Last Tango in Toulouse

by Mary Moody

  We almost run down the track back to camp, doing it in half the time it took us to ascend. Not such a good idea, as we both end up with thumping great headaches and nausea, but even that doesn’t dampen our joy at what we have just shared. We eat some lunch with the group then continue our descent, knowing that in just a few days we will be back in Pokhara, in civilisation, with phones, proper toilets, showers and other home comforts.

  The first thing I do when we reach Pokhara is find a telephone and contact David. I am concerned that if news of our exciting adventure in the forest has reached Australia he will be beside himself with worry. When I call he’s not there, so I leave a message. I call back later and he sounds very upset. No, he hadn’t heard about our misadventures. But he has some terrible news. Michael O’Shaughnessy, the ‘boy next door’ for our children’s entire childhood and one of their oldest friends, has died suddenly and without apparent cause while on duty with the Rural Fire Service in Katoomba. And Rick, the young Canadian man so badly injured in the Bali bombings, has also died. They were both in their early thirties. I am plunged, quickly and painfully, right back into the real world.

  We have a final dinner in Pokhara and the group presents me with a brilliant orange T-shirt with ‘Are the Himalayas Steep?’ embroidered across the front. Over a chilled local beer I ask everyone about their personal highlight of the trip. ‘The mountains’, ‘the views’ ‘the villages’ ‘the people’ are the standard responses but all agree that the highlight was probably getting lost in the forest. They will dine out on it for years, and it’s a night that none of us will ever forget.

  35

  I am so happy to be going home, and when David meets me in Sydney I am genuinely overjoyed to see him. We are both filled with relief that I am back home for at least six months. It will give us time to sort through all the issues we have confronted over the last year, and time for things between us to settle down a little. We spend the night at an airport hotel because the flight arrived very late; the plan is to drive home at our leisure the next day. Despite feeling exhausted from the long journey we make love and I am amazed at my feeling of desire and passion for him. I can’t quite fathom how falling in love with another man and having an affair can be the catalyst for a rekindling of intimacy between husband and wife, but this is what is happening. It’s as though we are clinging to each other for dear life after surviving a traumatic ordeal.

  On the way home he tells me that a serious drought has set in over the past three months but I am not prepared for the bleak vista that greets me as we drive over the mountains and down to the western plains. The lush green paddocks of last year are burnt brown and white and most of the dams look half-empty. It’s a dusty, barren landscape. As we approach Yetholme, David tells me to be prepared for a shock. ‘You won’t recognise the farm,’ he says. ‘It looks terrible.’

  As we come up the drive I see that the sweeping lawns have disappeared; and it looks as though they have been soaked in bleach. Only the dandelions seem to have survived. The rest is almost white and crunchy underfoot. What I am not prepared for is that David hasn’t watered any of my pot plants. As if the dead lawn and paddocks aren’t enough of a shock, the sight of dozens of dead twigs sitting in large terracotta tubs around the back verandah leaves me speechless. We have unlimited house water from a deep spring, and it would have been just a matter of watering them every few days. Even the succulents are dead, and it’s almost impossible to kill those.

  ‘What happened here?’ I ask, trying not to sound too upset. I don’t want us to start off on the wrong foot.

  He looks amazed. ‘I suppose I didn’t even notice them,’ he confesses, as if seeing them for the first time. It occurs to me that he’d had a lot of other things on his mind. ‘You didn’t ask me to water them,’ he adds.

  Down in the vegetable garden the 400 broad bean plants I put in have also died. I shrug my shoulders. It doesn’t really matter; after all, they’re only plants. I can grow more when the drought is over.

  David takes me proudly out to the poultry yards and introduces me to his babies, the goslings, who by now are almost full grown and very handsome indeed. We take a walk around the farm to survey the situation. The dam is almost dry but the spring and Frying Pan Creek are still flowing. None of the trees looks stressed as yet but the only plant in flower is a carpet rose that I transferred from a pot into the ground just before I left. Roses are remarkably tough, and in most country gardens are among the few plants to survive really prolonged drought.

  At another great family reunion I present my seven grandchildren with Nepalese coats and hats that I had had made for them in Pokhara. Little Isabella is still looking very tiny compared with her cousins at the same age, but she is a smiling, gorgeous baby content to lie on the floor on a blanket while the older ones dance and play around her. They lie on top of her and smother her with kisses – I sometimes wonder how she can survive such rough treatment – but she giggles her way through the day, thriving on being the baby of the family.

