The vision of my father as the office masher was unappealing. Joyce was at pains to explain to me that she wasn’t a prude, and I believed her. The undeniable fact was that she was young, serious and hard-working and he couldn’t keep his hands off her. And ‘poor old Gerry’, as Daddy called him, saw what was going on and despised him for it.
‘He must have had a car, now I come to think of it,’ said Joyce. ‘He used to offer to drive me home to Flemington after work. I always made an excuse.’
I slumped in my chair, looking dark. Sod the bastard. Joyce was the one keeping the damned office going while he coffeed and lunched and coffeed and cocktailed, and she couldn’t accept a comfortable ride home because my father, my father! would force his attentions on her. (Daddy, Daddy, you bastard, I’m through.)
‘Surely he was engaged then?’
‘I asked him about that. He said that he was impressed with my looks. He told me men could have different feelings towards women. He was very keen on female beauty. He was great on those art books, you know, all these arty studies of nudes.’ Doubtless showing these to his staff was Reg Greer’s way of inviting them up to see his etchings.
At least he didn’t tell her that he loved her, I thought sourly. I suppose he couldn’t really without breaking his engagement.
‘When I moved to another job upstairs in Newspaper House, he told me that his new girl was much more co-operative. “I’ve made the office much more comfortable,” he said. “I’ve brought in a blanket. We have wonderful lunchtime sessions.”’
So much for my claim that my father was one of nature’s gentlemen. A cold fist of contempt began to tighten in my chest.
‘Did you believe him?’
‘Well…. He used to fantasise a lot, I think.’
I remembered an unsavoury little story that my father told my brother, of taking some girlfriend to the train at Spencer Street and giving her a quick one in the carriage before the train moved off. He even supplied the woman’s name in the account he gave my brother. The evidence was not adding up to reveal my father as officer material.
‘By that time he must have been married.’
‘I think so,’ said Joyce.
‘Do you think he was in love with my mother? Why do you think he got married?’
‘I think he wanted to propagate,’ said Joyce drily.
‘Did you believe what he said about his new secretary?’
‘Well, he was attractive. Not that good-looking, but he was always beautifully dressed and he had a great line, great charm. He gave the impression of being quite well-educated, with that posh voice.’
‘But you didn’t think he was English?’
‘All I ever heard about was Adelaide. I thought he was born in Adelaide.’
‘He never mentioned Tasmania? Launceston?’
‘Never. He gave the impression of being quite a well-educated man. But now I come to think of it, he really was mysterious. I’ve worked in all kinds of jobs all over the world, and I’ve never worked for anybody I knew so little about. Something murky about it.’
Everything murky about it. I was wrestling with the unfamiliar experience of feeling sorry for my mother. She was not much older than Joyce when Reg Greer stood beside her at St Columba’s Church. She married him in the forms of the Catholic Church, linked herself indissolubly to a philanderer. He had a flash job, flash clothes and a flash voice. He was a lounge lizard, a line-shooter, a larrikin, a jerk. When he and his mates were bored, they would put false death announcements in the paper and have wreaths and condolences sent to the widow of someone who was still alive. Rib-tickling stuff.
‘There was an executive from the radio station, a woman, who used to come across every few months from Adelaide, and she’d have me working flat out setting up her appointments and all that. Sometimes she’d ask me out to lunch, three-course lunch, with linen tablecloth, all very nice, and I was happy to go.’ (Catch Reg Greer asking Joyce out to lunch! You can’t grope people at lunch.) ‘Then one time she asked me out to dinner at the Hotel Alexander, which was a new hotel then and really elegant. When I told your father I was going he created. He was quite upset. “What do you want to go to dinner with her for?” Anyway I went, and dinner was beautifully served and I enjoyed myself. And while we were taking coffee, a demi-tasse in the lounge, you know, she said that there was a beautiful view from her room upstairs and why didn’t we go up? I thought try anything once. I was curious to see the room but, just as we were about to go upstairs, a well-dressed gentleman came up and said good evening to her. She wasn’t the least little bit pleased to see him. “I’m going to insist on buying you a liqueur. I won’t take a refusal,” he said. So of course I said yes. I was dying to taste a liqueur. And then he asked what time it was and it was a quarter to eleven. I jumped up and said I had to rush, because I was late already but he stopped me. “I’m going to order a car, for you,” he said, and he did. And I had a wonderful ride all the way home in a chauffeured car. When your father came into the office next morning, he put a book on my desk. “I think you ought to read this,” he said. It was The Well of Loneliness. Do you know it? By Radclyffe Hall?’
