A Woman of the Inner Sea

by Thomas Keneally

  There can be little doubt she looked upon it as an essential item, took it to Fiji with her, and had it now in hospital. It was a fragment out of which the whole might be able to be built again. Given that she had a journey in mind, and a transformation, and that the transit she was now about to undertake might become too heated for mere glass, she’d grabbed the chance offered by a visit from Uncle Frank. She was, she said, anxious that her parents might out of kindness want to do away with the one artifact she had carried away from the disaster. She wanted him to take it and keep it safe and separate.

  Of course Uncle Frank, from his long experience of the demented in the presbytery parlor or in O’Toole’s mortuary, knew exactly what she wanted. Understood very closely all the saving illogic of grief.

  —You wouldn’t drink any of it or mix it in, would you?

  —Mother of God, what manner of gobshite do you think I am?

  So she had arranged sanctuary for the last thing taken from her house, and was now a free traveler.

  A number of nurses would call in to say goodbye to her. It was not that she had been an endearing patient. But they were professionally endowed to look the demon in the eye, to be familiar with the ghosts of loss. She did not appall them as she appalled the populace at large.

  On top of that, she noticed with a mute astonishment that they seemed to feel warmly for her, though she was not conscious of having put any thought into her connection with them. So was it real regard, or was it rough-handed pity? She did not so much want to work her way to a zone where she could answer such a question. She wanted to work her way to a zone, though, where it wouldn’t even come up.

  It is hard to define the remoteness of the sadness she feels for Murray. He has arranged his work so that he can have the afternoon free to ease her back into her girlhood household, where Jim and Kate edgily wait for her. She does not have resources to feel any remorse for them, for they are in the game of disappointment after all. They are parents. Parents always deserved better and could be expected not to come anywhere close to getting it. She knew from television that Jim and Kate Gaffney were bearing another grief too:

  Uncle Frank had been suspended at last by Fogarty, and some Uncle Frank-supporter in the diocesan chancellery seemed to have leaked the fact to the press so that His Eminence would be abashed. Saint or rogue? was the burden of an item a current affairs program had done on Uncle Frank. People swore by him, and others at him. In the light of Father O’Brien’s recent family tragedy, some people said, His Eminence Fogarty might have shown more tact.

  But—judging by his visits to her hospital bed—Uncle Frank seemed to take with good humor the cancellation of his right to preach and marry people and say Mass in public. He was talking of a lawsuit. He had a high if raw sense that even priests could appeal to civil courts for equity.

  Though the not-so-Reverend was her Deity, she was only his niece. In the corner of the room she has left her larger suitcase with all her best clothes in it, including the blouse and skirt she wore from the airport the day they shipped her here in an ambulance. She has taped to the bag a letter with Murray’s name on it, and a second letter for Jim and Kate and Uncle Frank to share.

  Murray’s read:

  Dearest Murray,

  Please, my dearest Murray. You won’t find me when you come for me because I haven’t had time yet to let things settle. As you know, I’ve drunk a great deal and kept myself dazed with your friendship. On top of that I hugged the sun like some moth. So I’ve been utterly distracted.

  If I’d known someone like you—a straitlaced Anglo-Saxon—was so tender and so erotically proficient, dearest Murray, I might have turned to you in girlhood.

  That sentence was deliberately flippant, but an instinct told her you had to put in some flippancy. It convinced people you were sane, that you could be safely permitted to go off alone. It also said, This is all our holiday in Fiji counted for: a bit of anthropology. It had been that in one sense. She had been surprised by the narcotic, raging hours with Murray. He took it as a given that this meant serious business between them. She lacked the history to take on any more serious business. His confusion wouldn’t kill him. He could find other women. He had a track record now.

