A Woman of the Inner Sea (10 page)

She sat there inspecting her hand. She still wore her wedding ring and, from habit, an ancestral piece of Polish jewelry which had survived World War II and which Mrs. Kozinski had given her in the first flush of the engagement with Paul.

It struck her as she looked at these gifts from the Kozinskis,
mère et fils
, that Paul could with plausible justice have said to her,
You find time to dine with your father, quicker than you do to dine with me
.

It hadn’t occurred to her till now that perhaps she should have
considered working in that business, that industry which, whatever you said about the people in it, was a
genuine
industry. There were gifts she had which could equally be applied there. So she had the stratagem available to her of becoming her husband’s left or right hand? Indispensable and unsackable not only because she once signed trustee documents in some lawyer’s office. Indispensable in the strict terms of daily business.

It was an idea—at least—to give room to. She gave some room to it. Then it came to her with a little surprise that her father had been at the telephone for a long time. She looked up to the bar, where calls were normally taken, but her father was not there. The maître d’ saw her confusion and came across to her. He also was a Slovenian masquerading to be either an Italian or a Hungarian, only so that he did not have to waste time explaining to ignorant clients where Slovenia was, and he did not want to describe himself as Yugoslav.

—Mrs. Kozinski, your father has taken the telephone call in my office.

She watched the office door for a time, but Jim Gaffney did not re-emerge. The manager reappeared and offered her a liqueur, but she declined.

At last Jim came from the office and crossed the floor to her. He looked stricken and more wizened than he had earlier. There were vacancies beneath his cheekbones where solidity should be. He began to speak to the Slovenian maître d’, who kept nodding as if saying, Of course, any arrangement you want to make.

What entitled Jim to such serious obedience?

That settled, Jim approached her.

—Kate, we have to go.

She asked him what was the matter. He said it was best not to talk there. Standing, urged upright by his hands, she said, It’s mother, isn’t it?

He seemed more confused still, as if his exact anxiety had been forgotten and replaced by numbness.

—Mother? No, it’s nothing like that.

But then he waved this aside with his hand.

—It’s something. But we can’t talk here.

At that point she saw the line of his mouth threaten to crumble. She walked with him amongst the tables, making for the door.

—It
is
mother, she said.

—No! I told you. We have to go, Kate.

They had to leave this bright place full of easeful people. They had been disqualified from it.

—Then it’s Paul. It’s Paul! Tell me! He’s had an accident! With that tart Perdita!

—Kate, come with me. We’ll talk in the car.

—The children. My God, it’s Siobhan and Bernard!

—Stop talking like that! he told her, and in his desperation he had genuine command. Everyone is all right.

But he was evasive about the
everyone
. She could tell it infallibly. The children might be all right, but not
everyone
was.

—Mother.

—For sweet Jesus’ sake, Kate, stop saying it. Come with me.

She would always remember afterwards that at that time she had
had
the image of Paul and Mrs. Krinkovich dying together in something that involved an impact—a limousine which collided with a fuel tanker, for example; or a plane crash, as rare as air disasters were meant to be in Australia’s kindly skies.

—I won’t go to the car until you
do
tell me, said Kate on the pavement. I’ll get a cab and go and check on everyone.

Jim’s face threatened to collapse in upon itself even further. He pleaded.

—Please, Kate. I’ll tell you everything once we get to the car.

It was parked outside a boutique run by a Hungarian couturier whom Kate had met at parties. Jim Gaffney seemed to have trouble opening the vehicle. His keys stabbed at metal.

—Do you want me to come round there and help you?

—No, no. But if you don’t mind, when the door’s opened, I won’t come round and hand you in.

At last Jim managed the task, and his door opened and the central locking was released. Kate got in her side. Her father seemed to be using the steering wheel to keep himself upright in his seat.

—Let me drive, she insisted.

—No, no, no, he muttered in an attenuated voice. He already knew, as incapacitated as he was, that soon she would be left limbless, a woman stripped of everything, and every vital function turned to ice.

—Well, turn the key and tell me, she demanded.

He started the car and pulled out, circling the block to come to
New South Head Road, the artery which fed all Sydney’s fancy Eastern Suburbs.

—Well? she asked, after he had negotiated the right turn safely.

But she did not press it, because she could see that he should not be pressed, and she made a decision to submit her anguish to his apparently greater pain.

—A moment, he kept saying. The moment lasted quite a time. Through Kings Cross and down William Street, where the sixteen-year-old tarts wore crotch-high leather skirts and high heels this night of wind and squalls.

It lasted too through a right turn from William Street, past the Domain, the back of the Mitchell Library, the tunnel under Macquarie Street. Breaking from that tunnel was always a moment of exaltation to Sydney-siders, for the Harbour presented itself, Sydney Cove. Where the ceramic sails of Sydney’s Opera House were visible.

There were dangers here too, because lanes came together. The extraordinary Harbour Bridge was a mechanism of annoyance for drivers, and they showed it by behaving recklessly on all its approaches. Where the lanes merged then, a large truck loaded with vegetables came raging into Jim Gaffney’s track, coming close to obliterating the front end of his Jaguar. It was in fact so close that Jim braked and began to weep and say, Oh God, oh God.

The vegetable truck was disappearing into the further tunnel which would take it right onto the bridge. Its driver would not know, Kate was sure, that he had unmanned Jim Gaffney, creator of the hypercinema.

Jim merely sat panting over the steering wheel, and other drivers made annoyed swerves to bypass him. Shaking his head to clear his vision, he hit the hazard light button.

—You can’t stay here, Kate reminded him.

And then Jim dragged his attention to Kate. And he told her.

N
EARLY THREE MONTHS have passed. The injuries have healed and the fever has burned out, and the Black Virgin of Czestochowa no longer occupies her hospital room and upbraids her. Her shoulders have healed to a pink lumpiness. A surgeon has been to her and canvassed the option of skin grafts.

Murray has agreed to collect her at noon and take her to her parents’ flat above the harbor. Jim Gaffney let her nominate Murray, knowing that if his wife Kate O’Brien and he came to collect her it would all grow to be fussy.

She had with her in her hospital room a full bottle of vodka, its label torn. The only relic of her house. On the night, a young man wearing some sort of civil mercy uniform—State Emergency, Fire Brigade—had made his way a little distance down the corridor and, probing round the corner, had grabbed the thing, brought it out, and in the end pushed it into her hands. Stupefied, she had carried it away from the scene. At her parents’ place it had stood on a table by her bed. The Gaffney parents could not bear to mix the bottle in amongst the other liquors in their cocktail cabinet, even if Kate had permitted them to. It also seemed wrong to think of pouring it out or throwing it away. It had the sort of holiness which attaches to unlikely survival.

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.