The Long Hot Summer

by Mary Moody

  At the television station at 7 a.m., make-up and hair in place, I sit quietly in the waiting room with Jane before being ushered into the studio for my interview. Jane senses how fragile I am. There is a monitor with the program we are doing playing live-to-air. Mel and Kochie with their usual humorous banter.

  Mel throws to the commercial break with the words: ‘After the break we’ll be talking about having an affair and getting away with it by someone who knows.’

  The words don’t seem to impinge on my numb brain, but Jane is on her feet in a flash, dashing out to find the producer of the show. Words are exchanged but it is too late to change the line of questioning. At least I am forewarned that it’s going to be a rocky ride. Like a lamb to the slaughter, they lead me to the sofa where the interview is about to start. I wonder how on earth I’m going to handle it.

  David Koch opens the interview brightly with a brief introduction. Then: ‘Well, Mary, you’ve just had an extra-marital affair. Would you recommend it?’

  Blam. Right between the eyes.

  ‘Don’t be mad,’ I respond, trying my best to look amused rather than amazed. ‘It was the most traumatic event of my life and I am still trying to deal with the repercussions.’

  I then steer the interview away from the affair by talking with great enthusiasm about other aspects of the book. The food in France. The farm at Bathurst. My grandchildren.

  It works. We end on a happy note and there are no more heart-lurching questions to field. As we leave the studio, I wonder if David has been watching me on the hotel television. Probably.

  Back at the hotel I finish packing and we say our goodbyes. He holds me closely and tells me that no matter what happens he will always love me. I ask him to think seriously about everything we have discussed. I tell him I am as worried about him and his future as I am about myself. And I mean it.

  ‘There is still so much about our relationship that is good,’ I say as I prepare to leave. ‘Too good to just throw away. Our lives are intertwined. We mustn’t unravel them. We must at least give our marriage one more try.’

  He says nothing and I leave for Perth.

  45

  The first few publicity events in Sydney – the interviews and the lunch – have prepared me for the sort of questions I am going to have to face on this tour. Jane has been very careful in selecting media reporters who will be positive, but we are both still worried that I will have to counter some tricky interrogation along the way. This was something that didn’t really occur to me when I was writing the book, but now I see that I have stirred up a bit of a hornet’s nest and I am going to have to deal with the consequences of my frankness.

  The literary event in Perth is a cocktail party rather than a dinner, with several hundred well-dressed women milling around sipping champagne and eating finger food when I arrive. The bar closes and the audience is ushered into a small auditorium. A couple of women have hijacked the last of the champagne and have the bottles hidden under their seats. They keep drinking while I give the talk, laughing more uproariously than the rest of the audience. Then it comes to question time.

  A few typical questions pertaining to French food and the progress of my language skills are asked. Then one of the closet champagne drinkers lurches to her feet.

  ‘Gidday Mary,’ she slurs slightly. ‘Loved both your books and I also saw the documentary on the ABC. What I reckon is that you should leave your husband. He’s boring. Go back to France and have another affair. Have lots of affairs. Good on you, Mary.’

  How do I handle this one? I try to make light of it without totally brushing her aside with: ‘Well, it’s not that easy really. I love my husband and I don’t want to leave him. I value him and our family too much to abandon them. And I might get bored if I was in France all the time. I will always have the desire to come home again.’

  If only they knew the truth.

  In between bookstore signings and literary events I give radio interviews constantly, sometimes in a studio and sometimes over the phone from the hotel room. Jane has organised a pretty hectic schedule so I don’t have much time to sit around dwelling on my problems. But in the evenings I phone David and from the first day he sounds different. More distant. Less receptive. Now that I am away from him, physically at a distance, he has regained his strength and his resolve. Whenever I mention the issue of us ‘trying again’, he says no. He’s made up his mind. He will live with me at the farm until February so that we can have our last Christmas together as a family, then he will go to meet up with the other woman.

  He keeps telling me I should go and live in France full-time. He says he wants to keep the farm for the family – in particular for our son Ethan, who has been establishing a native plant nursery on the property. I will be welcome, he says, to come and go as I please and to maintain my financial equity in it. But our marriage as such has ended. Full stop.

  This dialogue between us continues for the entire three weeks of the tour. As Jane and I zigzag across the country from Perth to Melbourne to Adelaide, back to Brisbane then various regional centres, David and I talk at least once a day. Often several times, because I keep phoning him to try a different angle. To put my case a different way. Sometimes I cry, sometimes I scream, sometimes I can barely speak because of my distress. And in between the calls I am putting on make-up and fixing my hair and dashing out to make appearances, often to hundreds and hundreds of women. I have never had to put on such a brave face and Jane is only too aware of the strain I am under. I can’t eat, for a start, because my throat constricts every time I try swallowing. I was already thin when I came back from France, now I am looking gaunt and haggard. I try to cover the dark circles with make-up and hope nobody notices that I am a cot case.

