The Long Hot Summer

by Mary Moody

  ‘Go,’ I say to her. ‘Throw the boys in the car and we’ll pay for a motel until you find a place to live. Just get yourselves down there and we’ll look after the rest. Rick can stay until you find a place, then he and I will pack everything up and send it across to you. He can follow.’

  So that’s exactly what happened. Miriam bravely drove with the four boys across the Hay Plains, car packed to the gunnels. They had been to Adelaide briefly the previous year to check it out, so she had already found a good caravan park near the beach with comfortable air-conditioned cabins. It was a two-day drive and they were all totally exhausted when they finally limped into the caravan park. The boys were in holiday mood, being so near the beach, but for Miriam it was anything but a relaxing period. She spent weeks dashing from one real estate agent to another looking for a house to rent. It was almost impossible to find a suitable house within their limited budget that was also big enough for a family of six. Then there were the animals – two cats and two dogs. The agents all shook their heads.

  Her phone calls home became increasingly more frantic.

  ‘Don’t worry, don’t worry,’ I reassured her. ‘We’ll keep the cats here at the farm with us and find a home for Lippy [the larger of the dogs]. Surely you’ll be allowed to keep Ulysses; he’s such a cute little dog.’

  So she went back to the agencies and eventually found a place that would allow one pet only. She enrolled the three older boys in a local school and managed to get a part-time place for Gus at the university child care centre. Rick and I packed up the Bathurst house and ordered a removalist van. For the last week he stayed alone at the house, camping on a single bed mattress, until news came through that his work had managed to organise a transfer. Such a huge relief. He packed Ulysses and their last few possessions in the second car and headed south, leaving a large gap in our lives.

  50

  It’s now more than a year since David and I made our decision to stay together. It’s been a rocky fifteen months but we have somehow survived and most of the time things seem to be okay. We have both made compromises and have talked and talked about the past, about the present and about the future. In some ways this massive shake-up has been good for our relationship. We have had to take a step back and examine ourselves and each other more vigorously than many people do in their entire lives. We have learned a lot about each other and a lot about ourselves. We have laughed and cried and continued to argue at times, but mostly in a constructive rather than in a destructive or negative manner.

  There are still stumbling blocks and things that worry both of us. For me it is the fear that David will never really be able to forgive me for what happened over those three summers in France. Inevitably, whenever we argue, my love affairs somehow become part of the conversation. Every time David is moved to anger – no matter what the issue may be – the subject of my infidelity crops up and at those moments my heart sinks. Is it always going to be there like a dark shadow lurking in the background of our lives? No matter how much we move on, we can’t seem to shake it off. During one long-distance phone conversation, when we are both getting upset about a communication problem, he suddenly says, ‘How do you expect me to feel? You broke my heart.’

  I know I did and I fear he may never recover.

  On the other hand, David’s worry is that I am bored with our relationship. Even though he knows I love him, he is also aware that I crave more excitement in my life than he does. There is an element of truth in this, of course, and it’s a common problem in long-term relationships. I spent three decades of my life holding the fort at home while he had an exciting and adventurous career as a filmmaker. Now he is happy to spend a lot more time at home and I am raring to get up and go.

  Because these personal issues are always on my mind, I listen intently to television and radio programs that touch on any issues concerning relationships. I also read extensively on the subject, groping for a better understanding. On an English science program, the physical manifestations of sexual attraction are pinpointed. After extensive study and testing they have discovered that when humans feel sexual attraction to another person endorphins are released, just as they are when people exercise vigorously. It’s a ‘feel good’ sensation and it’s also highly addictive, which explains why humans just love to fall in love. It’s such an exciting feeling. When I make love to David, it is more deeply sexually satisfying than with either of my lovers, so he finds it difficult to understand why I would therefore be unfaithful to him. All I can say is that it must be the excitement factor. The tingling thrill of a new relationship. And I have learned, the hard way, that the downside is more painful than the tingling thrill is worth.

  On the car radio one day I hear an interview with a so-called ‘expert’ on family relationships who has been compiling statistics on modern marriages. According to his findings, people of my generation – the baby boomers – have three major life partnerships. Three long-term relationships or marriages. The first occurs in late teens or early twenties. First love. It’s a carefree, fun relationship that involves a lot of partying and travelling and good times. In our late twenties or early thirties, the second relationship takes over. It’s a more serious and settled partnership in which the couple set up home and possibly start a family. It lasts for fifteen to twenty years. The third relationship occurs in our forties or fifties, and the partner chosen is a soul mate. A relationship based on shared passions and perspectives. Sex is less important, according to the statistics, than mutual interests.

  In essence the expert is saying that we no longer expect to have a life-long partner. We aspire to three satisfying relationships that are successful at various times of our lives according to our needs and our expectations. First playmate, next housemate, finally soul mate. I’m not convinced we can parcel our lives up into such tidy, well-thought-out packages. That we can throw over one partner because the time has come to move on. That we can cut and run because we have outgrown our earlier relationships. If it was that easy we would all be statistics.

