Narrow Dog to Carcassonne (27 page)

It started to rain and then it stopped and then another storm passed along the horizon and Jim panted and I sweated. Then more rain came and the staff in the restaurant came out and in eight seconds moved everyone indoors and all the furniture and Jim.

You have such bad weather here,
madame
, Monica said to the manageress, how smoothly you all move, you must be doing that all the time. We have done it once, said the manageress, in twenty years.
Après nous le déluge
, I said to Monica—I hope they don’t find out we bring impossible weather wherever we go.

The frogs tasted of nothing and were full of little bones. As I lay in bed the frogs in the Chalon basin went
Cricky cricky
croo
and I thought I ate your uncle tonight har har, but I didn’t feel good about it.

TOURNUS IS NOT A BIG PLACE BUT IT IS ON THE railway and on the main road so the toffs used to stop on their way to Cannes and Nice. Now the motorway has passed it by but there is still a four-star hotel and some restaurants, and gift shops around the abbey. The waterfront is run down. Sewage enters the Saône by the pontoons, so it is best to moor upstream and upwind, where trout prowl the margins and the
norberts dentressangles
flicker along your windows.

In the abbey, music lingered loath to die as a group of musicians practised at the end of the nave. My gaze lingered loath to die on the balance and proportions of the pillars and arches and on the balance and proportions of the lady lead violin as she swayed in her long
pantalon
. There were some abstract modern windows—avocado and taupe, inspired by the landing window in a general practitioner’s house in Milton Keynes.

Dinner in a square. As we left, the English couple at a nearby table spoke to Jim, who pulled across to try his luck. Would you take offence if I gave your Jim a piece of my steak? asked the gentleman. Sit Jim, said Monica. Does he hold out his paw and say please? asked the lady. No, I said, but if you give him a bit of your steak, he’ll sing ‘Moon River’. The gentleman gave Jim a large piece of steak and then he gave him two more pieces and there was a small piece left and he ate that himself.

They were so nice, said Monica. They were from Rochdale, I said. It’s like the Potteries. Remember when I asked the girl at the sweets counter in the pictures in Stoke-on-Trent for some chewing gum? Yes, said Monica, she said We can’t sell it because they spit it all over the pavement but here have a bit of mine. It’s a pity the southerners aren’t like that, I said, but they have to go to work by train so they get tired and there are so many of them and if they had to be nice to each other it would drive them mad. But come on we have a date.

Fritz had been stalking the
Phyllis May
down the river with his camera since we left St. Jean de Losne and the Burgundy Canal and we had asked him on board and now we were invited for a drink on his motor cruiser, of which he was very proud.
Siegfried
was blue and smooth and made of steel and fitted in walnut inside. It was fifty-two feet long—shorter than the
Phyllis May
but twice as wide and three times as deep. It had two engines, a generator, four storeys, two bathrooms, a terrace, a basement, a laundry and a games room. It cost three grand to fill with diesel and you could drive it to Norfolk, Virginia, without drawing breath.

Fritz was a surgeon from Hamburg and Marlene had been a patient. They didn’t speak much English or French but Monica speaks a bit of German and Fritz had a big face that showed what he was thinking all the time anyway. Fritz and Marlene kept
Siegfried
very tidy and were very friendly and not slow with the wine and the cashews, and those little footballs full of cheese you used to have at parties fifty years ago and can’t find any more.

It’s a nice boat, said Monica later, but if Fritz filled it with diesel and tied it with a bow and put in a hundred cases of Gevrey-Chambertin I still wouldn’t swop the
Phyllis May
for it. Perhaps he would throw in Marlene, I said, and an unlimited supply of cheese footballs.

IT SAYS HERE IN THE
GUIDE NAVICARTE
THAT there are scenes of unusual animation in Mâcon on the quay, said Monica. Mustn’t miss those, I said. It’s men, said Monica, in shorts and moustaches—Hello sailor. We are not going to moor there. I know you, you’ll get knifed. Look what you were like with that German.

