A Woman of the Inner Sea (37 page)

She was somehow tickled by his mixture of hard monetary advice and moral hauteur. She let him stroke her frazzled hair.

—I will marry you at any stage. Nothing that has happened to you frightens me away.

—That’s a boast, she said, and fell asleep.

She woke in the afternoon and Murray was gone. But Uncle Frank was sitting on a chair on the left side of her bed. From a small radio in his lap came the static of a race meeting turned down low. An Australian voice with that peculiar adenoidal twang of racing announcers was recounting the finishing order of horses Uncle Frank had now been forbidden to place bets on.

He saw her and seemed slightly embarrassed to be caught at his passion like this. He switched the radio totally down but not off.

He said, There’s a three-year-old, Diamontina. I tell you, it’s going to be one of those wonder horses. They’ve got it set to emerge in the spring carnival. Next Melbourne Cup, Kate, they’ll have to put a truck on its back to stop it. It’s a beautiful beast. Put some money on for me, Kate, if I happen to be unavailable for the purpose myself.

He laughed but his eyes were narrowing in a way which had nothing to do with hilarity. He was measuring her, as he’d measured her every day since their reunion.

He came to his conclusions and rose and went to the door where his airline bag waited. He unzipped it and produced a bottle. It was a vodka bottle, full, and it produced fear in her. Ah, she thought, he has drunk or lost or broken my bottle and now intends to pass off a substitute.

But the one he held up was the one from the house. She recognized the unforgettable tear in the label.

—I kept this at home. Faithfully, Kate. As requested.

The memory of the request gagged him for a moment. But swallowing he resumed.

—I took it out one night from the cabinet, for reasons to do with a kind of nostalgia, and I stared it hard in the eye and I noticed a yellowish tinge which didn’t seem right at all for vodka. I am after all a publican, they tell me. So I have this friend, a chemist with the police …

Another client of Uncle Frank’s talents of condolence. Or else a customer of the O’Brien-Kearney Starting Prices ménage.

—He says there’s a solution in this vodka of some great thumping amount of something called Vallergan. If you took two mild slugs of this vodka, Kate, you would be asleep within ten minutes, and you would sleep for ten hours or so. Mark what I’m saying. It’d be fanciful to say that this bottle was poisoned, Kate. But it was certainly heavily doctored.

At this news she felt the near-dead glands of her curiosity come to a peculiar chemical life. This was a strangely painful and delicious revival.

—Who? she asked. It was so hard but intriguing to believe in.

Uncle Frank shook his head, as if he were the one most afraid of knowing.

—It was hard enough telling you any of this, Kate, without saying who. But it does tell you something, doesn’t it? That you are free of blame. There are all sorts of stories, Kate, about your husband being overextended. He’s been on with that woman perhaps as long as three years, and something about her must have given him delusions. He financed all those malls in Southern California, and put up properties here at inflated valuation as security. You know the phrase
heavily geared?
Your husband has liquidity problems. That’s the background landscape, Kate, to what I’m going to say now. Two incomplete Kozinski Constructions development sites have had fires. While you were out on the road. Out of our midst …

Uncle Frank put the vodka on the bedside table, and the radio. Abandoning horseflesh for the day. Somewhere perhaps faithful servants were taking bets on behalf of himself and Mrs. Kearney. No, she had a sense of the hollowness of the man. He’d been
closed down. But listen, she told herself. Listen. Come back to the question. It’s not his level of operations that’s the question at the moment.

—Remember, said Uncle Frank, how on the night he yelled,
Why weren’t you here?
He said,
Your car’s here. Why weren’t you?
And everyone forgave him because of the terrible time, Kate. But there is a device now, Kate, utterly combustible, which you can put in electric boxes if you have a mind to. Expensive, it overrides the circuit breakers. It causes arcing. It produces a merry bloody combustion.

Drugs did not confuse her now. She understood the reasoning. Since it had a familiar feel to her, it was clear that in some ways she had always understood it.

—The only thing in his favor is that he wanted you to go off without any pain.

