A Woman of the Inner Sea (18 page)

Cleaning out two fresh schooner glasses—that too was set down in the liturgy of pubs: never the same glass twice—she set them on the drip tray and commenced the pour. She wanted the sweet, familiar act to be available to her for good, but there was every chance this was her last pour for Murchison’s Railway Hotel.

Jack appeared from the direction of the saloon, and Burnside stretched his big hand out across the bar, a brawny lad asking a question in class. She heard him ask Jack in his plausible voice whether Kate Kozinski was here. No, said Jack, in a style meant to finish the conversation. But Burnside amended his inquiry.

—What about someone called Kate Gaffney. Kozinski’s the married name.

Jack did not say: he had a sheet in his hand and was checking the bottles behind the bar for reordering. His manner was denial. Clear out. Who do you think you are interrupting people in the full routine of their business?

But Burnside pushed a card at Jack, which Jack took and placed on top of the reorder form and read fully, his eyebrows arranged crookedly.

Having finished her two perfect schooners, Kate delivered them down the bar and held her hand out to be paid. She wanted to stretch out each act to a great span of time. It was enough to strike time still, the idea that this man with a blond mustache who had once sunbathed on the
Vistula
with the children and Mrs. Kate Kozinski, might soon be dealing the Kozinskis’ names to her across the bar. The wonder was that he or someone like him hadn’t come and done it much earlier.

She had of course the bottleful of sleeping tablets to resort to but that wasn’t the possible journey anymore.

On the night, outside the desolation of her home, Paul Kozinski had justifiably screamed, Why weren’t you here? And she had agreed with that then and still did: she was a criminal through her absence. Just the same, even while voting for the idea with all her soul, she had come to sniff an air of ignorance about the proposition that her absence had destroyed the afternoon world. She had developed the idea that the Arson Squad chief inspector or the chief of Emergency Services might seek her out one day and give her something, an item, a plain sentence, to mute the blame. By one means or another, she must wait for that.

So would she slip away out the back where the nineteenth-century stables were, and flee to another town? Jelly might be confused by the suddenness of that. He expected a close of play, but a gentler one. To that extent she was a new woman. In the old state, she had been willing to leave Jim and Kate Gaffney without explanation.
Yet the heart which had been torn out of her now had a bias to be kind to Jelly.

—What did you call her? Jack Murchison asked, still inspecting the man’s card, looking for some little detail in the corner that would invalidate it.

He would in fact have made a first-class site boss. Cement wouldn’t have gone missing. Likewise, people serving writs to the dogmen would have been sent to buggery.

Even head-thumping Burnside was careful of him.

—Kozinski. Married name. Gaffney, maiden. It’s no problem. I just have some information that’d benefit her.

Jack appointed the saloon bar as the place Burnside could wait. It was empty in the daytime, since no one came to the Railway for confidential lunches, and the ordinary clientele considered drinking there a waste of money. Jack himself opened the door of the saloon for Burnside to go through. It was somehow meant to let Burnside know that there were stringent limits to what would be permitted to happen.

Burnside having passed through, Jack came back behind the bar and approached Kate like a parent who has just heard dubious news about the child’s behavior somewhere else, beyond the normal reach of fatherly purview.

—Okay, Kate.

He passed Kate the card.

—Do you know this feller?

Kate hung her head. It was partly shame of course, given that Burnside was from the Kozinskis’ hemisphere where her shame was well established. It was weary loathing of Burnside.

—He works for my husband, Jack.

—Wish I had a big dumb bugger like that working for me.

He went on looking at her. Had she given any sign, he would have taken her away and hidden her.

But of course she knew she had to face him. He was someone from the Kozinski world she
could
meet without peril to the new woman Shirley’s steak and white bread was making of her. She was grateful to Paul for not coming in person. That would have been impossible.

—Sure? Jack insisted on knowing.

—Oh yes.

She took the card with her as she went through into the saloon.

He sat with his back to her. She walked round past his great shoulders and saw that he had one eye raised, as if she were a stranger, as if they had not floated together in the green water off the
Vistula
’s stern. His eyes were precisely as she remembered: those of someone who was used to terrifying people in a whimsical way. His arrogance came from the fact he thought himself a character, and because he had done good, frightening work for the Kozinskis, they told him that, the thing he wanted to hear.
You’re really a character, Burnside
. A legend in the building business. People either shat themselves with fear or with hilarity.

—Your boss gave me a big welcome.

Jack had given him a glass of beer, and he sipped it once while assessing her.

—I love a bit of hostility. Mother’s milk.

He showed his teeth. He thought all this stuff was subtle, but he looked melodramatically feral.

—Let yourself go a bit, love, haven’t you? That Murray bloke who fancies you mightn’t fancy you like this.

—Good, she said.

—No, I was just commenting, Mrs. Kozinski.
I
can get you back to where you were.

This stupid promise left her less frightened.

—We met a few times, I think. On that boat of Mr. Kozinski’s.

—Pleasant days.

She would have made it sound sarcastic, less neutral and more edged. But she did not want to cause him to take one attitude or another.

He said, I’ve been honored for a long time by association with your husband’s company, Mrs. Kozinski.

—Paul’s mother is Mrs. Kozinski. She was endowed in that high office by the Blessed Virgin Mary of Czestochowa and by the Holy Father. Ask her and she’ll tell you.

—But you’re Mr. Paul Kozinski’s wife.

—I reverted to my maiden name.

—Understood.

He’d begun nodding and was playing at being conciliatory. He had produced a thick envelope from the pocket of the vast suit coat slung on the back of the chair.

