A Woman of the Inner Sea (9 page)

—There aren’t any precedents for any of us, Murray. We discover the precedents as we go.

In a mode for departure, Murray still kept deciding to delay. He began to gesture toward the rubber bushes, the tea tree, the liana, the palms which cascaded down the slope from the road to the Kozinskis’ front garden, embowering the bridge with their fronds. He was attempting to work up a theorem out of them.

—I’d better get back and sober up. In any case the technicians will come and fix the phone.

He did manage to convey, almost despite himself, that once he sobered up and the phone was fixed he would not have any future need to expose his grief to any outsider.

Bernard awoke, and Kate made him a sandwich. In strengthening light, perhaps she could open the doors to the sun deck soon and let the sea air discreetly in.

But then thunderheads bulked up around the headland again.

The telephone rang and it was Jim Gaffney, master of the hypercinema.

—I was thinking. Your mother is going to the ballet with her group.

For Mrs. Gaffney had become in middle life a balletophile, if not -maniac. She had discovered the work of a Sydney choreographer called Graeme Murphy, and had taken to the dance with very nearly the same degree of loyalty she displayed to her brother, the fallen priest.

—I believe Paul is away in Brisbane, said Jim, always better at intelligence than anyone ever expected. I think this is a good chance for us to have dinner.

—I’d have to see how Denise is placed.

—You ought to get a live-in nanny.

—I’m a professional mother, as everyone kindly points out. I don’t need a nanny yet.

—What if we went to Bilson’s and looked down on Sydney Cove? asked Jim. Where it all began, eh? Phillip and the convicts. Father and daughter?

—Have you been talking to Uncle Frank?

—Well, I don’t have to talk to Uncle Frank to work out what’s happening.

—I don’t need comforting.

Jim said, not quite plausibly, I’m the one who needs comfort. I haven’t seen my daughter sufficiently.

She made a number of excuses. For this was supposed to be the afternoon for the dancing lesson. There were balletomanes in this household too. She wanted to be home for them when Denise brought them back from their class. However, since they had colds, she doubted she would send them to the dancing class.

She asked Jim to wait a moment. On the rule of thumb that if the child was sick, she would say,
No, I want you to stay with me
, she went and asked Siobhan whether she would like Denise to come and stay with her that evening.

Siobhan did not even take her eyes from the page on which she was drawing a dancer, yet another one.

—No worries, she told Kate.

The idiom of the Avalon playground was there.
No worries
.

Bernard had just woken and had overheard the question. He sat
up, greeting the idea by clapping both hands in front of his face. A memorable gesture, to do with life’s abundance.

We can indulge and find outright poignant Kate’s minor flush of jealousy. It had been apparent for some years that Denise the baby-minder was not merely a substitute Kate. She was autonomous in the children’s order of things.

It worried Kate that envy arose even so minutely. The chance was inherent of slipping into the habit of resentment, of growing up to become Mrs. Kozinski senior, whose life consisted of the bitter assertion of the primacy of her own vision of Paul; of pushing the idea that nobody understood Paul as she did, that in connecting with Kate he had placed himself in the hands of a base interpreter.

Kate went back to the telephone and told Jim that—dependent on Denise being free—she could meet him. She felt like something quiet and less special-occasion than Bilson’s, though.

He nominated a restaurant in Double Bay, one of his favorites though not one of hers. He liked hearty meals. He was not an enthusiast of nouvelle cuisine.

—Shall I send a car? he asked.

But then she remembered what had happened in the Forest last time, and couldn’t accommodate any more misunderstandings of that nature.

—No, I’ll drive myself.

As was usual, he wanted to dine early. It was his working-class origins, he said. Six-thirty.

Worn out from the strenuous business of creating a universe of balletic success for her central character, Siobhan now fell asleep. Kate read to the refreshed Bernard on the couch.

There were more weather changes that day than she could keep count of. It rained and stopped. The sun struck the beach. Then it rained again. The light came back from its drenching a second time very subtle. She would remember the nuances of that afternoon’s pendulum swing from storm to tranquillity and back. She was at the same time utterly concentrated on reading aloud, on the quiet ecstatic playing out of stories of wombats and badgers, of Madeleine the smallest girl in the Paris school, of the Magic Pudding and the Giant Peach, all into Bernard’s unflinching appetite for tales.

Denise was there on time at half past four. A newly awoken Siobhan somersaulted to mark the arrival. The light was thinning. The sun had nearly gone now behind the sharp hillside above Palm Beach.

She dressed and kissed the children goodbye and went outside. From the corner by the open-sided and doorless garage, the sort of garage people favored at the beach even though it let the salt at the metalwork, she looked back at the house. Because it had struck her again that her children did not ask her the question children were supposed to ask in marital tragedies.

Her car wouldn’t start. It had always been so reliable. German engineering, as Mr. Kozinski senior always said, slapping it on the bonnet with perverse and grudging Polish admiration. It had never failed to start at the first turn of the key up to now. Perhaps she had left lights on by accident. She inspected the dashboard but there was no explanation.

There wasn’t time to call for mechanical help. She would call Totally Tom’s Garage in Avalon the next day. She went back to the house and rang for a taxi. It took some twenty-five minutes for a cab to reach her remote arm of the Northern Beaches. In that time her children played with Denise and were less likely than ever to ask questions about Paul.

Double Bay was touted as a cosmopolitan part of town. It had a high number of Middle and East European refugees who had flourished in Sydney’s Eastern Suburbs. It had European-style cafés and exorbitant boutiques. The indications were that it was about to acquire a new wave of immigrants and refugees, South Africans, Hong Kong Chinese, Japanese. What were considered the niftiest kind of immigrants: the ones who brought their wealth with them.

