The Long Hot Summer by Mary Moody

Author:Mary Moody
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781741977523
Publisher: Pan Macmillan Australia

24

The days are getting hotter and we are drinking even more rosé than ever. My plans for painting the house interior are shelved because it’s just too breathless to paint. It’s really too hot to do anything. After fifteen minutes up a ladder the sweat is running from my scalp down the back of my neck and I feel dizzy and exhausted by the sheer effort of even setting up the equipment and stirring the paint. The persistent heatwave has sapped everyone of their energy and those with any sense stay inside most of the day, only venturing out when the sun drops low in the sky.

The house has become like a sauna, and it’s very difficult to sleep at night. Some nights I dampen the top sheet and lie under it in the hope that a breeze may flit through the bedroom window, which is open wide all night. Friends tell me that they have abandoned their upstairs bedrooms and have taken to sleeping in the salon or even in the courtyard. Often the only cool place in a house is the cellar, and I hear that plenty of people have dragged mattresses down into these dark rooms normally used for storing wine and cheese. Our cellar is too small and dirty to contemplate sleeping in, so we persist in sleeping in the bedroom despite the discomfort.

Various friends have swimming pools and we sometimes fall into these at dusk. If we go to the markets we only go first thing in the morning, and long hot lunches are almost totally off the agenda. We live on salads and cheese and foods that require little or no preparation.

A week after ‘Australian Story’ has been aired, I am sitting in Le Relais at lunchtime drinking a cool beer with my friend Miles, who is down with his wife Anne for the rest of the summer. An English couple sit down at the next table and start chatting. They are house-hunting and are finding the relentless heat exhausting as they are shuttled from one village to the next by the eager real estate agent. Against the front wall of the bar I notice a man sitting alone, also drinking beer. David suddenly looms into view, flushed in the face and dripping with sweat from his fast and furious power walk. He stops and joins us and we order a jug of rosé, which he proceeds to drink on an empty stomach. Not a very wise idea. As we talk, the man from across the road walks over to our table and asks if I am Mary Moody.

‘Yes, I am,’ I reply, with some curiosity.

‘I’m a journalist from the London bureau of the Sun Herald, in Sydney,’ he says. ‘I’ve been sent here to find you and to talk to the locals and establish the identity of the man from Toulouse. Do you mind if I join you? Let me buy you all a drink.’

We nearly choke on our drinks and sit wide-eyed in stunned disbelief.

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