My list includes the unexpected success of my first book, From France with Love, a memoir of the first time Olivier took me to France ten years ago. I wrote the dreamy beginning of my story of Olivier before I married him and it’s a record of how I fell so deeply in love with him that it lasted until his dying breath. Tears rush out again at the memory of his dignified, quiet departure.
I try and grasp the fact that I had a life before Olivier, an identity as a prominent newspaper woman. I make another list to build myself up: the women I have interviewed. My career was built on writing women’s stories and they make up a unique ‘who’s who’ of trailblazers. That feisty American feminist Betty Friedan, who kick-started the women’s movement in America, was one woman who taught me to be prepared. When I admitted I hadn’t read all of her tome The Fountain of Age, she told me coldly to ring again after I had read every word. ‘Then I will talk to you,’ she said from her Sydney hotel room. I oozed chutzpah back then when I knocked on the hotel room of American feminist Marilyn French, who wrote the ground-breaking novel The Women’s Room. She was in Adelaide to speak at Writers’ Week. However, her real story that day wasn’t her books (she gave me a copy of every one), but how she was recovering from throat cancer and didn’t quite know how she would cope with such an important speaking engagement. I learnt about resilience! Marianne Faithfull, a truly likeable person, had grown beyond a suicide attempt and broken heart over Mick Jagger to become a famous singer. She had built a new life beyond sex, drugs and rock’n’roll to shine in her own right. And in stark contrast, I interviewed Hazel Hawke a few times who reflected how women must be stoic during adversity. I admired her so much, but she almost walked out on me once when I asked her about Bob’s drinking habits.
My heart lifts somewhat as I realise that I honed my craft interviewing these incredible women. I was fearless finding a story. Delightful Janet Holmes à Court talked candidly about her marriage to Robert and widowhood. I wish I had paid more attention. And one of the most extraordinary interviews—the day I met Nene King, Australian Women’s Weekly editor, when we both wept in each other’s arms. She was still grieving for her husband taken by a shark and I was mourning the recent loss of my mother, who died a shocking, lingering death following heart surgery that went horribly wrong. I learnt the most relevant fact: the universality of grief in women’s lives. Surely I had a gathering of life skills to cope with any adversity?
Did I really live that fabulous life? Then whatever is the matter with me now?
The weeks slip by since Olivier’s death in May 2012 and I still feel gutted emotionally by grief. I drift in a permanent state of despair, a mental illness the doctor calls ‘reactive depression’. But I want to cope without medication. Except I have no idea of who I am anymore. I don’t want to write, which has been my abiding passion for decades, and I certainly don’t cook anymore. What is the point of cooking?
‘Why don’t you go back to cooking; you have always been a fabulous cook,’ says my son Tyson one day. I look at him in amazement. He has never—in his 31 years of life—said that I was a good cook.
‘I just wish I felt like writing again,’ I answer. Journalism had been my raison d’être and when I became a published author in 2007, I felt a fulfilled woman. After all, in a fortunate twist, I was deeply in love, about to marry and about to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of my journalistic career. When Olivier helped me launch my website nadinewilliams.com.au in the early days of my retirement, daughter Felicia flew from Melbourne to be MC at the glitzy event. I felt a child of the universe.
Like the words of the song, it was all past tense. Life remains like a heavy winter fog where you can’t see the road ahead. Yet, a candle begins to flicker ever so tenuously in my black world. Olivier’s best friend, Dominique, who had been a part of our French social circle, returns to Adelaide to visit.
Is he shocked to see me like this? I wonder. However, he takes me to the Fleurieu Peninsula and teaches me how to use Olivier’s expensive Nikon camera. During the course of the day, he asks: ‘Why don’t you come and visit us in France? I think it will be good for you.’
How can I explain that I see my Belair life as my anchor, a haven for coping with grief by sharing each day with Olivier in spirit? I can’t imagine how I could leave our home. I still talk to him as things happen during the day and write him letters each night. I stare at Dominique blankly and don’t answer.
When Dominique leaves, I re-read my letter to Olivier which I wrote last night.
