The Long Hot Summer (19 page)

We tend to wake early, have breakfast and do our overseas calls and emails. Then David heads off on his walk, and I either go shopping or make some attempts at continuing with my writing. We eat lunch together in the dark with the shutters pulled, and drink far too much rosé. An afternoon sleep leaves me feeling thick-headed, and in the evening I open the shutters hoping for a cooling breeze. We listen to music, have a light dinner and talk about nothing in particular.

Although we are not fighting the way we were when Miriam
was around, there's an uneasy feeling between us. A calm before the storm.

Having David around in his current frame of mind is certainly a dampener on my spirits. Usually I'm out and about, drinking in the bar, meeting people for dinner at the Plan d'Eau and having friends for dinner. This year we are both keeping a very low profile and the house has become like a prison. People don't knock on the front window any more asking me out for a drink, and the gay and carefree atmosphere I have enjoyed in the past has totally disappeared.

One evening, sitting together as it gets dark, I stand up to tidy the glasses away and get ready for bed. I'm not relishing yet another sweat-soaked sleepless night.

‘Sit down,' says David. ‘We need to talk.'

I am accustomed to David being intense, but nothing has prepared me for the bombshell he is about to drop.

‘You have a new lover,' he says.

For me the ensuing conversation remains a blur to this day. What can I say? There's no point denying anything. David seems to know everything. Who the man is and when the affair began. David is a master of ambush. He knows when I am most vulnerable. Tired. End of the day. But I don't believe he deliberately chose this moment to lie in wait for me. He's obviously known for some little while, from way back early in Miriam's visit, and he's been stewing on it ever since. I don't think he could keep it to himself any more.

I am shattered. We are both shattered. All I can say is that I'm sorry. That I didn't intend to hurt him. I didn't want him to find out, ever. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.

David is much calmer and more resigned to the situation than
I ever could have imagined. He seems one step removed, as though it's happening to someone else, not him. In quiet conversation he says he always knew it was on the cards. It's the way these things go. He accepts it. He even understands it. I feel hollow and shocked and sick to the stomach. I am accustomed to David's immediate and passionate reactions to events that affect his life. It's how he has conducted himself during the thirty-three years of our cohabitation. He's such a black-and-white person. So definite in his beliefs. But now, twice over, he has reacted in a way that I couldn't have predicted. He's almost too calm and collected. I guess it's the shock of it all.

Remarkably, after the affair has been ‘outed' the atmosphere in the house improves dramatically. As though the lid has been lifted off the pressure cooker. Suddenly we are talking again and making love passionately as an act of mutual comfort and reassurance. What has happened has given us both a big fright and we are doing our best to claw our way back together. All our life as partners has been punctuated by long separations followed by intense sexual reunions. And sex has always been used as a way of healing rifts whenever we have had serious arguments. Now we need it more than ever.

David is determined to have a conversation with my lover. I am terrified by the prospect. What can be gained? He claims that his knowledge of the affair was nothing more than a gradual realisation. Putting pieces together in a jigsaw to arrive at a conclusion. But I suspect he's been tipped off by one of the gossips, and he admits that he has already discussed the matter with some of our mutual friends, who have confirmed that there have been rumours around for quite some time. Nobody, it
seems, was prepared to confirm these rumours but they were virulent enough to have had a deadly impact.

David only has a few weeks left in France. Before we left Australia, it had been agreed that he would spend a couple of months with me after the Cannes festival then leave me to work on my novel before the arrival of the walking tour group in September. At the time he expressed concern that I was ‘trying to get rid of him' but I was adamant that I simply wanted some time to myself between his visit and the start of the tour, which always involves a lot of hard work. A little bit of down time. Some space to just do my own thing.

Now he is convinced that I planned the whole thing from the start. To allow him to come and stay for a while and then banish him back to Australia so that I can continue my affair. It sounds plausible from his point of view, but I try to convince him that none of this was ever planned or premeditated. It just evolved.

So David visits the home of my lover to confront him. My lover is prepared for this encounter, as we've had time for a brief conversation about the fact that our relationship has been discovered. It is apparently a calm and civilised meeting between the two men. Afterwards David tries to tell me the detail of their discussion but I refuse to listen. I am so mortified by the whole thing that I simply don't want to hear what has transpired. I have spent my life dodging confrontation, and even though he assures me there were no heated words or crossing of swords, the very thought of the conversation fills me with dismay. I realise of course that I have created the situation in which I now find myself, but I can't deal with the consequences. I know that even if I wanted to pick up the threads of my relationship with my lover, it is now impossible. And that, in itself, is a good thing.

David's way of handling the whole scenario is uncharacteristic. Most husbands would have reacted with immediate rage. Shouted, screamed, ranted, raved and then probably walked out the door. The marriage would have been over. Full stop. It's possible that one affair in thirty years can be tolerated. But two affairs in two years is unendurable. Yet he appears to be taking it all in his stride. He is affectionate towards me, we talk a lot and we make love more often than usual. However, he's drinking the local wine to excess. David is normally a moderate drinker. He's also now chain-smoking roll-your-own black Gauloise tobacco and is beginning to look raddled. The combination of the unabated heat, the stress, the drinking and the smoking are taking their toll. On both of us.

We are invited to, and agree now to attend, several summer parties as people try to counteract the heatwave by socialising as a diversion. David is concerned about the rumour mill and I reassure him that in France nobody much cares about these things. That we must tough it out and act as though nothing untoward has been happening. It's not easy. A couple of times we find ourselves at large gatherings where my lover is also in attendance. David and he always have a polite chat and outwardly there are no signs of the turmoil that is simmering away under the surface. I am so relieved that things haven't escalated into a giant uproar. We are all in our own way testing the water and it's an artificial attempt at normality. I have no idea who's talked to whom or what anybody knows. It's just a matter of keeping up appearances. Putting on a brave face.

