The Long Hot Summer
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), Last Tango in Toulouse (2003) 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
the long
hot summer
A French heatwave and a marriage meltdown
Mary
Moody
First published 2005 in Macmillan by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Limited
This Pan edition published in 2006 by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty limited
1 Market Street, Sydney
Copyright © Mary Moody 2005
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.
National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication data:
Moody, Mary, 1950–.
The long hot summer: a French heatwave and a
marriage meltdown.
ISBN-13: 9 78033042 2376.
ISBN-10: 0 330 42237 5.
1. Moody, Mary, 1950–. 2. Man-woman relationships – France.
3. France – Social life and customs. I. Tide.
306.872
Papers used by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd are natural, recyclable products made from wood grown in sustainable forests. The manufacturing processes conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.
Set in New Baskerville by Midland Typesetters
Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group
These electronic editions published in 2005 by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd
1 Market Street, Sydney 2000
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The Long Hot Summer
Mary Moody
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Contents
COVER
ABOUT MARY MOODY
ALSO BY MARY MOODY
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT
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
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
INTRODUCTION
If I were a poet or a novelist, writing this book would be less difficult. I could fictionalise the main characters to maintain their anonymity. I could set the narrative in a different place and a different time, and in doing so protect myself from publicly acknowledging that the story I am writing is my own. It is a dangerous business, writing about your own life in such a personal, revealing way without exposing yourself to public criticism by appearing self-absorbed.
It’s now four years since I ran away from my real life in search of a quiet time for reflection. It was the year I turned fifty, and I seized upon a brief window of opportunity for escape. Our children had grown up, left home and were well established – indeed I already had the delight of four grandchildren. My mother, who had lived with us for twenty-five years, had died suddenly and my career, although demanding, could easily be put on hold – for a little while at least.
That first year I spent six months living alone in a small room at the back of a shop in a medieval village in a remote rural region of France called the Lot. It was the first time I had ever lived alone and I revelled in the delights of that first long, hot summer with its village fairs and markets and days filled with socialising and sightseeing and balmy twilights where the sun doesn’t set until nearly eleven at night. I fell in love with France and ended up buying a small house in a nearby village with the full support of my husband David, who had remained in Australia for the six months of my escape to work on two feature films being shot in Queensland. When he realised how serious I was about wanting to buy a house in France, David flew over for the last few weeks of my stay so that we could choose the perfect place together.
It’s a modest house with enormous charm in the quaint village of Frayssinet-le-Gelat, which is surrounded by fields of maize and dense oak and chestnut woodlands. For me, the decision to buy a French property was made with a sense of urgency because I was worried that after going home my life would just revert to its usual round of deadlines and demands. I feared that the personal gains I had made by living alone, immersed in a different and fascinating culture, would rapidly disappear. It’s like when you say goodbye at the end of a much-loved holiday, always expecting to return some day. But I knew in my heart that I would get caught up in the pressures of my life and never find time to go back to this unique region that had won my heart. By buying a house there would be a permanent connection. A reason to return year after year.
If David had been able to foresee then how buying a house in France would so dramatically change our lives, I am positive he would never have agreed. Indeed, he has said just that many times as we’ve struggled to remain together through the tumultuous events that have unfolded.
Each year I go back to France with a purpose. I need a place where I can be my own person and have some time out from the usual demands of my life, but I am also taking refuge to write and just be alone if I choose to be. Or socialise non-stop if that’s what my heart desires. My way of justifying the time to myself and the expense of having a bolt hole so far from home is to organise village walking tours. Each year I lead a small group from Australia and introduce them to the delights of this little-known historic region. It’s a lot of fun but it also takes a lot of energy so I spen
d some time, both before and after each tour, chilling out in our village house.