  In November we have some rain, really good rain, and, although the dam doesn’t fill, the lawn and paddocks turn green again almost overnight. The lawn actually needs mowing for the first time this year and I feel a burst of energy and enthusiasm for the garden for the first time since we arrived. I weed some of the beds around the house and start to plant the vegetable garden in earnest. It’s late spring, which is the perfect time for planting in this climate. I put in three rows of herbs, annual and perennial, four or five different varieties of thyme and sage, oregano, sweet marjoram, basil, coriander, chives, Italian and curly parsley, rocket and various salad greens. I go to town on the tomatoes, planting about forty in neat rows with wooden stakes and trellis for support, plus dwarf beans, borlotti beans, climbing beans, runner beans, silver beet, sweet corn and four very long rows of potatoes, which Miriam’s boys help me plant. Within a week everything is sprouting and I mulch furiously between the rows with thick layers of newspaper and straw. I also create a new garden bed along the back verandahs and plant it with drought-tolerant shrubs and perennials – lavender, roses, catmint, ornamental grasses, artemisia and cranesbill geraniums. There’s a little more rain, and as the weather gets warmer everything flourishes. The plants seem to double in size every week and I am thankful for such soil and growing conditions. I get a sense that this is part of my healing process, and I come to understand that getting back into the garden helps me feel ‘normal’ again.

  Things between David and me are much calmer and more settled. There has been a major shift in our relationship. Where once we ran around all day being busy and getting on with our lives, allowing few moments for intimacy, we now make a deliberate effort to set aside time for each other. The mornings are spent working, and David also sticks carefully to his exercise regime. But we try to have lunch together in a restaurant at least once or twice a week, and we often spend part of the afternoon in bed, which feels decadent. I don’t get as much time for gardening, but what the hell, it’s much more fun. In many ways this aspect of our relationship is better now than it has ever been. We have stopped talking about what happened in France earlier in the year. We have said everything that can be said and going over and over it just seems to prolong the pain. We put it aside and move on.

  We decide to kill a gosling for our Christmas lunch and, although initially resistant, David finally agrees. But he won’t be the one to do the dastardly deed. Rick has volunteered and Miriam is keen to do the plucking. She has never helped with this part of the process before. We rapidly discover that plucking a goose is a lot more work than plucking a rooster. Underneath the thick covering of feathers is a carpet of fine down that is extremely tedious to remove. I want to save the feathers for making pillows, and she painstakingly drops each handful of feathers and down into a pillowslip. It takes hours – no wonder people gave up killing their own poultry and happily started buying chickens from the supermarket instead. There just aren’t enough hours in the day for goose pl
ucking. I perform the gruesome gutting process, saving the kidneys and liver for the stuffing, and then singe the entire bird over the gas stove to remove the last of the down. After plucking and dressing it looks small and pathetic, and we all feel rather sorry for it by the time we wrap it up and put it in the fridge.

  Two days before Christmas I am alone at the farm when the weather suddenly changes, with dark clouds scooting overhead and a storm brewing. The skies open and rain pours down, within minutes turning into hailstones that pound the corrugated iron roof, becoming louder each minute. I stare out the window, incredulous. It gets heavier and more furious, and the entire landscape turns to white within five minutes, blanketed with a thick covering of icy balls. It stops as quickly as it began and I run outside, almost falling as my feet slip on the icy covering that has smothered the pathways. The hailstones are thirty centimetres deep outside the kitchen door and even deeper on the eastern side of the house. The new garden bed beside the verandah is in tatters. The foliage is shredded, every plant reduced to a fraction of its size. Half the soil and mulch has washed down the path and up against the outside toilet block.

  I slither around to the vegetable garden and survey it with horror. There’s nothing left. It’s all been smashed to the ground in a pulp of shredded leaves. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. The fruit and nut trees have also been brutally damaged. Very little remains on the trees and what is there is badly bruised and battered.

  Why did I bother planting anything? If this is living in the country then, as a gardener, it’s just too tough for me. I’ll go back to letting the weeds grow and buying our vegetables at the supermarket. A quick call around the neighbourhood reveals that everyone in Yetholme has been badly hit. The commercial fruit growers have been devastated, and this helps give me a sense of perspective. Why should I worry about my few rows of tomatoes when some people have lost their entire income for the season? They also reassure me that events like this are very rare. There’s hasn’t been a heavy hailstorm like this in twenty years or more. I am slightly reassured. And after Christmas and some extra watering the vegetable garden grows by itself, although I doubt I will have any ripe tomatoes this year. The drought intensifies, there are bushfires all over the state and water everywhere is becoming scarce. It’s all part of being Australian, especially for those of us who live away from the big cities. In spite of the hardships, I love it.

  On Christmas Eve Aaron and Lorna’s dog, still a pup, discovers the bag of goose feathers hidden in the shed, and to him they obviously smell irresistible. He rips and shakes the bag, covering the entire back and side lawns with feathers and goose down. We wake to a ‘white’ Christmas.

  36

  When I was a little girl I always tried to be good. It was part of my way of coping within our deeply troubled family. I believed that if I was really good people would love me – and for most of the time it worked. I knew that my mother loved me – she often told me so. And in his own funny way my father loved me too. He just loved himself more. I recently met up with some old girlfriends from infants and primary school and they confirmed that, for most of the time, I was a ‘goodie two-shoes’. My friend Annabet, who is writing a book about her childhood growing up in the boatshed at Balmoral Beach, wrote about her own rebelliousness in kindergarten and talked about our stern infants mistress, Miss O’Connor.

