by Mary Moody
George drops me over to Miles and Anne’s cosy terrace house in Battersea for one night, and it’s great to see them in their own environment. Miles takes me to one of the clubs of which he has been a long-time member, the Oxford and Cambridge Club, and I am appalled to discover that women are still not permitted to have a drink at the bar. I am only allowed to peek furtively through the heavy oak portals to the overly grand male-only bar, then we are forced to find a dreary backroom where men and women can sit together. Given that more than half the students of Oxford and Cambridge are female, I can’t fathom how this situation can still exist. Miles thinks it’s mildly amusing, but Anne and I agree that such sexism is totally outrageous. I am beginning to understand how David formed his negative opinion of London life. In truth, I suspect that any former student with half a brain simply wouldn’t want to become a member of such an establishment.
After a day organising my computer and browsing through Harrods I am well worn out and more than eager to head back to France. Harrods is full of the most ridiculous and expensive goods—incredible household furnishings, like cushions edged with spangles and ostrich feathers, and clothes that are ostentatious, impractical and overpriced. I wander about in a daze, wondering who buys all this crap—and indeed who can afford to buy it. But the place is packed with credit-card waving tourists and I can only assume they have more money than commonsense.
On my last couple of nights in England I head out of London to stay with some of our oldest friends who live in a quaint house in a leafy lane in Surrey. Bev is an Australian artist and fabric designer and her husband Julian, a filmmaker, worked with David on a couple of features back in Australia more than thirty years ago, and they have lived in the UK since then. Bev has always worked from home and Julian has bumbled along from one eccentric film project to another for more than twenty years. His current obsession is crop circles—those mysteriously perfect geometric patterns that appear in wheat fields in certain parts of the country, usually places of spiritual significance. Julian speaks in an amusing loud and cultured mumble, and invariably rambles on about his latest venture as though you automatically know everything about it. He breathlessly describes to me the two years he has spent putting together a documentary that purports to be ‘the ultimate investigation’ of this peculiar phenomenon. Having also recently discovered the joys of computer technology, he has been editing the film at home. He shows me hilarious extracts and interviews with earnest young devotees who are convinced that aliens are responsible for the midnight appearance of patterns in the fields. It is wonderful to have friends who are loony, and Julian is loonier than most. Bev and I exchange looks when Julian comes out with yet another outrageous anecdote about his crop circle exploits. The funniest angle for me is that Julian doesn’t really have much faith in the commercial viability of the film, in spite of the fact that he has spent two years and a lot of his own money getting it to editing stage. I keep suggesting possible outlets—the Discovery Channel or another pay-TV station—but he shakes his head. He hopes he may be lucky enough to sell a dozen or more copies over the Internet, and I seriously wonder why he has bothered going through with the whole exercise. But that’s Julian. I love him.
Anthony picks me up on the last evening and we drive south towards Portsmouth for a repeat performance of the overnight ferry. He has been attending a ‘self-discovery/improvement’ seminar in London over the weekend, and is as high as a kite after three days of undergoing what I consider to be mesmerising exercises in brainwashing. This moneymaking pop psychology, where groups of people are separated from the real world for a few days and put through a series of confronting workshop exercises to break down barriers and supposedly put them ‘in touch with their feelings’, leaves me quite cold. And Anthony knows it. He starts detailing his weekend experience from the beginning, describing every exercise, its aim and its outcome, and asks for my opinion on each. I point out that the issues they are addressing are very basic indeed. Not earth-shattering revelations, but good old-fashioned commonsense. We talk well into the night while crossing the Channel and again for most of the following day as we undertake the long drive from the coast to the southwest. He gradually comes back to earth and simultaneously the weather improves. It has been grey and raining for the six days I spent in the UK but by the time we reach the Lot the sky is brilliant blue and the sun is shining. I feel I have come home.
25
SEX IS A DIRTY WORD TO A person living for six months in self-inflicted celibacy. In the twenty-nine years that we have been together, David and I have managed to maintain a monogamous relationship despite a couple of brushes with romance on both sides that could easily have gone the other way. We are quite proud of our achievement, though it remains largely unspoken, and neither of us suffers from that nervous insecurity that plagues couples whose relationships are under threat of imminent infidelity.
To say that sex has been an important part of our relationship is an understatement. At times it seems to me that it was the only thing that bound us together, especially during those early years when we argued so often about money or child-rearing. In the years we have been together, David has spent a lot of time absent from the house and from my bed. Indeed, for twenty years he was away for the larger part of each week in Sydney, camping overnight in his office; and of course when he was in the midst of producing a film I rarely saw him at all. This always added a certain spice to our relationship. There is nothing like a passionate reunion to keep the blood pumping.
