Last Tango in Toulouse

by Mary Moody

  ‘Yes,’ she replies with some pride. ‘I just love this look, but you don’t have to have it done like this. You can just have the fine lines on your upper lip smoothed out with tiny amounts of collagen. I had it injected into the body of the lip to change the shape. It’s just a matter of personal choice.’

  When I look closely I realise that Louisa is a walking advertisement for her husband’s work. Every line and fold and crease, except for the very fine lines around her eyes, has been ‘smoothed out’, as the brochure says.

  I shiver a little and wonder what I am doing here. Might be too late to back out now.

  It turns out that I can’t have collagen (phew) because I have to be given an allergy test for it first. A tiny quantity is to be injected into my arm to see if I have any allergic reaction. But I seem to be locked into having my forehead done. The numbing cream has taken full effect and it seems a bit churlish to back out now.

  Dr Paul finally wanders in, all smiles and good humour. I talk to him briefly about botox, but he seems more concerned about the likelihood of pain. His wife prepares to hold my hand but I reassure them both.

  ‘I’ve given birth without pain relief. I think I can manage this okay.’

  Nevertheless, he further numbs my skin with blocks of ice and asks me to ‘give him a big frown’ so he can see where the lines are. This will guide him on where to insert the needle with the toxic bacterium that will paralyse the muscles between my eyebrows. I can’t really believe I am doing this, but what the hell. I tell myself that I am just dipping my toe in to see what happens.

  To distract me from any possible pain, I suspect, Dr Paul chats brightly during the few minutes it takes to botox my forehead. ‘Men aren’t very good at pain,’ he says. ‘I do my own botox in the mirror, but I have to stop all the time because I just can’t stand it any more.’

  The mental image of Dr Paul fainting in front of the mirror while botoxing his own wrinkled forehead appals but also delights me. It’s just like that episode of ‘Mr Bean’ where Rowan Atkinson manages to paralyse the dentist, then proceeds to drill the holes in his own teeth in the mirror. It’s almost impossible to watch such a grotesque performance.

  I confess to Dr Paul that I haven’t, as yet, told my husband what I am doing.

  ‘I wouldn’t worry about it,’ he says dismissively. ‘I’d estimate that 90 per cent of women who have work done never tell their husbands or boyfriends.’

  ‘But, surely,’ I protest, ‘these men must notice a change in their wife’s’ appearance if, as you say, the treatments make an appreciable difference?’

  He snorts. ‘Men don’t look at their wives.’

  I am left wondering just who the women are doing it for. Themselves, I suppose. That must also include me. I am aware that David thinks it totally unnecessary. He has said so dozens of times. And I suspect that the man from Toulouse would also think it a rather pointless exercise. It’s not as if I look a lot older than my years. Realistically, I look exactly what I am – a woman in her early fifties. It’s just that I don’t want to look like a woman in her early fifties. I want to look five or even ten years younger, and if I can achieve that with some relatively innocuous injections, then why not?

  ‘All done,’ he says. ‘You were a model patient. If I had a jelly bean, I’d give you one.’

  Bloody expensive jelly bean, is my only thought. $350 poorer plus $80 for the collagen allergy test. I ask the good doctor about the young girl in the salon who was planning a botox treatment, but he can’t seem to recall having ‘done’ her.

  ‘About the youngest patient we see is thirty,’ he tells me, ‘unless people are having it for genuine therapeutic reasons.’

  I wander from the salon. There is no pain and the muscles between my eyes still work perfectly if I choose to frown. He says it will take two days to work and should last from four to six months.

  Over the next few days I spend a lot of time looking at the small triangle of flesh between my eyes, wondering if there is any difference. Three days after the treatment I realise that I can’t frown, even if I try. Frowning is an unconscious muscle movement and we rarely try to frown deliberately. Thus I don’t walk around feeling numb or as though I have lost any facial sensation. However, when I look in the mirror and deliberately try to crease my brows by frowning, I can’t. And the area looks smooth. So I suppose it has worked, but I wonder if it is worth it in terms of time, trouble and cost. Do I look any younger? I doubt it. But perhaps after the collagen in my lips . . .

