Last Tango in Toulouse (30 page)

The whole business of living in two countries is very difficult. While there is the joy of the diversity – the different friends I love in each place and the beauty that I relish in both France and Australia – there's an element of sadness each time I pack up and leave. I won't be seeing Jan or any of our gang again until the middle of next year, and yet I will soon be home again with David and the children and grandchildren. I feel torn. In between, I am going to meet my sister, and the thought of it overwhelms me.

I have spoken to Margaret only twice on the phone since we first started communicating last December. The first time was
when Jon was visiting on his way to France. I thought it would be a good time to exchange our first words, knowing that Jon would be there beside her. It takes me all my courage to dial the number. In fact, I dial two or three times then hang up before it starts ringing. I am worried that I might cry, and that would be embarrassing for everyone. I sense from Margaret's letters that she isn't anticipating any sort of overly emotional reunion. She's certainly very pleased to be seeing Jon and me after all this time, but she quite obviously doesn't want the situation to escalate into high drama. Neither do I, although I feel deeply emotional about the prospect of meeting her and talking over all the memories and sensitive topics that are bound to arise. When I first hear Margaret's voice I am amazed. She sounds a lot like me and hasn't a trace of a Canadian accent – indeed, she still sounds fiercely Australian. I find it very reassuring. She also exudes warmth and humour over the telephone. She jokes with Jon and I speak with him briefly; he sounds tired, and I expect he must be feeling both physically and emotionally exhausted.

The next time I phone is a few days before I leave Frayssinet, to make sure we have communicated clearly and that she and Ken will be picking me up from the airport at Victoria. I am concerned about the lateness of the flight but she reassures me that it's no trouble at all. They are both very excited about seeing me.

From Paris I fly to Montreal, where I change flights for Vancouver. From there to Victoria is just a twenty-minute flight. The airport at Vancouver is virtually deserted when my plane lands, and it takes me a few minutes to find my way to the transfer desk and work out where the small plane is leaving from. My luggage has been booked right through, but I have only a few minutes to get myself from one side of the terminal to the
other. The booking clerk looks at my ticket, then at me. ‘Can you run, lady?' he asks.

‘If I have to.'

‘Well, off you go. Gateway 22. They'll be waiting for you, I hope,' he smiles.

So I run like a madwoman down the long corridors of this half-deserted airport. Running to meet Margaret. I don't know whether to laugh or cry – after fifty years of wanting to meet her I'm running like fury to catch the plane. It's the dash of my life.

I make it and the flight feels as if it is over almost before it began. We barely reach our cruising altitude before we have to descend. I pick up my bag and walk out through the arrival gates. I catch a glimpse of Margaret from inside the arrival area, picking her out instantly from the photographs she sent me. I feel a shock of recognition. She is intently searching the face of each passenger who arrives. There is something so familiar about her facial expression but I know it can't be my memory of her because I was less than eighteen months old when she fled our family home. She looks at me but doesn't react until I call out her name. She then smiles and we embrace just for a moment. I then see Ken, who is very tall and has a grin on his face. I give him a big hug, too, and we go straight out to the car to head back to their farm. In the back seat is Sidney, their geriatric Newfoundland dog, who puffs and pants and fills the car with his warm doggy breath.

We are all very tired and, after a cup of tea and a bit of a chat, we head off to bed. I sleep well and wake the next morning to the smell of pancakes cooking. It's Sunday and pancakes are a tradition. Over breakfast they fill me in on the plans for the next few days. Monday is Thanksgiving Day in Canada, and some of
Ken's family will be coming for dinner – they will cook a large turkey for the traditional celebration. On Wednesday Margaret's painting group will be coming to the house. This is a group of about twenty women artists who meet once a week at each other's homes to paint and have lunch together. They have been meeting for years, and some of them have travelled with Margaret and Ken to France, to the Lot. They have driven through my village, I feel certain. And they know the region and love it well.

