Long Slow Affair of the Heart, A Read online

  A Long Slow Affair of the Heart

  An Adventure on the French Canals

  BRUCE ANSLEY

  For Sally (of course)

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  I don’t know when it changed. No shadow flickered in the bright landscape of our new life. One moment we were in a traveller’s tale of escape and adventure and the romance of journeys in another world. The next, it turned into a story of love, and a marriage trembling on the edge, and how hard it is to live life well.

  We knew nothing of this, that March morning when we arrived in Holland.

  I whimpered in the grey air outside Schipol airport, Amsterdam. The Singapore Airlines flight had touched down at six a.m. We were tired. We cannot sleep on long flights. I am claustrophobic and Sally is scared. I fight panic as the tiny space around me fills with papers, passports, books, tickets, forms, pens, headphones, tables, towels, food and those strange personality changes which afflict people on aeroplanes, causing them to confess serial adultery to neighbours, or fossick around endlessly in overhead lockers. Sally worries clots are forming in our deepest veins which will kill us in our tight economy class seats, and if they do not, that a wing will fall off and we’ll die anyway.

  We knew it was six a.m. because the pilot had said so. He sounded the hour with an American’s certainty, but as many of his compatriots had established in countries we had only that morning flown over, he might have been mistaken. This could have been Amsterdam, or it might have been anywhere dark, and cold, and foggy, such as Hamilton.

  For a moment I hoped it was Hamilton.

  I’d dreamed of throwing in my job, of going to Holland, buying a boat, sailing it first to Belgium then France, of living on the French canals for a year or two. Sally had imagined villages and flowers and peace. But the trouble with dreams is not so much their coming true as the chill kiss of truth when they do.

  The fourteen-hour flight from Singapore had wrecked my internal calendar and clock. Like my phone, and my watch, they needed re-setting, and I couldn’t be bothered with any of them.

  Had the American pilot, like his leader, taken a wrong turn? Of course he had not. This was indisputably liberal Holland. To get into the country I answered a single question: why was I there?

  I was on holiday, I replied, not wanting to complicate matters. Have a good time, said the immigration official, waving me through. His mate glanced at Sally’s European Union passport (Sally had been born in England) and skipped the questions altogether.

  The Netherlands lay outside: cold, grey, flat, like our mood. I dug out my mobile with no great hope of connecting to anyone, but surprisingly it worked. A man in the car lease office answered. He’d got up early for us, he said, and he’d been waiting. His office was in a hotel, and we’d find the hotel’s shuttle bus right outside the airport.

  We rode to the hotel with our two pilots as fellow-passengers, peering out of the windows at concrete and cars and morning mist. The American captain talked deals. He knew about property prices, and shares, and where best to buy automobiles. His co-pilot watched him through hooded eyes and said nothing.

  The car lease man was German but said he’d always wanted to live in Amsterdam with his Brazilian wife, and when he got this job only last January all his dreams came true. All of this I learned on our way up the stairs. I envied him the simplicity of his dream. Perhaps that was the secret.

  His name was Flores, which meant flowers in Spanish he said, and was evidence of the Spanish influence in both Germany and Holland, a history stretching over so many centuries that it would take quite a long time to explain but he had the time if I did.

  Let’s talk about it on the way back down the stairs to the car, I said, and departed around the time Sephardic Jews first arrived from Spain and Portugal in 1492 with only around 500 years to go until we were fully up to date.

  It was eight a.m. Dismal. Huge trucks were racing by on a nearby motorway along which we had to travel in a leased Peugeot so tiny I looked around for a remote control.

  The dream hadn’t mentioned this.

  Now I was a man without a job in a strange city.

  It had seemed very fine when I’d awoken one autumn morning in our Sumner home with a wonderful, excellent idea. I’d throw in my job, do something so different, so bold, that it would change our lives, throw the cards in the air and the heck where they landed. Outside the window yellow leaves were dripping off the cherry tree, the old wattle was gathering strength for its winter show. Change is good, they whispered, the time is right.

