The Good Boy (24 page)

With the property sold and the money in the bank, I decided that that was the time to ‘come out' … not with any fanfare or public announcement but simply by no longer fudging the issue of my sexuality when it did come up. I decided to take a holiday in France and to look into the possibility of opening a guesthouse or bed-and-breakfast exclusively for gay men in Nice or, closer to home, in Noumea, thereby combining my interests in things French and in the gay scene. After visiting both cities, and having eliminated Nice because of the higher costs involved there and because of its distance from home, I was in the process of selecting a property to lease in Noumea when my Uncle Bert, then aged 88, phoned me.

He and his partner, though together for nearly 45 years, had never married. Theirs had always been a platonic relationship, a sort of ‘relationship of convenience' where each party enjoyed the companionship of the other and the ability to accept social invitations as a couple without having to share their lives sexually. My ‘aunt' had been an only daughter and had chosen to look after an ailing mother and then an elderly father rather than to look for marriage. She had, she told me late in life, found that Bert's undemanding friendship suited her well. She concentrated her energies on her parents while they lived and then on her career, in which she rose to the top. She took early retirement to move from Melbourne to Queensland and to move in with my uncle, retaining separate rooms until death eventually parted them. (My uncle was, I am convinced, homosexually inclined but apart from some seemingly disturbing adventures during the War, he lived a quite celibate life … mentioning to me not long before he died, at the age of 90, that he ‘used to wank a lot' but ‘didn't need to now'.) Both my uncle and aunt welcomed the appearance of normality and respectability that this strange relationship afforded them.

They were living in retirement on the Queensland coast when my uncle phoned me; both had by then developed serious health problems. Bert asked me if I would consider staying with them for a month or so and helping them when my aunt came back from a current bout of hospitalisation in Brisbane. I was the only nephew they had who did not have family obligations, Bert had been very good to me when I had been a difficult teenager, my mother would have liked the idea, or so I felt, and I therefore readily agreed.

After a few weeks with them and a couple of stormy sessions with my aunt (a retired hospital matron), who wanted to run the house from her convalescent bed or armchair, I decided that I should move out but stay close by, so that I could continue to help but without clashes in the kitchen. I rented a pleasant apartment a few kilometres away and called in each day to be of help.

After a few weeks of this ‘shuttle diplomacy', I hit upon the idea of changing the location of my projected gay B&B from Noumea to Noosa, which was only a 30-minute drive away, so that I would be able to get on with my own life and my idea of running a gay B&B, and at the same time be on hand to help my uncle and aunt. With a bit of searching I found and purchased a property with potential a few hundred metres from the beach, and then recruited a gay friend from Melbourne (who was a male nurse and recovering from a broken gay relationship) to come and help me, on a part-time basis, while working at the local hospital. An architect and a builder were duly engaged to make the necessary modifications, and after about six months of renovations we were able to open the place for business.

One day while the alterations were still under way, my friend and I had been sitting on the nearby beach when we noticed two large, dark birds patrolling above us along the beach, no doubt looking for their lunch. We decided (incorrectly, as it turned out) that they were falcons, and were a good omen, so we named the guesthouse ‘Falcons'. Business was slow at first but with carefully placed advertising it built up fairly quickly. By the end of the first year nearly half of the customers came from interstate and overseas. The name helped, as many customers thought that we were some sort of down-under branch of the famous Falcons porn studios in California!

No sooner had we got the business running smoothly, however, after eighteen months or so of hard work, than my friend and business partner decided to leave to pursue a new development in his love-life. Fortunately, I had told my uncle and aunt about my homosexuality (my aunt's response had been, ‘But we've always known that, dear') and also that the guesthouse was aimed at the gay market, because twelve months later it was my own love-life that interfered with the running of the business. I had been lucky enough to find a replacement business partner locally, and with his help the venture went from strength to strength. Suddenly, however, the thunderbolt struck and I met ‘Mr Right', a handsome chap many years my junior attracted by, rather than deterred by, grey hair. Unfortunately, he lived and worked in Brisbane, an hour and a half away by car.

After about a year of the two of us travelling to and fro, I decided that at that stage of my life the relationship was more important than the business and that it was therefore time to close the B&B, to sell the property, to move to Brisbane and to be with him once my family obligations had been completed. My uncle died within two months of my taking this decision and my aunt died twelve months later, just two weeks before the actual sale and closure of the business. I moved to the city a short time later.

The live-in relationship began with high hopes and with some reservations on each side. Neither of us had ever lived with a man before and both of us had left unhappy relationships with women. Moreover, Mr Right had young children to whom he was devoted. We both had a lot of emotional baggage; during the first twelve months together, many arguments, two trial separations and several tearful reconciliations occurred. But perhaps because each of us had tried the alternative of living with a woman and had found it unsatisfactory personally, we persevered, survived, and in due course celebrated our sixth anniversary of being together by travelling to Europe and taking a wonderful cruise of the Mediterranean and the Greek Islands.

Why did I persevere in this relationship when I had not been prepared to persevere in either the religious life or my marriage? After giving the religious life my best shot I had realised that I could not continue in it until death. I was too strong-willed, too opinionated and too given to questioning everything to be able to live a life of total obedience to another, whether Novice Master, Abbot or even Pope. If I was going to make a fresh start elsewhere, the sooner I did so the better the chance that I would have of succeeding. Similarly, after giving marriage my best shot I had come to the same conclusion – that my wife and I had very different ideas as to what marriage really meant and that as I could not conform to my wife's expectations of marriage, there was no prospect of us ever being happy and united ‘as one'; there were no children to jointly raise and there was no strong sexual bond between us. The sooner we each made a fresh start the greater would be the chances that the fresh starts would succeed for each of us. Moreover, by the time I had accepted my own homosexuality, had ‘come out' and had met my new partner, I was much older and, hopefully, wiser; I made this third commitment with a better understanding of what I was undertaking.