We moored in the marina three kilometres upriver and the next morning walked into town along the riverside parks in the sun. On the way we played The Game. Monica walks on nearly out of sight and Jim stays back with me, on the lead, whining. After a time he starts to scream and people turn round to look and he screams and screams until Monica stops walking. You fool, you fool, Jim is yelling—she’ll escape. Look what happened to Clive and Beryl, you let them escape, you fool, you sailed away and left them, and look what happened at Watten—I had to get Monica back myself. You are incompetent, oh God I wish I was bigger than you. Look, here’s a thought—why don’t you let me take over and be captain? I can run fast and see for miles and smell for miles and I can take responsibility and I am very intelligent. You could still be president or something and wear the Breton hat.

Don’t be silly, Jim, I say. You walk the other side of a lamp-post when you are on a lead and then look at me and say What is going on? You piss on yourself. I’m in charge here—go boy, go.

Mâcon hugs the river like a sailor and there is the Restaurant Lamartine. Alphonse de Lamartine was born in Mâcon, though to the best of my belief he was as straight as a die. As well as writing boring poetry Lamartine put his restaurant too near the waterfront traffic so we went and looked over the bridge at the trout and the bream and the chub and the norberts, and had lunch somewhere else.

This did not stop us eating out again that evening on a terrace next to the marina, with a bottle of Pouilly-Vinzelles, which was four years old. It was very nice but beginning to go a bit yellow and taste of toffee. Thank God, I said to Monica, we got here just in time. On the menu was Fry-up of Saône.

What is this Fry-up of Saône,
monsieur
? I asked. It is the
ablettes
, said the waiter, and when they arrived it was the norberts, the theen green feesh themselves, in a light batter. The owner came up—These are impeccable, said Monica. They are not frozen, said
madame
—they are caught from the river in nets. There is a gentleman who catches them—sometimes he catches only two kilos, sometimes ten. He cannot live from the hunt of the
ablettes
, so he has another job. Every little fish is emptied here in the restaurant, so they are light and fine. There are crayfish too,
là-bas au fond
, down there at the bottom, under the bridge.

After dinner I will go and see the crayfish, I said. Jim and I will stun them with the light from our kitchen torch and then we will catch some and have them for lunch tomorrow. Alas,
monsieur
, said
madame
, they are fearful, they back away. She backed away from our table,
à reculons, à reculons
, and with a twitch of her tail she was gone.

I’M FRIGHTENED, SAID MONICA, ABOUT THE Rhône. They don’t allow hire boats on the Rhône—there must be a reason. But we must have faith, I said—we have sailed past the Houses of Parliament, we have sailed up the Severn, we have crossed the Channel. Yes, but you organized those, said Monica. I didn’t have the responsibility. I am organizing the Rhône and I am frightened. Fritz said the Rhône runs
whoosh whoosh ha ha Mein Gott
, and Captain Bob said he would rather try to make landfall on a Pacific island in a Catalina running out of fuel with an engine out and a compass off a box of cereal than find moorings on the Rhône.

I’m not frightened myself at the moment, I said, but I usually am frightened, and we have been OK, so probably I should be frightened and because I’m not something awful will happen.

Wherever you looked there was Saône, and on it floated islands loaded with trees. You would not know where to go but you followed the stakes driven into the water about half a kilometre apart, and as they were fifteen feet high and a foot wide and striped in red and white that was OK.

Monica came along the gunwale. I can smell burning, she said. You’ve been going flat out. The river is too warm so the skin tanks along the hull are not losing the heat and you will blow up the engine. The cooling fluid has expanded—it should be only halfway up that tube and now it’s right up the top. You are getting careless—you think you are Captain Jesus Christ but you will do for us all. Typical—you’re either scared stiff or going like a madman. Take over, Mon, I said.

