‘What for?’ asked Mother.
I side-stepped. ‘Can I come down tomorrow and tell you what I’ve found out?’
‘I suppose so.’
As I piloted my car down the vast chaos of the Nepean Highway, my ‘touchy tummy’ screamed with nerves. I knew that it was pointless to plan the conversation, because by no stretch of the imagination could I foresee my mother’s contribution. Taking a leaf from my sister’s book, I decided to take her out to somewhere she felt comfortable.
‘I like Half Moon Bay,’ she said. ‘I always usually go to Half Moon Bay.’
She was whipping cream in a small enamel basin which did not sit on the mixer base, so she was steadying it with her hand. A dangerous proceeding, I thought. Another bowl, with what looked like a quart of cream in it, stood on the worktop. ‘What are you doing, Mother?’ I asked rashly.
‘I’m making a dip,’ said Mother. None the wiser, for I could see no ingredients for the dip other than cream, I reverted to the job in hand.
‘OK. Let’s go to Half Moon Bay.’
‘Like this?’ asked Mother. ‘Sit on the beach in our clothes?’
She was wearing a skin-tight synthetic knit dress, striped green, yellow and white. ‘It’s nice, isn’t it?’ she had said. ‘I found it on a fence. Yes. Somebody must have got wet, and it’s awful to sit in a car in a sopping dress, so they took it off and left it on the fence. I found it when I was out on my bike. I find all sorts of things when I’m out on my bike.’ She smoothed the dress over her hips, evidently quite satisfied with her own improbable theory about its provenance. ‘Yes, no, yes, I’m a scavenger, a beachcomber. That’s how I live.’
I reflected that to a woman who treated the whole world as a series of beaches, it was perfectly consistent to treat everything in it as flotsam and jetsam.
‘I trust the fence is not actually nearby. Mother. The dress is rather distinctive.’
‘Oh yes,’ said Mother, ‘I wouldn’t take anything from round here.’ I realised that one part of her echoing brain knew perfectly well that the dress had blown off a clothesline. On the fourth finger of the left hand of this rag-picker blazed her own fine solitaire diamond reset in a sort of steel lozenge with my grandmother’s five large rose diamonds. The setting was guaranteed not to allow any of the diamonds to fall out, but as it made them look cheap as paste, the object of the re-setting seemed to me completely defeated.
‘You can change, Mother, if you want.’
‘What about you?’ asked Mother, looking at my skirt and T-shirt as if they were white tie and tails.
‘Perhaps I could borrow some shorts.’
Mother squeezed herself into a pair of pale-blue stubbies, out of which her tanned seventy-year-old legs oozed like Brown Windsor Soup sliding down a ladle. Me she kitted out in a vast pair of black Bombay bloomers.
As we walked down the concrete stairs to the beach I wondered how to introduce the subject of my father, which had not so far been mentioned. I wished Mother would say, ‘Now what’s all this about your father?’ Instead she said in a special voice that she reserved for rhapsody, ‘Oh, yes, it’s been such a wonderful summer, this year. No, yes, no, last year we had hardly any real beach weather, but this, oh, this year has just been so marvellous. Day after day of beach weather. Just gorgeous. Yes, no, you wouldn’t find anything like it anywhere else in the world.’
‘What about Kenya?’
‘What about Kenya?’
‘Nothing, Mother.’ I scrambled back to conversational high ground, mentally upbraiding myself for falling for one of Mother’s gambits. Nothing would have been sillier at this point than to have played a game of ‘beaches I have known’ with a woman who has done nothing but lie on beaches for the best part of seventy years. We crunched along the coarse wet pinky-brown sand, which gave beneath my sandshoes, towards the northern end of the bay. If I had been less preoccupied I would have noticed that almost all the people sunning themselves on the sand were male and unusually scantily clad, in that their trunks were the kind I used to call handkerchiefs full of apples. Seen from behind their buttocks mooned quite bare and strangely pale.
I decided to plunge straight in. ‘I found Daddy. It was a struggle but I’ve got him.’
‘Hah,’ shrilled Mother. ‘You don’t even know if he’s your father! How do you know he’s your father? You don’t even know that!’ She shrieked with theatrical laughter. The men on their beach-towels lifted their heads to see us, and rolled their eyes at each other.
‘Mother, that is what is called an own goal. You may not know if he’s my father, but I do. I only have to look at him.’ Two boys in very, very tight jeans that had been torn off just above the knee minced past us, one on each side, rolling their hips. They turned their heads without turning their shoulders and stared at us insolently. ‘That’s about the only thing I am sure of; the man who called himself Reg Greer was my father.’
