A Woman of the Inner Sea

by Thomas Keneally

  She asked Jim to wait a moment. On the rule of thumb that if the child was sick, she would say, No, I want you to stay with me, she went and asked Siobhan whether she would like Denise to come and stay with her that evening.

  Siobhan did not even take her eyes from the page on which she was drawing a dancer, yet another one.

  —No worries, she told Kate.

  The idiom of the Avalon playground was there. No worries.

  Bernard had just woken and had overheard the question. He sat up, greeting the idea by clapping both hands in front of his face. A memorable gesture, to do with life’s abundance.

  We can indulge and find outright poignant Kate’s minor flush of jealousy. It had been apparent for some years that Denise the baby-minder was not merely a substitute Kate. She was autonomous in the children’s order of things.

  It worried Kate that envy arose even so minutely. The chance was inherent of slipping into the habit of resentment, of growing up to become Mrs. Kozinski senior, whose life consisted of the bitter assertion of the primacy of her own vision of Paul; of pushing the idea that nobody understood Paul as she did, that in connecting with Kate he had placed himself in the hands of a base interpreter.

  Kate went back to the telephone and told Jim that—dependent on Denise being free—she could meet him. She felt like something quiet and less special-occasion than Bilson’s, though.

  He nominated a restaurant in Double Bay, one of his favorites though not one of hers. He liked hearty meals. He was not an enthusiast of nouvelle cuisine.

  —Shall I send a car? he asked.

  But then she remembered what had happened in the Forest last time, and couldn’t accommodate any more misunderstandings of that nature.

  —No, I’ll drive myself.

  As was usual, he wanted to dine early. It was his working-class origins, he said. Six-thirty.

  Worn out from the strenuous business of creating a universe of balletic success for her central character, Siobhan now fell asleep. Kate read to the refreshed Bernard on the couch.

  There were more weather changes that day than she could keep count of. It rained and stopped. The sun struck the beach. Then it rained again. The light came back from its drenching a second time very subtle. She would remember the nuances of that afternoon’s pendulum swing from storm to tranquillity and back. She was at the same time utterly concentrated on reading aloud, on the quiet ecstatic playing out of stories of wombats and badgers, of Madeleine the smallest girl in the Paris school, of the Magic Pudding and the Giant Peach, all into Bernard’s unflinching appetite for tales.

  Denise was there on time at half past four. A newly awoken Siobhan somersaulted to mark the arrival. The light was thinning. The sun had nearly gone now behind the sharp hillside above Palm Beach.

  She dressed and kissed the children goodbye and went outside. From the corner by the open-sided and doorless garage, the sort of garage people favored at the beach even though it let the salt at the metalwork, she looked back at the house. Because it had struck her again that her children did not ask her the question children were supposed to ask in marital tragedies.

  Her car wouldn’t start. It had always been so reliable. German engineering, as Mr. Kozinski senior always said, slapping it on the bonnet with perverse and grudging Polish admiration. It had never failed to start at the first turn of the key up to now. Perhaps she had left lights on by accident. She inspected the dashboard but there was no explanation.

  There wasn’t time to call for mechanical help. She would call Totally Tom’s Garage in Avalon the next day. She went back to the house and rang for a taxi. It took some twenty-five minutes for a cab to reach her remote arm of the Northern Beaches. In that time her children played with Denise and were less likely than ever to ask questions about Paul.

  Double Bay was touted as a cosmopolitan part of town. It had a high number of Middle and East European refugees who had flourished in Sydney’s Eastern Suburbs. It had European-style cafés and exorbitant boutiques. The indications were that it was about to acquire a new wave of immigrants and refugees, South Africans, Hong Kong Chinese, Japanese. What were considered the niftiest kind of immigrants: the ones who brought their wealth with them.

  The French restaurant which Jim Gaffney had nominated was a hybrid, actually run by Hungarians. The sauces were baroque rather than delicate. There were hunting horns on the wall, and the decor strove to imitate a German beer cellar.

  —Look, Kate told Jim Gaffney as she arrived, I couldn’t get my car started. And I’m going home by cab. I don’t want any argument about that.