—Aaaaaah, she said, before taking in more air than she needed. But there was a new and awful confidence in all her functions. As Chifley had given the certainty of breath, Uncle Frank had given her the certainty and high natural chemistry of hate.

Yet he had his hands up now, counseling against too strenuous a use of it.

—He’s in utter hell. Your successor in his arms, Kate, is said to be unhappy on two fronts: his drinking and the threat of his fall. And she’s not an evil woman, though it would be better if she were. And she wonders why he can’t be happy, apart of course from his loss. She’s told friends that she admires him for the intensity of his grief. But she knows it’s more than intensity, more than average, even for such a non-average loss. She knows there’s something grandly wrong with it. And so do you now. We can leave him to it, Kate. We can watch him die and go to hell.

She found herself half out of bed. One leg, limp as string, was searching for the floor.

—I want to see a chemical report, she said. She suspected the one done by Uncle Frank’s friend. Not in itself, but in its informality. She wanted a printout.

—I want a proper analysis done.

—Sure. We’ll send it to a commercial lab.

She groaned and shook her head. The weight of something new. It
did
need to be painfully accommodated now. She had not thrown her children away, as the old version told her. The point of
the question,
Why weren’t you here?
had been reversed. She had not thrown her children away. They had been snatched. This unfamiliar equation made her sit up, chatter, cover her eyes. She could feel the strain in her skull. It was not the blessed gravity of air she stood to lose, but the gravity of blame.

Since loss and the drugs had so dried her out from the teeth down to the pit of the stomach that he could not understand what she was saying, Uncle Frank went and got her tea. She was asking, as it turned out, Who did it for Paul Kozinski?

Not the doping of the vodka: he had the stomach for that. Who put the arcing device in place?

Asking, but she knew the answer. Burnside. She was already used to vengefulness, it was as if she’d always lived with it. She wished she’d known all this on the day Burnside suffered. She wished Chifley had really struck, clawed Burnside’s guts out and strewn them across the bed of the sea.

When the tea came and she unlocked her tongue from her palate with a quick scalding mouthful, she asked, Are they open on the weekend?

—Who is that?

Uncle Frank seemed to be secretly listening again now to the fluttering and twittering voices of the tuned-down radio; for the signal that they were at the barrier for the next. It couldn’t be so. Though it would be in his nature to attend godlike with equal ear upon the flippant and the barbaric.

—The chemical labs, said Kate. The chemical labs.

She had made the words so precisely. The
l
and the
b
.

—Well, that’s an idea, Uncle Frank conceded. He took his attention right away from the radio and turned fully to her. He said he’d see to it.

—Don’t humor me, she told him.

—No. No. But I’ll check.

Kate, not being able to calculate what Burnside is owed, is soothed somewhat by Uncle Frank’s news: not only does Burnside walk with a stick, this taking the sting out of all his threat and all his manner, but he is as good as neutered too. She does not know if this last news is reliable, or if Uncle Frank has made it up to cosset her. But to have lost her signed release forms twice, she thinks, must be a torment to Burnside, and she takes satisfaction from it.

And then above all the walking with a stick. Murray has verified that for her. An enforcer with an inability to enforce. She savors this as she waits for the vodka to be analyzed, and for the chemical report to be made.

By contrast she knows that Paul Kozinski must be exactly punished, and she will apply herself to that question when the results arrive at her bedside.

So while she waits for the chemical analysis, Murray takes a day from work, collects her from the sanatorium and brings her to McCarr’s Creek, an arm of Pittwater. Waters familiar to the
Vistula
. But Murray has taken her on board a more modest boat today, one belonging to a friend. Thirty-two-footer. Very manageable. He uses the donkey engine to get them away from their mooring, and then he cuts it and hoists a foresail. It is wonderful, she thinks, how a little boat pitches so honestly in a slight swell with the breeze astern. How cleanly. She notices how delighted Murray is that she raises her chin to the sun. As if he thinks that, even though she knows now not to give herself up too utterly to that vicious, blazing star, once given a full reprieve she will sometimes risk her face briefly and without fear. Her hair is shampooed, since her view of entitlement to shampoo has been changed by Uncle Frank’s news. On her cheeks sits a mixture of makeup and sun lotion.