Today I begin walking down our street again with our new dog Oscar on his lead sniffing at every blade of grass and piddling to claim his territory. It is strange to do it alone, but then we never did walk these hilly streets once we returned from renting at Hindmarsh Island. You were too ill and I didn’t want to walk without you. You have been gone for six weeks now and it’s time.
I notice a fat koala is wedged in the fork of a gum tree beside the road. I run home and get your camera and snap him staring down at me. A medley of birdcalls pierce the still, wintry mist. If only you were here with me this crisp morning, because the winter creek, which runs across our property and along the side of the road, is rushing with water. I cannot remember if we ever saw it gush like this. Usually, it’s as dry as Oscar’s bone, but now it zips along flattening weeds and grasses on its journey down the hillside. There are magpies, too, hopping around, flying overhead. And I notice it all on my hillside stroll.
However, no more than ten metres around the corner in High Street, where we walked a hundred times in eight years, I find two cèpes, under the tall pine tree! I almost shout with joy and pick them carefully. ‘Here comes breakfast!’ I tell myself. ‘And a beef and mushroom casserole.’
Before I met you, I had no idea that finding rare mushrooms could be so much fun. One is almost as big as a saucer and neither has been infested with grubs. And as I walk briskly home, I remember our mushroom adventures last May in the Kuitpo Pine Forest on Fleurieu Peninsula. We found so many we didn’t have enough bags to carry them.
We had stepped over the fence into the ploughed earth, which bordered the forest, to find cèpes by the score popping up through the bare ground. But you insisted on going into the forest anyway—a dark place, dangerous to walk with broken branches and years of pine needles covering rocks.
‘No, let’s just go home; we have so many to pickle,’ I had said but still you beckoned me.
‘I will hold your hand, chérie,’ you had replied. ‘This is fun. I will show you some magic mushrooms; they’re bound to be here somewhere.’
So I traipsed alongside you through a wonder-world of countless fungi and we picked our way over the fallen branches, rocks, and pine needles, treading carefully with the smell of pine cones all around us. And you found a clearing where tall trees had long been felled where other mushrooms grew in gay abandon.
‘A-ha!’ you cried out in joy. ‘Magic mushrooms. You eat them and you will get as high as on marijuana.’
Now I smile at the memories and yet am sad to think you missed finding the same cèpes, which sell for $80 a kilo in French provincial markets, growing wild no more than 100 metres from our house. Now I can only imagine your pleasure.
And then something beautiful happens. On 26 July, ten weeks after Olivier’s funeral, there’s a bubble of sheer bliss when my daughter-in-law Vanessa gives birth to my son Tyson’s first child—a perfect little girl, whom they name Scarlett Rose. She’s simply beautiful, with black hair, defined eyebrows and a rosebud mouth. I am there in a flash, all smiles, even though my heart surely misses a beat when I must enter Ashford Hospital’s oncology reception to turn right to the maternity ward. I turned left so many days when Oli was hospitalised.
But today is the blessing of new life and after kissing my exhausted daughter-in-law Vanessa, I take the swathed babe from her bassinet into my arms and notice her eyes—closed tight, but definitely almond-shaped—like her daddy. And I am filled with joy. This baby is my redemption beca
use it’s such a happy family time, as we gather in a big room at the Hilton Hotel with our joint families on the next night.
Sadly, it’s a mere blip, although I am included in their exciting new life. Will nothing lift this blackness? My doctor believes I need anti-depressants and this time I agree.
More weeks pass in a hazy state of mind where tablets dull reality enough for time to aid recovery. Months later another candle casting light in my dark life arrives—my dear friend Jane has come to stay. She lives in Sydney, and it is twenty years since we first met at a meditation retreat at Mt Buller over New Year.
‘Remember how it snowed on New Year’s Eve and how amazing it was in high summer to watch those snowflakes land noiselessly on the glass ceiling?’ she recalls. ‘They looked like marshmallows dropping out of an inky black sky.’
