Last Tango in Toulouse

by Mary Moody

  My ancestry is more on the Irish side, and I have the opposite disposition to my husband. I never worry myself about trivial matters, am irresponsible with money, laugh at situations that others would find grim, and generally regard most days as an opportunity for a celebration or a party. Yet somehow, despite our opposing personalities, we have weathered more than three decades of mostly happy cohabitation.

  One of the main reasons our relationship has survived is because, over the years, we have spent quite a lot of time apart. David’s career took him to Sydney every week, where he stayed three or four nights, sleeping in the back room of his office, being available for phone calls and meetings with his working colleagues twenty-four hours a day. He also spent long periods away from home filming or doing research for various film projects – in the United States, England, Ireland, Scotland, South Africa, Turkey, France and Asia. His career has given him great satisfaction and provided financial security for our family, but I always felt it was at the expense of his involvement and participation as a husband and father. He enjoyed considerable success with many of his films, producing more than forty features that have been screened in cinemas and on television all over the world. In the late 1980s he made a controversial anti-apartheid film, Mapantsula, which was widely screened, received awards at several major film festivals and eventually earned him the 1988 Human Rights Australia Film Award.

  I was so proud of his achievements and his commitment to a risky cause, but my pride was tinged with bitterness. That particular film took David away from us for nine months, and when he returned he found living in Australia and being with his family an anticlimax after the intensity and danger of the film-making experience. He and his fellow film-makers had smuggled the film out of the country under the nose of South African Security so that it could be completed in London in time for the Cannes Film Festival (where it was an official selection). David felt such a buzz of excitement at their success that I suppose it was natural he would find home life boring by comparison. For me, this rankled.

  I also experienced a certain level of tension when David was at home, and I realise now, many years later, that it was because of our situation, having my mother Muriel under the same roof. While having Mum around was fantastic for me while David was absent, when he was at home it could be fraught with difficulties. Neither my mother nor I was prepared to hand over the reins to David when he walked in the door. We were accustomed to working together as a team, running the house and the garden and rearing the children. If David had strong opinions about how we were managing, especially in relation to the children, it could result in an instant explosion – usually from Muriel rather than me. At times they got along together brilliantly, especially in the last few years of her life. However, there were often long periods when the situation was pretty grim and I took on the role of peacekeeper, trying to calm down the situation however I could.

  In many respects my relationship with David was muffled by the constant presence of another adult in the house. I felt that I had given David permission to be an absent husband and father by not fighting against it more forcefully, not insisting that he spend more time at home and get more involved in the children’s lives. But I can now see that life was easier without him around. There was less conflict. And when he was around the last thing I wanted was to engage him in a fight about how I was feeling. If I had tackled him verbally for what I considered to be his shortcomings, Muriel would undoubtedly have jumped on the bandwagon and life would have been totally unbearable.

  So I put up and shut up. For almost twenty-five years I danced a jig around my husband and my mother so that the family would remain on an even keel. Mum was by no means an easy person to live with either. Opinionated, forceful and quick-tempered, she required a good deal of careful handling, and again it was up to me to keep her mood buoyant. Most of the time we had an excellent relationship – very open, very honest and very affectionate. We agreed on so many things, from politics to cooking, and I loved her dearly although I also found her exasperating. So there I was, stuck between two lovable but demanding people, with four growing and boisterous children to bolster the equation.

  A couple of times – perhaps three times – during this period I decided that I couldn’t stand it any more, that I should leave David and start a new life somewhere else. I am sure every marriage has moments like this. But there was really no possibility of it ever happening. If I left David, would I also leave my mother? Or would I leave them alone together and just take the children? A ridiculous notion. Even though I was working, I couldn’t afford to support my mother as well as four children and I was loath to break up the family. So I stayed put and made the best of it. To all intents and purposes we were one big happy family and, mostly, we were, but a lot of this fell on my shoulders. I took responsibility not just for the physical and emotional well-being of my family, but for the entire mood of the household. If you ask any of my adult children now, they will say they had a totally happy and carefree childhood, and for that I feel satisfaction.

  David’s justification for being distracted from the family, when things did occasionally come to a head, was always that it was the nature of his business that required his absence. That he was doing it for all of us. That he didn’t enjoy being away for such long periods, indeed he often felt depressed and despondent when away from home so much. That he had no choice. That he was not trained or qualified in any other area and could find no alternative employment. He was trapped in his working life and that’s just the way it had to be.

