The Good Boy Page 17
The Secondary Modern School was, of course, co-ed and the staff comprised a pretty even mix of men and women. With the issue of ‘What lifestyle are you going to choose?’ reverberating in my head, I even found time, and courage, to court the Senior French Mistress, the pretty young girl from Galway who had been on the interviewing panel when I secured the job. This courtship soon saw us going out together almost every night for six months, at her behest nearly always to a pub and nearly always with a group of teacher colleagues. This was a totally new scene to me and I hated the pubs and the endless, mindless drinking, but I was dazzled by my Irish colleen. She was the queen of that little group and indeed of the staffroom, and I could hardly believe that she favoured me, the ‘new chum’, above all others.
We progressed from holding hands to a very decorous goodnight kiss, and I was eventually invited home to be checked out by her parents. I seemed to pass muster and all went well until the conversation drifted around to my Irish forebears. I rattled off the family names of my seven Irish great-grandparents, ending with ‘Wade’, the maiden name of my great-grandmother born in Tipperary. At that the colleen’s mother raised her eyes heavenwards and said: ‘Lord save us, the tinkers!’ Somebody diplomatically changed the subject and I later learned that Wade45 was the name used by one of Ireland’s more numerous and troublesome tribes of tinkers (or gypsies or travelling people or Romany as they are known in other countries). The family must have wondered for a while whether my Wade genes were a desirable match for those of their only daughter.
Shortly thereafter the school year ended. I hired a car, a royal blue Mini Minor, and we set off together for a couple of weeks touring in Devon, Cornwall and Somerset, the birthplace of my Hockey forebears.46 I then had to leave Birmingham for France in pursuit of a teaching post for the new school year and decided not to leave before proposing marriage. Being given the somewhat enigmatic answer of ‘Wait and see’, I bought an engagement ring, an Australian opal set in diamonds, which was accepted with another slightly disconcerting remark: ‘Well, we’re not really engaged but if we do get engaged this will be the engagement ring.’ My colleen then accompanied me to Paris for a further two weeks’ holidaying together (separate hotel rooms, of course) and as two Francophiles we had a great time sightseeing and enjoying boulevard life. Then it was time for her to return to Birmingham for the coming school year and for me to travel south to Lyon for a job interview. I did secure a teaching position in that city, in a large Catholic boys’ secondary school, to be taken up two weeks after the interview.
Having both a little money and some time to spare I decided to head for the Côte d’Azur and some sunshine before being obliged to face a second European winter. Not at all sure whether I was really ‘engaged’ and, as a result, set firmly on a heterosexual path, ever ambivalent, I booked in for a few days in a small ‘gay-friendly’ hotel near Nice, overlooking the sea and offering modestly priced pension complète. On my first evening there I was asked to share a table for the evening meal with two 40-something German guys and soon found the conversation being steered from Australia and its beaches to Nice and its surrounds, to swimming, sunbaking, and sex at sea. I was in fact being sounded out, and by the end of the meal had been invited to spend the following day with them on their yacht ‘where no clothes are needed and where we could swim and sunbake and really relax.’ I was very tempted, but in the morning I politely declined: I did want the sexual adventure but was nervous about being totally dependent on them out at sea (they were both big, powerful guys and I was not a strong swimmer) … and like many of the Frenchmen around me, I had not quite forgiven les Boches for starting the two world wars.
I was more trusting the next night when, after dinner, I went walking alone in the Jardin Albert I between the Place Massena and the Promenade des Anglais. There, I had heard, a young gay man would not long be left alone … and so it proved to be. I had no sooner sat down on a bench under the palm-trees than I was joined by a strikingly handsome Frenchman, dressed immaculately in a white linen suit, his greying dark hair perfectly groomed, a cigarette holder gracefully waving towards the seat with a ‘Vous permettez?’47 I was flattered that such a suave and elegant chap would be interested in me and was instantly hooked and prepared to follow him out to sea, up into the mountains, wherever he wanted. In fact, however, he just wanted to chat. He had been out for his postprandial stroll, had noticed me ‘alone and a little lost’ and had thought to talk. He was, he said, gay and had immediately picked me as being gay (lesson number one). He was, however, married and had two young children and was not in a position to play, much as he would like to (lesson number two).
I briefly told him my own story and added that I was thinking of getting married within a few months. He said that he had thought, and hoped, that his homosexual yearnings would disappear once he had married … but they had not. He said he loved his wife and his children but still at times felt the need to share his life physically and emotionally with men, with his own kind. He talked a little about the difficulty of leading any sort of double life, of the dangers such a life brought to the man and to his wife and family (lesson number three). He said that he did manage to confine himself to talking with men who caught his eye (as he was doing with me) but that if he could put the clock back he would certainly not get married. ‘Il faut avoir le courage de rester seul,’ he said. ‘We need to have the guts to remain alone’ (lesson number four).
How hard it is in life to distinguish good advice from bad. If only I had listened to the charming chap in Nice rather than to the psychiatrist in Melbourne … If only I had been able to distinguish between advice based on personal experience and advice based on professional theory.
