Our boat was under a motorway, with a main road alongside and another over the water. There was grass, shivering in the roar, and there were showers. Outside our galley window was a bench for the winos, who were replaced every forty minutes by Central Casting.
Say Nat, that last lot, they looked like accountants, for God’s sake. Can’t you get some really scuddy ones, ones that talk to themselves? And look, tell them to use a bit of initiative, have a good scratch, fight, throw up.
We had visited Reims before and liked it, but we were beginning to wonder.
Last time we had not visited the cathedral, because I was in a phase of no history or ruins, and I bought a coat instead. It was supposed to be
imperméable
, but the man in the shop lied. Monica has not let me forget about the
imperméable
.
We walked through a filthy underpass, and came out by the Lesbigay bar, which looked cheerful, but was shut. Big Funereal Surfaces was open. Entry was free and all were welcome and it offered permanent promotions on selected headstones, and ring this number if you die out of hours.
The cathedral stood at the end of the street, and in the manner of things at sea the more we walked towards it the further away it went. We passed by some failed shops and came into a drab square.
A doll’s house gives you the illusion of size because it is big made small. Here the illusion works the other way. The cathedral does not look big, until you realize that the human figures carved on its façade are fifteen feet high. There is a sense of intimacy, and power, as if Jesus Christ had come to tea.
The interior could have contained the rest of Reims and over the west door the September sun shone blood and cornflowers through thirty-foot windows. Up under the roof was a round window and on a pillar a notice.
The rose window on the north side of the transept is the most beautiful of the cathedral’s ancient windows. It has two themes, creation and original sin. Right at the top the suckling virgin symbolizes the salvation of a sinful world by a second Eve.
The rose window was not triumphant like the windows over the west door; the reds and blues and greens were softer. Round the outer edge there were scenes of the creation and the fall of man, and the shapes seemed to move. I came on beauty that you won’t believe.
When people die and come back they say they floated above the world. If they hadn’t changed their minds they would have gone through the rose window.
Those guys a thousand years ago were saying the world could be saved from man’s first disobedience and the fruit of that forbidden tree, and one day the battle against evil will be won, and the powers of hell cast down, and while you were looking at the rose window you had to believe them.
On the way back Jim and I waited outside the supermarket. On the noticeboard the picture of a little girl.
Estelle Mouzin—9 years old. Disappeared 9 January. Height 1.35. Green eyes. Long chestnut hair. Navy blue anorak, violet beret, red dungarees, black satchel.
Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it.
THE PHONE RANG. IT WAS GEORGIA, OUR younger daughter. Lucy said if you had drowned she would have the Nepal carpet and me the wooden lion from Nigeria, said Georgia. That’s not fair. I don’t like the wooden lion—I don’t like its smile. I want the Nepal carpet. Lucy’s got a new dog. It’s a rescue dog, a French bulldog or something. It’s got a mouth like a frog and teeth down its throat. Horrible fat thing—shits all over the place, dribbles, farts, and rubs my baby with its horrible snotty nose and licks her with its horrible pink tongue. It’s out of control—it’s worse than Jim, and it’s ugly like hell. It’s got bulging eyes. I had it for a fortnight when Lucy was on holiday. I took it for a walk down by the cut and it was the hot weather and it lay down and started to die. I dunked it in the canal and carried it home.
I bet it was heavy, I said—I remembered carrying Jim home in a thunderstorm—so Lucy’s dog is a disaster? No, said Georgia—she feeds it on the tit. What about the girls? I asked. They all love it, said Georgia. They all lie on the sofa in a heap, laughing and farting. When are you coming home? In a couple of months, I said—we will be home for Guy Fawkes Night.
HOW LONG IS OUR JOURNEY FROM STONE TO Carcassonne? I asked Monica. Sixteen hundred miles, she said—and five hundred and thirty locks. If I had known that, I said, I wouldn’t have come. A thousand miles this year, to get to our mooring in Sens, south of Paris, said Monica, and six hundred next year to get to the Mediterranean and Carcassonne. Next year will be easy, I said.
