Narrow Dog to Carcassonne (24 page)

IT’S THE SMELLS, MAINLY, THAT YOU REMEMBER from the Burgundy Canal. The bass notes are from the locks and the banks. You feel them in your guts, not your nose—heavy, muddy, headachy, as when you first looked over a bridge and longed for a fish or bathed in a stream. The middle registers are cut grass, with its sweet breath, and the may flowers, which say relax, it’s OK, it’s warm, there’s no problem, don’t rush, stay here and let’s all get drunk. Over all, the floral tunes of rape and chestnut and lime.

Then the scale of the cut, its boldness. The Oxford Canal writhes like a scotched snake; the Trent and Mersey squeezes through necks of reeds; the Kennet and Avon struggles across the West Country like a cripple; but Old Father Burgundy Canal keeps rolling along down broad straights, with ash and willow and alder and rowan and beech and laburnum in royal proportion, and avenues of poplars that would honour Cleopatra. Grassy ways and verges; ten feet below through the trees the river Armançon, and on both sides titanic breasts and bellies of hills in their several greens.
La France profonde, la France vaste
. Sometimes a tufted water meadow and white cattle. No machinery, no workers in the fields. No trees undressed—the leaves are darkening and the candles of the chestnuts gutter and burn out.

Tanlay, Lézinnes, Ancy-le-Franc—little pale towns, mostly shut. You must not miss the frog’s legs in Tanlay, the judge had said. At the restaurant there was a notice—
Open Every Day
. In the courtyard a couple sharing a bottle of wine—
Oui, monsieur
, we are open every day, but not today.

In Cusy, which was the shut part of Ancy-le-Franc, which was shut anyway, there were four deceased cafés. But here and there often enough among the dust and glare of the narrow towns a house of wedding-cake perfection, or behind a gate a court with a green lawn, a tree, a table, a wall with the new leaves of the vine. And as you sail on you will sometimes see a chateau between the trees—and even a chateau pup in Renaissance style, dreaming in the middle of a lake.

Overhead the fast jets soar, under Mach 1 in respect for the stillness of the water. Below, the bream, in their dozens, a pound in weight, climb and fall away, their dark bodies and fins an echo of the jets: the same sense of power held back for fitness to the time of day, and the season, and the Burgundy Canal.

WE WERE IN A BACK YARD, WHICH THE RESTAURANT probably called its
terrasse
, in Ravières. The Bourgogne Aligoté was dead right for the snails, I said—never heard of it before. And I thought the red burgundies were heavy, but the ones from round here are fine and light and you can sort of taste the soil they grow in. I will give up beer and steeple-chase my way burgundy by burgundy from Chablis to Mâcon. You’ll kill yourself, said Monica. The canal is only the start of the wine region, and we’re not halfway along it. There are four thousand vineyards in Burgundy.

Hello, are you the people on the English boat? We are from Denmark—that’s our cruiser over there. You are going down the Rhône? You have a big engine? Can’t complain, I said. We are two hundred horsepower, said the Dane—we can get down and we can get back up. We winter in the south—the weather is good apart from the wind. There is a community of boaters in Aigues Mortes, many English. They spend their time grumbling about France. Aigues Mortes is a tourist place. We went to Sète to stay—that is a real town. In Sète they fish and grow oysters. There is an inland sea down there, a big one.

There are a lot of locks ahead of you at Vénarey—forty, close together, continued the Dane. They give you your own lock-keeper and he goes home and then he comes back for the second day. It’s sixty kilometres and eighty locks from here to the tunnel at Pouilly, and after that it’s seven hundred kilometres downhill to the sea. The tunnel is three and a half kilometres long and has no lights. It carried away our canopy. But you’ll be OK with your low-air draught and your narrow hull. They are strict about life jackets and lights and horns since a lady got drowned there. Nice to meet you—drop in on the way back to your boat.