My Irish colleen, my sort-of fiancée, resumed teaching in England when the new term began there and I spent my first term in France corresponding with and telephoning her. Despite my adventures on the Côte d’Azur and the advice I had received in Nice, I remained convinced that marriage was the right way to go and that she was the right girl for me. In retrospect I now see that my proposal of marriage was really more cerebral than emotional, and was based more on reasoning than on feeling; a competent marriage counsellor might well have foreseen trouble ahead in a union that, without my realising it then, was based on the mind rather than on the heart. I even suspect that this motivation may have applied on both sides of the equation and that in seriously considering me, my Irish colleen was responding to social and family pressure to ‘settle down and get married’ rather than to having ‘fallen in love’ with me. At all events, by the middle of the term she agreed that we should marry and proposed a date during the Christmas break. I flew to England for the wedding and we flew to Paris on the afternoon of our wedding day to spend our first night together in an elegant hotel in Paris near the Opéra, arriving just on midnight.
All seemed to go well enough despite our tiredness, our shyness and our inhibitions. (Yes, I too was inhibited. The uninhibited behaviour I had earlier shown had always been in the company of men. I still mentally put all women on a pedestal and saw them through the prism of my veneration of the Blessed Virgin Mary and of my love and respect for my mother.) I had heard or more likely read somewhere that a caring husband would always try to synchronise his ardour with his wife’s arousal, would postpone his ejaculation as long as possible and would concentrate on bringing his wife to orgasm and then on slowly winding down together. I did try to do this from the outset but when I eventually climaxed I was aware that my wife had not. I still remember her words: ‘Is that all it is?’ and my slightly defensive reply: ‘Well, I think so.’ Though I had previously had two experiences of heterosexual sex, neither could have been described as ‘lovemaking’, and our wedding night encounter really was a case of the almost blind leading the quite blind. Perhaps if either or both of us had had some instruction, we would have done better; as it was we were both a little disappointed.
We made our way next day to our first home, a small but pleasant flat i
n the former servants’ quarters of a riverside mansion on the outskirts of Lyon, and I taught in that city for the following two years. We were both teachers of French and both loved the country and its culture so we both enjoyed the challenge and the excitement of each new day of living à la française. These exciting experiences may, however, have obscured from us both the fact that we were not progressing sexually. Oh yes, we could have sex whenever we wanted to but our lovemaking continued as it had begun, with me trying unsuccessfully to bring my wife to orgasm and eventually climaxing alone.
My wife, like the Principessa in Lampedusa’s marvellous Sicilian novel The Leopard, never let her husband see her navel, let alone her breasts or any more intimate part of her body. I thought it would be disrespectful to insist and gradually formed the view that I was being allowed sex because that was what a wife had to do to keep her man in check. My wife had grown up in the west of Ireland where certain puritanical and Victorian attitudes imported and disseminated by the English in the nineteenth century still held sway long after they had faded in twentieth-century England. She had attended primary schools controlled by the local priests regardless of who staffed them, secondary schools run by nuns and a university college where conforming to the behavioural standards set by the often quite reactionary Irish bishops was required. I gradually realised that my wife’s education in sexual matters had been even more deficient than my own. In our six months of intensive courting in Birmingham, we had never really talked seriously about sex or marriage, had never gone beyond the chit-chat and small talk of English pubs. It was a year or so into marriage before I realised that we may have had quite different goals in mind. I had what may have been a rather idealistic view of marriage, probably basing it on the only marriage with which I was in any way familiar, that of my parents, and saw marriage as a union of equals, of two people with equal rights and similar goals. I thought that the very considerable pleasures of sex supposedly available in marriage would compensate each partner for any sacrifices of a personal nature and loss of privacy that the marriage entailed.
I slowly came to the conclusion that my wife had a quite different idea of the ‘deal’ we had struck and I thought back to the marriages with which she had been more or less familiar in Ireland. Her father, a policeman and a rather witty old charmer, had been a bit too fond of the drink, and the household was really run by his long-suffering wife, a lovely woman who was at times and to my initial puzzlement referred to as ‘sainted’ by other members of the family – her sisters, nieces and nephews. My mother-in-law’s two sisters, one married and one widowed when I met them, ran somewhat similar households, where the menfolk earned the money but the wives controlled it, making all the major decisions of the family and handing over just enough ‘pocket money’ for drinks at the pub. My father-in-law had a brother and a sister, both married, who farmed in the remote west of Ireland. We visited them there, one couple living in a picturesque thatched cottage ‘on the back of the mountain’ and I saw that there, too, the womenfolk ran the place. The men were almost treated like naughty boys who could not help themselves with their terrible interests in drink and sex and had to be looked after and guided by the womenfolk. One of my new wife’s favourite little games, of chasing me from bathroom to bedroom after I had showered and was still naked, where she would pretend to grab my balls and lead me around the room crying ‘Who’s the boss?’, began to take on a more than playful significance. She really wanted to be the boss: I wanted there to be no boss, just two equal partners.