I have never been one to fritter away a lot of time contemplating sex. Like many busy women, thoughts and fantasies about sexual encounters rarely enter my head from one day or week to the next. Unlike young men who, I once read, think about the sexual act twelve times a minute, I’d be more likely to think about sex twelve times a year, and only then as a direct result of my hormonal cycle. As a younger woman my casual approach to sex was undoubtedly a result of physical and mental exhaustion. Every day of my younger life was filled with work and demanding children and deadlines and family problems and issues—for many years I simply collapsed into bed every night far too knackered to give sex a second thought. For me it was either there or it wasn’t. Not a problem. David, on the other hand, was always very keen so I simply left it to him to initiate sex. It seemed to suit us both perfectly. In our earlier years together he often initiated sex in the most unlikely and sometimes uncomfortable places—in the back seat of our car coming home from the theatre, or at the bottom end of the garden late at night when the children were in bed. I suspected this was his way of gaining a little privacy for us, because of my mother living in the adjoining bedroom. Not that making love in the back seat of a car can be regarded as all that private, it was more the illicit business of spontaneous sex in a public place that obviously appealed to him. Over the past few years our sex life has dwindled a little, which I expect is perfectly normal for couples living together for such a long time. And car sex hasn’t been on the cards for quite some time, fortunately. When we do get around to it, sex is still as enjoyable as ever, even if it does lack the urgency and passion of our youth. It has simply evolved into a comfortable and comforting thing!
In the months leading up to my departure for France, David and I exchange a bit of light-hearted banter about the possibility of my having a fling while so far from home for so many months. It’s never a topic we discuss, as such, just a few throwaway comments and a couple of jokes about middle-aged women on their own in a foreign land. It is pretty obvious that the idea has occurred to both of us and in a way we are exploring each other’s reactions, though it goes no further. During my first few months away I rarely give sex a moment’s thought. I haven’t come on this journey to indulge in a raging affair with a French farmer, although now I wonder if David secretly imagined that this was partly on my mind when I decided to opt out for six months.
But once I am well settled in my house in the woods and living a relatively normal day-to-day existence, the thought o
f sex suddenly dawns on me. And like a child who has been told that sweets have been banned for bad behaviour, I become a little obsessed by the thought of it. It’s a bit like a medical diet I was once forced to follow in order to identify food allergies. While on this restrictive diet I became obsessed with the foods that were banned. I imagined them on my plate, I could smell them all around me, and I even dreamed about them at night. Now the same thing is happening to me with sex.
My dreams are suddenly filled with sweaty sexual encounters and I awake unsettled, with various body parts either erect or engorged. It’s no wonder that fundamentalist religious leaders are so often caught out publicly for having illicit sex or adulterous affairs. Once sex has become forbidden fruit it somehow automatically becomes the most tantalising thing. The objects of my sexual dreams are not David, but neither are they any recognisable person that I have encountered so far. They are just men, just bodies, and try as I might to put a face to them, they remain anonymous. I have an amusing conversation with Anthony, who is quite a religious soul, about the business of sexual fantasies. Is imagining and dreaming about adultery as bad as adultery itself? He takes the view that it is not a ‘sin’ but proposes that having sexual dreams and fantasies is ‘unhelpful’ because they lead to obsession which in turn may lead to acting out the fantasies. It’s a bit like the Methodist minister who preached strongly against premarital sex because it might lead to dancing. In my case it’s not so much unhelpful as uncontrollable.
Suddenly I am imagining sexual possibilities in all directions. The road worker who frequently waves and winks at me as I drive past his giant asphalt rolling machine suddenly becomes my phantom lover. I imagine him turning up unexpectedly at my doorstep and sweeping me upstairs to my dark room in the loft. Jock and I often bump into this man at lunchtime at the restaurants much loved by road workers, and he always smiles and even tries speaking to me a couple times. He’s tall and dark with a quintessential French moustache, and I estimate he would be in his late thirties at most. I can’t realistically contemplate suddenly engaging him in a torrid affair. I cast my eye around for other possibilities, and I realise they are very few and far between. I can’t imagine having it away with someone else’s husband and certainly I don’t fancy the idea of luring a stranger into my bed.
On the phone one Sunday afternoon I tell David a little of my dreams and fantasies, and he sounds rather nonplussed at my revelations. We normally don’t have conversations about sex—it’s something we do rather than talk about. Now I am teasing him, trying to draw him into the way I am feeling, and he starts to mumble and mutter in an uncomfortable fashion.
‘You make me feel very nervous,’ he says. ‘I’m not sure that I am going to be up to your expectations of me. You’ve got to remember I’m not thirty-five anymore.’
I laugh out loud, then reassure him that I’m not about to start tearing his clothes off at the airport when we finally meet again. It’s funny in a way to imagine him being so unsettled by me and the way I am talking. Perhaps he would rather I simply had an affair and got it out of my system. That would certainly let him off the hook.
If I really wanted to, of course, having an affair would be easy to organise. French men seem to have a more appreciative attitude towards older women, and instead of being invisible after the age of forty-five, as we so often are in Australia, women still seem to be objects of desire. I have even experienced a few harmless encounters with amorous men since I arrived, though nothing that I wasn’t able to handle with ease. One night in the bar of the Hotel du Commerce in Villefranche I converse in a halting mishmash of English and French with a forty-something-year old man who is on a bike riding tour across the southwest. Bike riding is hugely popular in France, and during the summer months the secondary roads are packed with obsessed riders of all ages, all rippling leg muscles and facial expressions of intense concentration. This fellow in the bar is quite attractive and appears intrigued at the idea of an Australian woman living alone in a French town in the middle of nowhere. Especially one who sits in the bar at night, drinking beer. He insists on shouting me a couple of drinks and I quickly realise I am getting myself into an uncomfortable situation. Like a coward I wait until he’s distracted in a conversation with the barman, then make a hasty retreat to my small, safe room.
