Last Tango in Toulouse (28 page)

I will be leaving David in charge of all the poultry; the weather is still quite cold and bleak even though it is meant to be early spring. I will be gone for nine weeks and he is not looking forward to it. I know it will be difficult for him being alone again, and I hope he doesn't spend the time stewing on what has happened. He has become much more positive and energetic since he resumed his exercise regime, and I am hoping that this improvement in his frame of mind will counteract the reservations he has about his wife gallivanting around the globe.

I have organised to get to Frayssinet a week ahead of the tour to finalise the last-minute details. Jon is there to meet me at the station, although he is leaving to return to Australia the following morning. We couldn't quite coordinate things so that we could spend more time here together. Jon has had the most fantastic three weeks in France, making many friends and doing a lot of sightseeing. He has also done some painting for me – the front door and windows are now a soft shade of apple green – and some work on the car. I am grateful for his practicality.

Jan and I are looking forward to the tour, hoping we don't make any of the same blunders we made when we originally walked our way through the itinerary. Jan is ideal for this job. She's blonde and bright and bubbly and people instantly warm to her enthusiasm and good humour. She's also a bit wicked, like me, and when we get together anything can happen. The Australian travel agent who is organising the logistics of the tour, Paul, is coming along on this, the first of what we hope will be many tours, to help out and see how it all fits together. He also enjoys a bit of fun, so we hope our tour group is good-natured and easygoing.

The people in the group are arriving en masse at Toulouse airport and Pierre, the bus driver, will pick them up and bring them to their hotel in Cahors. Jan collects me in the late afternoon and says, as we walk to the car, ‘As I was leaving the house there was a funny little squeak and I looked around. It was Flossie. She wants to come on the tour as well.'

Oh God, another epic journey with a demented emu. I'm sure they'll love her.

The people on the tour group turn out to be a great bunch, hell-bent on having a good time. Once again, they are mostly female, apart from Paul and an artist from the Blue Mountains, Philip, who is accompanied by his wife Gloria. There's Annette, who has travelled with me once before on a Himalayan trek and has decided that walking and eating in France will be far less strenuous. She has brought some friends along and they are a very lively bunch. There's also a small band of women from Sydney who have taken overseas tours together before and within days I have dubbed them ‘the bad girls' because they are always up to no good. It's hard to hear yourself think in the bus because there is so much animated talking and laughter.

The itinerary falls into place like clockwork. The plan is to stay in small hotels in four main townships – Cahors, Puy L'Eveque, Villefranche-du-Perigord and Gourdon – and to use these hotels as a base for day trips. Most mornings we go by bus to some beauty spot and walk for an hour or so, or tour a village or ancient fortified town (a bastide), and most days we take a picnic lunch. Christiane, from Le Relais, has undertaken the task of preparing these lunches. She has equipped us with large eskies to carry chilled rosé and iced water and a variety of cold meats, pâtés and salads with cheese and always something interesting
and different for dessert. We carry rugs and huge paper bags stuffed with fresh baguettes. Jan and I have already picked out the picnic spots but we are quite flexible. If we suddenly spy a better place with a good view we simply stop the bus and throw down the rugs. Our bus driver, Pierre, speaks no English but Jan translates all his little anecdotes about the local area, snippets of information known only to locals that enrich our understanding of the lifestyle in this part of France.

A good rapport develops, and within just a few days Pierre is telling us saucy French jokes during our shared picnic lunches, with Jan having the unenviable task of translating them into the Australian idiom. Among other things we do a guided tour of Cahors city, which is one of the most ancient towns in all of Europe; it is pre-Roman, with an awesome number of historic buildings still intact. We visit Bonaguil Castle, one of the most impressive fortress structures in France, and we go on a farm tour to see the way tobacco is grown and dried in the region and how the dreaded foie gras is produced. Some of the women stay in the bus during this part of the tour; they have no desire to witness acts of cruelty on helpless birds.

The concept of having picnics during the day and saving the large multi-course meals for the evenings is just common sense. Jan and I decided that if we all sat around for hours eating and drinking in the middle of the day, nobody would feel much like participating in the afternoon's activities. However, we have made two exceptions. One day we eat a sit-down lunch at a ferme auberge (farmhouse hostel), the one that Jock and I visited two years before. Little has changed. By law a ferme auberge must produce 80 per cent of what is served at the table themselves: this means baking their own bread, making their own wines and
aperitifs, preserving their own confit, growing their own vegetables and fruit and, in some instances, even making their own cheeses. This auberge is authentic in every sense. We are given a brief tour of the farm by one of the owners, who has quite good English. They also run their business as a horse-riding holiday farm; they have a great collection of handsome steeds and a barn that has been converted to motel-like accommodation.

We are ushered into a long, narrow room dominated by a very long trestle table. It can seat at least twenty people and we take up the entire room because Jock and his daughter Harriet, visiting from Australia, have decided to join us for the day. The furnishings are very plain – lino on the floor and a few dusty decorations. Everyone has a sip of the fruity aperitif but some people find it too overpowering and hand theirs over to Jock or me. We're accustomed to home-made alcohol. They bring out the soup in huge steaming serving bowls and the feast begins. The meal is served by the grandmother and a neighbour who has come in to help for the day. There is course after course – pâté/terrine/confit of duck/sautéed potatoes/green vegetables/salad/cheese and excellent tart for dessert. The wine bottles are replaced regularly with more local brew and we all sample the eau de vie (water of life) that is served with black coffee at the end. As the meal proceeds we get noisier and more hilarious and I am concerned that our hostess will think us an uncouth rabble. But they join in the spirit of the occasion and by the end of the meal the children of the family are sitting with us and everyone joins in for a toast at the end.

