by Mary Moody
He leans towards me and says, ‘I think you will like this dish. They have been doing it here for many years and they do it absolutely perfectly.’
He orders the wine with great care, discussing his choice with the wine waiter in almost conspiratorial fashion, as though they are plotting together to create the perfect dining experience.
Not for a moment do I feel as though I am surrendering my independence by just allowing all this to happen, just to unfold. And I find it hard to describe how much I enjoy the sensation of being led by the hand into unfamiliar territory. It is like being allowed for a few brief moments into another world, like dipping my toe into a culture and lifestyle that I have only ever read about. Yet here I am, sitting very close to my lover in the corner of a restaurant. He touches me often, touches my hand or my cheek or my knee, and we talk and laugh and share a level of intimacy that I find exciting but also a little disturbing. While we are both anticipating our inevitable move from the restaurant to the hotel he has booked, it’s the enjoyment of our conversation that really surprises me. I somehow thought it would be just about sex, but it isn’t like that all. It’s the whole experience – the meeting, the atmosphere of the places we go to together, the easy banter between us. Part of me knows that it isn’t real – this isn’t what everyday relationships are based upon – yet part of me relishes every detail of the unreality. It’s all a dream, a fantasy, except that it is actually happening and it’s happening to me.
The man from Toulouse is amazed that I have never had an affair before. When I ask him about his own sexual history with women other than his wife, he smiles enigmatically. Of course he has had affairs, not that many, but a few over the years. I wonder if I am just naive, playing into the hands of a serial womaniser. Or if I am fortunate to have fallen into a relationship with a man who has the experience to make this brief dalliance even more exciting.
One aspect of our relationship fascinates me. The man from Toulouse treats me as I have never been treated before. He is thoughtful and courteous in a way that I can only describe as old-fashioned. As a liberated woman of the Sixties, I am astounded at the way in which our affair is conducted. He always designates a meeting place and is waiting for me when I arrive. I never have to wait even a moment for him. He is there, smiling and welcoming. He takes care of all the logistics with the minimum of fuss. Accounts are paid and taxis are ordered and I am barely aware of it. When the time comes for me to leave, to catch the train from Toulouse back home, he takes me to the station in a taxi and makes sure I am safely where I need to be. His attitude is both solicitous and protective and I find it most appealing.
Tingling from head to toe, I sit on the train in the late afternoon, on the way back to Cahors, wondering if it is all a dream. Can this really be me having an affair? It’s not the sort of thing I do. I have never even contemplated it. Yet here I am swept up in the intensity of a new relationship and loving every moment of it.
29
As the time grows near for me to leave France and return to Australia I have several earnest conversations with the man from Toulouse about our painful situation. We both know that the time is fast approaching for us to reach some resolution about our relationship but we put it off until the last possible moment – until our last day together, our last lunch.
Guilt has never entered into my feelings about what has happened. I don’t feel guilty about his wife or my husband, although I do feel extremely nervous at the prospect of either of them discovering the affair. What worries me is the inevitable distress that such a revelation would cause, not just to our respective spouses but to our wider families – to our children in particular.
From the outset we both felt strongly that we were not entering into this relationship as a way of escaping from our marriages. He is very much a family man with a strong sense of his own identity and his place in the world. Likewise, my commitment to my family is unshakable, and I also feel very much an Australian woman in every sense. While I love France and want to spend part of each year living there, I certainly can’t imagine abandoning my husband and my home, my family and my country to take up a new relationship on the other side of the world.
For us both there has been a clear understanding from the start of what this was to be – an affair, nothing more. An interlude of heart and mind, a brief encounter. Not permanent, not damaging or negative.
Of course nothing is ever that simple. You can’t take a relationship and define it in such limiting terms. You can’t use terminology to categorise what passes between a man and a woman, because it has to do with feelings and chemistry, reactions and emotions. The truth is that the ‘affair’ is more heartfelt than either of us anticipated when we first recklessly embarked on it. We care more for each other than we ever intended and so keeping a lid on the situation is extremely difficult. I want to be cool about it, matter-of-fact and casual. So does he. I don’t want to phone him when we are apart and he doesn’t want to phone me. But we do. It is an irresistible attraction, a sort of madness that feels as if it will never go away. Intellectually, we are in total agreement about what the future holds for us – absolutely nothing. Yet we both feel shattered.
Nevertheless we end it. We say ‘no more’ and terminate the relationship. I pack my bags, hand my house keys to Jan and with a heavy heart catch the train from Gourdon to Paris to connect with my homeward flight to David in Australia. At the airport I bolster myself with several strong gins – not a good choice, as it is famous for causing melancholy. Sitting in the bar, feeling lost and strangely disembodied, I very nearly miss the plane because I am so engrossed in my own sad feelings. After take-off I have another drink and swallow a sleeping pill. I tend not to sleep well on planes but, remarkably, I fall into a deep coma that lasts more than eight hours. Nervous and emotional exhaustion (not to mention alcohol and pills) totally wipes me out yet, when I wake up, having missed both dinner and breakfast, I feel curiously light and happy. I can’t understand why I feel so good, but my sadness has lifted and I am left with a sense of relief that the tension is finally over. Even though the relationship lasted only for a few short weeks, I must have been coiled up like a spring for the entire time. Now that it has ended I come back to earth and feel grounded and focused.
