A Woman of the Inner Sea

by Thomas Keneally

The nation rewarded its returning heroes by giving them slabs of desert and the proud name Soldier Settler. Most of them farmed bravely on, sticking in the agrarian trenchline until the crash of 1929, or in some cases until the great drought at the start of another World War in the 1940s.

  Gus’s and his late brother’s place has one remaining Soldier Settler homestead standing on it, and is in fact made up of two abandoned Soldier Settler farms of about two and a half thousand acres each. The abandoned house, far from the homesteads of Gus and his brother, has timber floors with ancient linoleum still stuck on them, and beneath the linoleum the newspapers of a hopeful year. The family who gave up the homestead in the end has left behind very few exhibits or artifacts, but the most notable is a white and black banded snake preserved in kerosene in a large jam jar.

  Occasional iron bedsteads still stand as well—they belonged to children who perished of diphtheria or pneumonia or polio, and whom the parents were too weary to replace. Such are the beds to which Gus and Kate travel.

  In Australia movement is not westward to the center but eastward to the coast. Australia is periphery. It dreams of and yet abandons the core. So that the furniture removal trucks, when met, and even discounting the flood, are moving all the time in the wrong direction for Gus and Kate and the beasts.

  The sleeping Kate has with better success than she imagines become the woman she wanted to become. Her hands are begrimed still and cut about from shoveling and bagging sand. Her hair is lank and damp, and the roots would not tolerate too exact an inquiry. She smells of sweat and unchanged underwear and mold. If the Prime Minister saw her, he would not know her now. He would not be able to say, Gidday Kate, still voting for me?

  While cutting up vegetables in Connie Murchison’s kitchen, Kate, coming across references to Kozinski Constructions and small pictures of Paul or his father, would quickly enough start to fold the paper on itself over the scraped skins of carrots or the tops of onions or turnips.

  But one brisk morning, she did see something she wanted to read and it was not to do with the not-so-Reverend Frank. She moved an eggshell to see the item better. It had to do with a man already mentioned in this account: Frank Pellegrino, film-maker and early lover of Kate.

  Pellegrino was an anomaly, an Adelaide Sicilian. In some senses there was no more un-Sicilian a city than Adelaide. It started not as a convict settlement but as a yeoman-based experiment in progress. It had always lifted its skirts clear of the mad Irish-cum-Cockney convictry of Sydney. It prided itself on its British probity rather than on its Sicilians, except that Pellegrino couldn’t be ignored. He was one of the young directors who had emerged in Kate’s early adolescence and who sometimes expressed gratitude to Jim Gaffney for giving them a run in his cinemas against the advice of his board, and whose talent made a claim on everyone.

  There was a pre-existent bond—to do with Jim Gaffney’s reputation—between Kate and Pellegrino.

  Pellegrino’s youth had been spent making television commercials but dreaming, of course, of the feature film. He unleashed his cameraman, a Croatian from Melbourne named Rapotec, on the sublime desolations of Central Australia, and he confessed always to wishing that what they saw through the viewfinder of the Croatian’s camera could be employed to narrate tales rather than to sell petroleum products. He had made his first feature film for less than half a million dollars in one of the old Cornish copper mining towns in the South Australian wilderness. His film was chosen by the international jury for showing at the Cannes Film Festival. No sooner was it seen and misunderstood by Hollywood than he was desperately yearned for, and within a few years he was living in Beverly Hills and making studio films, two of which won Academy Awards for various of his technicians and actors, and one of which earned him an Oscar for himself.

  Kate met him when the winning film reached Australia. She took him over in fact at the airport, as was her job, led him through a press conference, got him into his hotel, supervised his itinerary and accompanied him to every large city in the Commonwealth for premieres of his film. A number of women in Bernard Astor’s office and in the film distribution business in general warned her at cocktail parties to be careful of him. He had a pleasant, larrikin style. In it he liked to conduct the whole palaver of seduction.

  She found him however to be a defenseless, short man, negligently dressed. He was exhausted by the flight from California. He confided in her in an urgent whisper how he had been kept awake by the terror of coming home.

