by Mary Moody
With no new books to read I have become totally dependent on my English-language newspapers. Normally I can read a newspaper in half an hour or so, but now I am making them last for hours, poring over every word right down to the television programs that I won’t be watching. Jock’s old radio gets only fuzzy reception of France Music if I balance it on the windowsill with the aerial poking into the street. It is a marvellous radio station, playing fantastic concerts and music ranging from classics to opera and jazz. But it is also the most intensely irritating station because the announcers love the sound of their own voices and there is more talking about music than actually playing it. I try and concentrate on what they’re saying, to help improve my French, but at the end of the day I am hungry for music, for familiar sounds of arias and symphonies and concertos. Even more infuriatingly, they have a tendency to actually stop a piece of music, often mid-climax, and start discussing it in depth. Some of the announcers even sing along with the music or the lyrics, warbling just slightly off mike, producing an effect that has me almost screaming in frustration. Several times I desperately want to throw the radio out on to the street, such is my fury. But it’s Jock’s radio, and without it I will be living in a world of silence.
Eventually I manage to scrounge some novels from the libraries of various friends, nothing up-to-date but some familiar authors and some I’ve even read before. But I don’t care, I just need words to massage my lonely moments. I take care to write a list of who has lent me what book, knowing that otherwise I will be tearing my hair out when the time comes to send everything back to its rightful owner.
During this period I also stumble across an infuriating English-language newspaper designed for non-French residents. Called the News, the line under the masthead says, ‘For lovers of France’, but the contents totally contradict this point of view. It’s little more than a whinge sheet, with articles emphasising all the negative aspects of living in France, from an English perspective. There are columns and features on how to beat the system, to play the French at their own game, make the most of pensions and retirement funds coming into the country from offshore, and overcome all sorts of bureaucratic problems that must drive the English potty. There are several pompous columns from middle-aged men who, from the photos accompanying their byline, obviously love one thing in particular about France: their bright faces and rheumy eyes indicate they like to imbibe, in true journalistic fashion. The newspaper is a waste of time and I totally avoid it after thumbing through one or two editions.
By now my inability to understand or speak French very well is becoming frustrating. People said before I left, ‘You’ll pick it up in no time,’ but that simply isn’t how things have panned out. Mixing with so many English-speaking people has meant that I don’t really get much practice listening to or speaking French, except when I am shopping or strolling around Villefranche. I can get by quite adequately at the presse (newsagency); station service (garage); bureau de poste (post office); supermarché (supermarket) and certainly I have no problems communicating clearly in restaurants and cafés. I can talk weather and in very simple terms about general events—the hunting season or the mushroom season or the walnut season. However, anything more complex and I’m totally stumped. I have done all the right things—listened to French radio stations, especially the news; read the front page of French newspapers; translated posters and flyers sent out to publicise community events, and listened and listened and listened to conversations. My vocabulary has certainly expanded dramatically, and if I were to sit down and make a list of words that I now comprehend and can pronounce, it would run into the hundreds. But stringing them together is another matter altogether. I really need some formal French lessons, but language classes simply don’t exist in this area. I find that I can understand the very basics of French conversation when spoken by an English person, because they tend to speak slowly and their accent is probably more attuned to my own ear. However when a French person responds in the course of the conversation, I am completely out of my depth.
A lot of my problem is concentration, combined, I suspect, with laziness and a brain slightly diminished by age and too much good living. When shopping I have fallen into the bad habit of automatically looking at the cash register for the total instead of listening to the total as given by the salesperson. To remedy this situation I teach myself the numerical words, and repeat them out loud every day, several times over. In the supermarket I then listen intently when the woman at the checkout tells me my total, and work out what it means before quickly double-checking the answer by looking at the cash register window. It sometimes takes a minute for me to work it out, but I stop feeling embarrassed about holding up the queue momentarily. After a few weeks this discipline starts to work, and I can finally understand even ridiculously complicated numbers such as ninety-nine, or quatre-vingt-dix-neuf, which translates as four times twenty plus ten plus nine.
In time I manage to teach myself some basic skills, such as using a French-language automatic teller machine, writing out cheques to pay bills in French, and working out the times, dates and venues for various social events publicised on posters. However if I need something accomplished over the phone, I must ask for serious help from a fluent French speaker.