Towards the end of my second year of teaching in Lyon I was contacted by the headmaster of the college in Melbourne where I had taught at the junior secondary level and to my surprise was invited to return and to take up the position of senior French master. My wife and I discussed the offer, which seemed likely to be in the long term financially much more advantageous than my employment in Lyon, and we agreed to go.
I resigned my position in Lyon and we sailed for Australia from Marseilles in the Messageries Maritimes liner Caledonien. The seven-week voyage out via Algiers, Madeira, the French and Dutch West Indies, the Panama Canal, the Marquesas, Tahiti, the New Hebrides and New Caledonia was something of a honeymoon for us and I think gave us our happiest times together. Once we arrived in Australia, where my wife was received like a princess by my family, we both immediately took up full-time teaching, my wife in an inner Melbourne High School with a large enrolment of non-English-speaking migrant children and I in the college where I had started my teaching career ten years earlier. The High School turned out to be as big a challenge for my wife as the Secondary Modern School had been for me in Birmingham and she was unhappy there. Fortunately, after just one term she was able to move to the junior secondary section of one of Melbourne’s most prestigious convent schools and quickly adjusted to that vastly pleasanter environment, and so by then we seemed to be settling into what looked like stable and satisfying teaching careers.
We were, however, still not happy as a couple. My wife was desperately homesick and I think that within a few weeks of arriving she found my family a suffocating problem rather than a support. My mother, her sister and her five brothers were all very close, and all then living in Melbourne, and I was very close to them all. I think that this only emphasised for my wife the distance separating her from her own family, and I often recalled a remark overheard at our wedding reception that ‘international marriages often don’t work’. In looking for the cause of the problem (naively thinking that there probably was an identifiable single cause), I decided that we might have a better chance of success if we lived away from my family, and so at the end of the year I accepted a position in the Commonwealth Public Service and moved to Canberra where the particular department was located.
This sounds, in retrospect, rather arbitrary on my part, but while the idea was mine the decision was jointly taken. The position in Canberra opened up the prospect of postings to Europe in the future, and would enable us to set up a way of life less centred on my own family than was happening in Melbourne. My wife stayed on in her teaching position at the convent in Melbourne while we assessed which job and which city should decide where we would live. She spent the term holidays with me in Canberra and in between I spent many weekends with her in Melbourne. Our marital difficulties were not, however, being resolved, and by the end of the school year my wife decided that she wanted to go home to her family. I could not argue against the idea as she was so unhappy.
She sailed on the Lloyd Triestino liner Galileo in December … and spent all of the following year in England and Ireland. While she was away I at first lived a largely celibate life, but as the months went by and a return to the marriage seemed less and less likely, I turned to masturbation for light relief. Unlike my years as a student and then as a teacher in all-male schools, my work in the Public Service brought me into contact with as many women as it did men … but I felt no impulse towards seeking social contact with them outside the workplace. I did, on the other hand, begin to look for social and then sexual contacts with men and in the second half of the year did have a few adventures of anonymous homosexual sex.
Towards the end of the year, however, I rather unexpectedly received a letter from my wife saying that she wanted to return to Australia and to try living together in Canberra, so I arranged passage for her via Panama on the Russian liner Shota Rustaveli and went to Sydney to meet her.
She soon found a teaching position near our home in Canberra, and we both set about trying to make the marriage work. I decided once again to put my trust in the old psychiatrist, to choose to put all ideas of homosexuality behind me and to concentrate on the marriage. It was not easy but for the next few years we were, I think, professionally busy and moderately happy, although of course I can really only speak for myself. We made two trips to Ireland to visit my wife’s family (and numerous ones to Melbourne to visit mine) but though my wife never opened up to me on the subject (we remained very poor communicators with one another) I s
ensed that she was increasingly dissatisfied with the way the marriage was turning out … as was I. We had early on agreed that we did not want children and the precautions that that entailed became, I thought, so inhibiting that, with her consent, I had a vasectomy at a Canberra clinic. Greater freedom to be spontaneous in lovemaking did not, however, do much for us and I suspect now that a closer examination of each one’s reasoning not to have children might have been a more constructive way to go. For my part, the reason had been the idea in the back of my mind that if the marriage did not work and we were ultimately to separate then it would be better for all concerned not to have had children. I never asked my wife the motive behind her decision or behind her agreeing to my vasectomy but remember that she did say early on in our relationship that teaching the children of others would give her all the contact with children she needed; she had always wanted to be a teacher but not to be a mother.
After four or five years of this I came to believe that things might be better if we lived in Ireland, close to her family, so I started to look for employment opportunities there. Although I did manage to secure interviews in Dublin, Limerick and Waterford, I was not successful in finding a permanent position. Our relationship continued to deteriorate and as there were in fact no children involved, I finally concluded that I could not continue any longer and ended it all by moving out. I didn’t discuss my plan, I just implemented it. My wife was, I think, both shocked and angry. Six months later, using solicitors as intermediaries, we obtained a legal separation registered with the Family Court in Canberra.