Last Tango in Toulouse (11 page)

‘Bonjour, Marie, ça va?' as we cordially shake hands.

‘Voulez-vous un café ou un jus d'orange?' laughing at his own ironic reference to my preference for something a little stronger.

If the weather is good I take my drink out onto the footpath or across the road, where Christian has set up tables, chairs and umbrellas in the forecourt area of the ancient church. This is a great way of being spotted by friends driving home from work for their two or three-hour lunch break. They furiously beep their klaxon (horn), or call out rude remarks about my predilection for drinking beer in a public place at midday. Or, more frequently, they stop and join me for an aperitif or two. These chance encounters can be a bit of a trap, especially if I am spied by one of the more enthusiastic drinkers in the group. Several times I have found myself not getting back to the house for lunch until two o'clock, by which time I have lost all interest in eating and am more likely to lie down for a nap instead.

Only during lunchtime, when the drivers have stopped for their well-earned two-hour feast, does the village become silent. The rest of the time trucks pass closely enough for the drinkers to reach out and touch them as they rumble by, belching out clouds of diesel and rarely slowing down much, in spite of the approaching dangerous intersection. In high summer, groups of youths gather in the afternoon to drink beer and some actually position their plastic chairs in the roadway so that the
trucks are forced to drive around them. This is alarming for me to observe, but the young men don't bat an eyelid. They obviously have confidence that the truck drivers won't risk not making their delivery deadline by running over a pedestrian (not that you can really call someone sitting on a chair in the road a pedestrian).

Le Relais also serves food at lunch and dinner time: a simple three courses which includes a plat that is generally either steak au frites or poulet au frites. They make excellent potage (soup) and always offer dessert. You can get basic sandwiches of jambon au fromage, served on crispy white baguettes with lots of creamy butter. The food is prepared by Christiane, who is possibly in her early forties, slim with a pretty face and a warm disposition. Unlike her husband, she always greets me with two kisses, and by my third visit she is attempting to speak to me in English by saying ‘Hello, Marie' whenever I enter the bar. I decide that hello isn't really ideal for an Australian greeting and teach her to say ‘Gidday' with a broad Aussie accent. She is intrigued, and within a few weeks several of the regulars also adopt this casual greeting, laughing heartily at the oddness of the word. There doesn't seem to be a single word in French that sounds even vaguely similar.

I gather that Christian and Christiane have both been married before. Christian has a son in his early twenties by a previous relationship, a handsome young man by the name of Giles, who seems to have most of the young women in the village drooling over him. Giles rarely rises before midday, and then comes into the bar for a heart-starting short black coffee, oozing with that ‘just rolled out of the sack' appearance. Indeed, I notice that in the French cosmetic salons it is possible to buy a hair gel or mousse that creates the dishevelled appearance of
someone who has just emerged from their bed and not bothered to brush their hair. I suppose it's meant to be sexy, and it certainly works for Giles if you consider the number of gorgeous young women who hover around him! Giles works in the afternoons at the local ‘Quad Hire', a summer holiday tourist attraction where visitors hire four-wheel bikes, grotesque-looking machines with wheels as big as a tractor's. They roar around the woodland tracks and the back blocks of local farms, making an outrageous amount of noise and causing general disruption; all this is tolerated as the normal summer madness of rural France. Giles has a dog who follows him around wearing the same baleful expression as most of the young women. A leggy brown and white hunting dog called Alf, he often sits in the road so that the truck drivers have to avoid him as well as the beer drinkers. It's all very casual.

Christian and Christiane also have a ten-year-old son, Guillaume. In between cooking meals and serving drinks, Christiane helps him with his homework in the late afternoon, sitting at one of the tables surrounded by the jolly noise of the drinkers. The attitude to children in bars here is certainly much more casual than in Australia. Children tend to wander in and out, looking for their parents, and it's not uncommon to see young women with babies sitting in the bar during the daytime. Indeed, a rather plump young mother with a three month-old baby comes every day for several hours; while the baby is sleeping or gurgling happily in its pram, the mother drinks coffee after coffee and smokes cigarettes. It seems a terrific antidote to the loneliness and isolation of new motherhood – she chats and shares a joke with the locals who come and go, especially during the middle of the day when the shops close for two hours and
their owners pop in for a quick aperitif. However, I wonder about the smoky, dingy atmosphere in which the baby is spending so much time – locals actually bend over the pram to goo and gaa at the gorgeous little chap, exhaling smoke fumes as they admire his progress.

This cavalier attitude towards health and safety issues is very typical of France. There is a general dislike of rules and regulations and, while Australians accept strict ‘No Smoking' rules in hotels, restaurants and airports and on public transport, this simply would not be tolerated in France. Sitting on the train to Toulouse one day I am engulfed by fumes from a young woman in the seat in front of me, who chain-smokes the entire way. The moment passengers tumble from the plane into the airport terminal building, clouds of cigarette smoke surround the travellers, who are not obliged to wait until they get out into the fresh air. Bars and restaurants are never smoke-free zones and parents can often be seen smoking inside cars with the windows up and children in the back seat. The same attitude permeates other aspects of French life. While seatbelts are mandatory, they are often not fastened, especially around toddlers and small children. Bike riders don't wear helmets, and road and parking restrictions are gleefully ignored.

Part of me admires this anarchic behaviour, but the more conservative side of me worries that children, who are often the victims of it, will suffer without having any say.