  She felt that she’d be safe with a working cab driver. They didn’t normally stop in the middle of the journey and offer the passenger extra services.

  Jim argued. You could get anyone driving a cab. The Koreans, he said, were totally berserk. He wouldn’t want her to drive all the way to Palm Beach with one of them.

  Kate decided to be brisk with Jim Gaffney.

  —This is exactly the conversation I didn’t come to Double Bay to have.

  He relented. But she had not yet finished.

  —And there’s another sort of conversation I didn’t come to have.

  He looked at his hands.

  —I know exactly which one you didn’t come to have, Kate. That’s why your mother’s not here.

  He grinned. His volatile wife would quickly raise the matter of Paul Kozinski, urge Kate to compel him home or seek a divorce. But she was safe with this parent.

  —We could talk about your girlfriends, she told him, wanting to display her humor intact, and certain he had no mistress.

  It wasn’t simply that he was her father. He was monogamous, almost by temperament, and he lived too packed a day. Before six o’clock he was in Centennial Park riding his racing bicycle. By six-thirty he was at Tattersall’s Club swimming laps. By a quarter to eight he was at his desk. He went to sleep early. He was a happy man.

  Over plates of onion soup, they spoke of the children and of Uncle Frank. At that stage Uncle Frank was still a parish priest in the Archdiocese of Sydney. But he was already under threat from Cardinal Archbishop Fogarty. Jim Gaffney could see extenuating causes which favored Uncle Frank, at least in Jim Gaffney’s eyes.

  —Admittedly Sydney is very straitlaced. Very narrow. I didn’t know it when I was a kid. It’s one of the revelations that came when I traveled. In any case the Cardinal thinks Frank has overdone it. Frank has stood guarantor on various loans his friend has taken. He’s technically in violation of the letter of canon law. He’s just bought another two pubs in the Western Suburbs. They’re in the woman’s name of course.

  He always called Mrs. Kearney the woman, or his friend.

  —There’s apparently an item of canon law which forbids priests to own inns. Did you know about that, Kate? Anyhow, in the midst of it all, the most astounding phenomenon is that of Uncle Frank’s people. I still can’t get over that. Former parishioners. People he’s said a few words to in O’Toole’s mortuary. And they never forget. That’s Frank’s great gift—attracting people’s loyalty.

  He lowered his voice.

  —But he’s not embarrassed to ask for a payoff on any spiritual comfort he gives people. He’s an amazing operator, the old Frank.

  —He’s never asked me for anything.

  —Well, he loves you beyond measure, Kate. You know what he is, Kate? He’s a bandit chieftain.

  And again he smiled. When he said bandit chieftain he was probably thinking of O’Dwyer, the Wicklow chieftain, a man held up as something of a martyr and hero to the sort of good Catholic boy Jim Gaffney had once been. O’Dwyer hero of the ’98. Earning the respect even of the British. Transported to Australia and lying now in an ornate grave in Waverley cemetery. Someone who like Uncle Frank partook in the holiness of the illicit and subversive.

  —Then there are the haters too. There’s a letter-writing campaign against Frank. I met his old friend Monsignor Bryant out at Royal Sydney the other day. Bryant told me
it’s a planned attack. They’re getting forty or fifty letters every Monday or Tuesday at the chancellery. People actually go to Mass to get a thrill out of seeing what they consider a scandalous priest up there, and then they come home and write their cowardly little missives.

  —But if they spoke to Uncle Frank, asked Kate, would he change his ways?

  Jim did not answer that. Uncle Frank, the barely Christian wizard, evaded that sort of inquiry.

  There was little doubt Jim Gaffney would have made a better priest than Uncle Frank. Jim Gaffney would have been a bishop. He wouldn’t have been a sign of contradiction like the not-so-Reverend Frank.

  —You mightn’t know it, said the potentially episcopal Jim Gaffney, trying to adjust the scales of discussion, but your uncle puts the entire income from his pub at the Flemington markets into the home for aged priests. I’m sure that never gets mentioned in the complaining letters to the Cardinal.

