Last Tango in Toulouse (23 page)

We have several days in Paris, the primary purpose being to travel out to Normandy to see Monet's garden at Giverny. For some of the group this particular visit has been a lifelong dream, and even though we are all quite exhausted and jet-lagged when the bus picks us up for the two-hour journey, there is a great sense of excitement. The bus journey out of Paris is a little tedious and some of the group drop off to sleep, but once we get out into the countryside they cheer up as we drive through little villages and get a taste of French rural lifestyle. Monet's garden is one of the most visited gardens in the world, and bus groups are booked in at specific times so that there are not too many people in the garden at once. It's not a very large garden and it is divided into two distinct sections – the flower garden that adjoins the pink and green painted house and the water garden made famous by Monet's waterlily series of paintings.

Before we left Sydney airport, as we were walking to our boarding gate lounge we passed a Taronga Zoo shop selling lots of stuffed animals. Standing on the carpet outside the shop was a very large fluffy emu with wild eyes and a spiked head of hair like Debbie's. As we approached, one of the women said ‘Look at that! Who would buy something as hideous as that?'

‘I would,' I said reaching for my credit card. ‘It will make a fabulous present for Jan, my friend who lives in the next village in France.' By the time we reach Paris, the emu, christened Flossie after the calf back home, has become our mascot on the tour – I carry it with us everywhere, even to Monet's garden.

The garden is financially subsidised by American art lovers and is always teeming with large groups of Americans who are
mad about everything to do with Monet. The gift shop at the garden is enormous; it was once Monet's art studio, where he painted his massive waterlily canvases, but has been converted into a sophisticated money-making concern with Monet scarves, ties, teapots and books and the usual postcards and poster-sized prints of his paintings. I find it all a bit tacky, but I suppose it is essential to maintain the garden at such a very high standard. Several years ago an Australian artist whom I met at a garden club when I was showing colour photographic slides that I had taken of Monet's garden one late spring subsequently spent almost a year living in the village of Giverny, coming into the garden every day to paint. She told hilarious anecdotes about how when the gardens closed every afternoon at 4.30, the gardeners would scurry around like crazy deadheading the roses and tidying up for the following day. If a clump of a particular group of flowering perennials or bulbs, such as peonies or iris, started to fade, they would simply dig up the entire clump and bring in freshly flowering replacements from where they had been growing in a nearby field. It was sort of ‘gardening by numbers', where everything was almost artificial in its perfection. I have always regarded the garden slightly differently since I heard this story, but for our tour groups it's two hours of sheer magic as we wander between the burgeoning flower beds and colourful borders.

Suddenly, a harsh female American accent pierces the air. ‘Oh God, in Heaven's name, will you look at that? That woman's carrying a turkey under her arm!'

I affect a look of wounded outrage. ‘It's certainly
not
a turkey, madam, it's a native Australian flightless bird. Have you never seen an emu?'

‘It sure looks wild,' she says, giving Flossie a pat on her spiky head.

We take photographs of Flossie standing in Monet's garden, sniffing the roses, and from this moment the tour degenerates into a non-stop comedy routine, with Flossie as the centrepiece of our hilarity.

In Paris we catch the Metro to the splendid Jardin de Bagatelle in the Bois de Boulogne and spend a dreamy hot afternoon enjoying the thousands of roses that proliferate in this formal masterpiece. Margaret and Richard decide to snooze for a while beneath a shady tree but are moved on by the gendarmes, and Margaret is outraged at the thought of being treated ‘like a derelict sleeping on a park bench'. On the way back in the Metro a young woman attempts to snatch her bag as we leave the station, a very common problem in Paris these days. I feel certain this young woman lived to regret this particular attempted theft. Margaret is so outraged that, clutching her bag tightly to her breast, she shrieks at the hapless and probably homeless figure: ‘You wicked, wicked girl! How dare you try to take my bag? You wicked, wicked girl!'

The would-be thief takes off in terror and I joke that she is probably in need of counselling after this encounter. But we are all rather shaken, and from that moment become more aware of the dangers of big cities for tourists.

That evening Richard loses his wallet on the bus coming back from Montmartre. It's there one moment and gone the next. The poor chap spends his last day in Paris filing a report for the police and, while the wallet is turned in later in the day, the money and credit cards are gone. It takes the edge off our enjoyment of the day.

Some of us decide to see a live show while in Paris, heading off in the Metro to the outrageously expensive Moulin Rouge – it costs the equivalent of $180 for the show and a half-bottle of champagne. The standard of the show is fantastic, however, and I see how the can-can should really be done – a bit different from my frilly red knickers at the Yetholme Community Hall. One of the acts has me absolutely gobsmacked. A massive glass-sided water tank suddenly rises up from under the stage. It contains a very large python, at least four metres long, swimming underwater. A naked young woman appears and dives into the water, where she proceeds to ‘dance' with the snake in a most lascivious fashion. I try not to laugh out loud, it's so over the top. A lot of the dancers at Moulin Rouge are Australians, I am later informed, chosen for their goods looks, long legs and athleticism.

The following day we take the train to London, where we will spend four nights before heading off on our tour of southern England. We arrive during the peak period of the Queen's Golden Jubilee and London is alive with shops selling tacky royal souvenirs and Union Jacks for those who wish to engage in a little flag-waving. As a dyed-in-the wool republican I am rather appalled at finding myself in London at such a time but some of the others are thrilled to be there during the celebrations. We enjoy some friendly banter about the pros and cons of the royal family and I buy some cheap and nasty souvenirs of the jubilee to hand out as prizes on the bus. I get a flashing plastic tiara for Margaret which she wears with great pride.

