The Long Hot Summer (16 page)

The walls of the house are more than a metre thick, and normally this ensures that the interior remains cool even on the hottest summer day. But not this summer. During July, the stone gradually soaks up the heat from the sun as well as the reflected heat from the roadway. It becomes like a heat bank, storing it overnight and into the following day. I am advised by the village women to keep the heavy timber shutters closed from sunrise to sunset. It certainly makes a difference, but it means that the house is in constant darkness. The windows inside are left open in the hope of a welcome breeze that may flutter through the cracks and gaps in the shutters. But the breeze never comes. Inside the house it just gets hotter and hotter, so that by August it's much cooler outside in the courtyard at midnight than anywhere in the house itself. Sleeping becomes an ordeal.

I try to buy an electric fan to make the bedroom more tolerable at night, but they have sold out everywhere. Weeks ago. Bottled water is also scarce on the supermarket shelves and when a new batch is delivered there's a frantic rush to buy up whatever stocks are available.

The heatwave is a crisis all over France, but news of its devastation is slow to filter through the media. And for us, living without
a television and rarely reading the local newspapers, there is total ignorance of what is going on in the wider world. The weather reports about the heatwave are consistent, but it will be many weeks before we get news of the alarming death toll.

The heatwave is all anyone talks about. Locals are glued to their television sets at night, anxious for news about the weather. Desperately hoping for a storm or a cooling change to come through. People are only venturing out in the early mornings or the evenings, and nobody wants to sit on the plastic chairs and tables outside Le Relais except late at night. Even Madame Murat's restaurant, normally packed at lunchtime during the summer, is eerily half-empty except for the road workers and truck drivers who are obliged to keep working despite the conditions. It's just too hot for the rest of us to contemplate a huge five-course lunch and all that red wine in the middle of the day. Heaven knows how Sylvie and Madame Murat manage in the kitchen, deep-frying frites and baking roasts of veal and lamb. It must surely be unbearable.

But holidaymakers seem to be enjoying the hot conditions, especially those from England where days and days of hot sunny weather are such a rarity. They sit out until midnight in shirt-sleeves, drinking beer or chilled wine and relishing the almost tropical atmosphere. During the day they sleep or sit wherever there is some shade – in stark contrast to the local farmers and other manual labourers, who have to endure the beating sun on their backs all day long. It's a very trying time.

The inescapable heat adds to the tension in our relationship. We both seem strung out, and David is exhausting himself by insisting on continuing his obsessive exercise regime, often walking in the middle of the day when the sun is at its hottest.

I buy bulk rosé from Bergerac and we bottle it together over the sink, hammering in the corks and stacking it in rows inside the fridge, which is struggling to stay cool. It's often too hot to eat very much, but we still manage to get through the rosé, using it as a prop to dull our fragile senses. We seem to spend half the day numbed by wine and trying to avoid getting into an argument. The topic of our relationship becomes taboo. We are just getting through each day the best we can.

We get a message from home that the ‘Australian Story' episode we made is being screened in July, not September as agreed with the researcher and producer at the time of filming. David is beside himself with rage. The agreement on timing is important, because he wants to be back in Australia when it is
screened so that we can be with our family, as a unit, to face it together. There is also the issue of the book, which won't be released until October – the original agreement was to time the documentary screening as close to the book release as possible.

We are also told that there have been problems with the edit. The producer, Janine Hosking, has presented her version of the story and it has been rejected by the executive producer. We can only assume this means one thing: Janine has made the film we agreed to and it has been knocked back by management. They want the story they want. It's an editorial decision.

We try talking to the executive producer but it's like banging our heads against a brick wall. We get nowhere. She is adamant that the program will be broadcast as soon as it's finished.

I have always loved the ABC and have watched it almost exclusively since my parents bought our first television set in 1961, when I was eleven. Our children were only ever allowed to watch the ABC, never commercial television because I hated the ads. For nine years I worked on contract with the ABC on ‘Gardening Australia', although that experience left me feeling rather disenchanted towards the end, because management decided that merchandising products to align with the program was a great marketing idea. None of us – the presenters – wanted a bar of the commercialisation of the program and our attitudes have been vindicated in the long term because most of the products, apart from the magazine and books, failed to find a market.

The ABC prides itself on being a public broadcaster, providing a public service with its programming. They are not, they claim, driven by competition for ratings with the commercial networks. They only present factual, balanced programs and
never sink to sensationalising subjects or to participating in celebrity beat-ups. That's what they claim, anyway.

Not only did the ABC break their verbal agreement with us to screen the program in September, but they sent tapes of the show to the tabloid weekend newspapers to get as much advance publicity for the Monday night screening as possible. Quite apart from the fact that they eventually edited the film to concentrate almost exclusively on my troubled relationship with David and the affair I had written about in
Last Tango
, they exploited the ‘sensational' aspects of the film to their own ends.

The weekend before the screening of ‘Something About Mary' – the tacky name they had decided to call the episode – Miriam phones us from Bathurst to read us the tabloid headlines.

‘Hope you're sitting down, Mum,' she says.

David is listening on the other extension.

‘Listen to this one: “Garden Guru in Torrid French Affair”.'

I gasp in disbelief. Then dissolve into helpless laughter.

‘It gets better, Mum. “Gardener Admits Adultery”.'

David is ashen-faced. He isn't laughing. He is very angry and outraged by what has been written.

As a journalist I can see the humour and absurdity of the situation. I recognise the stupidity of tabloid headlines – I have been responsible for some myself in my days as a journalist on
TV Week
. But this is patently ridiculous. Any integrity that the ABC may claim to have in the standard of its filmmaking for this program has been thrown out the window. The whole handling of the situation has been shameful.