  They talked about the passage of time. For she was near the end of what she called her sabbatical. Bernard would be at school within eighteen months. She had begun to tell people she could now see reasons for waiting till Bernard was seven before she went back to work for Bernie Astor.

  —It has to be an office job anyhow. I won’t be able to travel round with film stars anymore.

  Jim said, You’re such a good mother.

  She shrugged.

  —It isn’t much of a father-daughter night, is it? All we’ve talked about is Uncle Frank’s failed priesthood, and my failed marriage.

  —No, no. In my opinion, neither is failed. Or at least the failure’s not your fault, and perhaps not even Frank’s.

  If he had been Uncle Frank’s bishop, there would have been mutual diplomacy and a modus vivendi. Uncle Frank was nearing sixty. Time and a new age would soon take better care of him than diocesan edicts could.

  Just as gossip then, though it was to her more than gossip, she told him about Murray, about Murray’s young wife, about the diving, how Murray’s young wife and her boyfriend had hidden from Murray beneath the surface of the sea, and how Murray had become deranged, not the merchant-banker, Sheffield-Shield-cricketer Murray everyone expected he would always be. She felt—strangely—that even in reflecting on all this in her father’s company she was somehow misusing Murray, taking his pain as entertainment to distract her father from mentioning her own.

  A Slovenian waiter, with the Italian manner all Yugoslav waiters in Sydney seemed to adopt, came and told Jim Gaffney there was a telephone call for him.

  —I told my mistress not to call me here, he joked as he went off to answer it.

  She sat there inspecting her hand. She still wore her wedding ring and, from habit, an ancestral piece of Polish jewelry which had survived World War II and which Mrs. Kozinski had given her in the first flush of the engagement with Paul.

  It struck her as she looked at these gifts from the Kozinskis, mère et fils, that Paul could with plausible justice have said to her, You find time to dine with your father, quicker than you do to dine with me.

  It hadn’t occurred to her till now that perhaps she should have considered working in that business, that industry which, whatever you said about the people in it, was a genuine industry. There were gifts she had which could equally be applied there. So she had the stratagem available to her of becoming her husband’s left or right hand? Indispensable and unsackable not only because she once signed trustee documents in some lawyer’s office. Indispensable in the strict terms of daily business.

  It was an idea—at least—to give room to. She gave some room to it. Then it came to her with a little surprise that her father had been at the telephone for a long time. She looked up to the bar, where calls were normally taken, but her father was not there. The maître d’ saw her confusion and came across to her. He also was a Slovenian masquerading to be either an Italian or a Hungarian, only so that he did not have to waste time explaining to ignorant clients where Slovenia was, and he did not want to describe himself as Yugoslav.

  —Mrs. Kozinski, your father has taken the telephone call in my office.

  She watched the office door for a time, but Jim Gaffney did not re-emerge. The manager reappeared and offered her a liqueur, but she declined.

  At last Jim came from the office and crossed the floor to her. He looked stricken and more wizened than he had earlier. There were vacancies beneath his cheekbones where solidity should be. He began to speak to the Slovenian maître d’, who kept nodding as if saying, Of course, any arrangement you want to make.

  What entitled Jim to such serious obedience?

  That settled, Jim approached her.

  —Kate, we have to go.

  She asked him what was the matter. He said it was best not to talk there. Standing, urged upright by his hands, she said, It’s mother, isn’t it?

  He seemed more confused still, as if his exact anxiety had been forgotten and replaced by numbness.

  —Mother? No, it’s nothing like that.

  But then he waved this aside with his hand.

  —It’s something. But we can’t talk here.

  At that point she saw the line of his mouth threaten to crumble. She walked with him amongst the tables, making for the door.

  —It is mother, she said.

  —No! I told you. We have to go, Kate.

  They had to leave this bright place full of easeful people. They had been disqualified from it.

  —Then it’s Paul. It’s Paul! Tell me! He’s had an accident! With that tart Perdita!

  —Kate, come with me. We’ll talk in the car.

  —The children. My God, it’s Siobhan and Bernard!

  —Stop talking like that! he told her, and in his desperation he had genuine command. Everyone is all right.

  But he was evasive about the everyone. She could tell it infallibly. The children might be all right, but not everyone was.

