A Woman of the Inner Sea

by Thomas Keneally

  You could not deny though that the Kozinskis would make much of the fact that she had not wailed early and had then thrown herself into the arms of some neighbor. So Uncle Frank moved in at Murray’s shoulder.

  —Come on, young feller. Better she gets away now.

  He had got back the old capacity to make shocked people obey him.

  Even when they had her in the Jaguar, and she saw Jim seeking Drive as fast as he could, the lack of street lighting for once supplied by all the flashing red and blue and yellow, she could still hear Paul Kozinski asking, Why weren’t you here?

  She was distracted though by someone groaning and wailing inside the car. Her, but it was too profound to be merely derived from lung capacity. Nothing at all, she found to her dread, lay beneath the base of that wail. She had become a pillar of loss, bereavement incarnate. And at some stage, at some point in the column of grief, culpability set in. Paul Kozinski her husband, lover of Mrs. Krinkovich, was absolutely right of course. Who could doubt he deserved a more observant woman?

  He was quite right saying she should have been there.

  At last the gentle chief of the Arson Squad, who had stopped her with his condolences on the way to Jim’s car, took a statement from her. This was in her parents’ wide-balconied apartment in Double Bay. It looked out on a Harbour which had never been without interest to her or to the race in general. The Harbour into which Captain Phillip had stumbled in a whaling boat on a morning in January 1788 and exclaimed that a thousand ship of the line could ride here in perfect serenity. The Harbour of Slessor’s Five Bells. The Harbour Bridge, of which she had learned in the February classrooms of childhood that it was the biggest single span on the planet.

  Ferries rounded Middle Harbour and headed up past Fort Dennison toward the Opera House and the Quay, the whole scope of this action visible at a glance from the Gaffneys’ wide glass. The Opera House with its great ceramic sails shining, semaphoring a generous intelligence of light toward the parallel glimmer of the Gaffney glass. Wonderful. All managed through bounty Jim Gaffney had earned his family by unassertive cleverness.

  None of it meant anything to drugged Kate Gaffney-Kozinski, whose mother kept trying to distract her daughter’s attention from the cognac behind the cocktail bar.

  Drain it all away and fill with ashes the great pit, the pit of harbor dug by glaciers. And it wouldn’t hold the ashes she had. A fact of physics. It would not hold them.

  The chief of the Arson Squad told the Gaffneys things they already suspected. It had started in the electrical box. An arc. It had devoured the sun-dried, beach-salty red cedar facings of the house too readily, leaping quickly from them to the sun deck, which was massive and combustible. It had also entered the roof and consumed the insulation. The insulation above all gave off noxious gases. The children and Denise had not died in pain. They had been asphyxiated. He wanted them to know he wasn’t just saying that. It would be proved by the coroner’s report.

  In her crazy state, she thought quite kindly of the forensic men and women who had uncovered in her children the evidence that no sooner had they opened their mouths to ask where she was than the fumes had numbed them.

  The chief of Arson further explained it was likely Bernard had actually been asleep at the time, since Bernard had been found in the remains of the bedroom. Denise and Siobhan had been together. The way he spoke implied companionship and merciful sleep, and she watched her parents be consoled by such fragments of promise.

  On the Soldier Settler verandah at the bottom of the sea, pale Kate, trading all this history for Chifley, found that she had finished the first account she had ever uttered to how her children had been lost through her absence. At points throughout it they had heard Burnside raving and demanding, but they knew he could wait. She had had to concentrate on the narrative, expecting at each step the solidity of things to give way beneath her. It was not so much a minefield—people often said that: Emotional minefield. It was more a series of steps in space. Every image a precipice. Gus too seemed to be aware of these perils. His lips were thin beneath his smashed nose.

  But at the end he used the word they had all used. The word beyond belief: accident. She heard him fumbling for something to say, conscientious even though Burnside’s knee had done his face so much damage. And he said the plain things. Oh love! and Jesus love! Even more trite for emerging nasally from his sick, leathery face. And he said accident.

