by Mary Moody
MARY MOODY has been a prolific gardening author and a former presenter on ABC-TV’s Gardening Australia. Her books include The Good Life (1981), Au Revoir (2001), The Long Hot Summer (2005) and Sweet Surrender (2009). Mary divides her year between her farm near Bathurst in New South Wales and her house in south-west France.
Also by Mary Moody
Au Revoir
Last Tango
in Toulouse
last tango in Toulouse
Torn between two loves
Mary
Moody
Contents
Cover
About Mary Moody
Also by Mary Moody
Title page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Acknowledgements
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
First published 2003 in Macmillan by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd
This Pan edition published in 2005 by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Limited
1 Market Street, Sydney
Copyright © Mary Moody 2003
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.
National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication data:
Moody, Mary, 1950–.
Last tango in Toulouse: torn between two loves.
ISBN 0 330 42165 4 (pbk).
1. Moody, Mary, 1950–. 2. Women horticultural writers -
Australia - Biography. 3. Man–woman relationships.
4. Marriage. 5. Family. I. Title.
306.81092
Set in 11.5/16pt New Baskerville by Midland Typesetters
Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group
These electronic editions published in 2003 by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd
1 Market Street, Sydney 2000
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
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Last Tango in Toulouse
Mary Moody
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This book is dedicated to my husband, David,
who, in spite of his pain, gave me ceaseless love
and support throughout the roller-coaster ride
of the last few years.
There was a little girl
Who had a little curl
Right in the middle of her forehead
When she was good she was very, very good
And when she was bad she was horrid
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank my children, Tony, Miriam, Aaron and Ethan, and their partners, Simone, Rick, Lorna and Lynne, for always supporting me, even if they didn’t agree at times with what I was doing. And for allowing themselves to be a part of the story, however painful.
I would like to thank my two dearest friends – Christine Whiston in Australia and Jan Barwick-Claudy in France – for lending a sympathetic ear and never judging me.
Also our neighbours in Yetholme, Sue and Robert Porter, who were always there for David when I was in France and he was at the farm alone. And Kaye Healey who supported us both, again without judgement.
Last but not least I am indebted to my editor Debra Adelaide for her generous contribution to both Au Revoir and Last Tango in Toulouse.
1
If running away from home for six months to live in an ancient village in rural France is the fantasy of every middle-aged woman, then I feel as though I have been living the dream for all of them. The year I turned fifty I set off alone on a sabbatical to escape from my demanding career and large family and live in southwest France. It was a watershed year in my life. There were many reasons why I felt driven on that particular journey, but I realise now that I was only vaguely aware of them at the time. I certainly didn’t expect that my time alone would have repercussions that would change my life in so many ways. Nor did I realise that I was entering a critical and confusing phase when all aspects of my past life would come under scrutiny, from my work and family priorities to my most intimate personal relationships. Perhaps if I had known in advance I would never have dared embark on this risky mid-life adventure, because some of the changes have been painful and the pain has been felt deeply – not just by me, but by my entire family.
When I experienced the overwhelming urge to run away I was entering the early stages of that female demon, the menopause – the roller-coaster ride of years which some women glide through without batting an eyelid and others rage through in a sweaty battle of hormones, rocketing emotions and inner angst. I fall into the latter category.
The fact that I found mid-life so difficult to negotiate was a great surprise to my husband and children, and even more of a shock to me. As a younger woman I sailed relatively unscathed through my pregnancies and births and always revelled in motherhood. Later I embraced becoming a grandmother with delight. I had, with seemingly little effort, juggled a fairly high-powered career, an ever-expanding family, a high-maintenance garden, a three-decade relationship with my husband David and even the trials and tribulations of a live-in mother who, for the most part, was more of a joy than a burden.
So why now, when the future is so rosy and the world around me secure after many years of financial struggle, am I suddenly so unsettled and restless? Has running away from all my responsibilities for six months uncovered a wellspring of hidden unhappiness that is causing all the certainties of my life to unravel before my eyes? And is there, therefore, an inherent risk in selfishly following my dreams? Would it be better to just shrug my shoulders and accept life as it is without ever taking any risks? I don’t think so.