Ironically, we didn’t meet during that communal bliss fest, filled with an array of professionals, lawyers, New Agers, married couples, divorcees and single mothers, because we were encouraged to dwell in silence. We were thrown together on the bus returning down the mountain and we began to chatter. I discovered Jane had worked with the Australian Children’s Television Foundation. She had been the marketing manager for Open Learning Australia and we discovered we were both single mothers, which opened up a Pandora’s box of shared issues.
We are certainly in tune when conversation involves literature, film and theatre. My inbox offers up Jane’s refined collection of book and film reviews, fad diets, women’s health tips and Sydney restaurant hot spots. When I visit Sydney Jane has a full itinerary organised, whether it’s a movie she believes I must see, time at the beach or, recently, visiting Wendy Whiteley’s unique community garden at Lavender Bay. I feel as if Jane is almost a life partner, living at a distance.
I cherish one particular time Jane came to Adelaide. Our new home was finished, and although Oli was very ill, she stayed in our second bedroom with its pretty joie de toile curtains and French bed linen. She cooked, washed the dishes and cleaned my pantry and in the evenings, while the nurses were preparing Oli for bed (by then he was in a hospital bed set up in the living room), we would sit together in my marital bed like little girls and discuss the books we were reading.
Jane missed Olivier’s funeral because her mother died three days after my darling husband. We wept together over the phone as she explained she had her own ‘celebration of life’ to organise for her mum.
‘I feel so wretched,’ she said. ‘Your worst moment and I won’t be there because of my worst moment, losing Mum.’ Our shared grief was one more pillar to our abiding friendship.
She phones most days and I still sometimes weep down the telephone. One day, she says, ‘Nadine, it is so hard for me to see you suffering so much when I’m so far away.’
‘I wish I could stop it too.’ I confide that I have started taking medication to stabilise my feelings of despair. Yet, I still feel my grief which glues me to a black world like that tar baby in the children’s fable my mother would read.
So she continues.
‘Why don’t you take a holiday back to France?’
I remain silent.
‘I have never been to France and I could come with you so you aren’t alone. You will recover in France, because you know you have to recover, don’t you, darling?’
Perhaps, I muse.
I love la belle France and I had begun to learn the French language a year before I met Olivier.
After I met him, we spent six weeks every year travelling around France. I know the history, characteristics and food cultures of most regions.
I fell immediately for Brittany with its crude Romanesque churches, its windmills, its white-washed unique fishing villages, rugged coasts and forests shrouded in Celtic myths. We explored idyllic French Alpine towns with high pitched roofs and heavy timber balconies clustered around central fountains, cafés and cathedrals and the terracotta-tiled cheek-by-jowl white housing of Marseilles and Provence. Onward we drove through Aveyron with its quaint fishscale slate roofing of housing to the ancient fieldstone hamlets of The Lot. It was so exciting to discover how France’s forbidding medieval military castles and walled cities of Carcassonne and La Couvertoirade contrasted in spectacular manner with the fairytale castles of the Loire Valley.
Olivier’s legacy is my memories of those 5000 kilometres each time we drove across France (and he made me drive my fair share). I never tired of the landscape itself—captivating lavender fields of Haute Provence, ancient olive groves of Provence, the white horses, bulls and bird sanctuaries of the Camargue delta on the Mediterranean, the swaying green grain crops and fields of sunflowers and red poppies in the north-west to the wonderful wine regions spread throughout this glorious, rich land.
And Oli’s modus operandi was to ensure that I, at his right hand, learnt from his country and loved it the way he did.
Our French travels were like an open-air classroom. We counted many Christian crosses at intersections, discovered prehistoric dolmans on the roadside and at Carnac; we bought fresh goat cheese from a farm gate in Auvergne and we once bought a whole foie gras in The Lot. Always there was a cultural lesson to follow. Such as that first morning of our honeymoon in France, when he reckoned we should seek out lily-of-the-valley in the forests surrounding our château hotel instead of staying in bed. (Although I do remember that, naturally, as honeymooners, we did loll about in ecstatic love before rising and pulling on our walking gear!)