  Burnside’s body seemed to attract darkness to it and lay in a pool of early night. The complaints from that source were dim. The rifle in Gus’s hands was held so loosely that soon she was sure she would be able to remove it. He wanted to grasp the sentences of condolence more firmly, and in his condition couldn’t manage two things at once. His intention to finish Chifley had dropped from him.

  The price for this result was that she felt too bitterly how much of her biology was still that of the superb mother of Palm Beach. How much irreducible Kate Kozinski was still there! How the hated, culpable woman still clung on, lingering like damned Ophelia in her bloodstream. Rigor, she thought, rigor would be needed! Reformation, which she’d thought was pretty well advanced, had only just begun.

  Gus stood. He had released the intention to murder Chifley now. He said he wanted to be ill. For some reason he staggered into the house instead of out amongst the dark dots of tea tree and saltbush. It was all right. She could face cleaning up a little mess. While he was away, she opened the breech of the rifle he’d left and emptied the bullets out, dropping them into the pocket of her cardigan.

  He soon returned. His ruddy look remained but his mouth gaped. He said he had no balance, that he had to lie down. She helped him into the bed, covering him. For it was getting late and the level of cold was rising up from the heart of the Pleistocene sea.

  He said, For God’s sake, you’ve really got to get the police and the ambulance now. You can’t leave Burnside there overnight.

  Holding the bullets in her pocket and watching his lolling head, she considered him a neutralized force. She would need to bring back the doctor not only for Burnside but to him too.

  Murray telephoned every day in the demented week she spent with her parents after the funeral. There was no word from the Kozinskis in those days lit and alleviated by the garish yellow comfort of booze and sedative drafts. Brandy and sedatives kept the wailing down, and her dreams sleeping and waking were unnaturally full of children after all restored, and of the reproofs of the Kozinskis by the ruin, at the church, by the graveside. The old man had needed to be helped to his seat in the church by two Kozinski executives. She had seen that. Somehow it had confirmed her responsibility. And the son yelled by the wreckage, and the mother yelled in the cemetery, sustaining the blame. And justly so, of course. No argument. She kept on putting her hands up. No argument. And her mother pressed on her wrists and said, No, there’s no need, darling.

  Because Kate Gaffney senior knew that this lifting of the hands was always the start of some paroxysm.

  In that week when Murray called politely each day then, she still waited to be convinced that the thing had happened. Maybe everyone was conniving with the Kozinskis for her own good to ensure that from now on she would attend Australian-Polish presentation dinners and subscribe to Mrs. Maria Kozinski’s proposition that this Polish pope was greater by factors of three or four than Uncle Frank. Once she was utterly sure there wasn’t a chance they would say to her, There you are. Now you’ve had your scare. Go and be a good wife!—then she would certainly go and kill herself. She had the means to hand.

  But Murray kept calling. One who was certainly not in any conspiracy. And he talked in his normal, un-Gothic Sheffield Shield cricketer way, and she was astounded and confused by that.

  Murray who would usually have needed stretches of time to make informal telephone calls, telephone calls out of season. Who had taken so long to call the number of his wife’s lover, politely maintaining to the point of lunacy the idea that of course his friend was a dece
nt fellow, and his wife would certainly return. He who had had to rehearse anger at his young wife the scuba diver. He wanted to know would she like to go out for some coffee?

  Her mother said she should. Given that nothing had been heard from the Kozinskis, and that they had returned no calls from the Gaffneys, not even a crazed call Kate herself had tried to make. Whatever damage had been done to Kate’s repute there, was beyond repair.

  Sitting at the Cosmopolitan at Double Bay, drinking Vienna coffee, Kate was barely conscious, looking without understanding at the refugees from South Africa and Eastern Europe, eloquent and busy wives coming and going, well dressed. Unlike the cloistered Australian born, talkative about the condition of the world.

  And Murray pushed his lawyer’s lips forward and he had a small, kindly smile on his face and said, Kate, you just have a little mustache of cream.

  To get off more hurtful subjects, she planned a sentence and then had her mouth—which had been borrowed from some other person—utter it.