While I was in France I wrote a book about my physical and emotional journey. Au Revoir gave me an opportunity to reflect on the ups and downs of my life and to chart my reasons for needing to escape. In the process of writing this book I quickly discovered that there was a vast difference between talking about life’s sad
or difficult moments and actually committing them to paper. By documenting events from my sometimes painful childhood, I believe I finally confronted their impact for the first time.
Being alone in France also gave me a chance to think deeply about my relationship with my husband David. It forced me not only to examine our past but to contemplate our future together. With our children grown and out of the nest, everything now depended on just the two of us, and I was not entirely convinced that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with him, even though I knew I still cared for him deeply. Complicating matters was an unexpected surge of sexuality which at the time caused havoc all around me. I met a man and fell in love and found myself having to negotiate that most difficult of all balancing acts – trying to keep my marriage and family intact while having an affair.
During this turbulent period there were many other changes in our lives. We bought a small village house in a little-known region in the southwest of France, known as the Lot, because of my desire to re-experience the joys of my new-found freedom; we left our much loved house and garden in the Blue Mountains and moved to a farm in the small rural hamlet of Yetholme near Bathurst; I abandoned my career on television and took a new direction that saw me travelling overseas for at least half of every year. And I went on a search for my long-lost sister Margaret, to finally piece together the jigsaw of my early life. It was at times an intensely painful journey, but it brought with it moments of great joy and self-discovery.
For most of us, living safely within the confines of our familiar comfort zone is much easier and certainly less confronting than plunging headlong into the unknown. The older we get, the more difficult it is to take risks and establish new patterns of behaviour, to make new friends or experiment with living in a foreign culture or to consider abandoning an entire way of life. While we change externally, as nature takes its toll on our faces and bodies, inside we are at risk of becoming more cautious and more conservative.
From what has been written about my age group – the baby boomers – I understand that there is a common desire to fight the natural aging process on every level. Although, as a young woman, the notion that growing older could be a problem never occurred to me, when I hit fifty I suddenly started to resent the possibility that my life could become less exciting. Instead of growing old gracefully, I yearned to break out of the mould, to escape from my responsibilities and obligations; I also wanted to remain youthful and vibrant, both physically and mentally. I wanted new challenges and new excitement and even, perhaps, new dangers. I wanted to be outrageous and experiment with a few things I hadn’t tried before, to break a few taboos.
This desire to live every moment of life to the full is no doubt deeply connected to the hormonal changes that most women experience in mid-life. It must be very disturbing for those who have delayed having babies until their late thirties to confront this urgent restlessness when they still have school lunches to pack and Saturday morning sports to attend. At least I was in the fortunate position, with my children fully grown and completely independent, to be able to indulge myself in the desire for freedom that was overwhelming me.
During the blissfully irresponsible period I spent in France, I enjoyed, for the first time ever, a breathing space that allowed me time to think about and reflect upon my life to date. It was quite cathartic looking back to my childhood and the difficulties of my family life with parents who were brilliantly clever but deeply flawed – alcoholic, left-wing political rebels who tried to live within the 1950s ultra-conservative social culture. It was also humbling to look back at my years as a parent and to realise that, despite the best of intentions, I had also made so many blunders, in many ways not dissimilar to those made by my own parents. Most painfully, it was illuminating to look back on my marriage, which I had always regarded as solid as a rock and admit that in my heart there were many areas of difficulty and frustration. No different, I have no doubt, from many long-term relationships, yet confronting for me now to consider so deeply.
During this period of reflection I also started to look ahead to what I wanted for the remainder of my life, for the next twenty or thirty years. Should I go on as I had always done, clinging to the stability of my large, extended family of children and in-laws and grandchildren, which had always seemed at the heart of my very existence? Or should I make radical changes that could have disastrous consequences for my family life?
2
Returning home after my liberating time in France, I immediately threw myself back into the all-too-familiar pressures of work and family life. I had urgent deadlines for magazine articles and botanical photographs to supply to publishers and, with Christmas imminent, I was faced with a mad scramble of preparations – the pine tree to decorate, food shopping for the eighteen or so people who would participate in our usual celebratory lunch and, of course, last-minute presents and treats to buy for grandchildren.
