahamas and France. They met each other’s needs, they were physically able, charming, made friends easily. Their visits home were brief. They seemed to have less need of friends and family, the weft and weave of a community or neighbourhood than, say, we did.
But Roger and Jenny needed community. They were taking their sailing catamaran home to England after three years sailing around the Mediterranean. They lived in a seventeenth-century house in a little village in Kent. Roger had been in the oil business. They’d been well-off. But he’d been made redundant in his early fifties. He’d gone inside his house and had scarcely emerged for eighteen months. He’d thought that everyone knew, everyone would laugh at him.
They were very British, almost caricatures. He was the son of a naval officer and had inherited the manner. She, Hobbit-like, spoke with the chopping sound of a motor mower, he with that English drawl you could tie knots in.
We walked along the grassy riverbank, past families picnicking and fishing in the evening quiet. A little restaurant was built into the old town wall beside a tower where, past a portcullis and up winding stone stairs, lay a tiny wooden cell where miscreants once languished. The restaurant, a crêperie, was tucked into a gallery above the river, unchanged since it was painted by the town’s former resident celebrity, the impressionist Alfred Sisley. It lay beside the town’s old church, a gunpowder factory during the French Revolution although it had taken almost three centuries to build and was so old that one side of the apse had to be walled up to stop it collapsing. Had the armaments’ manufacturers been a little careless with their tobacco they might have disappeared into the ether along with bits of revolutionary.
I ate crêpes filled with beans and egg and andouillet, French tripe sausage so pungent it carried a whiff of farmyard. Sally’s were stuffed with ratatouille and poached egg.
Roger, asked for his order by the waitress, barked it out in English and saw me watching. ‘Name rank and serial number,’ he said.
He told the table, ‘My parents were well to-do.’ Next morning George was outraged. ‘Wow,’ he said. ‘Did you hear that? Who would ever say a thing like that?’
Each night Roger regaled us with tales of corporate derring-do. Once he’d gone to a hotel in India and asked for his usual room. To his horror, they’d given him a standard one. Worse, when he went to the hotel pool, the attendant had given him only one towel; ‘One towel is all you get for that room number, Sahib.’
The indignant Roger soon fixed that. He called his mother back home. She was the big boss’s secretary — they’d call her a PA now, he said. On his very next trip to the hotel lobby the manager had hailed him. There had been a mistake: ‘For you, Sir, the presidential suite.’ And next trip to the swimming pool — why, he got three towels. One small step for mankind, perhaps, but for Roger … He’d drop remarks into conversations like bombs. ‘We’re of an age when sex is not an issue,’ he said once. ‘And on a boat it’s either non-existent or a floor-show.’ Well, possibly, but only Roger was going to talk about it.
Yet they were both honest and vulnerable, and anxious about their return. Roger thought he might serve on the vestry committee, Jenny that she might volunteer for hospice work, and they chorused the by now-familiar theme of the English, things at home were not the same; they were much worse.
Going home was more mysterious than worrying for George and Toby. She wanted to go, he did not. She said rather wistfully, ‘I just want to go back home for a while. But I wonder what George will do.’ Yet I felt home for both of them, like so many of their companions, was the transient community on the canals.
Clive and Di simply seemed displaced forever. They seemed to have nowhere to go, nowhere to call home. They’d arrived on their cruiser and launched straight into canalside society. Clive had bought, by his account, possibly the world’s best cruiser, built by a man so busy making himself rich he never had time to use any of its vast array of toys.
We were talking about the film The Queen when Clive arrived. ‘I was in it,’ he announced, by way of introduction. He had our immediate attention.
He’d been a cop on a motorbike in the film’s documentary footage. Clive was an ex-cop, although you needed a very sharp eye to spot him. We’d met so many of his fellows we thought we had the answer to Britain’s crime rate: all the cops were on the canals.
Clive had been in a protection squad and was full of stories.
Cherie Blair, wife of the former Prime Minister: ‘She once wanted to send one of the squad for milk and bread.’ Clive stood firm on this misuse of police personnel.
Labour government generally: They made excessive use of the Royal Flight. ‘Maggie Thatcher only used it once.’
The Queen Mum: She’d tapped him on the shoulder one day when he was fishing near Balmoral. ‘You should try over there,’ she said.
The famous butler: Didn’t do it.
Clive had loved his job, he said, but when he’d done thirty years he took the money and ran and some seven years on was still telling the tale. Clive’s partner Di said, ‘You get his whole life story in the first thirty minutes.’ We reckoned that in Moret he made it in twenty. Sally fed their dog Harry (yes, named after the prince) a piece of sausage from the BBQ. Di was aghast: ‘He’s a vegetarian.’
Di went back to England for a few days. Sally detected a spring in her step, but she might only have been sympathising. Clive was morose. He came over for a drink. He was talking (about propellers) as he climbed over the rail. Sally found a novel she urgently needed to read. David received sudden inspiration for a column he wanted to write. Anne just disappeared. To cook dinner, she claimed. Later we ate sausages stuffed with Roquefort and potatoes fried in olive oil and rosemary.
We all caught a train to Fontainebleau, the magnificent palace restored by Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte. At Fontainebleau Napoleon bade farewell to his Old Guard and went into exile in 1814. We stood in the little room at the table where he’d signed his abdication, climbed the steps where he made his farewell speech on his way to Elba.
Then we went back to Moret and met two wistful boys and their collie dog. For French kids they didn’t seem to have much French. That’s because we’re Irish, they said.
Their mum and dad had started a café in an ornate building in a town square, full of spires and garrets and decorated with carvings of artisans at work. Their dad served us coffee there next day, under a wooden stonemason chipping blocks, woodcarvers brandishing chisels, blacksmiths beating iron.
He was a vet who’d decided to move to France, but not for the usual reasons. He was not disillusioned, just adventurous. ‘If you don’t do it now ….’ he said.
He and his wife wanted to buy some land and farm it. Land was cheaper in France than either Britain or Ireland, he said. I asked the boys how they liked it here. ‘It’s a bit boring,’ said the older one. The younger said nothing.
David and Anne settled into all of this very well for people not yet acclimatised to the passing parade. They even took the ship’s bathroom, if not in their stride, then at least at a shuffle in the middle of the night.
Next door, Christian and Julia had come to stay with George and Toby. The couple were French. George had met them when his engine broke down in St Mihiel, the Ardennes village where we’d stopped months earlier. He’d gone into the Citröen garage owned by Christian. ‘I have a problem,’ he’d said.
‘You no longer have a problem,’ Christian had replied, ‘I have a problem.’
They’d been friends ever since. Christian and Julia had wanted to retire for the past two years and had at last found a possible buyer for the garage. If it did not sell this time, said Christian, he’d have to walk away from it, partly explaining the huge number of locked and closed-down businesses in parts of rural France.
Christian insisted on the panoply of courtesies at the start of the day, lots of bonjours, earnest discussion of the weather and the beauty of the day, a handshake for me and a kiss on each cheek for Sally, who was soon promoted to three kisses.
Once, Christian said, a customer had rushed into his garage with a problem he thought desperate enough to be worth dispensing with the formalities. The client was mistaken. Christian made him go outside then come back and start again, this time properly. When he and Julia left, Sally’s was a four-kiss farewell. I stuck with the handshake.
Long Slow Affair of the Heart, A Page 24