The Long Hot Summer (20 page)

The decision is made for our team to retire from batting at lunchtime regardless of whether all the players have been bowled. I'm the last player to go out, looking rather awkward in oversize pads and gloves. I face the bowler and try not to be intimidated. I hope they will lob me a few gentle balls and not try to massacre me.

The first bowler is kind. I hit the ball wildly but not very far several times, then finally manage a decent whack and score a couple of runs. I don't care much after that. Some of the blokes were out for a duck, so as long as I can hold the fort until lunchtime I will feel I have more than done my bit.

I play conservatively and realise that some of the opposite team players on the field are sending me up. Sledging me, but in a humorous rather than a malicious fashion. They sing out that they can see my knickers through my white pants. I do my best to ignore them. David is amazed at the way I'm hanging in. I am just determined not to get out. Lunch is called and we have scored 183 runs. The batswoman not out for three. I am hot
from standing out in the midday sun with all the mad dogs and Englishmen and can't wait for a cold drink.

Our team has a little meeting before we settle down to our picnic and I put forward a strategy. ‘If we can get them drunk on wine during the lunch break they will crumble,' I suggest.

I have several bottles of chilled rosé in our esky and I wander through the opposition team topping up their glasses while sticking to water myself. They are hot and frazzled from standing out on the field all morning. Their first batsman takes a bottle of red wine out to the stumps and swigs from it before facing the first ball. I know we've got them. We will prevail.

My young friend, the fourteen-year-old, plays brilliantly and lifts the score for his team. He obviously isn't swigging wine like the rest of them. The language on the field gets pretty rough as the afternoon wears on. I come in for a lot of flak but I remain buoyant. In the end we win by just three runs. The three runs I got, I like to kid myself.

After the match, the wives produce high tea under the shade of some nearby oak trees. There are cucumber sandwiches and cream cakes and tea or coffee, though most of the men have opted for cold beer. We have about an hour left to go home, shower and change then come back for the village fête. We book a table and gather up our picnic baskets.

The evening is balmy and most of the cricket players have opted for staying and drinking beer under the oak trees rather than going home to clean up. They look a motley bunch as we take our seats at the long trestle tables for the meal to be served. It's a well-organised event – unlike some fêtes where the food doesn't appear until late in the evening, sometimes even midnight. We have good chicken soup with bread and an entrée
of local wild boar terrine followed by spit-roasted lamb and potatoes with a chestnut sauce. There is cheese – my favourite fromage de chèvre (goat's cheese) – and a rich apple tart for dessert. The wine flows steadily, although after the main course we are expected to pay for extra bottles – the tariff for the meal is about 15 euros and includes everything, but the French tend to stop drinking once the meal has finished. It's the foreign holidaymakers who like to swill on into the night.

The best part of the day is when a group of local women, all well into their seventies and eighties, perform a series of comedy sketches in the ancient regional language, Occitan, which is still spoken here but only by the older generation. It's amusing to see the French in the audience, who are just as out of their depth as we are because they can't follow the dialogue. Fortunately the sketches are very visual, almost slapstick, and everyone roars their approval.

It's days like this that remind me why I love it here so much. I only wish that a little of the pleasure of it might rub off on David.

In many ways a crisis in a marriage is a great way to shake things up. To open up wide-ranging discussion and to face some of the demons of our past life. When David and I talk about everything we have been through we have to be careful not to go over and over and over the same issues because eventually we'd find ourselves just talking in circles and getting nowhere. But our hope is that through all this pain a clearer picture has emerged of who we really are. There's no time now for anything but total honesty, and some of our conversations are quite brutal as we confront each other and try to make a way ahead.

David says he doesn't recognise me any more. That I am simply not the woman he thought he was living with for all those years. He's pretty straightforward in admitting that he preferred the old me. But that's only natural. The old me was a known quantity. Steady, reliable, faithful, loyal and loving. The mother of his children. The grandmother of his grandchildren. His partner, both in business and in life.

David has been forced to acknowledge some unpalatable home truths about himself and about our relationship. He looks back at the years when our children were growing up, when he was so often absent because of his career. He admits now that he was unaware of how unhappy I was with that situation. It's partly my fault. I should have been more forceful and insistent. But David is a very stubborn man. Inflexible. Almost impossible to shift once he has determined that things have to be done in a certain way. Single-minded. Blinkered. Intractable.

Not that I am without myriad faults. I am impulsive, impatient and wilful. A spendthrift who is irresponsibly generous when we can least afford it. I overcommit myself and I am constantly trying to accomplish more in a day than is humanly possible. I rush at things like a bull at a gate. I often don't think things through clearly, preferring to leap into action rather than pause for reflection. If something is worrying me, I do my best to ignore it. Hope that it will simply go away. I hide bills I don't want to pay and ‘forget' to return phone calls if I know I have to let someone down. I become irrationally emotional about political and social injustice. I feel things too deeply and allow myself to be badly hurt by events that are out of my control. I don't necessarily make that vital connection between cause and effect.

David has therefore been a good balance for me. I try to help lighten him up and he tries to help rein me in a little. My flamboyance is tempered by his more staid perspective. His ability to manage finances has saved us from bankruptcy on more than one occasion. If left to me, we would be perpetually penniless. Opposites attract, or so they say. Perhaps that's why we have remained together for so long.

During our lengthy conversations I try to give him an
understanding of just how much I have changed. Why I must have this time and space to sort out who I am and where I am going. As a way of further illustrating how the last few years have been just as harrowing for me as they have been for him, I tell him about the attack. The night the Englishman hid in the house and then tried to rape me.

He sits in his chair and eyeballs me with a look of utter horror on his face. ‘Why didn't you tell me about this before?' he asks. ‘How could you not phone me when it happened? You told other people. You didn't tell me. You didn't tell me.'