We had reached the end of the bay, where a rough tongue of rock crisped like boiling toffee dropped into cold water stuck out of the cliff and curled through the sand. We sat down side by side on a smooth patch. The two boys stared at us fixedly, looked at each other, shrugged their shoulders and sauntered away.
‘What do you mean called himself?’
I began to tell her, but she interrupted. ‘They’ve got no birth certificate for him in Durban, you know,’ she said, triumphantly.
Satisfied that Daddy had never levelled with her, seeing as she sent to Durban for a birth certificate after he died, I said carefully, ‘That’s because he wasn’t born in Durban.’
‘So where was he born?’
‘In Launceston, Mother. But he’s not called Greer.’
‘So what’s his name?’
‘The only name he knew was his foster-mother’s name. He was boarded out.’
Mother took over. ‘Oh, they only did that for the money. Yes, no, yes, they were paid to take in poor little children. They did it for money. Poor little kiddies, they just piled them in, beat them and starved them—’
‘Mother!’ I yelled so loud that a particularly Grecian-looking youth who was standing in the sea dabbling his fingertips in the water and turning slowly from side to side started and looked round at us. I couldn’t bear to hear her slandering Emma Greeney. ‘Emma Greeney was only paid 21/6 for each child. She didn’t—’
‘That was a lot of money in those days, but then you wouldn’t know about that. No, yes—’
‘Mother, I’m talking about 1904, thirteen years before you were born.’
‘I know that.’
‘So both you and I have exactly the same chance of knowing what 21/6 was worth when Reg Greer was born. Emma used all the money to feed and clothe and house her children adequately, and in any case she got nothing for Eric, because she adopted him privately.’
‘Who’s Eric?’ asked Mother. The logical sequence of the story was to hell and gone. I was obliged to blurt out the facts of Rhoda King’s travail out of sequence, muddling Mother with a plethora of names. Worst of all I could feel her getting agitated, and struggling for escape.
‘You’re not going to write all this? About the man I married? You wouldn’t. The poor old man. What a cheap journalistic trick…. I’ll stop you. You can’t. You won’t write this stuff.’ A man in overalls suddenly appeared on the rock behind us. He seemed hurried and excited in some way but, when he saw us, he stopped in his tracks and seemed to be signalling with his eyes to one of the men on the beach.
‘Mother, it’s not my fault that my father was a fraud. When I took the commission for the book, I did so in good faith. I’ve spent two years trying to verify my father’s phony biography, two years and God knows how many thousands of pounds—’
‘That’s it, isn’t it? You’ve spent it and you can’t give it back. You’ve spent it!’ she jeered. ‘Hah! hah! You’ve spent it!’ Suddenly she stuck her face into mine. ‘What’ve you been eating? Eh? You’ve been eating onions. God, it’s awful when you put your
face near anyone. God, what a stink.’
‘I didn’t put my face near anyone, Mother.’
Mother banged me sideways with her shoulder, to push her face closer. ‘No, garlic, that’s it. What did you eat?’
I stumbled into her trap. ‘It must have been the Ethiopian food last night.’
‘How revolting,’ said Mother, having proved to her satisfaction that I was mad.
‘N’jera wat. It was delicious, actually,’ I said softly. ‘Do you want to know about Reg Greer or not? If it doesn’t interest you I shan’t tell you. You can wait to read it in the book. This might be the one book of mine that you do read.’
‘The poor old man. How could you bring yourself to write all that about anyone?’
‘He’s not a poor old man,’ I said, exasperated. ‘He’s dead. Much you cared about the poor old man, anyway. Talk about starving and beating.’
‘Oh,’ she said, ‘all he wanted to do was eat. I was always cooking. It was terrible. But I miss him, yes, no…,’ her voice was modulating to the rhapsodic mode.
I tried to get on with my story. ‘Eric was Emma’s second child. The first was Henry Ernest; Emma called him Ernest Henry—’
‘Oh, your father’s brother, Ernie!’ Mother stopped, annoyed with herself for exhibiting a normal human reaction.
‘What did Daddy tell you about Ernie?’ I asked.
Mother’s face went blank. ‘You know the best book I ever read about you?’ she said. ‘It was that Difficult Women by what-sisname.’
‘David Plante, Mother dear.’
It was the perfect wind-up. She must have known how I hated that book. I sat on the rock in the sunlight, suddenly chilled to the bone. I used to say to David, ‘Isn’t it time you got an honest job?’ Here I was hoisted off my feet by my own petard. In her random onslaught, mother had hit home, slammed me in the solar plexus.
I stared at the human statuary that posed on the beach. A man I had seen gather up his towel and leave, minutes before, reappeared and lay down again, rolling over to show two pale globes of buttock. Several boys were watching something at the top of the cliff. I followed their eyeline and saw a man beckoning from the bushes. One of the boys laid his manicured hand on his sternum, and the man nodded. The boy gave his rivals a skittish look and ran lightly up the stairs.
