The Long Hot Summer (27 page)

After the Sydney literary lunch David and I have only one night together before I leave in the morning for Perth and the rest of the tour. I'm feeling quite desperate. Somehow I have to turn things around between now and when we go our separate ways in the morning. We go back up to the room and David decides he'll have a work-out in the hotel gym. We then plan to have a late afternoon snooze and go out for a quiet dinner together. David has been keeping his mobile phone by his side at all times, even taking it to the gym, so while he is having a shower after his work-out I call out to him that I am going down to the shops for a little while. I steal the phone from his bedside table and make a hasty exit. I don't own a mobile phone and I don't even understand how they work, except to press the red and green buttons for calls. But I know they have a memory and somewhere in this phone are calls from the new woman. I need to hear her voice. I want to know what messages she has been leaving him. I need to understand.

I sit on a bench in Pitt Street Mall and fumble with the
phone trying to work out how to access the message bank. After several botched attempts I work it out and I hold it tightly to my ear as message after message from her plays back to me. Her voice is soft and low and she speaks with an intimacy that shocks me. She calls him darling and expresses concern for his wellbeing. Is he getting enough sleep? Is he feeling upset or unhappy? Is he coping with his difficulties (meaning me, I suppose)? I play them back a second time with tears pouring from my eyes. Then I play them a third time just to be sure that I haven't missed anything.

Back at the hotel room David is waiting for me, furious. He realises what I have done and asks me to return his phone immediately. I'm hurt, I'm sad, I'm jealous, I'm frightened and I'm angry. All at the same time. David and the woman have obviously accelerated their relationship much further than I thought. It's way past the kissing in the car stage.

We talk and talk but I'm not really capable of a rational discussion. I ask a lot of questions, in particular about his future plans with her. He says he will go to South Africa in February and will live with her for a while. They will test the waters and see how they like each other. He has made a commitment to her. A total commitment. He has told her his marriage is over. Finished. That he is ready for a new relationship. With her. She has told him that she wants to spend the rest of her life with him. She is convinced he is the one for her. Her future.

I try everything I can to make him change his mind. But nothing has even the slightest impact. We make love, but that doesn't soften his resolve. We talk about our family and our love for them. He doesn't weaken. We talk about the farm and our financial and emotional ties to it. It makes no difference. I cry.
I plead. I get angry and say horrible things about the woman. I threaten to call her. I sob. He simply will not budge.

I guess we finally get some sleep. I don't really remember. I have to leave with Jane very early in the morning for an interview on breakfast television. Then we fly to Perth, where I have a literary event in the evening. It's going to be a long, arduous day and I am totally shattered.

At the television station at 7 a.m., make-up and hair in place, I sit quietly in the waiting room with Jane before being ushered into the studio for my interview. Jane senses how fragile I am. There is a monitor with the program we are doing playing live-to-air. Mel and Kochie with their usual humorous banter.

Mel throws to the commercial break with the words: ‘After the break we'll be talking about having an affair and getting away with it by someone who knows.'

The words don't seem to impinge on my numb brain, but Jane is on her feet in a flash, dashing out to find the producer of the show. Words are exchanged but it is too late to change the line of questioning. At least I am forewarned that it's going to be a rocky ride. Like a lamb to the slaughter, they lead me to the sofa where the interview is about to start. I wonder how on earth I'm going to handle it.

David Koch opens the interview brightly with a brief introduction. Then: ‘Well, Mary, you've just had an extra-marital affair. Would you recommend it?'

Blam. Right between the eyes.

‘Don't be mad,' I respond, trying my best to look amused rather than amazed. ‘It was the most traumatic event of my life and I am still trying to deal with the repercussions.'

I then steer the interview away from the affair by talking with
great enthusiasm about other aspects of the book. The food in France. The farm at Bathurst. My grandchildren.

It works. We end on a happy note and there are no more heart-lurching questions to field. As we leave the studio, I wonder if David has been watching me on the hotel television. Probably.

Back at the hotel I finish packing and we say our goodbyes. He holds me closely and tells me that no matter what happens he will always love me. I ask him to think seriously about everything we have discussed. I tell him I am as worried about him and his future as I am about myself. And I mean it.

‘There is still so much about our relationship that is good,' I say as I prepare to leave. ‘Too good to just throw away. Our lives are intertwined. We mustn't unravel them. We must at least give our marriage one more try.'

He says nothing and I leave for Perth.

The first few publicity events in Sydney – the interviews and the lunch – have prepared me for the sort of questions I am going to have to face on this tour. Jane has been very careful in selecting media reporters who will be positive, but we are both still worried that I will have to counter some tricky interrogation along the way. This was something that didn't really occur to me when I was writing the book, but now I see that I have stirred up a bit of a hornet's nest and I am going to have to deal with the consequences of my frankness.

The literary event in Perth is a cocktail party rather than a dinner, with several hundred well-dressed women milling around sipping champagne and eating finger food when I arrive. The bar closes and the audience is ushered into a small auditorium. A couple of women have hijacked the last of the champagne and have the bottles hidden under their seats. They keep drinking while I give the talk, laughing more uproariously than the rest of the audience. Then it comes to question time.

A few typical questions pertaining to French food and the progress of my language skills are asked. Then one of the closet champagne drinkers lurches to her feet.

‘Gidday Mary,' she slurs slightly. ‘Loved both your books and I also saw the documentary on the ABC. What I reckon is that you should leave your husband. He's boring. Go back to France and have another affair. Have lots of affairs. Good on you, Mary.'

