Long Slow Affair of the Heart, A Read online

  ‘You came a bit early,’ said our broker’s friend unconvincingly. ‘I was about to start cleaning it down. A good scrub and it’ll look much better.’ Perhaps not that much better, we thought, heading inside.

  We were to become familiar with the smell of boats locked up for the winter. They had an odour of old cabbage and lost summers. Diesel fuel fermented in the bilges. This one had a tincture of desolation. It had two single bunks in a little V-shaped cabin in the bow, or front. Behind that was a dinette on one side and a galley, or kitchen, on the other. Then came the saloon, a boat’s living room, with one of the two steering positions (the other was on the deck at the back). Right in the stern was a big cabin with two single beds. We wanted a double bed, and by then had not learned lesson number four: every boat is a compromise.

  Worse, this boat had no shower. We wanted one of those. French marinas sometimes offered showers, but charged for them. We wanted to save money and a long walk and given the sometimes lengthy gaps between showers, we needed our own. We imagined ourselves sniffing anxiously, uncertain whether that occasional whiff was the chicken in the fridge or something going off much closer to home.

  This was a large boat, thirteen and a half metres. Why anyone would spend the amount of money needed to build a boat like that, without a shower, was one of the mysteries of the Netherlands we never quite resolved, for we were to find that in the matter of showers the Dutch were whimsical. Quite big boats often had none. Rather small boats might have two.

  But it was not time wasted. We had taken the first step to lesson number five, the most important of all: trust your instincts. First impressions counted. If the boat failed that first test, we were to find that no amount of rationalising made up for it. Not trusting our instincts almost led us unto disaster later. In the meantime, however, our instincts told us first that the boat was not going to be our home for the next year or two, and on a more feral level, it stank.

  So we moved on to the next boat, a few berths further on. I’d been studying this boat on the internet for months. It seemed perfect, for one outstanding reason: it was a classic, and I loved classic boats. My own little motor-sailer at home was designed by the wonderful Athol Burns and built in 1966. It was planked in kauri and had more ribs than Eve ever contemplated. Sally refused to set foot on it. If she could avoid looking at it — not easy, since it was moored in Golden Bay within sight of our dining table — she would. If she had to describe our bay there would be a black hole at one end of it. She thought it smelly and a thorough waste of time. Both were quite true.

  I’d drooled over boats, lived for them since I was a kid and had put to sea in a banana box. I’d discovered two things about boats immediately. First, if they can go wrong they will. Second, nothing in boating is cheap because if it is, it sinks. The third thing I found out was that boats, like porn, are fantasies best kept to yourself. I lugged the sodden crate home and asked my dad to put a point on one end and fill in the holes. To my delight he spent several hours obliging.

  When he’d finished I picked it up and set off on what I intended to be its maiden voyage as a real boat rather than a mere banana box.

  ‘Where are you going?’ he demanded, the beginnings of alarm in his voice.

  ‘Down to the beach.’

  ‘My god,’ he said, ‘not in that thing.’

  He seized his hammer once more and began knocking it back to the banana box which, he said, at least he could stand on so it would come in handy for something. Delight turned to despair, but the box served me as well as it had its bananas. It gave me nagging rights which I exercised so thoroughly that next Christmas, I came down the stairs to find the most amazing present I have ever had: a boat! Not just any old boat. A brand-new one, built by my dad and my Uncle Jock, who was a carpenter. For the first time I saw the perfect beauty of stem fitting keel, frames holding planking to voluptuous curves ending in a transom whose metaphor I was far too young to appreciate.

  It didn’t work, of course. It was too heavy, too narrow, too small. Its bottom planking split in the sun. ‘Cover it in wet sacks,’ said my dad. ‘It’ll soon come right.’ But I’d discovered yet another thing about boats. They were so beautiful I didn’t really care whether they were good or bad. I loved looking at them, and I admired this one until it had rotted into a pile of mould.