—Mr. Paul Kozinski asked me to give you these documents.

—Mr. Paul
and
Mr. Andrew.

—Well, yes. These are for signature. Maybe you’d like to look at them.

She did not take the envelope. She let him put it down on the table. There it lay. She would have been happy for it to get beer-glass rings on it.

—Mr. Kozinski’s very appreciative of the fact that you’re not seeking anything as marriage settlement, or at least he presumes that, since he hasn’t heard anything from you. But he realizes he has a responsibility to you. Some of the papers to be signed are to do with relinquishing directorships in a number of Kozinski subsidiaries. It doesn’t seem likely you’ll want anything to do with them anyhow. And you’ll see he hasn’t been ungenerous. There’s a letter of agreement in there which will entitle you to a two-million-dollar settlement payable in six monthly installments, the first within fifteen days of your signature.

—Yes, she said. Very nearly anxious, she distracted herself with the aftertaste of the delight in bounding over plains with Chifley. She relished the echo of that happiness.

High above the town, somewhere between the apex of the Railway Hotel and the roots of time, there was a prodigious, proud, languid bark of thunder. It seemed to her that Burnside blinked.

—God, listen to that. They get floods here, don’t they?

—It’s all they talk about.

—So … you’ll see the documents of resignation. And you’ll see also an annulment petition to the Archdiocesan court. Sign that, and you don’t have to mess around with the buggers any further. Then the settlement document for when you’ve signed all the rest. There’s a cross and a penciled K.K. where you sign each document. Katherine Kozinski. You mightn’t want to sign them Kozinski, but you’d better, because that’s the legal requirement.

She didn’t care enough for all this to tell him the Kozinskis could take their settlement to hell. Why should she say something for the entertainment of the muscular servant of the Kozinskis? Who would add it to all his other smartarse stories of divorce in the private investigator business? For he was, it seemed, a licensed private investigator. At least his card said so. And she didn’t want him to be able to classify the story. She would like him to be left with so little he didn’t have a story at all.

Anyhow she knew her part-change, her mid-transmogrification, would be his story.

—Jesus, should see how she’s let herself go.

Damn him.

—You’ll be able to afford to leave here, he said. Of course, Paul wouldn’t have wanted you here in the first place.

—Very kind of him. But this is where I am.

Burnside frowned since it all seemed to be going so easily. Something professional in him mistrusted the ease.

—Probably just as well if you sign now, he nonetheless urged her. You’ll probably go on thinking about Paul Kozinski and the whole sad business while ever these papers are around.

—Don’t mention the sad business!

—I was just saying …

—Don’t say! Don’t fucking say!
Don’t say!

—All right. Whatever you want, Mrs. Kozinski, but it doesn’t look as if you and Paul will get together again. So why not sign? And the annulment … I believe your family’s very Catholic too, and you’d want a Church annulment. So the document in there initiates the process.

—I know. You explained that.

—None of this divorce and annulment stuff is a big deal. Not for people like the Kozinskis.

—Old Andrew Kozinski is a Papal Knight.

—That’s what I mean. So that document needs signing with the others. It’ll go through like grease. Would you like me to open the envelope now?

—I wouldn’t.

—Just that if you signed them, I could drive back to Wagga and catch the eight o’clock plane. We all have families …

But then a pallor, she saw, an awareness of having made a gaffe crossed his face.

—Oh Jesus, I know what happened … that business out at the beach … Please forgive me, Mrs. Kozinski. I didn’t mean …

You could give forgiveness cheaply to someone like Burnside.

—We all have our families, she affirmed.

He thought she had let him off the hook and he was pleased to be able to resume his main argument.

—Listen, as I say, why not open these now?

He decided to be forceful, and picked up the envelope and was working at its flap.

—Leave them alone. They’re my papers.

—That’s right.

—Then leave them alone.

—Sorry. Look, I wish you’d—

Again a great elemental cough of thunder. The Railway Hotel itself seemed to move. The heavens ground their way across Myambagh like a river over gravel.

—You leave them with me, she said.

She didn’t know why she’d want to delay things. What he said was good sense. Get rid of them and of him. He had interrupted her sea change, her change of form in Australia’s most oblivious town. None of it could start up again until he left. If then.

Yet even at a cost to herself, she wanted to delay the Kozinskis’ purposes. She remembered old Kozinski’s story of the Pole and the lamp and the Chinese army. She had got to the level where relative balances of torment were what mattered, or where the lost took joy in minute gestures. She would
utterly
know her own shame, take it into herself, reinforce by decibels Paul’s scream on the night, if Burnside were to walk into Paul’s office and when asked if she’d resisted would be likely to say, No, there weren’t any problems.

—You’d better stay here, Kate advised him. You’ll get these in the morning.

—You know you’ll sign them in the end, love.

—It costs twenty dollars a night, and—for that—steak until it’s coming out of your ears.

—Since you know you’re going to sign them, I
was
hoping you’d save me the trouble.

—The Kozinskis will pay your hotel bill, I’d think.

—Well, of course they will …

—Stay here then.

—I don’t know what crowd you’re mixing with at the moment, Mrs. Kozinski. But maybe you ought to tell them I’m licensed to carry a firearm. If I’m visited during the night …

—Don’t be stupid.

—It’s just there’s some big bastards out in that bar. The publican himself is a big bastard.

—Yes. But he doesn’t have your malice. Just stay here and shut up and I’ll see you in the morning.

She remembered one last thing.

—You’re not to eat with me. You’re not to eat what Jack calls
tea
. Not with me. There are plenty of other men here you can eat it with.