  —This is a bloody tough country to come back to, he would say again and again.

  She told him that all the nation was proud of him and felt included in his success.

  He said, That’s the ordinary people, love. What about the culture police? They’re going to ask me why I went to America, why I made American movies, when I’m going to come home. As if Australian bloody films had been available for me to make, once they’d worked the industry over. I know I’m going to get the big question, and there’s no answering it.

  All the critics who met him at press conferences were genial however, and didn’t ask the questions he feared.

  —Jesus, love, he confided in her. I think this bloody country might be changing for the better.

  His tentative exhilaration began to color all the meals they had together, all the jokes they shared in the lifts and corridors of all the good hotels. She began to indulge that perilous feeling that she’d known him since childhood.

  But he was still tremulous about the premiere in his own home city.

  —Not a big Dago city, love. Not even a big Irish one either. The only bloody state of Australia where the Anglos still hold the redoubts.

  But the Adelaide acclaim was so full-throated that she could see the final ropes of tension dissolve in his face. His parents attended a great post-screening melee in a vast marquee by the banks of the Torrens. She’d been expecting to see workworn Sicilian market gardeners, but they were in fact two stylish retired restaurant managers. Their quiet, well-ordered elation reduced him safely in her eyes to the status of son rather than director. She forgave him the slight vanity by which he’d represented the parents to her as hapless and bewildered peasants.

  Back in the hotel, in the corridor, he took her easily into his arms. She could smell on his breath the sourness, the enormous amount he had drunk to protect himself from failure.

  —Marry me, he said with vinous ardor.

  He meant it of course, and she knew he would continue to for the rest of the tour. He was the sort of man who said these extreme things easily, and then went to a lot of trouble to believe them for a day or two. He remained a devoted lover from Adelaide to Perth and then back to Sydney. Sitting in planes he would touch her helplessly and gaze at her and praise her. It was all of such a high octane that there was a kind of relief when at last, with a keen but feigned wistfulness, he got on the plane to go back to Beverly Hills. He had to face up there to the berserk expectations he had raised by winning an Academy Award.

  An altered Kate moved an eggshell to read in the kitchen of Murchison’s Railway Hotel a feature on her old three-city lover, Pellegrino. His picture on the page on which she was about to roll things brought back a reminiscent dry flutter behind her ribs, a serpent turning over in husks of corn. The feature said his last film, The Reaper, story of a crime passionnel on a Texas farm, had done poorly. It had received no nominations at all, and had lost money and been badly reviewed.

  The feature quoted Pellegrino as saying, I think my impetus as a director was based on the fact that I came from so far away. Now I’ve probably been too long absent from my Australian well-springs. I want to go back, gather myself, and make one beautiful Australian film.

  The beautiful Australian film he wanted to make was a novel by one Bruno Casey. In summary it didn’t seem so surefire a story. An Australian woman runs a farm in western New South Wales during World War II while her husband is away in the Southwest Pacific. Her husband’s elderly parents are also partners to this
arrangement: her husband’s older version therefore helps her run the place. Assigned an Italian prisoner of war as a farm laborer, the woman falls in love with him. Her husband is crippled in a jeep smash on Bougainville. It had all to be in the telling.

  The film was to be shot in western New South Wales on a property called Craigholme northwest of Cobar.

  Kate wakes, feeling at first tireder than the aged western plains. But her remembered information restores her all at once.

  Gus wakes too and groans and says, It’s cold.

  But he lets go of her and is embarrassed for what she will think of him.

  She asks, Do you know the properties around here?

  Gus confessed to having worked on some of them. He was a remarkable man, willing to answer any question in good faith on first awakening.

  —Do you know one called Craigholme?

  —Oldest bloody property in the district, said Gus as if it were one of the fundamental data of geography.

  Nineteen

  CRAIGHOLME, the set of The Italian Visitor, sat framed by bare imported poplars beneath a moist dawn. It has not been too easy for Kate and Gus and the beasts to reach it. They have walked more than two hours through the predawn, negotiating seventeen wire fences and crossing five sloppy red clay roads gouged with the marks of bogged tires.