  By Adelaide I reach a state of despair. I lie awake one night for hours and decide, irrationally of course, that suicide is probably the only way out of this for me. I get dressed and go looking for the stairs in the hotel, hoping to get up onto the roof. There is no access. The management is obviously aware that sometimes guests have these desperate moments. I tell David how I am feeling and he is horrified. He calls Jane and asks her to watch me every minute of the day which, of course, she can’t do. But I realise she is monitoring me pretty closely.

  Each day gets more difficult. I am running on automatic pilot. Each time I stand up before an audience to give a talk, I wonder how I am going to get through it. But I do and Jane is always there to whisk me away at the end. To sit and have a late-night drink with me before we collapse into our beds. What a nightmare for her having to prop up this demented writer on tour. Worse than trying to control a drug-crazed rock and roll band. Her friends think she has a cushy life, travelling around the country and staying in plush hotels. If only they knew how difficult her job can be at times, dealing with loopy people. And I’m one of them.

  In Canberra I seriously spend time in my hotel room contemplating suicide in a more cool and calculated fashion. Instead of jumping off a building I will organise some tablets and do it properly so there can be no slip-ups. I will organise the legalities to protect our children. I don’t want the other woman getting hold of my children’s inheritance. Of course this demonstrates how totally irrational I am at the time. There’s no way David would allow anything that we had accrued together to go to another person. We had already covered all these possibilities years ago when we made our wills. But I am now seeing the other woman as the enemy and logic and common sense have nothing to do with my reasoning.

  That night, neither David nor I get any sleep. I phone him every half-hour, raving incoherently. He lies on our bed at the farm cradling the portable phone in his arms. He is relieved each time I call, no matter what the hour, just because he can hear I am alive.

  The last leg of the tour is back in Sydney. David has decided to come down and stay with me at the hotel to lend his support. He’s not doing a turnaround in terms of his stance on our marriage, he just wants to hold my hand for these last few days. He wil
l have to invent a story for the new woman about where he is staying and play the ‘mobile phone switched off in the hotel’ game again. I feel sorry for him caught between two women, both of whom he obviously loves and cares for. One waiting expectantly for him to launch into a new and exciting relationship; one desperately clinging to him and slipping further and further into a state of insanity.

  In Sydney we embrace and David immediately senses my extreme physical and mental frailty. He is very concerned. I have always been the strong one, the doer, the one with endless energy and stamina. Now I am thin and pale and trembling. He makes love to me and I try to pretend that everything is okay. Just like it used to be before all this happened. It’s a fantasy in my head, because I know it isn’t going to change anything. It’s all hopeless.

  The next day I have a library talk on the North Shore and we are delighted that some very dear friends have turned up unexpectedly. Two women who were neighbours and close friends when we lived in the Blue Mountains, and also Bob Huber, who was a close colleague of David’s from his days working in television. The talk goes well and afterwards we spontaneously join David’s old friend Bob for lunch. We have been friends for thirty years and even though we don’t see him very often, it’s the sort of friendship that picks up exactly where it left off. We chatter and gossip about our children and grandchildren, comparing photographs and funny anecdotes. It’s just so warm and familiar and comfortable, and as we sit around the restaurant table I am swamped by the realisation that none of these old relationships will ever be the same again. Here is a friend who has known us as a couple since I was twenty-one, and soon David will have a new partner and the continuity will be broken. Severed. Not that Bob won’t still be my friend, of course he will. But there will be an essential shift and I can’t help but think of all our friends and extended family members who will be affected in the same way. It just seems too terrible for words.

  I sit in silence as we drive back to the hotel. I am feeling angry again. Angry with myself for creating the problem in the first place and angry with David for his part in it. As he drops off the car out the front of the hotel for parking, I take off on foot. Running through the city like a madwoman. I find a corner pub and order a double gin and tonic. I find the darkest corner and sit in it. Fifteen minutes pass and I order another one. Suddenly I see David approaching. He has tracked me down. Unwisely we have a couple more drinks – I haven’t been eating properly for weeks and the alcohol affects me much more intensely than usual. David steadies me as we walk back to the hotel. My mind drifts back to Adelaide a week ago when I was on tour. I had a get-together with two female friends who know us both quite well. I poured my heart out to them about our predicament. They listened and expressed great concern. Then one of them said something which at the time seemed a bit outrageous. But now, in my alcohol-dazed state of mind, it seems to make a lot of sense.

  ‘Perhaps what David wants is for you to drag him back from the clutches of this other woman. Like a cavewoman. Club him over the head to knock sense into him and drag him back.’

  When we get back to the hotel room, I fly at David in an uncontrolled rage. I whack him around the head a few times then pull back. I pick up various objects and throw them at him. He’s ducking and weaving and trying his best to reason with me. I am, however, completely out of control.

  What is happening here? I am re-enacting a thousand domestic brawls I witnessed as a child. My parents at war. Eternally. My mother flying at my father. Scratching at his face and throwing whisky glasses and bottles at him. The only difference is the response. David is totally passive and just defends himself from my wild attack. By this stage my father would have knocked my mother to the floor. She’d have had a black eye, or worse. She may even have been unconscious.