My only French female friend is Lucienne, an elegant woman in her mid seventies, and an old and close chum of the Barwicks who has taken warmly to their motley band of friends. Lucienne is a widow and her late husband was English, which is quite unusual in this region. She lived most of her married life in an old and rambling château at Loubejac, which in keeping with French inheritance laws was sold after her husband’s death. She now lives in a traditional stone house with a spacious garden at Pomarède, and is a perfect example of the traditional French hostess and cook. Although her children and grandchildren live in Paris, Lucienne has them to stay for lengthy periods during the summer holidays. She is an active and good-humoured grandmother, taking them swimming and horse riding and feeding them sumptuous meals. She has taken the English-speaking community under her wing, like a French hen, and everyone loves an invitation to dine with her because of the way she effortlessly produces course after course of perfectly cooked food. Jock calls her the best cook in France and from a foodie of his calibre, this is no small compliment.
When I finally do decide I need a telephone connection, it’s Lucienne who organises the entire complicated rigmarole for me, in just a few minutes. She also kindly offers to speak simple French conversation with me if I pop in for a cup of coffee on my way through Pomarède, but somehow I never seem to quite find the time. I wonder to myself if I am avoiding the issue, or if I am simply overcome with embarrassment at my ineptitude. As a person accustomed to being in control of things, floundering over the most simple conversation is quite galling. I would like at least to be able to manage some simple sentences before inflicting my stumbling mispronunciations on someone as charming and sophisticated as Lucienne. I also feel it’s ill-mannered of me not being able to speak the language of a country that I adore living in. So when people like Philippe tease me from time to time for my verbal ignorance, I feel truly chastened. Mind you, there are plenty of other non-French speakers living here in the Lot full time who have not attempted to speak much French at all, but I certainly don’t want to be like them. I realise I lack a natural facility with languages and know it will be a long, hard struggle.
17
I BUY A PHONE CARD TO use in the public telephone booth, but calls to Australia devour 100 ff ($25) in no time at all. Then I notice that the phone box has a number, and I decide to try an experiment with David. I give him the number so he can call me back. It feels odd standing in a glass box waiting for the phone to ring. But it works perfectly and we are finally in regular communication. I give the number of my corner phone box to my children and the routine is that on Sunday morning (Sunday evening in Australia) I use my phone card to let them know I am in the phone box. For the first time we have long chats, and I feel
so much more at ease knowing that everything is okay at home. I describe my view of the world from the phone box.
‘I can see a round stone tower with blue shutters. The streets are cobbled and very narrow and everyone has to stand against the wall when a car goes past. There’s an antique fair this weekend and the place is packed with stalls and buyers. Here comes an old man with a black beret, carrying a bread stick under his arm, just like in the movies. Here comes one of the cats I’m feeding—it’s started yowling because it’s recognised me through the glass.’
The children are called to the phone to say hello to Mutie, but Eamonn still simply refuses to cooperate. According to Miriam he goes very quiet when the subject of his errant grandmother in France is discussed, and has even told her, ‘I don’t want to talk about it’. He must be feeling really miffed and is punishing me for abandoning him. It works. I feel terrible.
In late July, Aaron and a heavily pregnant Lorna move into our house in the Blue Mountains with Hamish, giving up their rental property. David has now gone to Queensland for at least three months of solid filming, and there are so many animals to look after that leaving the house empty is out of the question, even though it’s quite stressful for Lorna to move so close to when her baby is due. I call on Sunday morning and I feel happy to hear her voice sounding settled and relaxed at last. I ask to speak to Hamish and he comes on line. Late afternoon is a notoriously bad time for three-year-olds and I should have expected some trouble.
‘Where ARE you, Mutie?’ he asks with a tremble in his voice.
‘In France, darling, a long way away.’
‘I want you, Mutie, I want you now.’ His voice is thick with tiredness.
‘I’ll be home in a few months, darling. At Christmas. Do you remember I told you that I will be home at Christmas?’
‘But I want you back NOW, Mutie, I want you NOW,’ he wails, and starts to sob. Then shriek. In the background I can hear Aaron getting involved, talking calmly to Hamish and taking him out of the room. He sounds as though he is throwing a proper wobbly, and when Lorna comes on line she’s crying. So am I, standing in a phone box, tears cascading down my cheeks. It’s pathetic.
Generally, however, the calls home on Sundays are a great success and everyone feels better for a routine chat. I try not to call when the children are at their low, late afternoon ebb. Or during meal or bath times, which are always chaotic.
My most heartfelt wrench living in France is the sudden lack of regular communication with my daughter Miriam, with whom I am particularly close. I have grown accustomed to lengthy gaps in my relationship with David, because of him being away so often filming, but even when Miriam was at university in Canberra she was only three hours away. Now not speaking to her for literally weeks at a time feels weird. Sending off the odd postcard doesn’t feel like making a real connection at all, and the idea of writing and posting letters is clunky and slow when you are accustomed to the efficiency of electronic communications. Miriam’s computer has no email connection, so she goes over to our house and uses mine whenever she can escape from her three small boys, sending me long emails which I pick up the next day at Jock’s. They are generally packed with news and information, but also tinged with a certain poignancy.