  My counter argument would always be that even when he was at home he didn’t ‘engage’ with the family. He complained of being exhausted by the intensity of his working life and would frequently spend long hours when at home stretched out on the sofa reading the weekend papers cover to cover, recovering for his return to Sydney the following Monday. However, during the weekends he readily made himself available for his work colleagues, who would phone any time of the day or night, often needing his counselling or support with a film project. Scriptwriters – such a needy lot – were the worst. One in particular had uncanny timing, phoning on Sunday just as I was setting out the family lunch. David should have been the one to carve the roast, but often this was left to me because he would take the call and speak for an hour, sometimes longer, propping up the writer’s fragile ego while his lunch congealed on the plate. This used to drive me crazy. I was the one dashing to Saturday morning sports and doing the shopping and mowing the lawn, although he did eventually take on some of these chores. I dealt with my dissatisfaction by drinking lots of beer and cooking up large, happy family meals that brought cheer to the household. I kept it all together, but underneath there was a simmering of discontent and resentment, seldom acknowledged but ever present.

  The other vital aspect to this whole relationship equation was love. When I wasn’t furious with David or frustrated by his intransigence or enraged by his stubbornness, I was in love with him. Our personal relationship was loving and passionate and this always undid me in the end. Just when I thought I could walk away from our marriage he would make contact with me on such an intimate level that the thought of leaving him was impossible. We were bound together by something that was difficult to explain, that was more than just our mutual adoration of our children or the physical joy of our sex life. Something intangible kept us together and helped us survive. I always knew that he loved me deeply and this constancy gave our union security.

  But now, in middle age, I have started to question seriously whether love is enough. Whether all those years of sublimating my feelings for the sake of family harmony can be wiped away by love. Should I be grateful that I have a man who loves me? After all, many people don’t have love in their lives and would regard me as reckless for throwing away a husband who adores me and whom I certainly love in return. For reasons I can’t really explain, however, I am no longer prepared to live in a situation that doesn’t work for me. I am no longer prepared to co
mpromise. It’s a major dilemma, one that I am going to have to confront once and for all.

  6

  The first people to live in our little village house in France were our son Ethan, then just 21, and his girlfriend Lynne, who was about the same age. As soon as we arrived back in Australia and announced we had found a place they started saving to make the trip. Within five months they had arrived in Frayssinet with little or no French language skills and only meagre savings.

  Our friends in France welcomed them with open arms, nicknamed them ‘the kids’ and even provided some local work for Ethan using his horticultural qualifications. The plan was that they would do some basic renovations, such as chipping off crepi (mortar) and painting, in return for the house, rent-free. They intended to stay for six or twelve months, depending on how their finances lasted, but this idea was quickly squashed when Lynne found herself unexpectedly pregnant.

  What was meant to be a carefree working holiday turned into a bit of a nightmare for Lynne. She was desperately morning sick and homesick and missing the support of her mother and sisters during such a difficult time. Neither Ethan nor Lynne had planned to have a child at this stage of their relationship and, while they were excited, they were also daunted and I think a little frightened at the prospect of parenthood. Both of them came from largish families, both of them adored babies and children, but it meant that their time in France was to be foreshortened; and for Lynne it meant a lot of time alone – and feeling frightful into the bargain. Ethan was frequently working during the week and the constant aromas of rich French food cooking in the village added to her nausea. She made a lot of friends who were supportive, and when Ethan was working she did some tentative exploring, but the very nature of her pregnancy limited her ability to enjoy the experience of living in a foreign country.

  The weekends were easier for them both – Ethan was at home and they could do things together, even if it was only starting some of the preliminary renovations. One Saturday he decided to clean out the upper level of the barn, which was piled high with all sorts of junk and mounds of dirt – it’s quite a mystery why anyone would shovel dirt up to a first floor. The window at that level had no glass, so Ethan simply shovelled the rubbish into the courtyard below, intending to take it by trailer to the tip at a later stage. The first thing he discovered in the gloom, after erecting a portable light to work by, were dozens of beautiful old timber trugs – purpose-made agricultural baskets for carrying produce such as walnuts, chestnuts or apples. Some of the trugs had a mesh base for allowing dirt to pass through; they must have been made for harvesting potatoes and other root crops. He dusted them off and put them out in the sunshine for closer inspection. Some were badly eaten by woodworm, but many were quite perfect, with beautiful bent willow handles. On closer inspection he also found a whole range of tools and templates for making trugs, including a vice-like piece of equipment that was obviously used for forming the arched handles from water-soaked willow stems. He realised that the barn, in a previous incarnation, had been a workshop for making these agricultural baskets, all of which were stamped on the side with the word LEROUX.

  Later, he noticed a framed black and white photograph on the kitchen wall of our friend and neighbour, Danny. It was of the village in the early twentieth century. There was our house, with the name LEROUX out the front and the downstairs shutters opened to the street, making a shop entrance. It seems that part of the main downstairs room was a shop selling these gardening artefacts; this was quite a coincidence given that Ethan and I are both such keen gardeners and have strong horticultural connections in our work. It made him believe the house had a special significance for us, that it was just right, meant to be.

