The Long Hot Summer Read online

  Now, if it’s possible, I have created an even more complicated and anxiety-ridden existence for myself at an age when my life should, by rights, be starting to become more relaxed and easier to manage. I have split myself in half. I am trying to lead a double life. When I am in France I am one woman: independent, free-spirited, impulsive, self-indulgent, outspoken, wilful, at times wild and irresponsible. Reckless. I love this new person because in many ways she is the real me who has been trying to get out for years. Aspects of this hidden me have always been obvious to my close friends and family, but they have been outweighed by the other half of me, the responsible and hard-working one. The wife and mother, the daughter and the grandmother. The backbone of the family. The matriarch.

  Now I am endeavouring to achieve what I fear is impossible. I am trying to hang on to my husband and our family life while still relishing the freedom I experience when living in France. I don’t wish to exclude David from being part of both my worlds, but I do want to have a little time in France on my own to write, to lead my walking tours and to be enveloped by the glorious sensation of being ‘me’ which I have only ever experienced when I am in the village on my own. When I am in France, Australia seems like a dream. I miss my children and even more so my grandchildren, but I know that they are getting on extremely well without me. I also know that I will return to them soon – I will always return to my home and my family, and this makes the separations much easier to bear.

  As for David, I have grown accustomed over many years to living apart from him for long periods and I have always believed it to be quite a healthy thing for our relationship. Now that he is working from home at the farm, I find that being able to escape for a while to France is maintaining that balance in our lives. We can go our separate ways and meet up again, whether in France or back at the farm. It seems like the perfect arrangement.

  My friends claim jealously that I have achieved ‘the perfect life’. A house in France, time alone, a place in the Australian countryside, a warm and loving family and a devoted husband. But I know this is far, far from the truth. I am struggling to maintain the facade of this dream and I know that it must eventually collapse around me because it is nothing more than a facade. A front. The truth is much less palatable.

  5

  I have never been a nervous woman. In all my years of travel I have only ever taken the simplest security precautions with my travel documents, money and passport. I have wandered on my own through the back streets of New York, down laneways in New Delhi, and I even breached security regulations to explore Soweto when working on the feature film Mapantsula with David in the troubled city of Johannesburg in the late 1980s. I have never experienced a house robbery, car theft or bag-snatching, except for an odd incident when I was pregnant with our first child and living in Sydney. Two strange men wandered in through the front door of our semidetached cottage in Crows Nest. Our family dog Wombat puffed himself up to double his usual border collie size and chased the strangers out the front gate. I easily dismissed that incident as a one-off and it didn’t motivate me to remember to lock the car when I went shopping or the back door when I went to bed, even when David was away filming. It’s a rather cavalier attitude to security which some people may regard as naïve or even reckless.

  My mother Muriel, on the other hand, was always highly nervous and hated being left alone at night or even for long periods during the day. I’ll never forget an incident that happened when Mum was well into her seventies. She was vacuuming the floor and was suddenly aware of someone at the glass doors of the front verandah. She turned off the cleaner and opened the door only to be confronted with a young man who appeared, to Mum’s instant alarm, to be reaching inside the zipper of his trousers. She slammed the door in his face and took off like lightning through the house, out the back door and down into the garden where she somehow effortlessly scaled a 1.5-metre fence into the neighbour’s back yard. After raising the alarm, she returned to our house with the neighbour in tow only to discover a small group of puzzled people gathered outside on the footpath. Our neighbour approached them and told them what had just happened to Muriel, and it turned out that the young man, who was slightly mentally retarded, was door-knocking for a well-known charity. Just before Mum opened the door he realised that his zip wasn’t properly closed and was trying to rectify the situation when she appeared, misinterpreted his intentions and reacted – or overreacted. She was not amused when I shrieked with laughter at her story, especially the mental image of her getting over the back fence at a stage of life when she found climbing the front stairs an effort.

  I never wanted to be like Mum, frightened of my own shadow, so in some respects I almost consciously went in the other direction by totally disregarding the possibility of stranger danger. Over the years David has often remonstrated with me for my casual attitude to locking doors, and I have only become more conscious of the need to lock up the house, the sheds and cars since moving to the farm because, as he quite rightly points out, our insurance won’t cover us if we are robbed when the locks aren’t in use. But when living in France I tend to revert to my lackadaisical attitude to security, probably because I feel more like I’m on holiday than living in the real world. I try to remember to lock the house and car last thing at night, but during the day the downstairs shutters are wide open and the side door is always unlocked unless I am going to be out for the whole day.

  There’s a feeling of security living in the middle of the village, surrounded by neighbours, with people coming and going from the car park across the road. I don’t even have curtains – my charming French doors and windows give me an uninterrupted view of the bustle of village life outside, and those who walk past have a clear view of my cosy living area both night and day. I don’t feel vulnerable or exposed, I just feel like part of the life of the village.

  When I first lived in France a few years ago, I rented a little cottage nestled deep in the woods for three months. My friend Margaret Barwick was horrified when she first visited.

  ‘However will you sleep at night?’ she asked. ‘Won’t you be terrified being on your own in such a lonely, isolated place?’

