“Didn’t I tell you
What I believe
Did somebody say that
A love like that won’t last
Didn’t I give you
All that I’ve got to give baby.”
Sade No Ordinary Love.
After my ‘treatment’ in the mountains, I return for one final week in the hut. Cure thermale is what the French government generously treat their elderly to once a year. A treatment of thermal baths and daily walks under the cool of a forest canopy; and a restricted but nutritional buffet. Thank Christ I’m not there yet, I’d have to smuggle in the scotch, as old Madame Gardon did… whenever I cleaned for her, I found cognac stashed in the corners of every room.
I choose to leave Wonderland on dusk, stretching the return drive to five hours, wanting it to never end. I hug the old tar, the minor roads, and they snail me up and down, sidling la rive of a turquoise lake big as a sea, now ink-black under the night sky. Farther along, approaching the hamlet of Le Vernet, I slow to second gear to silence the engine, my thoughts silenced by the giant massifs, custodians of one hundred and forty-nine passengers.
Emerging into the broad river valley, I switch the radio channel from France Inter, too hip with an emission on the London psychedelic scene, to the intimacy of France Culture. Favouring going slow, I glide between the narrow-gutted villages of Haute-Provence and a replayed interview with Jacques Tati makes me laugh and cry and feel something else overwhelming: a wave of sobriety and sadness. And enchantment. Enchantment for my foreign home; for the whirl of unknown words, the sensation of being lost each day, not just in the mystery-mountains, but also in the most familiar of places. The village boulangerie or pharmacie for example, where an unexpected question will suddenly flounder me. For so long I confused this floundering with being lost, but now I realise it has been a gift to feel lost, to forage in this undergrowth of unknown words, endlessly roaming for clues. The irony is that as soon as I exit my solitary roam, I will regret the ordinariness of knowing all the words. Being held captive by doubt for six years is, in fact more rewarding.
My ricocheting between Australia and France retracts, landing me abruptly back home: the knot looks different from the inside. The mystery of a ‘homeland’ deepens. Now I have nostalgia for the land of France, which is another kind of homesickness. A mal de pays for a budding green; fungal smells that I cannot find here, a certain tone of speech that is more like song, these nuances, which secrete themselves in accidental meaning, is the essence I feared losing. Along with the voices of France Inter. This is a new sadness.
But I’ve escaped the particular madness of homesickness, which I reflect was of course a madness of choice: I chose to follow my husband to another country, chose to uproot myself. I have no concept of the horror of being stolen, or chased by war out of my homeland. Therefore I wonder if my descent into dislocation was disproportionately dark. Lured by Pascal. And now, the fusty room Pascal inhabited is instead replete with the life of the living. Rather than the tinnitus of his presence, I hear a gentle percussion like the wafting of my neighbour’s wind chimes outside our Melbourne terrace. The simple joy I feel at walking the seven minutes past trams and pubs and op shops and sourdough bakeries to my daughter’s house, a happy place where I inhale the baby scalp of my new grandson; this is life itself.
Of Loup, I am less certain. For he is now living the drama of proving himself in a foreign land. Of course he had already done that in his audacious dare to dissect Australia from south to north on roller-blades. But such heroism, even if for the audience of himself alone, is irreconcilable with the drabness of daily life. We are tested. That brave couple I imagined us to be, whose more than ordinary love could withstand six or seven months apart over a period of nine years and the merest of contact, (Loup did not believe in Skype, or seeing each other on a screen); that couple it turns out, are running out of time.
Strangely hotter than summer. I am driving down from those blue-violet hills where Pascal Loup and I first trespassed, nine Christmases ago. Their rise and fall not unlike the Provence hills, my distant twilight companions. Now, winding down through a forest of Mountain Ash, I am dizzy from looking up. I can barely see the sky between. Up close, these hills are alive in a different way from Les Alpilles. Here, is a rainforest of ferns taller than trees with chameleon Lyrebirds hiding in the dense understory; there, was an arid rocky spine where nothing could hide and all things were illuminated. Reluctant, the car and I leave the canopy, landing in a flat bitumen-bound city where rage sizzles along the road. This Monday, any excuse will do. Déjà vu strikes, and for a panicking moment, I am back on the Autoroute in France, incapable of matching the mad race. But I am fuelled by duty and desire. As I now have four grandsons. The first, Oliver, who was in my heart at the conception of this writing, and whose absence broke me as I ricocheted between two worlds, is now visiting from across another vast space between our Australian cities.
My pace quickens with my need to hold babies Theo and Jacob and read stories to cousins Flynn and Ollie. It may be a trope, but there is no greater joy than the wet mouths of your grandchildren on your parched face. No greater gift than their perfect hands seeking out your own flawed. My second chance to be a better mother. My old friend Zena and my mother judged it right: I did near fuck it up the first time. As I walk the leafy glittering streets of Melbourne’s inner north, pushing Flynn and Ollie along in a double pram, I re-discover parks and playgrounds and bike paths and revel in the enduring ‘Monkey Grip’ sensation of my hometown. The intoxicating blend of old hippies, new hipsters and their offspring; of elderly Italians growing Roma tomatoes on their nature strip, of the charming mix of Edwardian and Victorian row houses, some quirky with the random collections of student households, of tattooed girls on bikes with flower pots in the front pannier, of the smell of good coffee served by bearded baristas, and what feels like laid-back acceptance, everywhere. A kind of suspension of judgement that I rarely felt in the cities of France, although Marseille always seemed a little different. There, it seemed possible to avoid the expectations of being à la mode.
