Kamila was an expert at making chaux: take a clean cement mixer, fill it with white chalky chaux, add large quantities of ochre pigments of your choice and enough water to make a thick paste, then switch on the cement mixer until there are no lumps or bubbles of pigment. Simple. Just like making a cake.
Down to Apt we went to visit Chavin, a leading ochre specialist in the Luberon. In this Aladdin’s cave of colours Claire and I made our choices, after great deliberation and assistance from the staff. All the correct wide, thick brushes were bought and more advice was taken. Apparently we could not go wrong. There would be no sickening fumes, no mess and no gloss to paint around the wooden window frames. What I didn’t know was that it would be like painting with thick glue. After the kitchen had been painted, Claire came to inspect my handiwork and even she was impressed with how difficult it was to apply the thick paint, and my improving biceps. As I moved from room to room, I became more adept at slapping on the paint in large sweeping brush strokes using a herringbone pattern, giving a slightly uneven rustic look that went perfectly with the crooked walls, nooks and crannies.
Kamila arrived one day to inspect the choice of colours and snorted in ridicule when she saw that the same colour had been employed throughout. She had also come to invite me to dinner. Kamila was an outstanding cook and a consummate hostess. Her Polish background and her journeys across Europe gave her an ability to cook many different types of food and speak passably in English, German, several Eastern European dialects and of course flawless but heavily accented French.
That evening as we all gathered in her exotic salon, she spoke in English to make her Anglophone guests more at ease, announcing to the group: ‘Yes, look everybody, come outside. I have a beautiful shining new vulva.’
Her command of the French language was perfect, but the same could not be said when it came to English. I heard someone murmur, ‘I think she means Volvo, dear.’
Expensive perfumes hung in the air and everywhere I looked there were dandies in their finery: men with smart linen suits, waistcoats in jacquard prints, linen shirts with ruffles and flounces. Exquisite scraps of beautiful fabrics adorned the women’s reed-thin bodies, exposing large areas of their equally beautiful buffed skin. As usual, their undergarments were taking pride of place as necklines plunged to the waist and minuscule portions of lace and silk covered their modesty. Barely. Through the throngs of guests, I spied a man who was apparently charming the pants off a harem of ladies around him. Their girlish laughter and frenetic batting of eyelashes were positively nauseating. Whether or not this man was on the lookout for a new mistress or wife, the word was that he was one of France’s largest private industrialists and the women were doing their best to be first in the queue or at least be noticed. They were swarming around him like the proverbial bees around the honey pot. I could see that he was waiting for me to join the queue so I deliberately turned on my heels and headed off in the opposite direction. He moved towards me, held out his hand and caught me; in rapid French he addressed me: ‘Bonsoir, my name is Jungpo. It would give me great pleasure if you sat next to me this evening for dinner.’
With his guttural Provençal accent, I managed to understand one word in five spoken to me during the course of the evening. He told me something about the Eiffel Tower and how his company had recently installed some new electrical fitting on it, which made me assume that Jungpo was some sort of electrician. I had been mildly terrified when he insisted on using the intimate ‘tu’ form instead of the very polite ‘vous’ form for ‘you’. It was far too familiar for my liking so I stuck with ‘monsieur’ and ‘vous’ and left his company and dinner as soon as possible. I discovered many months later that his name was not Jungpo, which did not sound particularly French to me, but Jean-Paul, which did. I also learnt that he was not an electrician. It was a long time before I met him again.
The children breathed a sigh of relief that the painting was taking place somewhere other than where they lived, and was not interrupting their schedules, which consisted mainly of hours of homework, television watching and sitting at the table with their mouths open waiting to be fed yet again. Although I had risen slightly in their estimation during the past year with my capacity for hard work and early morning starts and the amount of washing and ironing I did, they did not want their friends to see me in my painting clothes, which consisted of track pants and several layers of very ugly clothing, most of them Raymond’s rejected winter clothes. Through Claire, I learnt later, much too late, that a Frenchwoman would dress in her good clothes, take a bag of painting or exercise clothes and then change in a discreet spot. When seen in public a Frenchwoman represents her family to the world and on no account would she consider letting her standards drop. Paint-bespattered clothes or Lycra exercise pants should only be worn indoors, well away from view. The biggest, and perhaps the only, exception is bike pants: they are acceptable on men and women on Sundays for a bike ride. Needless to say, good lacy underwear and tiny knickers should be worn at all times. Standing in the paint aisle in the handyman shop, I realised that I would have to put more effort into my appearance; according to the children I was a sartorial train wreck. My standards had slipped to rock bottom.
