Last Tango in Toulouse (12 page)

My way of relating to these young men was to become one of them. I wanted to be one of the blokes. I could drink as many beers (often more), smoke as many cigarettes, puff on as many joints, swear and tell rude jokes with the same enthusiasm and even partake of some of the risk-taking behaviour that young men seem to enjoy – driving recklessly in fast cars after an all-night party and walking a fine line between honesty and breaking the law.

I expect that my behaviour during my teens was also connected with my unhappy home life. The atmosphere in the house was far from harmonious, and tensions between my parents made me crave the fun and excitement I enjoyed when in the company of my gang. I really don't know how I survived my last few years at school. I got very little sleep as a result of our nocturnal roamings; it was not uncommon for me to sneak back home at 4 am, sleep for three hours, then get up and get ready for school. We always managed to scrape together enough money to buy beer, so most days I was not only exhausted but slightly hung-over. Not a recipe for academic achievement!

Eventually, after a couple of years, I did become sexually involved with one of these boys and we ended up living together in a group house for almost three years. But this was all before I met David and started down the long road of our thirty-one-year relationship.

There's a lot to be said for a younger woman having a sexual relationship with an older and more experienced man. When David and I first got together I was very unworldly and unadventurous when it came to lovemaking. In those early years he opened me up to the joy and passion of a healthy sexual relationship and it was this, I often used to joke, that kept our marriage together when times were tough. Our children were always very aware of this deep affection between us, often catching us in a quick embrace or sneaking off for a cuddle when we thought nobody was around. They made jokes about it, especially when they got into their teens and, instead of being embarrassed by their parents' unusually passionate relationship, I think they quite liked it. It was better than having parents who had a cold relationship.

During the years I was filming the gardening show with the ABC, my best times were working and socialising with the on-the-road crews who were predominantly men – field producers, cameramen and sound recordists. As a tight-knit team we worked creatively together during the day then invariably let our hair down in the evening over dinner, which would often lead to a night on the town at a disco or karaoke bar. Once again I fell into my old pattern of being one of the boys, kicking up my heels and being a bit outrageous because we were often on location away from our homes and family responsibilities. David never worried about my exploits on the road with the film crews
because there simply wasn't anything to worry about. Just Mary and the boys behaving badly, as usual!

During my adult life I have also enjoyed several very close but platonic relationships with older men. I often wondered if these men were substitute father figures because my relationship with my own father had been so troubled and sad. Even David, who is eleven years older than me, could have been categorised as an ‘older man' during those early years. I was twenty-one when we first got together; he was a mature thirty-two and had already been through a ten-year marriage that ended not long before I met him. The age difference in the early stage of our relationship was more pronounced than it seems today and I can look back and acknowledge that I was seeking the emotional and financial security that I hoped an older man could offer, in contrast to my unstable background.

My most significant relationship with an older man was with a beguiling, witty and well read Irishman called Paddy O'Shaughnessy who lived two houses down the street from our home in Leura and who became part of our family for nearly seventeen years. Paddy had two adult children from his first marriage and then fathered a son with his second wife Margaret. This young boy, Michael, appeared on his scooter the day we first moved into the house, hoping to find boys of the same age to play with. He virtually lived in our backyard until all the children finished school and left home.

The first time I met Paddy, under the brilliant-pink flowering cherry trees that lined our street, he asked – in his lilting Irish brogue – how I was enjoying living in the mountains.

‘I just love it,' I gushed. ‘The fresh air, the blue skies, the frosty mornings, it's wonderful.'

‘And of course the altitude means we are a little closer to God,' he commented, smiling widely.

I thought I must be living next door to a nutcase or a religious fanatic, but quickly discovered that I couldn't have been further off the mark. Paddy was totally irreligious, having survived a tough education at the hands of the Christian Brothers in rural Ireland. He was the illegitimate son of a teenage girl who had been abandoned to the workhouse by her parents' shame at her pregnancy. Miraculously, his grandfather had fetched Paddy home from the institution, leaving his own daughter there, where she somehow managed to get pregnant again and endure the same pain and loneliness. Paddy was reared by his grandparents then joined the British Air Force and spent most of the war years stationed in the Middle East before migrating to Australia, where he worked on the Snowy Mountains Scheme, like so many postwar immigrants. He always referred to himself as ‘an unqualified success' because he had forged a highly successful career as an electrical engineer, based on skills learned in the air force, but without any formal qualifications. When we first knew him he was semi-retired and had the most casually laid-back attitude to life.

‘Today, nothing is of the slightest importance' was his creed. This allowed him to spend many guilt-free hours sitting at our kitchen table, drinking cups of tea and smoking cigarettes, whiling away the hours and days and weeks talking to my mother or playing with the children. In many respects he became the grandfather of the family, and I never tired of his company – he could call in any time of the day or night and was always welcome. It was a very special relationship indeed.

My other close older male friend was the former cabinet
minister, senator and judge Jim McClelland, who lived in the next village to us for the last fifteen years of his life. Jim had the same irreverent sense of humour and fun as Paddy, but also a deep understanding of politics and the human condition that made him a great companion. We spent a lot of time together in his last few years, drinking wine, laughing and solving the problems of the world.

When I turned up on Jock's doorstep in France more than a year ago we fell into a warm and comfortable relationship not dissimilar to those I once shared with Paddy and Jim. If my relationship with my own father had been dismal, at least during my adult life I had enjoyed the richness and intelligence of some very interesting older men.

