Narrow Dog to Carcassonne (23 page)

Another grebe arrived on the Yonne and the pair looked at each other and dived. When they came up a long way away they were together.

A walk by the river. Jim’s first countryside, his first chance of a burn-up since we came back from England. The path between the trees was bordered by new grass, with constellations of buttercups. Bird’s-eyes looked at us and we were children again. Once when I was ill, said Monica, I went for a walk and the bird’s-eyes were out and I said to myself everything was fine when I was a little girl and it will be fine again.

The chestnuts and the rowan and the rape and the bird’s-eye speedwell and the fume of the may—by the Yonne you can be a child again.

THE NIVERNAIS CANAL IS CLOSED, SAID Monica. The VNF have just told me on the phone. A lock has gone at Auxerre. We’ll have to go down the Burgundy Canal. It comes out on to the Saône at St. Jean de Losne.

But no one goes down the Burgundy Canal, I said. It climbs to twelve hundred feet. It’s as far as Stone to London, with two hundred locks. We won’t see anybody for months, just each other and Jim. There won’t be any radio or newspapers and our phones won’t work and the locals probably hunt each other with dogs.

Do we want to get to Carcassonne or not? asked Monica.

We waited in the pretty stone basin and sailed into the fifteen-foot lock and up on to the Burgundy Canal.

Ten

THEIR SEVERAL GREENS

The Burgundy Canal

A
t the quay stood Den. Won’t talk, he said—bit of a session last night—an Englishman, a Frenchman and a Dutchman. He tied off our rope and went back to bed. We were in the town square of Migennes, with the first game of
boules
of the year tapping outside our window. A hire fleet owned by an Englishman lay immaculate, like the twenty swans that drifted around the basin, wings over their heads, asleep. Across the basin the railway and the sewage works and a boatyard, owned by an Englishman.

I had rung the Englishman at the boatyard before we left for France and mentioned that I was hoping to sail the Channel and he said I’ve done a lot of boating and yachting—I’ve been across, I know. If you are writing a book and you want to finish it go over on a lorry—you can lose your boat or your lives. I thought we should look at his yard and give him the news of our success, which with any luck would cause him great unhappiness.

The Englishman came out from under a boat and looked almost pleased—like Jim a master of the dramatic art. Crossing the Channel is no joke, he said. Quite right, I said, we did eighteen months’ research. We would have waited a year for the weather. We mustn’t have too many people trying to do it, he said—would you do it again? No, I said, we are glad we did it once but we were lucky. So much could have gone wrong.

THERE ARE A HUNDRED SYSTEMS ON A BOAT, and some of them are always broken, so every voyage is a disaster more or less under control. The two hundred gallons of water in the bedroom at Watten would not have helped our trim off the North Foreland. Going to London we broke a belt and seized up in a laundry of steam. Once the
Phyllis May
sank at her mooring because the propeller shaft leaked. Here in Migennes the shower pump stopped working.

It’s only a switch, I said to Monica. The principle of the switch has been established for centuries. Attack is needed and the appreciation of first principles—don’t walk away, Renée. I took an
haricots verts
can and drained the beans off and put them in a cup. Then I took the tin-scissors and cut the lid of the can in half. I screwed the two semicircles to the side of the bath, trapping each of the wires from the switch.

Watch, I said to Monica, this will hold until the end of the summer. We must be prepared to look after ourselves, to be resourceful. I rotated one semicircle on to the other. The shower pump hiccuped and there was a hissing and the bathroom filled with sparks.

The electrician from the boatyard said he had heard you cannot electrocute yourself from a twelve-volt system, but he had never really believed it until now.

New-washed we headed down the empty avenues. Straights five kilometres long, lined with poplars and lit by chestnut candles, with mown paths along each side. Green water, light with a hint of blue. Cowslips as single spies and in battalions; margins where you can moor. The locks were forty-five yards long, always empty, ready for us to sail in. Get the rope up round a bollard quick and wind it round the grab-rail and hang on and
bang bang bang
as the lock fills and slip off the rope and out through the gate with a salute. I am not a regular lock-keeper, said the young lady. I am not surprised, I thought—the speed you filled the lock, silly little bugger, could have done for the lot of us. Ah, I said, you are perhaps a student. Yes,
monsieur
, a student of psychology. Perhaps you could have a look at my dog, I said.

