by Mary Moody
Didier was also facing the prospect of having to spend a lot of money to upgrade the Frayssinet shop to bring it up to European Union health standards, which have been imposed across France. Traditional boucheries engage in all sorts of practices that no longer conform to European norms. In the old days fresh meats and prepared foods, such as terrines and foie gras, were all displayed together in one glass cabinet. Now, separate display units with regulation cooling must be provided. The floors must all be standardised for cleanliness and even internal architectural details, such as the old oak beams that are an attractive feature in many old shops, must be covered over completely. One of the charms of the village butcher shop has always been the weekend rotisserie with rolls of chicken and turkey and pork that are placed outside mid-morning, filling the air with the rich aroma of spit-roasted meats. This is also being phased out, along with the giant paella pans that steam with the smell of rice and saffron and fresh prawns cooking.
Given that most of Didier’s customers were the elderly people of the village, there simply wasn’t enough cash flow from the business to spend on all the obligatory renovations. So the building was sold, to be converted into a gîte (holiday apartment), and now the locals must make do with a butcher’s van that sets up twice a week in the car park. Many of the older locals don’t have transport to get to the larger towns for markets or to the supermarket. So instead of buying fresh meat every morning for the tasty lunches she makes for herself and her husband, Madame Thomas must plan ahead and shop on Wednesday and Friday afternoons instead.
Hortense at the alimentation has been similarly affected, and the rumour is that she will close down completely within the next year or so. This will be a disaster for the village. Apparently the health inspectors have been and the list of requirements for her to satisfy their demands is as long as your arm. For decades she has been selling everything from cleaning products to cat food, from tobacco and wine to fresh fruit and vegetables and of course local cheeses and processed meats such as ham and salami. Hortense has a round table in the corner of her shop, and when her friends pop in to visit they all sit down and have coffee and cake and a good old chinwag. She’s now not allowed to drink coffee in the shop or entertain her friends, which makes life tough for her because she is open almost ten hours a day. So far she is ignoring the directive.
Hortense and her husband Jacques have three small dogs who also hang around the shop all day. They often sleep on the plastic chairs outside in the sun and they make a daily pilgrimage into my courtyard and stand at the back door, longingly hoping for the scraps left over from my last evening’s meal. I usually reward them. When the weather is cold, they huddle under the table inside the shop where Hortense and her friends sit chatting and laughing. This is now an absolute no-no. No animals are allowed anywhere near a shop that serves fresh produce. I recall when I first moved into the house and Hortense had an old cat that slept all day on the shop counter on the pile of newspapers she used for wrapping various purchases, pulling sheet after sheet from under the dozing moggie. The cat on the counter never worried me, but imagine the look of horror on the faces of the inspectors. Just as well the cat has since died!
Hortense will first dispense with her cold food cabinet because it no longer complies with the standards. So there will be no more cheese or ham or fresh milk or yoghurt. Then the racks of vegetables and fruits that she wheels out in the morning will have to go unless she is prepared to resurface the floor and line the timber-beamed ceiling. All that will be left is tinned food, wine and tobacco. Such a shame.
18
Within days of returning to France, I have resumed my heady relationship with my lover from the previous summer. We didn’t broach the subject via email while I was home in Australia, but the moment we meet again it’s as though there has been no separation. We both know that David will be arriving from Cannes soon and it’s as though we are trying to condense as much as we can into the few weeks that are available to us.
Unlike my previous affair, which was conducted well away from the village over long flirtatious lunches with breathless anticipation, this is much more clandestine and constrained. We are careful not to be seen out alone together, for the obvious reason that it would initiate gossip. So we carry on with our usual routines and meet at times when we hope nobody can observe us. Our paths sometimes cross in social situations because we have friends in common, and those evenings are quite tricky because we mustn’t allow our body language to give the game away. Making eye contact, knowing that we will be seeing each other later, is quite thrilling for me. And if we accidentally touch it feels like a jolt of electricity passing through my body.
Yet emotionally I feel quite differently about this relationship. I am capable of being more objective. Of standing back and analysing what is happening. I am keenly aware that for me it’s very much a journey of sexual experimentation and discovery. I’m a middle-aged woman and a grandmother and here I am exploring aspects of myself that I never knew existed. Playing sexual games and being adventurous. Is it the sheer danger of it I enjoy? I realise I am taking a great risk, but I am mesmerised by the excitement and simply cannot resist the temptation of continuing.
My lover also maintains a certain distance, and this is strangely one of the attractions. Instead of smothering me with words of love that could easily smack of insincerity, he says very little. It’s all in the eyes. There’s a driven quality to our lovemaking, a certain desperation. I am aware that I am still on the rebound from having terminated my relationship with the man from Toulouse, and that part of the pleasure is the pain of it. At times I see us as two rather lost and unhappy souls clinging together for mutual comfort, and at other times I see us as two knowingly irresponsible adults behaving very badly indeed.
