Lavender & Linen

by Henrietta Taylor

  Somewhere in the middle of Florence I caught myself in a daydream, wandering through the same streets and emotions as twenty years before: the same emotional turmoil and with the same man. But the iron grip that Raymond had had around my heart was loosening just a little. Why was it not possible to have all areas of my life under control? I tried to make a list of positive things in my life:

  1. Mimi and Harry were in robust health, happy and wise beyond their years.

  2. Clients were coming back to Provence in droves.

  3. The manuscript was finished, even though the wonderful cathartic effect I had hoped for never eventuated.

  4. My business would survive another year as I staved off bankruptcy once again.

  For the first time my lists did not work. Basically I was unhappy. It was February 2004; our winter wedding should have taken place in Venice but here I was in Florence with my best friend and the children. I wanted to run away as far as possible and not face the reality of what was happening.

  Our bags were barely unpacked from Florence when the telephone rang. It was Lizzie: ‘Henrietta, have you heard the news?’ She was always the first to know everything. ‘The March school excursion for Venice and Ravenna has just been cancelled due to terrorist alerts. The kids will be so disappointed. The school will not risk it, but what if we do it ourselves? Do you think that you could manage to get away for a couple of days in mid-April before the season gets under way? Really, what are the chances that there will be a terrorist strike in Venice? What do you think? Let’s pack the kids in the cars and head off to Italy. Just the five kids and us. I’ll find the accommodation. Let’s go. What do you say?’

  What could I say? Yeah, sure — and hey, that’s a great place to have a wedding! Pity Raymond doesn’t want to attend his own fucking ceremony. I couldn’t bring myself to tell her that I never wanted to go to Venice again in my life. That April coincides with the anniversary of the death of my husband, when normally I take to my bed in tears with boxes of tissues to wait out the day. Instead I heard my voice reply meekly: ‘Sure. Let’s use the long weekend to go to Venice.’

  All I really wanted was to float down the canal in Raymond’s arms in a sea of love that had not gone bitter and twisted.

  Our backpacks packed once again, we threw them, along with the dogs, into the back of the car, dropping Zorro and Rosie off at the kennels. It would take eight hours to travel the 720 kilometres to Venice. It was safer to cut the journey in half, setting off at five o’clock, the moment afternoon classes at the high school ended, so that we could stop at a hotel near Nice airport. We would have an evening picnic in Nice and then start very early the next morning to attack the myriad tunnels into Italy. As evening descended on Nice, tablecloths, wooden boards and knives, picnic glasses and plates appeared from our hampers and there we sat, glasses in hand, listening to the ebullient sounds of happy children munching on a mouth-watering roast chicken banquet, with cheeses, fruit, baguettes, chocolate desserts and copious bottles of lemonade, Perrier and red wine. Despite my reservations, our trip was off to a wonderful start.

  We spent an idyllic three days floating on gondolas, eating ice creams and staying up far too late. The pale rays from the mid-April sun moved across the lagoon of Venice but nothing eclipsed the sunny moments that we spent together as we lavished attention and love on our children. Louie and Ollie were delightful in their enthusiasm, as was little Margaux, who was becoming a young person in her own right. My children suddenly realised that she was no longer just a little dot who would fall asleep in her mother’s arms at the end of the evening. She was there to play and be counted in on all of their games. In three days we traversed Venice by foot or by boat or gondola so many times that we began to look like locals as the children wove their way instinctively through the throngs of bedazzled tourists, bumping our little hand-pulled trolley up and down the steps and stone pathways of Venice. We had thick frothy coffees while the children ate cakes; we devoured picnics on the island of Burano, with its colourful painted houses; we basked in the watery sun, kicked balls and once again licked ice creams.

  Blissful perfect days. As they say, the calm before the storm. When we walked through St Mark’s Square for the last time, the Venetian authorities were hurrying to put down the planks in readiness for the unseasonable and quite ferocious flooding that was imminent, ready to dampen the tourists’ spirits and feet.

