A Family Madness (27 page)

That first.

The following morning Gina did not let him sleep late. She woke him by placing on his bare shoulder one of those frozen plastic containers of coolant people put in their picnic baskets to keep the beer and the meat fresh. They were going picnicking, she told him grimly, even if it cost her her job. She dragged him into the kitchen and showed him what she'd gathered—ham, tomatoes, mozzarella, sundry dips, a barbecued chicken in a foil bag, two beers, a bottle of Frascati. “Well,” he said, “you Dagos know how to put a picnic together.” But he was blind with misery. How could they find their way to a cliff face and force this stuff down their throats? He tried to restrict the time she might demand of him. “Why don't we go up to Springwood at lunchtime?” he suggested.

“Bugger that!” roared Gina, pointing at him. You'd almost believe a curse was in it for him if he didn't go along. “We're going to the beach.”

He groaned. The cement promenades of Bondi rose in his mind.

“Palm Beach,” she said. “You know, there's a lighthouse there. We're going up the lighthouse. Come on, no resistance. You're supposed to be fit, Mr. Delaney.”

It was better than he thought, a clear winter's morning with a sort of frank bland light which didn't suit that species of crucial conversations Steve Mansfield called “deep and meaningfuls.” In the spirit of the enforced expedition to the beach, Gina drove and made careful and polite talk.

When Greg Delaney had driven his adolescent son to Palm Beach on summer Saturdays it had always taken two hot hours or more. Delaney and Gina got there this winter's day in one and saw the whole long strand of ocean beach all but empty under the sun. At the northern end a shred of sand dunes ran toward a great and separate headland, almost its own island, on which the lighthouse stood. Delaney felt an instant wistful urge to climb to it but wasn't sure how you got up there. It was as if Gina had read the guidebook though. She parked on the edge of the dunes, on the inland side, by the great sweep of water named Pittwater after one of those British ministerial Pitts, Delaney wasn't sure which one. “Hands out,” she ordered him as she landed the picnic basket in his arms. She led him off along a narrow stillwater beach, the sand soft, the surf from beyond the dunes resonating in his ears. The Wave, the bloody Wave. It would drown the filament of dunes and lap the sandstone ledges of the headland. To Kabbel therefore all this lovely shore was already done for.

“This is beautiful,” said Gina, walking unevenly beyond the tidemark.

There were fishermen's huts ahead, below the cliffs of Barrenjoey headland, on this back side of Palm Beach. Delaney suspected there weren't many fisherman left in the area and that the shacks were probably leased by trendies from the Eastern Suburbs. Whatever the case, past the first one Gina led him right and up a track fringed with tall boulders, by banksia and vines, acacias and melaleucas, and other arrantly Australian vegetation.

“Ancient,” said Gina. “Ancient country.”

They climbed the uneven sandstone track. Walls of scrub and great boulders did what they liked with the sound of the sea, blunting and slowing it at one bend, bouncing it at them fast at another. Rosellas skittered across their vision, leaving a stain of scarlet and blue. There was no one else there. It was as if the guidebook had promised Gina there would be no one.

The lighthouse seemed smaller when they reached it, but the mouth of Broken Bay immense, and the illimitable coastline swept away northwards. Gina clung to him for a while in case space devoured her. Off among the low salttough bushes sat ledges of sandstone. They were exactly the places to spread a picnic blanket.

Delaney and his wife went looking off in the scrub for the right slab for them. They moved stooped over an overgrown track—the spiny vegetation needled their arms and legs. On their right a fenced grave appeared. Fred Mulhall, born in 1815 in Somerset, made the long interstellar journey to Australia, kept the light on Barrenjoey till the light took him—a bolt of lightning frittering him in the 1880s. His wife was laid with him. Conjugal lessons seemed to be following Delaney even into the bush.

They defused them by sharing a laugh at poor Fred's epitaph.

All ye who come my grave to see
,

Prepare in time to follow me
.

Repent at once without delay
,

For I in haste was called away
.

They found a platform at last, open to the sun and lightly fringed with wax-tongued banksias.

