Daddy, We Hardly Knew You

by Germaine Greer

  The blossom was so satisfyingly gorgeous that I forgot my self-scarifications for an hour or two under its benefic influence. The tree was stout and mahogany-green, with dark matt leaves, against which the great umbels of burning red blossom and the clusters of magenta-tipped buds on the point of bursting shone with astonishing clarity. Despite the heat and the wind, the blossoms were velvety and fresh. Their fringes of vermilion stamens were like those of some sea-creature gleaming under water, while the leaves and twigs were as solid as rock. On the end of each stamen shone a tiny grain of pale gold pollen. Inside, the calyces were a luminous pale jadey-yellowy green except where they were packed full of bee. In the phantasmagoria of wilting petunias and yellow marguerites fried brown by the salt wind, the gums were unruffled, triumphant in their bee-loud glory.

  When the road reached the sea, I looked for a place to stop and dally until the time should arrive when I could call Miss Record. The waters of Bass Strait were grey and fidgety that day; there are no ocean rollers in this narrow channel, but a kind of nervous seethe of water. Snappy little waves broke against the long ridges of burnt-looking crumbly rock with loud plops. Along the foreshore runs a railway-line, right on the edge of the sea. And the road runs alongside it, and then the ugly houses gaze across both to the uneasy horizon, in all a pretty good example of scenic vandalism. The place I stopped at was called Goat Island.

  It was the kind of place I loved to escape to when I was a child. In the basins and crannies in the wrinkled rock were dozens of rock pools, some shallow and weed-filled, others deep and mysterious, others quivering with energy as the tide water slopped in. I ground the heel of my slipper onto a sea-snail, and dropped the smashed thing into the water. As the juices spread the sea creatures got the message. First came the transparent sea-fleas with their crimson punching gloves at the end of very long arms. Their pecking order was causing them some difficulty, for the largest fed first and most, and the others were obliged to make do with what fell from his table. Then a hairy little crab appeared, sidling along the rock wall of the pool. He boxed with the fleas and eventually, after a good deal of weaving and bobbing and feinting, made his run and tucked the booty under himself with all his legs. He was being watched by a crab three times his size, as smooth as he was hairy, with huge pincers that seemed made of pink china. Hairy had almost got back to his lair when Pink China made his run. I expected a furious fight. To my disappointment the little crab clean dropped his bundle into the waiting pink china claws.

  I try not to believe in omens, but I knew that the episode of the little crab meant that there is a time when it is wise to give way, give up. Even a banquet is not worth getting injured for. I remembered Jeffrey, ‘Don’t be too hard on yourself. Tell yourself a few little lies.’ Turn back, give up, go home. I drove on frantically into the mountains, longing for the moss and the cancellation of the horizon, longing for the drift of the leatherwood petals. But the black ant cannot give up. For two years I had dragged my burden backwards up one side of the grassblade and down the other. I had staggered miles out of my way pulling with my great jaws, for I could detour, but I could not give up. I stopped the car at a place called Yolla and went to ring Miss Record.

  ‘There’s no Greer,’ she said. ‘You said there might be a name change. Ernest Henry Greeney came to the Launceston State High School from Charles Street School on 30 January, 1917. He left on 19 December, 1918 and became a clerk at the Examiner. He was born on 19 May, 1903.’ I said nothing, thinking that she had researched the wrong name. ‘His brother, Eric Greeney, born 1 September, 1904—’

  ‘We’ve got him! Got him! That’s my father’s birthday!’

  Miss Record went on, imperturbable, as if it was the most natural thing in the world. ‘Same father, Robert Greeney, carter, of 136 Bathurst Street. He went to Wellington Square School, and was admitted to the High School on 29 January, 1918 to D class, but he only stayed two months. Left to become a bookbinder. Oh, it says religion C of E but they all say that.’