Most days at Le Relais there is also a young local man, Pascal, who scurries about collecting glasses, wiping tables and carrying drink orders across the road, dodging the trucks without spilling a drop. Pascal has a slightly odd look about him and drives one of those tiny ‘lawnmower engine' cars that are sold in France to
people who can't get a regular driver's licence. You see a lot of old people who may have failed their test because of poor eyesight driving to the markets and back in these boxy little vehicles which, I have been told, are hugely expensive and quite tricky to drive because of their odd gearing. However, because of their low horsepower and their inability to reach a speed of more than 40 km/h, they have become a popular vehicle for people who would otherwise not qualify to be on the road. I figure that Pascal has some kind of disability, which is probably also why he has been given semi-permanent work at the bar. It's a common attitude in rural France to try to find useful occupations for people who may otherwise not be employable. The church bell-ringer, for example, is unable to hear or speak but has great prestige in the village because of his daily ringing of the bell at midday and dusk. I admire the inclusive and accepting attitude of the local community.

It is a curious concept that unlicensed drivers are allowed on the road in flimsy vehicles, no matter how underpowered. Drivers disqualified for repeated drink-driving offences could easily be out there too, but the attitude to such ‘misdemeanours' is much more casual in France. Even though there is a fear of being caught, it seldom happens. The simple truth, however, is that the road statistics in rural France, especially here in the southwest, are appalling, with more deaths and injuries per capita than anywhere in Europe. It's a sobering thought.

Even though I am busy setting up the tour, I have time to stop and think about my life back in Australia compared with my life as a single woman here. I have been wishing that I had more time here this year, but pressures of work and moving from the Leura house to the farm have impinged and I am due back in October for the release of
Au Revoir
. This is a daunting prospect because I have been so candid in the writing of the book, exposing my life – and the lives of my family members – to close scrutiny. Although I worked in television for almost a decade, wandering around on camera in a straw hat pruning the roses, it is a very different matter to write a book that reveals intimate memories and feelings.

I am also worrying about my future with David at the farm, and I am wondering if the move was such a good idea after all. Faced with the prospect of being alone out on the farm with him day after day – as we are now both working from home offices – I seriously wonder if I will be able to cope with his melancholic disposition. It's many years since I last seriously contemplated
the fact that my marriage could be in trouble, but I am starting to think that perhaps my desire to leave him and come to France for extended periods is just the beginning of the end.

I start to fantasise about being a single woman again, perhaps living here in France full-time, working as a writer and only going home to visit my children and grandchildren once a year. A lot of people do it – a lot of people live in foreign countries and only see their family from time to time. A lot of people also end their marriage after thirty years for reasons not dissimilar to the issues I am facing. Our children are all grown up now and independent – surely the separation or divorce of their parents could not be traumatic at this stage of the game?

In my heart I know this isn't true. Our children would be just as distressed if we were to part now as they would have been if it had happened when they were little children, perhaps even more so. A marriage isn't simply the union of two people for life. It's a complex relationship that involves all the people that surround it and are part of it – our children and their partners, our grandchildren and extended families, our friends. What we have created over the years isn't to be treated lightly, even if I am struggling at this stage to remain happy within the boundaries of the relationship. Part of me thinks that I should stop worrying about everyone else and how they feel and seize the day, striking out for my own personal happiness no matter what the consequences. And the other part of me knows perfectly well that I could never be really happy living away from the large family unit that we have created.

When I was first in France I met and socialised with a lot of interesting men – married men, divorced men, retired men, tradesmen, men who had never married, men who had had a
succession of girlfriends, Frenchmen, Englishmen, New Zealanders, Americans, Canadians. As men or as potential lovers, I didn't really give them a second thought at the time – except sometimes in disturbing dreams that I realise now, with hindsight, I can attribute to the hormonal fluctuations of my impending menopause. I have always thrived in the company of men, especially en masse. It's not that I don't adore my female friends – most women I know have positive qualities that far outshine those of their husbands or boyfriends or lovers. But I have always loved being surrounded by men.

When I was a teenage girl, I had a small ‘gang' of boys that I used to hang out with instead of the usual gaggle of girlfriends. These boys, many of whom I still keep in regular contact with today, were spotty and lanky and in most cases going through that awkward stage of life when young women were unavailable to them, so they seemed delighted that I was prepared to sneak out of my bedroom window at night to meet up with them and share their nocturnal adventures. Initially there was nothing sexual in my relationship with these boys, although I am sure there was a constant undercurrent of sexual tension that I found exciting. But there is safety in numbers, and being the only girl in a gang of eight or ten boys had its own in-built feeling of security. To be honest, I just loved being the sole female at the centre of this odd assortment of young blokes.

I didn't have to compete with other girls for attention – and I could flirt to my heart's content, knowing that I had them wound round my little finger. It was also a reflection of how I felt about myself physically. With a shock of curly red hair, a face full of freckles and a pear-shaped body, I believed myself to be totally unattractive. My voluptuous and more sophisticated
girlfriends were all blondes with rich golden-honey tans and smooth fringes and they looked ravishing in their brief bikinis, sunning themselves at the beach. My skin went from snowy white to painful red in the sun, while my freckles darkened and joined together to form deep brown blotches. After a swim my hair sprang into a frizzy tangle, and I was incapable of filling the bra cup of any swimming costume. Psychologists would no doubt say that as a teenager I suffered low self-esteem. I just felt rather plain, which is why I avoided being seen out and about with the gorgeous girls and hung out with the spotty boys instead.