‘So this is your favourite beach. Mother. No wonder you like David Plante. You’re a fag-hag. You’ve sat us here right in the middle of the meat rack. Or fish rack, maybe, seeing it’s the beach.’
‘Yes,’ said Mother, and added, ‘I suppose they suck each other these days because of AIDS.’ Her light carrying voice lashed round the beach like a whip. The boys stiffened and turned and stared.
‘I’ll get you some binoculars and a notebook, Ma, and you can do a behavioural study.’ It seemed a good moment to go.
‘They’re not all queer, you know,’ said Mother, looking hard at a very tanned, flat-bellied older man who lay by himself on a huge expensive towel with a tiny expensive radio plugged into his ear. Then I understood. Having found most of her life’s necessities on a beach, Mother was now beachcombing for another husband. The older man rolled over, revealing the same moon-pale buttocks that we had noticed on the others. He began carefully to anoint them with sun-block.
Mother’s steps were flagging when we tramped back along the sand, and we had to stop twice on the concrete stairs. For all her strength and her demonic energy, she needed her fantasies and I had torn them away. Occasionally I would surprise a look of panic in her eyes. She had been conditioned all her life to be a satellite and now she was spinning out of orbit, a moon looking for an earth. Reg Greer had convinced her that she was making an advantageous marriage. He cast her in the role of a raw suburban girl marrying a man about town, and though she had sneered at his pretensions she had never doubted them. Reg Greer had applauded her for being ultra-feminine and spectacular, and had done so well that even now she believed that she had only to look straight at a man and he would follow her anywhere.
I was afraid that she would suffer delayed shock when she actually considered the truths that I had told her on the beach. I asked her to call me if she felt confused. Instead she telephoned her elder brother. He could make no sense of what she was telling him, and waited until I came to lunch next day to get the facts straight. He told her that he was reading The Madwoman’s Underclothes.
‘You didn’t spend good money on that rubbish, did you?’ said Mother. She announced that she wouldn’t come to my farewell dinner at Jane’s, but would run away. When I called for her next day she had not run away, but was waiting, ready dressed and made up.
‘Jane made me come,’ she said. ‘She’s a terrible bully. She said she’d been cooking all day and I had to come. She didn’t need to do that.’ All the way down in the car she kept up a running diatribe against her whole family, accusing us of the most appalling crimes, wild promiscuity, drug addiction, grand larceny. Our successes were ascribed to Machiavellian machinations and luck. She, Mother, was the only intelligent, beautiful and virtuous member of the family. Things were back to normal.
At dinner on the deck of Jane’s beautiful house, looking over the sloping lawn and the art nouveau shapes of the melaleucas, as we went over details of the story again, the magnitude of Reg Greer’s achievement was made manifest.
‘When I went to Kilbreda, I used to think of myself as a real toff,’ said Jane laughing. ‘I reckon the old boy knew what he was doing.’
Some of the constriction round my heart eased. They had forgiven me for digging up the dead with my nails, but I had not forgiven myself.
‘Oh, look,’ breathed Mother, ‘no, no, just look at the moon. Isn’t that gorgeous!’ We had all been looking at the moon all evening as it rose silvery pale behind the solid clouds of melaleuca and sailed up through the thin cloud streamers of the eastern sky, but Mother wished to tutor our earth-bound senses in the apprehension of beauty. ‘No, yes, look at it,’ she said. ‘Now where would you see a moon like that?’
‘In the sky?’ said somebody.
Mother swept on. ‘It’s, oh, how would you describe it?’
‘Round?’ said somebody. Mother made several more attempts in the course of the evening to get us to appreciate the moon, but we remained cold and matter-of-fact, to her high requiem a bunch of sods.
The job was done. My quest was over. There were huge gaps in the story but I had the answers to my most insistent questions. I seem to remember being given once a pottery figure of a lady spinning. Her arms moved back and forth and her wheel really went round. I recall the strange porous texture of the low-fired biscuit ware of which she was made. She seemed the more wondrous and intricate to me because as a result of the war I had had no toys except the kangaroo and the rabbit that my mother made of felt and stuffed with such vim that they were hard as rocks, and a pink cotton doll with white nylon hair. I picked up the spinning lady, turned her upside down and shook her to see what made her spin and lo! a quantity of sand ran out of her and she spun no more. Perhaps if my parents had told me what I needed to know I would have my spinning lady still. Instead I was beaten and told I was a destructive child. I didn’t need the beating, for I was crushed already. I had owned my first mechanical toy for only half an hour.
