Last Tango in Toulouse
Read Last Tango in Toulouse Online
Authors: Mary Moody
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MARY MOODY has been a prolific gardening author and a former presenter on ABC-TV's
Gardening Australia
. Her books include
The Good Life
(1981),
Au Revoir
(2001),
The Long Hot Summer
(2005) and
Sweet Surrender
(2009). Mary divides her year between her farm near Bathurst in New South Wales and her house in south-west France.
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Also by Mary Moody
Au Revoir
Last Tango
in Toulouse
Torn between two loves
Mary
Moody
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First published 2003 in Macmillan by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd
This Pan edition published in 2005 by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Limited
1 Market Street, Sydney
Copyright © Mary Moody 2003
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.
National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication data:
Moody, Mary, 1950â.
Last tango in Toulouse: torn between two loves.
ISBN 0 330 42165 4 (pbk).
1. Moody, Mary, 1950â. 2. Women horticultural writers -
Australia - Biography. 3. Manâwoman relationships.
4. Marriage. 5. Family. I. Title.
306.81092
Set in 11.5/16pt New Baskerville by Midland Typesetters
Printed in Australia by McPherson's Printing Group
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These electronic editions published in 2003 by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd
1 Market Street, Sydney 2000
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved. This publication (or any part of it) may not be reproduced or transmitted, copied, stored, distributed or otherwise made available by any person or entity (including Google, Amazon or similar organisations), in any form (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical) or by any means (photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise) without prior written permission from the publisher.
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Last Tango in Toulouse
Mary Moody
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Adobe eReader format: 978-1-74197-148-4
EPUB format: 978-1-74197-349-5
Online format: 978-1-74197-751-6
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This book is dedicated to my husband, David,
who, in spite of his pain, gave me ceaseless love
and support throughout the roller-coaster ride
of the last few years.
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There was a little girl
Who had a little curl
Right in the middle of her forehead
When she was good she was very, very good
And when she was bad she was horrid
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
CKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank my children, Tony, Miriam, Aaron and Ethan, and their partners, Simone, Rick, Lorna and Lynne, for always supporting me, even if they didn't agree at times with what I was doing. And for allowing themselves to be a part of the story, however painful.
I would like to thank my two dearest friends â Christine Whiston in Australia and Jan Barwick-Claudy in France â for lending a sympathetic ear and never judging me.
Also our neighbours in Yetholme, Sue and Robert Porter, who were always there for David when I was in France and he was at the farm alone. And Kaye Healey who supported us both, again without judgement.
Last but not least I am indebted to my editor Debra Adelaide for her generous contribution to both
Au Revoir
and
Last Tango in Toulouse.
If running away from home for six months to live in an ancient village in rural France is the fantasy of every middle-aged woman, then I feel as though I have been living the dream for all of them. The year I turned fifty I set off alone on a sabbatical to escape from my demanding career and large family and live in southwest France. It was a watershed year in my life. There were many reasons why I felt driven on that particular journey, but I realise now that I was only vaguely aware of them at the time. I certainly didn't expect that my time alone would have repercussions that would change my life in so many ways. Nor did I realise that I was entering a critical and confusing phase when all aspects of my past life would come under scrutiny, from my work and family priorities to my most intimate personal relationships. Perhaps if I had known in advance I would never have dared embark on this risky mid-life adventure, because some of the changes have been painful and the pain has been felt deeply â not just by me, but by my entire family.
When I experienced the overwhelming urge to run away I was entering the early stages of that female demon, the menopause â the roller-coaster ride of years which some women glide through without batting an eyelid and others rage through in a sweaty battle of hormones, rocketing emotions and inner angst. I fall into the latter category.
The fact that I found mid-life so difficult to negotiate was a great surprise to my husband and children, and even more of a shock to me. As a younger woman I sailed relatively unscathed through my pregnancies and births and always revelled in motherhood. Later I embraced becoming a grandmother with delight. I had, with seemingly little effort, juggled a fairly high-powered career, an ever-expanding family, a high-maintenance garden, a three-decade relationship with my husband David and even the trials and tribulations of a live-in mother who, for the most part, was more of a joy than a burden.
So why now, when the future is so rosy and the world around me secure after many years of financial struggle, am I suddenly so unsettled and restless? Has running away from all my responsibilities for six months uncovered a wellspring of hidden unhappiness that is causing all the certainties of my life to unravel before my eyes? And is there, therefore, an inherent risk in selfishly following my dreams? Would it be better to just shrug my shoulders and accept life as it is without ever taking any risks? I don't think so.
While I was in France I wrote a book about my physical and emotional journey.
Au Revoir
gave me an opportunity to reflect on the ups and downs of my life and to chart my reasons for needing to escape. In the process of writing this book I quickly discovered that there was a vast difference between talking about
life's sad or difficult moments and actually committing them to paper. By documenting events from my sometimes painful childhood, I believe I finally confronted their impact for the first time.
Being alone in France also gave me a chance to think deeply about my relationship with my husband David. It forced me not only to examine our past but to contemplate our future together. With our children grown and out of the nest, everything now depended on just the two of us, and I was not entirely convinced that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with him, even though I knew I still cared for him deeply. Complicating matters was an unexpected surge of sexuality which at the time caused havoc all around me. I met a man and fell in love and found myself having to negotiate that most difficult of all balancing acts â trying to keep my marriage and family intact while having an affair.
During this turbulent period there were many other changes in our lives. We bought a small village house in a little-known region in the southwest of France, known as the Lot, because of my desire to re-experience the joys of my new-found freedom; we left our much loved house and garden in the Blue Mountains and moved to a farm in the small rural hamlet of Yetholme near Bathurst; I abandoned my career on television and took a new direction that saw me travelling overseas for at least half of every year. And I went on a search for my long-lost sister Margaret, to finally piece together the jigsaw of my early life. It was at times an intensely painful journey, but it brought with it moments of great joy and self-discovery.
For most of us, living safely within the confines of our familiar comfort zone is much easier and certainly less confronting than plunging headlong into the unknown. The older we get, the more difficult it is to take risks and establish new patterns of behaviour, to make new friends or experiment with living in a foreign culture or to consider abandoning an entire way of life. While we change externally, as nature takes its toll on our faces and bodies, inside we are at risk of becoming more cautious and more conservative.
From what has been written about my age group â the baby boomers â I understand that there is a common desire to fight the natural aging process on every level. Although, as a young woman, the notion that growing older could be a problem never occurred to me, when I hit fifty I suddenly started to resent the possibility that my life could become less exciting. Instead of growing old gracefully, I yearned to break out of the mould, to escape from my responsibilities and obligations; I also wanted to remain youthful and vibrant, both physically and mentally. I wanted new challenges and new excitement and even, perhaps, new dangers. I wanted to be outrageous and experiment with a few things I hadn't tried before, to break a few taboos.