Since buying the house I have written two books about my travels and adventures – Au Revoir (2001) and Last Tango in Toulouse (2003) – and they have received a very mixed reception. The books are not simply travelogues that detail where I go and who I meet and what I see. I do write about Frayssinet-le-Gelat and our house renovations and the wonderful local food and wine, but the books are about much more than that. They are an intensely personal journal in which I take a long hard look at my life, past and present. I openly discuss the problems of long-term relationships, including my own thirty-three year marriage. I describe the delights of living alone for the first time and the difficulties of confronting the menopause and the inevitable ageing process. I write openly about the unexpected sexual drive that some women experience at this age and I ponder on what I really want to do with the rest of my life.
After the publication of my last book some readers objected to such a candid memoir. While I accept that some may distrust my motives for throwing into the public arena events that many people regard as strictly personal, I maintain my right to document the difficult and often painful journey I’ve been on these last few years. Those who object, I am sure, strongly identify and sympathise with my husband, who is an integral part of my life and has therefore unwittingly become a character in my books. There’s no doubt that the subjects I touch on in my writing are often confronting and painful for David, but although he would prefer that I wasn’t so candid at times, he nevertheless supports my right to express my feelings – provided that I do not misrepresent his point of view.
For me, writing is a form of therapy, a way of crystallising the events and making some sense of them. It can be therapeutic for David at times, too. He read and reread the last book – far more often than I have – as a way of trying to gain some insight into what I struggled to express.
Yet I am painfully aware that writing ‘warts and all’ about my life while I am in the midst of living it is a totally bizarre situation. Often it feels unreal to me. Until all this happened I was a journalist who had made a successful career as a gardening writer and television presenter. After the publication of Au Revoir, which was part memoir and part travelogue, my writing career took a turn in a totally different direction. Instead of inspiring gardeners with the joys of making compost, I find myself writing about drinking too much red wine at lunch and being stopped by the gendarmes while driving back to my little French village. Instead of telling people how I go about pruning my roses, I’m describing how I fell in love and had an affair.
When Last Tango in Toulouse was published the reaction was fairly divided. On the one hand I was applauded for being ‘honest and brave’ by many of my readers, those who empathised with the various dilemmas and contradictions I was facing. These readers, who came to my literary lunches and bookshop events, wrote me the most encouraging and supportive letters and they seemed to understand – or at least appreciate – my way of dealing with the problems I was facing in my life. Of the rest, many had not actually read the book but instead reacted adversely to the publicity surrounding its publication. As a result, some determined that I was totally selfish. It was certainly difficult reading some of those negative reviews and comments, but I couldn’t allow myself to be overly concerned about what other people thought of me, especially strangers. Doing so can be almost as dangerous as believing your own publicity.
In a sense I am caught on a treadmill. Having tried so hard to escape one set of demands and commitments, I find myself caught up in another equally demanding life and career. There is little I can do but continue living my life and writing about it as I go, while ever hopeful that sometime soon a sense of normality will return. At times it seems unlikely.
Mary Moody,
March 2005
1
How did I find myself in such a weird situation, confessing my misdeeds in print in the book Last Tango in Toulouse? It was never planned, it just evolved. After the success of Au Revoir I signed a contract with my publishers to write a second book about my travels and adventures in France. While I was flattered at being asked to continue telling my story, I was also a little nervous that there wouldn’t be enough fresh material to sustain an interesting narrative. The feedback from the first book had been very positive and although I wasn’t approaching the second book as a ‘sequel’, I realised that I had to write in the same voice and with the same enthusiasm as the first one because it had resonated so well with the readers. At the time of signing the contract, I remember making an offhand remark to my publisher and my agent, and ironically also to David, that I should probably have some raunchy sex in the new book to add some sparkle to the plot. An affair, or even a couple of affairs. That would liven up proceedings. We all laughed.
In mid-2002 I launched myself into writing the new book with more confidence about the structure and the way the narrative should flow, with overlapping chapters set in France and back home in Australia. David and I were now living on a farm at Yetholme, near Bathurst, and gradually starting to get more organised and acclimatised to country living. For twenty-five years, while our children were growing up, we had lived in the Blue Mountains, and although we had a large garden it was never as much work as the acreage we were now trying to maintain. At my instigation we had started breeding geese and ducks, and David surprised me by taking on the role of goose-herder with great enthusiasm. He fussed over the birds, rounding them up every evening to lock them away from the foxes, and became so attached to our first batch of goslings that I feared we would never have the heart to kill and eat them.
