Au Revoir Read online

  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), Last Tango in Toulouse (2003), 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.

  Also by Mary Moody

  Au Revoir

  Last Tango in Toulouse

  The Long Hot Summer

  Lunch with Madame Murat

  Au Revoir

  au revoir

  Running away from home at fifty

  Mary

  Moody

  First published 2001 in Macmillan by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd

  This Pan edition published 2003 by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd

  1 Market Street, Sydney

  Reprinted 2003 (four times), 2004 (twice), 2005 (twice)

  Copyright © Mary Moody 2001

  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 the prior written permission of the publisher.

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication Data:

  Moody, Mary.

  Au revoir.

  ISBN 0 330 36448 0 (pbk.).

  1. Moody, Mary - Homes and haunts - France.2. Solitude.

  3. Women - Australia - Biography.4. France - Social life

  and customs.1. Title.

  155.92

  Typeset in New Baskerville by Midland Typesetters printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

  Cover and text design by Liz Seymour

  These electronic editions published in 2001 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.

  Au Revoir

  Mary Moody

  Adobe eReader format: 978-1-74197-147-7

  EPUB format: 978-1-74197-549-9

  Online format: 978-1-74197-750-9

  Macmillan Digital Australia

  www.macmillandigital.com.au

  Visit www.panmacmillan.com.au to read more about all our books and to buy both print and ebooks online. You will also find features, author interviews and news of any author events.

  Contents

  About Mary Moody

  Also by Mary Moody

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  To David Barwick and Emma Veitch-Turkington

  who both loved this little corner of France

  THE YEAR MY MOTHER TURNED FIFTY she had a nervous breakdown. My father had run off with another woman and Mum wrapped herself in a blanket of sleeping tablets and alcohol. She lost her high-profile job as the public relations executive for an international cosmetics company. Her half century culminated in two dramatic attempts at suicide which were clinically treated, quite alarmingly, with several large doses of LSD. She never worked again.

  The year of my mother’s breakdown I turned twenty and I tried, with little compassion, to grasp the implications of her illness. After many years of my father’s infidelity, heavy drinking and domestic violence, my love and respect for him had totally evaporated. From my point of view my mother was well shot of him. Being so young I was unable to come to terms with the notion that people of my parents’ advanced age could still feel such intense love and passion that it could drive them to heights of rage and despair. My parents’ behaviour simply appalled me. I did my best to escape by running away from home with an unsuitable long-haired local boy to enjoy the tail end of the swinging sixties. For me life was full of exciting possibilities—living in a share house in trendy Paddington, going to rock festivals, partying all night and working by day as a cadet journalist on a popular women’s magazine. I became deeply resentful at having to spend so much of that year rescuing my mother from her ongoing crisis. I ran out of patience with ambulance dashes to hospital casualty departments and visits to the weird psychiatric clinic where she was being treated.

  At fifty, the women of my mother’s generation were considered old. For many, after their fiftieth birthday celebrations it was downhill all the way. Middle age meant blue rinses and tight perms and Friday nights at the bingo. From my self-obsessed, youthful perspective I believed that my mother should just pull herself together, forget about her failed marriage and get on with growing old gracefully.

  The year I turned fifty it dawned on me that I was exactly the same age my mother had been when I’d thought she had ‘stopped living’. Suddenly, and with some guilt, I saw clearly for the first time how my mother must have been feeling that terrible year. My own life had taken a very different path from hers—I had a solid marriage, financial security, a busy and successful career and a wonderful collection of children and grandchildren. I was happy but also very aware that for my generation fifty is still considered quite young. Sexy, even. Certainly not the beginning of the end. While my mother at fifty could see no further than the black hole created by my father’s departure, I saw my life as only just starting in so many ways. Instead of feeling pain and despair, I was feeling joy and excitement.

  The year I turned fifty, in memory of my mother, I decided to claim six months for myself. I abandoned my career, my husband, my children and grandchildren, my friends, my home and my large garden, and went on a journey alone, to find myself.

  1

  I AM A CLASSIC BABY boomer. I was born into relative affluence and, like so many women of my generation, I’ve had it all. I have maintained a busy life and have worked professionally with virtually no time off for thirty years, while simultaneously rearing a larger than average family, balancing a relationship with my partner, managing a house, establishing a garden and generally being all things to all people. The expectations placed on us fifties girls have been enormous, and many have crumbled under the strain, admitting that being superwoman just isn’t worth it. I somehow managed to survive, but—oddly enough—only with considerable help from my mother.

