A Woman of the Inner Sea

  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 …

  —The one I suggest … What you must do is send me someone who will shut up and write what I want. It’s all rubbish and it burdens my soul and my children’s souls. I want to return the whole shitty mess to the owners.

  —Of course. But you have to think of your future welfare too.

  —Go to hell, Murray. I’m very hungry actually. You should have seen me eat in the country. They know how to eat there. It’s different …

  He brought chicken and unshelled prawns and orange juice up from the galley.

  —Perhaps you should rest awhile after lunch. While I sail back. There are bunks below.

  She repeated it.

  —There are bunks below.

  It was a sentence of sweet contours.

  In the midst of shelling king prawns and dropping the carapaces over the side, he reached to her and kissed her, holding his arms open-handed and away from her, not wanting to mar her clothes with the rank sea smell of the prawns, clasping her shoulders with his wrists.

  —I want nothing from them, she told him.

  Murray tested that idea. You could tell he was thinking, What a concept for a lawyer to hear. I should say something. But he couldn’t manage it.

  She said, Yes. I mean it, for Christ’s sake.

  She smiled at her luck in finding such men. For the steak-eating woman, there could not have been better men than the sainted Jelly and then Gus. And Murray for the sanatorium patient. It was all beneficial for her purpose. She must be utterly quit of Paul Kozinski before she could begin to think of which way to punish him.

  Uncle Frank did not turn up as often now. He had become busy—conferencing with his lawyers, as he liked to say. His telephone calls stood in place of his presence. He always sounded in good heart: she could tell he congratulated himself on having safely changed her idea of what had happened to her, all without damaging any of her tissue. His pride in this was at least as spacious as his pride in not having bribed anyone.

  Kate was visited by a youngish lawyer, her age, but young in the way in which men to whom nothing has happened except the expected are young. She told him to be quiet and to take down to dictation her demands. Without consideration (she said) other than that no employee, casual or permanent, of Kozinski Constructions should take any action for damages against Mr. Gus Schulberger of Bourke, New South Wales, she released all her interests in and claims on all the Kozinski businesses. Specifically the writs issued by Mr. Burnside against Mr. Gus Schulberger should be withdrawn as a condition of the release.

  She said she wanted him kindly to draft the letter in the terms she had given him. She wanted no argument. She would sign any exemption he wanted. If he would shut up and do it, she would pay him any price.

  Old Kozinski would of course be cheered to receive such a document. He would not see anything but her sense of shame behind the lack of demands. Mrs. Kozinski would attribute the good outcome to the intercession of the Black Virgin of Czestochowa. But Paul would be arrested by it. Paul would correctly disbelieve it. What is she trying to say? he would ask himself.

  A good thing.

  Twenty-four

  WHEN IT ARRIVED, the chemical analysis was twelve pages in length. Inside a cover blue as O’Toole’s helicopter. According to its summary, some 450 milligrams of Vallergan, trimeprazine, had in fact been dissolved in Kate’s vodka. Trimeprazine was an antihistamine of extreme potency; the maximum recommended dose of thirty milligrams produced in a male of average height, weight and age an extreme drowsiness followed by profound sleep. The effects of the drug would be—to quote the analytic summary—potentiated by its mixture with alcohol.

  A mixture of vodka and trimeprazine would have produced in the first instance a clear solution, and only over a time could the substance react with the clarifying agent to produce a faint yellow coloration.

  And so Kate remembered the ballet class. Denise’s job to take the small dancers. Vodka time for excellent mothers.

  Kate’s first impulse on reading the report’s summation is a motherly one, a strange onset of futile tenderness toward Paul. She can see him locking the door on the boardroom and beginning to experiment with sedatives and glasses of vodka from the corporate cabinet. Mrs. Kozinski’s junior chemist. One drug turns the vodka immediately blue. Another alters it green or yellow. He may even have had to make notes: he couldn’t have had such a success without bringing methodologies in.

  Burnside would have without question got a whole battery of sedatives for him. Since there were kingdoms and fortunes involved, Burnside would have been paid exorbitantly for the service.

  The problem of the chemical analysis for Kate is that having painlessly yielded up to the Kozinskis all that Paul had tried to achieve through mixtures and then through sending Burnside to the bush, how could she punish him without entering the whole mean question once again; debasing herself and sacrificing her breath?

