‘I’d rather say goodbye to your wife,’ said Christian.
New Zealanders arrived. ‘We’re from O’Rewa,’ announced the captain, a man named Austin.
‘We’re from Christchurch,’ we said.
‘Oh my god,’ they said.
‘At least we know how to pronounce Orewa,’ we said.
‘Gerrruph,’ he said.
‘Austin is obsolete isn’t it?’ someone else said.
We called it quits. Why waste good lines when there were so many Australians around? But instead, a French couple found the only vacant space. They had a huge chow dog on their little boat. The dog was grumpy and the couple quarrelsome, especially in the early hours. The dog would bark in chorus.
George and Toby left to travel east and find a winter mooring. They intended spending the first part of winter in France instead of the Bahamas. Then they’d travel to New Zealand for our summer. We’ll see you there, they said. Sure, we said. We wondered whether the Ministry of Tourism was ready for the numbers of canal travellers who’d said the same thing.
That November they sent us an email. They’d stayed overnight in France alongside two Aucklanders, John and Rosemary, they said. The pair invited them to look them up when they arrived. They did. The Aucklanders had fixed them up with a house to stay in and a mobile caravan to travel in. George and Toby were overwhelmed. They were more astonished that we knew the Kiwis. ‘Wow,’ said George.
They drove down to Golden Bay after Christmas that year and visited us. George looked at the emerald water tinged with gold at its edges. ‘Wow,’ he said.
They were at last going back to their home in Connecticut. It was a dream of its own, deep verandahs and white lace on the edge of the water, yet they seemed frightened by the prospect. They told us Christian and Julia had not sold their business in St Mihiel after all. They’d walked away from it, just as they said they would. Now it was another closed shop in the little Ardennes town.
Roger and Jenny sailed for home, she happily, he diffidently.
David and Anne packed up and left early one crisp autumn morning on their way to meet their family in Spain. They accidentally took my mobile phone with them and posted it back. The French bureaucracy was cumbersome, but it always worked. The trains ran on time and so did the post. My phone was waiting at the next port.
The noise and laughter died away.
We went back to Briare and settled among the flowers. Now white and mauve autumn crocuses formed bright little islands on the canalsides. Flecks of red and gold tinted the trees, lighting the way into a new season. Fields of corn ripened beside us, clouds of crows bursting above them like smoke. The faintest breeze shushed in the oaks.
A hotel boat opened its windows to reveal another life: polished wooden floors, a deck set with chairs and tables, plush white chairs and sofas inside and a table set with white linen and silver and cutlery all gleaming and playing the sun around the room.
We sat amid the bright tiles of the Briare church. The glass now shone with the colours of autumn. That night was the opening match of the rugby World Cup, although we were not praying for that, or for anything else; we just liked sitting in churches. They soothed us, smoothed us. Their endurance seeped into our bones.
Pascal, the port captain, had good news for us. He’d scouted the town. The nearest brasserie was also the best. They would have their TV set tuned to the opening World Cup game. We should book a table for dinner, said Pascal, for it was bound to be crowded.
We’d already met Madame, who ran the brasserie, but we’d planned dinner elsewhere. So we went along afterwards, and found only one table occupied, by Madame’s large extended family. Sally and I sat at the bar, listened to the speeches, sang along to ‘La Marseillaise’. The men of Madame’s family slowly got interested. All Blacks number one, they said. France also number one, but All Blacks more number one. Kids yelled, women went home, France lost. The men quickly got drunk. All Blacks number one, they said, but France still number two.
Bill the mechanic came aboard to check over the boat in Decize. He had innocent blue eyes and missing front teeth. He sucked on a roll for lunch. He’d done a degree in modern languages in Scotland and had come to France to perfect his French. That was around three decades ago. He’d stayed. After a few years his father, his only family, came to France and the two of them shared a caravan. Then they’d bought a house in Decize.
Bill arranged for a crane to lift the caravan over the wall of their new house and into the back garden. When the crane arrived his dad was still asleep. Bill didn’t like to wake him. Besides, it was well before eleven a.m., when his father usually got out of bed. So the crane picked up the caravan, dad and all, hoisted it into the air and deposited it on its new site. Bill went back to work.
