A Woman of the Inner Sea

by Thomas Keneally

  Send Kate to David Jones’s department store on the corner of Elizabeth and King Streets to buy a present, at an end of a frightful year, for Mrs. Kate Gaffney’s fifty-seventh birthday.

  Follow her as she ascends the escalator, making for the gallery on the top floor. She steps off at the second, amongst the couturier clothing, and comes close to colliding with Perdita Krinkovich.

  With all else to distract her, this was the first time that it struck Kate: Perdita coveted her name. Kozinski. Kate was surprised to find herself loath to give it up. There was flesh invested in that name. She had paid for the stretch of desert it stood for.

  A terrible meeting, both in the same instant coming eye to eye, both parties bereft of a moment to prepare themselves.

  Kate saw Perdita’s mouth open and the lower lip draw back ferally. She saw too that Perdita was well pregnant, in the phase they called showing.

  That is my child, she thought. She has captured my child.

  She staggered sideways, in the direction of the handbag counter. If she got her balance back she might flee. But there was a chance she would attack Perdita.

  —Oh Jesus! she heard Perdita murmur.

  Paul Kozinski’s lover turned and began to hobble away amongst the counters. Slotting herself in athletically between the shoppers, women older and younger, she wanted to lose herself behind their average flesh and the padded shoulders of their coats.

  Kate was startled enough not to pursue. Besides, humanity and a sense of sisterhood asserted itself. Behind her stood the down escalator. Briskly she excused her way past the plump companionable women who wanted to descend two by two, talking as they went. Women with the spaciousness of their achieved motherhoods.

  Downstairs was a doorman the store still used, even in hard times, in imitation of Harrod’s. She told the man she needed a taxi at once.

  —They’ve just taken my mother to hospital.

  He took her through the melee of other women awaiting taxis.

  —Excuse us, ladies. I’m sure you don’t mind … this woman has an emergency.

  She was fortunate that the cab driver was a Korean. He understood enough to know there was an urgency, but not enough to hear the doorman’s lackey blather about hospitals. He forced his way through the traffic of Elizabeth Street, driving in the swashbuckling mode of his race. He jousted his way up Parramatta Road, making for the address in Abbotsford which she had given him. Uncle Frank’s place.

  Mrs. Prendergast opened the door to Kate. She had been the not-so-Reverend Frank’s housekeeper for seventeen years, this thin woman who shared none of her employer’s vices.

  She knew Kate at once, and went on calling her Miss Gaffney.

  As she led her down the hallway, she turned to Kate and her eyes filled with tears.

  —It’s dreadful what has happened to Father Frank.

  —He’s taken it well. He says he’s very comfortable.

  —I know. He says it.

  Kate could see that she would have to talk to the woman for a time, to console her.

  Mrs. Prendergast said, If they seize his property to pay tax, this house will go and I’ll be on the street.

  She had a memory of being destitute, after her husband’s death in 1959. A repeat episode was the dread of her life, and Uncle Frank her only guarantee against it.

  —It won’t happen. My father says that if they sell, he’ll buy.

  Though she had not heard her father say this, she must remind him that it should be so.

  —He’ll buy it for Uncle Frank.

  Mrs. Prendergast was rendered ecstatic so easily.

  —Oh, everyone knows Mr. Gaffney is a saint.

  —That’s right. A very loyal man. Could I see Uncle Frank’s study? My father is handling Uncle Frank’s affairs. He’s given me a list of documents he’ll need …

  Mrs Prendergast would open any door as long as it was for Jim Gaffney, the saint, the deus ex machina of her life’s history.

  Kate entered Uncle Frank’s study alone.

  There was a long ovoid mirror inset above Uncle Frank’s mantelpiece. It was familiar to her from her childhood, from the days Uncle Frank had the Gaffney family here to his off-duty house, where he could operate free of the scrutiny of his parishioners. To the side of its beading sat a little block of varnished wood which seemed like a small blemish in the general carpentry. She knew from having pressed it in childhood that something as magical as a small compartment lay behind the mirror. She had been so delighted to find it at the age of eleven. A secret compartment. Even in Abbotsford, New South Wales. It had meant that the real world and the world of secret places encountered only in film and television were continuous at Uncle Frank’s house and that drama, which at that age she thought was confined to another hemisphere, was therefore everywhere.

  This slight nodule of wood was still easy to find, and locating it she pressed it, and the mirror swung as if on gimbals just as it had twenty years past. There was revealed—as there had been that day in her childhood—a clutter of dusty papers. Perhaps they were precisely the same papers which had been there when she was eleven. And at one end, at the corner of the cavity, a large revolver lying upside down along its barrel, butt against the wall. Beside it was a dusty little box which said .32 caliber and she picked the box up and rattled it and found it was near full.