  She wishes of course that Uncle Frank was there. She would like him to sit down and relieve her with talk about three-year-olds and the spring carnival. When she wakes at the end of an afternoon’s sleep, her body prickles and is covered with hives. Only the scarred shoulders are exempted
from this panic of the flesh. They coat her in lotion, but then the heat of it all enters her mouth and she begins to gag, and they have to put her on a drip of adrenaline.

  When she woke the next morning, Uncle Frank was found to be standing at the end of her bed reading the chemical report—his own copy. He had written neatly on it: The Reverend F. O’Brien.

  —Heard about your episode, Kate. A rash …

  As if accusing her of sending obscure messages, he shook his head.

  —I want you to get well, Kate. Because in two days the madness will start. Cameras will follow me and Fiona Kearney everywhere. Going to court, coming.

  He sighed. A put-upon Irishman.

  —I don’t think I can do much for you or anyone just now.

  She inspected her arms and saw that they were white and clear of blemish.

  —Your man Murray tells me you have given everything back to the Kozinskis. It could turn out to be wise, Kate. By one view you’ve doubled his wealth. By another, you’ve doubled his indebtedness. You can’t give a damn about how the man feels. He’s put himself beyond.

  —Then how can I touch him? If he’s beyond?

  —Kate, he’s pretty thoroughly touched himself. Except … to be honest … Michael Collins would never have let a man like that live.

  One of Uncle Frank’s ambiguous saints: Michael Collins. Director of operations in the old days, when the IRA had all been good people and Ireland was facing its indisputable destiny. The best of men with the blessing of most of the clergy upon their heads, except for a few pre-Fogartys in the west who tried to excommunicate them. In those days they went to the church after ambushes and prayed for the repose of the souls of the Black and Tans they had just felled, the British agents they had just shot in the head.

  So she wondered was Uncle Frank arguing Paul Kozinski had moved out of the zone of civil justice into the militant zone? Summary punishment appropriate? Uncle Frank a possible participator in the militant?

  —I want to forget it all, she rushed to lie. You have your own case to settle, Uncle Frank.

  —Mother of God, do I!

  He walked the room, hitting his arm with the rolled-up chemical report. On it, that perfect copperplate: The Reverend F. O’Brien.

  —I wonder if His Eminence Fogarty will abrogate my damn suspension to permit me to say Mass in Long Bay.

  She smiled.

  —I think he might let you.

  —The apostle to the crims of New South Wales. It won’t be the first fooking time a priest has worn chains in this place, let me tell you!

  That was his saving delusion again: that he was some sort of political prisoner, a saint of anarchy, a successor to the rebels of 1798. Someone kind should deliver him of that notion so that he could have a tranquil old age. Or someone cruel should. She didn’t have the space or strength to do it herself.

  —Are you going to wear your canonicals in court?

  The glory of his black alpaca and his virgin white collar.

  —Of course. I don’t yield to the gobshites, Kate. I’m as much a priest as the next feller.

  She had been thinking of trying to argue him out of this perhaps inflammatory mode of dress. But she imagined him in a plain man’s lounge suit, and the idea lacked such credit that she said nothing.

  She was aware of thinking of her mother too, in an unlikely, intimate way she thought she had sworn off for life; in a way her shame for the lost children had until recently invalidated for her. Her mother was not well; suffering from lack of sleep and complicated family shame. The shame of the tragedy; the shame of Kate’s vanishing and return; the shame not of Uncle Frank’s crime but of a society, sober when it suited it, that judged her brother to have behaved illicitly.

  They had arguments though about whether Kate would go to court. For Uncle Frank had told Mrs. Kate Gaffney that her daughter shouldn’t go. Uncle Frank said Kate wasn’t ready to leave the place yet, and his authority with his sister hadn’t been lessened just because he was facing charges under the Gaming Act.

  —Murray will take me, Kate argued. Murray will protect me from the press.

  —And then the press will say, Missing heiress Kate Kozinski with her friend Murray Stannard and the whole world will be left to guess what friend means. Including the Kozinskis.

  Mrs. Kate Gaffney didn’t understand that they were all now free of the Kozinskis.

  Mrs. Gaffney left and Murray arrived, Kate asking him to stay on in her room after dark to watch the footage of the not-so-Reverend Frank and Mrs. Kearney walking into the New South Wales District Court. The woman commentator said, Still wearing his clerical costume …

  Nothing much seemed to have happened after that, the day apparently spent on legal palaver. The big news: Uncle Frank’s clerical collar.

  No sooner did the news item end than she and Murray began devising a time for her to go to court. Early afternoon on Thursday say, when after lunch the press would be less vigilant. By 2 P.M. too her morning dosage of sedatives should have partially worn off and left her less thick-tongued in case the unspeakable took place. She would in any case sleep all morning to prepare herself.