It must have been dreadful for the lady in the tunnel, I said to Monica. Think of the darkness. One move, one step, and it’s end of adventure or worse. Our engine is too small for the Rhône and even if we get down it what will the south be like? We have to get across that inland sea place, the Etang de Thau—it says in the book there are gales and it’s full of oyster beds. The French probably lay mines in the oyster beds—remember Churchill sank their navy in the war. But what is the Midi? What is the Camargue? You can read books but it means nothing. It could be awful. All I know is something about white horses, from television in the sixties. And flamingos—in
Alice in Wonderland
they seem rather unpleasant. Perhaps they attack whippets. We don’t know anything about Carcassonne—we chose it because the name sounded nice. In the pictures it has castles, but I bet they are not real castles like we had in Wales, with walls twenty feet thick. It’s probably all fake, and full of Irish pubs. Everyone we know has been to Carcassonne already, and some of them are there now, sending us e-mails saying Ho ho we got here first.

Very true, said Monica, it was all a bloody silly idea and a waste of three years. But if we survive the Vénarey locks and the Pouilly tunnel we will pour a glass of burgundy in the canal. It will find its way down between the Massif Central and the Alps all the way to the Mediterranean, and so will we. You’re depressed after being ill. Let’s go and try some of that Danish hospitality—perhaps it will cheer you up. I hear they give you the bottle and let you get on with it.

WE MOORED IN THE BIG BASIN AT MONTBARD and in the morning Monica went to the launderette. She put on her determined expression and as she walked by children burst into tears. I carried the bags and left her hammering and kicking the machines and Jim and I wandered about the poor town, all sideways and up a hill—and behold, a cinema.

I used to take my mother to the Showcase in Walsall. We went early, and often we were alone. The best bit was the popcorn and the coffee and the Brazil nuts with chocolate on them. One day as we were going through the barrier my mother said loudly—Are you sure you have been to the lavatory, Terry? Mother, I said, I am sixty years of age and a company chairman. But resistance is futile—if I had held my ground she would have told the girl on the turnstile about when I was a baby and she took me down into Pembroke Dock and had me circumcised.

The last film we saw was
Quiz Show
, with Paul Scofield playing Mark Van Doren, who must have been a very boring man. If I had known I could have taken her to a proper film, with the Borg, and Klingons.

It’s called the Phoenix, I said to Monica. It’s sort of twenties style; it’s concrete and it’s small and it’s lovely, and it’s showing an American film at eight o’clock about people murdering each other and at five o’clock a French comedy. Let’s go to the French one. We owe it to their culture—after all we are their guests. I thought of Jean Gabin at daybreak finishing his last cigarette and reaching for his revolver. I thought of Jean Marais walking through the melting mirror and down the corridors of hell to rescue his wife. I thought of Paul the student, the dominant male, destroyed by his weakling cousin. I thought of Stéphane Audran, as one does, and I thought of Anna Karina, and Catherine Deneuve, and I thought of popcorn and Brazils and big paper cups of coffee and fat cashews in tins.

Monica had forced the washing machines to submit and was in a good mood so she said she would come to the pictures with me. To my joy the Phoenix was open as advertised, though it was Sunday. Two old folk sold us the tickets and hurried round to take us inside.

The cinema had been refitted in a steep rake with a hundred blue airline seats for children. A few people of our age sat in the middle, quite close together, the ladies holding handbags in their laps, the men in white shirts and brown jackets. We sat down and I realized that there had been no snacks for sale.

The advertisements began. There were glass slides of each shop in Montbard—the florist, the
podologue
, the launderette, the
tabac
, the
traiteur
, the baker, the dog hairdresser. Each was shown for ten seconds, while a Sidney Bechet track was played. You couldn’t see the slides properly because someone had left the door open. Then there was a filmed commercial with flashing lights. This ice-cream bar, said a commanding voice, is not just chocolate, but double chocolate, and also caramel. I think mention was made of nuts. A spotlight came up and the old chap from the ticket office came through a door with a tray at his middle. He moved at a steady five knots to another door a few yards away and went out. No one in the auditorium had moved. My hand was still in my pocket for change.

The screen moved its sides in and out a few times and the film began. It was about a bunch of middle-class French people who go to a wedding and it was based on the idea that if you sleep with your brother’s wife this can cause disarray. The bride’s mother wasn’t very nice and the best man lost the ring. There was a large cast and a lot of shouting. The story was set in the Rhône-Alpes and would make you want to go there as long as you could be sure never to meet any of these people. The audience did not laugh and the actors were all the wrong ages. A lot of actors have got old and died and perhaps there aren’t so many to choose from any more.

