Last Tango in Toulouse (21 page)

In Australia, of course, we are not permitted to force-feed geese as they do in France to produce the highly prized foie gras. The RSPCA would quickly intervene if a farmer was reported for force-feeding. However, in France they have a different attitude to animals, and forcing vast quantities of grain down the throat of a goose so that its liver becomes enlarged, fatty and therefore perfect for foie gras is simply a way of life. I have watched the process of fattening geese in France and it is awful when the overstuffed birds collapse to the ground, unable to move because of the weight of the corn in their crops. The farmer justifies his production methods by saying that the actual fattening only occurs over a period of three weeks and that the geese actually like it. They line up for it. Well of course they line up – otherwise they wouldn't be fed at all. And they are always hungry birds.
The farmer also says that the process is quite natural because wild geese do exactly the same thing to themselves when preparing for the long migratory flight they undertake each year. During the weeks before migration the birds overfeed and deliberately allow their livers to become enlarged as a survival strategy to get them through the long flight ahead. The farmer assures me that only migratory birds have livers that swell up in this fashion, which is why only geese and ducks are suited to making foie gras. This means, I guess, that if you tried force-feeding a chicken or a kookaburra you wouldn't get the same result.

The actual process of making the foie gras is fascinating. I always imagined it to be a concoction, like a pâté or a terrine, with the liver mixed with other flavourings and ingredients. But no, the real foie gras is liver, just liver. Swollen and pink and fatty and fleshy. The best foie gras is processed in a tin or in glass jars when still warm, freshly extracted from the dead bird. In commercial foie gras farms they have the killing room right next to the canning room: the livers are quickly carried from where the bird has been slaughtered, put into tins and heat-processed. Jan tells me that every year she does her own foie gras. She goes to a nearby farm and buys the livers, still warm. She keeps them warm in an esky, driving home like a bat out of hell to the kitchen where warm, sterile jars are waiting. The aim is to have the lids sealed and the jars cooking before the liver has time to get cold. It all sounds brutal, but the result is so wonderful that most French people don't have any problem with the concept. I love foie gras, but only in small quantities and very occasionally. It's just too rich. I know that I won't be able to produce it in Australia, but I can still produce good meat birds with plenty of fat and make a pâté from the liver. I'm not too sure about using
the gizzards, as they do in France, to make a warm salad with wilted greens and vinaigrette. I am not sure which bits of the bird go into this delicious amalgamation of flavours and textures known as salade de gesiers, so I will have to do some research next time I am in Frayssinet.

Just a few weeks after buying the flock of muscovy ducks I come home from town and find the drake in dire distress. He's half-submerged in the pond with one of his hooked claws caught in his eyelid. He has impaled himself and appears half-dead. I immediately suspect that Laurie, the maladjusted drake in the next pen, is the culprit. They have been fighting through the fence wire and somehow the well-behaved drake has managed to tangle himself up in his own claws. I gently unhook him and take him into the shed, making a warm nest of straw for him to lie still and recover. But he doesn't. He can't lift his head, and within hours he has expired.

One of the prize muscovy ducks is sitting on a clutch of eggs and I have been keeping a record. It takes thirty days for duck eggs to hatch. Chickens take only twenty days. The duck is sitting on a mixture of duck and hen eggs, which can happen when they are housed together. I should really have removed the chicken eggs but I decide to wait and see what happens. Back in Leura we had a duck that hatched chicken eggs, so I imagine that this bird may be capable of rearing a mixed flock.

Sadly, the sitting duck also meets a sudden end and I can find no explanation for it. David phones me when I am in Sydney and he sounds very upset.

‘The duck sitting on the eggs is dead,' he says. ‘Totally dead. And there's a tiny chicken beside her. It's just hatched out and it's cold and almost dead too.'

I tell him to put the chicken in a cardboard box and put a lamp over it so that the light bulb is quite close to the bird. It will slowly warm it.

‘It's no good,' he says. ‘I think it's already dead.'

‘Just try, anyway,' I say. ‘I will be home in a couple of hours.'

Just past Lithgow the mobile phone rings and I pull off the road. It's David, and he's elated.

‘Listen to this,' he says, and puts the phone into the box so I can hear the cheep, cheep, cheeping of the yellow fluffy chick which has staged a complete recovery.

David is amazed that he has managed to save the chick. He doesn't see himself as being very practical when it comes to animals. By the time I get home the chicken is raring to go and has imprinted on David. As far as Cheepy Chicken (the name David has already given it) is concerned, David is its mother. And he is very protective. The cats must be locked out and Floyd, the Labrador, watched closely. Within days the chicken has the run of the house and can often be found snuggled up to Floyd for warmth. Whenever it hears David's voice it comes running and follows him around, cheeping and fluffing its down feathers and pecking the floor. It's hilarious, especially when David is making business calls on the portable phone, pacing up and down our long hallway with a small yellow chicken hot on his heels. For a man as fastidious as David, who dislikes animal mess, the change of attitude is amazing: the chicken leaves small piles of poop all around the house. I am constantly picking up these smelly bits with a tissue but David is totally unconcerned. When our grandchildren come to visit they are thrilled and spend hours playing with the ‘house chicken'. It's very tame, and I start to wonder if it will ever be allowed to go outside and join the flock. I am also
worried in case it turns out to be a rooster – this will mean, quite naturally, that it will end up in the pot. I don't think David will take kindly to eating his firstborn.