He read the Rugby League news in both
Herald
and
Telegraph
with at last, after weeks of being adrift, some sense that it was—as Danielle had once said—
his
game. In the
Herald
, a piece on Bernie Swift, the Saint George five-eighth. Delaney had once played against him, Metropolitan Catholic Colleges versus Combined High Schools, curtain raiser to Australia versus France at the Sydney Cricket Ground. Swift had had everything then—wonderful understanding with his halfback, could scurry and then open up with a change of pace like a center. Brilliant on the little kick.
So I had the message when I was seventeen that there were blokes better than me. Perhaps I thought the buggers would move to Queensland
. No, what he had thought then, when he was seventeen, was I will learn, I will learn. The sun however spread its consolations across the page. Besides, he had some of his father's tranquillity. When it came to ambition he had not been swallowed whole.

As he found out after eating lunch and urinating grandly like Adam from the edge of the rock, this was Gina's seduction venue as Dyson Engineering had been Stanton's. Delaney was dazed by a full-blooded winter sun, by half a bottle of Frascati, and by an unusual sense of the world being right. Gina moved with that same knockabout gruffness she'd employed to force the picnic on him. She had been sunbathing topless (as her mother had never done in the Mediterranean sunlight), a bathrobe around her thighs. She shifted and laid herself across his lap, and later it occurred to him that if he had not shown any interest she would have lost everything—the day, her pride, her friendly calm—and been forced to hurl the bottle at him and curse and gouge him. He touched her breasts and found her honest moisture nearly without thinking, certainly without thought of the Kabbels and Danielle. What he said after these opening movements wasn't what he meant to say. He tried to assert a sort of fidelity to Danielle, but that didn't come from his mouth. What came from his mouth was, “I'm not out of the Kabbel thing yet.”

She wasn't any fool, he would later tell himself. The “yet” was a dead giveaway, as good as a promise. It was not quite ecstasy up there on the rock platform. It was not intended by Gina for that purpose. It was the meat, bread, and greens of love, meant to build the boy up after too long a time on an alien and overrich diet. It was a negotiation. It made ordinary life more or less possible again.

On the way down the headland she said, “I'm sorry for broadcasting the Hawaiian business to my family.”

The remaining shame of that old misdemeanor crackled across his skin like a failure of warmth. From now on, Mrs. Terracetti would always look at him sideways.

“I don't go around bumping everyone I meet, you know,” he told her, squirming through the powder sand, laden with the basket. “I smoked pot. That brought it on.”

“I'll buy some straightaway,” said Gina solemnly.

“Gay Mansfield wanted me to try her on, and Steve wanted a crack at you. And I knocked them back.”

“Ah,” said Gina, “that's why she told me.”

“
She
told you?”

“She took me aside after the last Cronulla game and said she figured I ought to know. ‘You can't forgive what you don't know,' she told me.”

Gina winked across Pittwater, as if at the pilot of a seaplane which was just rising from the green water. “You shouldn't have knocked Steve back without telling me,” she said. “He isn't a bad-looking fellow.”

Delaney reached the car and rid himself of the burden of the basket. “You know I'll have to see Danielle one more time.

That made Gina solemn. “I suppose so,” she said in the end.

39

F
ROM THE
J
OURNALS OF
S
TANISLAW
K
ABBELSKI
, C
HIEF OF
P
OLICE
, S
TAROVICHE
.
June 20, 1944

First session of Belorussian Central Congress, under Czech cut-glass chandeliers of Minsk Opera. As humiliating as I feared. Oberführer Riese on the gavel. They sit on our faces! Parallels the trouble I have had, being permitted by von Gottberg's people and by lean Kappeler to draft plans to take the countryside back, but being allowed to execute nothing. Am able through my standing as chief of police, Staroviche province, to experiment in my own garden, as it were. Against the tide, terrorist incursions in villages and railway yards in Staroviche province fallen since Easter!

Know Ostrowsky had to submit his speech to von Gottberg's office and that Redich and his papally connected crowd go round muttering that he should have refused. Saw Redich at lunchtime. Explained how Ostrowsky can't win on the matter—has to establish Belorussian Republic before Germans leave Minsk (if, of course, they do). If central government isn't established before Russians come there can be no official government-in-exile; no government to offer the Americans, British, French; no government to return to Belorussia with these potent Allies as they turn against the genuine enemy.

