Last Tango in Toulouse (15 page)

David immediately senses my unsettled mood. Although he hasn't said much about our strained conversations when I was still in France, he is well aware that I am in a strange frame of mind. I try denying that anything is amiss. I try to blame my fluctuating hormones for the fact that I have become withdrawn and, at times, deeply melancholic. But he knows there is more to it than that and keeps probing until eventually I tell him how I am feeling, about my confusion and yearning for the man from Toulouse.

His reaction is, understandably, quite intense.

Once I manage to reassure him that the relationship has not actually been consummated, he starts to put forward a strong case for my ending the liaison there and then. Initially I resist, saying that I believe it is important for the relationship to ‘run its course'. I argue that because I have been with him since I was only twenty-one years old, I have a right to other sexual experiences and that it is only natural that after thirty-one years I should feel a need to explore my sexuality outside our marriage. I debate various long-term issues in our relationship: his absence over the years, his emotional and sexual unavailability, his ongoing moodiness and depression. I make it clear that I am no longer prepared to tolerate aspects of our relationship that I have been tolerating for decades.

The arguments simply don't wash. David's reaction to the
possibility of my entering into an emotional and loving relationship with another man is totally negative and passionately intense. But suddenly something else is happening between us. While we are raging and at times screaming at each other we realise that we are communicating on a level that we haven't reached for years. There is a new openness, honesty and intimacy that has evaded us till now. It is painful but exciting to feel the dynamics of our relationship shifting and changing with such power. More than this, the intensity of our sexual relationship also changes dramatically. From several years of complacency, David is shaken into a realisation that I am no longer satisfied with the occasional, almost routine, lovemaking. He has reached that crucial age for men – 60 plus – when sexual function is no longer automatic, and he has been taking the easy option of allowing our relationship on that level to dwindle. The possibility of losing me to another man acts as a powerful aphrodisiac and suddenly we are making love as we haven't done for years. It is energising and exciting but it adds greatly to my confusion. In France I had felt justified in contemplating an adulterous relationship because of a lack of intimacy with my husband. Now I don't have any real justification.

During the following months, when I am feeling unhappy and unsettled, David is supportive and loving. Having suffered depression on and off he knows how debilitating it can be, how hard it is to feel motived on days when life seems quite pointless and even the simplest of routine tasks seem too difficult. He's never really seen me in this state of mind so he worries a lot, but is always there for me. It helps me feel that I am not entirely alone. I discuss the situation with Miriam as well and tell her about the relationship that has been developing in France. She
is compassionate because she appreciates how difficult I have found life with her father over the decades, but she is also highly protective of our family unit and urges me to put the thought of a love affair to one side and try instead to heal my relationship with David.

Meanwhile, I am in almost daily contact with my Toulouse man, either by email or by calls that are set up by email. I let him know when David is not at home and he calls me – often on his mobile phone because he, too, needs to be out of his home when he makes contact. The intensity of our long-distance foreplay doesn't subside and I indicate to him that I am having problems at home and that my husband is aware that I am involved with another man.

‘You must tell him nothing,' he insists. ‘It will be very bad for your relationship with him. He must not know, not now, not ever.'

So I go underground. Or at least I think I do.

I tell David that I have terminated my relationship with my proposed lover, that it is completely over and that he is to stop worrying. I know that I am not a very good liar, but I do my best to reassure David that everything is now fine and back on an even keel.

He isn't, as it turns out, fooled for a moment.

I try my best to lift my spirits out of the trough, but somehow I am living in a completely unreal state of mind. I am desperately trying to love being on the farm, to love my husband and continue being a good wife, loving mother and involved grandmother. But in my heart I am in another place, another space, another time. My thoughts are constantly straying into the realms of my fantasy love affair. I simply can't get it out of my
mind. I lose weight, dramatically. I can't sleep – or at least I go to sleep initially then wake up at 3 am and lie awake for the rest of the night, tossing and turning in troubled thought. I finally doze off at 6.30 am, waking up shortly afterwards consumed by a feeling of sadness that I can't explain. Waking up sad – it has never happened to me in my life, not even during those troubled childhood years when I was surrounded by the insecurity of domestic violence and family chaos. I catch David looking at me, concerned, asking if I am feeling okay.

‘You look so sad,' he says. ‘What's wrong?'

‘Nothing,' I say, attempting cheerfulness. ‘Nothing.'

But he knows.

When David and I make love I don't fantasise that he is the man from Toulouse, and for this I am relieved. However, just about every other waking moment is spent visualising and fantasising about the moment when I will eventually meet him. Lying in bed in the middle of the night, with David sleeping soundly beside me, I play out the drama and romance of that moment in my head. Sometimes we meet on a railway platform, sometimes in a restaurant, sometimes in the street. Although I don't know him very well I have developed a strong visual image of him in my mind and I also have a clear sense of his character from our ongoing illicit conversations. He's very straight up and down and direct and, even though our relationship is based on deception, between us there is an honesty that I find reassuring. There's no game playing here. We discuss the nature of our attraction for each other and the implications of our future liaison, and we both agree that the feelings between us are strong enough to be disturbing. He seems to be as rattled by the whole thing as I am.