So Murray sits at the tiller and feels triumphant. He is aware too how itchy the world is for a photograph of Kate. News editors are utterly sick of the old stills. He relishes the idea that she is safe from cameras here. He has delivered her from the electronic snouts. He glows with frankness and with love.

Provisionally—subject to the chemical analysis—she recognizes this in him and is provisionally pleased. And on the same grounds she accepts the dazzle of these waters where she picnicked with her children and with Burnside and with girls hired by the Kozinskis to please those who would do them favors.

Murray has at home his collection of Paul Kozinski press clippings. He likes to think of each clipping as yet another leaf of the Polish onion boiling free and sloughing away.

The most effulgent recent addition has to do with Queensland, where a former state cabinet minister has told a government inquiry that he received a political gift of $250,000 as reward for
building a bridge specifically to service a Kozinski Development Corporation’s shopping mall. At the time of the exchange of money, the mall had not yet been built, but the Kozinskis were careful planners.

In New South Wales, shamefaced union officials of the kind who sailed aboard the
Vistula
and lunged at the Kozinskis’ proffered girls, had already confessed to extorting gifts of money and kind from Paul Kozinski; and a political donation from Paul Kozinski had been put into the hands of a party official in the expressed hope of favorable decisions in the matter of a marina-hotel development at Tweed Heads.

These admissions have been made before various state and federal inquiries, including the Commission into the Building Industry, whose address Murray keeps close at hand, since there is some talk that Kate might be called as a witness. If so, he would like to mediate.

On top of this, the financial news. Kozinskis,
père et fils
, have had to go into meetings with bankers with a view of restructuring the Kozinski debt. The indignity of these meetings, Murray explains to Kate, is acute, particularly the fact that the press waits gloating at the door for reports.

But both father and son keep a composed demeanor. It is reported around Sydney that Mrs. Kozinski has frequently said that the only people not in trouble now are the Jews. It is Christian recklessness and spaciousness of soul which have brought her husband and her son to troubled times.

They tacked into Jerusalem Bay, where other boats were moored. People were lunching aboard, seated deeply in the stern, passing wine bottles. A woman’s birdlike laughter rose up the cliffs.

—No liquor for us. Though we gave it a shake in Fiji, eh? The hospital staff warned me. It won’t go with your medication.

These were
Vistula
waters also, though Murray could not be expected to know that. Siobhan, drifting in the water, had looked up at this stratified bush and said, Where are they going?

Murray went down into the galley to cut chicken up, as Kate used to do on the Kozinski craft. He kept an eye on her up through the hatch.

—Something I ought to tell you. Nothing to be concerned about. Burnside has taken an action against Gus Schulberger.
Some form of criminal assault to do with negligent care of animals. A nineteenth-century Act of Parliament with twentieth-century amendments.

When she looked stricken he ran up the companionway.

—No court will give him a judgment. Honestly.

But the writ itself was an abomination.

—You told me to make a straight settlement with the Kozinskis?

—Well, that was personal advice. Though it’s not bad professional advice either. Take what they offer, while they have it. Sign their papers and forget them.

But of course Murray did not understand the size of their ill will, and how unforgettable Paul was.

—I want to make my own document. Could you draw up a document for me?

Of her own will and her own drafting, she wanted to hand over to the Kozinskis the assent Burnside had been neutered trying to gouge out of her.

She said, Very important. Very important.

—I can’t draw up a document for you. I’m too close to you, Kate. It could be challenged at a later date. Undue influence. After all, you’re in a sanatorium. And I’m showing kindnesses to you. That’s interpreted one way by us, but in court it looks like a plot. Besides, if I drew up a document like that, it would finish me with your parents.

She looked at him in a studied way, hoping there was a tremendous weight of demand in her eyes, like the weight of grievance in Connie Murchison’s.

—Well, I could send someone independent to talk to you and draw up a document like the one you suggest …