  Later I built a kayak out of wood and some sort of sacking which the shop said was cheap but every bit as good as canvas. It was not. It leaked, always. I built an oil-drum raft, a racing catamaran, bought a R-class yacht, a clinker dinghy, a surfboard, a fine X-class yacht which I saw lying in someone’s front garden with grass growing through its bottom and spent at least three times longer restoring than it would have taken to build a new one. I took my new girlfriend Sally out sailing on Otago Harbour in that glorious boat. She got wet and accused me of using her as a fender to prevent my varnished topsides crashing into an iron piling. I thought it a sacrifice any woman would be proud to make. She got over it but I learned another of those endless truths about boats: women are at best resigned to them, or at least all who sail in them.

  So this classic boat lying in its funny little marina not far from Amsterdam definitely started from behind. I had spent a lot of time working on Sally. Oh all right, lying to her. I’d told her how roomy the vessel was, how beautifully built by van Lent, one of Holland’s leading builders of luxury craft; how maintaining its varnish would take only a couple of hours every six months, possibly every year; how it would certainly appreciate in value and could quite easily make us a fortune. The last argument was difficult to sustain with a straight face because no boat I had ever owned had made us so much as a cent; rather, every one of them had cost us dearly.

  This boat had been on the market for at least three years, and even the rankest optimist might conclude that it was hardly being rushed by buyers tearing open their cheque-books as they ran. It was a disaster, of course, varnish so hideously water-stained my estimate of a couple of hours work multiplied by a factor of, oh, a thousand or so. Its teak decks looked forlorn, its paintwork forsaken. Bits of interior lay around inside. We didn’t even bother unlocking its doors.

  ‘It’s cheap,’ the broker’s friend said. ‘Make an offer.’ His tone suggested any offer. But the boat may lie there still, mould dripping over its curves, its splendid design a trap for smitten Kiwis looking for a cheap doer-upper.

  I was not dismayed. In fact, I was delighted. After just one day I knew I was onto something here, something good, unusual, wonderful. Ask yourself this question: how often do you go out with a load of money to buy yourself a hideously extravagant toy? Or: how did he get a load of money in the first place? The answer to the first was, of course, never; to the second, the money was a legacy Sally had received from her mother, which she’d rashly decided to invest in her husband’s later-life crisis.

  If you’re a bloke, you might rephrase the situation like this: how often do you get licence to do nothing else but cruise this way and that, looking at anything you like as long as it floats, in company with a woman who isn’t viewing this as some peculiar blokey addiction but is, as they say in the world of boats, on board?

  Like sex, it was exquisite for him, and she quite liked it too. When I drew this analogy for my friend Tom, he sent an acid addendum back from New Zealand: like sex, he said, it didn’t happen all that often either.

  The weather was perfect. Our friends Glenn Busch and Trish Allen had been in Holland a month later when they’d bought their canal boat a few years before. The cold had riven their bones.

  When Glenn found a parka in a second-hand shop back in Christchurch, he bought it for me immediately. ‘You’ll need it, mate,’ he said. It was a remarkable garment, made by Ralph Lauren. Oh, how the mighty price had fallen, to twenty dollars. It could have warmed a Mac truck. When I put it on I looked like a cartoon Eskimo. Sally said it made a mountain out of a molehill and I agreed that it certainly occupied more than its fair share of a bus seat. It was like carry
ing my own home around with me, warm and worn and comfy. But too big. When I came to pack it, the parka needed a suitcase all of its own. I could have worn it onto the plane, but the airlines were then contemplating excess fares for obese people, and I feared this might tip the balance. An economy class seat just wasn’t big enough for both of us.

  Instead, I went out and bought a state of the art fleece jacket from Earth Sea Sky, a wonderful Kiwi-made thing, light as a feather and quite at home in Colombo Street or up a mountain. Sally bought merino jackets and fleece and lots of polyprop shirts and long johns for both of us, and with ski hats and gloves we felt outfitted for the worst the Netherlands could heave at us.

  The weather turned out to be as shocking as we expected, but for a different reason. The sun shone from a clear sky; well, as clear as it gets in the Netherlands, which is like a nice blue day in New Zealand only with the curtains drawn. ‘We have not had a proper winter,’ Mr Flores had said, happily. ‘You are very lucky.’ Blue day followed blue. The temperature one Sunday reached twenty degrees. The winter gear hung in the wardrobe as a reproach. The Dutch celebrated by walking everywhere, especially right in front of our little Peugeot. They took to their bicycles in vast numbers. They celebrated their good fortune endlessly.