  On our return, I needed to confront Raymond with my fears: was he involved with another person? The answer to this question was finally obvious to me. I just needed confirmation. My father Jack would no longer listen to any sentence that had Raymond’s name in it and my closest ally, my sister Kate, was not too far behind. Apparently, everyone except me knew what was happening. As it often is the way, I was left fumbling in the dark, not really wanting to open my eyes because that is when I would have to take some sort of action.

  Love is blind, as they say, but not deaf. When telephone calls started to come in the middle of the night and no messages were left, and worse still when messages were left containing hysterical and abusive diatribes from a very deranged and nasty woman, it was time for damage control. It was unsettling that this unstable person had access to my telephone numbers. With bile and spite colouring her words, the woman left me in no doubt that she was in a relationship with Raymond and wanted me to know.

  Excluding the time leading up to and during my marriage of eight years, I had spoken, written or emailed to Raymond nearly every week, and often daily, for over twenty-two years, but now the knives were out, the gloves were off. We had been very careful about never mixing our lives together; no communal addresses, bank accounts or children. He lived on his side of the line and the children and I lived on ours. Admittedly, I had taken my line a little further by going to France. Words such as ‘betrayal’ and ‘vengeance’ began to sprinkle our conversations and emails. Poison filled every nook and cranny of our relationship. Misunderstandings from twenty years previously began to resurface, as they never had been clearly dealt with and dispatched to the dusty vaults where they belonged. Grievances and disappointments swirled around, sucking us down into the vortex of despair. For the first time, Mimi and Harry watched, powerless to help as their pillar of strength and determination disintegrated before their eyes. Claire, too, stood by and for the first time said nothing. Having experienced an acrimonious divorce first-hand, she was aware that only time would allow the crisis to develop fully and explode — and after that, some sort of help could be offered, to clean away the detritus.

  ‘Go back to Sydney. I will look after the children. You cannot do this over the telephone. It must be face to face.’ Claire had given me the green light that I had been waiting for. Within half an hour, I had thrown a couple of T-shirts, underwear, toothbrush and a huge selection of books into my large handbag and walked out the door, hoping to buy a ticket to Sydney on any airline that had an available seat when I reached the airport in Paris. Claire had said to take two weeks but I knew that one would be more than enough. May was a busy time with the properties. I could miss one Saturday but not two. Mimi and Harry heaved a long sigh of relief. They always missed me, but anything was better than living with me right now, with the perpetual thundercloud over my head.

  Something that my mother Sheilagh used to say finally reached me loud and clear in my dreams: ‘At the bottom of everything there is usually a bottom’. I wanted to prove my mother wrong even from beyond the grave, even though I knew beyond a doubt that there was another woman involved — a woman I called The Nasty One. What I did not know was how important she was to Raymond.

  Raymond had shifty eyes and a blank dead-mullet look when I approached this subject, spitting words at him like missiles: ‘I have just spent twenty-four hours sitting in a plane to fly out here to speak to you and all you can say is that I am overreacting! I just want the truth. I want to know what is going on. Do you understand that you are mixing me up with your affairs? Do you realise that this Nasty One
is leaving obscene messages on my telephone in the middle of night? Did you realise that the Nasty One has been reading my manuscript that you must have left lying around your office? That manuscript was for your eyes only, not some bimbo who you picked up. Raymond, finally it is over. No more. We are finished. I am too tired to listen to your excuses. We are too geographically challenged, but more to the point, I don’t want to fight for you any more. Raymond, I don’t love you any more. I have no respect for you. Do what you wish with this bimbo, it really doesn’t concern me — but as choices go, she seems irresponsible, nasty and cruel. I doubt if she will make you very happy. And by the way, I am going to Manly Police Station to give them the dates and times that she has rung me and details of what was said, and if I receive any more calls I will be taking out an apprehended violence order against her. Don’t think that I am joking. She has approached my family and I will protect us. This must stop. I hope you understand.’

  I felt ill. My self-esteem had taken a beating. The police had explained that it was out of their control to stop someone making international calls to France, but they put the complaint into their report. I had never wanted our relationship to end in this manner, but now there was no turning back.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  You’ve Got Mail!