I am left with a smug, joyful sensation. I can’t believe I’ve really had this experience. My brain skips through all the special moments with the man from Toulouse and, instead of feeling devastated that it has finished, I am thrilled with the memory of it. I have managed to get away with something remarkable, without hurting anyone in the process.
When David picks me up from Bathurst airport he appears relieved to see me and I am thrilled to throw my arms around him. I have just walked away from the most unsettling experience of my life and I feel so drained that having the arms of my large, familiar and loving husband wrapped around me is the most unexpected but enormous relief. It is cold and wintry as we drive back to the farm, where I am greeted by the warmth and love of my big, noisy family. All the fires are alight, the vases are overflowing with flowers and the house is filled with the aromas of Sunday lunch cooking. I am home. I am safe. I am happy. I give all the grandchildren their presents and empty my purse of my French loose change, which our oldest grandson, Eamonn, collects with great care. He doesn’t just throw the coins and notes in a jar, he catalogues them according to the date they were minted and their denomination, then works out their value in Australian dollars. I hope he won’t end up a merchant banker, though he has the sort of personality that might be suited to it.
After lunch we go for a walk around the farm then sit about in front of the fire, drinking wine and catching up on the news from Bathurst and France. It appears that Gemma, the tarty Husky from across the road, is indeed in pup and that Floyd will be a father in four or five weeks’ time. Miriam is keen to have one of the pups, especially if there is a female. John barely survived the winter temperatures at Yetholme and drove north at high speed the day after David arrive
d back to take over the reins of the farm. There’s very little wood left in the shed and Aaron and Ethan have spent the last few weekends trying to collect another decent stack to get us through the winter. I catch up on news of our grandchildren but, as the afternoon wears on, I feel jet-lag creeping over me. The families pack up and go home, to Bathurst, Mudgee and Wentworth Falls. David and I sit by the fire and I struggle to stay awake, trying to last until nightfall so as to get back into a normal sleeping pattern.
He sits quietly opposite me on the sofa. ‘I know about the man from Toulouse,’ he says.
Speechless, I simply burst into tears. The game is over.
‘It’s all right, I understand,’ he says, much to my amazement.
David is much more astute than I have given him credit for. Ever since I first hinted, all those months ago, that I was feeling an attachment to the man from Toulouse, he has been tuned into my moods and emotions, and knowing me as well as he does, it’s been perfectly obvious that I was heading towards an affair. I had also sent out lots of signals during the period leading up to my return to France and when we were together at the village house in the middle of the year. The most obvious signal had been in a newspaper interview I did after the release of Au Revoir. I was asked by the journalist what I would do if I knew I had only one more year to live. I nominated a ‘wish list’ of unfulfilled dreams that included taking my grandchildren on a trip to France and taking my own four children trekking in the Himalayas. My final wish was to have a love affair, then come home to David and die quietly, sitting on the front verandah with a glass of wine in my hand. For David it has been as though I have been waving a huge banner in front of his face, announcing my intentions.
How should a husband react when he knows that his wife of thirty-one years has just had an affair? I would have thought with rage, possibly bitterness and even revenge. However, this is not what happens.
While David is far from happy, he is not angry. He doesn’t raise his voice, although he is quite obviously very upset and hurt. What he says to me is that he feels sympathetic to my pain and takes much of the responsibility for what has happened on his own shoulders.
The fact that our relationship has become stale over the past few years and that I am obviously carrying around resentment for various perceived failures on his part – some dating back more than twenty years – is the reason, in his mind, that this situation has occurred.
Confirmation came in the form of our phone bills, which indicated that I had been making regular calls to France for more than six months. These days every number is itemised and there were dozens where I had phoned Toulouse to say the coast was clear, then hung up so that my friend could call me back. David had also, just once, picked up a phone extension when I was talking to France. He assures me he didn’t listen to the conversation, but in the few brief moments he was there he sensed the intimacy between us. It was enough for him to put two and two together.
‘Why didn’t you say something about it when we were in France?’ I ask.
‘I don’t know,’ he says, suddenly looking devastated. ‘I just felt it was all out of my control and I thought confronting it there and then might make matters worse. It obviously just had to run its course.’