Perhaps, said Monica, but we’ve been lucky. Remember the lady they told us about at Charleville, who got a rope round her and they nearly had to cut her leg off? And next year there’s the Rhône. The Rhône is terrible. Sergeant-major Owen had a friend who lost an arm on the Rhône. The week we went up the Bristol Channel the Rhône drowned fifteen people, and they were in their homes at the time. On the Rhône even the fish get drowned. It’s different over here—Mme Surribas was out walking holding her husband’s hand in Lunel and she was knocked over by a flood and sucked into a drain. They found her three hours later, half a mile away, clinging to a pipe.
When we arrived, I said, and Jim and I went for a walk, we happened to spot a pub in the square.
A YOUNG MAN STOOD AT THE BAR——RAPT. HE had long black hair and three earrings in the same ear and looked like a gypsy who had stolen a pair of yellow Bermuda shorts. He was twirling in his hand a withered spray.
The flowers in the square are sensational, said Monica. Yes
madame
it is a competition, said the gypsy. Condé always enters and all the towns and villages take part. The open pillared place, full of lilies, said Monica—your market hall, I suppose.
The historical records are incomplete and I am personally of the firm opinion that no one is quite sure of its origin, said the gypsy. The building has been moved many times. There is a particularity about it which I will explain to you. It is made of chestnut, and there is a particularity about the chestnut that is known to few. Do you know this particularity,
madame
? Goodness, no, said Monica. The wood of the chestnut tree, I am able to inform you, said the Scholar Gypsy, will not abide the spider. So there are no webs in the rafters and no dead flies drop upon the merchandise, which is very satisfactory.
Poor spiders, said Monica at dinner—nowhere to go. Don’t you worry about the spiders, I said—French spiders do very well. Arthur Rimbaud said he was consuming himself, but the spider in the hedge eats nothing but violets.
THERE WAS A SIGN ON THE CANAL BANK—
DRAGAGE dans le bief
. I knew
bief
meant a canal pound, but I didn’t know what
dragage
meant. Shall I get out my little black dress? I asked. No, said Monica, it’s dredging—remember the brave Sir Peppermints? Yes, indeed, the day we lost steerage on the Macclesfield Canal and Monica was stranded on the wrong bank. A British Waterways green giant floated his toy dredger up and took her across and said I’m not much of a knight in shining armour but here—and gave her a chewy peppermint in a twist of paper, and one for me.
In France round the corner a floating excavator roared and smoked and threw its bucket into the cut with a whack like a whale’s tail. It carried on roaring and brandishing until we were a few feet away and then backed off, snarling.
Round the next bend the cut broadened and there were four machines heaving up blue mud and dropping it into barges. The engines screamed, the mud fell in landslides, the buckets slammed and the cut threw up waves. On the bank and in the barges workmen leaped and shouted.
Then the French Air Force came in three o’clock high, at Mach 1. The French fast-jet pilot, denied a hero’s death in the Falklands or Iraq, turns his rage on his own kind, harrowing the land with explosions, cracking open the sky and throwing down thunder, traumatizing babies in their prams and shocking to death the very voles in the fields and streams. Squadron followed squadron, the firmament full of sonic boom boys, yelling Take that, you babies, you voles, har har. If it happened in England the mayor would have a word with the group captain at the golf club. And the
dragage
would have been more leisurely too. Georgia told us that in the heatwave the labourers on the railway near Stafford took their sunloungers to work.
WE MOORED ALONG A GREEN BANK AT AY AND the boat filled with spice and vinegar, bittersweet and rotten. Monica had just unwrapped some sausages and we sniffed them and read the packet—
Since man first walked the shores of the Mediterranean, people have sought the savour and preserving power of the herb. And since the Gallo-Roman age, the peasants of the Franche-Compté have given a specific taste to their charcuterie.
Like most descriptions in France, it took the topic a fair way back. But the smell wasn’t the sausage, it wasn’t Jim, it was something else pouring down the cut on the south wind. I remembered Arthur Rimbaud and ‘The Drunken Boat’—
I’ve seen vast rotting marshes—in their snare
Ferments the body of a whole leviathan
We looked in the reeds for a whole leviathan, or even a half leviathan, but couldn’t see one.