Like most parents, negotiation was the basis of my relationship with the children. As they wandered down the track towards the bus stop in the early morning winter fog one day, laden down with schoolbooks and encased in their padded overcoats, I smiled to think how my babies had grown up so fast and now resembled small black bears, albeit with backpacks, trundling down the lane. Sentiment turned to alarm as a volley of shots rang across the path from the hunters who, in the mist, thought that my children were prey. Mimi and Harry could not bring themselves to wear fluorescent vests with flashing lights, so the bargain was struck that I would drive them to the end of the lane and wait with them for the school bus, ducked down low so their friends on the bus wouldn’t see that their mother was wearing her pyjamas underneath her overcoat — or worse still, my Australian green and gold painting balaclava.
Even with an early start in the morning and the children staying at school at lunchtime, the painting in Place de la Fontaine was taking a lot longer than I initially thought. As I went up into the room on the top floor, I realised that the long ladders would be necessary. When I had been a small child, my sister Kate and I would watch in wonderment as our father hung suspended from the roof high above the ground or off the veranda. It must be in the genes: neither of us has any fear. I also had no money to hire someone else to do this task. I was confident that I was up to it. Claire was confident that I would fall. She had insisted on being on site on the ground floor, where she was making new slipcovers for the two sofas. She felt that the day I fell from the long ladder, she should be there to pick up the pieces. Until now, she had always been right.
High up above the stairwell in the far corner, deep in thought, I tried to extend my hand too far, overbalanced and off I came. This house, and in particular this room, had been extremely lucky for me before; once again, my luck stayed with me as I fell, bouncing down the ladder and then onto the hard floor. The extra layers of clothes and my extra winter weight protected me from any major injuries, but not from Claire’s ire. ‘Just concentrate on the painting. Don’t think about anything else. It is a wonder that you weren’t seriously hurt.’
‘Claire, that’s the problem. I am painting this house because I know that I have to sell it. I have to sell this property as soon as possible but the biggest problem is that I don’t want to. Look at this place; it has never looked as pretty. By the way, I’ve made another decision. That wall I have just finished has to be repainted a dirty blue. What do you think?’
From my perspective, lying on the ground, it was evident that the long wall needed some sort of colour. I hoped that the agonising decision to sell or not would be just as easy, but it took many months to arrive at the final solution.
Painting is very cleansing for the mind, like ironing sheets: an expan
se of a neutral colour and the end product looks fantastic. My mind had been spring-cleaned and I was clear about our next move: a quick Easter trip to Sydney before the 2003 season started. We had enough frequent flyer points to redeem them for one adult ticket for Mimi, and as Harry was still flying as a child the total amount would not be too horrendous. The biggest expense was hiring a car, and even that looked economical compared with European prices. It would be a whirlwind trip. The children usually stayed with their aunts and uncles and I stayed with Raymond, but this time we would not be seeing Raymond; he would be on a family visit to New Zealand, he said. Our Big Discussion was delayed yet again and I caught myself too many times being grateful for his absence. Our family home in Mosman was being rented out. I walked past the ill-kept garden and noted the general chaos that appeared to reign in the house with a certain amount of detachment, as it now only represented for me some bricks and mortar; a good investment but no longer our home. Some friends were away for Easter; others were busy with their holidays. The strong ties to Sydney appeared to be loosening.
I had met up with a university friend who was now a highly respected journalist. Susan had listened to my story and had encouraged me not to be afraid to write. I felt as though my brain was ready to explode with sentences and words that had been floating through my grey matter for the past decade. I had made up my mind to work seriously on a memoir after our return to France. I had no idea how long it would take or — more to the point — if I had the necessary literary and computer skills. Too many people had novels sitting in the bottom drawer incomplete and unpublished. Did I really want to go down that path? I knew by the end of our very short stay that my fingers were itching to get to a keyboard and make sense of my rough thoughts and jottings.
At home in France again, the children slipped back into their school routine, happy in the knowledge of what May would bring them: more holidays. In France, three out of four weeks in May have public holidays and sometimes the unions even add an extra day to make it a long weekend for the workers. May always makes me shudder with disbelief. And school children cheer if the holidays fall on a Tuesday; it means that their weekend extends from Saturday through to Thursday, as Wednesday is a day off.
Harry, like Mimi, needed some extra coaching to help him with his language skills, to prepare him for his eventual entrance into high school. I found it difficult to explain to a ten-year-old the need to learn lists of verbs and tenses: the subjunctive and the past historic tenses made his eyes water. These were areas I had dealt with when I was at university, but it was mandatory for primary school children to have a working knowledge of these lists that unfortunately just had to be learnt off my heart.
I continued to maintain that it was necessary for both of them to speak to me in English, and to speak in French only when there were non-English speakers with us. Our family council had voted that we would stay until the end of their schooling here in France, so it was important that there was some balance in their lives. They read and spoke in English but rarely wrote emails or postcards in English. Astérix comic books and French magazines aimed at the pre-adolescent market were consumed with pleasure and gusto as they became more and more French.
