Last Tango in Toulouse (19 page)

The three pregnant cows are all due to calve around the same time and I keep a close eye on them, checking first thing in the morning and again in the late afternoon. I have no knowledge or experience of livestock, but I feel confident that they will give birth without any trouble, just as women do if they are left alone to get on with it and not hooked up to machines or knocked out with painkillers.

Early one afternoon I wander around to the back paddock, where the grass is very long. I see the cows grazing in the distance then suddenly come upon two tiny, damp calves curled up asleep in the long grass. There are still remnants of afterbirth around them, and as I approach they wake up and bleat. The two mothers, one of them Snowy, immediately bellow loudly and come towards me in a protective manner. I move away quietly and watch with delight as the two newborns stand under their mothers and feed. Miriam brings the boys out to see the babies that very afternoon.

Both are female and I allow the boys to name them – Flossy and Luce. A few days later the third calf is born, a small grey male. They call him Bubby Gorgeous. Having baby animals around is lovely, and I am happy for the children to have the experience of watching the calves and being able to handle them. We have a huge old apple tree, laden with fruit, and we
feed the windfalls to the cattle. By the time the calves are big enough to eat the fruit they are also wise enough to notice us heading towards the tree with baskets and they gambol with pleasure as they cross the paddock towards the gate where we feed them. It's a lot of fun.

Our chicken run has two roosters, which is one more than is strictly required. The brown and white speckled rooster is timid but extremely handsome, with a brilliant red comb and graceful arching tail feathers. The white rooster, a leghorn, is just as handsome but devilishly aggressive; he takes any opportunity to strike, targeting small children in particular with his wicked spurs. When we go in to gather eggs in the afternoon he often flies at the children, aiming for the head, specifically the eyes, and I decide that he is too dangerous to keep in the flock. We shall have to eat him.

The following weekend Aaron neatly despatches him with a sharp axe and I sit on a plastic chair under the cherry tree, plucking him for the next day's lunch. Aaron's son Hamish, aged four, watches the killing of the rooster without concern and is fascinated by the plucking process, standing close to me and chatting cheerily while I remove the last of the fine feathers from the bird's belly. He asks for a couple of long tail feathers to play with and I oblige. I think it's good that children understand where food comes from and don't feel squeamish about it. I then enlarge the vent with a sharp knife so I can remove the gizzards, which I do by hand. The bird is still warm and very soft. Hamish is particularly interested in this part of the process but, as I plunge my hand into the cavity, I force air inside the bird and it travels all the way up the windpipe to the small voicebox, which is still intact. The headless rooster promptly crows loudly in his
distinctive, pre-decapitation voice. A look of total horror comes over Hamish's face and he takes off towards the house at full pace, dropping the tail feathers on the ground. Lorna brings him back outside a few moments later and I explain to him what has happened. But it doesn't reassure him much. He asks me repeatedly, ‘Is the rooster dead, Mutie? Is the rooster really dead?'

But when it comes to the crunch the following day, Hamish doesn't hesitate, enjoying a thick slice of the rooster's breast with baked potatoes and rich gravy. So do the other small boys (I usually have to cook two or three chickens when the whole mob comes to lunch). Hamish happily tells his cousins about the dead rooster who could still crow.

Later that afternoon when we are gathering eggs, young Theo leans over and speaks confidentially to one of the plump young hens. ‘Ha, ha, ha,' he says. ‘I ate your Dad!'

I guess that none of them has been traumatised by the realities of life on the farm.

Our cats have become outside cats, which is more appropriate on a farm. Because of the flies I can't leave a window open so that they can hop in and out at will, and because they are all quite geriatric they can't be left inside with the doors closed – they will make a mess on the carpet. I set up the laundry with baskets and boxes filled with old towels and blankets, and they quickly adapt to this more rugged lifestyle. The oldest cat is a black and white male that the children named Marilyn, after the famous actress, because when he was a tiny kitten we thought he was a female. The name stuck, but his personality never quite matched his effervescent namesake. A few months after arriving at the farm, Marilyn starts to look very scrawny and drink a lot of water, a sure sign of the kidney disease that seems to be the downfall of most
domestic moggies. One morning he doesn't show up for his breakfast and I spend most of the day looking for him. I take a torch and go under the house, and together David and I scout around the garden and look in the shed, but Marilyn isn't to be seen.

David is convinced that he has taken himself off somewhere to die but I don't give up, spending the next few days searching and calling, even into the night. After several weeks we feel certain that Marilyn has done exactly what David predicted. One weekend when the boys are working in the toolshed, sharpening the blades of the chainsaw to collect more wood for my fuel stove, they notice huge blowflies going in and out under the door of the locked storage shed where most of our office equipment and books is still stored in boxes. Then they detect the most hideous smell.

‘Think we've found your cat, Mum,' says Aaron, and fetches the key for the shed.

Sure enough. Marilyn must have crawled through a small gap in the timber door and simply curled up and died. But that was weeks ago and in this hot weather he has turned into black and white soup. What follows is funnier, in a macabre way, than a circus. There are three adult males – David, Aaron and Ethan – and none of them is capable of dealing with the dead cat in its current condition.

‘I'll dig the hole,' says Ethan, grabbing a spade and getting as far away from the shed as possible.