The problem is that I have lost my perspective. I’m too much in the here and now, and not considering the bigger picture of my life and my relationship with my husband. It seems easy to dismiss everything that has been my world up until now and just live for the thrill of the moment. In the situation I’m in, it suits me to take the view that we were never really meant to have just one sexual partner for life. That it’s only natural for a woman to evolve sexually, just as she does intellectually and emotionally, and to therefore desire different partners as she matures. I’ve conveniently forgotten that my sexual life with David always has been, for me, the most crucial aspect of our long and often difficult relationship. It bound us together through the challenges of rearing children and balancing demanding careers. It was more important to me than anything and now I’ve just thrown it away for the sake of immediate gratification.
I’m getting very little sleep, often driving home at some ungodly hour half-dressed and trying to sneak back into the house without waking up the entire village and setting the tongues a-wagging. I stick to the back roads to avoid encountering the gendarmes who sometimes mount late-night patrols at village intersections. Instead I drive along the winding narrow roads through the woods, encountering strange wildlife in my car headlights. Huge white owls, deer and weasel-like creatures that scurry along the side of the road. The last thing I want is to have a conversation in broken French with a curious gendarme at 3 a.m. with my underwear spilling out of my handbag. I usually coast down the hill to the car park with the engine off and the lights dimmed, then wait until there is complete silence before gathering myself together and tip-toeing across the road to my side door. If I catch a glimpse of myself in the large mirror in the main room, I see a dishevelled and disarrayed figure. My lover always phones to make sure I have made it home okay. It becomes a nightly ritual. It’s all sheer madness.
On the phone to David I am acting out the role of busy French housewife, getting the house in order and stocking up the pantry for his arrival and also for Miriam, who will fly down from Paris the day afterwards. It’s a charade.
In spite of our best efforts, eventually there is some gossip within our circle of friends and my lover and I become aware of it
. I have always assumed that the French don’t give a damn about the private lives of their friends and neighbours. That they are too civilised to chatter about other people’s peccadilloes. After all, isn’t ‘taking a lover’ supposed to be a normal part of the French way of life? No doubt just another myth that they have to live with. In any event, the gossip isn’t among the villagers, it’s within the expatriate community and it’s rather unpleasant. It seems that some people in our circle are always on the lookout for a bit of scandal. My lover is an eligible bachelor, somewhat sought after by some of the single women we both know. And I am a married woman on the loose. One person has seen my lover and me in the wrong place at the wrong time and put two and two together. The odd ambiguous remark is dropped over drinks and dinner. Soon the whole place is abuzz with it and we can’t help but be aware by the way people stop talking when we walk into a room, or huddle in a tight conversation, then look at us. I am totally unaccustomed to this type of situation and I really don’t have a clue how to handle it. So I revert to type and bury my head in the sand, hoping that if I ignore it, it will just go away.
In the meantime, relations between David and me are extremely strained. He has arrived in Cannes and is engrossed in his usual round of meetings and parties. When we speak he sounds wound-up and anxious, as though he’s not really enjoying himself. This is not customary, because usually David gets a total charge out of being at the Festival and thrives on the business of it. This time he just sounds exhausted and irritable. Several times we exchange cross words for no particular reason other than that we are both obviously stressed. He keeps saying that he is dreading coming to the village. That he really doesn’t want to be part of the scene any more. My response is that he shouldn’t come to Frayssinet if he’s feeling so negative, but he’s determined to be part of Miriam’s birthday holiday. He says it’s the only reason he’s coming and this makes me sad. I really want him to like it here and to feel part of the place. By his attitude, it seems unlikely that he ever will.
By late May the weather has started to become hot. Unlike Australia, where spring and autumn are quite long seasons, here the weather seems to go from freezing cold to stiflingly hot in just a few short weeks. When I first arrived, I was lighting the big Godin fire downstairs to warm up the house in the early morning when I was having my first cup of tea. I would sit toasting my toes in front of the oak logs in the grate, staring bleary-eyed into the flames and trying to get a grip on my life. But by the time David is due to arrive from Cannes, it has begun to get very hot and I have stripped the doonas off the beds and started closing the shutters in the middle of the day to stop the bedrooms from becoming overheated.
By now I am actually looking forward to David’s arrival. My reckless behaviour is catching up with me physically and emotionally, and I hope that when David arrives there will be some stability and I will be more centred. After all, he is my partner of more than three decades. He has a steadying influence on me and I certainly need a little steadying at the moment. There’s also the fact that I want him to love the house and to feel at home here. To stop seeing it as ‘my’ place and start thinking of it as a place where we can both have a lot of fun during the summer months. Perhaps with Miriam staying with us, David might relax and begin to enjoy a more positive frame of mind.
I spend time making the house look as welcoming and homely as possible. Jan lends me various bits and pieces from her attic to brighten up the main room – lamps and pretty mirrors and paintings, mostly originals that she has done herself, to hang around the walls. Philippe lends me an old wooden chest of his grandmother’s for storage in the bedroom. Margaret Barwick gives me two handsome pale blue chairs that really make all the difference to both the comfort and the appearance of the small sitting area. I want the house to remain quite simple – not too cluttered or over-decorated. And I am very mindful that I need to keep a lid on the budget. The house is already costing us a lot more than we anticipated.
