Escaping Read online

  Dedication

  On This Side

  To Mimi and Harry Taylor,

  who have done a fine job raising me as a mother.

  To Raymond W. Grose,

  who holds my hand no matter where I am in the world.

  On the Other Side

  To Norman J.Taylor,

  who turned me into Veuve Taylor.

  I love you all.

  Contents

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Part One: The Journey

  Chapter One: The Simple Sixties

  Chapter Two: The Latin Lover

  Chapter Three: Marrying Mr Right

  Chapter Four: The Long Goodbye

  Chapter Five: The Big Black Hole

  Chapter Six: Coming Up for Air

  Chapter Seven: The Pocahontas Tour

  Chapter Eight: White Christmas

  Chapter Nine: Someone Watching Over Me

  Chapter Ten: The Clean Slate

  Part Two: The Destination

  Chapter Eleven: The Perched Village of Saignon

  Chapter Twelve: Place de la Fontaine

  Chapter Thirteen: Easter at Kamila’s

  Chapter Fourteen: ‘Veuve Taylor’

  Chapter Fifteen: French Bricks and Mortar

  Chapter Sixteen: Chemin St Roch

  Chapter Seventeen: The New Business

  Chapter Eighteen: Who’s the Boss?

  Chapter Nineteen: He’s Leaving Us – Again

  Chapter Twenty: Happy Ending

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Prologue

  IT WAS MID-AUGUST 1995. The holidaymakers had long since returned to their homes. There was an autumn chill in the air. It was along this esplanade that I had learnt to ride bikes and stand upright on roller skates in my childhood, during an endless succession of hot summers; it was a place where I felt safe and secure.

  I swung my car into one of the many parking spots along the promenade and zipped up my jacket against the rising wind. If I could just let all of my pain soar off into the cheerless grey sky maybe I would be able to find a way out of the mess. If I could just let it go . . . but that would be impossible. This ache was almost physical, drawing me to its daily beck and call. Never before in my life had I experienced pain of this magnitude and now I’d feel strange if it weren’t present every day. It was more than just grief; the circumstances had made my emotions more complicated than that. The only thing keeping it from overcoming me was the thought of the children — Mimi, four years old, and Harry, just two and a half — our two little babies, very much alive. Just the thought of them made a weak smile flutter across my face.

  The park benches were empty. Only a few brave souls walked up and down the promenade, hand in hand or in comfortable solitude with their faithful four-legged companions. A bit of mid-morning exercise before the rain.

  Seeing their contentment brought the pain back even more strongly. For the first time in my life, I was completely without direction. My internal compass was spinning out of control. I needed to sit down and wait for the mounting nausea and the accompanying waves of despair to pass. Empty my mind. Breathe deeply and slowly.

  In the distance I heard a voice speaking to me: ‘Pet, are you all right? Here, dear, wipe your eyes.’

  Through my veil of tears I could just make out the image of an elderly lady sitting at the other end of the bench, her skin papery, tendrils of white hair escaping from beneath the hat she wore pulled down over her ears. In her shaking hand she held out a packet of tissues.

  ‘You know, I’ll give you some good advice for free. Men. They just aren’t worth it. We marry them and we have their children. They betray us and humiliate us. And in compensation, some of them even love us. But they dole out their love in small measures while we wait on them hand and foot. Pet, you girls of today just don’t know how lucky you are. I would do it differently if I had my chance again. Take it from me; I’ve been around the track enough times. Most of them are just not worth it and those who are — well, they’re a bit thin on the ground! Don’t go running away from your problems. Face up to things, dear. Turn your life around.’ Humming a tune immediately recognisable as ‘Pick Yourself Up’, an old Fred Astaire song, she continued: ‘I suppose you don’t know that tune. It comes from Top Hat, starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. You don’t hear tunes like that nowadays. Take it from me, pet, there’s no point crying. Go home and start all over again.’ And she shuffled off to avoid the impending rain.