I lamely give my reasons.

‘I thought you would feel helpless being so far away. I didn't want to worry or upset you. I thought you'd think I was incapable of looking after myself. I thought it would be better if I just dealt with it myself and didn't burden you.'

‘You didn't tell me. You didn't tell me.'

Not one thing that has happened until now has disturbed David as much as this. Immediately I wish I hadn't told him. He is distraught. Angry with me, really angry for the first time.

‘Don't you see,' he shouts at me. ‘This means you think so little of me and so little of our relationship that you didn't even tell me that you had been viciously sexually assaulted. You hid from me something that was fundamental to the validity of our relationship. I can't believe you didn't tell me.'

I suppose this means I just don't understand men and the workings of their minds. I try to fathom why David has been so deeply upset by this latest revelation. Surely my infidelities have been more damaging to the trust in our relationship than the fact that I protected him from knowing something that would cause him pain.

I seem to be making a total mess of my entire life. I have no one to blame but myself.

Just when things between us are as bad as they could possibly be we get a phone call from Australia, from our son Ethan who normally doesn't phone because of the cost. He and Lynne are living on a pretty tight budget. My first reaction is to imagine there's a problem, perhaps with little Isabella, so I am immediately anxious. But Ethan sounds bright and bubbly and asks lots of questions about our friends and neighbours in the village, where they lived for six months when Lynne was pregnant. He then tells us the real reason for the call.

‘I have some exciting news,' he says. ‘Lynne's pregnant. We're having another baby.'

The reaction he gets from me is so emotional that I simply can't speak because I'm overcome. I have to hand the phone over to David to finish the conversation. Nothing in the world could have made us happier than this. We have been frightened that Ethan and Lynne would not be brave enough to attempt having another child, given the severity of Isabella's condition. I feared that they would never experience the joy of being the parents of a healthy, problem-free child. A child who sits up at six months and walks at twelve months and is talking non-stop by the age of two. Although Isabella's condition is undoubtedly genetic, the thought of the new baby being affected isn't an issue for us, or for them either, it seems. The likelihood of two children with the same rare set of symptoms is highly, highly unlikely.

An hour after the call I am still very teary. It has brought me back to earth with a big jolt because it's so obvious to me that this is far, far more important than any of the argy-bargy that's been going on between David and me. Our troubles are trivial
compared to those confronting Ethan and Lynne and their children. It puts the whole thing into perspective and serves to remind me that my family is, after all, the most precious thing in my life.

I drive David to Toulouse to catch his plane back to Australia. He's travelling on a cheap business class ticket, which means he has a four-day stopover in Hong Kong, something he's really not looking forward to. He is subdued and melancholy. I am feeling totally drained by the last few weeks and quite honestly will be pleased when he's gone, so I can have some time on my own to mentally process everything that has happened. If I was confused about my life before the last two months, I am now even more unsettled and uncertain.

We are both quite subdued on the journey south, talking more about the effects of the heatwave on the crops and woods in this region than about our ongoing marital problems. The fields that adjoin the motorway are filled with burnt and frizzled stems of maize and sunflowers. The vineyards don't seem to have suffered as much damage, but the surrounding hillsides are very telling, dotted with dead and dying oak and chestnut trees all through the woods. A lot of the vegetation here, as in Australia, has grown naturally on very shallow, rocky ground. Over the
summer the roots have remained dry for so long that the trees themselves have started to die. It's the first time we have ever observed the northern hemisphere looking like Australia in the summer, faded and dry.

After his bags have been checked in, David turns to hug and kiss me good-bye. ‘I guess you'll be glad to see the back of me,' he says with a slight smile.

I deny it, of course, but he knows me well enough to know the truth. I need a break from him and from our deeply troubled relationship.

In the car driving back from the airport to Frayssinet, I put my foot flat to the boards. David always cautions me to drive the old Peugeot slowly. He believes it isn't safely capable of more than 100 kmh. But it's a lively little car and easily reaches 140 kmh on the motorway. I open the sunroof and inhale a sense of freedom and release. And relief.

This isn't right. I should be feeling sad that David is leaving. But I feel elated that I don't have to grapple with the difficulties any more. They haven't disappeared, of course, they have just moved out of sight for a little while.

I throw myself back into the party scene and start getting organised for the walking tour. The book isn't making much progress. I seem to be stuck mid-sentence. It's symptomatic of my entire life. Going nowhere.

My lover is away visiting friends in southern France and this allows me some space to do a little clear thinking. I have had no conversation with him since the day he and David met and talked, and I am concerned that he must have found the entire episode gruelling. I hope we can now revert to our former relationship – that of just being friends. It would certainly take the pressure off us both.

I hear not a word from David for the four days he is in transit. Normally he would call from Hong Kong every day for a chat, but this time there is complete silence. On the fifth day, he phones to say he has arrived back at the farm to total catastrophe. It's freezing cold at Yetholme. Snowing. A pipe linked to the hot water service in the attic has frozen and then burst, flooding the kitchen, bathroom, linen cupboard and one of the bedrooms. Fortunately our neighbour Robert Porter found the disaster within hours of it happening, but even so the water damage is extensive. Robert had been up to the house in the early morning checking the animals and at that stage everything seemed to be in order. For some reason he popped back in just before lunchtime, knowing that David would be arriving in the late afternoon. In the intervening period thousands of litres of water had cascaded into the house. He managed to turn off the water and mop up just before David came up the drive. It's a deeply depressing, distressing homecoming.

To add to the gloom, David discovers that rats have made a nest in our bedroom and dressing room. There are rat droppings everywhere and a huge amount of damage to our clothing. His best suit has been gnawed at the shoulder. And my new hat. David is very careful with his clothes. He looks after them and they last for years and years. He is horrified at the extent of the damage.