  —Has your wife come back home?

  There was a frank blush across the tops of his cheekbones.

  —No. She’s with her new friend. Had to be expected. They were very taken with each other.

  She watched his extraordinary lips—made as they were for confidential information about money, share and property prices, about unit trusts and currency notes—push further forward still.

  —Kate, we had a holiday booked, my wife and I. Since last year. One of the islands off Fiji. A private one, quite luxurious. South of Viti Levu. I wondered, if I could get you a room of your own, would you like to come as my companion?

  She looked at him, trying to fix on his face. She could focus on his discomfort. That was apparent even to the dazed and drugged.

  —All you need do is sit in the sun, and perhaps read if you want to.

  She wondered how he could be so innocent as not to know she was contagious.

  He said, My shout of course.

  —The coffee?

  —No. I meant the airfare and accommodation. Least I could do. Already paid for.

  She didn’t think that that was quite a logical claim.

  —Unless of course you’re worried about the divorce settlement. But I don’t think there’s any problem there. Not in the sort of faultless divorces we have now. In any case, he started it first … forgive me talking like this. I’m not trying to suggest anything you do is the equivalent of his involvement with Mrs. Krinsky or whatever her name is …

  He began coughing.

  —Listen, forgive me talking like this. In the circumstances.

  She laughed at that too, more heartily.

  —In the circumstances. In the fucking circumstances.

  She thought she had said it softly, but other coffee drinkers were looking.

  Murray said, I don’t care if your behavior’s embarrassing or if you talk like that most of the time. I mean, a bit loud. To hell with it. You’re entitled to.

  —Yes, I’m drunk and I am drugged.

  —I know that. You might even get less drugged and less drunk on holiday. Or less drugged anyhow. Liquor’s permitted on holidays.

  She started to laugh and she was sure now the laugh was under control. He sounded like a schoolteacher: Liquor’s permitted on holidays.

  She asked, What if there’s a Q.C. there? On the island? Or a federal judge? Or the Solicitor General?

  —A good reputation gave me no leverage at all when my wife left. To hell with the Solicitor General.

  She stood up in her place laughing.

  —Why would you do it, Murray? Why would you fucking well do it, mate? Do you love me or something?

  The idea tickled her so much that she couldn’t stop an automatic laughter rising in her, gushing out.

  —Yes, I believe I do.

  Everyone was certainly speaking loudly on the terrace of the Cosmopolitan, though she was aware now that they were not loud in the way she was.

  —And will we have children? Eh, Murray? Will we have children, mate?

  She had turned cruel and she wanted to rout him. She wanted to make his eyes slew sideways. She wanted him to gallop away, back to the legal secretaries in their runless pantyhose. But his eyes took hers on. He wasn’t going to be thrown off by her loud voice and the attention of the other coffee drinkers, who were saying, Isn’t that the woman … ?

  —I don’t go as far as children, Kate. One thing at a time. It’s hard enough getting used to things the way they are.

  Since he couldn’t be stampeded, she sat down again.

  Now she realized she had an opiate of her own; something to fight her parents over. They were edgy about Murray’s proposal, as if it was up to them. Kate Gaffney senior had this idea, from his behavior on the night, that he was some wild man. She kept asking how it would all affect the divorce settlement? She knew Mr. Andrew Kozinski was already talking to tame canon lawyers with a view to divorce and an annulment on the grounds of deficient consent.

  Joke stuff, as Uncle Frank had always said. She wondered whose consent it was that the canon lawyers would find deficient?

  She told her mother she didn’t want a settlement, and her mother argued that the time would come when she would, so that in the end Kate had the chance to bay at the ceiling over her mother’s stupidity. Mrs. Kate Gaffney née O’Brien: consistent excellence at passionately misjudging the issue.

  Through conversations the others had, Kate heard that Uncle Frank had actually been to see Murray.

  —A decent man, said the not-so-Reverend Frank. A decent man. And there’s the question as to whether you really want your daughter to take the charity of the Kozinskis for the residue of her life?

