The Long Hot Summer

by Mary Moody

Why am I so shocked by what has just happened? Surely this is what I should have expected. Should have known would happen. It is the logical outcome of the situation I created. It is what I deserve, given my outrageous behaviour and reckless disregard for David and for our marriage. I am getting my comeuppance. My just desserts. How could I have imagined that David would just sit quietly on the sidelines and wait for me to get my wild sexual urges out of my system? How could I have ignored the fact that he had been devastated and humiliated about every aspect of the last three years? The affairs. The book. The documentary. I have been selfish and self-centred and arrogant. So arrogant that I took for granted that David would not ever be interested in another woman. That any other woman would fall in love with him.

  I have been a fool. And now I am to pay the price.

  39

  In the car on the way back from Orange we have the most terrible fight we have ever had in our lives together. We’ve had some pretty passionate rows over the years, but nothing to touch this. To this day I can’t remember exactly what is said or what sparked his outburst, but it is terrifying in its intensity. I have no idea how David doesn’t crash the car or have a heart attack. For the first time ever he expresses his anger about what has happened. A part of him now hates me so vehemently that I am convinced he could kill me, he feels it so deeply. His words are like a thousand knives cutting into my flesh and they go on and on for miles and miles as he drives. Slicing through me.

  He wants me to leave. Now. Pack my bags immediately and get out. Go. He wants never to see me again. So many things have driven him to this point of fury. Not just the two affairs but the fact that I didn’t tell him about being attacked by the Englishman. That I have had unprotected sex with my two lovers and therefore put not just myself but also him at risk of catching a sexually transmitted disease. That I have seemed oblivious to his pain. That I have ignored his heartfelt letters. He goes on and on and calls me names so terrible that I could never ever repeat them.

  When the car pulls into the farm shed I turn and grab hold of him. We are both shaking and crying. I just hold him and hold him and say I can’t go now. I will go, but not now. I can’t leave him in this terrible state. I am frightened for him. I am frightened for both of us. I cling to him and slowly he starts to calm down. To breathe more normally. We have passed through the eye of the storm and are now on the other side.

  It’s getting late. I prepare a simple meal with the little energy I can muster and we shadow each other, barely speaking. Going through the motions. Trying to regain a little normality. After dinner and a few glasses of wine, we start to unwind a little more. I light the fire in the sitting room and we sit together. He tells me that he has phoned his woman friend in South Africa to tell her that he has told me the full story. They had apparently agreed that they would keep their developing relationship to themselves until after we had formally separated or divorced. They wanted it considered as a separate issue to our marriage breakdown. From David’s perspective they are two entirely different events and not connected in any way.

  After the shattering events of this afternoon, I am consumed by a desire for closeness to David. As if some tenderness between us will somehow help expunge the horror of our fight. I move close to him on the sofa and put my arms around him. We kiss and speak softly, both apologising for the terrible scene, for the hatred and the anger and the bitter words. I desperately want to make love. Not to reclaim David from the arms of his new lover but for my own comfort. A balm to smooth away some of the pain. David draws back and says it’s now impossible for him to make love to me. That he can never make love to me again. He has promised his new woman that there will be no intimacy between us. He is saving his love for her.

  David was my first true lover. Although I had a serious teenage boyfriend whom I loved deeply for three years before I met David, it was an immature relationship. Certainly it was less than satisfactory sexually, although I didn’t realise it at the time. When you haven’t had an orgasm you don’t know what one feels like. You don’t realise what you are missing out on.

  David was eleven years older than me and had been through a ten-year marriage and many lovers. His maturity and experience were a revelation to me and I was totally engulfed by the joy of sex for the first time. The first few years we were together we made love every single day, sometimes more than once. It was an intense intimacy the like of which I had never experienced. In every sense David introduced me to the ways of love. His tenderness released me from inhibition and his passion freed me from the fears I had about my own sexual inadequacies. I had low self-esteem and a negative body image. David made me feel beautiful and desirable for the very first time.

  Throughout our lives together our sexual bond remained strong. Through lengthy separations when David was away working. Through pregnancies, births and breast-feeding. Through the trials and tribulations of raising four children from toddlerhood to adulthood while managing two demanding careers. We certainly didn’t make love every day as we had once when young and first in love, but the passion still remained. I took it for granted. I suppose he took it for granted too.

  Now David is planning to take his passion to another woman. He doesn’t want me any more. Not sexually and not emotionally. I have destroyed his feeling for me and thereby have lost the most significant person in my life.

  40

  I wake with a start at two in the morning and the events of the preceding day come flooding back to me. I lie rigidly in the bed sorting through the sequence of events. The drive to Orange. David’s confession about his new relationship. My emotions in the doctor’s surgery. The terrible fight in the car. The dinner. My attempted seduction, his rejection of me and his promise of fidelity to the new woman.

  Somehow during my short sleep a very different emotion has taken hold. Gone is the sadness, the pain, the guilt, the remorse, the regret. I am seized by an anger so intense that I can barely lie still. I am furious. I am incensed. I am outraged. How could David do this to me? How could he leave me for another woman? How could he stop loving me, just like that, and go off into the sunset with somebody else? How could he?