  She knows by instinct that there is no documentation for this weapon. No means that it can be—as the cop shows have it—traced to Uncle Frank.

  It was very likely that Uncle Frank had acquired this weapon from some sergeant of detectives whom he had consoled in bereavement.

  Kate tried to pick the gray-blue weapon up by its brown-hatched handle. She lifted delicately at first, and failed to move it. She tried it again with a greater firmness of grip. It was terribly heavy in the hand. She walked up and down the study, training with it, so that it would come to feel a more accustomed weight. As she had been taught to do by the cinema, she opened the weapon and inspected the chambers. Four of them were full. Surely, she thought, this could not mean that Uncle Frank has used two?

  Though very dusty, a fact which strangely consoled Kate, the weapon seemed well oiled. It had the efficient look of something that would work.

  Uncle Frank’s revolver fits precisely into her office handbag, though it makes the sides bulge and may stain the satin lining.

  There is nowhere in a city that one can test-fire a revolver without drawing attention. But she has emptied the chambers and fired the mechanism. Six authoritative, businesslike cracks. The mechanics of it sound and feel very heavy, suitably potent. She has been satisfied and she is confident therefore at this hour.

  An evening hour.

  She sits in a cappuccino bar opposite Paul’s ocher-walled villa. She intends to wait in the street if the coffee bar closes. It does not prove necessary. A little after seven Paul comes home to the mother of his potential third child. From within the Jaguar he opens the ocher garage door, and it slides up with a ceremonial obeisance.

  He does not move the car on and under cover until the door has risen with robotic slowness out of sight and into its socket beneath the ceiling.

  This is the point at which to greet him. Seeing her coming he would not wind down the window, or at least could not be depended on to. She would shoot him through the window. She would load all the chambers. It would be frightful for Perdita, but people lived beyond the frightful. Not as frightful as his way with children. And even if grief consumed you, it was still a lifetime’s work to attend to all that must be attended to.

  Her excuse to Murray, to cover this vigil as earlier ones she has maintained into the meat of the evening, is that she has been to a screening. Murray never displays narrative curiosity: What was it about? He only wants to know was it good or bad? A cricketer’s question. In or out? Won or drawn?

  She was sleeping very soundly now, with confused dreams but without medication.

  The evening she intended to finish Paul, he was lat
e home. They closed down the coffee shop around her and she was reduced to sauntering up and down the block. She studied the pictures in the window of the real estate agent and had it confirmed to herself that Sydney was an expensive city. She read news posters. Her devices were those one uses when waiting on the other party to an assignation. Sheltering in the shadow of spotted gums, she smelt the tang of dog’s piss from around the base of the trunks. She waited like a lover for the unutterable second, the instant of encounter which would never but inevitably come.

  From shadows she sees the Jaguar come home toward its ocher walls. It halts at the curb, its burgundy hindquarters still stuck out in the stream of traffic which would never dare strike anything so impeccable.

  She walks out toward the Jaguar with her hand in her open bag and around the pistol. She wants to resemble a woman fumbling for makeup in her purse, her posture credible and nothing to cause alarm. From behind, from the darker shadows of the trees, she feels someone tug at her left elbow. The tugger is a large man about her own age. By the street lighting she can see that he wears an ordinary suit and a blue tie and has a preventive look in his eye. Looking from him to the Jaguar, she can see that Paul Kozinski’s smooth electronic persuasion has made his garage door slide right up. But two other large men in suits have moved in on the car and are hammering with casual power on its window. Faced with them, even Paul would feel compelled to wind the thing down.

  The man at her elbow introduced himself. He was a Commonwealth police inspector named Winter. Whereas the two speaking to Paul were from the New South Wales Fraud Squad. Or so he told her. So that Paul had sinned against at least two jurisdictions, state and federal. And domestic too, she could have reminded them.

  They let Paul drive in under his door, and they entered the garage, attendant on either side of the car.

  The inspector of Commonwealth police told her, We have a search warrant. It’ll be messy, Mrs. Kozinski. Why don’t you let me get you a taxi?

  She brought forth Uncle Frank’s revolver. The man closed one eye.

  —I was going to shoot him with this thing.

  He took it gently from her hands. After unhinging it, he looked in the chambers and then at the wall against which the revolving mechanism clicked into place. He pointed at this wall, though she could not see anything in particular.

  —You would have scared him, Mrs. Kozinski, though I think we’ve done a better job. The firing pin’s been taken out of commission. By a professional gunsmith too. Where did you get this?

  —I borrowed it from a friend, said Kate.

  He returned it directly into her handbag.

  —Too much bureaucracy if I took it from you.

