The Long Hot Summer (17 page)

The heat and the wine make the whole scenario seem even more surreal. I suddenly realise that David and I are quite drunk and probably also in a state of shock. I decide to somehow rescue the situation.

‘Why don't you join us for lunch?' I ask the reporter. ‘We'll answer your questions and then you can go back to London.'

So the three of us, David and I weaving, cross the road to the house, which is in darkness from being shuttered all morning. I open it up and quickly throw together a large platter of cold meats, cheeses and salad. Fortunately I had already bought our daily loaf of crusty bread because the boulangerie is now closed for siesta. The reporter falls gratefully on the food and gets out his notebook and pen. David foolishly pours more cold rosé from the fridge.

As we eat I start to feel slightly better and more in control of the situation. We answer his questions and I realise that he hasn't been briefed properly and knows very little about the background to the story, only some sketchy details from the Sydney office of the newspaper. He knows nothing about us, which is just as well from my point of view because I can therefore give him our perspective. Ultimately he is so grateful that we haven't slammed the door in his face and are not only being co-operative but also quite hospitable, that I hope he will file a story that isn't salacious.

As he leaves, he asks if he can take a photograph of us outside the house. He pulls out a tiny camera which is very non-threatening, as though he's just taking a family snap. I don't
know why we agree to this, but it seems harmless enough. We are standing on the hot road – me barefoot – both with a glass of rosé in our hands. He clicks the camera once, smiles, thanks us and disappears back to Le Relais, where we learn later he's been staying for the last two nights.

We never see him again.

Next Sunday, Miriam phones again. ‘You're in the
Sun Herald
again this week,' she says, obviously highly amused. ‘There's a whole double page spread story and a huge photograph of you outside the house. You both look drunk. And you'll never guess the headline this time, “A Tangled Tale of Tango in Toulouse”!'

Great.

I feel as if we have dreamt the whole thing. How did this happen to us? We are the most unlikely candidates for all this media attention. All I can think is that the Sunday papers must be totally desperate for stories to devote two pages to a couple of middle-aged to elderly grandparents going through a marriage crisis. I wonder what my Dad, who for nearly twenty years edited the
Sunday Telegraph
, would have thought of the whole thing. He would have laughed, I'm sure.

The summers of my Australian childhood were all beaches and boats and cricket. Living at Balmoral, my brother Dan and I regularly went for an early morning swim at ‘the net' before school and spent every weekend and all the long summer holidays in the sun, ignoring our painfully raw, burnt and peeling skin by revelling in the sensuous pleasure of the golden sand of the harbour beaches and the endless and glorious blue skies.

Although quite protective of us as young children, once we could swim competently my mother simply let us go. The beach and its environs were ours to explore unsupervised, and often we would leave first thing in the morning and not return until sunset. We set off with little more than a towel and a sandwich and an apple for lunch. We drank water from the bubblers, and sometimes we had sixpence for an iceblock. Quite early in the piece Mum despaired of giving us a tube of zinc cream to protect our noses and shoulders from the relentless sun. We invariably lost the tube and managed to get burnt regardless. We were
cautioned to sit in the shade in the middle of the day, which we usually did because the sand was unbearably hot – too hot to lie on. But our skin was also remarkably tough. I could walk over sharp rocks and gravel pathways, and even the bubbling bitumen on the road surface didn't daunt us particularly – the soles of our feet were like leather.

Both Dan and I were strong swimmers because at the tender age of five we were automatically inducted into the Balmoral Swimming Club. The summer I was due to join the club I was still not comfortable swimming out of my depth, so a neighbourhood mother decided to take the situation in hand by leading me out to the deep end of the baths where the races were held every Saturday afternoon. She piggybacked me down the ladder and swam with me on her shoulders out to the centre – about six metres deep – then abandoned me. It was sink or swim, so I swam. To the nearest ladder, which was about 25 metres away. The following Saturday I was entered in my first race – in those days twenty-five yards, which was half the width of the baths – and by the end of the season I was swimming in three or four events every week. These days, the notion of throwing a nervous non-swimmer in the deep end would be considered child abuse, but in the 1950s it was the expedient solution to my fear of deep water. It worked.

Cricket also dominated the agenda – not just the Saturday morning suburban competition games my brother Dan played but the after-school backyard games in which I was sometimes allowed to be involved. There were lots of neighbourhood kids who loved a hit, among them a tall, good-looking boy, David Colley, who would go on to become a well-known state and national cricketer. He and Dan were the closest of mates, despite
the fact that in childhood Dan was a chronic asthmatic who spent a good deal of time gasping for air.

Although they were of a similar age, David was bronzed and broad-chested, towering over Dan, who had the translucent skin, sunken chest and dark shadows under the eyes that characterised asthma in those years before preventive medication. But his comparative frailty didn't hold Dan back in the cricket department. He was tough and wiry and more than determined to keep up with his more robust friend, and this rivalry made the backyard games a battleground on more than one occasion. The only reason I was allowed to join in, I suspect, was because they needed the extra team members. I tried to glamorise my role by taking on the persona of my cricketing hero Richie Benaud. I wasn't afraid to face a hard ball, and how I survived with my teeth intact is remarkable. Dan didn't. One of his pearly-white front teeth was snapped in half during a match, much to the dismay of our mother, who valued our dental health above all else because her own teeth had decayed at an early age.