In the evening when he returned home his father had not emerged. Bill opened the caravan door. His father was still in bed, quite dead. He’d died the previous night.
I’d given Bill a roll of tissues; he’d taken one piece, wiped oil from the engine, carefully folded it and put it in his pocket. Now he pulled it out and wiped his nose.
Bill had perfected his French and become a mechanic, although he could fix computers too, and oh, the odd musical instrument. Lately he had been unemployed, but he’d discovered that the French allowed him to capitalise his benefit to start a business, so he’d gone out on his own.
Bill had an unusual way of billing us. He decided to charge $20 for every point Scotland scored against the All Blacks in their World Cup game. Scotland failed to score anything at all. Bill wanted to stick to the bargain. We argued; we compromised.
We returned to St Jean de Losne through the black stalks of sunflower fields. A few raindrops fell, then more, and suddenly it was very cold. For the first time since Holland I turned on the boat’s central heating. With wi-fi throughout the harbour I went to the BBC website and downloaded Radio 4. News, comment, politics, world affairs were sucked into the boat as if it were a vacuum. We were happy, laughing at everything like children at a birthday party. All around us people now said ‘hello’ rather than ‘bonjour,’ for the canal community was settling in for the winter.
After two freezing days to let us know summer was over the sun returned.
I heard a ‘gidday’, in a Welsh accent. My god, Beni. He’d come back like a bad peni. Worse, he’d read my account of him in a series I’d written for the Sunday Star-Times in New Zealand. Both Beni and story had returned to haunt me.
But wait. I’d wronged him, badly. This wasn’t the blowsy Beni of Fontenoy-le-Château. He was the new, no-nonsense, polite, friendly Beni, a Beni who observed the proprieties and did not abuse anyone, much less the woman he had aboard, Gillian’s friend Carol from Auckland.
We trusted Carol. Beni behaved himself around her. He was a new man, or perhaps just the old one with the corners knocked off by a good woman. He told us of more adventures, of restoring the old olive oil mill in Spain, of a house restoration business he’d run alongside a B&B, of derring-do in Argentina, of sailing before the trade winds across the Pacific, of the Galapagos, and this time we knew he was not a bull-shitter because Carol had been with him a lot of the time, and while he was telling of the Marquesas she was talking about leaving the same boat and sailing on another through the Aleutian Islands to Alaska, of cold and fog and running out of food.
Beni said the best moment of his life was at Marfells Beach, in Marl-borough. Once, he and Carol had been walking on the little beach gathering mussels when they’d heard a faint splashing in the kelp. It was a baby Dusky dolphin, entangled. They’d lifted it free, run along the beach and released it in clear water and knew they were alive, a single moment for the lucky. And some others on the beach gave them crayfish, and they ate it for dinner with their mussels and drank local wine, and God was in his heaven.
Not many have been to that distant beach, much less had the best moment of their lives there, but Beni had. He’d been to Blackball on the West Coast too. He’d loved both places. You co
uld not hold anything against someone like that. So Beni and Carol and I went to a bar to watch the All Blacks play France in the World Cup quarter-final. Just a formality, we thought, on the way to glory. Sally stayed on the boat and listened to Radio 4. Perhaps we should have done the same.
The bar was full of locals, and all of them had a little French flag painted on their foreheads. We ordered vin de maison rouge, the house red, which came in thick green bottles. The French ordered pizza in heavy square slices.
The All Blacks went into their early lead. The French bent over their dominoes. The balance shifted. La France was gaining ground. The French ordered more pizza, enough for us too. We ordered more wine. Dan Carter came off crying. The French were crying too. We knew it was over. I went to pay the bill. ‘Pouf,’ said the bar owner and waved it away. One disaster a night was enough for anyone. I presented him with the fat All Black pen Maurice and Denise had given us long ago in Toul, although it had just lost some of its cachet.
France began filling up with displaced New Zealanders. Evidently our love of rugby did not extend to someone else winning the cup. They made alternative arrangements. They sold their finals tickets, now fetching inflated prices among the British. They wandered around France looking dazed.
