by Mary Moody
We also visit Montpazier, which is one of the most popular bastide towns because of its unspoiled central square, often used as the location for television dramas and films set in medieval times. There are excellent shops here and we buy some presents for Miriam to take home for the children.
Most days Miriam and I head for Le Relais in the square for an aperitif before lunch. We are usually joined by friends – Jock of course, but also Claude or Jan and Philippe if they happen to be passing. While we are socialising, David is generally power-walking, choosing to stride purposefully through the woods for several hours to compensate for the fact that there is no local gym where he can get his daily exercise. He refers to the walks as his ‘punishment’, which indeed they must be because the weather has really started to warm up and he arrives home dripping with sweat and very flushed from the intensity of the activity. He tells me it’s his thinking time, apart from anything else, and a good way of redirecting his angst about being here. I find his attitude difficult to deal with, just as he finds my nonchalance infuriating.
It’s tempting for Miriam and me to sit too long and drink yet another glass of rosé in the summer sun, but eventually we tear ourselves away and prepare lunch for the three of us. We all tend to snooze in the late afternoon, then there’s usually some sort of social event in the evening – a new restaurant to try, or a dinner party with friends.
‘I don’t like the lifestyle you live here in France,’ David says. ‘All this non-stop eating and drinking and staying out late. I just can’t keep up the pace, and you will have to understand I just don’t want to be part of it all the time.’
To lighten the atmosphere, I make jokes about David being ‘boring’ and a ‘wet blanket’. But I certainly don’t intend staying home quietly every night. And I point out that, as Miriam is here for such a short time, we must make the most of every minute.
David’s negativity saddens me, but I also understand how he must be feeling. I love this place so much and sense he is punishing me for what happened here last year by resisting my entreaties to lighten up and enjoy himself. I want him to get over it and move on. Stop dwelling in the past. Totally unfair of me in light of the secret I am keeping.
Several times we find ourselves at dinners and lunches also attended by my lover. Sitting at tables laden with wonderful food in friends’ lush summer gardens. Laughing and drinking the afternoon or evening away as though nothing untoward has been going on between us. Weirdly, it doesn’t make me feel even slightly uncomfortable – in fact I am always delighted to see him. I suppose I should be feeling odd with my lover and my husband sitting at the same table, talking and drinking together. But I don’t. I try to avoid direct eye contact and certainly any give-away body contact, but I still manage to find myself sitting between them on more than one occasion.
It may seem bizarre but in fact it doesn’t rattle me at all. Perhaps because we were friends before any of this happened, I am capable of slipping back into the ‘just good friends’ mode. Or perhaps I subconsciously enjoy the frisson of having my lover and husband at the same table. Or it could be that I have managed to package my life and my emotions into separate portions. Right now I am in a family phase, with Miriam visiting and David in residence. Only two weeks ago I was in a single woman phase, enjoying all the freedom that that entails.
Miriam laughs and says that it feels very strange to be living back under the same roof as her parents. She left home at seventeen to go to university in Canberra and hasn’t really lived at home since, except for a couple of brief spells between moving houses. Without her husband and four children to look after, she has slipped back into her old role as our dependent daughter.
‘I feel like I’m reverting to my childhood’ she laughs. ‘I love sleeping in a bit, and the fact that you two are doing all the washing and cooking. It’s just like being a kid again.’
What I fail to realise during Miriam’s visit is that David is gradually gaining an awareness of what has been going on while I was here alone – both last year and before he arrived this year. He has no firm evidence and says nothing at all to me, but his pain and anger are simmering away under the surface and this has a profound effect on the atmosphere in the house. I can’t explain how it feels, but Miriam surely also senses the explosive mood. David is drinking furiously and still smoking non-stop, which is totally uncharacteristic. One night in bed we have a whispered fight, trying not to upset Miriam, and he leaps out of bed and starts getting dressed, saying that he is leaving immediately. That he can’t tolerate being here one more moment. I beg him to calm down and to stay, which eventually he does. But it’s a strong indication that things are very rocky indeed.
The days fly past and suddenly we realise there’s less than a week left of Miriam’s holiday. We decide to spend some time in Toulouse, even though the temperature is rising to the high 30s and a heatwave has been predicted.
Toulouse is a beautiful and elegant city. The streets are wide and tree-lined and the buildings are constructed of the local pink stone, which is quite distinctive. There are classical ornamental parks and gardens, and squares lined with outdoor cafes and restaurants, and the shopping is mind-boggling. But the whole place also has a youthful vibrancy because it is very much a university town.