  I had thought the news would make me sad, but for the moment I was delighted. ‘Gotcha!’ I kept saying to Daddy. ‘Gotcha! Didn’t lie quite enough, did you? You left just enough truth in amongst the lies for me to get you. If you’d changed your date of birth, if you’d changed your first name, if you’d made a clean break with your parents’ names, if you’d denied Launceston, you’d have got away with it. I’d never have found you, you liar. Just didn’t lie quite enough.’ And I laughed aloud. ‘Liar! Liar! Liar!’ I kept yelling as I tore back along the narrow highway to Launceston.

  ‘You love truth better then your father,’ said a voice over the whine of my Japanese engine. ‘Damn right,’ I said and cackled again.

  I dashed into the library and checked all the Greeney addresses. Then I dashed out to buy a camera so I could photograph my father’s birthplace. Again, the primal elder had his laugh. Of the dozen or so houses the Greeneys lived in, all in the same congested area of west Launceston, not one is still standing. Three of the houses they lived in are now a huge supermarket, another is the back of a small factory, another is a parking lot. Another was swept away by a new road. I began to wonder if Robert Greeney hadn’t been feckless, a drunk perhaps, unable to provide a stable home for his children, seeing as they moved every couple of years, a few doors up, a few doors down, never outside a half-mile area of terraced workmen’s houses.

  In the hot dark night other thoughts rose up and gibbered around my hot bed and seething plastic foam pillow. Through the fly-screen on my open window burst fusillades of Friday night revelry, a scream of tyres, a blast of distorted rock music, a confused noise of yelling and cursing, spiked by an occasional crash of breaking glass or a woman’s shriek. Then the small-town silence would resume. I went into the bathroom to wash my sweaty face and neck, and caught sight of my reflection.

  I hardly knew myself. My face was set, my eyes staring, the pupils fixed as if suddenly grown insensitive to light. My brows had collapsed over them like a No mask of unutterable severity. My top lip was drawn down in a rictus with harsh wrinkles like hooks at the corners.

  I tried to laugh at myself but what happened was merely a ghastly simper, a short convulsion of my rigid features, before the face returned as hard as ever. My eyes looked like eyes that had never wept.

  ‘You’re mad,’ I said to myself.

  The face answered, ‘This is what you wanted, isn’t it?’

  ‘No, no, it isn’t. It can’t be,’ I answered myself.

  ‘Did you really think you’d find out that your father was a brilliant refined young man with a great future and distinguished connections who just happened to lose touch with his family? You never really believed in him.’

  ‘I did,’ I wailed, trying to soften the cruel face staring at me, which didn’t resemble Daddy’s beloved face at all. ‘I thought he was a prince in disguise.’

  ‘That was just your own vanity. You knew he was illiterate. Jesus, you’ve been a teacher all your life. How could you not know the man could barely read and write? Why do you think he read his tabloid newspaper from cover to cover, because he’d rather have been reading the Tractatus? You knew he was a fraud. Dammit, you treated him as a fraud.’

  ‘Did I?’

  ‘Of course you did. Whenever he tried to give you advice, you snorted at him and turned your back.’

  ‘Well, he was always wrong. He never knew the circumstances. He pontificated without ever bothering to find out what the circumstances were.’

  ‘Don’t you think he knew that if he ever got into a real conversation with you, his cover would have been blown? Of course he always spoke to you from a lofty distance. He didn’t do that with Barry because Barry accepted him as he was and didn’t want him to be any better or any different.’

  ‘He still didn’t level with him though.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  I didn’t. I left the face, and went to lie on my bed in the dark to think about it. Despite the heat I would have lik
ed the red cat’s purr to reassure me that I was not congenitally unlovable. I buried my face in the plastic foam pillow instead and tried to suffocate myself to sleep. A pair of drunken lovers were slugging it out in the street below. An hour later I went to take a cool shower. The face was still looking at me.

  ‘So you think Barry and Jane knew that Reg Greer was actually Eric Greeney?’

  ‘Not really,’ said the face. ‘He couldn’t really level with them, after all that time, could he?’

  ‘You don’t reckon that it’s my fault he got stuck with the lie? The lie was made up before I was born!’

  ‘Yes, but you and your pretensions locked him into it. Your questions forced him to embroider it. He didn’t do that for anybody else.’