  Craigholme itself was a white wool-palace with broad verandahs. Its poor-relative litter of outbuildings in aged brick and slab timber hunch wetly around it. A string of caravans, where cast and camera crew were clearly living and—at the moment—sleeping, connected the big house to the shearing shed and the shearers’ quarters, which sit on a bare knoll parallel to the wooded one the big house takes up.

  From beneath dripping stringybarks, Gus, Kate and the beasts observed this present capital of Pellegrino’s imagination.

  A man in a yellow wet-weather jacket emerged from the end room of the shearers’ quarters and made his way with fuming breath to a long white catering truck. His hunched back and the vapor his breath made reminded Kate of her own coldness.

  —Let me talk, Kate told Gus. The power to issue commands had shifted to her now. She expected though that the beasts would do most of the talking.

  They all walked like habitués down from the last fence amongst weeping eucalypts into the film location. Stars and cameo roles, cameramen, soundmen, boom operators, grips and best boys, electricians, drivers, carpenters, continuity women, makeup artists and costumers slept all around them as they progressed.

  The hunched, steaming man had by then entered the catering truck and Kate knocked on the door. The man reappeared, rubbing seamed hands. From within an early morning radio quacked resonantly on a stainless steel bench. The noise bespoke a warm studio, a newsreader with coffee close to hand.

  —Police are interviewing a Myambagh father and son about the death of one man and the disappearance of a further man and woman.

  Would they have Guthega and Noel under hard inquiry in separate rooms? If Jack had anything to do with it, they’d be treated gently, as shocked survivors.

  —It is now believed that Myambagh man Barry McNeal (Kate was astounded to hear Jelly called by his civil name) perished in an abortive attempt to blow up the Myambagh–Cobar railway line. Two associates of Mr. McNeal’s vanished later in the night, when they set off across the flood-swollen township of Myambagh in an aluminum boat. The names of the missing couple are a Mr. Gus Schulberger of Bourke and Miss Kate Gaffney of Myambagh. Grave fears are held for their safety …

  —Yes? asked the canteen man again. He had not heard the content of what the newsreader had said. He had heard only the general contours: Myambagh, flood, the normal cast of missing persons. Every flood gathered its quorum of the missing. No foul play was ever suspected; foul water took all the blame.

  —We brought the animals Mr. Pellegrino wanted, Kate told the canteen man.

  —Oh yes. I don’t know much about that.

  —He needs animals for today’s shoot, said Kate. Or it might be tomorrow’s. Anyhow, we’ve brought them.

  The man caught sight of Menzies and Chifley.

  —They aren’t caged.

  —Yes. We don’t confine them. They aren’t lions and tigers.

  The man laughed without any ill intent.

  —Free range, eh?

  —Mr. Pellegrino told us to contact him soon as we got here.

  —They had a night shoot last night. Give him another quarter of an hour’s sleep, love. Have a cup of tea with me. Christ, they just stand there.

  —They think they’re members of the family, said Gus, still honestly deploring the fact. My wife and I raised them from the egg and the pouch.

  The man was not to know the wife was gone, and he thought the wife must be Kate, and the reference calmed him a little.

  They drank tea, giving Frank Pellegrino and his American wife a last quarter-hour of sleep.

  —What agency sent you? the canteen man asked. He was casual. He was not prosecuting them.

  —Bernard Astor, said Kate, flying automatically so to speak, with thousands of feet of thinness under her wings.

  —I thought he was in promotions. I didn’t know he was an agent.

  —See, said Kate. We did this job for him at a film premiere in Sydney.

  Young men and women carrying metal boxes or battery belts or holsters for spanners and screwdrivers round their waists came and went, making themselves tea and coffee. A man with a light meter round his neck on a black cord arrived rubbing his hands and yelling, Oh Jesus, it’s a cocoa morning, boys and girls!

  This fellow Kate recognized: Pellegrino’s boyhood friend, Pete Rapotec, who had shot all Pellegrino’s films, the good and the bad, just as Marty Fenton, graduate of the Adelaide University School of Music, had written all Frank Pellegrino’s scores. Rapotec was a walking index of Pellegrino’s loyalty to the talents of old friends.