One night, after a long, long lunch and a hot and breathless afternoon during which we have failed to sleep, we relax in our pretty sitting room and talk late into the night. On one hand,
David seems very pragmatic about the whole thing, but he wants to talk about the future. My intentions. I say, as I have said over and over these past two years, that the last thing I want is for our marriage to end. That I love him and that our family is more important to me than anything in the world. He knows that to be true.

But I cannot promise that this will never happen again. I must be honest here. I know that I am in a very highly charged emotional state and that to guarantee that I will just stop now, settle down and go back to being the wife I was before all this happened would be totally unrealistic. I want to leave things open-ended. Dangling.

‘I'll get through this phase,' I say to try and assuage his doubts. ‘Just give me time until I get whatever it is that's troubling me out of my system.'

His final words on the ‘Australian Story' documentary return to me over and over. Like a mantra:

‘I'm not a forgiving person but I could forgive Mary Moody anything. I love her that much.'

I have convinced myself that this is the crux of the matter. I am going through a rocky period because of my age, because of the difficulties of our long-term relationship and because of my unsettled sexuality. But I will recover my senses and everything will work out okay in the long run.

I really am kidding myself.

As a very different summer diversion, I find myself getting involved in a local cricket match to be played at the nearby village of Montcléra. There are two teams of mostly English expats, with the odd Australian and New Zealander thrown in where needed. I am told they are desperate for more players and I rashly volunteer myself and am quite startled when they take me up on my offer. I haven't played cricket for forty years, but I feel certain it will be a good-natured match and only hope the bowlers are either inept or modify the speed of their balls in my direction.

I try to convince David he should also play. He played competition cricket as a kid in New Zealand, but like me hasn't played for decades, except on the beach with a tennis ball during family summer holidays. He's quite fit from the past few years of constant exercising but really doesn't want to pull on a pair of cricket pads. I don't blame him really, because by now I'm wishing I had kept my big mouth shut.

I nervously go along for a practice session a few days prior to
the match. I am the only woman in either team, and while a lot of the blokes are middle-aged and not especially fit, there are also several keen young male players, which is slightly unsettling. We all have a turn at batting and I manage to hit the ball first swing, unlike a lot of the others. I can't hit it very hard or very far, but at least I can hit it. I decline bowling – I have never been good at this and know I will do the typical female thing of chucking the ball lamely in the direction of the wicket. It will be far too embarrassing. But I am quite quick off the mark fielding, stopping the ball with my foot rather than catching it. I have small, finely boned hands.

On the day of the match we set off early with a picnic packed with cold quiche, salad, wine, cheese and crusty bread. David is dressed for the occasion in white jacket and Panama hat. We take chairs and cushions and our spirits are quite high. Within minutes of arriving he is roped reluctantly into being one of the scorers in tandem with one of the wives – an outrageous Englishwoman called Fanny whose Irish husband is on the opposite team. They set up under an umbrella and David struggles to remember the scoring rules from all those years ago. He's now sixty-four and the last time he scored a match he would have been sixteen. It comes back gradually over the day.

Montcléra is a picture postcard village about ten minutes up the road from Frayssinet. It has a feudal feel to it, with modest stone cottages clustered around an imposing château that some locals describe as being ‘a little bit Walt Disney' because of its rounded turrets with pointy slate roofs. The château is owned by a French family from Paris and not foreigners – which makes the village even more unusual these days – and every year they host an art exhibition in their palatial barn. This weekend there
is a village fête with various musical events and a feast cooked by the local women. The plan is for members of both cricket teams to come back in the evening for the meal if we are still capable of walking after a day of vigorous exercise.

The oval we are playing on is a local soccer field with woodlands all around and a gentle slope where the spectators set up with blankets and umbrellas. The weather is hot, but mercifully not quite as hot as the preceding few weeks, and there's even a little cloud around to bring relief to those who will be fielding. I notice that there are virtually no French people around – this is very much a gathering of expats and their families and friends who are down holidaying for the summer.

We win the toss and go in to bat. I am listed as the last in to bat, for obvious reasons. That means I will spend the morning watching, remembering some of the rules I have long forgotten, and cheering our team on to score. I have managed to rope in an extra player, the grandson of an Australian friend who is renting Claude's barn for the summer with various members of her family. He's a tall strapping lad who looks to be in his late teens but is only fourteen. He is co-opted onto the other team, who are thrilled to have the full complement. He's a very keen player and bowls admirably. I wish he was on our team instead.

During the morning my French friend Lucienne's daughter Ann, on holiday from Paris, arrives at the field. I spend some time trying to explain the rules of the game to her, but I can see she's entirely baffled and bemused.

‘What is everyone doing now?' she asks as the fielders change position at the end of each over. I try to describe the strategies but she still looks totally bemused. I guess you have to be born and brought up with cricket to make sense of it all.

People sit in small happy groups and cheer loudly if a couple of runs are made or if one of our batsmen is bowled out. David seems to be really enjoying himself and it's the first time I've seen him look relaxed and comfortable since he arrived. It could be that most of these people are new to him – not our usual circle of friends – so he feels somehow distanced from the reality of what has happened. I sit on a rug near the table where he and Fanny are keeping score and it feels good to be here. The fact that we are playing a very English game on a foreign field doesn't seem to matter. The day is hot yet not stifling, cakes and sandwiches and hot tea are being passed around, and somehow the world seems okay.