My grandsons and I find ourselves passing a bar where I would frequently meet my inebriated boyfriend. Seeing my sixty year old face reflected in the glass, pushing the innocents in their stroller, I am shocked to see I am the same woman who had sex in that bar.
‘G-g, it’s like the outback!’
Exclaims Ollie as we wheel from Park Street alongside Merri creek. The bushy trails are a crackled lemon-scented summer-brown; that unique perfume which protects us from our city. And then in the opposite direction, we roll along the bike path toward Royal Park, an elevated oval of tinder dry grass, of ghost gums and gallahs nesting in fallen logs and ants foraging under creamy paper-bark; the soaring glass towers of commerce so close and yet so far. We are on aboriginal land; strolling their sacred skin. Ollie and Flynn are surprised to see a couple of homeless men, encamped under bowering silver branches. But that is the best place to make a home, I tell them.
‘You are a wonderful mother,’ I say to my other visiting daughter later that evening, as I pick up random pieces of Lego and squashed spaghetti, in an attempt to diffuse an old argument, which taunts us. The part of my ego still afloat presumes this naturally implies that in part, I was a good mother to her.
And what of Loup? He who sails through life, untethered; un-mothered, un-fathered, without having fathered a child himself? He is free from all judgement. Free of ugly comparisons with his genetic determinants. He is all of his own nature, no nurture. Or so he believes. And I have placed Loup high on the pedestal I made for him. At my lowest point, he saved me from further stupidity with men and years later, when I sat alone in my car on a dismal rainy afternoon, overlooking the ships in the harbour, working far from home, I struggled to compose a Birthday letter for the Frenchman I had met, loved and lost, and carefully bubble-wrapped two small Aboriginal paintings of a yabby and a goanna.
Speak to him, I intoned.
I counted the days… an express-post delivery and return…. at the best, nine or ten days. On the eighth night setting off for work, I drove the four kilometres along my limestone track before the tar. A storm was brewing, and the Cape, sea and sky were a stew of steel. I rounded the corner where half a dozen DIY letterboxes sat precariously on posts, their metallic numbers and decorative touches dislodged by the wind. If I stopped I would be late. I hesitated then the car lurched and stalled, the wind almost ripping the door off its hinges. My letterbox was a red enamel retro-rubbish bin, with a slit cut into its side. I had wired the lid onto one handle, so that it could be easily levered open. Salt air had rusted every edge. But it was still the cutest box. Once, I lifted the lid and a huge huntsman dropped down onto the mail. Please God, no huntsman tonight. Please God, let it be Loup.
And it was. His childlike printed hand, the familiar French stamps of our long ago correspondence. I was late for work, but I did not care. My world was now transformed. Six months later at Loup’s invitation, I was sitting on the TGV from Paris to Marseille. I had landed from Melbourne without so much as a follow-up phone-call. Not even a text to confirm that the man I had not seen in nine years would indeed be at the Gare Saint Charles waiting for me. I just had to have faith. And there he was, older and more tired than I remember, not from naturally ageing, but from the kind of fatigue you get from relentless work; from mental exhaustion. But when, like two nervous teenagers he drove me back to his blue-door stable and shyly we made love, the boy I remember reappeared.
My daughter observes plaintively that I don’t have a home. She has a point. I do have a tiny house, but someone else lives there. Someone else wakes up to the sun bucking on the white of the waves as they gallop the sweep of the Bay. Someone else falls asleep up in the attic as it creaks like a timber Galleon, listening to the rain on the tin roof, just inches from their head. However, I had learnt in France that my home was born of the chemins upon which I walked. I re-learn here in my country that home is a temporal thing. And that ‘my country’ has never been mine: that as the old Aunties say, we belong to the land, it does not belong to us.
And what of Pascal? I imagine my Father and he in silent collusion somewhere; a sacred, scorching, ordinary place, where in times of wretched self-doubt I can retreat. Too late, I realize that the hut in France was one such place. And that all the plans we attempt but fail to make since, all the struggles Loup faces in this new land, are in need of that familiar entrapment, that modest pared-back comfort.
For now that Loup and I are here, finally, we are hounded by a lack of forgiveness and from the debt that sucks him dry. We dream desperate dreams to build our own little hut, far from anywhere, upon a limestone cliff, battered by winds from Antarctica, isolated in a field of tall grass and twisted trees beside a broken shore, where kangaroos throng and snakes slither and birds sing, all night long, as they did in France.
But in fact what happens is far less poetic. History repeats its pattern: Loup packs his things and walks out. Just like his father had, thirty-five years ago. Gone, erasing all that faith bestowed upon him, the pedestal in ruins. The déception we risked, a foregone conclusion.