Narrow Dog to Carcassonne (25 page)

What’s the matter with him? I asked. No one goes up the Burgundy Canal so the VNF can’t afford a lock-keeper on each of the locks, said Monica, and the lock cottages are falling into ruin and I think they let people live in them free if they will take boats up and down. We are taking two days out of his farming.

He’s not a farmer, I said. Look at him. Look at the people he stops and talks to. They’re all short and fat and brown and none of them says hello to us. And have you seen their ears? The VNF have come to an arrangement with the local trolls. Ours has stolen a pair of spectacles to look more like us.

How do trolls live? asked Monica. They hunt and eat other primitive creatures, I said, mainly gnomes, but they will tackle a goblin, and they keep goats. They hate us but are frightened of us because we are bigger than them and have guns and dogs and fire. They piss on us from holes in empty locks. They do crop circles for whisky. They live near bridges and locks and passes and threaten travellers. From the garden of a lock cottage a couple of brown goats looked at us.

Our lock-keeper was joined by a female. She was four feet tall, nut-brown, spherical. I had seen her face before, in British Columbia, on a totem pole. She didn’t say hello. She talked to the lock-keeper all the time so things went much slower and she opened the paddles before we were roped up so we banged about and our cupboards fell open.

That evening at dinner a bottle of Marsannay, from the Côte d’Or. I suppose we’ll give the troll bloke a tip, said Monica—I mean he is at our service for two days. We’ll put a note in an envelope with a card and put
merci
on it and his name. But we don’t know his name, I said. There is no personal relationship, he is not even polite—no tip for him. It’s a matter of principle. If anyone wants a tip from me they have to grovel. I was a waiter as a student. I know the rules—I grovelled.

The Burgundy Canal is beautiful even when you are slogging up locks in the sun in the company of hostile life forms. We were climbing on to the roof of Burgundy, the Langres plateau, not looking up at the hills any more but looking across at them. The avenues of poplars had lost twenty feet in height; there were more oaks and some conifers. Always the smell of cut grass. The machine that mowed the towpath had left flowers here and there in islands.

No towns, no villages, no passers-by, no boats. At every lock a ruined cottage. One or two were occupied, though still ruined, and then our companions had loud discussions with the tenants, or vanished inside with a gesture, leaving us hanging on our ropes in the sun. At one cottage there was a heap in the garden—the remains of dozens of gnomes—disembowelled, red hats scattered, arms torn off. Bastards, I thought.

Before lunch Jim lay down by a lock and would not get up, so we picked him up and put him in the boat, where he slept for three days. After lunch I fell over some gate gear. The secret of falling on concrete is to hit the ground with as much of yourself as possible, but I knew I would be stiff for days. Oh Lord I can hardly move to reach for the rope. Only ten locks to go, only five, only two. Just keep moving.

The French do a low-alcohol beer which is not bad if you mix it with one of their strong lagers. Two or three of those make a reliable isotonic drink. Did you give him a tip? asked Monica. Yes, I said. He took it all right but hardly thanked me. I thought you were going to make a stand against rudeness, she said.

Their job was to get us up the locks and they did it, I said. We are fifty miles from anywhere and these guys control the canals and they all know each other. Remember what happened to Jon Voight and Burt Reynolds in that film. Remember what happened to Ned Beatty, poor devil. You don’t mess about with the guys from the forks of the creeks. But he got no envelope from me, no card with his name on it—I gave him the money straight in his hand. I didn’t want to be hard on him, but it’s the only language they understand.

THE POUILLY TUNNEL IS THREE KILOMETRES long and very boring. Before you go in you can see the point of light at the other end and you watch that all the way. After about twenty minutes you get mesmerized and nearly fall off the back of the boat. But we were through, into a fine stone cutting with moss and overhanging trees and a thin rain, and into a basin. We poured a glass of Marsannay into the water and crossed to the lock, where the A-team waited for us, moving from foot to foot.

Four chaps in fluorescent waistcoats, smiling and jogging and buzzing up and down the towpath. The A-team were under the control of Dijon, not Tonnerre, and big rich Dijon had not come to an accommodation with the local primitives. All eleven locks were open and full when we arrived and we were down the lot in an hour and a half and into the next basin, to be welcomed by the deadly embrace of the Spider Woman.

