The Long Hot Summer (15 page)

‘I'll never be able to eat cheese in Australia again,' she declares after sampling the Roquefort and Cantal. ‘It will be a total waste of time.'

Miriam and her husband Rick are foodies and both are great cooks, so she is fascinated by the range and variety of foods available, not only in the markets but also at the supermarket. We spend hours trawling the shelves and she gasps in delight at the jars of terrines and tins of foie gras and vegetables – especially the slender haricot vert (green beans) that are quite different from the French beans we grow and buy in Australia. The meat section is particularly fascinating to her. The meat is often butchered differently, with unusual cuts available and delights such as breast of duck and leg of rabbit just sitting there on the shelf. So much more exciting than a boring old lamb chop! The sausages are also very different – thick rich red Toulouse saucisse curled up in a circle, and rows and rows of duck and pork salami-like saucissons.

Miriam makes the observation, quite accurately, that there is hardly anything available apart from traditional French ingredients.
There are some pastas from Italy and a few other foreign staples such as couscous and rice, but very little that is exotic. In Australia we have become accustomed to a wide mix of southeast Asian ingredients being readily available. I point out that the French are quite chauvinistic about food, protecting their traditions by limiting the availability of ingredients from other cuisines. It's possible to get bits and pieces to make a curry or a stir fry, but there simply isn't a great diversity.

There is, however, an entire row in the supermarket devoted to wine and spirits, and the cost of the alcohol is amazingly low compared to Australia. We stack the trolley with reds from Bordeaux and Bergerac and rosé from Provence and Spain.

This is paradise for Miriam, and she's sad that Rick isn't along to share the delights. But, surprisingly, she hasn't started missing the children as yet.

‘Give me time,' she says. ‘I'm having too much fun.'

The village house is quite small, without much privacy, and even though we are going out and about a lot, we are also spending quite a bit of time at home together. In spite of our efforts to avoid confrontation, Miriam naturally picks up on the tension between us and handles it by making jokes. She must have inherited that strategy from me.

‘God you two, get a life,' she says as we snipe at each other over some trivial matter. ‘Now I remember why I left home.'

I feel mortified that we are spoiling her holiday by being so unhappy together, but privately Miriam reassures me that it's fine. She's having a great time.

We organise a birthday party for her, and luckily the weather is hot and sunny so our guests can spill out from the main room into the courtyard. Miriam enjoys the pleasure of preparing for
a party using all the local delicacies – we visit the market in Prayssac on Friday morning and buy cold meats, pâté and cheeses including Cantal, Camembert and the best quality Roquefort we can find. There's a stall that just sells olives – from tiny black Kalamata to plump green varieties that have been marinated in chilli. Smoked salmon is good here, and we also buy a large quantity of red capsicums so I can grill and skin them and soak them in good Italian olive oil. The tomatoes are at their peak and have a flavour that you simply never taste in tomatoes at home unless you grow your own. We slice them with basil and make a large green salad using all the leafy varieties that are plentiful in the market.

In the village we order a chocolate gâteau and a fruit flan from the patisserie, which is considered to be one of the best in the district despite the fact that our village is comparatively small and remote. We buy our crusty bread here, too, rather than at the markets because, once again, the quality is impossible to beat.

We invite people for midday and the house quickly fills with noise and laughter. It's a great way of celebrating her birthday – and it's not lost on me that Miriam is our first-born and very much our love child. It all seems so long ago when I look back and recall how young and carefree I was at the age of twenty-two, when she was born. Life was so uncomplicated then and I was happy, truly happy, with my love for David and my secure place in the world. How confused and contradictory my life is now by comparison.

Every day is crammed with places to visit and people to meet. We take Miriam to the thirteenth-century bastide town of Villefranche-du-Périgord to see the little room in the back of a
shop that I rented during that first summer of my escape. We walk down the ancient back streets and admire the medieval architecture that remains intact everywhere – towers and courtyards and decorative doorways with flat iron nails. Miriam loves the hotel in the square with its weathered stone archways and the covered market with its stout stone pillars, famous as the centre of the cèpe trade in the autumn. These knobbly mushrooms are highly prized and plentiful in this region and the town is overrun with eager buyers every Saturday morning. They are used fresh in omelettes and also preserved in glass jars for use in stews and casseroles all through the year. They have a distinctive flavour and texture – quite different from truffles – and I just love them, even though they can be quite expensive.

We also visit Montpazier, which is one of the most popular bastide towns because of its unspoiled central square, often used as the location for television dramas and films set in medieval times. There are excellent shops here and we buy some presents for Miriam to take home for the children.

Most days Miriam and I head for Le Relais in the square for an aperitif before lunch. We are usually joined by friends – Jock of course, but also Claude or Jan and Philippe if they happen to be passing. While we are socialising, David is generally power-walking, choosing to stride purposefully through the woods for several hours to compensate for the fact that there is no local gym where he can get his daily exercise. He refers to the walks as his ‘punishment', which indeed they must be because the weather has really started to warm up and he arrives home dripping with sweat and very flushed from the intensity of the activity. He tells me it's his thinking time, apart from anything else, and a good way of redirecting his angst about being here.
I find his attitude difficult to deal with, just as he finds my nonchalance infuriating.

It's tempting for Miriam and me to sit too long and drink yet another glass of rosé in the summer sun, but eventually we tear ourselves away and prepare lunch for the three of us. We all tend to snooze in the late afternoon, then there's usually some sort of social event in the evening – a new restaurant to try, or a dinner party with friends.

‘I don't like the lifestyle you live here in France,' David says. ‘All this non-stop eating and drinking and staying out late. I just can't keep up the pace, and you will have to understand I just don't want to be part of it all the time.'