  Another friend, a professional marriage guidance counsellor, tells me that the number of women leaving their husbands after twenty-five or thirty years of marriage is rapidly on the increase. Just when relationships should be reaching that comfortable, easy stage they are falling apart. Women are initiating the change, not men. I listen and understand how these situations can so easily happen. It’s quite frightening. When David says he no longer recognises me as the same woman he has lived with for more than thirty years, I totally understand. I don’t feel like the same woman, and in many ways I am simply not her any more. I have spent a lot of time agonising about it and trying to understand myself and who I have become. Trying to understand how all this happened to me, and why I reacted in the way that I did.

  To be honest, a lot of it I don’t understand. I can only assume that for the past four years I have been on some sort of journey, spiritual as much as physical and emotional. It’s a side of myself that I normally deny – that I could possibly have a ‘spiritual’ aspect to my personality. But I must acknowledge that I’ve been searching for something, trying to find myself and gain some insight along the way. My whole adult life has been filled with people and responsibilities – my husband, my children, my mother, my career, my grandchildren. I ran away from all of that because I wanted time to myself. To be alone. But I did not achieve that goal – in fact I ended up crowding my life with even more people and responsibilities, and in doing so created confusion, conflict and contradiction.

  On one level, I realise that I probably did want to end my relationship with David and just be my own person. Live independently, travel as I choose and make all my own decisions. But when it came to the crunch, when I pushed my relationship with him to the brink and he was poised to leave me, I relented. I panicked. I was terrified of abandonment and, ultimately, of being alone. He thinks I only wanted to stay with him because of my desperate desire to hold together our wonderful family unit. That is part of
it, of course, but by no means is it the whole story. I obviously have a tremendous need for David in my life – a dependency – and this need probably goes back to my difficult childhood. A fear of abandonment. A little girl lost. Who knows? It would probably take years of therapy or analysis to figure it all out and make some sense of it.

  All I do know is that I want to feel comfortable with myself again. To feel content and at peace. And I haven’t reached that stage, no matter how hard I have tried. No matter how hard we have both tried.

  David and I still have many obstacles to overcome, the main one being the house in the village in France. During the period I was convincing David that we shouldn’t separate, the question of the house came up as a major sticking point. David was adamant he has no desire to ever visit the house or the village again because what happened there has spoiled that region of France for him for ever. At that difficult stage I was prepared to do anything, even sell the house, to keep us together. I made the point that our marriage was more important than a house. Which of course it is.

  But when I returned in April 2004 to lead another walking tour, I was filled with regret at the thought of leaving this place forever. Indeed we both reneged on words spoken during that tumultuous period. Although David insisted he could never return, he did in fact join me in Frayssinet in late May after the Cannes Film Festival. Just as he had done the year before. The summer of the devastating heatwave. This time I hoped he might start to feel better about this place. It was a vain hope.

  Something happens to me when I turn the big brass key in the old mortice lock and swing open the door into the main room of that little house. It feels as though something in the walls envelops me and makes me at one with it, part of a continuum of people who have lived under this old roof for centuries. I have no idea what comes over me when I arrive but I know I will feel tremendous loss if I have to leave and never return. In many respects the house symbolises a stage of my life that was very important to me. My moment of freedom and escape. My taste of recklessness and irresponsibility. My experiment at dipping a toe into another culture and finding myself feeling totally at home in a foreign land.

  Momentous for me. Totally destructive for David.

  At least that year we had a positive reason to be together at the house. After the walking tour we spent the entire month of June filming a documentary for SBS television about the one-hundredth anniversary of Madame Murat’s restaurant. I have loved this establishment since I first came to France four years ago, and last year I discovered that they were planning a big party to celebrate the fact that the restaurant has been in the same family for a century. Five generations of women have owned and operated what is essentially a simple country kitchen that caters mainly to working men – construction and road workers, the men from the local quarry and veal farm, the truck drivers and local tradesmen. Having made friends with Jeanette (Madame Murat) and her daughter Sylvie, who are the current proprietors, I thought it would make an inspirational film, showing a slice of traditional life that is rapidly disappearing all over the French countryside. So I spent some time researching the idea with the Murat family, looking back at their old photographs and archives and studying the cuisine from when the restaurant first opened in 1904.

  I had high hopes that making the film together would be such a positive experience it might help David overcome his aversion to the place. I believed if we could work together closely with a common goal – to make the best possible film about something we both felt strongly committed to – it would not only be good for our relationship, it might just help make David feel he could regard the house as ‘his’ again.

  Sadly, it was not to be. While we were making the film we were certainly united in our passion for the project and it was a great experience. But the moment it ended and we packed up the house to come back to Australia, David made it quite clear that this would be his last visit. That he had only come to help with the film and felt no differently about the place than he had the previous year. For him it has been a place of such pain and sadness that he simply doesn’t want to relive it year after year. The house, in fact, has become the symbol of our troubled marriage and it comes between us like a wedge. I am irresistibly drawn to it and he is overwhelmingly repelled by it, and until we resolve the issue of whether we should keep the house or sell it our marriage will remain shaky.