  25

  For several years now I have been leading treks into remote regions of the Himalayas, taking groups of people to see alpine plants in their natural environment. It’s not so much a job as a passion, and I decide, now that I am no longer tied down by the television program, to take a few extra tours every year to the northern hemisphere. Jan and I have planned a detailed itinerary for an autumn walking-cum-eating and drinking tour of the region of France where we both live, and I have also agreed to take a tour group to northern France and southern England in the spring, to look at gardens and visit the Chelsea Flower Show – a highlight in any garden lover’s calendar. This means leaving the farm unattended, because David has plans to visit the Cannes Film Festival, as he does most years. We have decided to meet up and spend time at the house in Frayssinet. It will be our first time there together and I am looking forward to it, even though the spectre of the man from Toulouse is looming.

  Our son-in-law’s father, John, has agreed to come and house-sit for seven weeks and take care of the animals. John has recently retired as an army captain and then music teacher, and has been travelling around Australia in a campervan on an extended sabbatical. He is looking forward to having a roof over his head for a couple of months, and being on the farm means that he is close to his four grandsons, whom he adores, and who adore him. Originally English, his preference is for a warm climate, and for the past eight years he has been living near Bundaberg, in Queensland. The shivering cold of the climate where we live will be a shock to his system, but we feel sure that he will cope. John is such a special character that I have written a children’s story about him as a bit of fun for our mutual grandsons. The story is about John’s uncanny knack of getting the children off to sleep by reading their bedtime stories in such a monotonous voice that they simply cannot keep their eyes open.

  We run through all the practical things John will need to know about keeping the fires going, looking after the poultry and fixing the house pump if it should break down. David and I head off in different directions, leaving John and Floyd, our dog, standing at the top of the long driveway, waving. David flies to Nice en route to Cannes while I head off to Paris with half my tour group under my wing. The others will meet us when we get there.

  People who go on gardening tours are usually earthy people with no pretensions and a great sense of fun. This group is no exception, although they hail from vastly different backgrounds, and when we all first get together I wonder how the chemistry of it will work out. I refer to this style of expedition as a ‘twinset and pearls’ tour, because it’s all highly organised and comfortable. Air-conditioned buses, top-quality hotels, and excellent meals in the evening. A bit of a contrast to my adventure treks, where we sleep in tents and walk uphill for seven or eight hours a day. Women usually outnumber the men on both types of tour, exactly as they do in garden clubs, but on this tour I have two blokes to help balance the equation. Richard is a middle-aged man who is the ‘travelling companion’ of Margaret, an Englishwoman who runs an antique shop in the mountains. The other man is Colin, whom I have known for many years, a professional horticulturist with a string of award-winning gardens under his belt. He has never been on a plane before and his excitement at the prospect of visiting so many famous international gardens is palpable. There are other knowledgeable gardeners on this trip too – a young woman called Heather who operates a wholesale citrus nursery in a nearby country town, another Margaret, who owns one of the best ga
rden centres in New South Wales, and several garden club members, including Pam, with beautiful gardens of their own. Then there’s Debbie, nearly six foot tall and gorgeous with spiked blonde hair and a loud and very broad Australian accent. She’s outrageous, and I wonder how she and the more quiet and conservative members of the group are going to get along.

  Apart from anything else, it’s my role to keep the travellers happy and harmonious – a bit like being the mother of a large family – and I sometimes wonder if I am just jumping back into that old familiar role again of looking after everybody else. There is a certain skill in making everyone feel good about the trip, especially people who come from different backgrounds and have different expectations of the experience. It’s a bit of a juggling act, but I have had so much practice within my own family that keeping the atmosphere light and happy is second nature to me now. Whatever, I always have a lot of fun on these tours and bond so closely with some of the participants that we become friends for life.