To lighten the atmosphere, I make jokes about David being ‘boring' and a ‘wet blanket'. But I certainly don't intend staying home quietly every night. And I point out that, as Miriam is here for such a short time, we must make the most of every minute.

David's negativity saddens me, but I also understand how he must be feeling. I love this place so much and sense he is punishing me for what happened here last year by resisting my entreaties to lighten up and enjoy himself. I want him to get over it and move on. Stop dwelling in the past. Totally unfair of me in light of the secret I am keeping.

Several times we find ourselves at dinners and lunches also attended by my lover. Sitting at tables laden with wonderful food in friends' lush summer gardens. Laughing and drinking the afternoon or evening away as though nothing untoward has been going on between us. Weirdly, it doesn't make me feel even slightly uncomfortable – in fact I am always delighted to see him. I suppose I should be feeling odd with my lover and my husband sitting at the same table, talking and drinking together. But I
don't. I try to avoid direct eye contact and certainly any give-away body contact, but I still manage to find myself sitting between them on more than one occasion.

It may seem bizarre but in fact it doesn't rattle me at all. Perhaps because we were friends before any of this happened, I am capable of slipping back into the ‘just good friends' mode. Or perhaps I subconsciously enjoy the frisson of having my lover and husband at the same table. Or it could be that I have managed to package my life and my emotions into separate portions. Right now I am in a family phase, with Miriam visiting and David in residence. Only two weeks ago I was in a single woman phase, enjoying all the freedom that that entails.

Miriam laughs and says that it feels very strange to be living back under the same roof as her parents. She left home at seventeen to go to university in Canberra and hasn't really lived at home since, except for a couple of brief spells between moving houses. Without her husband and four children to look after, she has slipped back into her old role as our dependent daughter.

‘I feel like I'm reverting to my childhood' she laughs. ‘I love sleeping in a bit, and the fact that you two are doing all the washing and cooking. It's just like being a kid again.'

What I fail to realise during Miriam's visit is that David is gradually gaining an awareness of what has been going on while I was here alone – both last year and before he arrived this year. He has no firm evidence and says nothing at all to me, but his pain and anger are simmering away under the surface and this has a profound effect on the atmosphere in the house. I can't explain how it feels, but Miriam surely also senses the explosive mood. David is drinking furiously and still smoking non-stop, which is totally uncharacteristic. One night in bed we have a
whispered fight, trying not to upset Miriam, and he leaps out of bed and starts getting dressed, saying that he is leaving immediately. That he can't tolerate being here one more moment. I beg him to calm down and to stay, which eventually he does. But it's a strong indication that things are very rocky indeed.

The days fly past and suddenly we realise there's less than a week left of Miriam's holiday. We decide to spend some time in Toulouse, even though the temperature is rising to the high 30s and a heatwave has been predicted.

Toulouse is a beautiful and elegant city. The streets are wide and tree-lined and the buildings are constructed of the local pink stone, which is quite distinctive. There are classical ornamental parks and gardens, and squares lined with outdoor cafes and restaurants, and the shopping is mind-boggling. But the whole place also has a youthful vibrancy because it is very much a university town.

Miriam is immediately enchanted. After the tranquillity of our rural village, the energy of Toulouse captivates her. David does the driving and I navigate us into the city, where we find a comparatively cheap hotel in a narrow back street. The tariff includes parking. It's almost unbearably hot and we stagger to find a cafe where we can sit and recover from the drive with a cool beer. In the main square, Place Wilson, we stumble across a street parade with people dressed in the most outrageous costumes. Men dressed as women and women dressed as men. Suddenly, reading the banners, we realise it's a Gay Pride March and we find a shady cafe, sit down and watch the whole performance.

We have some memorable meals in Toulouse, which is much more cosmopolitan than the rural area where our village house
is located. We eat Spanish, Italian and Chinese cuisine, and blitz the shops, which are also of a much higher standard than those in the small towns and villages. Not that we can really afford to do a lot of shopping, as we have already far exceeded our budget and will need to live a bit more frugally once Miriam leaves for home.

‘This has been such a great experience,' says Miriam. ‘I'll never forget this holiday – it's been fantastic.'

I start to feel unhappy about Miriam leaving. Apart from missing her because we have had so much fun together, I will now have to deal with David on my own and I sense it's not going to be easy. We have another six weeks together, and while I initially hoped it would be fun, I now fear it's going to be a nightmare.

We farewell Miriam tearfully and drive back to Frayssinet in virtual silence. The three days in Toulouse were exhausting, not just because we were keeping up with Miriam's exuberance but because the temperature gauge never dropped below 40 degrees. The French heatwave of 2003 has begun.

In late June 2003 the temperatures across Europe start to climb rapidly and by mid-July they are hovering daily in the high 30s. While it's usual for most parts of France to experience high temperatures in July and August, this particular summer is much, much hotter for much, much longer than any summer on record.

In rural France the summer heat is dry, like inland Australia, and therefore more tolerable than the humid heat experienced in other regions. But this summer is not just hot, it's breathless. There are no breezes to bring relief in the still of the evening, and even during the long twilights the temperature barely drops a degree or two.

During previous summers in France I have experienced several weeks of heat followed by much cooler spells and some blessed rain. This year, hot days turn into hot weeks which turn into hot, hot months. It is relentless.

Our village house faces south and gets sun on the front wall from mid-morning right through until the evening. The dark
bitumen road abuts the house, with only a narrow concrete footpath barely 60 centimetres wide as a buffer between the house and the road. There are no patches of green lawn or shady trees to soften the impact of the sun. It just beats down on the house, punishingly, day after day. The trucks roll past belching diesel fumes that seem more caustic than usual, and tractors laden with bales of hay also rumble past our front windows on a regular basis. It's hot and noisy and dusty and quite different from the previous summers I have spent here.