In our teens our father somehow managed to scrape together enough money to buy a small yacht – I think it coincided with the death of his mother in Melbourne. In spite of her external poverty, his mother had been secretly prudent and managed to leave a legacy that allowed Dad to buy us some new household furniture, a gracious Spode dinner set and a boat called ‘Sparkle'. It was a 24-foot sloop with a timber hull and elegant lines, and for a few years it made a huge difference to our family atmosphere and unity. Until then our lives had been bleak at the weekends, with our parents engrossed mostly in hitting the bottle and fighting. The boat gave us a new focus – it had to be maintained. With the encouragement of our older brother, Jon, Dad
joined the Sydney Amateur Yacht Club and we entered into the Saturday afternoon racing calendar.

So we gave up swimming on Saturday afternoons and took up sailing. I loved it. For years Jon had been a crew member on a larger yacht, ‘Cherub', owned by the feisty
Sun
newspaper yachting editor Lou D'Alpuget. He was an exacting but peerless skipper and Jon had learned well the tricks and techniques of Saturday racing. He passed them on to us and we enjoyed a degree of success during the three years we raced competitively. Because of my size and agility I was nominated for'ard hand and became adept at setting large spinnakers, but I was also expected to perform the female tasks: making tea and coffee below during the race, then breaking out the cold beers and rum once we were over the finishing line. It was a lot of fun, and a much needed diversion from the grimmer aspects of our daily life at home.

The summers of my adulthood were very different, mostly revolving around my passion for gardening and the sporting demands of my children. We lived a long way from the coast so the opportunities for swimming and sailing were rare. I was often asked if I missed the ocean and the beaches I grew up with, but I didn't. I have always felt more comfortable in the countryside. We bushwalked in the Mountains a lot, heading for the dramatic scenery of Wentworth Falls and Katoomba Cascades. We also had a favourite picnic spot in the Megalong Valley, where we would climb a fence into private farmland. The river there had created the most cooling summer pool for swimming. And unlike Balmoral, there were no sharks.

In France, the summer pastimes are rural and quite different from any I have experienced in Australia. Apart from the ‘fêtes' – the village weekend celebrations that involve a lot of eating
and drinking and dancing in the village square – the summers are punctuated by a non-stop round of markets or sales that specialise in second-hand goods, from the stylish brocantes (antique fairs) and salons des livres (antiquarian book markets), to the more downmarket vide greniers (attic clearances) and trocs (which translates literally as a ‘swap' or ‘exchange' gathering but in truth is more of a car boot sale). In my first year in France, shopping at these markets was a waste of time as I couldn't imagine lugging treasures back to Australia. But now that we have a house they have become a compulsive part of summer life. Even though you arrive knowing that the goods on sale will either be too extravagantly expensive or total rubbish, you can't resist going just in case there is a bargain to be found.

Generally I find the brocantes out of our price range except for small items such as occasional bits of china or those traditional crystal salt and pepper servers. The fabulous walnut and oak armoires and classic French beds cost thousands of euros, and anyway our house is too small to accommodate them – they would look out of place and would dwarf our rooms, which have comparatively low ceilings. I am aware that Australian antique dealers travel to France every summer just to collect charming pieces to fill a container and send back to the smart shops that specialise in ‘genuine French antiques'. But while I appreciate that compared to the prices charged for similar items back home these are probably cheap, I simply don't know enough about it to get involved in seriously hunting down treasures. I suppose that says something about me: back in Australia I am not driven to auctions or antique fairs to gather objects for my home, so it's not surprising that here I have adopted a similar attitude. A few
comfortable chairs, a good bed and some bits and pieces of dubious quality are quite enough to satisfy my needs and my tastes.

David, never a keen shopper at the best of times, is quickly bored by these non-food markets and can only see the junk that's on offer, not the possibility of something useful or beautiful hidden beneath the detritus. But during this hot summer he does develop a bit of a passion – more for the game of bargaining down the prices with the stallholders than for the actual items themselves. One Saturday while driving to Cahors we pass through Goujounac, where a vide grenier is under way. There are only about twenty-five stalls, mostly in the new ‘halle', and I insist we stop the car and get out to browse.

‘Ten minutes, that's all,' says David, squeezing the Peugeot into a space that's rather too small.

I systematically go from stall to stall, stooping to look at folded lengths of linen and lace in old cardboard boxes and rummaging through the shoeboxes overflowing with dusty costume jewellery. An old suitcase catches my eye because it is filled with grubby china that has a pretty design – a matching set in pink and yellow with a gold edging. I stop for a closer look. When I turn the plates over I see the ‘Limoges' stamp on the back – an indication that the china has been made in the town to our north that has long been famous for its exquisite china. The stallholder shows me a second box, also full of the matching set, which has the letters ‘TLB' and an emblem of a rooster also stamped on the underside. A quick calculation tells me there are more than sixty pieces, including plates of two sizes, bowls and some delightful serving platters, dishes and jardinieres.

The stallholder wants 150 euros and I call David over for a
look. He agrees that it's beautiful china but thinks the price too high and begins to negotiate in his almost non-existent French, ending up at a figure of 98 euros the lot. It's in the boot of the car before I can blink an eye. Then I spot a set of three orange Le Creusot saucepans (from the seventies obviously) in very good condition and this time they only want 15 euros – the new ones cost a small fortune, even here in France. But David still wants to haggle, and in the end he gets them for 12 euros. A genuine bargain. Normally I hate shopping with David. It makes me nervous the way he hovers impatiently and frowns whenever I pick up something to examine it more closely. But here in France I can see that we could easily get hooked on hunting for bargains as a team.