  We have several days in Paris, the primary purpose being to travel out to Normandy to see Monet’s garden at Giverny. For some of the group this particular visit has been a lifelong dream, and even though we are all quite exhausted and jet-lagged when the bus picks us up for the two-hour journey, there is a great sense of excitement. The bus journey out of Paris is a little tedious and some of the group drop off to sleep, but once we get out into the countryside they cheer up as we drive through little villages and get a taste of French rural lifestyle. Monet’s garden is one of the most visited gardens in the world, and bus groups are booked in at specific times so that there are not too many people in the garden at once. It’s not a very large garden and it is divided into two distinct sections – the flower garden that adjoins the pink and green painted house and the water garden made famous by Monet’s waterlily series of paintings.

  Before we left Sydney airport, as we were walking to our boarding gate lounge we passed a Taronga Zoo shop selling lots of stuffed animals. Standing on the carpet outside the shop was a very large fluffy emu with wild eyes and a spiked head of hair like Debbie’s. As we approached, one of the women said ‘Look at that! Who would buy something as hideous as that?’

  ‘I would,’ I said reaching for my credit card. ‘It will make a fabulous present for Jan, my friend who lives in the next village in France.’ By the time we reach Paris, the emu, christened Flossie after the calf back home, has become our mascot on the tour – I carry it with us everywhere, even to Monet’s garden.

  The garden is financially subsidised by American art lovers and is always teeming with large groups of Americans who are mad about everything to do with Monet. The gift shop at the garden is enormous; it was once Monet’s art studio, where he painted his massive waterlily canvases, but has been converted into a sophisticated money-making concern with Monet scarves, ties, teapots and books and the usual postcards and poster-sized prints of his paintings. I find it all a bit tacky, but I suppose it is essential to maintain the garden at such a very high standard. Several years ago an Australian artist whom I met at a garden club when I was showing colour photographic slides that I had taken of Monet’s garden one late spring subsequently spent almost a year living in the village of Giverny, coming into the garden every day to paint. She told hilarious anecdotes about how when the gardens closed every afternoon at 4.30, the gardeners would scurry around like crazy deadheading the roses and tidying up for the following day. If a clump of a particular group of flowering perennials or bulbs, such as peonies or iris, started to fade, they would simply dig up the entire clump and bring in freshly flowering replacements from where they had been growing in a nearby field. It was sort of ‘gardening by numbers’, where everything was almost artificial in its perfection. I have always regarded the garden slightly differently since I heard this story, but for our tour groups it’s two hours of sheer magic as we wander between the burgeoning flower beds and colourful borders.

  Suddenly, a harsh female American accent pierces the air. ‘Oh God, in Heaven’s name, will you look at that? That woman’s carrying a turkey under her arm!’

  I affect a look of wounded outrage. ‘It’s certainly not a turkey, madam, it’s a native Australian flightless bird. Have you never seen an emu?’

  ‘It sure looks wild,’ she says, giving Flossie a pat on her spiky head.

  We take photographs of Flossie standing in Monet’s garden, sniffing the roses, and from this moment the tour degenerates into a non-stop comedy routine, with Flossie as the centrepiece of our hilarity.

  In Paris we catch the Metro to the splendid Jardin de Bagatelle in the Bois de Boulogne and spend a dreamy hot afternoon enjoying the thousands of roses that proliferate in this formal masterpiece. Margaret and Richard decide to snooze for a while beneath a shady tree but are moved on by the gendarmes, and Margaret is outraged at the thought of being treated ‘like a derelict sleeping on a park bench’. On the way back in the Metro a young woman attempts to snatch her bag as we leave the station, a very common problem in Paris these days. I feel certain this young woman lived to regret this particular attempted theft. Margaret is so outraged that, clutching her bag tightly to her breast, she shrieks at the hapless and probably homeless figure: ‘You wicked, wicked girl! How dare you try to take my bag? You wicked, wicked girl!’

  The would-be thief takes off in terror and I joke that she is probably in need of counselling after this encounter. But we are all rather shaken, and from that moment become more aware of the dangers of big cities for tourists.

