A Woman of the Inner Sea

by Thomas Keneally

  By common consent Gus and Kate kept silent for a while. Kate said, Make room for us in the budget, Frank.

  Frank Pellegrino scratched a worry sore on his lower lip.

  —Come on, Frank, Kate insisted. Be a sport.

  —Oh Jesus. A sport. Is that what you want?

  He shook his head, but in a way which added up the old loyalties and debts.

  —Okay. Report down to the production office—it’s the one closest to the catering van. I’ll ring ahead. Use any names you like. Tell them I sent you. You’re the animal wranglers. I reckon you’ll need accommodation. You’ve got to see the executive producer about that. Klaus. Next to the production office.

  Menzies walked right past Frank Pellegrino.

  —Reassure me though. What are these two like with actors?

  Gus said quickly, The roo doesn’t box people.

  —I don’t want him to box anyone, mate, said Frank. What I want is for him to wander up to our Italian leading man and give him one hell of a great bloody epiphany. The spirit of Australia eyeing the bugger off. I mean, he’s big, your roo, and he’s got that archetypal look. Would he stand still for a shampoo, do you reckon? Rapotec’ll want to give him one.

  —Shampoo’s okay, said Gus.

  —Our Italian leading man can have a bloody epiphany with the emu too. You know, the best things in the script are often things that befall you at the time, on location. So, Kate, you can hang round here while we film the grace notes with these two. You ought to dry off and get some breakfast. I’d better get back to the missus.

  And with a small wave which gave them the liberty of the location, he turned and went back to his caravan, the sodden laces dragging, the leather coat crackling in this dry winter dawn.

  It was in this way that Chifley and Menzies were not so much written as injected into the shooting schedule of the new Pellegrino movie.

  The Italian prisoner of war is left by his charges at the gate of the sheep station. He asks in broken English where he is to go.

  —Up that way, mate, say his departing Australian guards. Up at the house.

  Walking up the long red road, he encounters Chifley blocking his path, a tutelary deity. Chifley weighs him in that direct contemplative way. It is not exactly the epiphany Frank Pellegrino wants, but it inhibits the Italian—at the threshold of the farmhouse where he’ll meet and become the lover of an alien woman—with a sense of the level, terrible strangeness of the country. At various stages the Italian encounters Chifley again, and Chifley’s gaze is to return to him frequently in flashback throughout the film.

  Likewise Menzies’ enormous striding speed cuts across his vision, especially in a crucial early scene. The vehicle in which the Italian star and the female lead are traversing the great, vaporous plain encounters Menzies, who scoots along on an indifferent, uncompetitive parallel, in the end outspeeding the truck. Excellently shot. Not overdone. The lead actors are required to occupy the truck during this long-range shoot: Pellegrino rarely permits standins. Kate and Gus attend the screening of the rushes every evening in the freezing shearing shed, where rugg-ed actors and crews pass bottles of cabernet sauvignon around from mouth to mouth and exclaim about Rapotec’s camerawork.

  In the rushes, they see too the separately shot truck interior scene. The Italian prisoner turns to the woman in the truck—at this stage they don’t know each other well—with a wide-open and inappropriate smile on his face, because he thinks she has seen and been amused by this startling progress of great, flightless Menzies. But she has not even noticed Menzies. The bird is simply an unremarked item in her landscape. She wonders what this Italian is grinning at. She is hostile to the size of his grin. Gawp-eyed Menzies is a catalyst of hostility and so, in the end, of passion.

  —Get the bloody marsupials while they’re hot! Frank Pellegrino would regularly yell during the shooting of these scenes, and his New York wife would smile and shake her head at the same time for his combined loutish speech and filmic gift.

  He would stride out onto the set after a shooting had stopped and sling his arm around the Italian star’s waist and yell, Listen you old Eye-ty poofter. We’ve got to have a conference!

  Pellegrino always seemed tickled with Gus. He was delighted with the way Gus could get Menzies to run by pressing a point on the bird’s nearly nonexistent hip. As for straight-gazing Chifley, he needed no coaching and no cues.