As in most education systems, support classes for those who needed help in specialised skills were fairly thin on the ground and infrequent. The local village school had no access to help. The director of the school, Monsieur Champeau, had investigated various avenues and came up with two half-hour classes in Apt. This had been wonderful as a beginning to their learning, but Harry had advanced to a point where he needed some quite specific help. Anne George’s name was put forward by one of the secretaries from the high school. Formerly a teacher who taught children in their last year of primary school, after a family tragedy she had taken early retirement and now offered coaching to a select few. My fingers were crossed that she would have the time and the inclination to rise to the challenge of teaching Harry verbs, tenses, vocabulary, mathematics, geography, history and generally inspiring him into high school. In short, she would have to teach him all over again from scratch.
The 2003 season started off slowly, but little by little bookings were made — and most owners in the rental accommodation business breathed a small sigh of relief. Except for Deirdre, who was struggling with coming to terms with the finality of death and all of the problems that seemed to go hand in hand with it. Her husband Geoffrey had lost his battle with throat cancer and finally passed away, leaving Deirdre with a mountain of medical bills and complex problems with taxes and Geoff’s will. These problems were compounded daily. Although she was a great tap-dancer, she was very shaky in her knowledge of French and how to deal with the banking system, lawyers and officials from the mayor’s office.
My mother had died shortly after my husband. After their funerals I decided never to attend another one. No friendly words of support or love were forthcoming from me when my best friend and tennis partner of five years buried her father and mother within the same year; I couldn’t trust my emotions at any funeral ever again. There are some times you just have to stand on the sidelines. But when Geoff died, Deirdre held a huge wake at their home to thank her friends for their years of support during his illness and to celebrate the generosity and warmth of this man among family and friends. All the expatriate community, the mayor’s office from Roussillon, and some of Geoff’s nurses and doctors attended. Amongst the safety of the pots and pans in the kitchen I thought I could just ease into the background of the gathering. The churning of my stomach made me think otherwise, prompting a quick exit to throw up violently in the garden.
Like most new widows, Deirdre was brilliant and appearing to cope when she was in a crowd. However, it was when she was on her own that the rot set in and she would call me. We attacked the financial problems first; the emotional ones had to be left until much later. I translated accounts and threatening letters that were arriving, making pages of lists of things that she had to do in order for me to help her. Strategies and meetings were marked down, columns of figures of income and expenditures were written down, added up and totalled; she was haemorrhaging financially. We walked around the problems and looked from all the angles, but in the end the only sensible option was to sell everything, pay off the debts and start with a clean page.
In the still of early evening I sat in the dusk, teacup in hand, mulling over the problems that beset Deirdre’s life and thinking how it was in a process of flux and change. Chaos was ruling but at the same time there seemed to be some sort of advancement. Was that chaos theory? I made a note to look it up on the Internet and read more about it. There were so many parallels in life. We all take such different paths that lead to the same destination: love, loss, joy, heartache — then eventually we find out that we are all merely mortals, on this earth for such a short time.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The Poisoned Right Arm
My favourite month, May, brought the gypsies into the district to prepare for the cherry harvest in June. The locals despised them as a necessary evil: but they worked hard, when the conditions were hot and the hours long. The cherry harvest could not wait while the French took their two-hour lunch break and the extra days that linked the weekend to the public holidays in May. Night after night I could hear beautiful melodies from a guitar floating across the vineyards and distant cherry orchards. One night after listening to the same haunting tunes, my curiosity was piqued by the music carried in the stillness of the night. The gypsies had set up camp in the only large opening accessible for their large vehicles and caravans. I was like a moth to their flame and within moments I was out our front gate, walking through the fields towards them. From a vantage spot just metres from their fires I watched as one handsome swarthy young man clutched his guitar between his legs and caressed the instrument, running his fingers gently up and down the neck of the guitar while the outlines of people around him sang in tune to his song — which, even though the language was incomprehensible to my ears,
I could tell was about life and sorrow. No matter our colour or race, we are, after all, just the same.
The gypsies were like a plague of locusts that arrived in large white vans filled to the brim with brown-faced children; after three weeks the cherry trees were stripped bare, and the vans and caravans were gone. Lines once full of colourful clothing strung up between the cherry trees surrounding the camps were empty; the sheets no longer flapped in the stiff breeze. The campsite became barren overnight. Everything had been tidied up and swept away; the gypsies had disappeared like the proverbial puff of smoke, their romantic life on the road leading them to their next destination.
Another gypsy entered my life: my father Jack, accompanied by his new girlfriend, Cecily, whom I had never met. Across a crowded room in the summer of 1953, Jack had spied Cecily. Their eyes met and fireworks went off. Jack was twenty-six and head over heels in love with Cecily. He was still living in his home town of Glasgow but decided that taking a young bride of twenty to the shores of Australia was too much to ask. Cecily went on to marry his best friend, Les. Fifty years later, after my mother and Les had both died, Jack and Cecily took up exactly where they left off. Cecily continued to live in Scotland and Jack in Mosman, but they were meeting up to spend the summer in France with each other and with me.
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