David paces the lawn, still in his nightshirt, muttering and mumbling into his whiskers and wringing his hands in despair. Aaron puts on a brave face and tries to scoop the remains into a box with a flat shovel, but immediately starts to heave. It takes
an eternity for them to complete the task, with David doing the worst of it in the end, and I am left with the grisly job of cleaning up and getting rid of the maggots that have multiplied into thousands. The shed smells frightful for weeks, and that particular Sunday nobody feels much like lunch.

Being in the midst of such a large and lively family and distracted by all the tasks of running the farm helps me cope with my mental confusion. I realise that this is the way I have coped for most of my adult life: by creating an environment around me which is so busy and demanding that I don't have the time or energy to think too deeply about how I am feeling. But now, in the middle of the night, my dilemma returns to haunt me. When the children and grandchildren have gone home at the end of the day, after dinner and a few glasses of wine I am left alone with David and my thoughts, knowing that I am feeling far from happy.

A couple of months after Christmas the long-awaited letter from my sister Margaret finally arrives. After the brief card she wrote acknowledging the copy of
Au Revoir
I sent there was a long, long silence, and I was seriously worried that she would never write again. Perhaps her childhood memories are so traumatic that she doesn't care to relive them in any form – neither the written nor the spoken word. Perhaps her need to divorce herself totally from our family is so strong that my reappearance, after fifty years, is just too much for her to stand.

But not so. Margaret's letter is long and friendly, handwritten and covering ten pages. She tells me with humour and some pride about her full and happy life, the life she made for herself after walking out the front door of our overcrowded and unhappy flat on her eighteenth birthday. There is little reference to the pain of her childhood, just lots of good news about her extensive travels and her career. When she left home she was on a teacher's college scholarship and training at East Sydney Tech
to be an art teacher. It was a struggle but, by working at nights and weekends, usually in factories, she managed to support herself until she completed her degree. She then worked in a couple of country high schools as an art teacher: for several years in Cooma, in the Snowy Mountains, and then at Dubbo. In the 1960s she went to England to teach and from there she travelled to Canada, where again she taught art in rural schools. Along the way she decided to upgrade her qualifications and completed two masters degrees, eventually undertaking a PhD in art education. Margaret didn't marry until her mid-thirties and she and her husband Ken, also a teacher, don't have children. Margaret embraced Ken's large extended family and eventually, when they both retired, they built a farmhouse and established a commercial kiwi fruit farm on glorious Vancouver Island, where they still live.

Margaret sends me a photograph of herself, now aged in her late sixties, standing in her garden wearing a straw hat. She looks so much like me, only with grey hair, and I am amazed at the parallels in our lives. She loves her garden and is an enthusiastic producer of compost. She loves to cook and fills her pantry shelves with jams and jellies and preserves, just as I have done for years. She and Ken love to travel and they have spent many happy holidays with friends painting village scenes in France. Not just anywhere in France, but in exactly the same region of France that we so love and where we own our little house.

The hair on the back of my neck stands up. This is my sister that I don't know. She left our home when I was fourteen months old and made a totally different life for herself. Yet here she is, so like me in so many ways. She obviously had a burning need to achieve too, hence her long string of academic qualifications.
She must be a kindred spirit. I read her letter over and over, soaking up her handwriting, drinking in every word.

For the first time in months I feel really happy. So much has happened in my life these last twelve months – the move from Leura, the entanglement with the man from Toulouse which has created so much confusion in my mind, the sheer hard physical work of setting up the farm, the launch of the book and the overwhelming reaction to it, the rediscovery of my long-lost sister and my inner struggle with my relationship with David. I feel quite drained emotionally.

In January we have our first big party at the farm and I am thankful for the large community hall that will accommodate the seventy or so guests we invite. My half-brother Jon who lives in the small town of Warialda in northern New South Wales will be seventy, and I decide to round up as many of his and our relatives and old working colleagues as possible and have a lunchtime gathering in early January. By email, phone, fax and snail mail I manage to track down five of his cousins on his mother's side of the family, the Fannings, who came originally from Melbourne, where our father, Theo, met Jon's mother, Veronica, back in the early 1930s. These cousins range in age from mid-forties to late fifties and are scattered around the countryside but, because they've all stayed in close touch with each other, it's easy to find them and they are all happy to be invited.

I also contact some of our Moody cousins, the various offspring of my father's brother Rollie, who was a well-known journalist of his era. Now, if my father was a cad and a womaniser
and a drunk, his brother Rollie left him for dead. Rollie married several times and fathered illegitimate children in between – well, at least one that we know of. His first wife had two sons. His second wife (my darling Aunty Jeanne, who died two years ago) had three sons and a daughter. Then there was a daughter out of wedlock, which caused a scandal at the newspaper where they all worked. Who knows what after that. Rollie's preferred
modus operandi
was to have two women pregnant at the same time. Initially, neither would be aware of the other but eventually he would try to move them all in together in a communal living arrangement. He succeeded at least once in convincing a wife that the mistress and baby should move in. It didn't work out, as one would expect, and in the end Rollie fled back to Melbourne, abandoning all the children and their mothers. He offered no financial, physical or emotional support to any of them. Attempts had been made over the years to link up the half-brothers and sisters, and I had met some of them at a small but happy reunion in Sydney the previous year. Now I want them all to come to Jon's party; this means that at least two of them – half-sisters – will be meeting each other for the first time. It makes me think of my own tenuous link with Margaret. What a tangled family these Moodys are, with so much pain and confusion caused by two egotistical, self-centred brothers.