  —Mother.

  —For sweet Jesus’ sake, Kate, stop saying it. Come with me.

  She would always remember afterwards that at that time she had had the image of Paul and Mrs. Krinkovich dying together in something that involved an impact—a limousine which collided with a fuel tanker, for example; or a plane crash, as rare as air disasters were meant to be in Australia’s kindly skies.

  —I won’t go to the car until you do tell me, said Kate on the pavement. I’ll get a cab and go and check on everyone.

  Jim’s face threatened to collapse in upon itself even further. He pleaded.

  —Please, Kate. I’ll tell you everything once we get to the car.

  It was parked outside a boutique run by a Hungarian couturier whom Kate had met at parties. Jim Gaffney seemed to have trouble opening the vehicle. His keys stabbed at metal.

  —Do you want me to come round there and help you?

  —No, no. But if you don’t mind, when the door’s opened, I won’t come round and hand you in.

  At last Jim managed the task, and his door opened and the central locking was released. Kate got in her side. Her father seemed to be using the steering wheel to keep himself upright in his seat.

  —Let me drive, she insisted.

  —No, no, no, he muttered in an attenuated voice. He already knew, as incapacitated as he was, that soon she would be left limbless, a woman stripped of everything, and every vital function turned to ice.

  —Well, turn the key and tell me, she demanded.

  He started the car and pulled out, circling the block to come to New South Head Road, the artery which fed all Sydney’s fancy Eastern Suburbs.

  —Well? she asked, after he had negotiated the right turn safely.

  But she did not press it, because she could see that he should not be pressed, and she made a decision to submit her anguish to his apparently greater pain.

  —A moment, he kept saying. The moment lasted quite a time. Through Kings Cross and down William Street, where the sixteen-year-old tarts wore crotch-high leather skirts and high heels this night of wind and squalls.


  It lasted too through a right turn from William Street, past the Domain, the back of the Mitchell Library, the tunnel under Macquarie Street. Breaking from that tunnel was always a moment of exaltation to Sydney-siders, for the Harbour presented itself, Sydney Cove. Where the ceramic sails of Sydney’s Opera House were visible.

  There were dangers here too, because lanes came together. The extraordinary Harbour Bridge was a mechanism of annoyance for drivers, and they showed it by behaving recklessly on all its approaches. Where the lanes merged then, a large truck loaded with vegetables came raging into Jim Gaffney’s track, coming close to obliterating the front end of his Jaguar. It was in fact so close that Jim braked and began to weep and say, Oh God, oh God.

  The vegetable truck was disappearing into the further tunnel which would take it right onto the bridge. Its driver would not know, Kate was sure, that he had unmanned Jim Gaffney, creator of the hypercinema.

  Jim merely sat panting over the steering wheel, and other drivers made annoyed swerves to bypass him. Shaking his head to clear his vision, he hit the hazard light button.

  —You can’t stay here, Kate reminded him.

  And then Jim dragged his attention to Kate. And he told her.

  Eight

  NEARLY THREE MONTHS have passed. The injuries have healed and the fever has burned out, and the Black Virgin of Czestochowa no longer occupies her hospital room and upbraids her. Her shoulders have healed to a pink lumpiness. A surgeon has been to her and canvassed the option of skin grafts.

  Murray has agreed to collect her at noon and take her to her parents’ flat above the harbor. Jim Gaffney let her nominate Murray, knowing that if his wife Kate O’Brien and he came to collect her it would all grow to be fussy.

  She had with her in her hospital room a full bottle of vodka, its label torn. The only relic of her house. On the night, a young man wearing some sort of civil mercy uniform—State Emergency, Fire Brigade—had made his way a little distance down the corridor and, probing round the corner, had grabbed the thing, brought it out, and in the end pushed it into her hands. Stupefied, she had carried it away from the scene. At her parents’ place it had stood on a table by her bed. The Gaffney parents could not bear to mix the bottle in amongst the other liquors in their cocktail cabinet, even if Kate had permitted them to. It also seemed wrong to think of pouring it out or throwing it away. It had the sort of holiness which attaches to unlikely survival.