  In the caravan she shared with Gus, Kate washed and combed her hair but did not dress it. She showered, but always put her clothes back on inside the bathroom. She would have been ashamed for Gus to see her scarred shoulders. She wouldn’t share the news of them with him as she had with Jelly.

  On Gus’s urging, Chifley and Menzies were permitted the freedom of the location, except during those scenes where they were not needed and during which they were corralled for a time in the small stockyard behind the big house. Often, drowsing in her bunk, Kate could hear them ambling and weighing the earth outside the caravan, the dry flutter of flightless Menzies, the heavy, casual shifting and loping of Chifley.

  Still hoping for mutation by carbohydrate, she ate vastly from the covered catering truck’s hearty breakfasts, lunchtime soups and pastas, evening roasts.

  One lunchtime the star, an Australian woman whose reputation rivaled that of any of America’s cinematic women, came stamping up to the catering truck in her 1940s jodhpurs and riding boots. She was attended by a young production assistant, and raged at her.

  —Though I don’t know why he wants me in for all these fucking long shots. That’s what he’s got Sharon for. He’s filming from four hundred meters away and he says he needs me! Why’s he so bloody funny about that? I know what he says. The soul is the fucking soul, and the talent’s the fucking talent, even at four hundred meters. But I’m freezing my arse off in the summer long shots. I just won’t do it today. I’ve got a bloody cold coming on. He can go to hell.

  The Sharon the star spoke of was a young Sydney girl who rode well and who resembled the actress. But as the female lead implied, Frank Pellegrino believed temperamentally in soulprints and in the capacity of a presence to be discerned from another one at a great distance. It was said that movie stars, who did not believe in the unswappability of the spirit, always got the flu in Pellegrino films.

  But for Kate, the meaning of the movie star’s passing the dressing tables where technicians and lesser actors were eating was that her eyes settled for a cold moment on Kate and did not see her as a sharer of the same air. Kate had sat beside her in press sessions when they were both young. A witty, self-absorbed woman, but with enough sharpness of mind to scan faces in passing and become aware of cues from the past. She picked up no cues from what she saw of Kate.

  In muttered sentences during the shooting of the animal scenes, and as if he was instructing her in some technical matter, Frank had told Kate that he would provide a truck and driver when the Chifley-Menzies combination had finished its work. The day of Chifley’s last scene Pellegrino pulled her out of the luncheon queue and asked for a word.

  —Do you know young Kevin? Frank asked. The red-haired kid, the gopher? He’ll drive you wherever you like.

  He looked away at the line of his people, the tribe required for the making of any picture anywhere. They would be fueled by the catering to cohere together in the making of sublime images, or so Pellegrino hoped. He returned his gaze to her.

  —Do you know a bloke called Burnside? Would have worked for the Kozinskis and people of that ilk. When I used to make documentaries as a kid, he was always turning up. A frightening feller. Adelaide people aren’t used to men like him.

  —He wants me to sign papers.

  —I heard you married that prick Kozinski. Why did you do that, Kate?

  —Well, she said. She could have given the supreme reason: I wanted children. But he wouldn’t have understood the force of her old desire for motherhood. She found it hard to remember herself.

  —He was here just after dark la
st night. Shower time, before dinner.

  For Frank was a great showerer and she seemed to remember that they had spent a lot of time together under cascades of water—the bed resorted to only for exhausted sleep.

  —He doesn’t believe what was on the radio. He thinks you’re on the road. He came right up to the door of my caravan, and I thought, Shit! because, as I say, I remember him when I made a little documentary, and I interviewed him as a colorful figure and he said, Yes, it can be a rough business. It’s full of rough bastards. And then he put a grip on my arm that made the tears come to my eyes. I kept hoping you wouldn’t appear from your caravan, but you were acute as always, Kate, and you stayed low. You must have known somehow.

  —I didn’t know.

  —On a commission. He told me that he was offering a quarter of a million dollars for information leading to your location, Kate. I looked at him and I said, Whose money? and he said, My money, Mr. Pellegrino. Part of my fee.

  She had had a dream about lushly, heartily uttering gratitude to Frank, but by the day’s light she still spoke in her flat way and the heart was mere steak. Just the same, he deserved to be told something.