“And,” asks Redich, stating the old problem, “are the Americans likely to respect a head of state who in the Minsk Opera House pledges eternal dedication to Hitler?”

“They'll know he had to, that
that
was written for him. They're realists.”

A consummate conspirator, Redich stooped in front of me and whispered, “A pincer movement is coming in on Vitebsk. Likewise Zhlobin. We should hear the gunfire by tomorrow. German intelligence says the Russian forces are highly mechanized now with vehicles supplied by dear old Henry Ford and the cripple Roosevelt. You see,
that
alliance is stronger than some people think.”

Afternoon session, Ostrowsky showed true political style, got Kappeler and Riese on wrong foot to my considerable delight. He rose and made speech of his own, saying that the Central Council had now finished all it could do within the limits of power permitted it by General von Gottberg. Therefore intended to resign and call on the convention, the thousand patriots sitting in Opera stalls, to elect new president.

Riese jumped like a shot rabbit, knew that Ostrowsky's resignation would reduce the convention to factional chaos and von-Gottberg would blame him for letting it get out of hand. He ran to Kappeler and began muttering in his ear like a penitent. Uproar of conversation in body of theater. Ostrowsky went serenely back to his seat beside old Stanek Stankievich in the front row of stalls, only a few meters from where I sat in aisle seat second row. I was placed, because of seat on aisle, to rise and walk solemnly round front of stalls and publicly urge Ostrowsky not to abandon us to the factions, but felt that he might not want me to do that. He looked like a man in good control of things. Saw him nod and smile moderately at something old Stanek said. Saw also Redich leaning over to speak in ear of Abramtchik, head of papal gang. Abramtchik hands clasped, imperceptibly waving an index finger. No, he was saying, no, we don't have numbers. To my surprise, he rose, climbed the stairs to the stage, whispered briefly to Kappeler and Riese, and while Oberführer Riese punished the table with his gavel, came to the microphone. Had to admire him. He too, like Ostrowsky, acting on political instinct. It was unthinkable, he said, that the father of the Belorussian Central Council should now, as a Belorussian Republic appeared to be a possibility, remove himself from the leadership. He understood what pains and stresses had operated on this great patriot during the past six months, but he urged him to take the burden on his shoulders once more. He called on the delegates to elect Ostrowsky president of the convention by acclamation.

The acclamation was enormous. Delegates climbed on their chairs and wept and shouted, reached toward Ostrowsky as if they wanted him to cure them of blindness. Part of their ecstasy was their knowledge that Ostrowsky had demonstrated to the Germans how absolutely they needed him if they were to hold or, at the worst, ultimately return to Belorussia.

Riese tried to get control back by chiding delegates for forgetting to send loyal greetings on occasion of Herr Hitler's fifty-sixth birthday last April. Amid gales of laughter and the singing of birthday songs, greetings were moved and carried. In the afternoon, we began to form committees. At one end ballet rehearsal room, I chaired or more exactly briefed an informed relocation and security committee on draft plans. At four o'clock heard the first thunder from beyond the Beresina, but such was our absorption in our work and such the general noisiness of Minsk that we did not at first recognize it for what it was.

Tonight late summoned to Ostrowsky's suite. Since Danielle and children moved up here he has the courtesy not to drop in at an hour which might disturb their sleep. Conditions at the Europa already bad enough. Delegates are three to a room and rowdy. Not content to drink, shout, play cards behind closed doors, they leave the doors open, maybe hoping that the racket and the sight of their tumbled bed linen will attract other roisterers in. Worse still, if they want to sing they come into corridors to do it. No riot from Ostrowsky's suite though, and door closed. Knocked, and admitted by one of Ostrowsky's secretaries, wearing the new uniform of Defense Force, very like the SS uniform but the red double-barred cross on the collar. That another cause for complaint: that SS will when it suits them try to subsume the Bela Rus Defense Force straight into their ranks.