  I yearned for adventure; but adventure is so contrary you spend a lot more time thinking about it than doing.

  Easy, I supposed, if you’d been born Sir Edmund Hillary. For people like him adventures bloomed like crocuses in spring. As soon as a very high mountain appeared, or a pole, or a long river or something of that kind, you simply set out to climb it, or drive to it, or sail up it in the most dangerous way possible, certainly the most uncomfortable one, and everyone knew you’d had an exciting time.

  Unfortunately there was a downside, as any number of heroes from Robert Falcon Scott to Rob Hall could testify if only they were in a position to.

  Downside was not a mountaineering expression. It sprang from another kind of adventure whose Everest was the boardroom, where men and women in suits clambered after power and money and some became heroes also, even if mainly among their own. I preferred Hillary’s clean run and respect for humanity.

  But none of that was any help to the rest of us, the men and women over the garden fence who wanted to spike their lives a little, seek something different, find a bit of fun or even that hideously overworked term, a challenge.

  Mostly, adventures were things someone else had. You read about them, or watched them on television, and those were probably best of all. Real adventures were uncomfortable, and could be dangerous, and might be best not approached by the unarmed citizen.

  Some time ago I listened to a man called Alistair, whom I knew vaguely as a neighbour, talking on radio about a very big adventure. He’d been sailing down from the Suez Canal in his large motorboat when he spied what could only have been pirates zooming towards them in a speedboat.

  Dear god. What were they to do? The pirate ship signalled them to stop, which they did. Then they saw the baddies leaning over the stern of their boat. They slowly realised they were looking at deliverance: the pursuing boat had fouled the fishing lines they’d been trailing, and the lines were now wrapped tightly around its propellers. Slowly the two boats drifted apart, and when they were a decent distance off they quietly chugged away, leaving the pirates rather than themselves dead in the water.

  I could see it all as he spoke: their white-and-varnished ship in the blue gulf waters, the blazing sun, the pirates in their rakish vessel doubtless in red headscarves. The story had everything: heat, danger, excitement, the triumph of good over evil, or at least a tidy escape.

  Much later I met Alistair in a restaurant. ‘What an adventure!’ I said. ‘Not if you were there,’ he replied. ‘We were terrified.’

  Terror was not part of your own script when you were imagining these things. Terror was best
left entirely alone, along with boredom, worry, squabbling, exhaustion, discomfort, hardship, possibly death. They were all nicely filtered out by an imagination which saw only fun and excitement.

  The idea, then, was to pick an adventure which had maximum potential for fun and excitement and minimum possibility of boredom, discomfort or death. That was not so easy. Even for fifteen seconds of excitement on a hydroslide you had to battle the traffic, climb an awful lot of stairs then wait in a queue with a bunch of very noisy kids. A fortnight in Bali or a bus trip around Europe were all very well, involving nothing more ferocious than a travel agent, but you still had to pack yourself in to an aeroplane (see boredom, discomfort above), then pass the time when you reached your destination (see squabbling, exhaustion etc.).

  I quickly ruled out anything too dangerous on the grounds that Sally wouldn’t go, although the truth was that she was much braver than I. She just could not see the fun in boredom, discomfort or death. She would have been happy watching the surf down the street, or planting a peach tree, or telephoning our twin sons Sam and Simon. But she was prepared to forego those things and go along with me — god knew why.

  Sally suggested driving around Australia. I’d done a little of that, once. I’d driven from Sydney to Canberra and back with my four brothers and sister, in a van.

  We’d turned off the motorway to have a beer in a small town, where the pub was laced with verandahs and the locals stopped talking when we walked in, as if the video shop stocked only old westerns. So we had a beer or two, and as we were leaving someone started screaming.