I clearly remember the sensation of falling in love for the first
time as a teenager. It was like a sickness that overwhelmed my body and mind, manifesting in physical symptoms like nausea and heart palpitations. I lost the ability to concentrate and my head was constantly filled with thoughts of my new love. More than thirty years later I'm experiencing the same feelings, and while I find it exhilarating, it is also causing me a great deal of pain and anxiety. I don't wish to hurt David, but I know that for my own sake I need to see this relationship through, to reach a conclusion.

Part of my feeling so odd during this period is the realisation that I am thinking and behaving abnormally. Lifelong habits have disappeared and been replaced by quite different patterns of behaviour. All my life I have been a dedicated fan of classical music, with a large collection of Beethoven, Mozart, Rachmaninov and Vivaldi. Now I am buying and playing albums of soppy love songs by Eva Cassidy and Luka Bloom, and listening to favourites from my teenage years – Donovan, Cat Stevens, Simon and Garfunkel and Bob Dylan. All my adult life I have read a daily newspaper cover to cover, but now I can't be bothered. I don't have the concentration for novels either. I have always managed to read a book every week. Now I haven't opened one for months. I stare at the ceiling instead and daydream. Instead of looking outwards and embracing the world, my thoughts are all self-directed.

Feeling for the first time, ever, that I am out of control, I decide that the onset of menopause is connected to my extreme lack of energy and enthusiasm for life here at the farm. Disconcerted at my inability to cope with even the most prosaic of domestic problems or challenges, I consult various doctors, start a regime of hormones and, at the prompting of a friend, begin seeing a counsellor once a week to talk through my feelings.

My friend is concerned that my mid-life unhappiness may well be connected to the traumas of my childhood and that they are only now beginning to surface as a result of the hormone change experienced in menopause.

In my wildest dreams I have never imagined that I would be a candidate for this type of help and I've often made insensitive jokes about the proliferation of counsellors in modern society. It has seemed to me that every trivial trauma in life these days necessitates professional intervention, and that it has become a growth industry. I have believed, quite arrogantly, that nothing can replace family support as the most natural form of counselling, yet here I am surrounded by a large and loving family, none of whom can help me out of my misery.

It is unnerving to sit and talk about myself for hours at a time, almost as unnerving as writing about myself and my family in
Au Revoir
. At the gentle prompting of my counsellor I start with my childhood and talk my way through my life. She listens with an open mind to the story of my ups and downs. In many ways it's an unremarkable story, because so many people survive much more difficult childhoods and develop all sorts of strategies for coping with life's problems. The counsellor asks lots of questions and throws many of the issues I raise back at me, forcing me to question my interpretation of aspects of and incidents in my life and the ways in which I handle them. At no point does she offer me advice or tell me what to do. She simply draws me out of my shell and allows me, by talking candidly, to draw my own conclusions.

What I begin to understand for myself as a result of these counselling sessions is that I do indeed carry a deep well of dissatisfaction about my relationship with David, that I resent his
constant absences over so many years and his emotional distance from me and our children. Looking back over the years, I believe that his passion has all been directed towards his work. Yet I know that he has always loved me deeply and adores his children and now his grandchildren. It's just that in several ways he hasn't been there for us.

The counselling sessions also help me look at myself more objectively and to realise that my self-esteem is low. In spite of my career achievements and the fact that I have also enjoyed success as a parent and home-maker, I feel very insecure about my own abilities and worth. This is not an unusual way for a survivor of a troubled family to behave.

‘You have a very ready smile,' my counsellor says. ‘An instant smile that's very attractive. It gives the impression of openness and happiness. But often people who smile a lot do so because it's a mask. Often a wide smile is used to hide an inner unhappiness or nervousness or insecurity,' she adds.

Little bells of recognition start ringing all around my brain.

Many of the girls I went to school with in the 1960s were much more sexually precocious and liberated than I was. Much of it was due to their advanced physical maturity, as most of them had visibly curvaceous bodies at thirteen or fourteen when I was still flat-chested and without a single strand of pubic hair. Females reach the menarche earlier and earlier with each subsequent generation, and these days it's not uncommon for girls of ten or eleven to start menstruation and to have to cope with all the associated physical and emotional changes that this hormonal state brings. I was sixteen before I had my first period – years behind my girlfriends, many of whom were already sexually active and taking the pill. In many ways I was glad to be a late starter because it afforded me a certain sense of innocence and safety. While my girlfriends had boys phoning them for dates and were pleading with their mothers to be allowed out on Saturday night, I was still happy to stay at home and watch television with the family cat on my lap.

I sometimes stayed overnight at the homes of my girlfriends,
and when they giggled and talked furtively about their experiences with boys it was over my head. I remember staying with one friend, sleeping top to toe in her narrow single bed, when we were woken at 2 am by a vigorous knock on the window glass. She opened the window and there was a burly young man in his early twenties, smelling strongly of beer. She clambered out in her cotton shortie pyjamas and disappeared for what seemed like an eternity. It was probably just half an hour. I lay there, wondering what on earth was going on. Later, when she climbed back and snuggled into bed, I asked her.

‘Who was that? What were you doing?'

‘Don't be such an idiot, Mary,' she said and promptly dropped back to sleep.

It was months before the penny dropped. One of my other friends told me she was in love with one of the boys in the local football team and that they were ‘doing it'.

I was shocked.