  The canteen man grabbed a woolly-headed boy with a belt full of tools around his waist and said, Rabbit, take these people over to Frank’s caravan.

  Frank. The egalitarian film set in the egalitarian bush in egalitarian Australia.

  The boy led them across open ground on grass which crackled—its moisture had frozen overnight. The beasts at this or that stage either followed, led, or outflanked. They got to the caravan with PELLEGRINO stenciled on its door and the boy knocked. Opening up, Frank Pellegrino was wearing a towel around his waist. His upper body had an olive smoothness which Kate remembered, but which had aged a little and acquired with success and failure baplike slabs of fat around the chest.

  —Jesus, Rabbit, he said. This is worse than fucking Alaska.

  He had once made a film in Alaska. With his childhood cameraman Rapotec. Music by his childhood composer Fenton. He stared toward Gus and Kate and the loosely associated beasts, and moisture steamed from his undried shoulders.

  —Do those two want a job? he asked, nodding toward Chifley and Menzies.

  —We brought them for that, Kate told him.

  —For what scene? I didn’t order them.

  —My name’s Kate, Kate told him. I knew you. I worked with Bernard Astor.

  —Kate?

  —Kate Gaffney. You might remember. Adelaide.

  First he looked over his shoulder, widening his eyes, shaking his head slightly within the boundaries of the wider, more sweeping movement.

  —Listen, wait there. I’ll just get dressed. Wait there.

  Naturally enough, he didn’t want his wife to hear the utterance of old lovers’ names.

  While Pellegrino got dressed, Kate led Rabbit and Gus down the hill a little. In this process Chifley and Menzies were still outriders, keeping watch on the limits of the known, tolerable, breathable world.

  —I might, suggested Rabbit. If you don’t mind …

  He nodded to the steaming knot of men and women around the catering truck.

  —You go by all means, said Kate.

  She watched him dance off to breakfast, and the cold b
urned within her like a flame and caused the old itching of the shoulders. Soon Frank Pellegrino emerged from the caravan, wearing untied sneakers and pants and a leather trenchcoat of the kind which must have cost him some thousands of dollars in New York but which he wore like a Myambagh Escapee wearing overalls.

  —Kate? he asked afresh.

  —Kate Gaffney.

  —I heard the radio. I wondered, you know. But you weren’t washed away? Some other Kate Gaffney …

  —Yes, some other.

  —I think it’d be a bloody mercy if this fucking location flooded. But listen, there was talk about an explosion …

  —Not us, Mr. Pellegrino, said Gus firmly.

  —What about those animals we brought, Kate asked him.

  —Christ, you’ve changed, love.

  And then, being the decent or at least sentimental man he was, he put his hand out and touched her clogged hair by her cheek.

  —I mean that without prejudice. Naturally you don’t work for Bernard anymore?

  —No. This is Gus, Frank. Gus, Frank Pellegrino.

  —Augustus Schubert, or some name like that? asked Frank, ever attentive, ever a student of news broadcasts.

  —Schulberger, Mr. Pellegrino, said Gus, hoping Pellegrino liked battlers.

  Pellegrino, who looked more of a crafty Sicilian than his parents did and who probably found it wise to cultivate his ancestrally wise peasant air, assessed Gus. Gus did not meet his gaze but fixed his eyes frankly on the misty hill behind the caravan. Pending judgment.

  Before long, Frank gave up being an employer and spoke quietly to Kate.

  —As I told you I would, I always remembered how you were kind to me in Adelaide. You were my guide in the bloody netherworld, Kate. I’m pleased you didn’t drown. I mean, I can’t help wondering what happened to you since … You know what’s happened to me, anyhow. Every bastard’s been dancing on my grave, but I won’t bloody die for them. And I’ve got a bloody good wife, Kate.

  —Can we stay here? asked Gus suddenly, since the reunion dance was taking so long.

  —I don’t know about incognito, Gus. Kate’s a well-placed woman. There’d be a lot of people sad if they couldn’t celebrate her survival. I think we ought to let people know.