The Good Boy (23 page)

To have brought about one's own unhappiness is depressing, but to have brought about that of an innocent and trusting partner as well is doubly so. I became overwhelmed with feelings of guilt, not at having ended the marriage but at having begun it. I had failed in my ambition of becoming the financial support of the family when my father had died; I had failed in my ambition of sublimating that and other worldly ambitions by becoming a Trappist monk; and I had failed in my ambition of becoming a happily married family man. I had failed to find happiness in life and was the cause of unhappiness in the lives of others. Why then continue living?

I quietly made my plans. A corner of the office car park largely hidden by shrubs seemed an ideal place to park the car late on a Saturday night, the exhaust pipe connected to the interior, the petrol tank full, the engine idling and the driver, me, asleep on the back seat under a rug. Nothing would be noticed until the car park started to fill up with workers on the Monday morning. I checked and found that the hose from the vacuum cleaner seemed ideal for its new use.

The weekend approached: time to write a farewell note. As I was about to leave the office my phone rang. It was my 82-year-old mother in Melbourne. I had been ‘keeping an eye on her' ever since moving to Canberra, phoning or writing every week and quite often managing to fit in a quick visit or even an overnight stay when my work took me to Melbourne. In the two or three months that had elapsed since I had been living alone, my mother had reversed the roles, phoning me frequently and at irregular intervals for a quick chat. When I urged her that evening not to run up her phone bill by calling me so often, she replied that it was not a waste of money as she wanted to ‘hear the sound of your voice' and she asked me when I would be down to see her next.

That evening and all the next day I tried to write my farewell note but could not complete the first sentence. Whatever I said, whatever way I looked at it, I was being selfish and cowardly. Selfish in that while ending my own misery, I would be breaking the heart of my mother and upsetting friends, family and work colleagues … and possibly even my estranged wife. Cowardly in that I was wanting to quit after a few months of loneliness while my mother had battled on for 32 years after my father's death, my father's mother had lived through 55 years of widowhood … and umpteen others with bigger burdens than mine had continued to live and had even found happiness. Strangely, as she normally spoke only of family matters, my mother had that Friday evening referred to my work and in doing so had reminded me that there was at least one area where I was being successful: I loved my work and was good at it, as a visiting vice-chancellor had just commented to her. I crumpled the draft notes, put the hose back onto the vacuum, phoned my mother and told her that I would be down in Melbourne to spend the following weekend with her … and threw myself back into my work.

My mother died four years later and after another two years I took early retirement from the Public Service and left Canberra, where my estranged wife stayed on. I moved to Bendigo, dear old Bendigo, where I lived for the following ten years.

In choosing Bendigo to begin my early retirement, I was returning to a place associated with happy memories from my youth. I walked up the hill from the cathedral to have a look at my grandparents' old home and was surprised to find that ‘Miss Donovan's house', next door to my grandparents' place, had been turned into a guesthouse, and was for sale. Rather impulsively, I checked in and after a few days as a guest decided to buy the property and to try my hand in the world of small business by running it myself.

The house had a handsome dining room and I decided that its use for a couple of hours per day to serve breakfast was a waste of a valuable resource and that an evening meal should also be available to guests. A good deal of money had to be spent on the property, installing central heating, modernising the kitchen to approved commercial standards, obtaining a BYO liquor licence so that guests could enjoy wine with their meals, adding a new wing of three en-suite bedrooms and reorganising the grounds at the back of the house into a walled garden leading to a large and secure car park for the guests. A long glass-enclosed balcony on the northern side of the house was turned into a winter garden, which proved an ideal place for early morning breakfasts, and a large room opening out to the balcony through three French windows was furnished as a very agreeable drawing room for the guests. The whole house was painted an off-white, ‘Athens Grey', and the long, cast-iron front fence was painted black, with gold leaf applied to the ornamentation at the top of each gatepost.