  Every night on television the news on global warming grew darker. Every day the Dutch mood grew brighter. I asked Jan Jellema, whose boat I was then visiting, whether he felt threatened in such a low country with the sea rising outside. He looked at me as if I’d come down in the last shower, even if that had fallen quite some time ago. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t worry a bit. The Dutch have been fighting the sea for centuries.’ Of course he was right. The place was as much water as land. Dykes were so common I scarcely noticed them any more.

  With more than sixteen million people jammed into a space much smaller than Canterbury the entire nation would have sunk into the mud under the sheer weight of humanity if they’d treated flooding as, say, people in the Bay of Plenty did: an act visited upon them rarely enough for them to hope that next time it would go somewhere else. The Dutch were so used to keeping the sea out of their living rooms that what did another few centimetres matter to them? If only they’d colonised Bangladesh instead of their East Indies, that country’s troubles might have vanished from the six o’clock news.

  So, in the Netherlands this March, there was no apprehension among either the Dutch or ourselves. The Dutch turned their pale faces to the sun, or where they felt the sun might be behind the haze. We put away our long johns and went looking for boats in the warm.

  We’d gone to Holland to buy our boat because the market was huge, the country was small, and most people spoke English. The Dutch loved boats almost as much as they did bicycles. They had millions of them. Water comprised a quarter of the country, and boats were jammed into every wet bit. The Dutch ran boats as New Zealanders ran sheep. The real problem here was not in finding a boat, for you could not miss them; it was finding the right boat.

  People had tried various methods. Glenn and Trish went off to Holland with essentially just a single boat in mind. They had seen it advertised on the internet. When that one was disappointing they set off in their hire car, staying in B&Bs in the places their search took them. Eventually they found their lovely boat, a turn of the twentieth century milk carrier converted for living, through a small ad in one of the boating magazines. A couple from Auckland hired a broker to search for them, and he found them a boat, a barge, in just two days. Our own technique was to watch the boats advertised on the internet, get a feel for the market, then compile a list of possibilities before we boarded our plane.

  Then I stumbled across a website used by the Dutch to advertise their holiday homes for rent. We found a warm, bright one-bedroomed cottage in Schoorl, a nice little village on the edge of a national park in north Holland. Behind the village lay the biggest sand dunes in all the Netherlands, some of them almost sixty metres high. We could sit in a café and watch families climb to the top of a huge sand dune then march down again, like the grand old Duke of York’s ten thousand men. The sand hills rolled down to the North Sea, a brownish-grey place that on a good day might be called bracing, although I preferred bleak. Still, the Dutch loved it, and like people everywhere went down to the sea in droves and stood, rugged-up, staring over the wild surf.

  Not far down the road was the town of Alkmaar, a fine tenth-century town which was the first city in the Netherlands to be freed from Spanish occupation in the sixteenth century after withstanding a siege whose last day was still celebrated each year. ‘Victory begins in Alkmaar,’ cried the locals, and in an office near Schipol I could hear Mr Flores rubbing his hands. Alkmaar’s houses sometimes rose straight from the canals, like a stumpy Venice. On sunny afternoons when the brokers’ yards were closed, or we had time, we would sit and watch the Dutch ambling by, for this was a nation of quiet pleasures.

  Between Schoorl and Amsterdam lay tulip fields, and the famous Keukenhof Gardens, striping the land in brilliant colours. Schoorl was not a popular boating area — not, that is, in the usual sense, for of course there were canals and boats everywhere. The brokers’ yards, though, were to the south, and east, or across the long causeway over the mouth of the Isselmeer, the shallow sea running down to Amsterdam. The country was so small it took, at most, a couple of hours to reach the boatyards in any direction, and we didn’t have to spend time looking for a place to stay. We could come home as late as we liked, sloth out and watch forty channels on the television, encountering perhaps the sole benefit of New Zealand’s mono-lingual education: we understood hardly any of them, so cutting down the number of channels we had to curse at.

  Still, our landlady was hardly any more cosmopolitan. ‘You came from New Zealand?’ she asked, doubtfully. She stared at our tiny Peugeot. ‘Did you drive?’

