The Long Hot Summer (3 page)

I drove gingerly towards Lithgow with the computer bouncing wildly on the front seat because the ute has bad suspension. I started to worry that the journey might damage the hard drive – then what would I do? The book would be lost, as in my harried state I hadn't thought to back up the manuscript before I left. But in a funny way I thought losing the book at this stage mightn't be such a bad thing. It would certainly eliminate the impasse between me and my husband.

In Lithgow I started investigating motels but quickly discovered they were all booked out. It was during the January bushfires and visiting fire-fighters had taken over every room. Not wanting to go to the mountains, I took a right turn and headed towards Oberon. The road was really bumpy – almost a dirt track in places – and the computer was having a very rough ride indeed. The first motel on the left as I drove into town had a huge, ugly fish, at least five metres high, positioned near the entrance. It was called ‘The Big Trout Motor Inn' and I suppose was intended to attract the custom of fishermen who come to the region for the excellent fly fishing. I booked a room for two weeks, nervously reconnected the computer cables and plugged in the telephone wire in the hope of being able to send emails.
I held my breath as I switched the computer on, but to my great relief it all worked perfectly. Even the internet connected. The first thing I did was to send a copy of the existing manuscript to my email address, where it could be retrieved should anything go wrong with the computer.

The rooms at the Big Trout are large and comfortable and air-conditioned, which was a godsend in the stifling heat of that particular January. Fortunately there was also a large round table capable of accommodating my computer and all the various print-outs of the manuscript. I set myself up with some basic groceries so that I wouldn't need to leave the room during the day. I really wanted to maximise the amount of work I could achieve in the short time left to me. The owners probably thought I was eccentric. I refused housekeeping and locked myself away like a recluse with the curtains drawn and only the hum of my computer's hard drive for company. I told them I would accept phone calls but none came through. Nobody really knew where I was, which suited me fine.

I started to write in earnest. Without the distractions of the farm and the pressure I felt from David's discomfort at the content of the book, it flowed from my fingertips at an alarming rate. I established a routine of getting up early and writing for three hours in my nightdress, with several cups of tea to sustain me. I then showered, made my own breakfast and continued to write for another three hours or more. I made a light lunch in my room and lay down for an hour to sleep or read. I wrote again all afternoon until hunger started to distract me, and then I went out for the first and only time of the day. Up to the local pub for a steak sandwich and a beer or two.

It was a blissful existence requiring no effort apart from the
creative process of writing. For the first time I could appreciate why so many writers find it impossible to concentrate with all the distractions of home. While I could easily bash out a gardening book with kids creating havoc all around me, when it came to writing in a deeper emotional sense I needed absolute peace and quiet. The Big Trout Motor Inn, phoney fish and all, was my haven.

I phoned David to tell him where I was and to reassure him I was safe. I also told him I was doing my best to write the book without any reference to the love affair. I painstakingly removed all references to it in the manuscript, and tried to flesh out other aspects of my travels instead. David sounded relieved, and surprisingly wasn't at all fazed by my sudden disappearance. He even offered to come over one evening and take me out for a meal. Which he did, and we had a very relaxed, stress-free evening together. Better than we had managed in months.

The rest of the time in Oberon I ate alone, watching the TV news over the bar in the local pub. I didn't stay more than an hour because by early evening I was totally wrung out by the volume of writing I had done – sometimes up to 5,000 words a day. One evening two rather ragged-looking blokes were sitting in the bar as I ate my toasted sandwich. In their mid-thirties, they were a scruffy pair with gnarled hands, more than a few teeth missing and hair that appeared not to have been washed or brushed for weeks. I took them to be timber workers, as Oberon is a big forestry region, and I also gathered that they had probably been in the pub all day because they were past the point of coherence. One called out to me.

‘Gidday luv, ow'ya goin'?'

‘Fine,' I said, continuing to eat and watch the news.

‘You know somethin', luv,' he continued, ‘you look great.'

‘Thanks,' I said, thinking I should probably down my beer quickly and leave.