Later that month we took the boat to its winter haven at St Symphorien, a few kilometres and one lock from St Jean de Losne. It would be looked after there by Roger, an Englishman so long in France that his velvety whippet was as much a memento of home as it was a pet.
We went through that last lock as carefully as if the boat were glass, although we didn’t escape without collateral damage.
The lock-keeper asked, ‘Do you want a Kleenex?’ I puzzled for a moment. Perhaps my French was not up to this.
‘The last New Zealand boat came through the week before the All Blacks played France,’ he said. ‘The captain said I’d be crying that Saturday night. He asked if I wanted a Kleenex. So now I’m asking you. Do you want a Kleenex?’
Our glory days were over. We were yesterday’s heroes.
We lowered the silver fern that night, and that other one with the Union Jack and stars. Sally listened for the ‘Last Post’ but heard only grunts: the flagstaffs had been so long in their sockets they’d stuck.
One foggy morning we left the boat covered in tarpaulins, awaiting its new owners like a badly-wrapped Christmas present. Fog lay thick as a blanket over the port.
We were looking forward to driving across France, for we were travelling from quite close to the Swiss border, through Burgundy and the Château district all the way to the west, through sweet countryside to the wild armoured coast of Brittany.
In the event we drove through fog and saw only roadside, emerging into clear sky at Rennes. We drove up to Dinan then negotiated half-remembered lanes to the hamlet of Le Bois Meen where my brother’s house sat, as it had done for three centuries, in its tiny farm at the end of a row of peasant cottages. After almost a year in the River Queen the house seemed wonderfully luxurious. We lay in the bath, stacked dishes into a dishwasher, slept in a bed so big we called to each other as if we were loose in a meadow. We gulped the sharp sea air, fresh as the spicy green apples we picked from trees in the garden.
Nearby Dinard, the seaside resort fashioned for Victorian British holiday-makers, hunched over pale sand, its blue-and-white striped bathing tents packed away for the winter. Picasso had taken long holidays here with his mistresses and his palette in the 1920s, painting plump women dancing with joy. The blue autumn sun warmed us.
We drank cider in a little bar in Dinan, among ancient houses leaning towards each other like les vieux gossiping in the autumn sun, and perched on the thick walls of St Malo eating half apples baked in sweet pastry rounded like breasts and watching tanned old people brave the cold Atlantic water.
Signs warned of being swept away by currents around cliffs looking over capes and reefs and islands dotted with forts and castles. We bought scallops and watched fishing boats unloading huge red crabs glowering in boxes. We sat under ancient oak beams in the fissures Bretons call harbours and ate bowls of tiny mussels, picking out the orange flesh with the blue shells. We ate two-hour lunches with lorry-drivers in Les Routiers restaurants, four courses of salads, sausage, potatoes, prawns, pâtés, cold meats, pork, spaghetti, calf’s liver, panacotta, crême brulée, crême caramel, chocolate mousse, Camembert, Brie, Port-Salut, Roquefort, with all the wine you could drink, all for $20. We found huge boulders which rang like bells when you hit them with stones. We explored the shattered ramparts of castles, climbed capes and leaned against the wind. We walked on beaches and kicked our bare feet into their fine gold sand and gazed over a sea whose colour washed into the sky. We marvelled at a lighthouse keeper’s house that looked like a palace. We met five men who’d been together in a seminary, turned away from the priesthood and now shared holidays together. We farewelled a man who proposed to row alone across the Atlantic. We listened to violins played by two women who sat under a tree, wine and glasses and a vase of marigolds set on a gingham cloth.
We smelled the salt water and the sea breeze cleansed our souls. We began to heal in the pale blue light.
But the light was fleeing, the nights drawing in, lonely hedge birds trilling a late dawn chorus. We sat above a pearly beach in the port at St Malo one last time in the crisp air, white sails on the sea, new pansies and chrysanthemums replacing the petunias, the French eating and talking all around us, and next morning we packed a car, drove to Paris and flew home.
The Takaka Hill went on forever, especially when you were in a hurry, or anxious, or excited. We were all three.