Miriam is immediately enchanted. After the tranquillity of our rural village, the energy of Toulouse captivates her. David does the driving and I navigate us into the city, where we find a comparatively cheap hotel in a narrow back street. The tariff includes parking. It’s almost unbearably hot and we stagger to find a cafe where we can sit and recover from the drive with a cool beer. In the main square, Place Wilson, we stumble across a street parade with people dressed in the most outrageous costumes. Men dressed as women and women dressed as men. Suddenly, reading the banners, we realise it’s a Gay Pride March and we find a shady cafe, sit down and watch the whole performance.
We have some memorable meals in Toulouse, which is much more cosmopolitan than the rural area where our village house is located. We eat Spanish, Italian and Chinese cuisine, and blitz the shops, which are also of a much higher standard than those in the small towns and villages. Not that we can really afford to do a lot of shopping, as we have already far exceeded our budget and will need to live a bit more frugally once Miriam leaves for home.
‘This has been such a great experience,’ says Miriam. ‘I’ll never forget this holiday – it’s been fantastic.’
I start to feel unhappy about Miriam leaving. Apart from missing her because we have had so much fun together, I will now have to deal with David on my own and I sense it’s not going to be easy. We have another six weeks together, and while I initially hoped it would be fun, I now fear it’s going to be a nightmare.
We farewell Miriam tearfully and drive back to Frayssinet in virtual silence. The three days in Toulouse were exhausting, not just because we were keeping up with Miriam’s exuberance but because the temperature gauge never dropped below 40 degrees. The French heatwave of 2003 has begun.
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In late June 2003 the temperatures across Europe start to climb rapidly and by mid-July they are hovering daily in the high 30s. While it’s usual for most parts of France to experience high temperatures in July and August, this particular summer is much, much hotter for much, much longer than any summer on record.
In rural France the summer heat is dry, like inland Australia, and therefore more tolerable than the humid heat experienced in other regions. But this summer is not just hot, it’s breathless. There are no breezes to bring relief in the still of the evening, and even during the long twilights the temperature barely drops a degree or two.
During previous summers in France I have experienced several weeks of heat followed by much cooler spells and some blessed rain. This year, hot days turn into hot weeks which turn into hot, hot months. It is relentless.
Our village house faces south and gets sun on the front wall from mid-morning right through until the evening. The
dark bitumen road abuts the house, with only a narrow concrete footpath barely 60 centimetres wide as a buffer between the house and the road. There are no patches of green lawn or shady trees to soften the impact of the sun. It just beats down on the house, punishingly, day after day. The trucks roll past belching diesel fumes that seem more caustic than usual, and tractors laden with bales of hay also rumble past our front windows on a regular basis. It’s hot and noisy and dusty and quite different from the previous summers I have spent here.
The walls of the house are more than a metre thick, and normally this ensures that the interior remains cool even on the hottest summer day. But not this summer. During July, the stone gradually soaks up the heat from the sun as well as the reflected heat from the roadway. It becomes like a heat bank, storing it overnight and into the following day. I am advised by the village women to keep the heavy timber shutters closed from sunrise to sunset. It certainly makes a difference, but it means that the house is in constant darkness. The windows inside are left open in the hope of a welcome breeze that may flutter through the cracks and gaps in the shutters. But the breeze never comes. Inside the house it just gets hotter and hotter, so that by August it’s much cooler outside in the courtyard at midnight than anywhere in the house itself. Sleeping becomes an ordeal.
I try to buy an electric fan to make the bedroom more tolerable at night, but they have sold out everywhere. Weeks ago. Bottled water is also scarce on the supermarket shelves and when a new batch is delivered there’s a frantic rush to buy up whatever stocks are available.
The heatwave is a crisis all over France, but news of its devastation is slow to filter through the media. And for us, living without a television and rarely reading the local newspapers, there is total ignorance of what is going on in the wider world. The weather reports about the heatwave are consistent, but it will be many weeks before we get news of the alarming death toll.
The heatwave is all anyone talks about. Locals are glued to their television sets at night, anxious for news about the weather. Desperately hoping for a storm or a cooling change to come through. People are only venturing out in the early mornings or the evenings, and nobody wants to sit on the plastic chairs and tables outside Le Relais except late at night. Even Madame Murat’s restaurant, normally packed at lunchtime during the summer, is eerily half-empty except for the road workers and truck drivers who are obliged to keep working despite the conditions. It’s just too hot for the rest of us to contemplate a huge five-course lunch and all that red wine in the middle of the day. Heaven knows how Sylvie and Madame Murat manage in the kitchen, deep-frying frites and baking roasts of veal and lamb. It must surely be unbearable.
But holidaymakers seem to be enjoying the hot conditions, especially those from England where days and days of hot sunny weather are such a rarity. They sit out until midnight in shirt-sleeves, drinking beer or chilled wine and relishing the almost tropical atmosphere. During the day they sleep or sit wherever there is some shade – in stark contrast to the local farmers and other manual labourers, who have to endure the beating sun on their backs all day long. It’s a very trying time.