I’ll take Jim for a walk, I said. This was no news to Jim, who had known for some time. Under the bridge a notice—
Grocer, Wines
—and a cave with provisions on shelves. I tied Jim up and went into the cave and a bell rang.

A big woman with a white face appeared beside me. She was wearing a loose black dress. She smiled—
Monsieur?
Do you have any burgundies of the region? I asked—I am doing a little research. Ah,
monsieur,
yes, of this very town, only five euros. I’ll have a couple of those, I said, and do you have any marc? The marc, yes indeed,
monsieur,
the marc—she reached one of her arms out of her dress and took down a bottle and handed it to me.

How much is the marc? I asked. Thirty euros, she said, and smiled, and moved closer. It was dark but I could see her lipstick was red. Oh well, I thought, it must be a very good marc.

The wine is
ordinaire,
said Monica back at the boat, brushing cobwebs off my jacket. It should have been one euro fifty. And the marc is not even a full-size bottle. You’ve been had. Thank God I only gave you forty euros. I should never give you money—someone always takes it off you.

A knocking on the roof—the Englishman from a big steel cruiser above the lock. Did I see you going to the grocer under the bridge? he asked. I should have told you. She’s very good, I said, it was an experience. Oh, she’s good, said the Englishman, she smiles. I was afraid she was going to eat me, I said.

The marc was packaged with transcendent vulgarity in a narrow bottle inside a moulded transparent box. It had a copper spring around the neck and a cork with a brass top. It said on the bottle it had been aged for ten years in oak casks. It was excellent. The wine was not worth five euros, but it was not bad, not bad at all.

I AM DEVELOPING TERRY DARLINGTON’S TIPS for successful boating, I said, as tested on the canals of England and France and Belgium, and on the surging main. No top-up-your-diesel or black-your-bottom stuff—this will be a broad perspective from a guileless mind. It could change the culture of boating. What do you think of this?

Before a tunnel wear sunglasses for a couple of days and take them off as you enter

When you walk on a beach, look out for rope and string and collect it

If you are fending off another boat, don’t use a boathook or a bargepole—use a broom

When you clean the glass on your stove, finish with a used teabag. When you light up, the boat will be full of perfume

If you come upon pine cones on the ground, gather them to light your stove

To get rid of a gongoozler, stare at him through binoculars Make sure your dog is always wearing his collar—then if he goes over the side you have something to catch hold of

If you have your water tank cleaned out and painted with pitch, your tea will taste like Earl Grey for six months

Is that all? asked Monica. I can’t think of anything else at the moment, I said. The sunglasses were my idea, said Monica.

Another thing, I said—it isn’t fair to put Jim in his kennel every night. Why not? said Monica—he’s a dog. It’s a lovely comfortable kennel. He goes there a lot on his own. But if we give him his freedom at night, I said, he can sleep in my chair, or on the sofa, according to his whim. That dog is all whim, said Monica. The creature is ruined. He outwits you at everything. Whippets are supposed to have a gentle nature, not be following you round staring and yipping and hustling for treats and walks all day and listening for words so you have to spell things out like the country singer singing ‘D.I.V.O.R.C.E.’. He’s cunning, and passive-aggressive, and thieving and disrespectful.

But we’ve got this lovely boat, I said. And on a narrowboat everything must be used all the time. We must share our blessings. Why shouldn’t the poor creature sleep where he wishes? Because he’ll finish up on the bed, said Monica, and we’ll finish up in the kennel. Oh no, I said, oh no, that battle is won. He comes on the bed by invitation only and never at night. He’s accepted that. Animals are very sensitive about hierarchy, and about space: about where they are allowed to lie—they never challenge the space of the alpha male. Which one is the alpha male? asked Monica. Me, I said—don’t worry about Jim, he knows how far he can go.

Jim went to his kennel in the bow towards the end of the evening and when we were going to bed he came down the boat a little and quietly occupied my chair and curled up. There you are, I said, how sweet. When I got up in the night for a pee he was a bit nearer, on the sofa, fast asleep. When I woke up in the morning he was lying on my chest, looking down my throat.