The new relationship, in which I was almost twice my part-ner's age, gave me the opportunity to help a younger man both with his own life and with the children's lives he had created and which he struggled to support. Moreover, my expectations were more modest, more realistic, less idealistic, than they had been when I had joined the monastery or entered the married state. We had both put our cards on the table and, while refraining from any formal or public promises to love and to cherish one another until death did us part, we did choose to give living together a good try. We enjoyed one another's company and discovered we could have amazing sex together … a good basis for moving in together (as well as reducing the expenses of two households and avoiding incessant travel from one home to the other). We had both come to the conclusion that sex in itself was healthy, good rather than bad. We had both come to the conclusion that the notion of ‘sin', i.e. the breaking of ‘divine laws', was a man-made concept, one that often did more harm than good. We both understood that, as a man's actions often affect others as well as himself, all actions should be evaluated in terms of the good or harm they produce rather than in terms of their conforming to some supposedly God-given code of conduct. We both understood that our relationship could only be good while it did not adversely affect others. We therefore found a house which had a self-contained flat where I could be based, leaving the main house for my partner and his children on their ‘shared custody' visits. It was a somewhat delicate arrangement but we made it work … and his relationship with his children and their mother entered a new, peaceful and happy stage.

Being the senior partner in our relationship, I soon found that my sex urge, though just as strong as that of my partner, was beginning to pulse less frequently than did his. After the first year of living together and the excitement of sex more or less at will, once or twice a week came to be enough for me while my partner still thought of sex during the day, every day, and looked for an outlet most nights. The solution I suggested was for him to get a little ‘on the side', to enjoy casual sex when the opportunities arose … and he being of the tall, dark and handsome type, plenty of opportunities did arise. We agreed then that ours would be an ‘open' relationship and that diversions outside the relationship by either party would be okay and probably were even likely to strengthen the bond between us by underlining the trust between us. The ‘unwritten rule' was to keep the extramarital sex casual, i.e. not to fall in love with the casual partners. This solution worked well until half-way through our seventh year when (reminding me of an amusing Marilyn Monroe film from the distant past entitled ‘The Seven Year Itch') my partner found that what had indeed begun as a cyber-sex diversion and a letting-off of steam was developing into a serious interest. It had been agreed that we would not discuss these ‘off-campus' adventures with one another, but once the casual contact became more regular, and then more frequent, than our own interaction he decided to tell me, saying that the adventure had developed into a second relationship. He had not so much fallen out of love with me, he said, as he had fallen in love with someone else as well … and he asked me if I would be prepared to share him with his new love-interest, a chap nearer to my own age than to his.

My initial reaction was to be stunned by the news, shocked at the idea of sharing him and angered at the apparently imminent loss. Fortunately, however, I remembered that I had in the past done something very similar (in breaking up my marriage) and had deeply wounded a trusting partner. Then I had totally abandoned the relationship rather than simply proposing an adjustment to it. With that in mind, I managed to control my temper and not to launch into bitter recriminations: after all, we had sworn no oaths of eternal fidelity and were both free men, at liberty to come and go as we pleased. I suppose my pride was wounded and no doubt I did not like facing the reality that I was no longer interesting enough to keep my partner happy.

My first action was then to retreat from the commitment, to put some distance between us, while I worked out what to do. But
Deo Gratias
, as my aunt the nun would have said, I was able to be pragmatic … perhaps the Fiennes genes came to the fore. I remembered that I had been aware of my shortcomings from the beginning of the relationship and that it had been I myself who had actually urged my partner to play around. That he had fallen for someone else was probably less his fault than my own. I had taken the risk that this would happen. Was I so greedy and so insecure as to feel threatened by the newcomer? Well yes, at first, that is how I felt but eventually I got my mind back into gear and decided to be ruled by my brains rather than by my emotions. My partner was really proposing a sort of
ménage à trois,
and such arrangements could, I believed, work. This would be one in which the third member lived in a different city rather than in the shared home, and as there were no plans for him to move in other than for holidays, it would barely amount to a real
ménage à trois
. His visits would be synchronised with my own absences (travel remained my great passion) and I would have the house to myself and available for my own visitors whenever my partner went a-wooing. This was an arrangement that I decided I could accept: my glass would in fact be not half-empty but three-quarters full! So with a bit of compromising all around we reached a
modus vivendi
which was pretty satisfactory and which continues in fact to bring more than a modicum of happiness to all concerned.

The way ahead for us does not look easy, but is life ever? While I ‘came out' to my family and work colleagues some years ago now, my partner has not yet done so, and is still looking for the right way of handling the problem. The prime consideration is the continuing happiness of his children, and then comes the hope of retaining for him their affection when they learn that Dad is not the same as the majority of other dads as far as sexuality is concerned. As for me, I have by now resolved the two problems that beset me in my teenage years … money and sex. A working life during a period of low unemployment took care of the first issue and the eventual acceptance of my homosexuality solved the second. But have I found the answers to the fundamental questions plaguing me and everyone else throughout life … who am I, what am I doing here, what lies ahead?

My early belief in a heavenly father and in a loving god was, at first, the result of well-intended education or, more precisely, brainwashing by the nuns and brothers at school. As I grew older, it was wishful thinking rather than intellectual conviction. It took me a long time, virtually a lifetime, to realise that to ask the question ‘Who made the world' is to beg the question … two questions, in fact. It assumes that the world was made, i.e. had a beginning, and it assumes that somebody/something else made the world.