  Age does not necessarily bring astuteness or wisdom. My spiritual guru was incorrect about two points:

  1. Men are definitely worth it.

  2. I had spent enough of my childhood in front of the television to know that tune came from Swing Time, not Top Hat.

  Norman had adored us every minute of every day he drew breath; from the moment he saw our two babies, he gave them his unconditional love. The same love he had given me the day we realised that we fitted together like pieces from a puzzle. My husband had lavished love on us unreservedly. And I had done the same in return. Together forever — so we thought. That dream had soured in so many ways over the last two years — but it hadn’t changed my belief in love.

  But my Park Bench Sage was right about one thing: I did need to start all over again. I didn’t want to end my days bitter and twisted about what might have been. If I could just empty my head, start eating again and stop consuming so much alcohol and medication, I might be able to find a path for us to follow.

  But how? As usual, I had no idea. The sky turned inky black and the first splotches of rain hit my face. If I could only remember where I’d left the children . . .

  PART ONE

  The Journey

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Simple Sixties

  THINGS HAVE A HABIT of changing course when you least expect it, particularly when you are not paying attention. All my life I had wanted to walk down the aisle wearing the big white veil and the drop-dead gorgeous dress, teetering on fabulous shoes. The church would be bedecked in divine floral arrangements and I’d be fully dosed with medication to eliminate any risk of a red nose, hay fever, or — horror of horrors — a violent asthma attack like those that had plagued me all my life. These plans had been meticulously considered since the age of five. I practised walking slowly around the house with my head in a white pillowcase or one of the slipcovers for the armchairs. The Perfect Bride ready for the Perfect Fairytale.

  My parents’ marriage had been quite unorthodox. My mother, Sheilagh, was from a huge Catholic Sydney family and my father, Jack, from a devout Jewish household in Glasgow. He’d left the navy to come to Australia at the age of twenty and quickly got into the rag trade. Sheilagh had worked as a librarian until Jack came into her life.

  They met on a sandy white Sydney Harbour beach. My father, dashingly handsome with his black hair and piercing blue eyes, had spied Sheilagh’s exotic beauty from afar. Many male eyes had already rested on Sheilagh in her revealing two-piece swimming costume, wildly daring for the early postwar beach scene. But Jack was more captivated by her long dark hair, loosely pinned up, and the way she peered over her horn-rimmed glasses at a book that was apparently engrossing her; it was a biography of Virginia Woolf. He couldn’t believe that it could hold her interest to such an extent. He kicked his beach ball towards her to see if he would get a reaction. As she brushed the sand from her book, the sparks ignited and the chemical reaction began. Needless to say, both families strongly disapproved of their marriage, and as a result religion was not welcome inside our door.

  Childhood for me and my sister Kate, two years older, was a time of blissful ignorance. Life seemed so much simpler back in the sixties. We knew nothing about skin
cancer, drink driving, seatbelt regulations, the hazards of smoking, or AIDS. We had no electronic games, portable telephones or personal computers. The long school holidays were filled with playing marbles, elastics, cat’s cradle, Hula Hoops and Frisbees, and drawing hopscotch squares on the path outside our leafy street in Mosman — in those days a quiet and unpretentious inner Sydney suburb. We were only a short drive from Balmoral Beach, where every Christmas we would christen our new Speedos.

  Not many winters feature in my childhood memories. Just eternal glorious summers: eating mangoes in the bathtub, being dumped on the sand at surfing beaches with the waves swirling overhead or feeling the heat rise up through our shoes from the burning pavement. The factors in our life were constant; happiness and laughter figured in most of our days.

  We were blissfully unaware that our perfect happiness was balanced on a knife-edge. Our lives could have been very different had it not been for modern medicine and my mother’s feisty spirit. Shortly after my birth, she was diagnosed with an untreatable cancer that ruled the rest of her life through illness and drugs.

  But somehow it rarely intervened in ours. Her remission held and we continued with our idyllic existence — except when her illness occasionally reared its ugly head and we had to help out with the household chores. I learnt to iron tea towels, fold underwear correctly, and most importantly, clean ovens. A golden rule learnt at my mother’s knee was ‘Nobody ever dies in a house with a clean oven’ — a mantra that has stood me in good stead ever since.