  —But she bore him children! cried Mrs. Kate Gaffney, and realizing what had been said, drowned in tears.

  Kate paid for her own ticket, and one morning she and Murray took off strapped side by side, wheeling over that Botany Bay renowned in convict songs, nosing forth over that most dazzling misnomer: the Pacific. They traveled at the front of the plane, and both of them drank crazily, Murray doing her the favor of matching her frenzy. They hurled two Armagnacs in on top of everything else. A chauffeured car took them from Nandi to Sigatoka. There a launch with a cocktail bar met them, and they were ferried out across a withering blue glare of ocean, the sea’s uppercut complementing the sky’s overarm haymaker. Kate insisted on sitting in the stern, her blouse pulled low on her shoulders as if this were a kissing sun rather than a brutish one.

  As he had promised Murray had reserved her a separate room. Not simply a room however. It was what they called a cabana, a thatched roof, air-conditioned hut with a living room and a bedroom, all looking out at an ultramarine sea. In the living room she and Murray drank together before and then after dinner. For by that hour of the night they did not trust themselves to the public scrutiny of the bar, or of the band of sweating Melanesian musicians. Here in the living room and in the bedroom is where they coupled, hectic and sweating, punishing each other, gouging out pleasure. Not certain whether it was transport or punishment they were seeking, punishment certainly coming into play once their sunburns began to bloom.

  With a lawyer’s certainty that things came to litigation in the end, especially if the Kozinskis were involved, Murray commuted from his cabana to hers. He showered for example in his own. He went back there early in the morning to try to impose on his sheets what looked like the indentation of a single, virtuous man.

  He was very muscular, she had noticed even in her stupor. More so than Paul Kozinski.

  Murray blamed himself, but all the experts said that in the tropics it took only half an unwary day to induce third degree burns. She had strung together many unwary days. Pretending to block the sun out with a raised hand and reading nothing at all, she sat by the lagoon with a book. Once she went out with him in the stern of an aluminum boat and waited near naked while he dived briefly. When he surfaced she had become ill from heat stroke and was shivering. The liquor had pr
obably dried up the nutrients in her skin in any case. One Sydney doctor would ultimately and sagely tell her so.

  Fijian boatmen carried her to her cabana on a stretcher. She lay shivering in a blaze of heat. At first she felt too ill to appreciate anything except the grateful pain, as the flesh of her shoulders howled and blistered and then shrank, becoming black, sloughing. Later it would seem so trite, such an unworthy gesture to her children. But for the moment she was pitiably satisfied.

  She could read the silliness of what she had done however in the bemused faces of Indian doctors as she wafted in and out of a conscious state in hospital in Suva.

  Murray stayed on with her, though the time of his holiday was over. When she was well enough to travel, they dressed her shoulders, and Murray took her home. He knew what pills to give her if she had trouble. He knew that she was not to drink liquor on the plane.

  In Australian terms it was a short flight and she was full of tranquilizer and opiates for it. The Gaffneys had an ambulance waiting for her at Sydney Airport.

  They never thought as much of Murray after that. For Uncle Frank had become too busy with Mrs. Kearney and her affairs to stand up for Murray’s cause again.

  Twenty-three

  RUSHING TO TOWN with news of Burnside’s injury, wanting to be fast to save Chifley from Gus’s mercy, she careered all over the red dirt road, dragging the russet bottom of Gus’s ocean behind her in a cloud. Rattling over bullbars, opening and closing gates, restless and competent. So many saltbush miles to the frontage road, to the final gate. She felt that she had been so long cloistered from the normal offices of civil life that she wondered in what language she would speak to the police or the ambulance people. She would open her mouth and Aramaic might come out.

  A band of cloud in the west had flattened the declining sun to a molten ingot. The world was full of still light. Light which waited upon an event. Something abominable was growling across the slant of the light. The sky descended to suck her up. She drove fast to evade it. Top gear. Seventy-five miles an hour and in something like terror. Rattling over culverts. The shadow of the sky passed over the windscreen and darkened her hands on the steering wheel.