  So she explained that she owned a lot of her husband’s business. Burnside wanted her to sign papers handing things back to Paul so that he could put them in his new woman’s name or more likely keep them to himself. Once bitten, after all. She’d signed papers for Burnside, but Burnside lost them when his car was washed away.

  —So do you want to meet him? Sign the things? Get a settlement out of the bastards? I’m not asking because of the money he mentioned, love. I’m wasting so much money here, his little payoff counts for buggerall. But do you want to be free and clear?

  She felt a pleasant flutter of anger behind her ribs.

  —I never want to meet him. I don’t want anything, but I don’t want to help Burnside or anyone from the Kozinskis.

  —What did they all do to you, Kate? You were a lovely woman. What did they do, love? I could have married you, not that I’m complaining—I’m not complaining. But I could have married you. Saved myself some anguish too.

  She laughed at the stupidity of his vain world scheme. I could have married you.

  —So I’ve let you down?

  —No, I didn’t mean it that way.

  But in part he did. She had reneged on the duty of old lovers to maintain a sort of continuum of charm against future chance meetings.

  But all that was contrary to the truth: Uncle Frank’s dogma about the necessary roles of people, a dogma she had seen fulfilled with Jelly and all the attendant deities of Murchison’s Railway Hotel. That not everyone was on the earth to save themselves anguish.

  So Kate said, You couldn’t have married me.

  Pellegrino had the good sense not to insist.

  He said, I did read what happened. You’ve got to forgive me for not writing to you. Something like that intimidates people, you know. Makes them think there really is nothing they can say. But Kate, are you going to spend all your life like this? That man Gus. Lovely fellow. But a fucking ghost, Kate. A bygone figure.

  —No. He’s alive. He’s okay. The world’s the ghost. It’s gone sour around him. But he’s not sour.

  He shrugged. Furtively he took a card from his pocket. Sicilian from South Australia, an Academy Award winner, commander of camera technicians, actors, horse wranglers, caterers, electricians and costumers. Furtively.

  —You can always reach me through him, he told her, nodding to the card. He’s my agent. Ask for anything. Money. Are you okay for money?

  Kate would not take the card.

  —I won’t need to call on you. The animals have made Gus and me a living. Thank you. Thank you.

  She found she childishly stamped the earth with the ball of her foot in her gumboot. Emphasis. Now she was going to leave. But he held her back, furtive again, by the elbow.

  —I know you don’t feel you’re in the land of the living. Jesus, you’ve got to change that.

  She shrugged.

  —I’m going along all right.

  He shook his head.

  —I hope you get through all this okay, he said finally, hitting an abrasive basso in which a suggestion of tears lay over the surface of the hormones. He was a sentimental man too. The bad reviews must have near killed him. The terror of the mockery not just of Adelaide but of the world might even now make him drift away in the midst of his wife’s caresses.

  Driving off the next morning in raw, bright air, amongst paddocks dun with frost, Kate—seated beside Kevin the gopher in the cabin of the truck—smelt the vegetable musk of his red hair and hoped a vegetable innocence was there as well. For Burnside might offer him so much for news of her.

  Sitting by the passenger window, Gus was occupied by such things too. For they both knew only Jelly had the sublime innocence, an innocence of the order which shone in the air the truck parted, which slithered down the flanks of their journey and then applied itself to the rear of the truck. The shoulders of departed innocents, Kate was certain, impelled the truck forward.

  She knew that it could be a mistake for her to read the whole universe as abetting her escape in this way. But her faith that the universe, having gutted her, would now help her at every small turn was reinforced by breakfast time on the edge of the town of Byrock, when a broad constable stopped red-haired Kevin and accused him of being ten kilometers over the in-town speed limit.

  The beasts were in the back, but there was not a tradition in Australia of cops searching trucks. Kate did not feel too great an anxiety about it.

  —But constable, said Kevin, we’re not even in town.

  —The speed is posted.

  Byrock, to fortify its existence, had spread its town speed limit for miles either side of its modest main street.

  The cop asked who owned the vehicle. It was leased, Kevin told him. Who by? Kevin pulled out the papers from the glovebox. Paramount Pictures, they said. That made the cop pause. He had never thought of Paramount Pictures and Byrock as existing in the one universe.