The night before David arrives, I visit my lover for the last time. We haven’t discussed it, but we both know that from this moment everything must stop. I just turn up on his doorstep, very late, and he is waiting for me. I don’t feel any guilt or shame and I have no regrets that it has come to an end. He will still be my good friend – hopefully we will always remain friends.
How should I be feeling? I honestly don’t know. Tonight is tonight and tomorrow is tomorrow. For me, strangely, they are in no way connected.
19
My life has always been one of walking that delicate line between responsibility and rebellion. At school I was more often than not the model student. A prefect. The editor of the school magazine. A member of the debating team and the person chosen to speak on behalf of the student body on Anzac Day. But I also smoked in the toilets, occasionally nicked over the road to the wine bar for a Cinzano and lemonade at lunchtime, and wagged school in the afternoon to meet up with my long-haired dropout boyfriend. In my final year my prefect badge was stripped from my lapel because I announced an anti-Vietnam protest at the school assembly.
As a parent I joined the P&C Association, served in the school canteen, worked hard as a school fundraiser, and enrolled my children in a multitude of extracurricular activities including sport, music, languages and art. But I roared with laughter when they swore and behaved outrageously, and in their teens I tolerated them smoking dope and having their girlfriends and boyfriends to stay the night. I let them turn one of the bedrooms into a disco where they graffitied the walls and had all-night music sessions.
In my career I have also swerved between the respectable and the outrageous. I have worked as a social reporter covering weddings and picnic race meetings for an upmarket women’s magazine, and I have written dozens of articles about the joys of pruning roses. But I have also edited a local newspaper that was so scandalous that at times our lawyer used to tear his hair out in disbelief at some of the articles we attempted to publish.
So there probably have always been two versions of me. The ‘good’ me who conformed to expectations and managed with good humour huge amounts of responsibility. And the ‘wicked’ me who has always been lurking just slightly under the surface, wanting to rock the boat and ruffle the feathers.
Like most journalists I have always aspired to the fantasy of one day becoming a publisher, knowing full well that the reality of achieving the lofty heights of a Rupert Murdoch or Kerry Packer is highly unlikely. Despite the ethical notion that publishers have absolutely no say in editorial content, any journalist who has worked for a large newspaper or magazine publisher knows that there is an ‘editorial policy’ that comes from the top. The ultimate power.
Although my bread-and-butter income during the twenty-five years we lived in the Blue Mountains was as a gardening writer and editor, I always retained a fascination with mainstream journalism, devouring all the newspapers, from the national dailies to the weekly local rag.
One icy Katoomba evening in the late 1980s I was invited out to a trendy cafe for dinner by an old friend who had published a weekly newspaper in the upper Mountains for several years. This had, to his financial and personal disappointment, been sold out from under him by his business partner. In his frustration he’d come up with the idea of starting his own local monthly newspaper as an independent publisher, and was curious to see if I was interested in being involved – not just as the editor but as co-publisher. On every level it was a crazy idea. Financially potentially disastrous in an environment where there were already two well-established local newspapers. There simply wouldn’t be enough advertising dollars to go around. Who would work on the paper and how would we pay them? We would need writers and photographers and advertising sales people, not to mention computers and production staff to do the design and layout. It was sheer madness but I leapt at the idea, convincing David that it was financially feasible if we recruited supporters who were prepared to give their time without pay. I must have caught him at a weak moment because he agreed. Th
e Blue Mountains Whisper was born.
My publishing partner in this hare-brained scheme was Geoff Fanning, a London printer who had migrated from the UK in the early 1980s with his glamorous blonde wife Anna and their son Jan, who had a peaches-and-cream English schoolboy complexion and a charming accent compared to my rough-and-tumble youngsters. Geoff had the wackiest sense of humour I’ve ever encountered. Because his trade as a scanner operator bored him rigid, he balanced his life by writing comedic essays and sketches, which he later performed as stand-up comedy routines on the live comedy circuit. In essence, Geoff was a frustrated writer and photographer, and therefore part of his motivation in wanting to own his own newspaper was as a forum for his creative energies. One of his first forays into getting his humour in print was by writing regular letters to the editor of the entrenched and highly conservative weekly Blue Mountains Gazette, which he did under a pseudonym. It took the naïve editor quite a while to realise that letters from J. D. Castleberg were a hoax, but in the meantime they created a stir in the local community. His tongue-in-cheek humour was over the head of some people and so the letters were always being discussed in coffee shops and offices around the Mountains.
The only way to make the Blue Mountains Whisper work was for it to be different in style and content from the two mainstream newspapers and to rally as much unpaid assistance as possible. The Mountains have always been a haven for creative people – writers and artists and musicians – and it was up to us to enthuse them with the concept and to get them involved.