  But I wasn’t at all jittery. It never occurred to me that I could possibly be the target of a crime. I have to admit these days I am no longer quite so blasé.

  One evening in the middle of my September walking tour, I joined a small group of friends at the bar across the road for a drink after a hectic day of running around organising my tour group. As usual I left the side door to the house closed but unlocked. The group included an Englishman I had met briefly several years before when he was staying with a friend who lives in a village nearby. He was down on another visit, again staying with his friend, and we spent a very pleasant couple of hours in a small group talking and drinking. Three in the group decided to have a light meal – a simple steak and chips – but because I had eaten a larger than usual lunch on the tour, I decided to wait for a while and perhaps have an omelette or boiled egg when I got home.

  As darkness fell, I realised I was tired and probably should get an early night in preparation for the busy day ahead. We had all noticed that the visiting man had disappeared. Initially we thought he had gone to the toilet, but when he failed to reappear we just assumed he had decided to walk back to the place where he was staying several kilometres up the road. I thought little of it, said my goodbyes and went immediately home.

  Inside the house was in darkness. I turned on the light to the stairwell and went upstairs to change into my comfortable pyjamas. I came down, switched on the light in the kitchen and started to fill the sink with hot water to wash the glasses and coffee cups left from several hours before when members of the tour group had come to have a look at the house. Suddenly, from the corner of my eye, I noticed a movement in the shadows on the other side of the room. I looked around and there was the missing man, obviously the worse for wear from drink. His demeanour was menacing.

  ‘Ah, there you are,’ I sa
id, trying to sound bright and unfazed by his presence, even though it had given me quite a start. ‘We all wondered where you’d got to. Shall I phone your friend and get him to pick you up? There’s a big storm brewing. If you try walking back now, you’ll get soaked.’

  I was babbling nervously and moving towards the phone when he grabbed me.

  ‘I’m staying here with you,’ he said, trying to kiss me. He really was far more drunk than any of us had realised and I knew in that instant that I was in big trouble. I would have to talk him around and somehow get to the phone and get some help.

  But it wasn’t going to be easy. He started handling me very roughly, pulling at my pyjamas in an effort to get them off. I wrestled with him but kept talking all the time, trying to reason with him rather than putting up a full-scale fight. A gut feeling told me that if I started to scream I could be in even worse trouble. That he might try to silence me with his large meaty hands around my throat. So I just kept talking and trying to fend him off.

  He was a big man, very heavy and quite strong. He couldn’t be talked down or reasoned with, he was way beyond that. He forced me backwards against the wooden staircase and dragged off my pyjama pants. He was trying to get me up the stairs, and the more I resisted the more he pushed my back hard against the wooden stairs. I could feel the impact of them on my backbone as I wrestled with him. He then started to bite me on the neck and breasts and on my inner thighs. It was appalling and I feared that if he got me all the way up to the bedroom I wouldn’t be able to fend him off.

  Although I was very frightened of the predicament I found myself in, I was also somehow strangely calm. I wanted to maintain at least some level of control of the situation. If I panicked, things could escalate and go terribly wrong. So I just kept talking and reasoning, not pleading but trying to make him see that what he was doing was a terrible mistake. I sensed that he was starting to be worn down by the struggle, although he persisted, pushing me step by step up to the second floor, where he grappled me into the back bedroom and onto one of the narrow single beds.

  There was a moment as he lay heavily on top of me, pinning me to the bed, that it occurred to me it would probably be safer and easier to just let him do whatever it was he wanted to do to me so I could hopefully then get rid of him. But the thought was so repugnant that I immediately set it aside and continued trying to calm him down and talk him around. He hadn’t managed to remove any of his own clothes and he seemed to be slowing down a little, so I was hopeful that I might be able to somehow get out from under him. Suddenly, nature intervened.

  The storm that had been brewing to the east for several hours suddenly hit the village with a vengeance. A huge gust of wind must have come down the main street, knocking my large front shutters from their fastenings. The resulting crashing sound was like the front doors being broken down and was loud enough and violent enough to make my attacker jump to his feet in alarm. That was all it took for me to be off the bed and down the stairs, naked from the waist down, and out the door into the street. By now the wind was really howling and it had started to rain heavily, so there was no one in the street to witness my distraught state. The man followed, and once out in the street he lost his power over me.

  I screamed at him to get away from me. Now. Run. I don’t think my language was very polite. As he moved off, I ran back into the house, locking the door quickly behind me. Through the front shutters, which were flapping around wildly in the wind, I could see him scurrying around the corner and out of sight, in the general direction of the place where he was staying. I immediately phoned his friend and, by now almost hysterical, managed to tell him what had happened.

  ‘Stay where you are,’ he said, ‘and I’ll call the gendarmes.’

  ‘No, no, I don’t want the police involved,’ I sobbed. ‘The language problems are just too great. I can’t deal with it all, not in the middle of a tour with all those people depending on me. And I don’t want people to know. I’m perfectly okay, really. Just a few bruises,’ I tried to reassure him. ‘Just get hold of him – he’s on the road back to your place. And get rid of him. As far away as possible.’