The end result was adjudged a great success by everyone. Marlborough House then offered comfortable accommodation in six en-suite rooms, breakfasts in the winter garden or dining room, dinner in the evening, and was available for small functions that could reasonably be held in the dining room and drawing room. Business was slow at first but gradually built up, and with the help of dedicated helpers – housekeepers, chefs, waiters, handymen – we became known for the quality of the welcome. Among ourselves, staff and I often referred to the place as ‘Fawlty Towers' (perhaps the others referred to me as Basil) and there certainly were occasions when we managed to avoid disaster by good luck rather than through good management. Like those of Fawlty Towers, the walls of Marlborough House could tell many an interesting tale.

On one occasion, for example, we had an eminent and elderly judge staying with us for several days while he was presiding on circuit at the Bendigo Courthouse. His Honour was accompanied by his Tipstaff (bodyguard/factotum), a middle-aged retired military chap, and by his Associate (junior legal assistant), a very pretty late-thirties brunette. On servicing his room on the first morning of the stay, we discovered that His Honour apparently wore long red bed-socks, which we rolled up and placed under the pillow with his folded pyjamas, and this was repeated next morning. On the third and final morning, however, the bed-socks were retrieved from between the sheets at the bottom of the Associate's bed, in her room across the hallway. Whether they had been kicked off by the Judge in the heat of an encounter or whether they had simply been loaned to the lady and not returned, we never knew.

One Saturday night when the six rooms were fully booked and the dining room busy, we had an accident where wine was spilled on a guest, the vase of flowers knocked over in the confusion, and the whole table had to be hastily re-set. Replacement tablecloths were kept in the linen cupboard which was under the staircase with access from what had once been the billiard room, but which I had converted to a large en-suite bedroom. It was not an ideal arrangement but in adapting an old house to new needs some compromises had been inevitable. We normally made sure that all the linen required for the day was taken out before guests were shown into the room but on this occasion that had not been done and we urgently needed a fresh tablecloth. Remembering that the young couple who had booked the room had mentioned booking a table for dinner at a restaurant in town, I grabbed the master-key, hurried to the room and, after a bit of difficulty with the lock, opened the door. The bed faced the door and as it swung open I saw the young couple in it, the husband sitting up and pulling the covers over his wife. The angry look on his face was directed at me, not her. Stammering my apologies I quickly retreated. I forget now how we managed to re-set the table in the dining room, but I will never forget the embarrassment of opening that bedroom door … or of serving breakfast to the couple in the dining room the next morning. By that time they were gracious in accepting my apologies and I certainly had learned the wisdom of that old rule of etiquette: ‘knock before entering'.

On another occasion we were serving dinner one Saturday night and, with both our regular waiters ‘off sick', we were relying on the help of two friends, both of whom had that particular weekend off from their regular work in restaurants in Melbourne. Our custom was to offer a small plate of
hors d'oeuvres
to diners once they had ordered and were waiting for their first course, and to offer a small plate of
petits fours
once the dessert dishes had been cleared away and while guests were waiting for their coffee. The more senior of our two ‘temps', actually the head waiter in one of Melbourne's most prestigious
silver service
restaurants at the time, stormed into the kitchen towards the end of the evening and with a sniff announced that as he placed the plate of
petits fours
on the table ‘the woman at table five asked for a pot of tea'! He had apparently replied that while Marlborough House was not a Tea House, he would see what he could do. I managed to find my grandmother's antique silver tea tray and service, which was given a quick polish and then advanced with a flourish to the lady at number five … while the rest of the diners enjoyed their freshly brewed coffee and the kitchen staff collapsed with laughter.

