Leontyne (14 page)

The next day, we moved on a little through the Bassin de Villettes, through the locations where
Les Enfants du Paradis
was shot in the last days of the war, under constant harassment from the Nazis. I stopped at the nearest point to the Gare du Nord to visit another expatriate, Anthony Sidey, an Englishman who has been living in Paris for twenty-five years doing what he first dreamt of doing when he was eleven: making and playing harpsichords. His workshop, in a cul-de-sac overlooking the rail marshalling yard outside the Gare du Nord, was a jumble of bent and drying wood, mixed with old musical instruments that had been sent there for repair or that he had bought for restoration. When I arrived, Anthony was sitting at a beautiful harpsichord that he had built, practising for his own pleasure. It takes him seven years to build a harpsichord from the moment that he cuts the first bit of wood and shapes it the way he wants. When the instruments are finished they are quite magnificent, and Anthony, a Francophile
par excellence
, prefers not to export them but rather to keep them in France for visiting virtuosi to play on their tours. I think he does not really like to see these beautiful things go too far away. It is unusual for such a talented musician to be able to build such highly prized instruments.

It was time now to end our perambulation round Paris and return to the Pont des Arts for the night of music, and rendezvous with my daughter Daisy and her husband Marcus. Luckily our mooring under the bridge was still free, but
we only just pipped a hotel barge to the post. There was a certain amount of argument but in the end he agreed to drop back and tie up against one of the barges a little further down river. To celebrate the night of music and my daughter's arrival, I had decided to have a dinner party on the deck of the barge and invite some friends. Bruno, a director of photography with more feel for the medium than most of his calling, was an excellent cook and prepared a very simple meal from leeks and a shin of veal. As it turned out, his reputation as a chef was guaranteed to remain safe, even had the meal not been delicious: no sooner had the musical celebrations started than all traffic came to a standstill, preventing the guests, with the exception of Daisy and Marcus, arriving. Moreover, our berth had become untenable because a really loud and astonishingly bad rock band had come to play no more than ten feet from the barge. While some of the smaller bands on the bridge above us were attracting large groups to hear them play, the band next to us seemed to have found the secret of actually repelling an audience. While all types of illegal substances were clearly being passed around, there was no sign of any reduction in the dreary decibels that were pumping from the vibrating but obviously robust loudspeakers. Ray and I decided to cast off and move up the river to tie up on the
quai
just below Notre Dame, which I am sure was illegal, but a crimette that we hoped would go unnoticed on a night such as this.

As we sat down to eat, the heavens opened for a few minutes and we all crouched under our blue awning holding our plates. Suddenly there was a piercing scream from Daisy who had been standing beneath part of the awning that had, we later discovered, been weakened by a burning cigarette butt thrown from the bridge above us at the Pont des Arts. The sudden shower had formed a large puddle in the canvas and the pressure had produced a fine jet of water which had gone down Daisy's neck. Her scream passed practically
unnoticed in the cacophony all around us. Bands were marching over the Pont Neuf; African groups were celebrating Sainte Cecilia's night with the wildest heathen music; on the opposite bank a lone violinist was making a poor attempt at a spirited Hungarian melody; and a beautiful blonde flautist was playing under the plane tree to which we had moored the barge.

The night was clear and fresh now, after the rain, and this vast tempest of sound was being echoed from one disapproving building to another, bouncing away down the river, never quite dying away before it was replaced by another squall of sound. The new tablecloth that I had bought for the occasion was soaked and the plates that we had laid for the absent guests had puddles of water in them. We dried the seats, opened a bottle or two of the cheap champagne we had bought near Rheims, and settled down to watch the spectacle and to wave at the
bateaux mouches
, those enormous glass structures that glide past by the minute, their loudspeakers blasting out essential tourist facts in every language known to man.

