In the two days before his arrival, our first task was to strip Place de la Fontaine of all signs of our twenty-week stay: books, cassettes, video games and almost the complete range of merchandise from Toy Story were packed into huge plastic storage hampers. Lizzie had kindly allowed us to store all these things in the basement of Place de la Fontaine. The Nintendo 64 was carefully wrapped in plastic and placed amongst the toys and books. No damp was going to ruin that precious item. Dozens of clay statues and figurines that the children had worked on throughout the long winter were unceremoniously dumped into the bin while their heads were turned. Winter clothes were bundled up into one large suitcase and taken to the Red Cross. Both children had grown like weeds and there was very little that could be recycled for the following year.
In a week’s time we would be setting off for Italy, so we needed to travel light from now on. We managed to downsize our possessions to a box of books (with the obligatory small book of Latin poetry for Ray), one large suitcase, four small backpacks, a case of beer and some sweets for the car.
Two days after Jack’s arrival — with both men doing their best to get along — the furniture in Place de la Fontaine was put back into its original place, our plastic hampers of precious toys and games were dragged down to the basement, the beds were stripped to the bare mattresses, keys were handed to the cleaner and we moved out, walking the twenty paces to our accommodation for the week.
The children and I felt miserable about leaving Saignon. The long summer holidays were fast approaching. The weather was delightfully warm and the swimming pools were filling up. Everywhere there was a sense of anticipation. The season was about to explode. We would miss the lavender, the sunflowers, the endless summer with Lizzie’s children beside their pool. None of us wanted to leave. But then again, there was the delicious anticipation of travelling around Italy. We all knew it was returning to Sydney that was the real problem.
Madame Blanc’s house, with its walls encased in stunning red Virginia creeper, was the most photographed property in Saignon, a backdrop to the beautiful fountain. Madame Blanc had suggested that we take two apartments rather than all trying to squeeze into the one. She had some wise words to describe our situation: sometimes a lot of space is needed to bring everyone together. So Jack would have a huge room and bathroom on the floor below. The decision turned out to be very prudent, given that Jack’s knees were causing him trouble — not that he would admit it.
After we’d all settled in, he stood at the window of our new apartment, glass in hand, watching the villagers go about their daily rituals: buying their bread from Christine’s bakery, or chatting to neighbours in the shade of the plane tree, away from the heat rising from the cobbled stones, which announced the start of another sunny day. The clip-clop of horses arriving to drink eagerly from the fountain made you think that you had fallen into a time warp — except that it was accompanied by the noises of small children tearing up and down the square on their scaled-down mountain bikes, ringing their chrome bells incessantly. Saignon was weaving its magic over my father as it did over everyone.
I told Jack my news and he was delighted that I had found a slice of paradise for my family, although he admitted to being dumbfounded over my long-term strategy. He wasn’t alone: I still didn’t have one! But he had never interfered in my life (he’d left that to Sheilagh) — and he wasn’t about to start now. Together we went to Rose Cottage and then to the property at Chemin St Roch, and I explained how I was going to start a small business like many in the area, renting out holiday homes throughout the year. He said he couldn’t think of a harder way to make money.
And it was on this point that he and Latin Ray came to agree, during a very long and boisterous lunch in Bonnieux. Stunned by Latin Ray’s ability to string some coherent sentences together about his feelings for me and the children, and more importantly about how he would always be there for us, Jack’s heart finally began to warm to this man whom he had never held in high esteem. But my father was still slightly wary on my behalf. He was proud that I’d managed to be so successful in finance, but he wasn’t so sure about my success on the emotional side.
The afternoon heat was becoming unbearable. We all retired to the new apartment to watch the French Open tennis with a glass of cold rosé. My thoughts wandered to the people who would be moving into Place de la Fontaine later that afternoon. I hoped that they would love it as much as we had.
My reverie was broken by Latin Ray, who was bumbling and crashing around the sink. I wondered what on earth he was doing — making more mess, no doubt. I loved him, but in the kitchen he was never very tidy.
The heat and our looming departure were making me feel weary and emotional. Plus, there was something very important about today that it seemed they had all forgotten. Every year it was the same. Nobody ever remembered.
‘Hen, I’m sure that your father won’t mind me saying this in front of him . . .’ By now Latin Ray was standing in the middle of the room, holding a limp bunch of flowers in his hand.
Jack looked up from the television screen. I was pretty sure that he would mind. I certainly did.
‘What you’ve done these past few months is outstanding and wonderful — in fact,’ Ray continued, ‘I think that you are outstanding and wonderful, and it would make me very happy to ask you to . . .’
I leapt up, red-faced and furious. This was the icing on the cake. If there were any possibility of doing something wrong, Ray would always find it. He’d picked the wrong time, the wrong words and definitely the wrong girl. I didn’t need protestations of love — or, even worse, proposals of marriage — when I felt hot and sweaty. We weren’t even alone. He wasn’t even on his knees.
‘STOP STOP STOP! I don’t want your words of love! Does anyone realise what day it is today? Has everyone forgotten my birthday? Does anyone care that today is the 3rd of June? What kind of a father forgets his own daughter’s birthday? Why do I constantly come last on everyone’s list? . . . And by the way, where are Mimi and Harry? I haven’t seen them for hours!’