  I must have been in shock, but at the time I was simply overwhelmed with relief that I had escaped shaken but relatively unscathed. I dressed and when I knew it was safe – because my friend called to say he had found the man, who was now packing his bag before being taken to catch the next train from Cahors – I ventured outside to close up the shutters and shut out the world.

  I sat for more than an hour shaking like a leaf and trying to make sense of what had happened. My friend arrived, having dropped the man at the station, and sat up with me for hours while I went over and over the story. Debriefing. Reassuring myself and him that I was okay.

  My friend continued to debate the rights and wrongs of involving the police. He argued, quite rightly, that his now ex-friend was obviously mentally unstable and that he could easily do the same sort of thing to another woman. That he probably already had a history of violence and aggression towards women. But I was really in no fit state to make a reasoned or sensible decision either for myself or for future victims of this man. I realise now that it was irresponsible, but my instinct at the time was to protect myself by just closing down and trying to bury it somewhere deep inside my psyche. I reasoned that if I could just get through the next few days I would be fine. That I was a strong woman, used to coping with difficulties. This was just another one and I would get through it.

  I now understand why victims of rape often don’t report the crime. It’s a form of self-protection and a belief, often mistaken, that they will simply ‘get over it’. But what happened to me didn’t just disappear in a day or two, or even after a few weeks. I got up the following morning and was alarmed at the extent of the bruising and bite marks all over my body. But I showered, dressed and went on with my job as leader of the tour as though nothing had happened. Only Jan, who works side by side with me on the tours, twigged that something was amiss and when I finally told her, nervously, she was visibly shaken and very, very angry. She couldn’t believe I hadn’t called the gendarmes and gone to be examined at the hospital in Cahors. She wanted to send a group of local men to look for my attacker, but I assured her that he had long gone and was probably already out of the country. Or at least I hoped he was.

  Thoughts of the attack haunted me for months, and although I didn’t become a nervous wreck I certainly developed a habit of locking all the doors every time I left the house, even if I was just ducking around the corner to buy a loaf of bread from Sandrine in the boulangerie. One unpleasant result was the dreams I had, mostly harking back to the time I was raped in my teens. It had been my first sexual experience and certainly not a pleasant one, although I hadn’t been as battered and bruised back then as I was this time around. But the memories of it, which hadn’t disturbed me for many, many years, came flooding back and I realised that they had probably been buried just under the surface all that time. And that it takes a trigger like a second attack to stir up the fears and emotions once again. It made my flesh creep.

  I also thought long and hard about my own behaviour and how it may easily have contributed to the situation. I know that it’s not uncommon for women who are victims of sexual crime to blame themselves and I certainly don’t believe that. But I do recognise that sitting around in bars drinking can put a woman at risk even if the people she’s with are known to her. I didn’t really know the man involved, but he was a friend of a friend, and I therefore assumed that he was fine. He was a known quantity. But he wasn’t. He had a dark and violent aspect to his personality and my openness and friendliness may have been interpreted somehow as an invitation. Which, of course, it wasn’t.

  The worst aspect of the whole sorry saga was that I also made a decision at the time not to tell David anything about the incident. Once again, the decision was made when I was probably not thinking too clearly. I reasoned that being on the other side of the world he would feel totally h
elpless and impotent, therefore unable to support me or to handle the situation the way he would have liked (which no doubt would have involved calling the gendarmes). I also convinced myself, quite selfishly, that the attack would add to David’s belief that I was not capable of looking after myself properly. That I was too open, that I exposed myself to risks and was therefore vulnerable to being preyed upon by men. So I said nothing when he phoned a few days later. I was now learning to lie, or at least to not admit to the truth, with some proficiency. It didn’t feel good.

  6

  Since buying the village house, travelling back and forth between France and Australia has become the pattern of my life. I seem to spend increasing amounts of time hanging around airports and railway stations – the journey takes more than thirty-four hours each way, door to door. A plane from Bathurst to Sydney, then Sydney to Paris, usually with at least one stopover. Then a domestic plane from Paris to Toulouse, a bus from the airport to the railway station, and a train from Toulouse to Cahors, where I am met by either my friend Jock or by Jan and Philippe for the 45-minute car journey to Frayssinet. Then the same in reverse when I pack and return to Australia, to David and the farm. It takes me nearly a week to recover each time I do the trip, and every year I swear that I will do it only once each year. But somehow I seem to be commuting twice a year, often with an extra trip to India or Nepal if I have a trek organised.

  My heart is in France yet my soul truly lies in Australia. Each time I return to Yetholme I am filled with a love for the farm and joy at being back in the bosom of my family. Although we have done very little to the appearance of the farmhouse, it always feels just right when I walk in the door, with the fires going and the family gathering for our customary happy and chaotic reunion. Our children and grandchildren love being at the farm, including Ethan and Lynne’s little daughter Isabella, who has been diagnosed with a wide range of disabilities and who is lagging seriously behind her basic infant milestones. She lies on the floor kicking and giggling with the cats and dogs and older children all bouncing around her and keeping her well amused. It’s a scene of familiar bliss.