A Woman of the Inner Sea (8 page)

—It’s the handsome Kate O’Brien, he said. Still voting for us, Kate?

She smiled but felt awkward.

—Of course, Prime Minister.

She cursed herself for the demure sound of that. He was the sort of man who would have appreciated her saying something ironic—he liked irreverent, tough women. She could have said, How else are you still winning, Prime Minister? But Reg Krinkovich had taken her impetus away from her.

So the Prime Minister spent no more time there. She feared he went thinking,
Silly, stiff bitch
. The Labor Party gets them out of the working class, and in two generations they become
her!

She contemplated his receding back.
He
had been a womanizer, the nation’s most famous. Self-confessed. The runs on the board. The indiscretions so much on the record that they had ceased to become indiscreet. Not as monogamous a creature as Paul. But at least he would never develop the sort of monomania Paul had. He would never give up a perfectly workable and extant wife and children for a furious delusion about another woman.

She realized that like most perfect mothers whose major jealousies were for their children, she would have preferred the ironic womanizer, for he at least came home in the end. He was not—even in your very
presence
—an absentee.

Jim Gaffney had provided a limousine for her, and the driver asked her which way he was to take her home. The Forest? he suggested. The Forest was a stretch of bush, semitropical, which connected the suburbs to the Northern Beaches. There were few distractions as you traveled through it. It was a good road for taking thought. So she agreed.

Partway into the Forest, the driver braked and pulled over into a lay-by. She-oaks, linked to each other by thick, succulent vines, with white trumpetlike blossoms nearly luminous in the night, pressed close up to the windows.

The driver looked at her by means of the rearview mirror.

—Is there any way I can help you, madam?

—Help me?

—It’s just that sometimes I can be of assistance …

—I don’t understand what you mean.

—Look, madam, if there’s been a misunderstanding …

—I want to get home, she told him. To my children.

—Of course. I just thought …

—There’s no mechanical problem, is there?

—No.

To show there wasn’t, he started up the engine.

When they emerged from the Forest into lit streets, she asked, What did you do before this?

—I was a mixed farmer, sheep and wheat. I do hope madam will overlook the misunderstanding.

—You’re talking like a European serf …

—Yes, he said. Well.

—Back in the Forest, were you
really
offering …?

—Well, some women ask for me, you see. They always say, Let’s go by way of the Forest.

—That’s incredible.

She sounded so prim, but the genuine sociological wonder of it amazed her.

She saw him grin tentatively in the mirror.

—It was a mix-up this time …

She said nothing. She wondered why such an adventure shouldn’t be welcome. She wished she could see it in those terms.

W
E’RE GETTING TO THE CORE, the frightful trigger. Let’s not worry about the threadbare trickery of it all—it’s the frightfulness of that day which is hard for us to contemplate.

That is why we postpone its literal accounting until later and here deal only with its lesser chronology and its domestic detail, sinister only in hindsight.

So weather:

the morning had been squally;

great thunderheads hung over the Pacific, that arm of it which is also called the Tasman Sea and which is so dangerous in days of cyclone;

the surf was pounding and emphatic, scraping the embankments of ocher sand away.

Siobhan was now a student at the state school at Avalon Beach. She had begun that February, in the same fog of humidity in which Australian children always commence their academic year. Jim and Kate Gaffney senior had stated the expected surprise that their daughter had not chosen the parish school. But Kate had formulated her program: expose her daughter to the full plurality for the first six years—for Siobhan was a girl made for pluralism—and then send her to Loreto or Sacré Coeur for the academic excellence.

Today, however, she did not send Siobhan to school. Nor did she send Bernard to the small nursery school he attended without any apparent fear or enthusiasm three mornings a week. Both the children had been fevered overnight and called out in their sleep. Mad fevers swept across the history of any childhood. There were women Kate knew who had been convinced that these viral squalls were a sign of unhappiness.