I was thunderstruck. The man who never read a book and certainly never suggested any book for his daughter to read had somehow got his hands on to a book and given it to a young woman who might genuinely profit by reading it. Perhaps he never suggested that I read any particular book because he seldom saw me doing anything else. Or he was afraid of my flashing answers. Maybe he was afraid that I would snap that I had read it and it wasn’t any good. There was a fuss when I turned up at home with a copy of The Well of Loneliness, but that was when I was in love with Jennifer and everyone was worried that I might be unnatural.
‘Did you read it?’ I asked Joyce.
‘I couldn’t put it down,’ said Joyce. ‘I realised that the lady from Adelaide wore tailored suits and flat-heeled shoes, and was not like other women.’
Another victory for heterosex.
The office masher abuses his authority in trying to flip you on your back on the office carpet, but his casual lust is preferable to the careful courtship of the lady in the grey flannel suit. This is morality.
‘I saw your father in the street one day, after he went into the Air Force. He was all dressed up in his uniform and loving it. Poor man, he must have hated losing his teeth. He was very vain about his teeth.’
‘The Advertiser never promoted him, you know. He had to plead to be given the title of manager a few years before he retired.’
‘Well, they wouldn’t,’ said Joyce. ‘Not without any background they wouldn’t.’
We stood together on her balcony, looking at a sulphur-crested cockatoo that had perched on a television aerial and was shrieking dementedly for its mate. The storm was almost upon us. Through the traffic noise I thought I could hear the roar of the curtain of rain as it tramped towards us from the northern shore of the harbour. The female cockatoo joined her mate and they flew off across the tin roofs of Paddington to their roost in Centennial Park.
The next day I bought yet another air-ticket. I knew how to find him. It was only a matter of running him to earth. I packed up all my things, sent sacks of mail back to England. I would not be passing this way again.
Eureka
He kissed Briar Rose
And she woke up crying,
Daddy! Daddy!
ANNE SEXTON, ‘BRIAR ROSE’
It was hot. Horribly hot. Sheep drifted across the dry pastures eating the yellow fluff that was all there was left of the grass. In the gaps between the ragged clouds the sky showed blue as a gas flame. A few of the farmers were ploughing, raising a smoke of brown dust that blew for miles. Since my last visit, Tasmania had somehow missed out on half her annual rainfall. Now that the rainclouds were bumping across from the west the more industrious—or more desperate—farmers were ploughing up the crusted ground to make the best of whatever rain was due.
I was running away, driving fast
, up into the rain forest, I hoped, away from the emblems of colonisation, away from the banks of gorse and brambles that disfigured the roadside, and disfigured it most hideously where they had been browned by poison. ‘BRUSH OFF did this,’ a sign said proudly. The inevitable cypresses alternated with Scots pines swollen to mastodontic proportions, and great stands of poplars coppiced like dragon’s teeth, and sallows spreading along the moister ground until they burst through the very tarmac of the road. It was a landscape that made no sense, full of false starts and miscalculations, trees that grew too big, planted too close together and straggling hedges of quickset and hawthorn marching up and over the naked slopes, against the grain. The hawthorns didn’t look like English hawthorns, for they were all wood and small wrinkled leaves, reddened with berries as small and hard as peashot. Everything panted, the faded grass, dotted with bulrushes, and the hot sheep ugly in their brown and greasy fleece and the cattle that trod the dry pasture to dust.
Some of the most beautiful landscape in the word is man-made, the hill farms of Tuscany, the paddies of Nepal, the stone-walled fields of the British uplands. Australian farming was ugly, is ugly, and, like all the farming in the world, it is getting uglier. I turned my eyes to the hills.