  Early in the week a member of the Legislative Assembly of New South Wales, a one-time parishioner of Uncle Frank’s, founded a Father O’Brien Support Group, all the more startling a body given that no one doubted the not-so-Reverend Frank could well afford his own legal fees.

  This development helped to generate in the bright winter’s day through which pale Kate and Murray walked bravely hand in hand an atmosphere of favor toward Uncle Frank.

  They waited for the lift amongst the melee of solicitors and barristers, many of whom nodded to Murray and murmured his name. Their eyes flicked too across the face of Kate’s sunglasses. The barristers wore their wigs and gowns with the same amourpropre she’d seen in academics. Yet you’d think they must be used to it by now. Perhaps the presence of Murray, a woman’s hand uncustomarily in his, had set them off, reminded them somehow of who they were and how they were different from him. Look at me, some of them might have been suggesting to Murray. Acned and uncertain in law school, now at least a wigged barrister if not a silk.

  It was a modern court. Imperial red fabric and Australian hardwood paneling. Late-twentieth-century architects had reversed the trouble their nineteenth-century counterparts had gone to and tried now to make the courts look no different from a fashionable accountancy firm. In this milieu, as they mounted the stairs to Uncle Frank’s courtroom, Kate and Murray were ambushed by a single young journalist, perhaps a sentry.

  —Mrs. Kozinski, the young man addressed her.

  Murray dealt with him briskly. He pushed her through into the court. Protected ground. Sanctuary. With a red and blue carpet.

  Three open galleries surrounded the pit of the court.

  —Theater in the round, Murray whispered.

  The hearing was already in progress. The prosecutor muttered about something procedural. Murray bowed to the judge, a token of reverence in which Kate didn’t feel bound to join.

  Two of the galleries were occupied by a scatter of spectators and interested parties and press. Mr. and Mrs. Gaffney were not amongst the interested spectators. In the third, the police who guarded the court and who were there to protect Uncle Frank and Mrs. Kearney from the impulse to escape, lounged. Everymen. Orta Recens Quam Pura Nites on their shoulders.

  Tight in under a gallery facing Uncle Frank, the jury. Seven men, five women. One of the men had a Polynesian face. Two of the women looked Greek. No necessity that they would share Uncle Frank’s comprehensive view of what morality was.

  The not-so-Reverend Frank wore the milk-white jacket which Roman clergymen reserved for social occasions. It set off the pure black breast of his clerical stock. Its appearance here was a kind of bravado. Elegant clergy from the North Shore wore that sort of coat on visits to Rome in the European summertime.

  Above the judge sat the lion and unicorn. The kangaroo and emu who sat above normal A
ustralian institutions were excluded from the court. It was under the lion and unicorn that all Irish heroes had been sentenced. Uncle Frank therefore was at least given a pretext to consider himself one in the line of Robert Emmet, Wolfe Tone, Michael Meagher of the Sword, Padriac Pearse, James Connolly, all of whom had been savaged by the lion and gored by the unicorn.

  A youngish man in a gray suit was ready to give evidence to the prosecutor and had been sworn in. Uncle Frank, his face animated but in a thoughtful kind of way, was in the process of passing a note out of the dock to his lawyer Eric Tandy, Q.C. Uncle Frank looked up, saw Kate, winked once sagely—to an outsider it could have been a tic—and returned his attention to the witness in the gray suit.

  The prosecutor began asking questions of the gray-suited witness.

  —Mr. Teece, you were till recently the assistant manager of the Mortdale branch of the Eastern Australia Bank?

  Mr. Teece said yes.

  —You are acquainted with the accused?

  —I only know Father O’Brien.

  Mr. Teece was very nervous. He had an old-fashioned working-class face and his freckles blazed, and the white between them was quite slick with anxiety. What did the anxiety mean? That was the question on which she could see that Uncle Frank’s attention was fixed.

  —So how did you meet the accused O’Brien?

  —I first met him when my youngest aunt died. She was only thirty-seven. A husband. Two children …

  —So the Reverend O’Brien first approached you in the role of a comforter?

  What a stupid question Kate thought that was. As if it were a role which made blame all the more certain.

  —He was very kind to our family, said Teece staunchly.

  —And he kept contact with you after he met you?

  —Yes. We had a bit of a wake. Father O’Brien and I got on well. He was exactly the right sort of priest for that sort of thing.