The other restaurant lunch is at Mme Murat's, an experience that I don't want them to miss. As she opens only at lunchtime, Jan books a large table for us – it runs almost the entire length
of the main room. The plan is to visit the local market at Prayssac during the morning then drive to Pomarede to the restaurant. From there we will walk through the woods to the village of Goujenac then cross-country to my village of Frayssinet, where I will serve afternoon tea or a drink, depending on the time of day we get there.

The morning market is very much a farmers' market, with great barrows of local produce but also a fish stall from Bordeaux and stall-holders selling plant seedlings and flowers, oysters and live poultry, and cheeses of every description. It's colourful and lively and very French. At this time of year there are not many tourists, so it gives us an opportunity to soak up the atmosphere of a genuine rural French marché.

The bus trip to Pomarede takes only fifteen minutes and we are seated at our table with a glass in our hands by midday. Jeanne and Sylvie are pleased to have so many Australians and have prepared a hearty lunch for us. There are two or three other long tables filled with workmen: the local road-working teams are there, several tables of electricians and the usual quota of truck drivers pausing for their ritual repast. Jock and Harriet have joined us again, along with Carole, who worked at Mme Murat's for many years when her children were growing up.

The meal starts off in sedate fashion but quickly degenerates as Jock demonstrates the chabrol, a traditional peasant custom of tipping red wine into the dregs of the soup bowl and then, with elbows on the table, drinking the mixture directly from the bowl. Within moments our Australian contingent are slurping their soup and wine from their bowls and causing a lot of hilarity among the tables of workers. One of our women asks Carole if she will approach the road-workers and ask if they
would mind posing for photographs at the end of the meal. They cheerfully agree. There are lots of smiles, waves and winks being exchanged between burly men in overalls with dark stubbly chins and our middle-aged but attractive Australian women who are quaffing the red wine like it's going out of style and tucking into each course with gusto. It's all a bit of a riot. The weather has become very hot, so there are lots of red cheeks and sweaty brows. By the time the dessert arrives everyone is groaning, but they battle on regardless. The road-workers get up to leave and are pounced on by half a dozen of the women, including the ‘bad girls', who pose with them for a series of photographs. Stocky road-workers line up with women's arms draped over their shoulders or firmly squeezing them around the waist. They don't look at all unhappy at the female attention. Flossie, ever present, regards the proceedings with a disdainful beady eye.

After coffee I remind the group that we are a ‘walking tour' and that we need to get started, as it will take at least two hours to get to Frayssinet. They look appalled.

‘We don't want to walk,' they cry. ‘It's too hot!' What they really mean is that they have had far too much red wine and the prospect of weaving their way through the woods is too much for them.

Jan manages to track down Pierre, who brings the bus over and we travel in comfort to my little house, where I pour more drinks (as if we really need them). The group spends the afternoon exploring the village, visiting the old church, walking down to the cemetery and then back to Le Relais, where they have a few more drinks to round off the afternoon. Most of them dip out on the dinner that was organised for that evening, and
they are still quite subdued the following morning. Just as well it's only picnic lunches from now on.

Philip the artist has been keeping a visual diary of our travels, with finely sketched impressions of the villages and churches that we visit and small portraits of people involved in the tour. He captures the essence of Jock with a glass of red wine in one hand at the ferme auberge, then Jan sitting on a picnic rug and me with my straw hat and cheesy smile. Even Flossie gets her own portrait. He also does a sketch of my village house, which is much more romantic than a photograph. At the end of the trip, back in Australia, Philip has a little book made up for each of us, providing the most evocative memories of the time we spent together.

The last three days of the tour are spent in Paris, visiting Monet's garden once again and seeing the city sights. Before we depart on this last leg of the tour we have a farewell dinner with Jan and Philippe at a fairly refined restaurant in Gourdon, and once again it's a dress-up affair. The outfits are outrageous and because the restaurant is several blocks from the hotel the group is forced to walk through the main streets of the town looking like nothing on earth. I'm not sure that some of these French townships are quite ready for an Australian invasion. By the end of dinner we have caused a scandal, with me again making an appearance in high-heeled boots and fishnet stockings, and I belatedly remember that this was the same hotel and restaurant where the maître d' looked down his nose at the prospect of accommodating a busload of Australians. He was, I realise in retrospect, quite correct in his appraisal of Australian tourists.

It's interesting to see how different Giverny looks in the autumn, with its spilling borders of nasturtiums, trees just
beginning to turn autumnal red and asters in full bloom. Some of the group would have liked to spend a whole day there, or even two, but it's the usual two hours in and out. On the last day as we pack our bags I'm really sad to see them go. We've had such fun as a group but, more than that, I have enjoyed sharing with them the little-known region of France that I fell in love with two years ago.

Back in Australia David is struggling with the cold weather and the loneliness of running the farm on his own. He phones me almost daily for a chat and I can tell he's feeling anxious and unhappy. I wish he could get one of his film projects off the ground so that he would have a working focus and not be so worried about me all the time. During my long stay in France he produced two feature films and was so frantically busy and preoccupied that the time we spent apart passed very quickly. He is finding being alone now rather depressing, especially when I relate anecdotes of the fun we are having on the tour. Our neighbours Robert and Sue ask him over for a meal at least once a week and he also stays in town from time to time to have dinner with Miriam, Rick and our grandsons. At the weekends Aaron and Ethan are often there, so it's not as though he is entirely abandoned.