  The days after the break-up with Raymond were spent shattered with jet lag and despair, waiting for the plane to take me back to France and my children. I walked the streets of my childhood in Mosman and along the Sydney beaches, deep in murderous thought about the pitfalls of true love. While on the foreshores of the sandy beach in front of Manly Wharf, I heard a jumble of sounds resembling a name. Against the strong wind, I heard ‘Miss . . .’ but the rest of the name was eaten up in the wind. Looking up, I saw that there were few people on the beach. In May it was possible to enjoy the last remnants of the autumn sunshine. A young mother with six small children appeared to be waving to someone near me but I did not recognise her, so I continued on my way until the incessant calling and waving made me stop to take another look at the young mother.

  ‘It’s me. Catherine Turnbull. Don’t you remember me?’ It was difficult to lie barefacedly but she obviously knew me well, so I leapt in the deep end: ‘Catherine, of course I recognise you. Why, you haven’t changed one bit since we last saw each other!’ If only I could remember when we had met each other last.

  She was a very enthusiastic woman with arms waving, grabbing escaping children as we spoke. ‘Heavens, are all these your children?’ Two of them looked very similar. ‘Are they all twins?’ What kind of demented woman would keep having children after the first two sets of twins? Was she going to populate Australia by herself?

  ‘Are you joking? Four of them are mine and two belong to that couple over there by the water’s edge. Neither David nor I had twins, which is strange, because it tends to run in the family.’

  She had told me the key words to decipher the puzzle. She and her twin brother David had been the top students of their year when I had taught French and Italian in a Sydney high school for a brief period during the early 1980s. They were both charming, clever and extremely serious students. Catherine’s determination made her stand out from the rest of the students in her year. Nothing would have changed very much, although I guessed four young children would test her limits. Having learnt to be a little more wily when it comes to inviting near-strangers into my house, I assessed the situation and reckoned that with four small children, European travel would not be on the cards.

  ‘Catherine, it is a pleasure to meet you again. You must come and visit me if you are ever in France. I really do mean it.’ Her face exploded with mirth as she began digging into her voluminous bag for a pen and paper to write down my details, squealing with delight.

  ‘You wouldn’t believe it but I am due to go to England and America for a conference later this month or early June.’ I shook my head in utter disbelief. Once again Mimi would have to vacate her room and sleep with me so that our guest could sleep in a modicum of comfort. How on earth could I rescind my invitation when this young woman wanted to travel so far out of her way just to come to visit me? I counted on the fact that it would be too difficult to coordinate and a terrible inconvenience for such a short trip. My addled brain filed the information away, safe in the knowledge that she would never come, or so I hoped.

  Four days later, still jet-lagged and a great deal poorer, I returned home to France with some of my self-respect still intact. During the first five months of 2004, I had been in Venice, Florence and now Sydney for less than five days. My head was spinning; I had no idea what time zone, day or country I was in except that I was home. It was better to be alone with children, cats and dogs and a struggling business than to be treated badly by a man. Winter wedding plans had become annihilation plans, verging on the homicidal. On my return home, I did the adult thing and erased Raymond’s email address, threw out all of his clothes from the cupboard and told the children never to mention his name again.

  Both Mimi and Harry stood back waiting for the storm to clear and for me to right myself so we could return to our normal routine. But nothing would shake me from my intense depression. The season was well and truly underway, and Claire was carrying the load. She kept checks on the linen supply, making sure that the washing and ironing were up to date. The lights in our workshop would go on at five o’clock, but instead of working alongside Claire I buried myself under the bedclothes, wanting the world to stop. I was neglecting my children, my friends and my clients. I was wretched; acting like a teenager with a broken heart — or maybe like a woman with shattered dreams on the verge of divorce? One day Claire slipped into the house to wave her magic wand and when I finally emerged from the bedroom, I found that the house was clean and tidy, the oven sparkling, and salads prepared and laid out on freshly ironed tablecloths. A note written in thick bold strokes had more than a touch of the imperative:

  Henrietta ~

  Love him forever in a corner of your heart but it’s time to let him go. Learn to use your left hand.

