Last Tango in Toulouse (34 page)

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.

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.