The Long Hot Summer Read Online Free Page B

handling difficult situations into adulthood and they have certainly come in very handy during my complex life. I juggled a demanding career while rearing four children and managed that most delicate of tightrope acts, negotiating good relations in an extended family that included my career-driven husband and my hard-drinking and frequently difficult mother.
    Now, if it’s possible, I have created an even more complicated and anxiety-ridden existence for myself at an age when my life should, by rights, be starting to become more relaxed and easier to manage. I have split myself in half. I am trying to lead a double life. When I am in France I am one woman: independent, free-spirited, impulsive, self-indulgent, outspoken, wilful, at timeswild and irresponsible. Reckless. I love this new person because in many ways she is the real me who has been trying to get out for years. Aspects of this hidden me have always been obvious to my close friends and family, but they have been outweighed by the other half of me, the responsible and hard-working one. The wife and mother, the daughter and the grandmother. The backbone of the family. The matriarch.
    Now I am endeavouring to achieve what I fear is impossible. I am trying to hang on to my husband and our family life while still relishing the freedom I experience when living in France. I don’t wish to exclude David from being part of both my worlds, but I do want to have a little time in France on my own to write, to lead my walking tours and to be enveloped by the glorious sensation of being ‘me’ which I have only ever experienced when I am in the village on my own. When I am in France, Australia seems like a dream. I miss my children and even more so my grandchildren, but I know that they are getting on extremely well without me. I also know that I will return to them soon – I will always return to my home and my family, and this makes the separations much easier to bear.
    As for David, I have grown accustomed over many years to living apart from him for long periods and I have always believed it to be quite a healthy thing for our relationship. Now that he is working from home at the farm, I find that being able to escape for a while to France is maintaining that balance in our lives. We can go our separate ways and meet up again, whether in France or back at the farm. It seems like the perfect arrangement.
    My friends claim jealously that I have achieved ‘the perfect life’. A house in France, time alone, a place in the Australian countryside, a warm and loving family and a devoted husband.But I know this is far, far from the truth. I am struggling to maintain the facade of this dream and I know that it must eventually collapse around me because it is nothing more than a facade. A front. The truth is much less palatable.

5
    I have never been a nervous woman. In all my years of travel I have only ever taken the simplest security precautions with my travel documents, money and passport. I have wandered on my own through the back streets of New York, down laneways in New Delhi, and I even breached security regulations to explore Soweto when working on the feature film
Mapantsula
with David in the troubled city of Johannesburg in the late 1980s. I have never experienced a house robbery, car theft or bag-snatching, except for an odd incident when I was pregnant with our first child and living in Sydney. Two strange men wandered in through the front door of our semidetached cottage in Crows Nest. Our family dog Wombat puffed himself up to double his usual border collie size and chased the strangers out the front gate. I easily dismissed that incident as a one-off and it didn’t motivate me to remember to lock the car when I went shopping or the back door when I went to bed, even when David was away filming. It’s a rather cavalier attitude to security which some people may regard as naïve or even reckless.
    My mother Muriel, on the other hand,