What is causing David the most pain is not the fact that I had a sexual relationship with the man from Toulouse, but that I had fallen in love with him. Several times David tells me that he would much rather I’d just had sex with someone I had met in a bar. He refers to an incident I wrote about in Au Revoir, when a bicycle rider tried to pick me up in the hotel in Villefranche-du-Perigord and I ran away. From David’s perspective it would have been preferable for me to indulge in a couple of one-night stands rather than give myself heart and soul to another man. But he knows that I am just not capable of casual sex; my inevitable emotional involvement is much more threatening and dangerous.
The next few weeks are a roller-coaster of emotions. Within days the entire family knows and the phones are running hot with family members trying to come to terms with what has happened. Although not at all approving, Miriam is easily the most understanding of our children and takes on the unenviable role of counsellor, listening first to her father for hours, then hearing my side of the story. Knowing how busy she is with her large family I try not to weigh her down with the responsibility of being the ‘go-between’, but she naturally takes that position. When she thinks either of us is being overemotional or unreasonable she tells us. Without ever taking sides she somehow negotiates the difficult territory between her parents. We are not at war but there are so many issues to talk through. The affair has brought everything to a head and it has to be sorted out now or we risk falling apart.
Our sons are less forgiving. After the initial shock – and they are genuinely shocked – they phone me individually and voice their opinions. While I should be pleased that our family works in such an open, honest way and that they are quite comfortable letting me know exactly how the situation has affected them, I am also shattered by some of the things they say to me. They are disappointed. They feel let down. They feel that I have betrayed the sense of values that I instilled in them as children. They are worried, indeed angered by the pain I have caused their father. They are deeply passionate about what has happened and I am surprised at their intensity. I realise that for the entire time I was contemplating the affair, and certainly while it was happening, I didn’t for a moment consider how my children might feel about it. Now it’s out in the open and I am having to wear their anger and disapproval.
I feel swept along as if in a dream. I am powerless to do very much to resolve the situation, except to keep the dialogue between us open. I feel that if we can just keep talking about it, eventually there will be some sort of resolution. For the first time I am incapable of making everything all right again for everyone. There is a major emotional storm engulfing my entire family and I am the creator of it.
Trying to explain to our children how the situation evolved, I am careful never to try to justify my actions. I don’t feel, for one moment, that I need to. I am also quite adamant that I feel no guilt or remorse. I try to explain to them that the affair itself was a good experience for me and one that I shall never regret even though I know it has caused a lot of pain. But eventually I get angry and defensive. And it is David who must bear the brunt of this reaction.
‘Why is everyone so bloody upset?’ I shout at him. ‘I didn’t do anything all that wrong. I had an affair, that’s all. I didn’t murder anyone. I came home, didn’t I? It’s over and done with. Can’t we all just get over it, and move on?’
It takes a while, but eventually we all do, even David. We have some terrible moments, but we also have some moments of pure joy as we go through the process of talking it out and coming to terms with it and laying it, finally, to rest. At times we are even able to laugh about it. And what surprises me more than anything else is that my sexual feelings for my husband are stronger than they have been for many years. And his for me. I have read that having an affair can be good for a marriage, and in that respect it certainly seems to be good for ours. But in the overall scheme of things it really isn’t, I finally conclude, such a wonderful idea. While it was thrilling for me and for the man from Toulouse when it was actually happening, it was extremely painful for us both to let go of each other at the end. It has caused pain to a large number of people I love and whose love and respect are very important to me. And it has changed my marriage forever. In many respects I love David even more for his tolerance and forbearance in the face of my betrayal, but for him something has vanished from our relationship that can never be restored.
30
I am due to remain in Australia for six weeks before returning to France to lead the walking tour that has been twelve months in the planning. For David this is the really difficult part. Having been through so much and gained so much in terms of the intimacy of our ‘new’ relationship, I am about to head off again back to France. However, I d
on’t share his feelings. Not only am I going to France I am also going to Canada in late September to finally meet my sister Margaret, and the prospect of this far outweighs any nervousness about being back near Toulouse and all the emotion that it brings up. Margaret and I have been writing to each other for months now, gradually filling in the gaps and exchanging photographs and family information and we have decided that the time is right for us to meet, after a separation of fifty years. My brother Jon – her full brother and my half-brother – has been in contact with her too, and he is planning to visit her in August on his way to France. They haven’t seen each other for fifty years either – he was twenty and she was nineteen when they last saw each other – and I am happy at the prospect of their reunion. I am also pleased that Jon is going to spend some time in our French house. He hasn’t travelled overseas for more than thirty years, and it’s only the desire to see his sister that has spurred him to make this journey. After Canada, I am heading to Nepal to lead a Himalayan trek, and David is far from happy about this, too, because of the political unrest in Nepal. But, as usual, I’m ready to leap in with great enthusiasm. I feel certain that trekking in the mountains will help restore my sense of who I really am, and enable me to put recent events further into the past.
Until it’s time to go, life on the farm drifts along quite happily and for the first time I start to feel that this place is really ‘home’.