I am at home now. The jade feathers are appearing on the acacia. The peonies are busting open in the warm border. My parrot has decided that he trusts me, and even lets me stroke his head and throat when I have Christopher the red cat purring loudly on my shoulder and dribbling down my back. There have been storms of apple blossom, and fritillaries along the drive. There is a fog of lilac along the roadside fence and frogs are dwelling in the pool in my wood which this year will cast shade for the first time. I am unmoved. For this, for every thing, I am out of tune.
There is a change—and I am poor. I cannot speak to Daddy any more because I know he lied to me. It was not the war that destroyed his love for me, but his charade and my censorious, scrutinising natur
e. He is no longer beside me with his face turned away, but lying in my desk drawer in tatters, a heap of cheap props. I think I know that the people who genuinely loved him were aware that his gentlemanly carry-on was an act and loved him for the way he did it, but I, like the RAF officers he met ‘overseas’, am not beguiled. ‘He was a character,’ his old friends say when they tell stories of the amazing effrontery that reduced policemen and publicans to apologetic wrecks. He was good company, but not for me. I was never his boon companion, but a full-on pain in his neck.
In finding him I lost him. Sleepless nights are long.
Acknowledgments for Quoted Material
The author and publishers would like to thank those who have given permission to reproduce the material quoted in the chapter openers and elsewhere, the sources of which are given below.
Extracts from ‘Full Fathom Five’ and ‘Daddy’ from Collected Poems by Sylvia Plath, Faber & Faber Ltd, copyright © Ted Hughes 1965 and 1981, reprinted by permission of Miss Olwyn Hughes. Extracts from poems by Marina Tsvetayeva from Selected Poems of Marina Tsvetayeva, trans. Elaine Feinstein, Century Hutchinson Publishing Group Ltd, reprinted by permission of Miss Olwyn Hughes. Extract from ‘The Grey-Eyed King’ from Selected Poems by Anna Akhmatova, trans. Richard McKane. Bloodaxe Books 1989. Bye Bye Blackbird (words by Mort Dixon and music by Ray Henderson) © 1926 Remick Music Corp, USA; reproduced by permission of Francis Day & Hunter Ltd, London WC2H oEA and Warner Bros Inc. Sometimes I’m Happy (by Vincent Youmans and Irving Caesar) © 1925 Warner Bros Inc (Renewed). All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of Warner Bros Inc/Harms Inc/Chappell Music Ltd. Sophocles, Oedipus the King, trans. Grene, from Complete Greek Tragedies, edited by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore, © 1942, 1954 by the University of Chicago. All rights reserved, Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus, trans. Fitzgerald, from Complete Greek Tragedies, edited by David Grene and Richmond P. Lattimore, © 1941 by Harcourt, Brace and Company, © 1954 by the University of Chicago. All rights reserved, (Chicago 1954 edition is revised translation.) Extract from ‘Marina’ from Collected Poems 1909–1962 by T.S. Eliot, reprinted by permission of Faber & Faber Ltd. Extract from ‘Disguises’ from Collected Poems by Elizabeth Jennings, Carcanet. The Ramayana of Valmiki, trans. Makhan Lal Sen, is reprinted by permission of Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers Pvt Ltd, New Delhi. ‘And One for My Dame’ from Live or Die by Anne Sexton, copyright © 1981 by Linda Gray Sexton & Loring Conant Jr., executors of the will of Anne Sexton; reprinted by permission of Sterling Lord Literistic, Inc, and Houghton Mifflin Co. Extract from ‘Examination of the Hero in a Time of War’ from Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens reprinted by permission of Faber & Faber Ltd, and Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Extract from Mussolini: His Part in My Downfall by Spike Milligan reprinted by permission of Michael Joseph Ltd. ‘Briar Rose’ from Transformations by Anne Sexton, copyright © 1981 by Linda Gray Sexton & Loring Conant Jr, executors of the will of Anne Sexton; reprinted by permission of Sterling Lord Literistic, Inc. and Houghton Mifflin Co. The lines from ‘My Grandmother’s Love Letters’ from The Complete Poems and Selected Letters and Prose of Hart Crane edited by Brom Weber, are reprinted with the permission of Liveright Publishing Corporation. Copyright © 1933, 1958, 1966 by Liveright Publishing Corporation. Extract from The Battlers by Kylie Tennant is reproduced by permission of Angus & Robertson (UK). Extract from Memoirs of a Variety Artiste by Hector Gray, Hawthorn Press (Australia) 1975. ‘Sleeping at the Wheel’ comes from Hawk Moon, 1981 copyright © by Sam Shepard, reprinted by permission of Faber & Faber Ltd (published in one volume with Motel Chronicles in the UK) and PAJ Publications (US and Canada).
Daddy, We Hardly Knew You Page 36