  That evening Richard loses his wallet on the bus coming back from Montmartre. It’s there one moment and gone the next. The poor chap spends his last day in Paris filing a report for the police and, while the wallet is turned in later in the day, the money and credit cards are gone. It takes the edge off our enjoyment of the day.

  Some of us decide to see a live show while in Paris, heading off in the Metro to the outrageously expensive Moulin Rouge – it costs the equivalent of $180 for the show and a half-bottle of champagne. The standard of the show is fantastic, however, and I see how the can-can should really be done – a bit different from my frilly red knickers at the Yetholme Community Hall. One of the acts has me absolutely gobsmacked. A massive glass-sided water tank suddenly rises up from under the stage. It contains a very large python, at least four metres long, swimming underwater. A naked young woman appears and dives into the water, where she proceeds to ‘dance’ with the snake in a most lascivious fashion. I try not to laugh out loud, it’s so over the top. A lot of the dancers at Moulin Rouge are Australians, I am later informed, chosen for their goods looks, long legs and athleticism.

  The following day we take the train to London, where we will spend four nights before heading off on our tour of southern England. We arrive during the peak period of the Queen’s Golden Jubilee and London is alive with shops selling tacky royal souvenirs and Union Jacks for those who wish to engage in a little flag-waving. As a dyed-in-the wool republican I am rather appalled at finding myself in London at such a time but some of the others are thrilled to be there during the celebrations. We enjoy some friendly banter about the pros and cons of the royal family and I buy some cheap and nasty souvenirs of the jubilee to hand out as prizes on the bus. I get a flashing plastic tiara for Margaret which she wears with great pride.

  Debbie has taken to calling out that distinctive Australian bush cry ‘COOOOOEEEEE’ at the top of her lungs to gather the group together. She does it in the hotel foyer in the morning after breakfast and she does it when we are getting onto the bus. Reserved English people passing by look at us with disdain, seeing a motley group of loud, noisy, Australian tourists (especially when they spy Flossie under my arm or staring out of the bus window with her beady eye). But we don’t give a hoot; we are having a great time.

  We do the Chelsea Flower Show and several famous public gardens in London, then pack up for our country tour, which will include the famous Sissinghurst Garden created by Vita Sackville-West. Our dr
iver appears with the bus outside our smart Kensington Hotel. His name is Roy and he is alarming in appearance. Six foot seven inches (2 metres) tall, he weighs twenty-one stone (137kg) and has no front teeth. As he bends over to load our suitcases into the baggage compartment we are presented with a vision of him from the back – that fleshy cleavage revealed when a man’s trousers or shorts don’t quite cover the rear end. Some people call this spectacle ‘builder’s bum’. I try not to catch the eyes of the other women because I know we will dissolve into hysterics. Roy is just as alarming in behaviour as he is in appearance. He is charmed by Flossie but a little too familiar for some of our tour group’s comfort. I am assigned the seat at the front of the bus, with a microphone, and I am also given a thick road map. It appears that I am expected to navigate because, once he leaves London, Roy doesn’t have the vaguest idea where he is going. Every time I speak to the group or say anything at all, Roy’s voice booms out in his marked London accent, ‘Now, Mary, beeeeeeave yourself.’

  He also has a habit of coming up behind me, and some of the other more friendly women in the group, and lifting me up in the air like a weightless rag doll. I quickly learn to see the look in the eyes of the other women as he approaches from behind and dodge out of the way. His favourite trick is to lift me up and bang my head – not hard – on the ceiling of the bus. While we are all amused at his antics, we also find him a bit odd, especially when he informs us that he has been married four times and two of his wives died in car accidents.

  As we set off out of London, heading south, I start to wonder if Roy might have been driving when these accidents occurred to his wives. He is a truly terrifying driver. Not only does he drive far too fast for the road conditions, he steers the bus erratically, veering from side to side so that our hand luggage is constantly crashing from the overhead storage shelf and landing on our heads. It’s impossible to stand up and walk down the aisle when Roy is driving, and after the first day I start telling him to slow down. I don’t want members of the group to be nervous wrecks by the time we reach each garden.