  Claire (your right-hand man!)

  Once again she was right. Freedom was the most important thing to me and for too long I had made excuses. Love can be nurtured, but once it is dead, a woman must turn the page.

  Much to my surprise, Catherine Turnbull contacted me barely ten days later. Somehow she was determined to spend a thirty-six hour leave period from her tight schedule with my family and me in the Luberon. Her guest lecture on directions for Sydney healthcare and social services was scheduled for Monday lunchtime in Cambridge, which would give her just enough time to get to us on the fast train from Paris, see every village and tourist spot between Avignon and Apt on the way from the train station, have dinner, early bed, early morning trip to the market at the world-renowned Isle sur la Sorge, then back to the station to catch the train that would take her all the way to London, where she could catch yet another train to get her close to Cambridge, where a bus would take her to her final destination. Evidently, Catherine’s fortitude had not waned in the passing years.

  I was becoming increasingly accustomed to distant acquaintances making the pilgrimage across vast distances just to experience our little corner of the world even for the shortest of trips. When the weather was warm, our house seemed to have revolving doors as acquaintances, friends and family made full use of our hospitality. Every year, the children would listen dutifully to my promise that I would put on the brakes during the season and we would entertain fewer guests. They rolled their eyes skyward as they knew that this would not come to pass. I found it irresistible to catch up with people from my past and from our part of the world, to hear the long flat Australian vowels and the laconic wit. It was revitalising to listen to their slant on European travel, and often I gained a fresh insight on my routine life from the perspective of holidaymakers.

  Catherine’s train had barely left the station when my telephone rang, deep within my bottomless bag. I knew that it would be clien
ts to announce their arrival, as the season was now in full swing. It was Dr Porter with his wife, Amanda, who were on holidays with three other couples to celebrate their fiftieth birthdays. Dr Porter had been my obstetrician for both of my pregnancies and had showed me great compassion during the time my husband Norman was dying. Somehow our paths had crossed many times over the years, even once by accident on the Spanish Steps in Rome. He and his companions wanted to celebrate their half-centuries with a quick trip to Italy and France, spending a week in Saignon to relax, enjoy the food and wine and, more importantly, unwind from their busy lives. They were no longer hell-raisers but they called their three-week European tour their ‘L’ Raisers Tour. This meant nothing to me until Harry pointed out the obvious: ‘Don’t you get it, Maman? “L” is fifty in Roman numerals.’ Sometimes it is easier when it is spelt out to you by a nearly twelve-year-old.

  The moment the telephone rang and I heard the voices in the background screaming in delight that everything was perfect, I could guess that their unwinding process was already in motion. The chaos of the season was unfolding.

  My head was almost clear from jet lag by now but my heart was still heavy from emotion. Life continued and so did the May mortgage repayments, which due to an error out of my control weren’t paid on time. A hurried meeting with Monsieur Perrard was organised. Claire offered to come with me, thinking that I was incapable of making any financial decision in my current state. She was privy to most of my affairs, but there were some things that I liked to keep private.

  Monsieur Perrard began our meeting with a short black coffee in the café next door to his office, but no longer accompanied by several cigarettes. The cigarette packets were gone, along with his famous upward-pointing moustache. His eyes shone with compassion as we started thrashing out solutions. The bottom line was that I was so overextended that something had to give. An oversight between banks had delayed my transactions and therefore the funds were not in the correct account on the correct day. Monsieur Perrard had been saying the same words since I had bought the Wild Thyme Patch: I was perilously overextended, precariously living from month to month, juggling accounts. Finally he said the words that had been in my head for too long. Should I not consider selling the family home in Sydney? Where did I consider home? I knew that Daniel was right, but it had taken me so long to come to terms with selling Place de la Fontaine. My timing for that sale could not have been worse. By the time I finally made the decision to sell, not one buyer could be found. The real estate market in Provence had fallen completely flat and Place de la Fontaine was still on the market. The same could not be said for the real estate market in Sydney, which was going through yet another record boom. Prices were skyrocketing. If I could find enough space in my head, I knew that I would have to give it due consideration.