  More of the letter:

  I’m sorry, but I don’t know when I will be coming back. So I plead with you, Murray, if you want to do me a large favor, don’t make any inquiries about me. I think you are aware of the simple equation, Murray—either I do this or I shoot myself. By not following me up you will let me breathe. If you can, discourage my family from searching too. Ask my uncle the heretic and the ex-communicant to say the Mass of the Angels for me and the children.

  So let me put it clearly. I owe you a great amount, Murray, and as exactly as I can say this to anyone, I say it to you. I love you. But the sentence doesn’t mean in my mouth what it would mean in the mouths of real people. You know that, how accurately I’m speaking, Murray.

  Yours sincerely, Kate

  For her departure she wore a bulky light blue sweater and green pants. They both happened to be of first-class quality, but she proposed to make a dent in that. She wanted to be able to turn up in a town like Trangie or Coonamble and ask for a job in a motel and not have the manager be confused by her clothes. So she was dressed in the lingua franca of couture. She owned a plastic bag with one Tampax in it. She had not menstruated for three months, but—since she was fitted with a device—she knew it was not pregnancy. In any case, would nature and chemistry dare that? She carries in her airline bag a few basic cosmetics, some underwear, and some potent sleeping tablets she was allowed to swallow as long as she was not simultaneously drunk. On the road she could take the banal way out, if she chose, and swallow the lot.

  She carries her airline bag unzipped to convey casualness and now that she is in the corridor, she mimics casualness too. She tells the nurse at the nursing station that she is going to the communal toilets to put on makeup.

  This is the private hospital. The toilets are as painstakingly kept as those in a five-star hotel. Sitting on one of the seats, she realizes that this is probably the most elegant Women’s she’ll encounter for some time to come. The reflection causes a shift in her soul. It is not joy, but the shadow of joy, a reflex thing, a twitch of joy’s seared musculature.

  We can see her, so casual in the lift too. She makes small talk with two hospital acquaintances of hers, a woman who has had a hysterectomy, another with thyroid trouble. In the lobby she looks around once, and then walks out into Darlinghurst Road and is struck with the awful familiarity of this city. It is difficult for her to believe it merely two centuries old. This town was aged before the Nineteenth Dynasty of Egypt.

  She catches a cab to Martin Place. Her intention is to live rough, but she draws $10,000 out of her own account. The bank treats the transaction with boredom, since it retains the mammoth’s share of all Kozinski money in all Kozinski accounts.

  She goes on to Central Railway, one of those cathedrals of steam. You could live in the Eastern Suburbs or on the Northern Beaches of Sydney and never see this place for years, this great arched roof you walk beneath to find trains. She hasn’t been here since a train journey she made as a child with her mother. The main hall is dressed and painted up now. It is more than a hundred years old, and so has a history. The country trains sit waiting at a dozen platforms for travelers who cannot afford planes or are bound for destinations too obscure to have an airport.

  The faces she sees in here, under the great arches, are the faces of an earlier and less complicated Australia. Country faces for country trains. No cosmopolites. Few Asians. Just the plain, worn, meat-and-potatoes of the bush. Anglo-Celts, as people liked now to say in the feature articles, jamming two ancestral enemies together with the ease of a hyphen. Patchy faces, sun-blasted. Often spotted with small sun cancers. Eyes which had squinted across great distances into earth-stripping winds and murderous suns and were even here, beneath the dome of Central, half closed. Features
which had been yielded up to the elements.

  The electronic screen told her that two trains would be leaving within the next quarter of an hour, and then none for nearly forty-five minutes. She would like to have wandered and had greater leisure than a quarter of an hour, but she was worried that Murray or someone else might come looking for her.

  The first train was an express northward, along the coast to Grafton. A coastal option. The second interested her more. Its itinerary, detailed on the board, brimmed with stops, and for a woman who wished to avoid the reproach inherent in the sea it was perfect, since it went inland, northwest to an interior where, Australians always liked to believe, either answers or nullities could be found. The litany of this train was so soothing too. Bathurst, said the board, Orange, Wellington. The British names reaching a certain way inland, but then the native ones taking command. Dubbo, Narromine, Trangie, Nevertire, Mullengudgery, Myambagh, Nyngan, where you changed for Hermidale, Canbelego and Cobar, or else kept on to Girilambone, Coolabah, Byrock, Boorindal. Before arriving at Bourke named for a colonial governor, and sitting on a river named for another—Darling.