  So it has come to this. The final degradation. For my entire adult life I have been non-violent. I have rarely smacked a child on the bottom for bad behaviour. I have always been slow to anger. Tolerant. Docile. Conciliatory. Non-confrontational.

  Now here I am like a whirling dervish, attacking David from every angle. Trying to injure him. To knock him down. To bite him and scratch him and maybe even kill him.

  Crimes of passion. How most people in our society are murdered. Not by strangers but by those who once loved them.

  For the first time ever in my life I truly understand.

  I was brought up by parents who were both communists and atheists. I was banned from Sunday school and never crossed the threshold of a church except for a family wedding or funeral. My parents were obsessed by social justice and issues such as human rights. These were the main topics of discussion around our dinner table and if religion, especially Christianity, was mentioned it was usually in a disparaging or negative fashion.

  Yet despite her atheism my mother Muriel constantly quoted from the Bible in her everyday conversations, so that although I was never allowed to read ‘the good book’ I am thoroughly aware of its basic teachings. My parents, in their behaviour towards each other, certainly didn’t set a very good example for their children but intellectually the lessons were always there. ‘As ye sow, so shall ye reap’ was one of my mother’s favourites, along with ‘Do unto others what you would have them do unto you’ and ‘Pride comes before a fall’.

  These basic precepts have stayed with me all my life and certainly affected the way I brought up my own children. I didn’t preach at my children, instead believing that leading by example is the most effective method of parenting. I believe that I demonstrated the importance of kindness and compassion, of love for humanity and of the joys of sharing. I have a firm conviction that the sense of values instilled in a child from birth will stay with them into their adult life. Not if they have been beaten over the head with theories of goodness, but if the theories have been practised as an integral part of their everyday life.

  Now my mother’s words come back to haunt me. Having believed I was always a kind and compassionate person, I now see myself in a totally different light. And the reason is simple. Instead of putting the welfare and happiness of others in front of my own, I have made a grab for putting my own needs first. I have acted out of self-interest and self-love, and the result of this is laid out before me like a tableau.

  It’s a complex question. Many would say that I have every right to nurture – or even indulge – myself at this stage of my life. My children have grown up and are successfully independent. They don’t really need me the way they did as children. I have worked hard, paid my way and been a ‘good’ wife and partner to my husband. Loyal and loving and supportive. Well, at least until three years ago.

  Others might say that I am getting exactly what I deserve. By wilfully following my own path regardless of the feelings of others, I have lost the right to expect the love and loyalty of my husband any more. Having felt betrayed and rejected, devalued and renounced, he has every right to follow his heart in a new direction.

  On reflection, I should have made some difficult decisions in my life several years ago. Intending as I was to launch into an extra-marital affair, I should have made a decision one way or the other. Leave David and go to my lover, knowing full well that the affair would have to end and I would be alone. Or deny my desires and remain faithful to my husband. I should never have imagined that I could have it both ways. That it was possible for me to tip-toe off to France for illicit sex while David unhappily sat back at the farm waiting for me.

  I’m sure there is a passage in the Bible that explains all this, but I don’t believe it would have helped me to read it. I was hell-bent on doing the things I wanted to do for my own hedonistic reasons. But doing so hasn’t made me happy. On the contrary, I have never been so unhappy in all my life. I am undone. Confused and thoroughly miserable. A lost soul, some would say.

  46

  The book tour has finally finished and David is driving us back to the farm. We haven’t discussed my violent outburst of the night before, but we are shaken and subdued. The accumulati
on of stress, exhaustion from all the travelling and speaking events, the emotional turmoil and the physical effects of not eating properly and drinking to excess have caught up with me. I dare not look in the mirror – not just because I’m having trouble facing myself but because I know I will be alarmed at my deterioration. I just need time to collapse and sleep and eat some home-cooked food and dry out a little. I just need life to be normal for a little while so I can regain my strength for the unhappy times ahead.

  When I think about it, my life has been on a razor’s edge for most of the year. The lead-up to leaving Australia with a film crew hot on my heels, the difficult time in France, David’s discovery of the second affair, his decision to end our marriage, my return to Australia and subsequent discovery of the new woman and then the frenetic book tour. It’s no wonder I feel shattered.

  We somehow settle into a familiar routine together. He does his calls and paperwork in the morning, then goes into Bathurst to the gym and I stay at home and write and cook and garden. He does the shopping, I do the cooking, and he does the clearing up. We sleep together and hold each other close even though we know it won’t be like this for long. After a few days we start to talk again about the bigger issues. I am determined not to get angry or to escalate our conversations into arguments. We must talk it through calmly and rationally. The time for fighting has finished.

  I put my case to David very plainly.

  ‘This is how I see it. We have been together for thirty-three years. We love each other and there are still many aspects of our relationship that are worthwhile. Worth hanging on to. We have created, in our time together, a fantastic family. If we split, the family unit will never be the same again. Our children and grandchildren will still love us and we will love them, but the unity will have been destroyed. Then we have our wider family and all our friends, with ties and connections going back three decades and more. Those relationships will never be quite the same again either. Financially, of course, we will both be worse off if our assets are divided. The quality of life that we have worked so hard to create will be severely diminished.