In between times Margaret plans to take me on a few tours around the area, to the Buchardt Gardens and on a scenic drive around Victoria, which is a historically significant city. I have only four days and we should make the most of them.

I realise, from the moment I first meet them, that Margaret and Ken are a very united and private couple. Even though they have busy and full lives, there is a calm, unhurried air about the way they do things. I am impatient to get Margaret talking, to draw out as much information as I can about what she remembers of her childhood and how she felt about leaving the family behind, but I sense that she can't be pushed in any way. I may be her sister but she doesn't know me and I have no right to expect her to open up immediately or to talk about memories that she might find painful or confronting. So I just go with the flow and enjoy their company, trying to get to know them a little without applying any pressure or having unrealistic expectations.

We take a leisurely walk around the house and then the farm. The house nestles behind a lofty hedge of conifers which have grown from small seedlings, they tell me, in the twenty years since they built the house. Although Canadian in design, with
a deep storage cellar and central heating and well-insulated walls and windows, it has the ambience of an Australian farmhouse because of the way it sits close to the ground and because it also has deep, shady verandahs. Inside, it is decorated not unlike my own home and this intrigues me – the same sort of old-fashioned but comfortable furniture, a house designed for living in rather than for show. The main difference is the artwork. Where my house is decorated with movie posters from David's numerous films over the years, Margaret and Ken's walls are covered with artwork, many of the paintings done by Margaret herself over the years. I recognise the style from the one painting she left behind as a teenager. It's now in the home of my brother Dan.

There are lots of photographs of Ken's family. His parents and grandparents and aunts and cousins are well represented, and there are also shots of Ken and Margaret on their various overseas holidays, mostly in France. There is not one single photograph of Margaret's family, but I know why. She didn't take any family photographs when she left, just a small suitcase with a few clothes and her painting materials. That was all of her first life that she could carry on foot as she escaped the madness that was her family home, and mine.

The farm is small but efficiently organised. Ken has a richly productive vegetable garden and he enters his crops every year at the local agricultural show. He's a prominent local farmer, involved in several agricultural committees in the region. It's the end of the season and most of the vegetable crops have been harvested, but the main crop, kiwi fruit, is still ripening on the vine. I have never seen full-scale kiwi fruit production and I am impressed at how attractive they are en masse. A huge area has
symmetrical trellises smothered in a brilliant green canopy, with thousands of almost-ripe furry Chinese gooseberries waiting to be picked. They grow two varieties: most are ‘Hayward', the same variety that is commercially popular in Australia, the others are ‘Ananaja', commonly called grape kiwi fruits. They are the size of a grape, with a smooth skin, and are eaten whole, skin and all. They are delicious. I've never seen them before and feel certain they're not available in Australia. I am determined to find out when I return.

In between trips out and about exploring the island Margaret and I spend precious time sitting in the family room, drinking tea and talking. It's good to talk. The look of familiarity that I detected when I first saw her at the airport still plagues me, and it takes me days to work out what it is. She looks a lot like our father, around the mouth and jaw in particular. She also has the most startling light-green eyes. I can't take my eyes off them and I ask her about them.

‘From my mother, apparently,' she responds. She has no idea what her mother looked like and can't remember seeing any photographs.

We gradually open up and talk about our respective childhoods. Her quiet, calm reminiscences make so much come alive for me and help explain many things that have been a mystery to me.

Margaret believes she was only about four years old when her mother committed suicide. She can't quite remember and she certainly can't remember at what age she first became aware of her mother's cause of death. It may not have been, she thinks, until she was an adult. She recalls being looked after by various relatives in the following years, including for a while our father's sister Melissa. Our father Theo married Muriel Angel, my
mother, when she was twenty-one and Margaret was eight or nine years old. That part of it is all a bit of a blur.