Much later we returned to our mooring under the Pont des Arts. The noisy band was still just as noisy but the gaps between numbers had increased substantially. The possibility of sleep was remote, so Daisy and I decided to take a walk round the crowded streets. In the Rue de Seine a raucous band dressed entirely in red plastic, too tight for comfort or decorum, was playing to a crowd of dancing students. The lead trumpeter was disturbing the rhythm with his attempts to tantalize the crowd by pulling down the bottom part of his plastic outfit and giving them a glimpse of pubic hair. The crowd were distinctly untantalized and the lady tuba player, wearing dark glasses and a trilby, stepped forward and briskly pulled his trousers down, so indicating in a perfectly French fashion that there was nothing there to make a fuss about. The music improved and Daisy and I joined the dancers on that warm summer's night. I was filled with
admiration that French law has it that every month for one night, everyone is allowed to make as much noise as he likes. Bravo, Paris.

One day we just had to leave Paris: the itch to start the motor and get on our way again, never knowing where we would stop for the night, was irresistible. We pulled away from the Pont des Arts in the dawn with the guardian
clochard
fast asleep in a huddled bundle on his favourite piece of cardboard. The morning light was slanting across the
quais
and the noise of the traffic was reduced to the sound of a single vehicle. The air was cool and fresh as we passed under the shadow of Notre Dame for the last time, and made our way up the Seine under the Pont de Bercy.

Just past the bridge, we passed a barge called the
Sylphe
which had been there when we loaded our barrel of wine on board. Her captain, a grumpy chap with a saint for a wife, told me he had to feed his family on the equivalent of four hundred pounds a month and, with five mouths to feed, found this very hard. I waved as we went past and he told me that he would be following us in a few days because he had got a cargo of barley to transport to Basel in Switzerland. A drought in the USA had caused panic in the grain futures market, and for some reason large amounts of wheat and barley were being moved from the huge Common Market silos to Switzerland. From time to time the mysteries of commerce elude me, but this
batelier
was a good deal happier than when I had last encountered him. Every cloud has a silver lining for someone somewhere, they say.

It took us longer to push up against the current than I'd anticipated, and it was early afternoon before we reached the junction of the Marne and the Seine. I then took the kind of
decision that you can only take when you do not have hotels booked or appointments to keep: I decided to divert from our planned route, and turned left, or, more nautically, to port, up the Marne. I had always wanted to visit Joinville, famous for its film studios, and had once passed that way on one of my earlier voyages, but been unable to stop. It was not very far out of our way and we reached the suburb of Paris in time to moor early.

Joinville still has villas from the 1900s stretched along the banks of the Marne, which gives it a sleepy, long-ago feeling – of dusty roads rather than streets and shady plane trees. We tied up outside a jolly-looking restaurant where a huge, cutout plywood chef, dominating the skyline, announced that this was Chez Gegène. The whole scene could have been lifted from the pages of
Babar the Elephant:
even the scullers seemed to have slowed down to the pace of the summer's evening, dipping the blades of their oars languorously into the glassy surface of the water with a satisfying swish.

Ray and I smartened ourselves up and went into the huge restaurant which was also a
bal musette
. There were half a dozen couples dancing to a live band. Inside the building and outside under umbrellas, people were eating and laughing. The menu, as in all good restaurants in France or anywhere else, was extremely simple: either lobster or steak and chips. The kitchen, which was outside, was manned by twenty swift and swearing waiters using the shortest slang abbreviations for their orders. The final dressings on the plates were dished out by the owner's extremely pretty daughter. Ray and I ate our meal and reminisced about the trip so far while watching the dancers. There was a woman of fifty summers, who looked exactly like Toulouse Lautrec's favourite dancer, La Goulue, dancing with a short fat man of the same age. His shirt, open to the waist, revealed a huge and hairy expanse of flesh. They made an odd couple, but they danced beautifully to an accordion version of a song
called
‘Au près de ma blonde'
, and one by one the other dancers sat down to let these two have the floor.