I SLOWED FOR A LOCK, PAST A YELLOW AMERICAN machine, one of those backhoe loaders mowers pruners diggers that is without shape because it seems to be folded into itself, all but the one arm or set of teeth that is doing the damage, as its tracks heave it back and forth and its engine makes the air shimmy like jelly. At the lock was an old chap. Aha, he shouted, the noise, the machines, the boats—the English are coming. And the Americans, and the Canadians. It is the big day today—D-Day—the day of the landings in Normandy.

When we moored up there was an e-mail from Georges Berger in Nogent—Georges the poet, Georges my fellow albatross. He wanted to tell us about his day exactly sixty years ago—

It was Madame Dubus our neighbour from above who told us the great news of the disembarkation of the Allies on 6 June 1944. My stepfather was the concierge and many tenants found themselves at our apartment just to talk about it. I can see them now, the seven or eight crowded in our little room between the bed with its red embroidered counterpane and the sideboard with two shell-cases engraved with a country scene. On the wall the photograph of my solemn communion. This had been delayed because one of the little girls in my catechism group had been killed by an Allied bomb in an apartment block in Letort Street.

What spontaneity in the celebration at 145 Rue Marcadet! No one doubted the Anglo-American soldiers would succeed. Everyone was making strategy and calculating when the Yanks would arrive in Paris. From time to time someone tried to get Radio Londres.

Under the bed we had a treasure, a bottle of sparkling wine and six bottles of red wine laid out carefully and wrapped in newspaper. Full litres, without labels, which the wine merchant across the road, next door to the
tabac
of Monsieur Pons (where my mother got her fags), had sold us, in more or less unlawful circumstances. Camus, my stepfather, considered the occasion too fine to ignore and we had to have a toast. We drank one bottle of the wine and the bottle of sparkling wine. Almost everyone in the apartment block came by, just to say a word or two and drink a glass. Even I drank a little glass, because this was an occasion which I must remember.

WE WERE IN THE DIJON BASIN: PARKLIKE, TREES a hundred feet high, a few boats. A heron landed in his nest in the sky. I walked to the station and picked up some English papers—our first since Sens. Dijon did not look much—cramped, beggars, shapeless. It is the capital of Burgundy and may be a fine city indeed—it depends how you feel, and we were feeling that six weeks on the Burgundy Canal was a long time.

The herons hardly troubled to peer down as we left the next morning. They looked comfortable up in the sun, as if they had enjoyed their coffee and croissants and were having a quiet hour or two before slipping out for the fish for lunch.

Brickyards and silos until our canal became once more the most royal and rural of waterways. Only thirty kilometres to go—dead straight. At the end of each kilometre, in the haze, a lock, with a cottage with roses and a garden fully gnomed. Lock-keepers, smiling by the open gates, once or twice a gamine lock-keeper so slim and tanned that it was hard to drive out of the lock without hitting something.

The barley just browning, crops strong after rain, the cut grass, the trees, the avenues of poplars, the royal avenues. A constant neighing, or the cries of a duck caught in a mowing machine. It is the frogs,
monsieur
, said a lady lock-keeper. At night they sing most strongly. They are singing most strongly now, I said—I wish I could see them. I saw them, said Monica. They were green and yellow like in children’s books. When I was on the tiller they were sitting on lily pads looking at me; they were swimming round in a ring. It’s
Dive dive dive
when I come along, I said, and for you they put on a variety act.

A plain with no hedges and crops changing as we passed and the roofs of cars speeding half a kilometre away. Three jet fighters alongside, their tails up—they took off with less noise than we expected: silver bats and then pinpricks. They headed south and returned ten minutes later, having buzzed the topless towers of Carcassonne. When they landed the angle of attack was so great that they seemed to be on their hind legs. One flew right over us, clothed in white metal: riveted, shivering, roaring.

We were closing on the last lock of the Burgundy Canal. In the water, red stems and green hair, and clouds and inverted trees. I tried to look through the reflections. I knew there were forests of weed beneath the glassy cool translucent wave, and green herds that swim through rainbows from the skies. But I could not visit the forests, to see where the carp slept or the crayfish laid their plans. The
Phyllis May
was an airship passing through the clouds, forbidden to land, though her captain longed for the streams and woods below.