  So we have reached an impasse. My yearning for the house in the village and the freedom to spend some time there alone each year now seems to be an impossible dream. I acknowledge that the situation is of my own making but it doesn’t make it any easier to resolve. Running away from the scene of the crime won’t solve the original problem, either. The problem of David and me rebuilding our marriage and our relationship. Even if we found a house in another part of France we would be taking our problem with us, not leaving it behind in Frayssinet.

  51

  Lynne’s pregnancy this time around is totally different from the one she experienced when carrying Isabella. Although slightly nauseous during the first few weeks, she has been feeling strong and healthy and has also been gaining a good amount of weight. With Isabella her belly remained very small and neat right until the end. This time, four months before she is due, her tummy is much larger than she was when full-term last time round. It’s very encouraging.

  During the pregnancy Lynne has had all the usual tests but she and Ethan have decided to avoid any invasive testing to determine if this new baby has a genetic problem. Apart from the fact that there is an element of risk attached to all these tests – a chance of miscarriage – their attitude is that they will be proceeding with the pregnancy no matter what the outcome. So there is no point testing for abnormalities if there is no plan to consider a termination should the new baby have any problems. They are also keen for the sex of the baby to be a surprise. They are very clear about their decision and are upset several times when the genetic counsellors try to pressure them into having precautionary tests done. They stick to their guns, however, and also decide to have a homebirth this time, much to the surprise and dismay of various doctors who are caring for Isabella.

  Miriam was Lynne and Ethan’s supporter when Isabella was born in the local hospital, but now she is living in Adelaide she won’t be around to help. So they ask if I will come along and help, and I am absolutely thrilled. I have been at the births of Miriam’s four boys, but I have never had an expectation that my daughters-in-law would want me to be around while they were in labour. It will be an amazing experience.

  Towards the end of her pregnancy, Lynne is huge and her belly looks hilariously out of proportion to her tiny, thin-hipped body. We look back at photographs taken just before Isabella was born and we can’t help but laugh. This time she looks twice the size and her tummy skin is stretched tight like a drum around the active lump that is the unborn child. I go with her for an ante-natal visit to meet the midwife, who is Dutch, very practical and down-to-earth. We establish a good rapport and talk about various options for the birth. Lynne likes the idea of spending time in the bath during labour. She has also asked her sister Bronwyn to come and help. The plan is for Lynne’s mother to come and pick up Isabella immediately Lynne goes into labour, so that Lynne can totally relax and focus on the birth. If Isabella is in the house, especially if she gets grizzly or unhappy, Lynne will be concerned and distracted. I think it’s an excellent idea.

  In the weeks leading up to the due date, Lynne goes in and out of labour several times. I drive back and forth between the farm and Katoomba and also stay over several nights because Lynne feels certain the birth is imminent. But every time it looks as though she’s about to pop, it all fades away.

  When I stay overnight I share a room with Isabella and tend to her night-time needs. She is hooked up to a pump that delivers formula directly into her belly every two hours. The pump releases formula continuously at a slow rate overnight, but gases build up in her stomach as the food is digested. While I do know a little about the
complexities of Isabella’s care regime, it isn’t until I am looking after her myself that I appreciate just how demanding it is for Ethan and Lynne. I need to set my alarm to wake up twice during the night so I can ‘de-gas’ her little tummy. It involves disconnecting the pump, closing off the tubes then lowering the belly tube so that excess gas can escape from inside her tummy. The whole system then has to be flushed with sterile water and reconnected. Needless to say it can’t be done while half asleep. I have to wake myself up totally so that I can pay attention to what I am doing. It’s quite exhausting. Then before dawn I have to wake up again and give Isabella a suppository because otherwise her bowels won’t work and, again, she will be in pain and distress. My admiration for my son and his young partner soars as I fully comprehend the breadth of their responsibilities.

  When Lynne reaches seven days overdue, the midwife comes for a meeting at their little house. All the indications are that she is ripe and ready to go but something is stopping the process. We are all aware that there will be a certain level of fear around this birth. Even though the doctor and the midwife are confident the unborn child is perfectly normal and healthy, it’s not unusual for women who have had a problem with a previous birth to become ‘blocked’. The apprehension affects nature’s ability to trigger the labour.

  It’s a positive session and we talk honestly and openly. One of the best aspects of having a homebirth is the relationship that develops between the mother and the midwife that then spills over to the whole family, the father and the birth supporters. It is just so much more personal and intimate than having a baby in a hospital with whoever happens to be on duty at the time. Lynne has a good cry, which also helps. She knows that if she goes much more overdue she may not be able to stay at home for the birth. So the pressure is on.