I was running away because I knew that the chase was coming to an end. We were closing on our quarry. Surrounded by gifted and hard-working women the lazy man didn’t have a chance. Between my new friends, Mrs Nichols and Mrs Eldershaw at the Archives Office, and Mrs Rosemann at the Local History Room and Miss Record of Launceston College, and his doggedest of daughters, Reg Greer was about to be flushed from his cover. His bluff was about to be called.
It was not as if I had not given him the benefit of the doubt. For two years I had persisted in believing his own vague intimations about his background. I had investigated Greers living in England, in Ireland, in South Africa, in Tasmania, Victoria, New South Wales, South Australia, and Queensland, Quaker Greers, Methodist Greers, Presbyterian Greers. I had written more than fifteen hundred letters to all the Greers in Northern Ireland, in Australia and in Africa, and to all the family historians researching Greers. I knew Greer history from the plantation of Ulster to yesterday. And I loved them, found family resemblances among them, supplied other puzzled Greers with information for their family trees, visited the graves of dead Greers. I was a Greerologist, a Greerographer, a Greeromane. But the result of all my searching bore inexorably towards one conclusion; though I might be all of the above, I was not a Greer.
For more than a year I had known of the existence of a series of strange coincidences involving the family of Greeney. My father said his mother’s name was Emma Rachel Wise; Emma Greeney’s maiden name was Wise. He said his father’s name was Robert; Emma’s husband was called Robert. He said he grew up in Launceston; Emma and Robert lived all their lives in Launceston. The date of their marriage at the Manse of the Baptist Church was too early, I thought, for my father was not born until 1904, fifteen years later, but an Ernest Henry Greeney ‘clerk’ appeared on the electoral rolls with them in 1925. This was a mite surprising for they were old to have a first child born in 1903 or so. No other son appeared on the rolls, only two girls, Hazel Margaret Sylvia and Gwendoline. Robert Greeney was no journalist; at his wedding he signed the register with an ‘X’. In the electoral rolls Robert’s calling was given as ‘labourer’.
While I scanned the newspapers and university calendars for indications of Reg Greer’s having passed any public examinations, I had noticed that in 1918 Ernest Henry Greeney of Launceston State High School had passed in all the usual subjects and got a credit in book-keeping and business practice. Mrs Nicholls at the State Archives Office knew of the Greeneys but, under my influence perhaps, she had discounted a relationship. Still she thought it would be a good idea if I searched the Launceston school files, which had not been forwarded to Hobart.
Before I left Hobart I made one last gesture of faith in my father. I went to the Registrar General’s Office and asked for searches for the death in Tasmania of any of three individuals, Emma Rachel Wise, Emma Rachel Greer and Robert Greer, from 1904 to 1949. And I paid for them. $180, cold cash. ‘You won’t find anything,’ I said to the counter-clerk and went my way.
The primal elder’s guffaws still ringing in my ears I took the high road up to Launceston. As I crossed the highest point on the Midland Highway the road became a slalom through the bodies of Forester kangaroos killed by motorists dashing down to the Hobart Cup. I began to wonder if I was losing my mind. Certainly I had lost my sense of proportion. Why else did I risk my life by corkscrewing around on one pair of wheels and then another, just so I wouldn’t have to hit the dead kangaroos again? Why else did the sight of a dead ’possum bounced off the road into a bush make my heart hurt and my tired eyes prick and burn? All life seemed cruel and unbearable, senseless and empty. I felt sorry for everyone, sorry for the pretty little towns that had started off so bravely, building their little churches out of stone, walling their small graveyards against marauding creatures whose excrement would foul the tombs, planting avenues of pines and cypresses that were now choked bulwarks of rushing darkness that tore up their walls and engulfed their houses. I felt even sorrier for the shabby weatherboard houses that offered ‘O’nite’ or ‘Colonial’ (i.e. uncomfortable) accommodation and the fruitgrowers selling off their decaying produce from battered utility trucks by the side of the road. ‘Spuds’, ‘Toms’, their hand-lettered signs said, or ‘Apricots’. The prices they were selling their fruit at would have hardly repaid the labour of picking it.
Though I felt sad as hell, I did not feel merciful. I felt like hell, implacable, hard and bitter. My heart was wrung out, shrunken to a stone. I was exhausted without being sleepy, famished without appetite.