  My mother regained her mental health, but really only completely recovered following the death of my father, two years after the dramatic dissolution of their marriage. She moved to a wheat farm in northern NSW with my much older half-brother Jon, but within twelve months had injured her leg so badly in a fall that she needed total bed rest to recuperate fully. It was harvest time and Jon simply couldn’t cope, so Mum arrived on our doorstep to stay for three weeks. Somehow this turned
into twenty-three years. My husband used to joke that it was like the mythical aunt who comes to dinner and never leaves, but somehow for all of us it seemed just right. By this stage we had two small children. Living up north, Mum had sorely missed them, and I had certainly missed having her around during those busy years with a young family. My relationship with her, which had been greatly strained during the years of her marriage breakup and nervous breakdown, was miraculously healed at the birth of my first child. It was quite amazing how her spirits lifted when this small wrinkled person arrived on the scene. She even wrote me a long and apologetic letter acknowledging how bad things had been, and how having a grandchild had somehow changed her life. Suddenly she was more positive, she had something to live for again. With her shock of unruly grey hair, her sharp wit and her irreverent sense of humour, she obviously had a huge impact on our lives over such a long period. She maintained her penchant for whisky and cigarettes, carefully eyeing the clock every evening for the stroke of five, when the lid would come off the bottle. But her contribution to our family life greatly outweighed her long-acquired bad habits.

  My partner of nearly thirty years is a filmmaker, eleven years my senior. David and I got together in 1972 when I was working as a publicist for a commercial television station in Sydney where he was in production with a television series. The first time I saw David walking along the gloomy corridors near my office I was aghast: he was a bear-like man in his early thirties, balding on top but with blond-streaked hair at the back and sides that swept down over his shoulders—and he had a brilliant red beard that came close to reaching his belt buckle.

  ‘There’s a man who works at the station,’ I reported to Mum that weekend, ‘who looks very much like an oversized garden gnome.’

  Not long separated from his first wife Kathleen, and still on the rebound from a disastrous affair with a pretty young woman in the production office, David really shouldn’t have been all that interested in entering into another full-on relationship. Yet he pursued me quite obsessively, and within a few months of meeting him we started living together. One of the first questions David posed to me in those early months of our relationship concerned having a child together. He already had a son, Tony, who had been born not long after the split-up with Kathleen, and he felt very distanced from him. David seemed desperate to have a child and for reasons I still cannot begin to fathom, I cheerfully fell in with the idea. I have often wondered why I was so compliant, given that it could easily have been a recipe for disaster: my youth and background of emotional turmoil combined with his poor history of relationships. I don’t remember thinking it through for a moment, or trying to analyse the pros and cons. I simply stopped taking the pill and we produced our first child—a daughter, Miriam—in 1973. Two years later we followed with a son, Aaron, and not long after, with Mum in tow, we moved the entire household to the Blue Mountains, two hours west of Sydney.

  As a flower child of the sixties I felt passionately that my children should grow up surrounded by pollution-free green fields, eating nothing but organic, home-grown fruit and vegetables. However I also had a fairly well-developed work ethic and couldn’t see myself floating around a free-love commune or living completely off the land. The compromise was a house and large garden in the mountains where I could work as a freelance writer and still give our children a healthy lifestyle, plus all the home-grown vegetables I could force down their throats. It was here that I taught myself to garden. I quickly discovered it was more than just a practical acquisition. It was a passion.

  In 1980 our second son, Ethan, was born in the front room with a midwife, neighbours, pet dog and older children in attendance. By this time David’s son Tony, now aged eight, was also living with us, so we were a large and boisterous family of seven. I would have happily continued producing babies as I adored being pregnant and giving birth, but David had financial reservations about supporting such a large tribe. I rather reluctantly undertook surgery to halt my fertility. It occurred to me then—and has often since—that as it was his desire that the baby-making finish, it should have been him to brave the surgeon’s knife.