Another time we had been asked to cater for a luncheon party to celebrate the 88th birthday of a local matriarch, a charming and lively old soul who could recall attending luncheon and dinner parties in Marlborough House 50 or more years earlier when it was still the Crowley home and one of the social centres of Bendigo. The daughter who was organising the function came to the house to discuss the arrangement of the room, the choice and placement of the flowers and, of course, the details of the menu. When it came to deciding on the dessert I asked her what her mother's real favourite was. ‘Rice Pudding, because that was Dad's favourite,' she replied. We both thought that even though a favourite, plain old rice pudding would not be quite elegant enough for the special occasion, and then I remembered attending a banquet in France years earlier where something similar had been served – it was
Riz à l'Impératrice
, a dessert invented for and named after Empress Eugenie, wife of Napoleon III. It had been served at the banquet given when the Empress went to Egypt to open the Suez Canal in 1869 and was indeed basically a rice pudding: the rice was cooked in vanilla-flavoured milk but was then enriched with eggs and cream and kirsch and candied fruits and was decorated with red currant jelly, whipped cream and angelica. My French cookery book added, at the end of the rather complicated recipe: ‘
C'est un entremets exquis
'.
⁴⁸
My suggestion was welcomed, the special menus were written out by hand, and the luncheon party went ahead and was a great success. The old lady was delighted by it all and insisted on coming to the kitchen to thank the staff. I was foolish enough to ask her if she had enjoyed the
Riz à l'Impératrice
. ‘Oh, is that how you pronounce it?' she said. ‘It was very nice but it's really just tarted up rice pudding!' Hand-written menus in French had not fooled her.

During the first year in Bendigo my estranged wife visited me from Canberra in what was, I suppose, a tentative move towards a reconciliation. It did not, however, work out, probably because she sensed that I was putting the success of the guesthouse ahead of the success of any reconciliation. It all ended up with her angrily returning to Canberra and communicating with me no further. My life in Bendigo was a busy one, as running a guesthouse is very time-consuming if not physically demanding. I did, however, have excellent staff to help, and so was able to make fairly frequent trips to Melbourne where my ageing aunt Nell lived alone and where my ageing uncle Leo lived in a nearby retirement home. Neither had ever married, and as their other nieces and nephews were all married and occupied with their own families, I unconsciously took up the responsibility of keeping an eye on the ageing relatives. Several times they came back with me in the car to Bendigo for a short stay, both being rather moved to be living next door to their parents' old home. At one stage my 86-year-old Uncle Bert came down from Queensland, where he was living in retirement and he stayed for a couple of weeks; when I asked him if looking at the old home next door brought back memories, he rather wryly replied: ‘I can't remember my memories!'

While living in Bendigo I used my fairly frequent trips to Melbourne to enjoy a little social life myself, sometimes taking my uncle and aunt on outings, sometimes going to the theatre or concerts on my own or with friends … and sometimes seeking company in Melbourne's very lively gay scene. This all happened just before the widespread use of personal computers and the emergence of the phenomenon of computer dating and ‘cyber sex'. My adventures in Melbourne usually began with a perusal of the Personal Notices in the local gay press. The religious life had not worked out for me and by the age of 55 I had begun to have serious doubts about its very basis, i.e. about religion itself as an adequate explanation of life. Marriage had not worked out for me either, and I concluded that one of the reasons for this failure was my feeling that there was indeed an alternative lifestyle available – I began to question whether marriage and the nuclear family were necessarily the basis of society.

My wife and I had not had to stay together ‘until the children were grown up' as we had both agreed to have no children. Moreover, I knew from the past that sex with a man could be, for me, just as good as, if not better than, sex with a woman. Physically there were, of course, fewer possibilities, but emotionally there were fewer problems: a man cannot fake orgasm, so one never needs to wonder whether one's male partner is really enjoying the sex. The answer stares you in the face. So it was while in Bendigo that I finally decided to accept as a fact that I was more attracted sexually to men than to women. This did not mean that I was prepared to ‘come out' – to tell anybody, let alone everybody, at least not there and then – but it meant that I decided to accept that my future sexual and social life would be more homosexual than heterosexual. I decided that I should maintain the
status quo
in Bendigo, if only for the sake of the smooth running of the business, but that I could safely look for homosexual friends elsewhere. Ironically, it was not long after I had come to this decision that I was, on two occasions, very elegantly propositioned by attractive female guests, and it was with some difficulty that I found the strength to decline the flattering offers and the right words in which to couch my refusal kindly, politely but firmly. The guesthouse venture did prove successful, but after ten years I decided that I did not want to continue there until I died, largely because I did not want to continue indefinitely concealing my sexuality. If I were to make a new start, it would be better to do so somewhere else, somewhere where my past ‘respectability' was not established … and I should do it sooner rather than later. As a result I sold both the property and the business to a young couple and left Bendigo.