  Oh, there was another reason for buying a boat in Holland, pure Kiwi: boats were reputed to be cheaper there. Here lay the universal truth about boats however: usually they were cheap for a reason. With boats, probably more than anything else, you get what you paid for. Holland’s bustling market might keep its prices below other countries’. Certainly I looked at boats and imagined them selling in Auckland for far more than the asking price here. But if the boat seemed too good to be true, then even in Holland it was. The boats at the top of our list quickly dropped off. Some were unsuitable. Some were in other places, such as the south of France, or Belgium. Some were just awful.

  We weren’t in the market for a barge. Instead, we wanted a steel cruiser, big enough to live aboard for months, even years. We thought of spending the first year on the French canals, the second drifting down the wide river leading south. We might nip out into the Mediterranean, we told each other, perhaps to Marseilles, even to the French Riviera.

  If we got that far, why not to Spain? We breathed deeply and smelled suntan oil. So we drew another list, of non-tradeable essentials. The boat had to have: a double bed, a good living space, a shower, a place for friends and family to stay, and an after-deck to sit on in the evenings watching the world turn rosy through the bottom of a wine glass.

  Naturally, these were the qualities we began to renege on when we saw boats which might otherwise fit. ‘Well, I wouldn’t mind sleeping in single beds for a while. It’s only for a year or two.’ (Not me.) Or, ‘How many people are going to stay with us anyway?’ (Me.)

  The boat heading our list seemed perfect on all counts. It was a Valk cruiser, a fine make. Panelled in mahogany with a teak deck and rakish bow. Lo, when we turned up at the yard, it had just been repainted too. New stainless steel railings glinted in the afternoon sun. Sally wanted to make an offer on the spot. But when we collected the keys and went below, oh dear. Its fine wooden floors were buckled. It stank. Mess was everywhere. I lifted the engine room hatch. Something gurgled far below.

  And the price had just gone up.

  ‘Well,’ said the broker, ‘the owner went bankrupt. The boat was lying around going to rack a
nd ruin. So we bought it ourselves. We had to take off the teak deck. It was beyond repair. We’ve already spent thirteen thousand Euro (twenty-six thousand dollars) on it. You won’t have to spend much more. New upholstery, well, a couple of thousand, canopies — they’re only cloth after all — a bit of work on the wiring, the engine doesn’t sound too bad … but we’ve spent so much, you offer me only five hundred Euro less than the asking price, I won’t take it.’ Five hundred Euros? I was thinking 5,000, at least. So we moved on, quickly. Over the next week we looked at big boats, small ones, the ordinary, the flawed and the downright boring. Creatures of grace and beauty proved to be of dubious virtue. Our list of essentials was so compromised it refused to appear in public. Until, finally, we had a short list of two: Beauty and the Beast.

  The Beauty was a varnished jewel, kept inside a huge gloomy shed where dark water lapped around hundreds of boats. Its owner, Jan Jellema, had it painted and revarnished every three years. It was an immaculate Super van Craft named Alcyon. Jan had visited Christchurch that January. ‘It is a very pretty city,’ he said politely. He had just sold his business and was buying another boat, of the same make but much bigger.

  We fell in love with his boat at first sight, of course. Yes, it had disadvantages. The shower was primitive. The main sleeping cabin was low, so it didn’t interfere with the vessel’s fine lines, and you climbed into bed doubled up in the interests of good design. Jan, a huge man, climbed into his bunk to show how easy it was, and lay there like a whale that had found its way into a bookshelf. Yet you could forgive anything of something so splendid.

  Jan had a nice line in responses. Anything I asked him he shrugged his shoulders and said, ‘I don’t know. Dirck/Hendrick/Johannes/Jens looks after that.’

  At night we discussed the boat rather in the way we’d talked of buying one of Sally’s favourite paintings, an old, sick man holding a cat. It wasn’t at all what I’d imagined living with but we loved it, so that was that. We arranged a second visit. This time Jan had his boat displayed on the jetty outside. It glittered nicely in the weak afternoon sun. His wife and son were there too. They stood to attention as they were introduced, as if for inspection. The son, with the weary patience of youth, explained to us that diesel engines did not run on petrol.