The Long Hot Summer

by Mary Moody

  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.

  29

  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 bemus
ed.

  ‘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.

  The decision is made for our team to retire from batting at lunchtime regardless of whether all the players have been bowled. I’m the last player to go out, looking rather awkward in oversize pads and gloves. I face the bowler and try not to be intimidated. I hope they will lob me a few gentle balls and not try to massacre me.

  The first bowler is kind. I hit the ball wildly but not very far several times, then finally manage a decent whack and score a couple of runs. I don’t care much after that. Some of the blokes were out for a duck, so as long as I can hold the fort until lunchtime I will feel I have more than done my bit.

  I play conservatively and realise that some of the opposite team players on the field are sending me up. Sledging me, but in a humorous rather than a malicious fashion. They sing out that they can see my knickers through my white pants. I do my best to ignore them. David is amazed at the way I’m hanging in. I am just determined not to get out. Lunch is called and we have scored 183 runs. The batswoman not out for three. I am hot from standing out in the midday sun with all the mad dogs and Englishmen and can’t wait for a cold drink.

  Our team has a little meeting before we settle down to our picnic and I put forward a strategy. ‘If we can get them drunk on wine during the lunch break they will crumble,’ I suggest.

  I have several bottles of chilled rosé in our esky and I wander through the opposition team topping up their glasses while sticking to water myself. They are hot and frazzled from standing out on the field all morning. Their first batsman takes a bottle of red wine out to the stumps and swigs from it before facing the first ball. I know we’ve got them. We will prevail.

  My young friend, the fourteen-year-old, plays brilliantly and lifts the score for his team. He obviously isn’t swigging wine like the rest of them. The language on the field gets pretty rough as the afternoon wears on. I come in for a lot of flak but I remain buoyant. In the end we win by just three runs. The three runs I got, I like to kid myself.

  After the match, the wives produce high tea under the shade of some nearby oak trees. There are cucumber sandwiches and cream cakes and tea or coffee, though most of the men have opted for cold beer. We have about an hour left to go home, shower and change then come back for the village fête. We book a table and gather up our picnic baskets.

  The evening is balmy and most of the cricket players have opted for staying and drinking beer under the oak trees rather than going home to clean up. They look a motley bunch as we take our seats at the long trestle tables for the meal to be served. It’s a well-organised event – unlike some fêtes where the food doesn’t appear until late in the evening, sometimes even midnight. We have good chicken soup with bread and an entrée of local wild boar terrine followed by spit-roasted lamb and potatoes with a chestnut sauce. There is cheese – my favourite fromage de chèvre (goat’s cheese) – and a rich apple tart for dessert. The wine flows steadily, although after the main course we are expected to pay for extra bottles – the tariff for the meal is about 15 euros and includes everything, but the French tend to stop drinking once the meal has finished. It’s the foreign holidaymakers who like to swill on into the night.

  The best part of the day is when a group of local women, all well into their seventies and eighties, perform a series of comedy sketches in the ancient regional language, Occitan, which is still spoken here but only by the older generation. It’s amusing to see the French in the audience, who are just as out of their depth as we are because they can’t follow the dialogue. Fortunately the sketches are very visual, almost slapstick, and everyone roars their approval.

  It’s days like this that remind me why I love it here so much. I only wish that a little of the pleasure of it might rub off on David.

  30

  In many ways a crisis in a marriage is a great way to shake things up. To open up wide-ranging discussion and to face some of the demons of our past life. When David and I talk about everything we have been through we have to be careful not to go over and over and over the same issues because eventually we’d find ourselves just talking in circles and getting nowhere. But our hope is that through all this pain a clearer picture has emerged of who we really are. There’s no time now for anything but total honesty, and some of our conversations are quite brutal as we confront each other and try to make a way ahead.

  David says he doesn’t recognise me any more. That I am simply not the woman he thought he was living with for all those years. He’s pretty straightforward in admitting that he preferred the old me. But that’s only natural. The old me was a known quantity. Steady, reliable, faithful, loyal and loving. The mother of his children. The grandmother of his grandchildren. His partner, both in business and in life.

  David has been forced to acknowledge some unpalatable home truths about himself and about our relationship. He looks back at the years when our children were growing up, when he was so often absent because of his career. He admits now that he was unaware of how unhappy I was with that situation. It’s partly my fault. I should have been more forceful and insistent. But David is a very stubborn man. Inflexible. Almost impossible to shift once he has determined that things have to be done in a certain way. Single-minded. Blinkered. Intractable.

  Not that I am without myriad faults. I am impulsive, impatient and wilful. A spendthrift who is irresponsibly generous when we can least afford it. I overcommit myself and I am constantly trying to accomplish more in a day than is humanly possible. I rush at things like a bull at a gate. I often don’t think things through clearly, preferring to leap into action rather than pause for reflection. If something is worrying me, I do my best to ignore it. Hope that it will simply go away. I hide bills I don’t want to pay and ‘forget’ to return phone calls if I know I have to let someone down. I become irrationally emotional about political and social injustice. I feel things too deeply and allow myself to be badly hurt by events that are out of my control. I don’t necessarily make that vital connection between cause and effect.

  David has therefore been a good balance for me. I try to help lighten him up and he tries to help rein me in a little. My flamboyance is tempered by his more staid perspective. His ability to manage finances has saved us from bankruptcy on more than one occasion. If left to me, we would be perpetually penniless. Opposites attract, or so they say. Perhaps that’s why we have remained together for so long.

  During our lengthy conversations I try to give him an understanding of just how much I have changed. Why I must have this time and space to sort out who I am and where I am going. As a way of further illustrating how the last few years have been just as harrowing for me as they have been for him, I tell him about the attack. The night the Englishman hid in the house and then tried to rape me.

  He sits in his chair and eyeballs me with a look of utter horror on his face. ‘Why didn’t you tell me about this before?’ he asks. ‘How could you not phone me when it happened? You told other people. You didn’t tell me. You didn’t tell me.’

  I lamely give my reasons.

  ‘I thought you would feel helpless being so far away. I didn’t want to worry
or upset you. I thought you’d think I was incapable of looking after myself. I thought it would be better if I just dealt with it myself and didn’t burden you.’

  ‘You didn’t tell me. You didn’t tell me.’

  Not one thing that has happened until now has disturbed David as much as this. Immediately I wish I hadn’t told him. He is distraught. Angry with me, really angry for the first time.

  ‘Don’t you see,’ he shouts at me. ‘This means you think so little of me and so little of our relationship that you didn’t even tell me that you had been viciously sexually assaulted. You hid from me something that was fundamental to the validity of our relationship. I can’t believe you didn’t tell me.’

  I suppose this means I just don’t understand men and the workings of their minds. I try to fathom why David has been so deeply upset by this latest revelation. Surely my infidelities have been more damaging to the trust in our relationship than the fact that I protected him from knowing something that would cause him pain.

  I seem to be making a total mess of my entire life. I have no one to blame but myself.

  Just when things between us are as bad as they could possibly be we get a phone call from Australia, from our son Ethan who normally doesn’t phone because of the cost. He and Lynne are living on a pretty tight budget. My first reaction is to imagine there’s a problem, perhaps with little Isabella, so I am immediately anxious. But Ethan sounds bright and bubbly and asks lots of questions about our friends and neighbours in the village, where they lived for six months when Lynne was pregnant. He then tells us the real reason for the call.