‘If anyone tells you that you don't look great, luv, don't you believe them. Because you look great,' he went on, trying to win me over with his backhanded compliment.

He then staggered around the bar and stood close, far too close for comfort, pressing his snaggle-toothed, beery mouth to my ear.

‘You know somethin', luv,' he said, grinning broadly. ‘You could do better than me.'

I stifled a laugh and responded, ‘You know something, I probably could,' bolting my sandwich and making a hasty retreat, laughing at his self-deprecating, clumsy pick-up line that for me was quintessential Australian male. I don't know how he thought I would respond, but probably not quite the way I did.

After nearly two weeks of frenetic writing the book had evolved to a stage where it was virtually complete. I had carefully gone through and removed all reference to the love affair. I hoped instead that the chapters I had written about the joy and excitement of finding my sister Margaret after a separation of nearly fifty years would give the book the emotional resonance it needed. I had written about this extraordinary tale of family separation in
Au Revoir
when I described my early childhood with alcoholic parents, and my half-sister who left our dysfunctional home and never returned. After the book was released, a reader contacted me with information on Margaret's whereabouts in Canada, and I was able to contact her and then visit her in person. It was the happiest of reunions, and I told the story in the new book.

I curled up on the hotel bed and started to read through the entire manuscript from where I had begun writing more than twelve months before.

It's very difficult reading back over your own work and I often
avoid doing so unless pressured into it by a persistent editor. But it was essential to get a feeling for the book as whole, so I set aside time just for reviewing it all. As I turned the pages I realised that what I had written had a hollow ring to it. It just didn't make sense. The central character, me, was in a state of turmoil. My distress and confusion were obvious but there was little explanation for this, other than my menopausal condition and my questioning of my long-term relationship with my husband. I found the narrative deeply unsatisfying, and knew that anyone reading this book would feel as though they had been left dangling. I knew at that moment I had to tell the rest of story, no matter how painful. All or nothing. I returned to the computer and sat through the night reinstating the sections pertaining to the affair.

Then I phoned David and told him of my change of heart.

‘I think you'd better come home now,' he said.

So I packed up my belongings – having first emailed myself the finished manuscript as a back-up – and drove the bumpy one hour back to Yetholme. It was lovely to be home, although the paddocks were bleached white from the hot dry winds and one dam had completely dried up. The bushfires that had been raging in the region had not come close this time, but the potential was always there, the farm being surrounded by pine forests and remnants of native vegetation.

I returned the computer to my office desk, hooked it up to the printer, then printed out the five hundred or so pages for David to read.

It was a gut-churning day and a half. He sat in the back room drinking wine and smoking cigars while he methodically read through the book. Sometimes I'd hear him laugh, which was a
great relief. But then he'd go quiet for what seemed like hours at a time. It was nail-biting.

Eventually he emerged and handed me back the well-thumbed pages.

‘It's an amazing book,' he said. ‘Very honest, very funny, very sad. But I'm never going to like it. To be quite honest, I hate it. But I totally support your right to write about your life and what has been happening to you these last few years.'

That was it. I hugged him but he stiffened under my embrace. He was still deeply hurt and traumatised by the events of the last year. But he wouldn't stand in my way.

He had flagged various pages in the text where he had concerns and together we worked to tidy up the final draft. Then to further demonstrate his support he actually delivered the final printed-out copies to the publisher's Sydney offices. On deadline, double-spaced, with the pages tied together with red satin ribbon.

My relief at getting the book finished while not destroying my marriage at the same time was palpable. I thought our troubles had finished, but they were only just beginning.

My life has always been a juggling act. As a child I tried to juggle the unpredictable emotions of my unstable parents and from an early age developed all sorts of strategies for maintaining family harmony. I found that by being bright and cheerful, amusing and helpful, I could defuse family tensions and keep life on a more even keel. I carried these techniques for handling difficult situations into adulthood and they have certainly come in very handy during my complex life. I juggled a demanding career while rearing four children and managed that most delicate of tightrope acts, negotiating good relations in an extended family that included my career-driven husband and my hard-drinking and frequently difficult mother.