  As you may know, Bourke was a town people mentioned when they were talking of something which sat on the edge of the vacancy inherent in the words like never never, in terms like back of beyond and gone bush. All these phrases soothed her. Yet every name on that string of track, Bathurst to Bourke, a chance. A perhaps ideal town.

  She did not buy a first class ticket. There was nothing to be had from first class on the Bourke line which would compensate for the present balance of the universe. She wanted to be amongst those country faces anyhow. She wanted to feed numbly on them. From the present, poisoned world, she wanted to track back with the help of those faces to the safer Australia, to Jim Gaffney’s version, the Australia where people called lunch dinner and dinner tea; where they referred to their suitcases as ports; called all dairy farmers titstrippers and cowcockies; cooked on wood-burning stoves which had belonged to their grandmothers, and might with the greatest of ease give you a comparative rundown of the drought or flood of 1964 as against the drought or flood of 1986.

  She bought a ticket which would take her all the way to Bourke. But she might not go all the way. She reserved the right to get off at the place which gave off the exact echo.

  Nothing she saw from the train window drew her until she was across the mountains and rolling into the coal town of Lithgow, hunched hard up against the backside of the mountains. The fringes of its streets gleamed with fragments of anthracite dropped by passing trucks. Promising enough in that it was so spread out and Australian—every miner and his wife living on their own quarter-acre block, in a house which refused to share any wall with another. Lithgow, however, was not correct; still—in a massive country—too close in to Sydney and the Kozinski towers.

  But then the sheep and cattle pastures set in, and the earth turned brown, and the paddocks began to look drier. Great, tough, iconic eucalypts grew out of the middle of pastorages and the false green of fodder crops. Wherever the train crossed rivers, she would see herds making their way uphill to the milking sheds, to meet their afternoon farmers. There was a kind of sedation in the sight. The passive habit behind it all, the unfussed lope of the beasts. She wanted to find similar sedating habits of her own, to succumb to their narcosis, to reduce herself to a few primal timetables and expectations. Out here, she thought, out here I might even be in some senses saved.

  But most of the scenes were static. This was grazing country, and herds—if you saw them at all—grazed so slowly, sunk in the great, triumphant boredom of the ruminant.

  Broad serpentine rivers marked some towns, and the plains were broad, always with a far-off mountain chain of teal or green. She considered herself blessed to be in country where towns delivered themselves up to view according to the same principle again and again. Towns began with a stutter of outbuildings, and then churches and banks and municipal halls, all of them utterly interchangeable with their counterparts in other towns. The civic buildings nineteenth-century brick or sandstone. Or else cream brick from the 1950s or ’60s, another era of high wool and meat prices, a boom time for the bush. And all the Victorian pubs which bore the same names, town by town, the Railway, Tattersall’s, the Federal, the Victoria, the Royal, the Commercial.

  It struck her that she ought to stay in a pub. Until now she had imagined herself renting a room in some large weatherboard house amongst pepper trees. But now she decided she would stay in a hotel called the Railway, in a narrow room with a single bed and no pictures, and a women’s bathroom at the end of the hall. Given that anonymity was her ambition, then the universal Railway Hotel was the go.

  All morning and half the afternoon she let the recurrent wide-spaced towns educate her. A little after four o’clock, while the train was moving gingerly across an aqueduct beneath which no water flowed, she was presented with a town. Held intimately in a bow of river, it had a distant view of a worn-down, sea-green set of mountains. It looked most eminently a town of habit. It looked as if it would grow achingly still once the sun set.

  And since this is May, and the clocks have gone forward, the sun will soon set.