I found the temperature gauge, which I had a feeling was somewhere on the control panel because I thought I had noticed it when we had the new engine fitted. It’s OK, I said—it’s eighty centigrade—I think it said in the book that’s the best temperature—on the canals we run a bit cool, at seventy. Monica slowed down to eighteen hundred and we ran a bit cool, at seventy.

Nearer to Lyon Jet Skis, speedboats, waterskiers, one or two pleasure launches, a few barges, two eighty-seven-metre barges locked together end on end with a pusher unit behind them. The speedboats buzz you and try to turn you over with their wash, or play chicken across your bow. I wave to them and they wave back. Why not?—they have a right to their waterway. Bloody prats.

We can moor here, or somewhere else, said Monica. OK, which? I asked. I don’t know, it’s always questions, said Monica. You expect me to find moorings but how do I know if they will be full and it will be worse on the Rhône. I turned and headed upstream to the Rhône Yacht Club. It said in the book that the Rhône Yacht Club used to be the most prestigious club in Lyon.

The clubhouse was a shed and there were seven plastic chairs and a broken yacht trailer and a barbecue. A young lady ran out along the pontoon and took our rope with a brownskin grin. The rigging of the yachts whipped and rattled and the water drove up into foam and we could have been out at sea.

We are at the start of the funnel between the Massif Central and the Jura, said Monica. This is the north wind that comes down the funnel, except in the winter it blows twice as hard and people go mad with the noise and the cold drops them dead in the streets. It’s the mistral.

WE HAD SEEN MANY FINE BUILDINGS FROM the waterways—the houses and boathouses up the Thames, Canary Wharf, the Grand Hôtel Régnier, the Renault factory, the chateau pup in the lake at Ancy. But my favourite of all was on the Saône right next to the Rhône Yacht Club.

A dirt car park with rusty knitted fencing, and convolvulus. No cars. Two black dogs bellowing behind a gate. Jim gave a quiet bark, saying If I were as big as you I would be quite short with you, but since I’m not I rather hope you can’t hear me. A menu on the wall, patched with rain, chipped concrete steps up to the first floor, and through a glass door.

The room did not seem to have walls—there was the river running to Lyon, the trees on the banks, sky, white clouds. Inside the long rooms the Art Deco shapes and proportions were unspoiled—low ceilings, curves, pillars. And much of the detail—flecked concrete floors with red and black lines, metal window fittings, even the apple-green paint.

We’ll both have the pizza with anchovies, I said, and a bottle of Beaune. That’s near here, isn’t it? The waitress was not young, heavily painted, dark, with a smile. I don’t know,
monsieur
, she said. My father will know. Yes, he called from the bar, it’s just up the road.

On the way out I spoke with Father. We use this floor, he said—the rest is empty. We can do two hundred covers. We have been here eight years. Nineteen thirty-seven it was built—the original clubhouse of the Rhône Yacht Club. Look at the balconies. It is a ship, you know,
monsieur
, a ship.

As we sailed for Lyon next morning I looked back from the tiller and could see the whole building—the curves and balconies and the flat roof and the windows holding a mile of river. It was Fred and Gingerland, Craven A, the Schneider Trophy, the sigh of trains, the
Normandie
with all the gulls around her. An ocean liner taking me back to my parents’ dream world, the world that rose from the depression, brought a glimpse of foxtrot heaven, and was torn apart.

TO LYON DOWN THE SAÔNE IS FLAT AND FACTORIED, at its wharves barges filling with sand, and on the right beyond the Beaujolais hills, the first outcrops of the Massif Central. Dull apartment blocks. A green hill ahead, with houses, and behind it another, and a cathedral with four minarets, attended by a withered Eiffel Tower.

We had been told Lyon did not welcome boaters. But walls in cream stone made one long wharf for miles into the city, double-and treble-ringed, and the wharves and rings were empty. A theek white feesh a couple of feet long threw itself into the air—it was frolicking. Under a footbridge. Look—some other boats under willow trees—and we moored next to Fritz.