For the first time we felt we were going somewhere, not conducting trials or trying to be brave or rambling round in the sun. We were on our way to Carcassonne. A lock-keeper gave Monica a bunch of lily-of-the-valley, which is offered, not for luck, or for good health, but for happiness.

WE HAD REACHED TONNERRE, AND I WAS ILL. Now it has been revealed how it is going to be, I said. No appetite, wanting nothing of life, no lust for drink, or girls, or sport, or green fields or friends or success or fighting: just sickness, tiredness, just what the hell. Lurching towards death, my incontinence pants rustling. Don’t be silly, said Monica, you’ll be better in a couple of days.

I sought comfort in a French inland waterways magazine. The world will not end in conflagration, it said, it will expire in coldness and emptiness as the galaxies rush apart. The French like to put things in perspective. The editor of the magazine, with three lines left, had reached the attempt by Charlemagne to reunite the Rhine and the Rhône, but I had to go.

When I returned, I looked at Monica’s vase of flowers—lady orchid, a hundred little dolls; Solomon’s seal, pearls for the livery of a duke; star of Bethlehem, bringing the news. In Stone we had one or two Solomon’s seal in the garden, Monica said—here they are on the bank in sheets.

A text message came through
peep peep
—friends we had asked on the boat had not been given a date and do you want us or not? We printed out the e-mail traffic and realized it was all our fault and I blamed Monica and Monica blamed me and Jim sat in the corner and cried. I said Shut up Jim I’ve got a problem here and I’m not well and if you don’t bloody shut up I’ll strangle you and he cried more because we were upset and it was the only way he could help.

A knock on the door—Michel from the boatyard. I have excellent news—your engine need no longer sound like a German bomber. I have found a new alternator and it will be here tomorrow. But alas it is a special alternator and it will cost not two hundred euros but five hundred euros. Would you like me to order it? If you do not replace your alternator your batteries will die.

I don’t mind the money so much, I said to Monica when he had gone, it’s just that it’s wrong to support crime. And I’m ill; what can I do to defend myself? They are gathering round me like vultures. This could be the final curtain. And all my friends hate me because I have offended them.

Jim started to cry again, as if he had realized the world was going to die in cold and emptiness. Jim, I said, I am a sick man and you are driving me nuts. One more sob and it’s into a sack and over the side. Jim started to howl.

Monica sent a text to our friends and they said it was all their fault and they were coming to stay and I rang the engineers of Bordeaux about the alternator. My God, they said, you are the English
monsieur
who crossed the Channel—we have your picture on the wall. Is the gentleman giving you a good service? It is not an enormous price for an alternator.

I said to Monica I think I could face a bit of bread and cheese. Jim had gone to sleep.

IT MUST BE WONDERFUL TO TRAVEL, SAID THE lady on the towpath, but you need money. There are no jobs in Tonnerre—all the industry has gone. I am lucky—I have a job for two hours each afternoon.

Monica went into the town. You stay in bed, she said when she came back, you haven’t missed anything. It’s all gaps and boards and dust.

On one side of the canal basin an empty silo and sad conifers, the other side majestic with trees, and underneath a satellite office of the Chamber of Commerce, open four hours a day. The windows were polished, the brochures in rows. At the desk a lady in a suit, fully made up, with brooches and a gilt watch. No one came to ask her anything.

Alongside us knocked an empty dinghy. It had drifted off its mooring. Apart from the
Phyllis May
and Michel’s small hire fleet it was the only craft in the basin. Its sail bore the name of the Tonnerre Philatelic Society and the image of a stamp. The sun came out and the little plastic boat flared with red and orange paper flowers.

We went to see the lady with the brooches. It is the Nautical Festival of Tonnerre, she said—three days of intense sensations. There is a demonstration by
les godilleurs de France
, who scull a boat along with the single oar: there is music, there is a monster. She gave us a newspaper which explained that the monster was the creation of the carnival committee, and when it came to astonishing the public with its monsters the carnival committee of Tonnerre knew no rival.

We dressed the
Phyllis May
overall in bunting and hung out the big French and English flags and the one with the Welsh dragon. A snail four feet high, covered with red and yellow paper flowers, floated past our windows.