  Looking back, I realise just how much Kate and I were shielded from Sheilagh’s distress and pain during our childhood. She wanted us both to be independent, free spirited and deep thinking. She was an intellectual giant, who read books voraciously, constantly seeking knowledge from sources ranging from women’s magazines to medical journals. Her quest for learning was insatiable and immeasurable, as was her love for my father and then for her two girls.

  It was probably a great love of reading that provided the glue that kept my parents together. Jack, my father and idol, was the hero of all the girls in the street, and we nicknamed him Steve McQueen because of his rugged good looks. For someone who left school at fourteen, he was an amazingly well-read and erudite person; he’d taught himself the piano and had a commanding knowledge of music — and literature even more so. A trip to Mosman Library for a new swag of books was a normal weekly occurrence.

  Every morning as I staggered from my bedroom I would see Jack sitting with his nose in a book and our fox terrier, Timmi, at his feet. In winter I would find him wrapped in a woollen tartan dressing gown, engrossed in some story of Russian misery, battling through war, famine and snow. Even at my young age I felt that I had overtaken him in sanity. He was in the cold Arctic weather of Russia, while we were experiencing a fairly mild Sydney winter.

  On summer mornings he would sit at the dining-room table bathed in sunlight, the light cotton voile curtains admitting the heat of yet another glorious day. His nose would be in a history of the Irish Famine or in the morning paper, spread out over the table, while Timmi snoozed at his feet, exhausted from their early start. The two of them would have been up since the crack of dawn, slipping out of the house of indolent sleeping females to Balmoral Beach, and going about their morning ritual of a swim and a walk along the white sand. (Jack has managed to continue this habit winter and summer for over fifty years, changing only the name of the dog that trots along beside him.)

  Jack considered it his responsibility to guide Kate and me through the literary minefield of life, and he would often select books from his shelves for us. In an attempt to lure our little faces away from the television screen, he infested our house with books. Oblomov by Ivan Aleksandrovich Goncharov was one of my favourites, as its main character never got out of bed — something I could easily relate to. English classics and books of Roman myths would be piled up high on my bedside table. (I should have been born in the era when life revolved around drinking tea and reading in the garden, as I excelled in both of these areas.)

  I appreciate Jack’s guidance now, but back then Kate and I were more interested in marauding around the neighbourhood: exploring the immense underground water pipes that emptied directly into Sydney Harbour; scaling pine trees in our search for the elusive Black Prince cicadas. These activities were interspersed with daily training for high-wire acts (admittedly, practised on thick pipes barely off the ground), or shooting Russian spies in the house being built next door. As soon as the call came, I would be ready to take over as the next Emma Peel from The Avengers, perhaps with a back-up job as a trapeze artist just in case the spy business was slow. As my mother would say, it was important to have many strings to your bow.

  I was sure it would be possible to have an exciting career and still manage to fall in love with Mr Right, Signor Giusto, Monsieur Bonchoix or Herr Recht (who would probably be a lawyer or something similar), before moving our four children (two boys and two girls — names undecided) and two dogs (a black and a sandy Labrador — both female) into the perfect Mosman house with a white picket fence and a large silver Volvo sitting out the front.

  I had already decided that my first ten years of married life would consist of spending hours at the school canteen, helping to cover books in the library and participating in learn-to-read programs — in short, I would be the perfect school mum, the antithesis of my own mother. In summer we would go on a fortnight’s holiday to Fiji or, more likely, to the Central Coast (echoing my own childhood holidays, when Jack would bundle my sister and me, the Gibson girls, Timmi the dog and Wilhelmina the white rat into his Citroën Goddess, with Sheilagh following sedately in her own car). By the time the children reached high school I would be ready to take on a part-time job to help with the school fees. That’s when I would be able to begin my espionage or circus career. Everything was orderly and predestined. It’s when bitter reality sets in that you realise that wishes and hopes are not necessarily fulfilled.