During the war years they all lived in America – Theo, Muriel, Jon and Margaret. There were endless fights and brawls, the result of heavy drinking by both parents. Muriel frequently sported a black eye or a bruised arm and Margaret recalls that she often tried to break up these violent fights but never succeeded. It was a lost cause.

Back in Australia, after the war, my mother gave birth to two children in fairly rapid succession – first Dan and then me. Our flat was small. It had only two bedrooms, one for Mum and Dad and one for Jon, so Margaret had no choice but to share a small glassed-in sunroom with Dan, who was a toddler, and then me as well, from the time I was born. She had no wardrobe or chest of drawers of her own – clothes were kept at one end of Jon's wardrobe. She described how difficult it was, as a teenage girl, dressing and undressing every day with no privacy.

I remember from my own childhood how our flat was always untidy and often dirty because Muriel loathed housework apart from cooking and ironing. Margaret confirmed this and added more to the picture. It appears that our father had several love affairs when Muriel was pregnant and nursing young babies. Her way of dealing with the situation was to drink, and to drink quite heavily. Margaret recalls that for much of the time when Dan and I were very young our mother was sipping sherry all afternoon, then fighting with our father when he got home from work. Margaret was in high school and at one point Theo had a brilliant idea. She should leave school and stay at home with Muriel, helping to run the house and look after us small children. Margaret was devastated. The years in America had set
both Margaret and Jon back academically because of the very different standards of education – Australia's standard was quite a bit higher. She had just started to catch up and excel at school, and now she was told she had to leave and stay home to wipe babies' bottoms and clean up the continuous mess that was our chaotic environment.

She went to school and informed her headmistress that she would have to leave at the end of the term. Outraged, this feisty woman asked for our father's phone number at work and promptly called him. There was never again a mention of Margaret leaving school. When she related this story it didn't really surprise me. Our father, for all his violent temper and bullying attitude, was a weak man, spineless. I can imagine the headmistress ringing him in indignation, defending Margaret's right to a decent education, and him backing down immediately. It made me even more furious with him than I was on my own and my mother's behalf.

It also highlighted for me the hypocrisy of my father's so-called political ideals. He often spoke of the importance of equal rights for women. We were told about the wonderful work of the suffragettes and how women must continue to fight for equal pay and recognition. But in truth our father had the most appalling attitude to women. The way in which he treated both his wives, with violence and a total disregard for their needs and their feelings, was deplorable. I recall as a child having no pressure placed on me to achieve academically whereas my brother Dan was constantly being urged to top the class. Margaret says the situation was the same for her.

Margaret also tells some humorous anecdotes at which we share a good laugh – even though, in many ways, the events
weren't very funny. It seems that our father's spending on his own clothes, on alcohol and tobacco, on gambling and other women left very little over for domestic purposes or the comforts of life. Muriel never had shoes, Margaret recalled. For years she wore the same pair of sandals, winter and summer. There was only one towel in the bathroom for the whole family to use and if you were the last in line for a shower – which Margaret often was – it was wringing wet. Every week the housekeeping money would run out by Wednesday and our father didn't get paid until Friday night. So Muriel would lug the family set of silver cutlery and two silver vases up the steep hill to Spit Junction to a pawn shop. There she would get enough money to buy food and booze and cigarettes for the rest of the week. On Saturday morning she would reclaim the silverware and they would once again have knives and forks to eat with.

When Margaret got her first holiday job, the very first thing she did was go to Nock and Kirby's to buy a set of basic cutlery so that on Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays the family didn't have to eat dinner with their fingers.

Margaret left home because conditions in our family were untenable for an intelligent and creative young woman. She waited until her eighteenth birthday because, legally, that was the youngest age at which a child could leave home then. She didn't want a fuss and she certainly didn't want the indignity of being dragged back home by the police. She spent the last few years, from sixteen to eighteen, quietly telling herself that it wouldn't be long now, that she would be free very soon. She was a calm, level-headed young woman and had obviously already developed such inner strengths and qualities of character that she was going to survive no matter what.