  —You with that picture down near Cobar?

  —That’s right. I’m taking these people home to Wilcannia. They’ve finished. Transport home’s in their contract.

  —What did you do on the picture?

  —Animal wranglers, said Gus.

  The cop was appeased. It sounded good.

  —Okay. Next time you’re through here, I want you to obey the signs.

  He patted the truck familiarly, as if as a vehicle of cinematic glory it was bound to traverse the limits of Byrock again and again.

  Pulling away, Kevin wasn’t grateful at all.

  —I told him Wilcannia, he explained, because you never tell them the truth. Not in a one-horse town that’s got bigger boundaries than New fucking York.

  They shopped at a country store south of Bourke in the early afternoon. Gus put the food he bought in a gunnysack not unlike the one in which Jelly’s remains had been dropped into the flood, and deftly gave some confusing information about his supposed destination to the talkative grocer, who claimed to know him and his sister-in-law.

  Then Gus had Kevin drop them all, himself, Kate, the beasts, at a gate in flat saltbush country. The gate said T. P. MCGLAGLAN. From this point they waved Kevin away. Kate saw the redhead leaning out of his cabin waving, radiant between his freckles. A coconspirator, at least till Burnside approached him and offered him the Kozinski incentives.

  Standing on the red dirt road which led off through the McGlaglan gate, Gus put his hand on Kate’s forearm. A gentle hand to her thickened, inhuman self. She was astounded by it and hoped it did not mean he was trying to bring off a habitual tenderness.

  —Not our gate of course, Kate. We’re cross-country, twenty miles from here. Easy stages, Kate.

  She was happy in a way. As always she enjoyed the prospect of covering cold ground with these worthy and philosophic animals.

  The earth here had once been a seabed, and had the abso
lute flatness of a great seabed still. Over this sea, with its screens of stringybark and its pointillisms of saltbush, within this landscape of sparse tribes and defeated farmers, Kate and Gus and the beasts hiked to the Soldier Settler farmhouse.

  Twenty

  MISSA DE ANGELIS. The Polish clergy who were friends of the Kozinskis said the Mass of the Angels for the occasion. The pale, not-so-Reverend Frank attended in a surplice at the side of the altar. He was already under his archdiocesan cloud, and demented in any case with grief. He would at the end of the Mass cling to Kate so closely that she could smell both the starch of the surplice and last night’s whiskey part denatured by Uncle Frank’s boilermaker’s body.

  —It’s an utter visitation, said Uncle Frank.

  She knew that a more orthodox priest might have said, It’s the will of God.

  The vestments for the Missa de Angelis are white. The first cold night at the Soldier Settler’s farmhouse, lying for warmth in Gus’s arms, swathed in saddle blankets which may have been thirty years old, Kate was all at once and without reason overcome by a craving to see these vestments again. She saw the Polish monsignors standing amongst the eucalypts in their bland, waxwhite faces and snowy-breasted chasubles and felt that she wanted at any risk to put her hand to the fabric, the white hot dignity of her children’s departure.

  Gus hiked off to visit his sister-in-law, leaving Kate time to loiter over the idea of the white vestments. The two of them took some time to arrive back in a red utility truck loaded with food and crockery and more blankets from Gus’s own homestead. The sister-in-law helped him carry it in, but she did not seem utterly happy. A large, muscular woman with a hook nose, she wore a red cardigan and gray skirt, and flying boots for warmth over her stockings. When she’d first dismounted from the red utility she’d cried, Jesus, Gus, it’s high time you got those beasts put down!

  Gus and his late brother had equally inherited their father’s place. Their two houses were over to the east somewhere, Gus’s normal residence and his brother’s, within hailing reach of each other. Gus’s brother had been killed in a stock truck smash, Kate would discover, perishing with a load of sheep when he lost control and steered into an irrigation canal. Cancer had got Gus’s own wife. Now brother and sister-in-law rounded the communal stray cattle and fixed the bore pumps. The sister-in-law, though visibly not an enthusiast, seemed fairly content about his recent absences. She must have taken or felt entitled to absences of her own. She seemed either not to have heard or not to have got into a state at reports of his drowning.