Gradually, I realise that by taking off to France for long periods of time I am not just running away; I am in fact looking for something. It's not just a carefree holiday jaunt, it's a serious attempt to try to discover who I really am after all these decades of nurturing everyone else and virtually ignoring my own needs. In a bookshop before I left Australia I found a weighty tome on menopause and decided that perhaps it's time I did a little reading and research on the subject. Written by an American woman doctor, the book is full of all sorts of spiritual claptrap that is quite meaningless to me, but between the lines are some simple truths that set off alarm bells in my brain. The feelings that this writer describes in such detail are feelings that are overwhelming me on a daily basis. Her explanation of the changes that occur in mid-life are really very straightforward and seem, to me, like good old-fashioned common sense.

It appears that the female hormones essential for pregnancy, childbirth and motherhood have the effect of keeping women in
an almost permanent state of passivity. The intricate balance of female hormones is programmed so that she will naturally and quite gladly take on the role of home-maker and caretaker and keeper of the peace. For most women, household harmony is automatically equated with happiness, and so we go to extraordinary lengths to maintain an atmosphere of love and safety, warmth and comfort, within the home.

Much has been written about women who, in times of great deprivation and stress, gladly give up their own meagre food and water rations to their children and go without, even if it means they die. This tendency for self-sacrifice isn't a matter of conscious choice. Women are also conditioned to put the needs of others ahead of their own, and while not all women fall for this concept, I certainly recognise a lot of this behaviour in myself. When female hormones are added to the equation, it's quite a combination. I have always believed that my ability to keep the peace in our family was a direct result of my own turbulent childhood, with it's constant drunken brawls and domestic violence. I was determined that my own children would never experience the pain and fear associated with warring parents and I bent over backwards to ensure that the atmosphere in our home was happy and carefree.

My way of dealing with the irritating aspects of my relationships – especially my relationships with David and with my mother – was to make jokes about them. I used humour instead of anger as a coping mechanism. I became very good at inventing strategies for jollying everyone along. There was a lengthy period when Mum and David were not speaking after a row about something so trivial that I can't even recall what it was. The atmosphere at mealtimes was leaden as they both sat in
sullen silence, refusing to even look at each other. Eventually, I decided to highlight the stupidity of their behaviour by arranging three or four oversize vases of flowers and foliage from the garden down the centre of the table. David was on one side, my mother on the other. David immediately asked what was going on and I simply said, ‘Well, if you're not speaking to each other it's probably better if you can't see each other either.'

They both laughed, of course, and the ice was broken. The flowers were removed and they started talking – awkwardly at first, but by the end of the meal the stalemate had been resolved.

That I should have resorted to such elaborate devices to maintain household harmony now seems ludicrous. The veil of peacekeeping has finally lifted and I am, as a result, simply not the same person I was thirty years ago; not physically, not emotionally and not intellectually.

My reading on the subject of menopause also informs me that women's sexuality and libido can undergo dramatic changes at this stage of life. We start to produce testosterone, which can make us more sexually aggressive and may even lead to a change of sexual preference. I am quite shocked at my own feelings of sexuality during this phase. I expected my sexual desires to fade away. I somehow saw fifty as the cut-off point – I would lose interest in lovemaking and throw my energies in other directions – into the garden or my grandchildren. It's certainly the image of middle-aged women that's promoted in the media, and it's one that I believed to be true. But here I am in France, in the mood for kicking up my heels, looking for a little excitement and feeling totally liberated at having abandoned my responsibilities. Reading the book about menopause has somehow reassured me that I am not abnormal, that thousands of women
feel just as I do: restless and filled with yearnings for change and fulfilment.

However, the constant references in the book to marriage breakdown do worry me. The author cites dozens of case histories of women who simply walk away from their long-term relationships when they hit menopause. They strike out on their own and make new lives for themselves, much to the shock and dismay of their families, who don't understand the changes that are taking place. One of the main problems, it seems, is the shift in the needs of men and women after thirty years of marriage, especially if the children have left home. Most men at this stage are approaching retirement and they start to look to their family for love and support; even if they have been out and about pursuing their career for decades, suddenly their sphere of interest contracts and they want to spend more time at home developing relationships that may have been on the back burner for years. At exactly the same moment women are coming out of their shell after decades of home-making and nurturing and starting to look outside the home for excitement and fulfilment. It seems that nature plays a cruel trick on us. Or perhaps it's nature's way of saying that we simply don't belong together as couples ‘happily ever after'. Sitting alone in the little French house, sipping rosé and nibbling fine Cantal cheese, I wonder if this is what's happening to me.

Some people are sexually predatory, while others spend their whole life hoping that someone else will make the first move. Waiting for the other person to make a pass is undoubtedly easier because it reduces the risk of rejection, and I know that in my younger days, before getting together with David and having a family, I preferred men to make a move in my direction rather
than the other way round. During that period of my life I was quite vulnerable to seduction in the sense that I am the sort of woman who finds it very difficult to say no. Not that I was promiscuous – once again it's related to the way women are conditioned not to make others feel uncomfortable or unhappy by rejecting them. That said, if in the past a man did make an overture and I was not interested I could always find a humorous way of deflecting the situation so that it didn't cause hurt or offence. However, if a man I was genuinely attracted to made a move in my direction I found it almost impossible to resist.