  Nine

  SHE GATHERED HER GRIP and moved to the end of the carriage before the train had even applied its brakes. The station buildings still carried the ancient yellow paint which had been on country ticket offices when she had last made a train journey as a child. She got down onto the gravel platform and made for that primeval yellow, carrying her grip. The ticket collector at the gate told her to wait until he was finished with other passengers and then fill in a form for a refund of the unexpended part of her ticket. He was mystified that she didn’t want to, that she should own a ticket good all the way to Bourke, and yet have got off here, two hundred and fifty miles short.

  She was gratified that he was puzzled. She wanted a town where everything was so habitual. Where there were hardly any flighty choices made. When a man would remember, as the highlight of his working day, as something to tell his wife, that a particular unknown woman had for some reason, with a perfectly good ticket to Bourke, got off at Myambagh and had failed to apply for a refund. If this was Myambagh’s version of meeting and admitting all kinds, then it was a safe place to spend time.

  Outside the station, in the railway freight yard, grass grows in clumps. There are a few strings of bulk grain wagons.

  Beyond them, a broad street fringed with peppercorns. Imperial surveyors, trained in India, laid these towns out in hopeful eras, and made the thoroughfare faubourg-broad just in case.

  A convent large and once, in the great days of the bush, when small farmers could subsist and when labor was widely needed, full of eager nuns from the same genetic pool as her mother, Kate O’Brien-Gaffney. The tasteful Anglican church, a sober Uniting. And the nineteenth-century courthouse in whose stone cornice are cut the lion and the unicorn and the letters VR. A few Aboriginals, and white boys in lumpy sweaters, wait on chairs on the verandah to face the last minor charges of the day.

  And then she comes level to a rail crossing, with the little yellow painted cottage beside it where once a gatekeeper’s family sustained their unwritten history, and here she sees it, back across the lines, on the north side. Two stories, wide verandahs. On its fascia boards, MURCHISON’S RAILWAY HOTEL. Separated by the railway line from major institutions of the township. That was in its favor.

  The train had left and had vanished further west, and as she crossed the rails by the gatekeeper’s abandoned cottage, she heard the steel sing in a silence which lasted a hundred miles eastward, back through silent towns, or ones where all that was heard were the complaints of crows and of old trucks suffering through gearshifts.

  Murchison’s Railway Hotel. Deep-brown brick walls, the bricks a dainty size which had not been manufactured now for perhaps ninety years. Semicircular writing on frosted windows. Railway Hotel. Licensees’ names painted over the main bar entrance: John Patrick Murchison
and Constantia V. Murchison.

  She did not go into the bar, but entered through a door beyond which a stairwell rose to upstairs rooms. She thought there might have been a registration desk there. But no, this was one of those pubs where you registered in a book they kept at the bar, where if you could not survive the scrutiny of the drinkers you should not stay. A pub, that is, where beer was the main order of business, and accommodation had its place because the licensing laws were so written.

  In the bar sat a few old men and some swarthy travelers who wore large stockman’s hats even indoors. At a servery window, a hefty woman was delivering steak sandwiches. The manager looked up from pouring beers and yelled, Okay, boys!

  He moved to fetch the sandwiches and put them in front of the travelers. As he did it of course he noticed Kate.

  At this first sighting of Jack Murchison, owner-manager of the Myambagh Railway Hotel, Kate thought he looked unreliable. He was tall but carried weight at his middle. He had an appeasing quickness to the way he delivered the sandwiches and worked the beer taps. He had been very ready to laugh when one of the travelers made some joke over the meat in the sandwich.

  All this is to say that he looked the way the licensee of a pub like this should look according to the program in Kate’s head. He was properly wary as he approached Kate. Though she had dressed down, her manner wasn’t right by him. He did not know that she wanted his tolerance. She hoped that he would understand she was in earnest transition. The tragedy had to be fully absorbed into the cells yet.