Au Revoir (26 page)

Bronte also works, but she picks me up in the centre of town in the late afternoon and takes me back to her house. She has been living with the younger of her two adult sons and his girlfriend, but they are just in the process of moving to another city. It's all a bit chaotic but very warm and welcoming, and I quickly discover why Bronte is the only person I ever meet in France who doesn't drink one drop of alcohol: she is a bit of a dope fiend. Well, not exactly a fiend, but as I sit on her sofa hoping she
may offer me a glass of something, instead she produces a fat joint. I'm rather over all that, so instead I suggest I take everyone out for a night at the local pub and a big English dinner. Bronte also doesn't seem to be keen on cooking, and the fridge looks rather bleak, so I figure it's my only chance of a drink and a feed.

Indeed we all have a splendid evening together, and are joined by her older son and his girlfriend. English pub culture and the food now served in pubs is rather pleasant, and a complete change from the southwest France cuisine and atmosphere. I thoroughly enjoy my fish and chips, and a couple of pints of good lager. Bronte is feeling low because, when her son moves the following day, she will be alone for the first time in more than twenty-five years. Her marriage failed many years back, but until quite recently she had a live-in lover who has since also departed. No wonder she is feeling sad. Living alone is all fine and dandy if you have a choice in the matter. This period of my life, in self-imposed exile, is causing me very little pain because I know that at the end of the six months I will be hopping on a plane and returning to the open arms of my large, warm family. For Bronte, who has a strained relationship with her mother, and two sons who are both now heading off in their own directions, the choices are much more limited. Being a woman of fifty without a partner is also problematic. The prospects of meeting someone congenial seems to narrow down with age, and working full-time to pay the bills means that life can become a grind of working and sleeping and little else.

In the morning I catch a train into London and am met at the station by David's sister Gillian and her daughter Annabel, who is just a few years older than Miriam. Gillian lived the life of a
country housewife and mother in New Zealand for twenty-five years; then, after her marriage broke up, she launched into a career as a school matron and private nurse, making good use of her pre-marriage mothercraft nursing qualification. Several years back, in a dramatic contradiction of her conservative lifestyle, Gillian upped sticks and moved to London where she now works as a nanny and shares a flat the size of a postage stamp with a girlfriend called George, also from New Zealand. George has found work with a high-flying dot com company, and is also having a great time living and working in London. Annabel is visiting from New Zealand, working part time as a casual teacher at several alarmingly confronting comprehensive schools, and she is also camping in the tiny flat. She is sleeping on the sofa in the sitting room and I am to sleep on a futon bed at the other end of the room where our toes will virtually be touching during the night. Despite its ridiculous size, the flat costs them a fortune every week, hundreds of pounds for an area that is half the size of my garage at home. All three work long, gruelling hours, spending a second small fortune on train fares and food, but they still manage to save enough money get out of town regularly on long weekend holidays. Greece and France, Sweden and Scotland are just some of the places they have visited to escape the dreary weather and the expense of London.

We have a pub lunch and, while at the bar ordering beers, I suddenly catch a glimpse of the opening ceremony of the Sydney Olympics on the television monitor overhead. The games are one of the reasons I have chosen this particular six months to leave Australia behind, imagining that they will turn Sydney into a chaotic nightmare. However all the newspaper and television reports have been to the contrary, and now as I gaze up at the
screen I feel a terrible wave of homesickness. When I see Cathy Freeman running with the Olympic torch towards the giant cauldron I am completely undone. How perfect that they—the much-ridiculed organisers—finally got it right, choosing this amazing young woman to complete the most important part of the ceremony. I stand sobbing in front of the screen while the others wait for me at our table.

‘You all right, love?' the barman asks with some concern.

I am all right, but I suddenly feel that I am once again missing out on something very special at home.

Gillian and I only have three days together, and I have to buy my computer and also catch up with Miles and Anne, who are keen for me to stay a night and have dinner with some other friends who visited the Lot in July. And although I have been to England several times I have never done the tourist thing and seen the sights of London—Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament, Buckingham Palace. This is because David loathes the English class system with such a passion that he refuses to dignify the history of the city by visiting monuments that he considers are symbols of it. He has lived and worked in London on film projects several times over the years and felt he has been treated as a curious colonial, so this has greatly clouded his viewpoint. So Gillian, George and Annabel take me, via the tube, on a whirlwind tour of ten or more major tourist sites where I pose for a series of cheeky photographs, waving the Union Jack and grinning like Dame Edna Everage, to send to David back in Australia. I get plenty of funny looks from fellow tourists, especially when I hold a photograph of the Queen in front of my face while posing for my Buckingham Palace picture. I also indulge my love of kitsch by buying several Queen Mother plates and teapots to
take back to France. In the pastel blues and pinks of her fluffy hats, they are truly hideous.

George drops me over to Miles and Anne's cosy terrace house in Battersea for one night, and it's great to see them in their own environment. Miles takes me to one of the clubs of which he has been a long-time member, the Oxford and Cambridge Club, and I am appalled to discover that women are still not permitted to have a drink at the bar. I am only allowed to peek furtively through the heavy oak portals to the overly grand male-only bar, then we are forced to find a dreary backroom where men and women can sit together. Given that more than half the students of Oxford and Cambridge are female, I can't fathom how this situation can still exist. Miles thinks it's mildly amusing, but Anne and I agree that such sexism is totally outrageous. I am beginning to understand how David formed his negative opinion of London life. In truth, I suspect that any former student with half a brain simply wouldn't want to become a member of such an establishment.