But it would not be sensible to send them out in their yellow oilskins and gumboots on an uncertain morning like this; a change-of-season morning in the luxuriant Northern Beaches, when plants released the strange allergic exhalations of April.

That morning Paul Kozinski was, by his own report, in Brisbane on more mall business. He had plans to go to Southern California, to Sherman Oaks—one mall development—and down to La Jolla—another—within the month. She supposed Perdita might find a way of going also.

For Kate could too easily think of Paul and Perdita side by side in some cabin above the Pacific. She soothed herself by pouring out felt-tip pens and lumps of play dough for the children. She talked to them with a feverish jolliness—she was beginning to indulge in frenetic conversations, which she feared the children could sense were too much of a good thing.

—You are so excited, Siobhan had told her earlier.

—You are so excited, said Bernard. For him glamour was whatever Siobhan had just done.

As the storms closed in, Bernard grew sleepy. He staggered to a couch and threw himself on it. Wary of the fever, Kate covered him with a blanket. But Siobhan worked on, drawing away with pencils and felt-tips and talking furiously. She gave the figures she drew fictional names.

—This is my friend, Carstanz. She is a very good dancer. The entire village flocks to see her dance …

At noon the sun came out. The wind dropped a little, the surf moderated. Bernard was asleep, Siobhan was deep in her own fiction, and Kate in that of a British feminist novelist.

She heard heavy boots coming down the sandstone staircase from the street and across the bridge of red cedar to the door. She did not expect a plumber or any delivery, so she went to look through the spy-hole at who it was. Siobhan was still too engrossed in the dancer whom everyone flocked to see to know that her mother had even risen from the table.

Kate saw through the little lens in her doorway that it was Murray, the lawyer-cum-banker, approaching. In the fish-eye portrait the viewing hole gave her, his skin looked bruised, in tune with the morning’s weather. He was not so much unsteady as strangely
deliberate. He rang the doorbell, and she counted to a certain number before opening it.

There should be no objection to the banality of his phone being out of order. May I assure you that in that section of Sydney, telephone cables are often brought down in storms like the one Kate and the children woke to this morning.

—Hello, Murray, she said fairly briskly. She remembered how he’d been abrupt on Anzac Day. Even in our extremest miseries, she thought, it’s still exciting to keep the score.

—Mrs. Kozinski, I have a favor to ask.

—Of course.

She didn’t ask him inside yet, nor was he comfortable with the idea of coming inside before he’d made himself as clear as he could.

—You must have thought I was pretty crass. You know, the day you spoke to me, round on the rocks. I was preoccupied.

He was certainly shaved, but not up to his normal standard. He had missed a patch on the side of his neck. In this imperfection he looked almost Italianate.

—Please. I’d forgotten that.

—Now my telephone won’t work. A branch brought the cable down last night.

She saw tears come into his eyes. This was an exceptional event for him, asking a neighbor for the use of something, weeping in front of her. But of course he had chosen her already, without knowing it, as a fallback. Exactly the way she’d chosen him. The nose for who can become a lover is never as strong as the nose for who can become a haven.

She said he ought to come in, and swung the door wide. He entered the hallway. Siobhan still recounted her tale to herself in the living room.

—So the teacher came and said to her,
We need you, Carstanz. For a special performance
 …

Murray leaned against the wall.

—I haven’t been to work yet this week.

—It’s only Tuesday.

But she knew that to a man like him it was an extraordinary nihilism to have missed Monday and have no scars to show by way of excuse. And now to be missing Tuesday …!

She told him to come into the kitchen. She led him in and she
began to make some coffee. She put the beans in the grinder and depressed the lid of the thing, and felt the blades chop the beans from Kenya into fragments. What a satisfying thing, a little Lethean rite.

—Nearly all these houses are empty during the week. But I knew you’d be here. Your phone?

—Of course. There’s one around the corner there in my study. I’d say pour yourself a vodka. But you may not want one.

—No.

But he did not go at once.

—Can you tell me why the phone should go off now? Why now? I woke up yesterday and I couldn’t even call the office. I had to go down through the storm to the beach. That phone booth there.