  It turned out to be me, because there was a huge, hairy spider on the footpath, advancing towards the van, and one little hop on those legs would carry it right into the vehicle to where, in fact, we were huddling in a corner like sheep in a pen.

  All five brothers and one sister were scared of spiders. Our father had returned from fighting in the Solomons during the war with a horror of the creatures which he faithfully passed on to us. World War Two, to his kids, had eight legs and a nasty bite.

  A small boy, attracted by the screaming, came out of the pub. The other patrons either couldn’t be bothered, or were worried about leaving their beer, or just thought screaming was what Kiwis did. He checked the spider, which, I fancied, eyed him right back. ‘Sheeitt,’ he said. ‘It’s just a tarantula.’

  Just? The last time a van left the town in such a hurry was when the pub ran out of beer. We were not slowed even by the discovery that the town had an off-ramp from the motorway, but no on-ramp. We simply reversed up the off-ramp.

  The only other time I’d attempted a long-ish trip in Australia, I’d set out for Hall’s Creek from Kununnara. After a couple of hours I was so bored by the red earth and drab trees I was nearly comatose. I turned around and went back. Australia, for me, was off the list. ‘Later,’ I promised Sally.

  We could live in Golden Bay, and that seemed quite a good idea. Our little green and blue tin bach stood beside the yellow sand of a bay whose clear water cooled our bodies, warmed our hearts and provided dinners of scallops, mussels and flounder when I roused myself enough to get them. A natural harbour opened to one side, and I could sit at the table in the living room and watch my boat rising and falling on the tide. Sally planted lilies and lettuce and wafted around the garden in her red-and-yellow lavalavas like a butterfly.

  When we were in Golden Bay among its gentle community we could think of no life more perfect. We wondered why we ever wanted to do anything else: could there be too much loveliness, too much perfection? Yet when winter came and the house and garden grew dark at five p.m. the night seemed very long. Paradise had one cinema, a small library, and only a few cafés braving the off-season when the community hunkered down.

  Perhaps we could go and live in my brother’s house in Brittany. His house stood in the tiny hamlet of Le Bois Meen, near St Malo. We’d lived there once, for a few weeks, and we loved it. Getting up in the morning, strolling around to Madame at the boulangerie for baguettes and croissants, breakfast in the garden, perhaps a dip at Dinard or a drink in Dinan, a chat with the neighbours (Sally, who had never learned French, had much less trouble chatting than I, who had), the happy gurgle of the first glass from a bottle of Bordeaux. C’est la vie!

  Where was the adventure in that? Well, I once heard Alan Duff say that looking at the first blank sheet of paper, knowing he’d just signed a contract for three novels, was a true act of courage, and I believed it. I could write, couldn’t I? The only difference, after all, was that Duff had a contract and oh, perhaps a little talent.

  The idea was alluring. But my brother, although endlessly welcoming, might jib at an announcement that we were taking over his house for quite a long time. Perhaps instead we could learn to play bridge, or telephone the Inland Revenue Department, exceed our credit card limit, park on the yellow line, ask a mechanic to take a quick look at our car, extend the kitchen or order tea in a café. All of those were risky, and all had their downside. But they lacked something, didn’t they?

  I supposed, in the end, it was best just to watch murder, mayhem and ripping yarns on television, and when you got sick of the six o’clock news, reach for the off-switch (see heroic etc. above). That seemed a bit tame. All right. We’d quit working. Then we’d go to Holland and buy a canal boat and spend a year living on the French canals and perhaps sail on the Mediterranean Sea; that’s more like it, we thought.

  At eight a.m. in the Netherlands romance curdles and dreams go sour. Tackling the motorway in our toy car was rather like putting to sea on a Lilo, except that death seemed certain to be more immediate. Looked at from the Peugeot’s point of view, we were the lucky ones. The car had to go from brand new to 120 kilometres per hour in the space of five minutes. It had to endure outraged honkings as its terrified driver dodged this way and that. It had to shut its eyes and pray when calamity seemed inevitable, and would not have been reassured to know that its contents were doing the same.

