Robert the Westie. My life. By me.

19. The Australia year and a chat with Kylie.

Well I'm back from my diversion. Just had to get it out of my system as I saw it happening before my eyes. The events that contributed to the outcome you have just witnessed had their origins back in 2000 in the months before my decease, even though this dénouement took another six years finally to arrive. This was the period of Steve's immersion in Australia.  

Of course, I now understand more clearly than ever before that he was somehow escaping from his disappointment with Jason. And what a huge disappointment it must have been. 

If I've painted a portrait of Steve as a dynamic, robust alpha male with an oversupply of charm and self-confidence, I may have missed that critically important feature: his deep-seated need to be loved.  

Was he unusual in that? Evidently not; the tendency of humans to bond, marry and bear children surely indicates a genetic wish to partner up. It's not unique to humans. Swans do it too, apparently. But Steve was one of these so-called gay folk. As such, he was statistically more likely to have a succession of relationships or even a succession of lust-fuelled one-off events. Well that was what the media that I saw encountered me to believe.  

The truth lay elsewhere. I had known him only as a member of a partnership, initially with Danny, latterly with Jason. Yes, a number of young men had occasionally accompanied him home for a drink on days when his then partner was absent. But I had never witnessed him embark with them on any of that sexy stuff he did so regularly with his live-in lover. 

He truly believed in the concept of the monogamous couple. Now it's quite true that stories of his youthful promiscuity had occasionally emerged over dinner or drinks with friends. But, however naughty he had been in his teen and twenty years, he had settled on stability and permanence as the preferred option for his later life.  

That abrupt transition from Danny to Jason might seem to cast doubt on this viewpoint. But this was the only major relationship variation that I witnessed and it seemed to me a function of two people who had evolved so much in their years together that a radical change was somehow inevitable. 

So why might Steve be so in need of this hypothetical love and affection? To be frank, I haven't a clue. Did he feel unloved in his childhood? Was he isolated in an early awareness of his gayness and short of friends at school? Did someone hurt him so deeply that the wound needed constant dressing? Your guess is as good as mine. But the need was surely there. I felt it when he greeted me on his returns from work or play, and in the way he responded to my woofs, licks and wagging tail. And I recognised it because it was a need that I felt deeply too, a need that Steve addressed at every possible moment, to my eternal gratitude.  

Did Jason have the same need, share the same concept of partnership, mutual support and unswerving loyalty? Well, we now know for sure that he didn't. The signs, I now realise, were all too apparent had I paused to reflect on incidents that I now recall all to clearly. I am guessing that each blow left Steve more disheartened, more hurt and desperate for an alternative scenario. In the event, that scenario was provided by the land downunder. 

You will remember his allusion to the three issues of deviousness, infidelity and disdain that had exhausted his ability to love Jason. From the evidence now before me, I think I can work out what they were.  

The deviousness may have been Jason's weird creation of another life in the office he occupied in the London hotel where he worked. I had always known that Steve was the funding resource for their everyday life. Jason was, by contrast, happy to be the taker of Steve's largesse. He had even invented the lie that he was repaying the small mortgage taken out by his Mother on the purchase of the Surrey country house. That lie had supported his plea that Steve pay all the ongoing bills on the house since he, Jason, had no spare cash to contribute.