‘If I’ve ever taken you for granted, Mum, and I hope I never have, I certainly never will again,’ she writes, in relation to the business of managing three boisterous sons with a husband away long hours commuting to his job in the city, and a reckless mother who has abandoned her to the task.
I don’t feel even slightly guilty at her words, knowing that she supports the notion of my escape from responsibility wholeheartedly, but I do miss her and the little boys badly, and feel a constant longing for the warmth I always feel in their company. This bond that we have is a joy: I know that such relationships are by no means automatic. More than a few of my middle-aged female friends have deeply troubled relationships with their mothers; unresolved problems that may date back to childhood, but probably manifested themselves in their teenage years. Over time these adult female friends have voiced their amazement that I should get along so well with my own mother. That I should actually enjoy having her living under the same roof as me for several decades.
I have often tried to fathom why these mother and daughter relationships have failed so badly, and it seems that several factors come into play. The question of control is a major issue for many mothers who try to squash the natural development of their teenage daughters as they emerge into womanhood. If the daughter has a strong or rebellious personality then conflict is inevitable as the power struggle continues—and it can do so for decades unless an effort is made to resolve it. Then there’s that strange form of jealousy that sometimes manifests itself when the daughter begins to blossom in her teens. It seems quite amazing to me that a mother could resent or feel threatened by her daughter’s beauty and sexuality. It’s something to celebrate rather than to resent. The issue of sibling rivalry is also often discussed at length by disaffected daughters. They believe that their mother’s love was stolen by another member of the family, usually a brother, ‘The apple of his mother’s eye’. How a mother could favour one child over another is difficult to comprehend, but I know it must be true. Otherwise why would all these women believe it with such conviction? For one close friend of mine this alienation of love so affected her life that she postponed having a child for nearly two decades. Then when she finally decided in her late thirties to take the plunge, she spent her entire pregnancy worrying that it might be a girl. She obviously dreaded a mother–daughter relationship that may have eventually turned out like her own. Luckily, I suppose, she had a beautiful son.
Having a good relationship with Miriam was never hard because she was always so easygoing. A self-sufficient, rather serious and thoughtful child who loved school and even seemed to quite enjoy being the only girl in a family of three noisy boys. Naturally she went through some rocky patches in her teens, but nothing more than the usual angst experienced by any bright, sensitive young woman establishing her place in the world. Of course my tendency to avoid being a confrontational parent undoubtedly made those teenage years less troublesome, especially as I adopted a fairly passive stance to her more minor rebellions such as choice of clothing, hair colouring or body piercings. My attitude has always been that these issues are fairly superficial and not worth fighting about. Better to save arguments for more important teenage problems, such as drug-taking and unprotected sex. In her mid teens Miriam went through a gothic phase, draped in black rags and with alarming pillarbox red hair, but she didn’t show any inclination to get mixed up with boys until she was seventeen and had passed that dangerous hormonal phase that drives parents of younger teenage daughters crazy. She excelled in her final school exams and emerged in her university years as a level-headed and eminently likeable young woman.
David and I were rather surprised when Miriam launched herself into motherhood at such an early age, but when I thought about it I realised she was only following the pattern that I had set myself. Our real closeness as mother and adult daughter developed quickly around the births of her three children and through the sudden death of my mother, her grandmother. There is nothing like birth and death to ground a relationship, and ours certainly did just that during a period of five action-packed years. Miriam’s first baby was born in the bedroom of the small flat she shared with fellow uni student Rick, who later became her husband. In attendance at the birth were me, Rick, and Miriam’s youngest brother Ethan, who was then fourteen. The midwife had a migraine headache and spent quite a bit of the labour in the next room, lying in the dark. When it came time for Miriam to start bearing down she reappeared, crowned the head, then allowed me to catch my first grandson and hand him to my daughter. It was a moment of such intimacy and love that everything before and since has slightly paled.
My mother died suddenly while Miriam was pregnant with her second child. Sensing my fragility, Miriam was constantly at my sid
e, especially during those few surrealistic days between the death and the gathering of the clan for the send-off. The hardest thing we have ever done together was to prepare Mum’s body on the morning of the funeral. Neither of us had ever seen a dead person before, but we wanted to be the ones to brush her tangle of grey hair into place and perhaps apply a little makeup in case we felt the mood was right for a viewing of the body by our assembled family and friends later that morning. We had an early morning cup of tea with Mum’s coffin sitting on the kitchen table. The funeral director had given detailed directions on how to unscrew and open the lid, which we did with more than a little trepidation. When we saw Mum lying there, so still, we looked up at each other with relief.