  Like storm-tossed debris on a beach, we were washed up in the village of Aalsmere, where I confessed to a passerby that I was lost. ‘You cannot be lost in such a small country,’ he replied. ‘Here no one is lost.’ Sure enough, neither were we. He pointed to a lane. ‘Down there.’

  A short distance along a narrow road near the lake, we disembarked, walked along the side of a little creek and met our first … shipbroker. So we thought. He proved to be a friend of our first broker. Our first broker had been admitted to hospital, where he was likely to remain for some time, and his friend had stepped into the breach. The first broker’s friend was a thin man with wispy grey hair, a scholarly manner and a forbidding attitude. ‘We want,’ we said, ‘a boat suitable for canals, and perhaps even the sea, one we can live on for a year, maybe two.’

  He frowned. ‘Have some coffee,’ he said, walking up a gangplank to a little office built on a floating pontoon. It wobbled under our weight.

  He was much better at making coffee than selling boats. Unlike almost everyone in the Netherlands, who seemed born knowing a stern gland from a sea-cock, boats clearly puzzled him. He scarcely knew his bow from stern, much less his koelkast from a boegshroef. Even I knew one was a fridge and the other a bow-thruster, although I wasn’t sure which was which.

  Outside, the foredeck and outboard motor arm were the only items of a runabout above water. A huge Dutch barge, partly converted for living, looked as if it might soon snuggle down beside it. Might we, I asked, have a look at one or two boats, preferably afloat? ‘Have some more coffee,’ he replied, hopefully. In marine terms, caffeine overload hove onto the horizon rather than the blue boat we thought might suit us.

  ‘The blue boat?’ he said at last, as if surprised that we were there for some other reason than his excellent coffee. ‘Certainly.’ He picked up a bunch of keys and strode confidently to the green boat nearby. ‘No?’ A spread of the hands. He was doing his best, but buyers were so difficult.

  ‘This one,’ I said, going to the blue boat an
d tapping it firmly on its stern. ‘Ah.’ He unlocked it and in we went.

  We were learning lesson number one about Dutch boats. They seemed huge. Perhaps on the glistening blue waters of the Hauraki Gulf in summer, or the vast (by Dutch standards) green expanses of the Marlborough Sounds, they might have shrunk a little. In the tight marinas within Holland’s narrow waterways they became massive, like cows in farm sheds. A twelve metre boat assumed the proportions of a Devonport ferry. A fourteen metre vessel looked ready to take paying passengers to the Bahamas. A sixteen metre boat — well, stand by Monaco.

  Lesson number two was they were almost always steel. The Dutch worked with steel as New Zealanders used pinus radiata. Any properly brought-up Dutch child moved straight from potty-training to arc welding. By the time they were teething they could roll, form and rivet.

  Wooden boats were treated as museum pieces and otherwise regarded with suspicion. Fibreglass, New Zealand’s favourite boating material, was a stupid foreign invention with no place in decent society. Proper Dutch boats were steel: big, heavy things which you certainly did not want to trip over.

  Third, the Dutch were the best of marine photographers. Their pictures could make a pile of rust look ready to take on the North Sea, carrying its crew in centrally-heated luxury. We were about to learn all three lessons at once.

  The blue boat was enormous. As we looked at it I heard a sharp intake of breath from Sally, as if she’d been imagining a family saloon and come across a bus. ‘It’s so big,’ she whispered.

  It was so seriously steel that I stubbed my toe just thinking about it. The builder had been quite careful with curves but every now and then he’d evidently gone for coffee, forgotten where he’d left off, come back and headed in an entirely different direction. Rusty stains leaked from knocks in the paintwork. The whole boat was covered in green mould from Holland’s wet winter. None of this was visible in the neat photographs we had admired on the internet back in New Zealand.