Water on the farm was an ongoing problem, and we continued to battle the workings of our water pump and household plumbing. We are fortunate to have a deep spring to supply the house and garden with a seemingly unending flow of water, but it needs to be pumped up from a paddock which is two hundred metres behind the old farm sheds. There were many days when David would turn on the tap first thing in the morning to put the kettle on for tea and not one drop would emerge. I have since discovered that this sort of situation is par for the course on rural properties. But my husband is not a handyman, and although he would do his best to track down the problem – usually a burst pipe somewhere underground between the spring and house – inevitably we had to send for help from the local water contractors. It was all costing a small fortune, and when we looked at our overall expenditure we realised that our dream of living on a farm was proving to be very costly indeed. And that, combined with the cost of owning a house in France, was putting us under considerable financial pressure. So while David tried to keep on top of the farm management while also developing his various filmmaking projects, I set about starting work on the second book.
Writing has become a way of life for me. I developed disciplined working habits back in the late sixties when I trained as a journalist. Newspaper and magazine offices are busy, noisy places and I quickly adopted a technique of being able to write fast and meet deadlines in spite of the endless noise and clatter of ringing phones, loud conversations and multiple other distractions. It was critical to success as a journalist. Only the star writers and columnists had quiet rooms of their own in which to write; the rest of us produced our copy in open-plan offices which were noisy and smoky but also lots of fun. I delighted in the camaraderie and the buzzy atmosphere, where the deadline was paramount but the tension was alleviated by the good spirits of my fellow workers.
During the decades I worked as a gardening writer, I managed to fit the demanding deadlines in and around my hectic home life. I had four growing children and a large house and garden to care for. I structured my day around writing and started in the early morning in the hope that my mind would be sharper. The plan was to finish by lunchtime so I could spend the rest of the day gardening, have time with the children after school and then prepare the family dinner. I quickly realised that if I allowed my disciplined routine to lapse the family would su
ffer. I would be fraught and bad-tempered as the deadline approached. So I stuck to my regime to maintain family harmony.
To get started on this new book I decided to write about recent events in our lives: our problems adapting to rural life; the tragic death of our farming neighbour Russell in a road accident; and the joyful arrival of our fifth grandson, Augustus James, who was born on my birthday in June. The writing came easily and I started to feel confident that I could produce another book with the same honesty as Au Revoir.
Not long into the writing, the time came for me to pack up and fly to France, where I was to meet up with our youngest son Ethan and his partner Lynne, now heavily pregnant, who had been living in our village house for six months to experience the lifestyle and also to start work on some much needed painting and renovating. Ethan and Lynne were about to return to Australia to have their baby and I wanted to spend a week or so with them before having some precious time alone in the house. This was my first return visit to the region after the life-changing six months I had written about in Au Revoir and I was filled with excitement and anticipation. I would have the chance to live in the house for the first time as a local rather than just being a visitor, and I was thrilled at the prospect of catching up with all the friends I had made the previous summer.
Since buying the house I had agonised about how to organise a legitimate way of living part of each year in France, not, as I had done the previous year, as an extended holiday, but involved in some sort of business that would generate income. I had given up my television job on ‘Gardening Australia’ and I desperately needed to replace it with an alternative career. Writing memoirs wouldn’t be enough to sustain houses in two countries.
The plan I came up with was to organise small tour groups of Australians to visit the region. So this first return visit was primarily to set up an interesting itinerary that would include several hours of walking every day, visits to historic villages, châteaux and gardens, plus lots of regional restaurant meals. Doing the research for the tour would be fun and I decided to work with my New Zealand-born friend Jan Claudy as co-guide and translator.