  Continuing the filthy and back-breaking task of shovelling barrowloads of dirt and other rubbish from the barn, he came across a folded length of old hessian buried deep within the debris. Pulling the light closer so that he could see better, he started to unravel the cloth, then reeled back in horror at the sight of a mummified dog corpse, obviously very ancient and somehow preserved in the dry soil where it had been interred probably close to a hundred years before. Why anyone would bury a dog on the upper level of a barn is beyond comprehension, unless it was a much loved hunting dog they couldn’t bear to part with. Or perhaps it had died in midwinter and the ground had been too solid to dig a grave. It might have been stored in the barn awaiting later burial, then somehow forgotten. Ethan wasn’t thrilled with the discovery and quickly repaired to the bar across the road for a few cleansing ales to recover from his experience.

  For one of the months that Ethan and Lynne were in France I was leading a trek high in the Indian Himalayas. While travelling I bought a house-warming present for the French cottage – a colourful dhurry rug which was packaged up in the traditional hand-stitched calico wrapping and posted to Frayssinet. Instead of being delivered to the local post office as I expected, it was held in customs in Toulouse, which meant that Ethan and Lynne had to make the tedious journey to pick it up, not to mention paying a huge whack of import duty, which I had also not anticipated. Cheerfully they set out to find the customs depot, never easy given the peculiarities of French signposting and roundabouts. However, Ethan had become quite a skilled navigator of the road system and they managed to find the right place and pick up the parcel without too many problems.

  On the return trip they were stopped by an official police roadblock, a not unusual occurrence at the entrances and exits of the motorways. Dozens of police and their intimidating-looking vehicles were parked to one side of the road and motorists were being flagged down randomly so that their papers and licences could be checked. Foreigners are required to always carry their passports as well as all the relevant papers for any vehicle they’re driving; fortunately, Ethan was well prepared and all his documentation was quickly found to be in order. But when the police noticed the suspicious-looking fabric-wrapped parcel, postmarked from India, on the back seat a more serious and thorough search was made. ‘The kids’ were ordered from the car and Lynne’s handbag was searched. Ethan was frisked, the boot was opened and they even checked under the seats, in the glove box and side compartments. The rubber floor mats were lifted. Ethan was given a sharp knife and ordered to unwrap the parcel on the side of the road, with several heavily armed police with machine guns over their shoulders standing over him. Shaking slightly, he cut through the needlework binding with the knife and unfolded the rug, spreading it out on the grass verge. The police crouched down, examining it closely, fingering the fringes and turning it over several times. Eventually they called their colleagues to come and look. Standing in a circle around the rug, they praised its design and colour, slapping Ethan on the back and telling him it was a ‘très joli petit tapis’ (a very pretty rug).

  He quickly scooped it up, threw it onto the back seat and took off for the village and safety. He phoned me at home in Australia that night to berate me for setting him up with a suspicious-looking package from a Third World country.

  Ethan and Lynne decided to stay in France until the sixth month of her pregnancy. They made the most of their time, travelling to Holland and then on to Paris by train and finally driving across the Pyrenees to Spain then down to the Mediterranean. It wasn’t quite the carefree working holiday they had bargained for, but it was an exciting time as they came to terms with approaching parenthood and had their first taste of overseas travel. It could be a long time before they have such a chance again.

  7

  My desire to leave Leura and find a more tranquil rural lifestyle had not diminished, but David was still very anxious at the prospect of moving. We were now living alone and the location suited him perfectly – just an hour and a half from Sydney via the expressway, so he could go to Sydney for meetings and return the same day rather than staying away all week. He had changed his work routine and was no longer an absent husband. The irony of this was not lost on me. Our lives had become much less demanding with our children no longer living at home,
and all the pressures of an extended family had vanished since the death of my mother. I sometimes wondered if Muriel’s presence in the house had been one of the reasons for his lengthy absences over the years, but David assured me this wasn’t so. It was pressure of work, simple as that, and he was pleased that I had my mother around for company and support while he was away, even if it had meant a weekend juggling act. Now he was virtually at home full-time and I wasn’t sure I was thrilled with that option either.

  Around this time our daughter Miriam, heavily pregnant with her fourth child, began to look for a larger house west of the Blue Mountains. She and her husband Rick searched initially in the Lithgow area, then eventually started looking in and around Bathurst, a country town we have always loved. Within weeks they put their house in Katoomba on the market and settled on a 1940s brick house in one of the more established streets of Bathurst. I was sad that the three little boys would now be more than an hour and a half from where we lived, as I had always enjoyed having them close by, but I fully appreciated their need to relocate. In many ways their reasons for wanting to leave the mountains, where Miriam had grown up, were the same as ours. They believed that the increase in population and the sheer number of tourists made the region not necessarily the best place to live, especially with young children. The streets had become very busy, the schools and local hospital overcrowded and Miriam, like me, had an idealised view of a suitable environment for children. The mountains had been perfect for my young family in the 1970s but were no longer perfect for her young family at the beginning of the new century.