Somehow, the music and the setting made me feel extremely apprehensive about the journey I had planned. Would we ever find anywhere as accessible as France? Although Ray's French was improving enough to be able to order his own meal, we both decided that now we were under way again, we would give up restaurants and live off our own cooking. We walked the few yards back to the boat and I pointed out the Joinville film studios to him. It is a mystery to me why film studios have to look so ugly from the outside. I suppose they are no more so than any factory, but somehow it seems odd that such varied and extravagant products should emerge from these utilitarian buildings.

The next morning we turned the
Leo
around and went down the Marne till we reached the Seine. Turning upstream we passed through the stockbroker belt, where trim expensive houses and trim expansive lawns stretched down to the river, its banks lined with weeping willows. There were many gorgeous females busy browning themselves for God knows what, but though we went very close and did our most charming waves, we never got so much as a flicker of recognition in return. Suddenly all my warm feelings for the French, from the night before at Chez Gegène, evaporated. Here were rich, superior beings who clearly believed that the sun was there to shine only on their posteriors, and that the very idea of a battered old boat like ours approaching within waving distance was too much. The rich are different, and their attitude prompted some wry and rudely accurate remarks from Ray, normally charitable about his fellow beings.

The beautiful wooded banks through Fontainebleau led us to our mooring, in the mouth of a stream near Montereau. Ray got out his fishing line and tried his luck, while I started to read a story called ‘The Two Hundred Pound Millionaire'. From a collection by Weston Martyr called
The Pipe Pushers
, it is a tale of courage and self-reliance which I highly recommend
to any voyager, and also to anyone who tries to judge people by their appearance. It reminded me of an occasion when I was growing up in India: my father heard me complaining about the five-day journey that we were making from Bombay to the Himalayas, and insisted that I read
The Worst Journey in the World
by Apsley Cherry-Garrard – the story of a disastrous expedition to the Antarctic, organized to collect the eggs of the emperor penguin. He was right to think that, having read that book, no one had the right to complain about discomfort while travelling.

The morning trip to the
boulangerie
took us through narrow streets to the usual comforting French square, its patch of sandy gravel dented by the impact of a myriad steel
boules
, thrown with accuracy and venom.
Boules
, or
pétanque
as it is known in the South, is the only game I know that rivals the subterfuge and meanness of croquet. I had, by now, fallen into the French habit of buying bread every day. French bread never seems to keep for more than a few hours, and croissants are at their best when still hot, the fat in which they have been cooked staining the sides of the plain white paper bags they all seem to come in.

As Ray and I strolled back from the village, we discussed the latest problem we were having with the steering of the boat. I felt that the fins that we had welded on to the rudder in London, and that had subsequently vibrated off, would have been a great help with the steering in the narrow rivers where we were having difficulty in turning. I had heard that there was a boatyard owned by a certain Mr Evans, who had to be English, in Sens – a town an hour or two away – and I thought that before we went into the wilds of the Canal de Bourgogne we ought to have the fins put on again.

Mr Evans was indeed English and from the British Navy. He had tried to set up his business on the Thames, but his speciality, namely repairing wooden boats, was considered too messy for the riparian authorities in the Home Counties, so he had tossed his curls, so to speak, ventured into the
Common Market, found things much easier to manage, and really felt, he said, that he had the right to exist here. As luck would have it, he had ordered a mobile crane that day, to lift some boats that had been stored in his yard back into the water; so we soon had the
Leo
on the bank for a welding job on the rudder. Though we had all the apparatus for welding neither of us had enough skill, so we recruited a friendly Dutchman who was building a hotel barge nearby and had run out of money. He was an extremely good welder and had our job done in a very short space of time. In the half an hour or so that the boat was out of the water, he managed somehow not only to tell us his entire life story, but also to ring up the local newspaper and tell them that we, an English boat, had stopped here for him to make repairs. Two reporters arrived and interviewed the Dutchman, who seemed to be a natural for that sort of thing, about his life and hard times – and they took a picture of the
Leo
.