I was on a roll, and nothing was going to stop me — except the large kiss Latin Ray finally planted on my mouth to shut me up. Everyone was laughing. The children came out from their bedrooms carrying armfuls of presents, while Jack went to the fridge to get the champagne.
‘If you would just let me finish,’ Ray went on, ‘I wanted to ask you all out for dinner to celebrate your birthday, your good fortune and a farewell to France.’
Saignon was, and always will be, a magical place where my life turned around on its axis. My children and I had become fused at the hip; I had finally learnt to be the mother they’d never had. Our holiday was an experience that could never be repeated. So when, two days after Jack left, the time came to wave goodbye to our little village, I was heartbroken. I had to force myself to focus only on the next five weeks.
I was the designated driver for our trip round Italy, and Latin Ray the navigator, due to my admitted lack of spatial awareness and cartography skills. We headed southeast towards Menton, on the French Riviera and right near the Italian border, and from there we would continue along the coast. We would be staying a week each in Lucca, Siena, and Maiori on the Amalfi coast, then five days in Sicily, one week in Rome and finally back to the mundane life of school and routine in Sydney. The children had already had a bet on how many times the navigator would throw up before we got to the Italian border, as we were all used to his penchant for carsickness. In fact, not much had changed since the days when he’d be sick on the lawn after the bus trip to our house in Bilgola.
Never had I imagined that travelling with the children and the Latin Lover could be so much fun or so full of fantasy. Our last night in France was spent just outside of Menton in a small bed and breakfast beside the sea. The owners directed us to a nearby restaurant that was right on the seafront. To reach it we had to clamber through a large hole in the back fence and down a steep track overhung with vines and studded with rocks. As
we slid down the uneven path, all around us there were tiny dancing lights. It was as though we had fallen through the Looking Glass and entered another world.
‘What are they, Maman?’
‘Fireflies! Look, there are millions of them!’
Over dinner, the Latin Lover regaled us with tales of fairies, goblins and ogres all intertwined with Roman myths — stories were yet another of his strong points. The children were completely seduced, and couldn’t wait to clamber back up the magical hillside. By the time we returned the fireflies had moved on, but it was an auspicious beginning to the Italian summer.
By the end of the first week, the children insisted that the Latin Lover change his name from Ray to something a little more Italian, and so he became Raimondo. I breathed a sigh of relief that they didn’t want to call him Dad; I couldn’t allow Norman’s role to be undermined in that way.
Since the age of four, I had been on many trips all over Europe with my parents and sister, alone, or with the children, but never as a ‘family of four’, with me steering the way. The only problem with this dream-come-true was the fact that Raimondo and I had never spent a great deal of time together as a couple, and certainly not as part of a family unit twenty-four hours a day. I had recently discovered what joys the children were and I wasn’t particularly keen on sharing my two little jewels with anyone. So it started to irk me as I watched Mimi grip Raimondo’s hand and pull him through the Uffizi Gallery in Florence (on a day trip from Siena), and heard them talking in low voices about St Sebastian and his arrows, the perspective in Uccello’s battle scenes and Botticelli’s ‘dancing ladies’. But I knew I’d have to learn to step back a bit and allow the children to develop a relationship with him on their own terms. It was obvious that he was as smitten with them as I was. He didn’t need to be their biological father for them to know that he loved them.
Here I was, back in Florence, where fifteen years ago my Saturday nights would start at 10 pm and end somewhere in the early hours of Sunday morning. Nowadays I was struggling to stay up until 10 pm. Somewhere in the midst of my idyllic stupor, the spectacle of banner throwing in Siena, and wandering through the walled city of Lucca and the medieval-skyscraper village of San Gimignano (another day trip from Siena), it finally registered that things had changed dramatically, and that maybe I had grown up a little somewhere along the way.
Summer was advancing and the temperature was mounting as we continued further south to the Amalfi coast, where I had found a holiday house (at great expense) before leaving for France. Back in 1986 my mother and I had travelled to the area and stayed in Positano, a famous little jewel of a village, but it had been cold and wintry. I never thought that I would have the opportunity to visit the region again.
Well-heeled Romans flocked to this part of the coast during summer, so by the time I organised our holiday most of the accommodation in Positano was either booked out or way out of our price range. Before I left Sydney the Latin Lover and I had made our first joint decision: we would scrimp and save on our final week’s accommodation in Rome with a single room for four in a cheap hotel next to the railway station. That way we could afford to splash out on the luxury accommodation in Maiori, ten kilometres east of Positano. But the experience of getting there almost made us regret the whole thing.
After travelling for hours along the main expressway through constant roadworks, we arrived at the train station just outside the busy town of Salerno. This was the designated meeting spot from which we would be personally escorted to our palatial accommodation in part of a rental house. As we travelled west into the setting sun, I dodged and wove in and out of traffic in my cumbersome car, desperately trying to keep up with the young couple who were guiding us. The Italian beauty’s lithe young body was wrapped tightly around her driver’s as their Vespa motor scooter swept along the road, hugging the cliff face; there was a sheer drop on one side, and on the other a vertical rock face loomed above us. Buses blasted their discordant horns as they turned the corners, barely giving us enough time to dive into any space that would allow them to squeeze past our car.
