Au Revoir (27 page)

In the months leading up to my departure for France, David and I exchange a bit of light-hearted banter about the possibility of my having a fling while so far from home for so many months. It's never a topic we discuss, as such, just a few throwaway comments and a couple of jokes about middle-aged women on their own in a foreign land. It is pretty obvious that the idea has occurred to both of us and in a way we are exploring each other's reactions, though it goes no further. During my first few months away I rarely give sex a moment's thought. I haven't come on this journey to indulge in a raging affair with a French farmer, although now I wonder if David secretly imagined that this was partly on my mind when I decided to opt out for six months.

But once I am well settled in my house in the woods and living a relatively normal day-to-day existence, the thought of sex suddenly dawns on me. And like a child who has been told that sweets have been banned for bad behaviour, I become a little obsessed by the thought of it. It's a bit like a medical diet I was once forced to follow in order to identify food allergies. While on this restrictive diet I became obsessed with the foods that were banned. I imagined them on my plate, I could smell them all around me, and I even dreamed about them at night. Now the same thing is happening to me with sex.

My dreams are suddenly filled with sweaty sexual encounters and I awake unsettled, with various body parts either erect or engorged. It's no wonder that fundamentalist religious leaders are so often caught out publicly for having illicit sex or adulterous affairs. Once sex has become forbidden fruit it somehow automatically becomes the most tantalising thing. The objects
of my sexual dreams are not David, but neither are they any recognisable person that I have encountered so far. They are just men, just bodies, and try as I might to put a face to them, they remain anonymous. I have an amusing conversation with Anthony, who is quite a religious soul, about the business of sexual fantasies. Is imagining and dreaming about adultery as bad as adultery itself? He takes the view that it is not a ‘sin' but proposes that having sexual dreams and fantasies is ‘unhelpful' because they lead to obsession which in turn may lead to acting out the fantasies. It's a bit like the Methodist minister who preached strongly against premarital sex because it might lead to dancing. In my case it's not so much unhelpful as uncontrollable.

Suddenly I am imagining sexual possibilities in all directions. The road worker who frequently waves and winks at me as I drive past his giant asphalt rolling machine suddenly becomes my phantom lover. I imagine him turning up unexpectedly at my doorstep and sweeping me upstairs to my dark room in the loft. Jock and I often bump into this man at lunchtime at the restaurants much loved by road workers, and he always smiles and even tries speaking to me a couple times. He's tall and dark with a quintessential French moustache, and I estimate he would be in his late thirties at most. I can't realistically contemplate suddenly engaging him in a torrid affair. I cast my eye around for other possibilities, and I realise they are very few and far between. I can't imagine having it away with someone else's husband and certainly I don't fancy the idea of luring a stranger into my bed.

On the phone one Sunday afternoon I tell David a little of my dreams and fantasies, and he sounds rather nonplussed at
my revelations. We normally don't have conversations about sex—it's something we do rather than talk about. Now I am teasing him, trying to draw him into the way I am feeling, and he starts to mumble and mutter in an uncomfortable fashion.

‘You make me feel very nervous,' he says. ‘I'm not sure that I am going to be up to your expectations of me. You've got to remember I'm not thirty-five anymore.'

I laugh out loud, then reassure him that I'm not about to start tearing his clothes off at the airport when we finally meet again. It's funny in a way to imagine him being so unsettled by me and the way I am talking. Perhaps he would rather I simply had an affair and got it out of my system. That would certainly let him off the hook.

If I
really
wanted to, of course, having an affair would be easy to organise. French men seem to have a more appreciative attitude towards older women, and instead of being invisible after the age of forty-five, as we so often are in Australia, women still seem to be objects of desire. I have even experienced a few harmless encounters with amorous men since I arrived, though nothing that I wasn't able to handle with ease. One night in the bar of the Hotel du Commerce in Villefranche I converse in a halting mishmash of English and French with a forty-something-year old man who is on a bike riding tour across the southwest. Bike riding is hugely popular in France, and during the summer months the secondary roads are packed with obsessed riders of all ages, all rippling leg muscles and facial expressions of intense concentration. This fellow in the bar is quite attractive and appears intrigued at the idea of an Australian woman living alone in a French town in the middle of nowhere. Especially one who sits in the bar at night, drinking beer. He insists on shouting
me a couple of drinks and I quickly realise I am getting myself into an uncomfortable situation. Like a coward I wait until he's distracted in a conversation with the barman, then make a hasty retreat to my small, safe room.

At one of the village fêtes another charming man makes a move in my direction, placing his hand on my leg between drinks and energetic dances around the square. He, too, is quite attractive and for a moment I seriously contemplate the possibility. The atmosphere is so divine and I am feeling heady from all the wonderful food and wine. But something inside me is blocking the possibility. Not just the fact that this man is well-known to my circle of friends and an affair with him would quickly become common knowledge. Not just the fact that I am feeling rather fat and therefore reluctant for anyone—even David—to see my fleshy naked body. But something else makes it impossible for me to step over that invisible line. It's not guilt and it's certainly not a strong sense of morality. It can only be fear of the unknown. I resort, as I so often do, to humour and self-deprecation to deflect the situation.

‘Now darling,' I murmur, putting my hand over his on my knee. ‘You wouldn't want to have sex with a grandmother, would you?'

He laughs it off in a rather uncomfortable way, and I slide out from the seat and rejoin the dancers in a ring.