Debbie has taken to calling out that distinctive Australian bush cry ‘COOOOOEEEEE' at the top of her lungs to gather the group together. She does it in the hotel foyer in the morning after breakfast and she does it when we are getting onto the bus.
Reserved English people passing by look at us with disdain, seeing a motley group of loud, noisy, Australian tourists (especially when they spy Flossie under my arm or staring out of the bus window with her beady eye). But we don't give a hoot; we are having a great time.

We do the Chelsea Flower Show and several famous public gardens in London, then pack up for our country tour, which will include the famous Sissinghurst Garden created by Vita Sackville-West. Our driver appears with the bus outside our smart Kensington Hotel. His name is Roy and he is alarming in appearance. Six foot seven inches (2 metres) tall, he weighs twenty-one stone (137kg) and has no front teeth. As he bends over to load our suitcases into the baggage compartment we are presented with a vision of him from the back – that fleshy cleavage revealed when a man's trousers or shorts don't quite cover the rear end. Some people call this spectacle ‘builder's bum'. I try not to catch the eyes of the other women because I know we will dissolve into hysterics. Roy is just as alarming in behaviour as he is in appearance. He is charmed by Flossie but a little too familiar for some of our tour group's comfort. I am assigned the seat at the front of the bus, with a microphone, and I am also given a thick road map. It appears that I am expected to navigate because, once he leaves London, Roy doesn't have the vaguest idea where he is going. Every time I speak to the group or say anything at all, Roy's voice booms out in his marked London accent, ‘Now, Mary, beeeeeeave yourself.'

He also has a habit of coming up behind me, and some of the other more friendly women in the group, and lifting me up in the air like a weightless rag doll. I quickly learn to see the look in the eyes of the other women as he approaches from behind
and dodge out of the way. His favourite trick is to lift me up and bang my head – not hard – on the ceiling of the bus. While we are all amused at his antics, we also find him a bit odd, especially when he informs us that he has been married four times and two of his wives died in car accidents.

As we set off out of London, heading south, I start to wonder if Roy might have been driving when these accidents occurred to his wives. He is a truly terrifying driver. Not only does he drive far too fast for the road conditions, he steers the bus erratically, veering from side to side so that our hand luggage is constantly crashing from the overhead storage shelf and landing on our heads. It's impossible to stand up and walk down the aisle when Roy is driving, and after the first day I start telling him to slow down. I don't want members of the group to be nervous wrecks by the time we reach each garden.

This aspect of the tour is a nightmare. I have to tell him where to take each turnoff in the maze of road systems through rural England. As he tends to speed we are constantly overshooting the turnoffs and then finding ourselves trying to turn the huge bus round in a narrow country lane. He drives so quickly through the villages that we can't see and appreciate the architecture, and I seem to spend my entire day asking him to ‘slow down' or ‘take it easy'. The standard of the hotels where we are booked is excellent, but unfortunately not always up to Roy's expectations (he is staying with us for the entire tour). At one hotel they have allocated him a single room with a single bed and he digs in his heels. He's just too large, he explains, to fit into a single bed and they don't have another room available, except for a deluxe room with a massive four-poster. In the end the travel company agrees to pay the difference and Roy wallows
in luxury – he had threatened to drive back to London and abandon us if he couldn't get a decent bed to sleep in. One night, Roy and I are given adjoining rooms and the porters bring our luggage up at the same time, knocking on each of our doors. We open them simultaneously and I find myself facing a half-naked Roy, only his trousers intact, with his massive bulk filling the entire doorway to his room.

‘'Ello, dangerous,' he says, leering at me.

I quickly grab my suitcase and slam the door, locking it immediately. I have decided that Roy is more of a liability than an asset, but we are stuck with him until the end of the tour. Might as well make the best of it.

The gardens, however, are gorgeous, the countryside lush and the small villages and towns are always interesting. We stay in Brighton and Bath and Stratford-on-Avon, where we see a Shakespeare performance in the evening. The group has bonded well and we have plenty of laughs along the way, trying to dodge Roy's clumsy advances and retaining our sense of good fun. We have a farewell dinner at a smart hotel in Bury St Edmunds; the theme is the Jubilee, and I ask everyone to dress up for the occasion. Fortunately, the hotel has allocated us a private room – some of the outfits are utterly outrageous, especially our professional gardener, who comes as a court jester complete with striped tights and codpiece. I wear high heels and fishnet stockings with a pair of Union Jack knickers that some of the group have bought me for a joke, a little reminiscent of my can-can outfit from home, but I am careful to remain well covered with a shawl between my bedroom and the private dining room. I don't think the hotel lobby is quite ready for this. However, late in the evening, after dinner and several bottles of Australian wine that
we found at a local off-licence, our court jester decides to stand on his head in the foyer, causing a ripple of concern among the reception staff. We are quite certain they will be glad to see the back of us!

Back in London we take part in some authentic Jubilee celebrations, standing on a bridge over the Thames for the impressive jet flyover and then taking a dinner river cruise. One of our group is nearly refused entry because she is wearing joggers rather than ‘feminine' shoes, but I manage to sweet-talk the maître d' who is being a bit of a stickler about the dress code. Once again, we have a hilarious night together.

I farewell my happy band of travellers in London and head for France to meet up with David, who has been at the house for several days, getting it ready for my arrival. The flight out of London is cancelled at the last possible moment – takeoff is aborted as we accelerate down the runway and the plane is turned round and taken back to the terminal. We are off-loaded unceremoniously and have to re-enter the airport through Customs and wait around in the baggage area to be told what alternative arrangements have been made for us. I am aware that David will be anxiously waiting for me at Toulouse airport and I only hope that the airline keeps those at the other end well informed.