Eventually, when the bird has grown feathers to replace the yellow down, I convince David that it is mature enough to fend for itself in the big, wide world. We transfer the chicken to the fowl run and David takes over the feeding and egg-gathering completely. Cheepy Chicken is, fortunately, female and she runs to greet him every time he comes in to change the water and replace the layer pellets. They are the best of mates and, from my point of view, a very odd couple.

In my early to mid teens I agonised over my appearance, spending hours in front of the mirror lamenting my bright red frizzy hair and pasty white skin, and the brown freckles that, to my mind, totally disfigured my face and body. I hated my lack of breasts and my fatty thighs and really believed that I was too unsightly to attract any right-minded youth. In my later teens I discovered make-up and hair techniques to modify my looks slightly. I smothered my skin with a thick foundation to mask the freckles, wore upper and lower false eyelashes and spent hours straightening the kinks out of my hair by wrapping it around my head after washing it, using a scarf. I had many nights of uncomfortable sleep trying to keep this contraption in place. I suspect my teenage insecurity about my looks was no different from that suffered by many girls of the same age and, thankfully, by the time I hit my early twenties I had developed a comfortable, if not resigned, relationship with my face and body.

This casual acceptance of my physical appearance continued happily through my twenties and thirties and well into my
forties. While my weight tended to fluctuate according to my lifestyle or whether I was pregnant or breastfeeding, overworked or relaxed, I was generally not too fussed about the way I looked when I had a moment to catch a look at myself in the mirror. Getting ready to go out took only a few minutes' preparation with a little eye make-up and some nail polish, and I allowed my hair to revert to its natural curl, which finally became a little more fashionable.

In my late forties I started to notice the first signs of physical decline. While I still felt as strong and physically fit as I had always done, I realised that my hair was starting to thin out on top and my eyes were surrounded by a patchwork of fine lines. A few wrinkles didn't cause me too much stress, but over the next five years the appearance of lines and cracks and crevices accelerated at an alarming rate. The aging process was most noticeable in photographs, especially close-ups, where the shadows caused by sagging flesh suddenly became profoundly apparent. Intellectually, I dismissed my concerns about the changing of my face as pure menopausal neurotics. I told myself that I didn't really care. All those expressions, once considered trite, suddenly applied to the way I felt.

‘You should be proud of your wrinkles, you've earned them.'

‘Your face has grown into itself.'

‘The face of a mature woman has real character.'

‘You get the face you deserve.'

To be quite honest, I preferred my face as it was before it acquired this newfound ‘character'. And I didn't think I deserved what was happening to me in the mirror. Why did I ‘deserve' that sag of flesh underneath my chin line, or those fine lines that were developing like a cat's bum around my mouth?

I suppose I should have felt resigned to my fate. After all, I had four adult children and seven grandchildren to testify to my ‘mature' status in life. Yet somehow I felt cheated – as though I had worked like a mad woman my whole adult life only to be rewarded with a face that was rapidly falling apart. I'm not sure if this attitude is a baby-boomer thing, an overwhelming desire to defeat nature's clock and stay young no matter what. I would like to think that I'm immune to it, but I'm not.

Suddenly my cosmetics drawer is bursting with bottles and jars and tubes of creams and lotions with names like ‘Visible Lift' and ‘Age Defying All Day Lifting Foundation' and ‘Skin Firming Lotion' and ‘Total Turnaround Visible Skin Renewer' and ‘Age-Intercepting Skincare', as if I really can turn this process round, defy my age and halt the process of gradual deterioration.

I know it's bunkum, but that doesn't stop me. A friend who for decades worked in the beauty business laughingly refers to these carefully marketed cosmetics as ‘pots of hope', and that's exactly what they are. Expensive products aimed at the troubled minds of the women of my generation who are staring old age in the face and not enjoying the prospect.

One day in Bathurst I notice a beauty salon advertising ‘non-surgical cosmetic procedures', which I assume means botox and collagen and all those associated treatments that promise wrinkle-dodging miracles. I make an appointment for a ‘free consultation' to discuss the possibilities, in the belief that I am not taking any real action, just researching the subject for future reference. I am curious about what promises are being made and want to know if they believe any of these treatments are suitable for me. While I know that they will probably say just about anything to get a customer, I rationalise that I am savvy
enough to make a decision based on fact rather than fiction.

The salon is located up a flight of stairs in an old, rather elegant building in a slightly out-of-the-way part of town. The lighting is subtle, the furnishings plush, and soft relaxation music is piped to every room – the sort of dolphin-worshipping/incense-burning music I find so irritating. I am taken to a small private room with a massage table and invited to lie down and wait for the ‘consultant'. She arrives, looking all of about twelve. She has flawless skin that has been creamed and polished to perfection. I am glad I can't see myself in the mirror to make a comparison.

We discuss the problems of aging skin and the benefits of various procedures, including facial massages and something alarming called ‘dermabrasion', which involves ‘resurfacing' the facial skin to reduce ‘scars, pigmentation and congestions'. It sounds a bit like attacking my face with a sanding machine and I baulk at the prospect, knowing that my fair and sensitive complexion turns bright red if I sit in a hot bath for ten minutes. My young beautician then waxes lyrical about the possibility of a ‘non-surgical facelift', involving an intensive facial and twenty minutes of laser therapy, which the brochure claims is ‘ideal for the serious-minded facial client'. I am not sure if I fit this category.

Lastly, and with a little hesitation, I ask her about botox and collagen. This is when she becomes really excited.

‘Botox is fantastic,' she gushes. ‘The results are amazing.'

I ask if many women in Bathurst come in for these treatments.

‘Oh, yes, lots of women have work done every three months,' she assures me. ‘It's extremely popular out here in the country.'