Soon my peripheral vision was blurred by utter terror. The side of the car kept narrowly missing the jutting rock formations and the sun visor I was wearing did nothing to deflect the rays of the setting sun. I could only focus through my squinting eyes on the road directly in front of me — and then only just. Miraculously, Raimondo’s carsickness had been momentarily cured; the injured animal-like noises and his white knuckles gripping the dashboard told me that all was still not well, but at least they were better than violent vomiting into plastic bags.
I muttered every obscenity I knew in Italian and wished that I had either hired a smaller car or done this trip while completely inebriated. Raimondo had estimated that it would take us a good fifteen minutes to get to Maiori, but as we were speeding along with the needle never coming off the eighty-kilometres-per-hour mark, it was barely going to take ten. And even then it would be way too long!
Suddenly, with much waving of slender tanned arms adorned with silver bangles, I was directed into a parking space the size of a handkerchief that hung off the cliffside. My hero Raimondo leapt out and stood in front of the oncoming traffic to allow me the maximum amount of room to manoeuvre the car back and forth into the tight spot. It was close to impossible, but in the end I managed to squeeze the car up against a metal fence, which was the only thing protecting it from the 100-metre drop to the rock floor below. To get out of the driver’s seat, I had to crawl through the window; there simply was no room to get out the door. I wriggled across the bonnet, with my handbag pushed down the front of my T-shirt, and my beloved straw hat askew on my head and just covering up my grey roots. Out of the corner of my eye I could see the mirth of the passengers on the local bus as they watched my performance. Meanwhile Raimondo had succumbed to the terror of the ride and was on his hands and knees being violently ill beside the road. I was seriously starting to wonder whether this would all be worth it.
I soon found out. We shimmied along the side of the road and through the gate, past the little pool on the roof, down the 134 stairs, until we reached our dream palace. The apartment was so much larger and better than anticipated, with a wide verandah that ran the whole length of the side facing the sea. It was here that we spent every evening thinking that we were the luckiest people in the world. In the distance, sliding across the Bay of Naples, we would see the large cruiser boats heading into or out of nearby Naples, and when the night finally became inky black there were fireworks displays on the water. Our hair-raising journey was quickly forgotten, and our week in this paradise flew past.
Unfortunately this bliss didn’t last. Next on our list was a five-day stop in Sicily before we headed up to Rome for the last part of our trip. By now Italy was well and truly in the grip of its summer heat wave. Tempers were fraying, especially mine — the constant responsibility for driving, not to mention food and entertainment, was becoming a little too much. Raimondo had now been living with us for four weeks non-stop. I was growing irritated by his lack of contribution to the family’s wellbeing; I tried to explain that children don’t drink beer and wine. I’d foolishly expected him to back me up when I laid down ground rules for the children, but he acted more like their elder brother than a responsible grown-up.
He, on the other hand, found that the sudden responsibility of being a family man didn’t sit comfortably with him. He was desperate to kick up his heels and find a bar with some male company. ‘Seek and ye shall find.’ He had a built-in radar when it came to bars, beers and blokes; it didn’t seem to matter that most of these blokes only spoke Italian.
There comes a point when you no longer care which fabulous city you are in; all you dream about is waking up in your own home. Our final week in Rome was exciting and exhilarating, but we’d had our fill. We moaned about art galleries and museums, the dust, the unbearable heat, the prices and the incessant noise. Every night we would squeeze into our steamy hotel room an
d moan some more. At the Spanish Steps, I literally walked into Dr Porter, the obstetrician who had delivered both my children and had helped me during the black months after Norman’s death. He and his wife had a room in a tranquil hotel with a swimming pool. We moaned even louder.
By the time the plane revved up its engines on the Tarmac at Rome’s Fiumicino Airport, we weren’t sorry to be leaving. Our return to Sydney would reinstate the old order of our lives: the children and I would be back in our home in Mosman and Raimondo, much though he was loved, would return to his house in Seaforth. He wanted to stop playing Happy Families with us for a while — and I began to think seriously about whether that would be permanent. Life was certainly simpler without a male.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Chemin St Roch
DURING THE FIRST FEW weeks after our return to Sydney, my thoughts about our future slowly crystallised into what I hoped was a manageable strategy. The children and I would live in France for two years while they were still young. They would have an enriching educational experience and I would renovate and rearrange the three houses, and do some gardening and maybe a little house painting. I would try to emulate Lizzie and Kamila and run a small holiday rental operation in the two houses in Saignon. I’d decided we would live in the third one outside St Saturnin les Apt, with its large sunny garden. The house was better suited to becoming our family home than a rental property, and St Saturnin was a busy village all the year round, with a much larger school — where I hoped there would be no English-speaking children.
That was basically the plan, but when I discussed this with Jack he threw back a list of indisputable negatives:
Escaping Page 23