FROM BEHIND A GATE SOME DONKEYS LOOKED across at the lock. You know that poem called ‘Prayer to Go to Heaven with the Donkeys’, I said, by Francis Jammes. Yes, said Monica, it’s in all the anthologies. He was younger than Arthur Rimbaud, I said, and he was around when Louis Aragon was around. He could have been a surrealist, or a communist and written about politics, but he didn’t. It’s a Catholic country as well.

When I must come to you, My Lord, let it be a day in spring when the dust shines in the sun. I would like to choose my own way, as I did on earth, to go to Paradise, where the stars shine by day.

I shall take up my staff and set out on the great road and I shall say to the donkeys, my friends—I am Francis Jammes and I am going to Paradise, because there is no hell in the land of the Good Lord.

I will say to them, come, dear friends of heaven, poor dear creatures who with a brisk movement brush away the dull flies, and blows, and stings…

Let me come to you, Lord, in the midst of these creatures that I love so much, because they lower their heads gently, and stop: putting their little feet together in a sweet way, which makes you pity them.

I shall arrive followed by thousands of ears; followed by some with crows on their backs, some who drag carts of acrobats or carriages with white feathers and silver, some with barrels hunched on their sides, by she-asses full as a leather bottle, with broken steps; by some with little trousers because of the seeping wounds made by the stubborn flies that crowd around.

Lord, let it be that I come to you with these asses. Let angels lead us in peace to wooded streams where cherries tremble, smooth as the joyful flesh of young girls, and may I, leaning over your heavenly waters in this dwelling place of souls, be like the donkeys, whose humble and sweet poverty reflects the clarity of eternal love.

The bit about the feet, said Monica—Jim does that. Yes, I said, the poem makes you wonder what other creatures might be feeling. Look at the herons—they wait until you are nearly on them and then they sail ahead and then they fly around behind and settle again. They must have some sort of feelings. Even the black and green dragonflies must have some speck of awareness—even the spider in the engine-room.

I started the motor and climbed out on to the back counter and took the tiller. A carp as big as a haversack had come in between the boat and the rocks and now it was trapped and the propeller was hammering and the boat was moving. The fish heaved itself free and bolted away down the side of the boat as if in great fear.

IN ENGLAND THE PIGEONS ARE NOT ALWAYS polite, but in France they say
Là-bas au fond, là-bas au fond
—down there at the bottom, down there at the bottom. Then there is a bird that says
Kiss kiss
with a French accent. All rather encouraging. In Vénarey something was going
Cricky cricky croo
and its friend would answer from over the basin
Cricky cricky croo
. What bird is that? I asked. It’s frogs, said Monica, this is France—there are frogs, they eat them. They haven’t eaten these, I said. Lots more frogs started saying
Cricky cricky croo
, louder and louder, and then as night fell they started to neigh. It was important that we slept well that night, but the frogs neighed until midnight, and started again when the sun came up.

We cleared out the well-deck at the front of the
Phyllis May
so we could jump in and out safely and moved the diesel reserves from the engine-room in case there was a fire and set out in a thin mist. A buzz-bike arrived. I am your lock-keeper, said the rider, taking off his helmet. He was small and brown, with a round face and round glasses and muscular legs. How many locks do you wish to do today? he asked. I thought of the twenty-nine locks of the Caen flight in four and a half hours. All of them, I said. No,
monsieur.
Twenty today and twenty tomorrow. Afterwards I thought That’s funny, we did not shake hands. In France you shake hands with everybody, including the chap next to you at the checkout.

The sun came out and the poplars took us round bends between the green hills and one of us was on the tiller and one of us walked the towpath with a boathook and Jim trotted along behind. As we left each lock our keeper stayed behind and closed the gates and emptied the lock and opened the bottom gates, which is how they like it on the Burgundy Canal. While this was going on we sailed to the next lock and opened it and went in. Then we had to wait for the lock-keeper to buzz up and fill it, because he was the guy with the key. It was much slower than doing it ourselves. When he opened the gates we sailed past him with a cheery word but he did not reply or he pretended not to understand.