The thin road squeezed through bush, broke into the open, brushed by a limeworks, wound through weathered marble, ignored overgrown driveways leading to fanciful houses built by people escaping from lives known only to themselves, and, perhaps, their kindred spirits in converted barges and peniches lying along the waterways of Europe.
It glided past an abandoned quarry with its manager’s house still staring forlornly over desolation, but this was a ploy; it only seemed to be descending. Just as you were shifting your bottom with that smug feeling of being over the worst, the road kinked left and began toiling upwards again. It widened into a passing lane where, if you were quick, and knowledgeable, and adventurous, you could even pass. It ran through country which once had carried sheep, although any survivors were now outnumbered by hermits.
Here I once drove my vintage Jaguar, its grace then unrecognised, and was startled to find one of its wire wheels passing me. The car’s corner hit the road with an awful grinding sound; but we fixed the wheel back on with No. 8 wire cut from a fence and drove away feeling guilty. Broken fences now lay everywhere. Knobs of marble jutted from tougher scrub and quite suddenly, the road broke out onto a summit.
Golden Bay unfolded below. The last of the winter’s snow traced its peaks. Bush purpled in the evening light; queer valleys turned dark. Far off, the sea sprang light, like a new dawn.
The way was now steep, through four hairpin bends, as if it had done all it could to slow us, to sharpen our anticipation, and now it was rushing us home. We seemed about to fly off the mountain and land on the beach. Instead it led to what had been the Rat Trap Hotel, before it burned down. When we were kids the hotel meant we were almost there. Mum and Dad would go inside; he for a beer, she for a shandy. The Zephyr would cool in the carpark, ticking deep in its innards. In its blue seats the five brothers — my sister was not yet born, and when she was, I was far too old at seventeen to commit social suicide and travel with them — would sit quietly, for once. We knew what would come next and oh, the cacophony when it did. Raspberry and lemonade, in trumpet-shaped beer glasses. The trick was to be last to finish, for then you’d have four pairs of envious eyes upon you; fine if you were the eldest, dangerous for the young.
Golden Bay had a final trick. It kept the sea till last. Instead the road ran through a little town, lingered in a valley, dallied with a river and t
hrew a few one-way bridges at the unwary until at last Takaka, the bay’s only town of substance, blocked the way. Then you swerved to the right before anyone had any fancy ideas about stopping at the Telegraph Hotel and headed back into the country. But now the skyline cleared. Patches of estuary appeared beside the road, then a camping ground and motels and at the end of it, we burst upon the sea, so blue, the limestone cliffs dotted with palms and trees, the sand the palest gold, so fine I felt dizzy.
Tuis sang on every side, kereru swooped low. I caught an oystercatcher’s desolate cry, glimpsed a dark rock heron hunched over the water. The eerie grey silos of the old cement works rose from the cliffs above Tarakohe harbour. What strange craft moored there today? Once it was a ship being dismantled, then a square-rigged sailing ship, then a high-bowed fishing boat painted bright blue, whose owner would tell you it was once owned by Jacques Cousteau while he made espresso under a sign announcing, ‘Pirate Coffee Ship’.
We drove up the little rocky peninsula with its tall white monument to Abel Tasman’s dismal adventure here. And at the top, our lovely bay appeared as bright as new, as wondrous as never seen before, as exciting as a present. The tide was out. Still ponds of seawater lay on its yellow sand. At the far end lay a natural harbour, its stone breakwater pointing like an arrow to our tiny green house almost hidden in bush.
I stopped the car. We walked on the beach, hand in hand, fused into a single ball of delight.
Adventures are not simple events. They are complex things, filled with satisfaction, and moments of complete happiness, and danger, and shards of hardship, and fright, and despair. Otherwise they would not be adventures. They would be ten days in Fiji.
I’d hoped our journey would show us, or even just hint at, the way we might spend the rest of our lives. Perhaps that was too ambitious. Perhaps too much change shifts or breaks the patterns that keep people whole. Ours worked in a way we did not expect; it narrowed the options by revealing starkly what was important and even more urgently, what was not.
Long Slow Affair of the Heart, A Page 25