  ‘Mum wasn’t interested. She didn’t care who the fuck he was.’

  ‘You’re so worried that he didn’t love you. Have you ever considered whether you loved him?’

  ‘I did. I do.’

  ‘You never loved him. You’ve never loved anyone.’

  ‘Don’t say that!’

  ‘Love is no detective.’

  ‘Don’t quote Tsvetayeva at me.’

  ‘You know it’s true. You didn’t hunt him down because you loved him, but because you hated him. He rejected you and you hated him.’

  ‘No, no. If I hated him why did it all hurt so much? Nothing has ever hurt me so hard and for so long as his dying did.’

  ‘You think you’re so warm-hearted, so noble. You never gave the poor bugger a second thought. After you left home, you never wrote. You never called.’

  ‘Oh, bullshit. All he had to do if he wanted to know where I was was call the University. He never bothered.’

  ‘You sound like him.’

  ‘There’s a limit surely. I did my best at school. I did my best to be good. And there was never a word of encouragement. He never noticed anything I did. Perhaps I should have got polio or started sniffing petrol or something. Perhaps I would have been rewarded for being a fuck-up.’

  ‘Oh, poor little genius you. Why don’t you burst into tears or something?’

  ‘You sound like my mother.’

  ‘Who did you think I was?’

  I turned off the light and lay across my bed again. How he must have hated the child who constantly pecked away at his flimsy cover. It was my fault he stayed so far out of my reach. I was a harpy chick. But no, it wasn’t my snobbery. It was his. His snobbery was inbred. Sir Lloyd this and Sir Lloyd that. I began to wonder if I was ever really convinced by his toff act, and if he knew that I wasn’t and feared that I would bring his house of cards tumbling down. And I bethought me of the cold-bloodedness of a man who could marry a young and virginal woman under an alias, knowing that she was estranged from the father who would have sussed him in an instant. Then there was the dreadful possibility that he had been married before. Perhaps he learned the art of lying in a prison, seeing as he had been unable to cope with school. How the hell did he change from a semi-literate book-binder to Reg Greer the toff? I knew I would have to confront the Greeneys still living in Launceston and my heart misgave me. The bed was heating up again. The sheets were strangling me. I got up once more.

  As I stood gasping at the window, the first drops clanged against the pane. The patter became a roar. Water poured from the sky in a solid curtain. The drought had broken. If it would only keep raining. ‘Send her down, Huey!’ I yelled and realised that I was quoting Daddy. But my tears did not fall. In half an hour the rain had gone. The morning sky ached overhead as blind and blue as ever.

  Strange things happened in those days. The piles carrying the mains water supply across the Tamar to Launceston subsided because of the drought. The three great pipes sagged and their joints split open, so that the reservoir began emptying its last tons of water into the river. For four days the water board struggled to restore the supply. In the unnatural late February heat the gardens of Launceston withered and died. Brides who came into the public gardens to be photographed stood astonished among the frizzled blossoms. The Tamar valley had never looked less Cornish.

  One of the hydro-electric stations suffered a seizure that sent a massive surge of current through toasters and irons and computers and dialysis machines. I was not yet so mad as to think all such catastrophes were my fault. But I did think that I was part of them. I was definitely bad news.

  My father, I am told, was brilliant on the telephone. Perhaps he liked to talk to people who weren’t able to look him in the eyes. I hate it. Even with people I know well, I hate to rabbit away without being able to see if they are reading some paper on the desk or making signs to someone else. I don’t know how to capture wandering attention on the phone.

  ‘Mrs Greeney,’ I began, ‘this will seem rather an odd request. Are you related to Ernest Henry Greeney?’

  ‘Yes,’ said a crisp voice. ‘He’s my husband’s father.’

  ‘I’m the daughter of his brother, Eric. I didn’t know this until yesterday, so I’m still rather fluttered.’

  Mrs Greeney thought it best to call her husband. ‘Why would you be writing a book about your father?’ he wanted to know.