  But at the age of twelve my life seemed on track:

  1. I could bend like a pretzel.

  2. I could stand on my hands (a bit wobbly at first).

  3. I had tremendous balance.

  4. I had a built-in clock that told me when it was lunchtime.

  5. I could blow smoke rings through each other.

  6. According to the boys at school, I was going to have great tits.

  I gloated over these physical attributes, as they made me feel better about my shortcomings in singing, drawing and other creative skills. I was pretty sure they would help me in my search for Mr Right, and in whatever career I chose to follow. Other options apart from secret agent and trapeze artist were:

  1. International gunrunner

  2. Actress (specialising in European accents)

  3. Qantas airhostess (I could also walk in a really straight line).

  Our favourite friends in the neighbourhood were the four Gibson girls, who like us were circus-performers- and gunrunners-to-be. The Gibson girls had introduced me to the film world of the Busby Berkeley Follies, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. Saturday nights were spent in front of the television watching The Golden Years of Hollywood. Those black and white images fired our fertile imaginations, giving us hours of mindless entertainment.

  If we were unsuccessful as gunrunners or spies, working in a Broadway chorus as a tap dancer was another possible option. While the Gibson girls and I waited to be discovered for international stardom, we made home movies, parading around the backyard in pinstripe suits, alluring satin dresses and black wigs, with plucked eyebrows and heavy make-up, enacting scenes in the best Hollywood tradition; at fourteen, we were already drop-dead delectable.

  But by this stage, something was throwing our plans for eternal childhood into disarray. Breasts were starting to jiggle and hair was sprouting in peculiar places. Sex, drugs and rock’n’roll were waiting in the wings and nothing was ever going to be the same again.

  It was the early seventies, and my life wa
s gently unrolling itself down the Yellow Brick Road, to the tunes of Elton John, Abba, Gary Glitter and the Bay City Rollers. In the background my mother was as sick as ever, but she never allowed her illness to enter into our selfish adolescent world, ruled by pop stars, glitter lip gloss and the best ten methods to achieve tightly waved ‘angel hair’.

  By the mid-1970s, a woman called Germaine Greer was calling all of womankind to order and preaching that men and women should be on an equal footing. Our mother started telling us how a rosy future depended on having a fabulously well-paid job, and being the boss not the secretary — and certainly not the wife. At our age, Sheilagh had been forced to stay at home and care for eight younger siblings; she felt her gifts had been wasted. She was determined that Kate and I would have all the advantages she had missed out on.

  We both attacked the same problems in different ways. Kate preferred to base her future on one of her TV idols, Gidget, a big-hearted girl who liked long surfboards. At twenty-two, she married her True Love, Mark the long-haired surfer boy (and quantum physicist!), amidst family and friends who were shaking their heads and saying that they were too young and it wouldn’t last.

  My parents gave them financial support while they both studied. Kate had her first child almost as soon as she had qualified as a nurse and learnt the difficult task of juggling motherhood with a career. Mark, who had left school at the age of fourteen, returned to complete his secondary schooling in adult education, then went on to university, where he eventually obtained a doctorate in laser physics. He was head-hunted in the eighties by the American Star Wars defence program but decided that teaching high school science in the public education system was his destiny, and, more importantly, his desire. But both Kate and Mark believed that putting down roots with a family came first.

  While Kate began her nursing studies, I tried to cram twelve years of schooling into the last months before my final exams. Having been asked to leave Queenwood, an exclusive private girls’ school, at the age of thirteen, and then asked to leave an academic public girls’ school, Cremorne Girls’ High, at the age of fifteen, I had eventually been enrolled at the local co-ed school. Mosman High School was not pleased to take on trouble, and my reputation of being unruly and disruptive in class had gone before me. The reality was that I was bored by the subjects on offer. Endless morning lessons on seismic activity in volcanoes, followed in the afternoon by ‘how to make the perfect sponge’, did little to stimulate me. At that stage I didn’t realise that help was just around the corner. Once enrolled into the senior years, where the choices seemed almost endless, I could finally pick subjects that would interest me for life. Unfortunately, by that stage I’d also discovered sex and was more distracted than ever, carrying on a secret life that I had to hide from my parents.