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The inescapable heat adds to the tension in our relationship. We both seem strung out, and David is exhausting himself by insisting on continuing his obsessive exercise regime, often walking in the middle of the day when the sun is at its hottest.
I buy bulk rosé from Bergerac and we bottle it together over the sink, hammering in the corks and stacking it in rows inside the fridge, which is struggling to stay cool. It’s often too hot to eat very much, but we still manage to get through the rosé, using it as a prop to dull our fragile senses. We seem to spend half the day numbed by wine and trying to avoid getting into an argument. The topic of our relationship becomes taboo. We are just getting through each day the best we can.
We get a message from home that the ‘Australian Story’ episode we made is being screened in July, not September as agreed with the researcher and producer at the time of filming. David is beside himself with rage. The agreement on timing is important, because he wants to be back in Australia when it is screened so that we can be with our family, as a unit, to face it together. There is also the issue of the book, which won’t be released until October – the original agreement was to time the documentary screening as close to the book release as possible.
We are also told that there have been problems with the edit. The producer, Janine Hosking, has presented her version of the story and it has been rejected by the executive producer. We can only assume this means one thing: Janine has made the film we agreed to and it has been knocked back by management. They want the story they want. It’s an editorial decision.
We try talking to the executive producer but it’s like banging our heads against a brick wall. We get nowhere. She is adamant that the program will be broadcast as soon as it’s finished.
I have always loved the ABC and have watched it almost exclusively since my parents bought our first television set in 1961, when I was eleven. Our children were only ever allowed to watch the ABC, never commercial television because I hated the ads. For nine years I worked on contract with the ABC on ‘Gardening Australia’, although that experience left me feeling rather disenchanted towards the end, because management decided that merchandising products to align with the program was a great marketing idea. None of us – the presenters – wanted a bar of the commercialisation of the program and our attitudes have been vindicated in the long term because most of the products, apart from the magazine and books, failed to find a market.
The ABC prides itself on being a public broadcaster, providing a public service with its programming. They are not, they claim, driven by competition for ratings with the commercial networks. They only present factual, balanced programs and never sink to sensationalising subjects or to participating in celebrity beat-ups. That’s what they claim, anyway.
Not only did the ABC break their verbal agreement with us to screen the program in September, but they sent tapes of the show to the tabloid weekend newspapers to get as much advance publicity for the Monday night screening as possible. Quite apart from the fact that they eventually edited the film to concentrate almost exclusively on my troubled relationship with David and the affair I had written about in Last Tango, they exploited the ‘sensational’ aspects of the film to their own ends.
The weekend before the screening of ‘Something About Mary’ – the tacky name they had decided to call the episode – Miriam phones us from Bathurst to read us the tabloid headlines.
‘Hope you’re sitting down, Mum,’ she says.
David is listening on the other extension.
‘Listen to this one: “Garden Guru in Torrid French Affair”.’
I gasp in disbelief. Then dissolve into helpless laughter.
‘It gets better, Mum. “Gardener Admits Adultery”.’
David is ashen-faced. He isn’t laughing. He is very angry and outraged by what has been written.
As a journalist I can see the humour and absurdity of the situation. I recognise the stupidity of tabloid headlines – I have been responsible for some myself in my days as a journalist on TV Week. But this is patently ridiculous. Any integrity that the ABC may claim to have in the standard of its filmmaking for this program has been thrown out the window. The whole handling of the situation has been shameful.
‘Australian Story’ goes to air and we speak immediately with the children. Miriam is crying. While she and Rick found most of the film okay – perhaps not the balance David and I would have liked, but certainly beautifully filmed and put together – she is distraught that her closing line in the interview has been edited.
The question was put to her: ‘What have you learned about your parents through this whole business?’
Her response was simple: ‘I have learned that my mother can be more selfish than I ever thought she could be – but then again that’s not a bad thing because she has spent all her adult life being uns
elfish and giving to others. And I have learned that my father can be more loving and tolerant than I ever thought he could be.’
They had cut out the second line. The line about her father. And she felt as though the words had been cut out of her mouth with a sharp knife.
The simple truth is that when you hand over your story to be made into a film, you have absolutely no control – and maybe, in some ways, that is not such a bad thing. An outsider can look at a story objectively and tell it through different eyes, take a different perspective. When I am writing, I have total control over what I say and how I choose to present my story. I always try to be honest and truthful but it is all subjective. It is my story, but only through my eyes. Not the eyes of an outsider.
We agreed to do the program and so it’s a fair cop. Janine did an outstanding job of making a beautiful and for many people a quite poignant and moving film. David Marshall, the cameraman, won an award for his fantastic work on it, and overall I have to say it was compelling television.
One question remains. Should it have been made at all? Was it, within the guidelines of the program, a subject that justified the time and money spent on its production? A lot of people don’t believe so, and with hindsight I think they are correct.