  Now this is where I find it difficult to justify my response to the situation in which I find myself. Common sense dictates that David is just behaving the way any normal person would under the circumstances. His wife has been unfaithful to him not with one man but with two. His wife has disregarded his pain for three years and has behaved in a wilful and selfish manner. His wife has done nothing but point out his flaws and his shortcomings and has attempted to blame him for her philandering. His wife has written a book in which she has described him as an absent father and a husband who didn’t satisfy her emotional needs. His wife has dumped on him big time. And now he has the opportunity for a new life with a new love and he’s going for it. Who could blame him and what right has she to be angry about it?

  But angry I am. Wild with rage. I lie awake for the rest of the night, seething. We have to catch an early flight to Sydney from Bathurst, because my book tour is about to begin. The first event on the itinerary is the Brisbane Writers’ Festival; David has meetings with various film partners in Queensland and has booked a flight to travel with me. He will stay for the duration of the festival then come back to Sydney with me for the major event of the tour, a literary lunch at the Sheraton Hotel. I will then travel accompanied by the Pan Macmillan publicist, Jane Novak, to Perth. All up the tour will last for more than three weeks and the schedule she has emailed me is gruelling.

  I wonder how I am going to cope with it all. I have to make speeches, dozens of them, to large groups and I have to look glamorous and appear confident and upbeat. On top of my life. But David is leaving me, my life is in tatters and I am completely demented. The timing couldn’t be worse.

  I get up before dawn and finishing packing my suitcase. In anticipation of the tour I have been shopping in France and have brought out some new clothes and shoes. It’s strange for me to spend a lot of mon
ey on clothes. Shoes in particular. My entire adult life I have bought one new pair of shoes a year and worn them until they have fallen apart. In one shopping spree in Cahors I bought seven pairs of shoes, from sexy sandals to stilettos. I can barely fit them all in the suitcase.

  Before David has even emerged from the spare room, I have dressed, applied my make-up and put my bags in my car. In my rage I have also hidden his partial denture. David played rugby and boxed in his youth and his front teeth have broken off. Without the denture he has great gaps in his mouth and in my irrational state I hide the teeth so that he will have to travel to Brisbane and attend all his meetings without them. At the time it seems like a great idea.

  As he comes out to make the coffee and tea I head for the back door.

  ‘What are you doing?’ he asks, rubbing his eyes. ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘I am going to Bathurst to wait for the plane. See you at the airport.’

  ‘But we’re not due there for two hours or more. Are you mad or something?’

  I let him have it with both barrels. Mad isn’t the word. Without raising my voice, but through tightly clenched teeth, I explain why I am so angry.

  ‘For the past three years we have both been through hell. I have struggled with myself because, even though I fell in love with another man, I was determined to hang on to our marriage. I couldn’t leave you. I wouldn’t leave you no matter what. Even during the second affair I always intended to stay married to you. I was hoping you would never find out, but you did. And I don’t blame you for being hurt and angry and bitter.

  ‘What I am trying to say is that in spite of everything that happened, I always wanted to hang on to our marriage. I could never, ever have just left you.’

  At this moment he speaks over me. Sharply. ‘Well you could have fooled me. I thought the reason for the affairs was that you wanted to end the marriage. That you had the affairs in order to end the marriage. That you just didn’t have the guts to come out and say it.’

  ‘Not true,’ I counter. ‘And after all we’ve been through you are now going to walk out and leave me for someone you barely know. Someone you spent time with over a period of five days. Five days! You don’t know this woman. You don’t really know anything about her. But you are prepared to throw away our thirty-three-year relationship for someone who kissed you in a car and said she loved you. I’m not the one who is mad. It’s you.’

  I dash out the door and head for Bathurst, leaving David standing like a stunned mullet in the kitchen dressed in his checked nightshirt. When we went to bed last night, we had been warm and affectionate with each other. We had a late-night hug and apologised yet again for our ghastly fight. Now this morning he has been confronted by a raging virago. A woman obviously not in control of her senses. And it’s me.

  41

  I arrive on Miriam and Rick’s doorstep in Bathurst at 7.15 a.m. I have never dropped in unannounced at this time of day before but they welcome me in and make a fresh pot of tea. I am pacing the floor and telling Miriam how angry I am with her father, and why I am so angry. She doesn’t proffer an opinion one way or the other but laughs in amazement when I tell her I have hidden his teeth. She gives me an odd look, as though she thinks I’ve lost my marbles.

  The phone rings and it’s David. Rick looks at me but I indicate that I don’t want to talk, so he acts dumb. David tells him that I have gone mad and that he can’t find his teeth. He tells Rick he believes I have done something with them.

  ‘If she turns up,’ he says, ‘get her to call me straight away.’

  The little boys are starting to come out of their bedrooms and look a bit surprised to see me all dressed up and made-up in their kitchen so early in the morning. I think perhaps I should leave them in peace. It isn’t fair to involve them in our messy problem. So I give them all hugs and kisses and promise to call from every city I visit to keep them up to date with what I am doing.