After a day organising my computer and browsing through Harrods I am well worn out and more than eager to head back to France. Harrods is full of the most ridiculous and expensive goods—incredible household furnishings, like cushions edged with spangles and ostrich feathers, and clothes that are ostentatious, impractical and overpriced. I wander about in a daze, wondering who buys all this crap—and indeed who can afford to buy it. But the place is packed with credit-card waving tourists and I can only assume they have more money than commonsense.

On my last couple of nights in England I head out of London to stay with some of our oldest friends who live in a quaint house
in a leafy lane in Surrey. Bev is an Australian artist and fabric designer and her husband Julian, a filmmaker, worked with David on a couple of features back in Australia more than thirty years ago, and they have lived in the UK since then. Bev has always worked from home and Julian has bumbled along from one eccentric film project to another for more than twenty years. His current obsession is crop circles—those mysteriously perfect geometric patterns that appear in wheat fields in certain parts of the country, usually places of spiritual significance. Julian speaks in an amusing loud and cultured mumble, and invariably rambles on about his latest venture as though you automatically know everything about it. He breathlessly describes to me the two years he has spent putting together a documentary that purports to be ‘the ultimate investigation' of this peculiar phenomenon. Having also recently discovered the joys of computer technology, he has been editing the film at home. He shows me hilarious extracts and interviews with earnest young devotees who are convinced that aliens are responsible for the midnight appearance of patterns in the fields. It is wonderful to have friends who are loony, and Julian is loonier than most. Bev and I exchange looks when Julian comes out with yet another outrageous anecdote about his crop circle exploits. The funniest angle for me is that Julian doesn't really have much faith in the commercial viability of the film, in spite of the fact that he has spent two years and a lot of his own money getting it to editing stage. I keep suggesting possible outlets—the Discovery Channel or another pay-TV station—but he shakes his head. He hopes he may be lucky enough to sell a dozen or more copies over the Internet, and I seriously wonder why he has bothered going through with the whole exercise. But that's Julian. I love him.

Anthony picks me up on the last evening and we drive south towards Portsmouth for a repeat performance of the overnight ferry. He has been attending a ‘self-discovery/improvement' seminar in London over the weekend, and is as high as a kite after three days of undergoing what I consider to be mesmerising exercises in brainwashing. This moneymaking pop psychology, where groups of people are separated from the real world for a few days and put through a series of confronting workshop exercises to break down barriers and supposedly put them ‘in touch with their feelings', leaves me quite cold. And Anthony knows it. He starts detailing his weekend experience from the beginning, describing every exercise, its aim and its outcome, and asks for my opinion on each. I point out that the issues they are addressing are very basic indeed. Not earth-shattering revelations, but good old-fashioned commonsense. We talk well into the night while crossing the Channel and again for most of the following day as we undertake the long drive from the coast to the southwest. He gradually comes back to earth and simultaneously the weather improves. It has been grey and raining for the six days I spent in the UK but by the time we reach the Lot the sky is brilliant blue and the sun is shining. I feel I have come home.

S
EX IS A DIRTY WORD TO A
person living for six months in self-inflicted celibacy. In the twenty-nine years that we have been together, David and I have managed to maintain a monogamous relationship despite a couple of brushes with romance on both sides that could easily have gone the other way. We are quite proud of our achievement, though it remains largely unspoken, and neither of us suffers from that nervous insecurity that plagues couples whose relationships are under threat of imminent infidelity.

To say that sex has been an important part of our relationship is an understatement. At times it seems to me that it was the only thing that bound us together, especially during those early years when we argued so often about money or child-rearing. In the years we have been together, David has spent a lot of time absent from the house and from my bed. Indeed, for twenty years he was away for the larger part of each week in Sydney, camping overnight in his office; and of course when he was in the midst of producing a film I rarely saw him at all. This always
added a certain spice to our relationship. There is nothing like a passionate reunion to keep the blood pumping.

I have never been one to fritter away a lot of time contemplating sex. Like many busy women, thoughts and fantasies about sexual encounters rarely enter my head from one day or week to the next. Unlike young men who, I once read, think about the sexual act twelve times a minute, I'd be more likely to think about sex twelve times a year, and only then as a direct result of my hormonal cycle. As a younger woman my casual approach to sex was undoubtedly a result of physical and mental exhaustion. Every day of my younger life was filled with work and demanding children and deadlines and family problems and issues—for many years I simply collapsed into bed every night far too knackered to give sex a second thought. For me it was either there or it wasn't. Not a problem. David, on the other hand, was always very keen so I simply left it to him to initiate sex. It seemed to suit us both perfectly. In our earlier years together he often initiated sex in the most unlikely and sometimes uncomfortable places—in the back seat of our car coming home from the theatre, or at the bottom end of the garden late at night when the children were in bed. I suspected this was his way of gaining a little privacy for us, because of my mother living in the adjoining bedroom. Not that making love in the back seat of a car can be regarded as all that private, it was more the illicit business of spontaneous sex in a public place that obviously appealed to him. Over the past few years our sex life has dwindled a little, which I expect is perfectly normal for couples living together for such a long time. And car sex hasn't been on the cards for quite some time, fortunately. When we do get around to it, sex is still as enjoyable as ever, even if it does lack
the urgency and passion of our youth. It has simply evolved into a comfortable and comforting thing!