  During these years when the children were young I continued working as a freelance journalist and author, an ideal career for a young mother because it meant I could basically work from home. In the beginning developing the disciplines necessary to juggle a busy family life with magazine and publishing deadlines wasn’t easy, but my sense of survival took over. I quickly discovered that if I didn’t work consistently or if I left everything to the last moment (as most journalists inevitably do) life deteriorated into a nightmare. The secret was good organisation and an ability to cope with long days. I usually started early by taking some time in the garden before getting the kids up for school. I worked in the morning, shopped, cooked and did housework in the afternoon and tried to knock off for a beer and to start cooking dinner by five in the evening. We had a wide circle of good friends and although we were often fairly broke, these years were really the best for us. David was away an awful lot during that time. For almost twenty years he spent the greater part of each week at his office in the city; then, when actually filming, he would be away for weeks or even months at a time.

  Being an independent producer in the Australian film industry is not the most financially secure of professions. We were often anxious about when the next bundle of money would come or where it would come from. So it was essential for me to keep working steadily as a backstop to the ups and downs of David’s career. The saving grace was having my mother around for company and support; without her the lonely evenings after the children had gone to bed would have driven me mad. Mum had a fine mind and a wonderful, wicked way of handling people. She passionately followed the daily news in the papers, on the radio and television, having herself trained as a journalist. She read voraciously, was devoted to her grand-children, loved to cook, and loved to help care for the animals: as well as dogs, cats, chickens and ducks, at times we also had guinea pigs, sheep, goats, rabbits and fish. Right up until her death at the age of seventy-six she could still take down shorthand at 140 wpm and do all the newspaper crosswords every morning. The only downside was Mum’s increasing dependence on the bottle for nightly enjoyment, and the repeated falls she had of an evening weaving from bedroom to bathroom.

  On the up side, David and I both loved our working lives and were constantly stimulated by our various independent writing and filmmaking projects. Our weekends were very lively indeed—always a loving reunion when David came home on Friday nights, followed by two days of lavish meals, entertaining, bush walks, open fires, good music and visitors from the city. It really was the good life.

  In 1992, after twenty-one years of this happy cohabitation, David and I took the plunge and got married. It had taken us this long even to think about marriage because David and his previous wife Kathleen had never actually organised a divorce, even after more than two decades of separation. They did start proceedings twenty-odd years earlier, but David so infuriated the sitting judge by debating with him the informal arrangements that he and Kathleen had made for the care of Tony, that the case was subsequently thrown out of court. So they remained legally bound for the entire time we had been together producing our large family.

  Although I publicly avowed that getting married was just a good excuse for a party, in truth it was the formalising of the commitment we had made so many years before. Our wedding ceremony, which was meant to be a brief prelude to a sumptuous Italian feast began by being slightly comical, then rapidly degenerated into a farce. The celebrant decided the occasion was deeply romantic, and therefore deserving of much hand-clasping, teary eyes and poetry reading. I had never intended it to be like this, indeed I loathe overly sentimentalised ceremonies of any description. I carefully prepared the celebrant with some succinct words we had written, explaining to her that we were already quite an old ‘married couple’; in spite of this, she insisted on treating us like a pair of eighteen-year-old star-cro
ssed lovers. I couldn’t make eye contact with David for fear of dissolving into hysterics, and one glance at our now almost-adult children revealed that they were finding the whole thing more than a little embarrassing. I am convinced that most marriage celebrants are frustrated actors who relish the opportunity to overact their socks off. But it provided plenty of laughs during the six-hour-long lunch, and we certainly didn’t forget the occasion in a hurry.

  By the mid 1990s Tony, Miriam and Aaron had started leaving home to pursue their various educational options. Although life became easier with just one teenager at home, my career suddenly became extremely busy and demanding, with television segments to film and monthly magazine deadlines to meet, as well as book contracts. About this time my mother’s health started to deteriorate. She didn’t like being left alone in the house, which meant we had to make sure there was always someone around to keep a watchful eye on her. If I was away filming, one of the children would come home and stay with her; sometimes it would even be one of their friends, as she had attracted a large retinue of young followers who had adopted her as their surrogate grandma.

  Then a strange thing happened. Miriam, who was in her final year of university, announced that she and her boyfriend Rick were going to have a baby. Before our youngest child had finished school David and I were going to be grandparents. Whatever happened to those years in between when we could enjoy having paid off the mortgage and have some peace and quiet? Have some time to ourselves without babies and high-chairs and bathtoys?

  Yet becoming a grandmother, I quickly discovered, was one of the sweetest joys of my life. Miriam had watched with fascination while her young brother Ethan was being born at home; now in turn she opted for a homebirth in the small townhouse she and Rick shared a few kilometres from her university in Canberra. Seemingly without effort, she gave birth to Eamonn in May and completed her degree at the end of that year.