Launceston Grammar had early dismissed my enquiries about Reg Greer. The history of the school has been written after a fashion and published, with details of the yearly intake but, as the book has the names of two of my Greers wrong, I was not convinced. Besides a memory popped into my head, which seemed to my indulgent fancy to associate my father indissolubly with Grammar. He told a story at least once of a visit to a factory by his school. According to this, the boys were dressed in boaters and Eton collars, and ‘bumfreezer jackets,’ in colours of black, blue and white. The factory hands gave them a terrific shi-acking on account of their effete appearance. End of story. Inconsequential enough, but like every detail I could learn about my father I hoarded it. In fact the Launceston Grammar boys did hate their ‘dorkers’ and their Eton collars, and in 1924 succeeded in getting rid of them once for all, for the same reasons that the factory hands found to laugh at them.
The school archivist, himself from one of Tasmania’s oldest and most distinguished families, kindly rang me to answer my insistent questions, but the answer was still, no Reg Greer. And no choral scholarships as far as he could tell. He suggested I ring St John’s Church who might have financed such scholarships at one time, but I knew that I was just tying off loose ends. I don’t know whether my father told me or I imagined that he went to his ‘secondary senior public’ school as a choir scholar. I had been tossed in this blanket of lies and fantasies for the last time.
The loose end of Scotch College, the other private school my father might have gone to, was not so easily tied up. For an establishment of rather grand pretensions, the school displays a peculiarly uncouth attitude to correspondence. My first letter waited months for a reply, which then simply told me that it had arrived at the beginning of term, and nothing had been done by way of investigating my query. The connection between the two facts was inconspicuous. Presumably, if the letter had arrived out of term time, I would have been told that everyone was on holiday and I would have to wait until they returned.
The only possible course was to visit the school myself. One secretary turned me over to another woman whose function was never explained to me. She found the correspondence in her file, and there was my second letter unanswered since
July. ‘It’s not my fault,’ she said. The head had passed the letter on to the archivist and the archivist had ignored it. No, she couldn’t ring the archivist; he was not due at school until the next day and she wouldn’t dream of disturbing him for such as me. Compared to the sanctity of Mr Skirving’s privacy, the fact that I had come all the way from England to follow up my unanswered letter was a mere bagatelle.
‘And tomorrow he will be at meetings all day, and have a perfect excuse not to speak to me,’ I said.
‘That’s right,’ she said.
There was a good deal more in the same vein. For the life of me I couldn’t understand why a competent woman would go so far to cover for her better-paid male ‘superior’, but it is a phenomenon often to be observed in the lucky country.
She offered to ring me with the answer to my July letter and so she did. ‘Records before 1920 are non-existent’ the message said, in typical Australese. Eighteen months before they could simply have written to say, ‘We have no records before 1920.’ which, as it happens, is not quite true.
Having exposed myself to such embarrassments (for the call from Grammar was even more embarrassing in its courteous way) I figured I had done my best for the Reg Greer legend. I turned to the state schools; one had been founded in 1923, and the other led me to Miss Record. In as long as it took to tell she had ingested all the salient details of my request. I had played my last card. And I shot through. Went bush. But I knew that I would not get far.
When I first encountered the Greeneys I felt a cold fear that they would indeed be the end of the trail. As I burned up the narrow road to the coast, sweltering behind huge lorries, I went over what I knew about them. Robert Greeney the elder was a convict; he married an Elizabeth and begat another Robert, born 1866. If Robert Greeney was my grandfather, I was the great-granddaughter of a genuine transportee! Yippee! I thought. Then I thought that Daddy must have been ashamed of him, ashamed of them, god-fearing, hard-working, united family that they seemed to be, for I knew that when Ernest married, Gwendoline and Hazel had appeared on the rolls. When Robert disappeared, Emma lived with Ernest until death claimed her too, a year or two later. The worm of dislike for my father that had been nibbling off and on ever since I talked to Joyce gave me a proper nip. Lying bastard, I thought, and got out of the car to inspect some gum-blossom by way of psychotherapy.
Daddy, We Hardly Knew You Page 28