Last Tango in Toulouse (4 page)

That said, he is also a highly charged creative individual, very loving and loyal to his family and friends and seldom boring to be around. He is a Scot by ancestry, and many of the character traits attributed to that race apply to him. He's careful and considered, pedantic and exacting, and in many ways quite conservative, despite his appearance and the fact that over the years he has been responsible for producing or working on films that could be considered radical. He is therefore a contradiction
in many respects. On the one hand, when working with scriptwriters and film directors and actors he can be inspirational with his intense enthusiasm and deep commitment to the project. At the same time he can be dour and negative, tending to anticipate the worst in any situation. When he is in this frame of mind or when he plummets, as he sometimes does, into a deep depression, I wonder what on earth I am doing with him.

My ancestry is more on the Irish side, and I have the opposite disposition to my husband. I never worry myself about trivial matters, am irresponsible with money, laugh at situations that others would find grim, and generally regard most days as an opportunity for a celebration or a party. Yet somehow, despite our opposing personalities, we have weathered more than three decades of mostly happy cohabitation.

One of the main reasons our relationship has survived is because, over the years, we have spent quite a lot of time apart. David's career took him to Sydney every week, where he stayed three or four nights, sleeping in the back room of his office, being available for phone calls and meetings with his working colleagues twenty-four hours a day. He also spent long periods away from home filming or doing research for various film projects – in the United States, England, Ireland, Scotland, South Africa, Turkey, France and Asia. His career has given him great satisfaction and provided financial security for our family, but I always felt it was at the expense of his involvement and participation as a husband and father. He enjoyed considerable success with many of his films, producing more than forty features that have been screened in cinemas and on television all over the world. In the late 1980s he made a controversial anti-apartheid film,
Mapantsula
, which was widely screened, received
awards at several major film festivals and eventually earned him the 1988 Human Rights Australia Film Award.

I was so proud of his achievements and his commitment to a risky cause, but my pride was tinged with bitterness. That particular film took David away from us for nine months, and when he returned he found living in Australia and being with his family an anticlimax after the intensity and danger of the film-making experience. He and his fellow film-makers had smuggled the film out of the country under the nose of South African Security so that it could be completed in London in time for the Cannes Film Festival (where it was an official selection). David felt such a buzz of excitement at their success that I suppose it was natural he would find home life boring by comparison. For me, this rankled.

I also experienced a certain level of tension when David was at home, and I realise now, many years later, that it was because of our situation, having my mother Muriel under the same roof. While having Mum around was fantastic for me while David was absent, when he was at home it could be fraught with difficulties. Neither my mother nor I was prepared to hand over the reins to David when he walked in the door. We were accustomed to working together as a team, running the house and the garden and rearing the children. If David had strong opinions about how we were managing, especially in relation to the children, it could result in an instant explosion – usually from Muriel rather than me. At times they got along together brilliantly, especially in the last few years of her life. However, there were often long periods when the situation was pretty grim and I took on the role of peacekeeper, trying to calm down the situation however I could.

In many respects my relationship with David was muffled by the constant presence of another adult in the house. I felt that I had given David permission to be an absent husband and father by not fighting against it more forcefully, not insisting that he spend more time at home and get more involved in the children's lives. But I can now see that life was easier without him around. There was less conflict. And when he was around the last thing I wanted was to engage him in a fight about how I was feeling. If I had tackled him verbally for what I considered to be his shortcomings, Muriel would undoubtedly have jumped on the bandwagon and life would have been totally unbearable.

So I put up and shut up. For almost twenty-five years I danced a jig around my husband and my mother so that the family would remain on an even keel. Mum was by no means an easy person to live with either. Opinionated, forceful and quick-tempered, she required a good deal of careful handling, and again it was up to me to keep her mood buoyant. Most of the time we had an excellent relationship – very open, very honest and very affectionate. We agreed on so many things, from politics to cooking, and I loved her dearly although I also found her exasperating. So there I was, stuck between two lovable but demanding people, with four growing and boisterous children to bolster the equation.

A couple of times – perhaps three times – during this period I decided that I couldn't stand it any more, that I should leave David and start a new life somewhere else. I am sure every marriage has moments like this. But there was really no possibility of it ever happening. If I left David, would I also leave my mother? Or would I leave them alone together and just take the children? A ridiculous notion. Even though I was working,
I couldn't afford to support my mother as well as four children and I was loath to break up the family. So I stayed put and made the best of it. To all intents and purposes we were one big happy family and, mostly, we were, but a lot of this fell on my shoulders. I took responsibility not just for the physical and emotional well-being of my family, but for the entire mood of the household. If you ask any of my adult children now, they will say they had a totally happy and carefree childhood, and for that I feel satisfaction.

David's justification for being distracted from the family, when things did occasionally come to a head, was always that it was the nature of his business that required his absence. That he was doing it for all of us. That he didn't enjoy being away for such long periods, indeed he often felt depressed and despondent when away from home so much. That he had no choice. That he was not trained or qualified in any other area and could find no alternative employment. He was trapped in his working life and that's just the way it had to be.