‘Australian Story' goes to air and we speak immediately with the children. Miriam is crying. While she and Rick found most
of the film okay – perhaps not the balance David and I would have liked, but certainly beautifully filmed and put together – she is distraught that her closing line in the interview has been edited.

The question was put to her: ‘What have you learned about your parents through this whole business?'

Her response was simple: ‘I have learned that my mother can be more selfish than I ever thought she could be – but then again that's not a bad thing because she has spent all her adult life being unselfish and giving to others. And I have learned that my father can be more loving and tolerant than I ever thought he could be.'

They had cut out the second line. The line about her father. And she felt as though the words had been cut out of her mouth with a sharp knife.

The simple truth is that when you hand over your story to be made into a film, you have absolutely no control – and maybe, in some ways, that is not such a bad thing. An outsider can look at a story objectively and tell it through different eyes, take a different perspective. When I am writing, I have total control over what I say and how I choose to present my story. I always try to be honest and truthful but it is all subjective. It is my story, but only through my eyes. Not the eyes of an outsider.

We agreed to do the program and so it's a fair cop. Janine did an outstanding job of making a beautiful and for many people a quite poignant and moving film. David Marshall, the cameraman, won an award for his fantastic work on it, and overall I have to say it was compelling television.

One question remains. Should it have been made at all? Was it, within the guidelines of the program, a subject that justified
the time and money spent on its production? A lot of people don't believe so, and with hindsight I think they are correct.

A filmmaking colleague of David's takes a very dim view indeed. His comment is: ‘What's the ABC thinking about, making a film about a high-profile media couple and their fucked-up marriage? It's a waste of taxpayers' money, and a waste of airtime.'

Given that the producers didn't stick by their original undertaking to tell the ‘whole story' and instead opted for highlighting only the sensational aspect of the affair, I think he's probably right.

The days are getting hotter and we are drinking even more rosé than ever. My plans for painting the house interior are shelved because it's just too breathless to paint. It's really too hot to do anything. After fifteen minutes up a ladder the sweat is running from my scalp down the back of my neck and I feel dizzy and exhausted by the sheer effort of even setting up the equipment and stirring the paint. The persistent heatwave has sapped everyone of their energy and those with any sense stay inside most of the day, only venturing out when the sun drops low in the sky.

The house has become like a sauna, and it's very difficult to sleep at night. Some nights I dampen the top sheet and lie under it in the hope that a breeze may flit through the bedroom window, which is open wide all night. Friends tell me that they have abandoned their upstairs bedrooms and have taken to sleeping in the salon or even in the courtyard. Often the only cool place in a house is the cellar, and I hear that plenty of people have dragged mattresses down into these dark rooms
normally used for storing wine and cheese. Our cellar is too small and dirty to contemplate sleeping in, so we persist in sleeping in the bedroom despite the discomfort.

Various friends have swimming pools and we sometimes fall into these at dusk. If we go to the markets we only go first thing in the morning, and long hot lunches are almost totally off the agenda. We live on salads and cheese and foods that require little or no preparation.

A week after ‘Australian Story' has been aired, I am sitting in Le Relais at lunchtime drinking a cool beer with my friend Miles, who is down with his wife Anne for the rest of the summer. An English couple sit down at the next table and start chatting. They are house-hunting and are finding the relentless heat exhausting as they are shuttled from one village to the next by the eager real estate agent. Against the front wall of the bar I notice a man sitting alone, also drinking beer. David suddenly looms into view, flushed in the face and dripping with sweat from his fast and furious power walk. He stops and joins us and we order a jug of rosé, which he proceeds to drink on an empty stomach. Not a very wise idea. As we talk, the man from across the road walks over to our table and asks if I am Mary Moody.

‘Yes, I am,' I reply, with some curiosity.

‘I'm a journalist from the London bureau of the
Sun Herald
, in Sydney,' he says. ‘I've been sent here to find you and to talk to the locals and establish the identity of the man from Toulouse. Do you mind if I join you? Let me buy you all a drink.'

We nearly choke on our drinks and sit wide-eyed in stunned disbelief.

I ask him to repeat what he has just said because, quite honestly, I am finding the whole notion impossible to get my
head around. Surely, surely, a journalist wouldn't travel all the way from England to this isolated little village in southwest France to follow up such a silly story? It's just too ridiculous for words. I tell him that I think he's wasting his time and ours. But I find it difficult to be rude to him or to send him away with a flea in his ear, even though it probably would be the best idea. As a journalist myself, I recognise his dilemma. No matter how foolish the story, he has accepted the assignment and has come a long way (at the expense of the newspaper) to follow it through. He has to come up with something.

With some embarrassment, Miles leaves us to our predicament and the English couple at the next table look rather confused – they obviously realise something unusual is going on, but can't quite work out the significance. I've had no breakfast either, and by now I am on my fourth drink and feeling very woozy.

‘Look,' I say to the reporter, now feeling rather sorry for him, ‘this whole thing is a complete waste of your time. Do you speak French?'

‘No,' he says.

‘Well, the people around here don't speak English, so how do you intend interviewing them? And how will you find the man from Toulouse when he doesn't even live around here? It's a joke, the whole thing's just stupid.'

David says very little and keeps pouring himself rosé.

‘Apart from anything else,' I add, starting to get a little angry, ‘the whole concept of a story about us is a waste of paper, a waste of column inches. Who gives a damn about us and what we do in France? We're grandparents. We're old people.'

‘That's right,' David adds. ‘We're not Tom and Nicole.'

‘Well, I have to write a story no matter how silly you think it is,'
says the reporter. ‘So you might as well give me your point of view. And it doesn't really matter if I find out the identity of the man from Toulouse or not, as long as I file a story some time today.'