  She liked the man. He had a gentle manner. By various movements of his eyebrows, he implied that they had a secret. He might be hell to know if he were forcing a confession from you.

  As she closed her bag, she felt thwarted, and yet re-enamored of Uncle Frank. She felt no crippling disappointment though. Angels had descended from Canberra and Macquarie Street to take over the punishing of Paul Kozinski. Winter was mere chorus when he spoke.

  —Listen, Mrs. Kozinski. He’ll get enough shit from us. Okay?

  He stepped into the street and raised his hand and a cab stopped. Behind her the door in the ocher wall opened, and half a dozen uniform policemen had appeared around the corner and were entering. Perdita Krinkovich was wailing somewhere inside.

  Twenty-six

  IT IS TIME to relinquish our grip on Paul Kozinski. Perhaps Kate is in part appeased by this degree of vengeance. Perhaps we are.

  But if not we might want to forecast that she will write to Perdita. Perdita, soon maybe to be Kozinski. She still lives in the ocher house, even though it is now in the hands of a receiver and in fact belongs more to a merchant bank and to the Australian Taxation Office than to Paul. She writes the letter not from meanness of vision perhaps so much as from the necessity of separating Paul from all life’s staples. In the text of the letter Kate commiserates with Perdita. For Paul Kozinski had complained to the press of police brutality at the time they searched his house. And the proof is that his wife-to-be miscarried with the shock and fear of it all. There are grounds for compassion there.

  Kate has coffee with wan Perdita in the cappuccino place across the road from Paul’s—or the Commonwealth of Australia’s—villa. Paul, though still living at home, goes to court daily. At first Perdita has gone every day with him, but now he has asked her to stay away for her own sake and for his. The court—as Paul understands—is not a place for those who want to show love. It pains him, he tells her, to see her looking so stricken in the visitors’ gallery.

  So she drinks cappuccino with his truest enemy other than himself.

  He stands trial for bribing a cabinet minister, for a series of violations of the Local Government Act, and for contravention of the Land and Environment Act. What was worst for him, Perdita tells Kate, was that he knew it was all just beginning. After the state of New South Wales had finished with him, he would need to appear in a succession of federal courts.

  It is on record that Paul gets five years from the state, and old Mr. Kozinski four years.

  Mrs. Kozinski comforts herself with a novena and tells friends that the Nazis are everywhere and that their spirit lives on. Kozinski Constructions remains in receivership but hopes to trade out.

  The ocher villa is sold for thirty percent less than market value, and Perdita moves to an apartment supplied by Mrs. Kozinski.

  Without telling Mrs. Kozinski, Perdita begins also to attend meals at Murray and Kate’s. Murray praises Kate for her generosity toward her betrayer, though there is a trace of doubt in his eyes as he says it. Wisely he cannot quite believe this is routine kindness, average sisterhood. The doubt becomes more marked when Kate invites Murray’s most outgoing friend, a banker named Ferris, to join them in suppers for four. Perdita, an honest woman, fights Peter Ferris bravely off for some months but succumbs at last. For Ferris is pleasant and untormented, he has earned his money in accredited ways, and no curse of lost children lies over him. Perdita plans to tell Paul only when he has left prison and is in business for himself again.

  Kate visits her uncle at the Central Industrial Prison and talks with him and hears from him the news that she is Queen of Sorrows. Later, in the exercise yard, maybe the not-so-Reverend Frank mentions the matter of Mr. Ferris to Paul Kozinski. Kozinski assaults him with a cricket bat—which happens to be Murray’s weapon of excellence as well. Paul receives another two years for assault. The judge tells him that if he had thought of himself up to now as a white collar criminal, his assault on an older and well-behaved prisoner should shatter his self-delusion.

  That should just about bring this narrative to the rainy night from which the tale began. It is obvious from the poster in the newsagent’s window that Uncle Frank has not passed up the chance for notoriety even from his prison hospital bed. He hopes to be out in a year with good behavior.

  And at least Murray waits at home for Kate, beyond the rain. Kate has reached that illusorily static point appropriate to the closure of a tale.

  We all wish her nothing but well.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  One of Australia’s leading literary figures, Thomas Keneally has won international acclaim with his novels Schindler’s List (winner of the Booker Prize), The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, Confederates, and Gossip from the Forest, among others. His most recent works include the novels The Playmaker (which was adapted for the stage and ran on Broadway), To Asmara, and Flying Hero Class, and two travel books: Now and in Time to Come, about Ireland, and The Place Where Souls Are Born, about the American Southwest. He has served on numerous government councils and commissions in Australia and has taught at universities there and in the United States. Currently he is a Distinguished Professor in the English Department at the University of California, Irvine. Thomas Keneally is married and has two daughters. He divides his time between California and Sydney.

/>