  There’s enough time to drive back to the farm. It’s better if we travel to the airport in one car, so I allow common sense to override my temporary insanity. I drive home, tell David where his teeth have been stashed and we drive back together to the airport. He tries talking with me, reasoning with me, but I am still too angry to speak. I have never experienced high blood pressure but I think I must be having it now. My eyes feel like they are about to pop out of my head. My muscles feel taut and tense and my skin is pressing in on me, holding me together. Barely.

  The two flights from Bathurst to Brisbane are a blur. We must have checked in and been issued boarding passes and passed through security but I have no recollection of any of it. We don’t sit together on the planes and we nearly miss each other at the other end, even though we are meant to be travelling together. David has quickly phoned a friend on his mobile to see if he can stay with him for the three nights of our visit rather than at the hotel where we have been booked by the organisers of the festival. I have made it perfectly clear that I don’t want him anywhere near me. At the baggage carousel I see him waiting for his bag. He is talking on his mobile again, confirming his meeting. I walk over to speak to him and as I approach I suddenly go blank. My knees buckle and I fall in a heap on the floor. My blackout must have only been momentary but it is enough to give us both a big fright.

  David hails a taxi to get me to the hotel and just as it pulls out from the kerb I tell the driver to stop and beg David to stay with me tonight because I am feeling so shaken by what has just happened. How can I get up and perform on a stage in front of a large audience when I can barely put one foot in front the other? I have never felt more vulnerable and frightened.

  I lie on the bed and manage to sleep for several hours in the afternoon while David goes to his first meeting. We have been left a message at reception asking us to meet with the publicist, Jane, and some of the other authors for dinner. I somehow have to pull myself together to get through the next few weeks. If I am a total cot case on day one, I can’t imagine how I am going to be by the end of the tour.

  David is more tender and concerned than I could have imagined, given my behaviour of this morning. He has never seen me in such a state and it has obviously caused him grave concern. We don’t talk any more about our situation and he helps me get myself together in time for the dinner. Anyone who didn’t know me probably wouldn’t pick up on the fact that I am in such a bad way that first night. I am just a little quieter and more thoughtful than usual. More subdued. I manage to find a moment to mumble to Jane that David and I are going through a very rocky time. I think I should warn her in case things take a turn for the worse.

  In retrospect it was a wise move, alerting her to my fragility, because over the next few weeks as we tour from one side of the country to the other Jane is my rock. The only person really who keeps me going.

  42

  So here we are in a hotel room in Brisbane in bed together again. Clinging to each other as we fall into a sleep of nervous and physical exhaustion. In the middle of the night I wake up and find myself with my arms wrapped warmly around my husband. My old lover. The man I would certainly have shot through the forehead this morning if I had been unfortunate enough to own a gun. I run my hand down his chest, over his belly and into his groin. He stirs. I know exactly what I am doing. I am seducing him and it feels very strange that after all these years I need to convince him that he should make love to me. But he doesn’t seem to need much convincing. It’s what he told me he was afraid of. That if we were together again, if we fell back into intimacy, he would be incapable of resisting. Sex is a great way to relieve tension, to bring about a feeling of wellbeing. But this is much, much more than that for me. It is like a valve being opened on a pressure cooker. As though all the build-up of emotions over the last few days – not to mention weeks, and months and years – have suddenly been released. I cry with the sheer absolution of it. Surely this must mean we are okay. There is hope. We can go on. Surely we are destined to stay together.

  We both sleep well after
wards but in the morning the tide has turned. David is now angry both with me and himself. Very angry. I have made him break his promise to the new woman in his life. She doesn’t realise he is staying here at the hotel with me, she thinks he is staying with friends. Now not only has he lied to her about his whereabouts, he has made love to me. He is distraught.

  ‘I know you say I don’t know this woman, but I know a lot more than you think. We have talked on the phone every day since she left and we know a lot about each other. She is a lovely person and I care about her a lot. I would rather die than hurt her. I will not hurt her.’

  I have to appear on a panel later in the morning with several other authors and I beg him to calm down so I can get on with what is expected of me. I fear that if our discussion escalates into another furious row, I will be incapable of continuing. He has more film meetings so we go our separate ways. Over morning tea I fill Jane in on what’s been happening then go on to the panel session, which is a lot of fun and very well received. Perhaps the pressure of the tour will be good for me. Take my mind off things and give me an alternative focus. I hope so.

  David and I stop talking about our troubles and just try our best to enjoy being part of the festival. There are interesting sessions to attend and a range of social events that are an ideal distraction. I meet his film colleagues and he meets up with lots of the other authors. Festivals are always fun, and we throw ourselves into this one with great enthusiasm. We also make love whenever we are alone together. Like we did when we first fell in love all those decades ago. The threat of his leaving me for another woman has made me desire him more than I have for years. And for him, I sense, it’s as though it’s our last opportunity to demonstrate to each other our old but somehow enduring love. As though we are offering comfort to each other in time of extreme pain and stress.