Now, if it's possible, I have created an even more complicated and anxiety-ridden existence for myself at an age when my life should, by rights, be starting to become more relaxed and easier to manage. I have split myself in half. I am trying to lead a double life. When I am in France I am one woman: independent, free-spirited, impulsive, self-indulgent, outspoken, wilful, at times
wild and irresponsible. Reckless. I love this new person because in many ways she is the real me who has been trying to get out for years. Aspects of this hidden me have always been obvious to my close friends and family, but they have been outweighed by the other half of me, the responsible and hard-working one. The wife and mother, the daughter and the grandmother. The backbone of the family. The matriarch.

Now I am endeavouring to achieve what I fear is impossible. I am trying to hang on to my husband and our family life while still relishing the freedom I experience when living in France. I don't wish to exclude David from being part of both my worlds, but I do want to have a little time in France on my own to write, to lead my walking tours and to be enveloped by the glorious sensation of being ‘me' which I have only ever experienced when I am in the village on my own. When I am in France, Australia seems like a dream. I miss my children and even more so my grandchildren, but I know that they are getting on extremely well without me. I also know that I will return to them soon – I will always return to my home and my family, and this makes the separations much easier to bear.

As for David, I have grown accustomed over many years to living apart from him for long periods and I have always believed it to be quite a healthy thing for our relationship. Now that he is working from home at the farm, I find that being able to escape for a while to France is maintaining that balance in our lives. We can go our separate ways and meet up again, whether in France or back at the farm. It seems like the perfect arrangement.

My friends claim jealously that I have achieved ‘the perfect life'. A house in France, time alone, a place in the Australian countryside, a warm and loving family and a devoted husband.
But I know this is far, far from the truth. I am struggling to maintain the facade of this dream and I know that it must eventually collapse around me because it is nothing more than a facade. A front. The truth is much less palatable.

I have never been a nervous woman. In all my years of travel I have only ever taken the simplest security precautions with my travel documents, money and passport. I have wandered on my own through the back streets of New York, down laneways in New Delhi, and I even breached security regulations to explore Soweto when working on the feature film
Mapantsula
with David in the troubled city of Johannesburg in the late 1980s. I have never experienced a house robbery, car theft or bag-snatching, except for an odd incident when I was pregnant with our first child and living in Sydney. Two strange men wandered in through the front door of our semidetached cottage in Crows Nest. Our family dog Wombat puffed himself up to double his usual border collie size and chased the strangers out the front gate. I easily dismissed that incident as a one-off and it didn't motivate me to remember to lock the car when I went shopping or the back door when I went to bed, even when David was away filming. It's a rather cavalier attitude to security which some people may regard as naïve or even reckless.

My mother Muriel, on the other hand, was always highly nervous and hated being left alone at night or even for long periods during the day. I'll never forget an incident that happened when Mum was well into her seventies. She was vacuuming the floor and was suddenly aware of someone at the glass doors of the front verandah. She turned off the cleaner and opened the door only to be confronted with a young man who appeared, to Mum's instant alarm, to be reaching inside the zipper of his trousers. She slammed the door in his face and took off like lightning through the house, out the back door and down into the garden where she somehow effortlessly scaled a 1.5-metre fence into the neighbour's back yard. After raising the alarm, she returned to our house with the neighbour in tow only to discover a small group of puzzled people gathered outside on the footpath. Our neighbour approached them and told them what had just happened to Muriel, and it turned out that the young man, who was slightly mentally retarded, was door-knocking for a well-known charity. Just before Mum opened the door he realised that his zip wasn't properly closed and was trying to rectify the situation when she appeared, misinterpreted his intentions and reacted – or overreacted. She was not amused when I shrieked with laughter at her story, especially the mental image of her getting over the back fence at a stage of life when she found climbing the front stairs an effort.