  ‘Mary was her favourite,’ Annabet wrote. ‘She was a pretty girl with a head of red curls and totally opposite to me in personality. Unlike me, Mary was not drawn to the attention of Miss O’Connor by anything other than her goodness. She was sweet and shy while I was boisterous. I feel certain that Miss O’Conner teamed us together so we would mutually benefit from each other’s personality traits.’

  The girl next door, Toni, had a slightly different perspective, probably because we played together every day and got on each other’s nerves sometimes. She recalled, at our recent reunion dinner, how I would get furious at times, go bright red in the face and kick her. So, underneath my good-girl exterior, there was an angry little girl who could sometimes be very bad. If I did something wrong at home – and it can never have been all that bad, because I don’t recall being smacked or severely punished – my mother would ruffle my head of curls and recite the little poem about the girl who was ‘very, very good, but when she was bad she was horrid’.

  By high school my naughty streak had started to emerge. I was generally doing my best to please my teachers and peers. I was the senior girls prefect, head of the debating team, editor of the school magazine and often the one asked to make speeches on ceremonial occasions such as Anzac Day. But I also started to smoke in the girls’ toilets, and to truant at lunchtime and on sports afternoons. I also became politically active and vocal. I helped organise an anti-Vietnam rally of high school students and announced it over the loudspeaker at the Monday school assembly. Prefects were allowed to make announcements without them being vetoed by the staff. This got me into terrible strife – I was stripped of my prefect’s badge – and the hypocrisy of it nearly drove me to leave school completely. At the same assembly a spotty youth from the school Christian Fellowship invited fellow students to attend a Billy Graham Crusade at the showground. Why was a religious announcement acceptable but an anti-war message deemed disruptive?

  I took my good-girl behaviour into adulthood, always trying to please everyone in the hope that they would love me. I wanted to be a good friend, a good journalist, a good mother, a good wife, a good gardener, always giving the impression that I was happy and that my life was perfect. I still had a wild streak, but I strove to keep it under control. In truth, I wasn’t always happy, and when, from time to time, I hit rock bottom, David was the only one to see it. It used to worry him tremendously, because my bad moments were usually manifested in some sort of serious illness that was the result of me pushing myself too hard, striving to achieve and fulfil all the expectations I had for myself. Friends, work colleagues and people in the gardening world would frequently comment, ‘I don’t know how you do it. Where do you have the time to do all the things that you do? Where do you get the energy?’

  It was mental energy, of course, and feeling driven to succeed.

  Looking back on the past two years I reflect on what has happened in my life. It’s complex and layered, not just a simple matter of going through menopause or feeling a bit bored or disgruntled with a long relationship. It’s more about me and how I am feeling about myself than it is about anyone else in my life.

  First, I acknowledge the fact that I am dreading the prospect of leaving youth behind. Aging, especially physically, is a process that I cannot accept graciously. While I love being the mother of adult children and I love my seven beautiful grandchildren, I don’t like the fact that being ‘old’ is part of the equation. I still want to dance on the tables and swing from the chandeliers, not potter in my garden with a straw hat and an apron. Like the men who go through a classic mid-life crisis and ditch their faithful wife of twenty-five years and go off with a young blonde, I feel a dread of being too old or too unattractive to appeal sexually to men. It’s ridiculous and pathetic, but for me – and I think for many women of my age – it’s real and very unsettling. I realise that I am far too anxious about my appearance, which is ironic because for most of my adult life I didn’t give two hoots about the way I looked. But now, when I catch a glimpse of myself in a mirror or shop window, I am mortified that the aging process is accelerating and that I am starting to look more and more like my mother when she was an old woman. This is another common fear that women experience – the thought of turning into a carbon copy of their mother. I am shocked by my dismay at the thought. In many ways, I am fighting to turn back the clock, which I realise is impossible, but emotionally find difficult to avoid.

  As for the love affair that caused so much pain for David and other members of my family, on one level it truly appals me. But for myself alone I don’t have a moment’s regret. The sheer power of it, combined with the
excitement and mischievous fun of being such a bad girl, was addictive. I know it was selfish, but somehow I just couldn’t help myself. The fact that it turned out to be such a rare and lovely experience adds to my determination never to look back at what happened with anguish.

  Life will go on. The house in France will have a new kitchen and there will be more walking and trekking tours. I will continue to nurture my precious new relationship with my sister and I will strive to be a saner and more reasonable wife to David. The farm will grow more beautiful and more bountiful and there will probably be more grandchildren to sit around the long table in the dining room. In ten or fifteen years, given our family record for having babies young, I might be a great-grandmother. By then, perhaps I will have come to terms with my life and be content to sit by the fire and grow old.