My counter argument would always be that even when he was at home he didn't ‘engage' with the family. He complained of being exhausted by the intensity of his working life and would frequently spend long hours when at home stretched out on the sofa reading the weekend papers cover to cover, recovering for his return to Sydney the following Monday. However, during the weekends he readily made himself available for his work colleagues, who would phone any time of the day or night, often needing his counselling or support with a film project. Scriptwriters – such a needy lot – were the worst. One in particular had uncanny timing, phoning on Sunday just as I was setting out the family lunch. David should have been the one to carve
the roast, but often this was left to me because he would take the call and speak for an hour, sometimes longer, propping up the writer's fragile ego while his lunch congealed on the plate. This used to drive me crazy. I was the one dashing to Saturday morning sports and doing the shopping and mowing the lawn, although he did eventually take on some of these chores. I dealt with my dissatisfaction by drinking lots of beer and cooking up large, happy family meals that brought cheer to the household. I kept it all together, but underneath there was a simmering of discontent and resentment, seldom acknowledged but ever present.

The other vital aspect to this whole relationship equation was love. When I wasn't furious with David or frustrated by his intransigence or enraged by his stubbornness, I was in love with him. Our personal relationship was loving and passionate and this always undid me in the end. Just when I thought I could walk away from our marriage he would make contact with me on such an intimate level that the thought of leaving him was impossible. We were bound together by something that was difficult to explain, that was more than just our mutual adoration of our children or the physical joy of our sex life. Something intangible kept us together and helped us survive. I always knew that he loved me deeply and this constancy gave our union security.

But now, in middle age, I have started to question seriously whether love is enough. Whether all those years of sublimating my feelings for the sake of family harmony can be wiped away by love. Should I be grateful that I have a man who loves me? After all, many people don't have love in their lives and would regard me as reckless for throwing away a husband who adores me and whom I certainly love in return. For reasons I can't really explain,
however, I am no longer prepared to live in a situation that doesn't work for me. I am no longer prepared to compromise. It's a major dilemma, one that I am going to have to confront once and for all.

The first people to live in our little village house in France were our son Ethan, then just 21, and his girlfriend Lynne, who was about the same age. As soon as we arrived back in Australia and announced we had found a place they started saving to make the trip. Within five months they had arrived in Frayssinet with little or no French language skills and only meagre savings.

Our friends in France welcomed them with open arms, nicknamed them ‘the kids' and even provided some local work for Ethan using his horticultural qualifications. The plan was that they would do some basic renovations, such as chipping off crepi (mortar) and painting, in return for the house, rent-free. They intended to stay for six or twelve months, depending on how their finances lasted, but this idea was quickly squashed when Lynne found herself unexpectedly pregnant.

What was meant to be a carefree working holiday turned into a bit of a nightmare for Lynne. She was desperately morning sick and homesick and missing the support of her mother and sisters
during such a difficult time. Neither Ethan nor Lynne had planned to have a child at this stage of their relationship and, while they were excited, they were also daunted and I think a little frightened at the prospect of parenthood. Both of them came from largish families, both of them adored babies and children, but it meant that their time in France was to be foreshortened; and for Lynne it meant a lot of time alone – and feeling frightful into the bargain. Ethan was frequently working during the week and the constant aromas of rich French food cooking in the village added to her nausea. She made a lot of friends who were supportive, and when Ethan was working she did some tentative exploring, but the very nature of her pregnancy limited her ability to enjoy the experience of living in a foreign country.

The weekends were easier for them both – Ethan was at home and they could do things together, even if it was only starting some of the preliminary renovations. One Saturday he decided to clean out the upper level of the barn, which was piled high with all sorts of junk and mounds of dirt – it's quite a mystery why anyone would shovel dirt up to a first floor. The window at that level had no glass, so Ethan simply shovelled the rubbish into the courtyard below, intending to take it by trailer to the tip at a later stage. The first thing he discovered in the gloom, after erecting a portable light to work by, were dozens of beautiful old timber trugs – purpose-made agricultural baskets for carrying produce such as walnuts, chestnuts or apples. Some of the trugs had a mesh base for allowing dirt to pass through; they must have been made for harvesting potatoes and other root crops. He dusted them off and put them out in the sunshine for closer inspection. Some were badly eaten by woodworm, but many were quite perfect, with beautiful bent willow handles. On closer
inspection he also found a whole range of tools and templates for making trugs, including a vice-like piece of equipment that was obviously used for forming the arched handles from water-soaked willow stems. He realised that the barn, in a previous incarnation, had been a workshop for making these agricultural baskets, all of which were stamped on the side with the word LEROUX.

Later, he noticed a framed black and white photograph on the kitchen wall of our friend and neighbour, Danny. It was of the village in the early twentieth century. There was our house, with the name LEROUX out the front and the downstairs shutters opened to the street, making a shop entrance. It seems that part of the main downstairs room was a shop selling these gardening artefacts; this was quite a coincidence given that Ethan and I are both such keen gardeners and have strong horticultural connections in our work. It made him believe the house had a special significance for us, that it was just right, meant to be.