On Friday empty stalls appeared on the lawns and a merry-go-round arose, and some houses near the basin were covered with paper flowers. Bunting was strung between the trees. On Saturday morning the stalls were furnished and at two o’clock the music started. There was Gerry Rafferty, Bill Haley, UB40, Tom Jones, Bananarama, Dexy’s Midnight Runners, Shirley Bassey. How strange, I said to Monica, their music is so like our own.

A lady with a clipboard passed and thanked us for decorating the boat. Two German professors waved through the window and we asked them inside. Jim jumped them and rushed off and got his frog of plush, which he offered and would not let go. After a while the German professors got the hang of his game, and seemed to enjoy it
Ho ho ho braver Hund Mein Gott
. They went and then they came back and gave us a bottle of German wine.

The festival had been advertised down through Burgundy and half a dozen English people had been caught in its toils. They came on board. There was a circuit judge and he was most interesting, especially if you know nothing of circuit judges. He said being a judge was a holiday compared to being a barrister, where he had nearly killed himself with worry and overwork, and yes, he nearly always knew straight away if the defendant had done it or not.

One of the visitors was on his narrowboat on the Yonne. We always wanted to go down the Rhône, he said, but we bought the wrong engine. We looked into it afterwards and found out it’s just not possible and we can’t afford to change our engine again. My wife has been in tears. It’s the gas barges—they are huge and they go like hell. The currents would sweep us under them and their props mince us into scrap. Like a leaf in the tide—our engine is only forty-three horse.

Oh, hard luck, I said—have you seen our log-box? It has
Phyllis May
on the front side and
Kiss Me Again
on the backside. It is based on a joke I heard Ted Ray make in the Stoll Theatre in 1947. Sometimes I sit in my chair with my feet up on the log-box and say it over to myself and laugh. Like a leaf in the tide, said the narrowboat skipper.

A couple of months ago I met your friends Beryl and Clive, he said. They were asking where you were—they came across on a lorry. Very sensible, I said.

MONICA AND I WALKED WITH JIM BETWEEN the festival stalls and tents. There were not many people around. The voice of the mayor came from the trees, thanking the high school, the single-oar scullers of France, the rugby club, the kung fu fighters, the graffiti sprayers, the town band. The biggest tent was the philatelic society. Please please come in, said the old gentleman outside, there are many nautical pictures. In the tent there were hundreds of postcards pinned on boards, showing canals long ago, but you could not see them because it was dark. Monica tried to buy some stamped cards to send home—But
madame
, that is for collection, you must not put it in the mail.

There was a tent celebrating the Canal du Nivernais, with models of boats and locks and a relief map, and T-shirts, but the Nivernais is another canal. There was a junk stall with a pretty plate from Verdun. Hello, sailor—a life-size plastic
matelot
outside a tent filled with pictures of war machinery and model ships, with a recruitment video playing inside. A stall sold sausages and onion jam.

On a platform a musical group. Five trumpets, played by children. On the floor lay five adults, holding the legs of the music stands so they didn’t fall over in the breeze. The children played slowly, in harmony, in strictest time, hitting the notes cleanly, keeping the pitch. They played ‘Rock Around the Clock’ and then ‘YMCA’, making both numbers sound like chamber music. Monica and I started doing the actions to ‘YMCA’ but stopped. We went and bought some onion jam.

The Tonnerre Noise Society came down from the town. There were twenty members, in cruel blue, each holding a drum. They played one two-bar figure over and over, hitting the drums as hard as they could. The world will end, I thought, not in ice but in noise, and maybe this evening.

Behind the drummers was the monster. This was a decorated tool-shed on wheels, on it the giant head of a frog. A dozen men with dirty faces and nets and tridents came before, and a dozen children came after dressed as frogs: then a young woman in green in a motorized wheelchair, and a bespectacled lady of a certain age in green and yellow frills and flukes and fins, waving her arms. They processed to the bridge and turned back and started walking into one another. In the head of the monster a loudspeaker thumped out a tune, and from its mouth there reached a bloody hand.

The lady of the brooches was in the Chamber of Commerce booth. Your boat looks nice with the flags, she said. It is a pity you are the only boat to visit us. We try very hard but there are few private boats on the Burgundy Canal and hirers won’t stop at Tonnerre. The hotel boats with the Americans don’t come through much since the Twin Towers. Then the canal has been closed the last two summers because there has been no water. This afternoon is the graffiti, and the hip-hop, and
les godilleurs
, who scull a boat along with the single oar.