The French restaurant which Jim Gaffney had nominated was a hybrid, actually run by Hungarians. The sauces were baroque rather than delicate. There were hunting horns on the wall, and the decor strove to imitate a German beer cellar.

—Look, Kate told Jim Gaffney as she arrived, I couldn’t get my car started. And I’m going home by cab. I don’t want any argument about that.

She felt that she’d be safe with a working cab driver. They didn’t
normally stop in the middle of the journey and offer the passenger extra services.

Jim argued. You could get anyone driving a cab. The Koreans, he said, were totally berserk. He wouldn’t want her to drive all the way to Palm Beach with one of them.

Kate decided to be brisk with Jim Gaffney.

—This is exactly the conversation I didn’t come to Double Bay to have.

He relented. But she had not yet finished.

—And there’s another sort of conversation I didn’t come to have.

He looked at his hands.

—I know exactly which one you
didn’t
come to have, Kate. That’s why your mother’s not here.

He grinned. His volatile wife would quickly raise the matter of Paul Kozinski, urge Kate to compel him home or seek a divorce. But she was safe with this parent.

—We could talk about your girlfriends, she told him, wanting to display her humor intact, and certain he had no mistress.

It wasn’t simply that he was her father. He
was
monogamous, almost by temperament, and he lived too packed a day. Before six o’clock he was in Centennial Park riding his racing bicycle. By six-thirty he was at Tattersall’s Club swimming laps. By a quarter to eight he was at his desk. He went to sleep early. He was a happy man.

Over plates of onion soup, they spoke of the children and of Uncle Frank. At that stage Uncle Frank was still a parish priest in the Archdiocese of Sydney. But he was already under threat from Cardinal Archbishop Fogarty. Jim Gaffney could see extenuating causes which favored Uncle Frank, at least in Jim Gaffney’s eyes.

—Admittedly Sydney is very straitlaced. Very narrow. I didn’t know it when I was a kid. It’s one of the revelations that came when I traveled. In any case the Cardinal thinks Frank has overdone it. Frank has stood guarantor on various loans his friend has taken. He’s technically in violation of the letter of canon law. He’s just bought another two pubs in the Western Suburbs. They’re in the woman’s name of course.

He always called Mrs. Kearney
the woman
, or
his friend
.

—There’s apparently an item of canon law which forbids priests
to own inns. Did you know about that, Kate? Anyhow, in the midst of it all, the most astounding phenomenon is that of Uncle Frank’s people. I still can’t get over that. Former parishioners. People he’s said a few words to in O’Toole’s mortuary. And they never forget. That’s Frank’s great gift—attracting people’s loyalty.

He lowered his voice.

—But he’s not embarrassed to ask for a payoff on any spiritual comfort he gives people. He’s an amazing operator, the old Frank.

—He’s never asked me for anything.

—Well, he loves you beyond measure, Kate. You know what he is, Kate? He’s a bandit chieftain.

And again he smiled. When he said
bandit chieftain
he was probably thinking of O’Dwyer, the Wicklow chieftain, a man held up as something of a martyr and hero to the sort of good Catholic boy Jim Gaffney had once been. O’Dwyer hero of the ’98. Earning the respect even of the British. Transported to Australia and lying now in an ornate grave in Waverley cemetery. Someone who like Uncle Frank partook in the holiness of the illicit and subversive.

—Then there are the haters too. There’s a letter-writing campaign against Frank. I met his old friend Monsignor Bryant out at Royal Sydney the other day. Bryant told me it’s a planned attack. They’re getting forty or fifty letters every Monday or Tuesday at the chancellery. People actually go to Mass to get a thrill out of seeing what they consider a scandalous priest up there, and then they come home and write their cowardly little missives.

—But if they
spoke
to Uncle Frank, asked Kate, would he change his ways?

Jim did not answer that. Uncle Frank, the barely Christian wizard, evaded that sort of inquiry.

There was little doubt Jim Gaffney would have made a better priest than Uncle Frank. Jim Gaffney would have been a bishop. He wouldn’t have been a sign of contradiction like the not-so-Reverend Frank.

—You mightn’t know it, said the potentially episcopal Jim Gaffney, trying to adjust the scales of discussion, but your uncle puts the entire income from his pub at the Flemington markets into the home for aged priests. I’m sure that never gets mentioned in the complaining letters to the Cardinal.

They talked about the passage of time. For she was near the end of what she called her sabbatical. Bernard would be at school within eighteen months. She had begun to tell people she could now see reasons for waiting till Bernard was seven before she went back to work for Bernie Astor.

—It has to be an office job anyhow. I won’t be able to travel round with film stars anymore.

Jim said, You’re such a good mother.

She shrugged.

—It isn’t much of a father-daughter night, is it? All we’ve talked about is Uncle Frank’s failed priesthood, and my failed marriage.

—No, no. In my opinion, neither is failed. Or at least the failure’s not your fault, and perhaps not even Frank’s.

If
he
had been Uncle Frank’s bishop, there would have been mutual diplomacy and a modus vivendi. Uncle Frank was nearing sixty. Time and a new age would soon take better care of him than diocesan edicts could.

Just as gossip then, though it was to her more than gossip, she told him about Murray, about Murray’s young wife, about the diving, how Murray’s young wife and her boyfriend had hidden from Murray beneath the surface of the sea, and how Murray had become deranged, not the merchant-banker, Sheffield-Shield-cricketer Murray everyone expected he would always be. She felt—strangely—that even in reflecting on all this in her father’s company she was somehow misusing Murray, taking his pain as entertainment to distract her father from mentioning her own.

A Slovenian waiter, with the Italian manner all Yugoslav waiters in Sydney seemed to adopt, came and told Jim Gaffney there was a telephone call for him.

—I told my mistress not to call me here, he joked as he went off to answer it.