How do I handle this one? I try to make light of it without totally brushing her aside with: ‘Well, it's not that easy really. I love my husband and I don't want to leave him. I value him and our family too much to abandon them. And I might get bored if I was in France all the time. I will always have the desire to come home again.'

If only they knew the truth.

In between bookstore signings and literary events I give radio interviews constantly, sometimes in a studio and sometimes over the phone from the hotel room. Jane has organised a pretty hectic schedule so I don't have much time to sit around dwelling on my problems. But in the evenings I phone David and from the first day he sounds different. More distant. Less receptive. Now that I am away from him, physically at a distance, he has regained his strength and his resolve. Whenever I mention the issue of us ‘trying again', he says no. He's made up his mind. He will live with me at the farm until February so that we can have our last Christmas together as a family, then he will go to meet up with the other woman.

He keeps telling me I should go and live in France full-time. He says he wants to keep the farm for the family – in particular for our son Ethan, who has been establishing a native plant nursery on the property. I will be welcome, he says, to come and
go as I please and to maintain my financial equity in it. But our marriage as such has ended. Full stop.

This dialogue between us continues for the entire three weeks of the tour. As Jane and I zigzag across the country from Perth to Melbourne to Adelaide, back to Brisbane then various regional centres, David and I talk at least once a day. Often several times, because I keep phoning him to try a different angle. To put my case a different way. Sometimes I cry, sometimes I scream, sometimes I can barely speak because of my distress. And in between the calls I am putting on make-up and fixing my hair and dashing out to make appearances, often to hundreds and hundreds of women. I have never had to put on such a brave face and Jane is only too aware of the strain I am under. I can't eat, for a start, because my throat constricts every time I try swallowing. I was already thin when I came back from France, now I am looking gaunt and haggard. I try to cover the dark circles with make-up and hope nobody notices that I am a cot case.

By Adelaide I reach a state of despair. I lie awake one night for hours and decide, irrationally of course, that suicide is probably the only way out of this for me. I get dressed and go looking for the stairs in the hotel, hoping to get up onto the roof. There is no access. The management is obviously aware that sometimes guests have these desperate moments. I tell David how I am feeling and he is horrified. He calls Jane and asks her to watch me every minute of the day which, of course, she can't do. But I realise she is monitoring me pretty closely.

Each day gets more difficult. I am running on automatic pilot. Each time I stand up before an audience to give a talk, I wonder how I am going to get through it. But I do and Jane is always
there to whisk me away at the end. To sit and have a late-night drink with me before we collapse into our beds. What a nightmare for her having to prop up this demented writer on tour. Worse than trying to control a drug-crazed rock and roll band. Her friends think she has a cushy life, travelling around the country and staying in plush hotels. If only they knew how difficult her job can be at times, dealing with loopy people. And I'm one of them.

In Canberra I seriously spend time in my hotel room contemplating suicide in a more cool and calculated fashion. Instead of jumping off a building I will organise some tablets and do it properly so there can be no slip-ups. I will organise the legalities to protect our children. I don't want the other woman getting hold of my children's inheritance. Of course this demonstrates how totally irrational I am at the time. There's no way David would allow anything that we had accrued together to go to another person. We had already covered all these possibilities years ago when we made our wills. But I am now seeing the other woman as the enemy and logic and common sense have nothing to do with my reasoning.

That night, neither David nor I get any sleep. I phone him every half-hour, raving incoherently. He lies on our bed at the farm cradling the portable phone in his arms. He is relieved each time I call, no matter what the hour, just because he can hear I am alive.

The last leg of the tour is back in Sydney. David has decided to come down and stay with me at the hotel to lend his support.
He's not doing a turnaround in terms of his stance on our marriage, he just wants to hold my hand for these last few days. He will have to invent a story for the new woman about where he is staying and play the ‘mobile phone switched off in the hotel' game again. I feel sorry for him caught between two women, both of whom he obviously loves and cares for. One waiting expectantly for him to launch into a new and exciting relationship; one desperately clinging to him and slipping further and further into a state of insanity.

In Sydney we embrace and David immediately senses my extreme physical and mental frailty. He is very concerned. I have always been the strong one, the doer, the one with endless energy and stamina. Now I am thin and pale and trembling. He makes love to me and I try to pretend that everything is okay. Just like it used to be before all this happened. It's a fantasy in my head, because I know it isn't going to change anything. It's all hopeless.

The next day I have a library talk on the North Shore and we are delighted that some very dear friends have turned up unexpectedly. Two women who were neighbours and close friends when we lived in the Blue Mountains, and also Bob Huber, who was a close colleague of David's from his days working in television. The talk goes well and afterwards we spontaneously join David's old friend Bob for lunch. We have been friends for thirty years and even though we don't see him very often, it's the sort of friendship that picks up exactly where it left off. We chatter and gossip about our children and grandchildren, comparing photographs and funny anecdotes. It's just so warm and familiar and comfortable, and as we sit around the restaurant table I am swamped by the realisation that none of these old relationships
will ever be the same again. Here is a friend who has known us as a couple since I was twenty-one, and soon David will have a new partner and the continuity will be broken. Severed. Not that Bob won't still be my friend, of course he will. But there will be an essential shift and I can't help but think of all our friends and extended family members who will be affected in the same way. It just seems too terrible for words.