He looked demented. The moisture in his eyes increased.

—I remember her saying that she was taking him back up to town. That was Sunday night. I don’t know what time. I was absolutely shot. Inebriated. I think if you’d pushed me, the scotch would have run out of the corners of my eyes. That’s not my normal condition.

—I think everyone knows that.

Kate is in her way a strong character. She’s not like someone out of Ionesco. It is all very well for novelists not to believe in character, but what if the characters themselves have been raised to believe in it?

Kate believes she is a structural being and not a thing of air. Yet even so—that day before much had befallen her—the river is flowing in one side of her brain, and its voice is taking up what was already said inside her on the day of the petition.

Thus:
If ever I console myself, this is the sort of man. But he’ll have to pull himself together. He’ll have to get back to being the fellow he was, the polite, serious, manly fellow he was
.

—That’s the last I saw of her. I didn’t call until after midnight—that was before the phone line went down. I kept on calling
his
number. You know he’s a former protégé of mine. But I only get the barbarous answering machine and his voice. A wonder of communication? A wonder of punishment if you ask me.

—Come on, said Kate, pouring his coffee. You’re allowed to say
you hate the fucking things, Murray. You don’t have to be gentlemanly any more.

—I
do
hate the fucking things. What good does that do me? Where is your telephone again?

She had to lead him to it. She left him by it then, but he was back in the kitchen very soon, looking even more attenuated in the face, more hollowed out.

—You got the answering machine again?

—I’m going up there. As soon as I’m fit to drive.

—Very well. I know you think you have to rush. But I don’t think rush makes any difference.

Such a sage, when it comes to other people’s spoiled love.

—I’m ashamed to say I know nothing’s going to work. But I have to test it out.

He looked at the ceiling and his eyes overflowed.

—My mother was many years younger than my father. She never treated him like this.

—Different times. And a different sort of girl.

Murray was talking about his stepfather, of course, a Sydney stockbroker who had fallen for the young
widow
from England and her Australian-born son.

He decided to go and prepare himself for his futile journey.

—Thank you, Mrs. Kozinski. I hope they fix my phone soon, and I won’t have to worry you.

She regretted having to show him out. She knew that once he was gone, she would be alone with the rage of the surf and with Siobhan still deep in the meat of her tale of ballerinas, where an evil rival had entered.

—But you can’t dance Giselle, Siobhan was saying in a malice-charged voice. Giselle is for me.

Kate opened the door on the garden and the wall of sandstone rising to the road. There was a wanness to sandstone after rain. She didn’t want to rush him away.

—I know it’s hard to talk to people frankly like this. I’m very pleased you feel you can.

—Oh well. I remembered you’d seen me at my worst. When I was sheltering under that towel. That terrible day. How long ago was that?

—Only the week before last.

—Oh God.

He began to contemplate the cedar planking of the footbridge.

—You’re very sympathetic, Kate.

—Will you let me know what becomes of it all? she asked in a voice of such forced casualness she was sure he could hear the device behind it.

But without any irony he said he would. He was ready to go yet did not. He looked at her and there was a rictus of a smile. This was a very painful thing to see on such an honest face. You could imagine that face, fifteen to twenty years younger, rising out of the creams of a New South Wales Sheffield Shield team picture. People seeing it and saying a lovely boy, a tryer, pity he mightn’t make the test team because he’s just the sort of sporting ambassador we need. The face of a man who believed there were rules and that he had clearly played by them, and was now doubting his own wisdom.

—Pardon me saying this, Kate, but I know you have problems of your own. I think it’s all a virus. I think it’s almost as if it’s a virus that wasn’t even there in my mother’s day.

—It was there. People feel more entitled now, that’s all. You know, to have obsessions. To have malice. It’s a sense of latitude. It’s not a virus.

—But I can’t imagine what lies on the other side of this sort of thing. A wife running away. There aren’t any precedents. Not in my experience.