  ‘My name is, or rather it was, Germaine Greer, until yesterday. I’m quite a well-known writer….’ I trailed off miserably, but Mr Greeney bore me up. ‘My father never spoke about his background. He became quite a toff—’ I stopped again, embarrassed, not wanting to make it seem as if I thought the Greeneys were low-life.

  Mr Greeney made no odds about my floundering. ‘Would you like to come and see us?’ he asked. ‘At two-thirty this afternoon? I’ll see what I can find out from the other foster brothers and sisters.’

  ‘I beg your pardon? Did you say foster—?’

  ‘Oh yes. They were all adopted. Didn’t you know?’

  Here was I thinking I had reached the end of the trail and it was just the beginning.

  While unbeknownst to me Mr Greeney rang around the family and went to his aunt’s house and looked for pictures, and Mrs Greeney baked a fruit-cake, I fidgeted in my hotel room and stared out of the window at the hideous bulk of the Myers building with its bi-centennial flaggery straining in the sharp wind that shoved the rain-clouds out of the sky. The irregular tiers of houses with roofs pitched this way and that, all different and chaotic and yet all the same, stared depressingly back. The town seemed as open as a fishbowl. If Reg Greer, sorry, Eric Greeney, was a ward of the state adopted by the Greeneys there was no question of fecklessness or brutality, I thought. There was no justification for jettisoning this family except snobbery and selfishness. Certainly Reg Greer had found no other to replace it, for the only parents he could produce were the Greeneys thinly disguised as Greer. The poor man probably never knew who his real parents were.

  I was early to the Greeneys’ house and sat in the car listening to boy sopranos grieving for the death of God. I saw a pretty woman and a girl in pink arrive after me and walk into the house before me. At two twenty-nine I took a deep breath and walked up the hill and rang the bell. Mr Greeney opened it, and took me inside. For the second time I blessed Australian directness and simplicity. There was great kindness but no ceremony, nothing to make me feel more awkward than I already did. They welcomed me, even though they must have known that their privacy was seriously breached.

  They showed me a photograph of Mrs Greeney, an old lady in a high-necked dress with a cameo at her neck. Her face was strong and kindly, with a handsome nose and a determined chin and real merriment in her smile. Her glee was occasioned by the rather grumpy-looking infant she held in her arms, my adoptive cousin John in whose house I was sitting and eating fruit-cake. ‘She died not long after the picture was taken.’ The pretty lady, who is another of my adoptive cousins called Geraldine, chimed in: ‘She loved it when the new babies arrived in the house, and she’d stay up all night with them, feeding them, holding them. She got them all as tiny babies, and they all kept their given names. The Greeneys did their job really well: all of the children we
nt on to make something of themselves in the world. They weren’t really so poor, were they? There was a lot of silver-polishing went on.’

  ‘How many of them were there?’

  ‘There was Ernest Henry, Eric, Eli, Hazel, Gwendoline, Dulcie, Kathleen and Bessie. We talked to Hazel, and she said that Eric was tall, with a fair complexion and curly hair. And he had very good teeth. But she couldn’t remember much about him at all. She said he worked at F. and W. Stewart’s the jewellers for a while and then at Mackinlay Proprietary Limited, selling menswear. Then he got mixed up with theatrical people at the Lyceum Theatre and went away with the Black and Whites.’

  ‘Went away with the Black and Whites? As what?’

  ‘He was in the show, wasn’t he?’

  Everyone seemed to think he was. I was astonished.

  Geraldine went on: ‘They all had good teeth. Mrs Greeney must have nourished them properly. According to her obituary in the Examiner, Mrs Greeney worked hard for St John’s Church. All the children sang in the choir.’

  Poor Daddy, I thought. How he must have hated it. He did despise bible-bangers so. He went on hating organised religion with the last spark of his sentient life. Perhaps he did not believe that Emma Greeney loved him, but bred him up for the maintenance money, the golden opinions and the heavenly reward. He was wrong of course. According to the way of women the world over, Emma probably loved her lazy, curly-headed boy the best. She may have found it hard to say so, or to show it, for she treated all her children equally, but his disappearance with never a letter—or rather one letter—must have cut her to the heart.