At one of the village fêtes another charming man makes a move in my direction, placing his hand on my leg between drinks and energetic dances around the square. He, too, is quite attractive and for a moment I seriously contemplate the possibility. The atmosphere is so divine and I am feeling heady from all the wonderful food and wine. But something inside me is blocking the possibility. Not just the fact that this man is well-known to my circle of friends and an affair with him would quickly become common knowledge. Not just the fact that I am feeling rather fat and therefore reluctant for anyone—even David—to see my fleshy naked body. But something else makes it impossible for me to step over that invisible line. It’s not guilt and it’s certainly not a strong sense of morality. It can only be fear of the unknown. I resort, as I so often do, to humour and self-deprecation to deflect the situation.
‘Now darling,’ I murmur, putting my hand over his on my knee. ‘You wouldn’t want to have sex with a grandmother, would you?’
He laughs it off in a rather uncomfortable way, and I slide out from the seat and rejoin the dancers in a ring.
I nearly get myself into a sticky sexual situation with a couple of burly Pompiers who arrive on my doorstep one morning selling rather dreary calendars as a method of fundraising. I smile sweetly and nod that I will buy one, dashing back into the house to find my purse. Then, in my abysmal French, I try describing the suggestive calendars occasionally produced by our local bushfire brigade back in Australia—the ones with photographs of themselves naked on every page, with just a fire hat or a hose covering their malehood. Somehow I don’t seem to be communicating very clearly. The word ‘nudité’ is being repeated and I realise they are getting very mixed signals from this woman alone in her house in the woods. I quickly thank them and virtually slam the door in their faces, mortified at my own stupidity. I really wonder what they thought I was on about, chatting about naked Australian firefighters so enthusiastically.
In truth, the thought of a full-blown love affair doesn’t really thrill me much, beyond the obvious physical titillation. By their very nature, affairs of the heart involve all sorts of runaway emotions, not simply lust, and people’s lives can become tragically tangled when passion turns to love and marriages fall by the wayside. The fallout is dramatic, especially for children, no matter what their age. Even though my children are fully grown and completely independent, I can just imagine how unhappy they would be if suddenly their parents’ marriage dissolved. They are so comfortable with us as a couple, as the grandparents of their children, as the ones to cook the Sunday lunch where all the family gathers. I wouldn’t jeopardise this for all the passionate sex in the world.
Thinking about it later I realise just how profoundly I have been affected by my father’s serial infidelities and the terrible pain they caused my mother, and our entire family. I don’t wish to ever make moral judgments on other people’s sex lives—it’s their own affair in every sense of the word. For me, having a ‘harmless’ fling isn’t a question of morality, but one of plain commonsense. It doesn’t make sense to risk ruining a solid marriage and a happy family for a good screw. The other point that occurs to me, in passing, is that it might not be good sex. It might be terrible. Wouldn’t that just be the pits, working your way up to a passionate encounter which then turns out to be nothing but a profound disappointment? I’ll just have to hang out until I see David again and hope he has some Viagra!
During this period of sexual confusion I come across a couple of fascinating views on middle-aged women. Germaine Greer, in the UK’s Sunday Telegraph, has written a feature claiming that shopping has become the ‘new sex’ for women of a certain age. Instead of bedroom romps, women are g
etting their thrills and satisfaction by cruising shopping malls and spending up big on their credit cards (or better still, their husband’s credit cards). I don’t quite see it myself; although I love the occasional shopping afternoon it doesn’t go anywhere near fulfilling my sexual desires. Then I pick up an article by a female medical writer in the Times expounding the new theory that women over fifty are at their most sexually powerful. Previous studies claimed that the early thirties was the age at which women reached their sexual peak, but now this lustful phase has shifted forward twenty years. Fifty-year-old women are no longer ‘old’ and with menopausal hormonal drug therapy, they still have healthy, if not excessively active libidos. That must be my problem, I conclude. I am peaking and there’s not a lot I can do about it.
26
TIME IS AN ILLUSION. It either moves very slowly, like during childhood when the summer school holidays stretch ahead endlessly; or it gallops along at an alarming pace, as it does during those hectic years when your children are growing up. It seems to me only a moment ago that my little ones were dancing around my feet in the kitchen yet now, miraculously, I am a grandmother. It seems like yesterday that my own mother was sitting at the kitchen table, drinking tea and marking up the newspaper articles that she thought I should be reading, no matter how busy I was. My days never seemed quite long enough to fit in all the things I needed to accomplish—journalistic work, gardening, writing letters or simply household chores. I looked at women who did not work full time and imagined that they had the luxury of hours and hours of empty time to sit and think, to idle away. How I longed for a lack of pressure, a little breathing space. Part of my rationale in escaping for six months was to indulge myself with some precious time to think.