Still jet-lagged, and also keenly culture-lagged after such a long time immersed in rural French life, I raced around getting organised and trying desperately to fit back into my ‘real’ life. I experienced a few hair-raising moments readjusting to driving on the left-hand side of the road, the same problems in reverse as when I first learnt to drive in France the previous June. After being away so long I realised I was looking at my old, familiar surroundings with a fresh eye, an eye that had adjusted to the simplicity of small French villages and open green fields. Although we tend to believe that Australia is relatively under-populated, I found coming home exactly the opposite. Where I had been living in France was so tranquil and uncluttered compared with the upper Blue Mountains where we had been living and working for twenty-five years. The school holiday throng of tourists, the lack of parking and the general down-at-heel appearance of so many streetscapes grated on my new-found sensibilities.
The day before Christmas I had what I can only describe as an epiphany on Katoomba Street. Caught up in yet another irritating traffic jam on this steeply sloping stretch of road that leads tourists to the famous Three Sisters Lookout, I was overcome with an intense feeling of frustration. I simply didn’t relate to this place any more. I didn’t like it and I didn’t want to be here. I don’t know exactly where I wanted to be, but it wasn’t in Katoomba or even in our pretty village of Leura, which had changed so drastically in character over the last decade.
When we first moved to the Blue Mountains in the late 1970s, Leura was a quiet backwater. There was one small teashop in the main street and many of the other shops were either vacant or stocked with half-empty shelves. On Sunday morning you could have easily fired a cannon down the main street of Leura Mall without the risk of hitting anybody. Then the mountains enjoyed a tourism renaissance, becoming as they had been in the 1920s and 1930s, a popular weekend and holiday destination. Guest-houses and B&Bs started hanging out welcome signs all over the Upper Mountains, and more than half the shops in the main street were converted into trendy cafes or bistros. While the influx of tourists did wonders for the prosperity of local business life and therefore the economy, there had been a definite downside for local residents. Over the past few years parking in the village had become impossible, even after an entire back-block of houses was cleared to create an extensive new car parking area. Up to a dozen huge tour buses would park in a side street every day, disgorging hundreds of sightseers wanting to cruise the shops or stop for a coffee. As a result, shopping locally became very expensive, with most retail outlets charging tourist prices, forcing residents to travel further afield to the supermarkets instead of patronising the local corner store (which, in turn, was eventually converted into yet another stylish cafe!). Certainly the village centre looked charming because of the money spent on tarting up shop facades and maintaining the pretty gardens that line the footpath and the central strip. But it was no longer possible to stop quickly to pick up a loaf of bread or a newspaper without double parking and causing traffic chaos, then running the gauntlet of the crowds walking four deep down the foot
path.
The day before Christmas I announced to my amazed husband that I wanted to sell up and move out. He had only just recovered from the shock of my desire to buy a house in a foreign country and now it seemed I was hell-bent on dragging him away from a house and garden that he adored, nestled in a community where he felt absolutely at home.
Generally men are less thrilled at the prospect of change than women. David, in particular, is a man who hates even the slightest disruption to his set pattern of life. The simple act of rearranging the living room furniture can send him into a steep decline, so my new idea of abandoning the house in which we had reared our children and the garden that I had slaved in (not to mention spent a fortune on) for more than two decades brought him totally undone. He was convinced that I had lost the plot, and put up strong objections to my idea.
‘I thought we would stay here forever,’ he lamented. ‘I was planning to die here.’
With a wry but determined smile I told him it could ‘possibly be arranged’.
He began to realise that I was deadly serious.
The essence of my argument for selling up and moving was the dawning realisation that our way of life in the mountains had been destroyed by development and tourism, and that we needed to look for a quieter place – perhaps even the farm that I had always dreamt about.
For me the final straw was the ugly and invasive red trolley tour bus. Phoney San Francisco-style dark red buses take tourists on whistlestop tours to all the main beauty spots and attractions in Leura and Katoomba. For almost a year I had been aware of them buzzing down our street eight times a day, but what I didn’t realise was that our house and garden was actually part of the tour. How many mornings did I wander out in my slippers to deposit the recycling bin on the footpath only to be confronted by a bus loaded with wide-eyed tourists gazing in our direction? A friend, recently moved to the district, decided to take the tour out of interest, and immediately phoned me to report in malicious delight.