I nearly get myself into a sticky sexual situation with a couple of burly Pompiers who arrive on my doorstep one morning selling rather dreary calendars as a method of fundraising. I smile sweetly and nod that I will buy one, dashing back into the house to find my purse. Then, in my abysmal French, I try describing the suggestive calendars occasionally produced by
our local bushfire brigade back in Australia—the ones with photographs of themselves naked on every page, with just a fire hat or a hose covering their malehood. Somehow I don't seem to be communicating very clearly. The word ‘nudité' is being repeated and I realise they are getting very mixed signals from this woman alone in her house in the woods. I quickly thank them and virtually slam the door in their faces, mortified at my own stupidity. I really wonder what they thought I was on about, chatting about naked Australian firefighters so enthusiastically.

In truth, the thought of a full-blown love affair doesn't really thrill me much, beyond the obvious physical titillation. By their very nature, affairs of the heart involve all sorts of runaway emotions, not simply lust, and people's lives can become tragically tangled when passion turns to love and marriages fall by the wayside. The fallout is dramatic, especially for children, no matter what their age. Even though my children are fully grown and completely independent, I can just imagine how unhappy they would be if suddenly their parents' marriage dissolved. They are so comfortable with us as a couple, as the grandparents of their children, as the ones to cook the Sunday lunch where all the family gathers. I wouldn't jeopardise this for all the passionate sex in the world.

Thinking about it later I realise just how profoundly I have been affected by my father's serial infidelities and the terrible pain they caused my mother, and our entire family. I don't wish to ever make moral judgments on other people's sex lives—it's their own affair in every sense of the word. For me, having a ‘harmless' fling isn't a question of morality, but one of plain commonsense. It doesn't make sense to risk ruining a solid
marriage and a happy family for a good screw. The other point that occurs to me, in passing, is that it might not be good sex. It might be terrible. Wouldn't that just be the pits, working your way up to a passionate encounter which then turns out to be nothing but a profound disappointment? I'll just have to hang out until I see David again and hope he has some Viagra!

During this period of sexual confusion I come across a couple of fascinating views on middle-aged women. Germaine Greer, in the UK's
Sunday Telegraph
, has written a feature claiming that shopping has become the ‘new sex' for women of a certain age. Instead of bedroom romps, women are getting their thrills and satisfaction by cruising shopping malls and spending up big on their credit cards (or better still, their husband's credit cards). I don't quite see it myself; although I love the occasional shopping afternoon it doesn't go anywhere near fulfilling my sexual desires. Then I pick up an article by a female medical writer in the
Times
expounding the new theory that women over fifty are at their most sexually powerful. Previous studies claimed that the early thirties was the age at which women reached their sexual peak, but now this lustful phase has shifted forward twenty years. Fifty-year-old women are no longer ‘old' and with menopausal hormonal drug therapy, they still have healthy, if not excessively active libidos. That must be my problem, I conclude. I am peaking and there's not a lot I can do about it.

T
IME IS AN ILLUSION
. It either moves very slowly, like during childhood when the summer school holidays stretch ahead endlessly; or it gallops along at an alarming pace, as it does during those hectic years when your children are growing up. It seems to me only a moment ago that my little ones were dancing around my feet in the kitchen yet now, miraculously, I am a grandmother. It seems like yesterday that my own mother was sitting at the kitchen table, drinking tea and marking up the newspaper articles that she thought I should be reading, no matter how busy I was. My days never seemed quite long enough to fit in all the things I needed to accomplish—journalistic work, gardening, writing letters or simply household chores. I looked at women who did not work full time and imagined that they had the luxury of hours and hours of empty time to sit and think, to idle away. How I longed for a lack of pressure, a little breathing space. Part of my rationale in escaping for six months was to indulge myself with some precious time to think.

The down side is that too much thinking can lead to all sorts of neuroses; some people who suffer physical and mental ailments do so because they simply aren't busy enough, they have too much time to imagine all sorts of problems in their lives: at least, that is what I have always believed, probably quite arrogantly. I also tend to the view that reflection can be left until old age, and that too much agonising detracts from the actual living of one's life. I intend to use my thinking time for a little light reflection. Not navel-gazing.

In reality, my days in France fill up naturally without effort. Instead of sitting alone in a café, making a cup of tea last for an hour and staring at the passing parade, I am struggling to keep up with a diary of social engagements and excursions to new corners of the area where I am living. I barely have time for washing clothes and writing letters home. Driving the car can be good thinking time, but I always seem to be in the company of others. Walking, too, is ideal for solitary thought, and this is where I finally manage to let my mind wander back and forth over my life without restraint.

One of the things I mull over while striding through the countryside is my journey as a mother. Before I undertook this trip to France I had already reached the unhappy conclusion that I was not the world's most effective parent. I wished that I could turn back the clock and have another go at it, back to the point at which my children entered their teens. I realise in retrospect that I set out quite deliberately to be a very different type of parent to my own. I was determined, from the start, that our home would be harmonious, without all the highs and lows and histrionics that I associated with my own troubled childhood. That isn't to say that David and I didn't have our disagreements,
but they were usually conducted in rooms well away from the children or in whispers in the middle of the night so my mother couldn't overhear and be upset. If we did have an argument that became a little heated it was always very much under control, without ever spiralling into the likelihood of the sort of physical anger that so terrified me. Without totally keeping a lid on emotions, I wanted to ensure that family relationships always floated along on an even keel, which I realise now was quite an unrealistic expectation.