Ay is in the Champagne region and we visited a
maison
that grew its own grapes. Since ancient man first tasted the sweetness of rotting fruit, said the gentleman, wine has been cherished, and since vines began to clothe the chalk mountains of Reims, my family has made wine here. We have records back to the fifteenth century, before champagne was invented. In the depression in the thirties no one could afford to buy our grapes so my grandfather risked all to bottle his own brand. Now we do sixty thousand bottles a year and we are the second wine on the list at the Savoy in London.
There was little to see: a press, the fermentation vessels, the cellar. The rotten-sweet smell was from the floors and run-offs in the fermentation rooms across Ay as the harvest worked in the vats.
A couple of cases have improved the trim of the boat and at Christmas I will drink with my family to grandfather Gosset, who pulled out the big one.
THE DENTIST LOOKED DOWN MY THROAT. NOT much left here you started with, he said. No
monsieur
, I said, most of my organs have been replaced more than once. Do not despair, he said, it is a minor infection—see. He pressed a button and a coloured screen lit up with a mountain range of defensive dentistry. The screen also gave my name, my height, my address, my credit card number, the maiden name of my wife, the length of my boat, and the name and colour of my little dog tied to the railing outside. The consultation took not five minutes. The dentist wrote a prescription and shook my hand warmly and the lady at reception asked Monica for a small amount of money and wished us every happiness. In the pharmacy I asked if I could drink alcohol with the pills. Yes, said the pharmacist, provided it is champagne.
The Bar du Midi in the square, like most French bars, presents a gripping contrast to our own public houses,
un contraste saisissant
. Every bar is a stage where we strut and fret but the production in a French pub is by a lighter hand, played for delicacy, not for tears and thundering laughs. The French find the dull and deep potations of the northern races rather vulgar. They are happy to be lightly intoxicated, perhaps at breakfast, or elevenses, or at lunch, but will not trudge to the pub in the mid-evening to get ratted. At times they drink coffee, which tastes so good that I often wonder what the blenders buy one half so precious as the beans they sell.
In England to look smart is evidence of dick-hood, but the French dress for the pub, especially on the weekend, appearing in high style as film stars from a long time ago. The women favour black, or leather and gold and high heels. They are often thin and sharp-featured. From their teenage years they have a ravaged charm, and smoke-broken voices that would coax an apostle off a stained-glass window. The older men choose an apache look, denim and moustaches, and the young men black shirts with trainers. Monica asked if she could have one of each to take to Carcassonne.
If it is not too late there are lots of children, and always dogs, which prowl around affably, and if they are small dogs Jim will come forth and play with them, and everyone will say Is it a greyhound, and Is he calm for my little boy to stroke him and Are you from Alsace?
Years ago I saw a television programme about lemurs. Lemurs are a sort of tall monkey, with long hooped tails, and they don’t do much except bounce around, passing through their group hundreds of times a day: touching fingers, grinning, embracing, as if binding the troop together with ectoplasm. If a lemur is for anything it is for saying Hello. In an English pub greetings are offered reluctantly, but the French are rather like the jolly lemur. They enter—
Ah messieurs, ’dames
—they shake hands in all directions, or greet with multiple kissing and punching and embraces, each encounter precisely reflecting degrees of friendship or kin, acknowledging bonds and experiences beyond the war, beyond birth, keeping whole the ectoplasm that binds them.
THE VINES COVERED THE HILLS IN ROWS, LIKE scenery for a model railway. A dredger surfed backwards across our path, then forwards, then swerved, then stopped in a roar. Perhaps he had seen Monica in her bush hat. Frenchmen fancy English ladies of a certain age, like Jane Birkin, or Charlotte Rampling, and when they think they have spotted one they chuck their dredgers around like anything.
Monica for her part was so moved she beached the
Phyllis May
on the side of the cut and the dredger had to come and pull us off, so all concerned had a lovely time. No peppermints, but a smile and a wave.
French locks are automatic—you don’t have to wind up the paddles yourself. The large locks are operated by men in towers and the smaller ones by pushing buttons and lifting bars. Sometimes in the small locks Monica had to climb a greasy ladder with a rope between her teeth and hold the boat steady as the lock filled. Often you are faced with two red lights because the lock is broken and then you ring the Voies Navigables de France, and someone comes out on a buzz-bike and fiddles about, or someone throws a switch in Bordeaux and all is well.