As the sun filtered through the tall trees, he grabbed my hand and we walked along a well-worn pathway through a carpet of ivy growing over everything on the floor of the wood.
‘This is a typical forest in France,’ he had said, lifting the branch of a young sapling out of our way. ‘The smell of damp earth,’ and he drew a deep breath of air into his nostrils. ‘The countless saplings all struggling for light and life, the tall, old trees, the fallen logs, covered in climbing ivy. Don’t you love it chérie?’
Then he stopped suddenly on our walk. He had heard a cuckoo and cupped his hands, blowing through and flapping one hand until a strange sound suddenly mimicked the cuckoo’s mating cry. No response from a cuckoo amidst the cacophony of birds.
‘When I was young, I could get a response from the cuckoos … every kid on a French farm knows how to do that. The cuckoo calls in spring.’
His raison d’être really was to teach me something new each day about France’s history and its food and wine culture. One day in Provence, for instance, on our way to Moustiers Sainte-Marie, he stopped the car, saying, ‘Look at the verge and you will find les herbes de Provence ready for us to pick.
‘Just look,’ he said, alighting from the car. ‘I pick, I crush between my fingers and voilà! One has a familiar scent of a hundred meals where Provincial herbs are used.’
My education about France took an academic turn one day when I heard a French university lecturer from the University of Adelaide speak on the iconic women of France. I sat in the front row listening, spellbound, as she spun fascinating stories about the French queens and mistresses of the Renaissance. I remember vividly how she stated that Eleanor of Aquitaine, the medieval French queen, actually divorced her husband—the boring but pious French king, Louis VII—to marry the dashing young Prince Henry of England, who would unexpectedly become king.
Olivier was most indignant at the notion and we had a petit débat (disagreement), neither giving ground. I was enthralled at Eleanor’s cleverness to claim her marriage was illegal in the sight of God because they were related by blood—even if it was a remote seventh degree of consanguinity.
Soon I was busily scouring historical tomes in libraries and sourcing newspaper articles about the Renaissance queens and mistresses. This was my private journalistic passion. And I created a concertina file giving it the grand title ‘French Women Who Inspire and Who Wrote the Story of French Love.’ Olivier fostered my interest and bought me Histoire de l’Amour en France by Guy Richard and its ten accompanying volumes in Fr
ench off the internet. I was so thrilled with his thoughtfulness.
The act of researching had never been so much fun! I thought there was a book in their explosive love stories as well as how these famous French women had created such a feminised society, still ensconced in France’s contemporary romance culture. The list swelled like yeast to become an earlier timeline, headed by licentious Eleanor of Aquitaine, followed by the virgin warrior Joan of Arc. But the notorious Renaissance queens Catherine de Médicis and Marie Antoinette along with those famous French mistresses of their era—Madame de Pompadour, Diane de Poitiers and Madame de Montespan—intrigued me the most. The kings’ ‘favourites’ were equally important because they virtually ruled France alongside their king and even today French schoolchildren can name the mistresses alongside the ancient queens. I researched the renowned French female writers and soon eighteenth-century ‘femme de lettres’ Madame de Staël, nineteenth-century author George Sand and twentieth-century author, existentialist and feminist Simone de Beauvoir were all added. I believed Australian women could learn from these iconic French women, who shaped France’s sensual culture. I worked like a beaver in my spare time gathering into my list French fashion icon Coco Chanel and Empress Joséphine. Eventually I zealously presented a proposal to an Australian publisher for a book devoted to their love stories and the French feminisation of love stretching back to the troubadours. It was promptly rejected and about that time Olivier was diagnosed with terminal cancer, which stopped my world in its tracks.
Shortly after Olivier’s death, Jane sends me a book entitled Joséphine by British author Kate Williams with a covering note. ‘You think Joséphine is pristine, but she was utterly unethical, immoral and unfaithful.’
In my dark mood, I see this as a ploy to get me back to the history of French women. I don’t read it. And yet it triggers a passing thought of France and memories of Olivier’s and my French life flash by …
Farewell My French Love Page 2
