A Woman of the Inner Sea Read online

  BY THOMAS KENEALLY

  Fiction

  The Place at Whitton

  The Fear

  Bring Larks and Heroes

  Three Cheers for the Paraclete

  The Survivor

  A Dutiful Daughter

  The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith

  Blood Red, Sister Rose

  Gossip from the Forest

  Season in Purgatory

  A Victim of the Aurora

  Passenger

  Confederates

  The Cut-Rate Kingdom

  Schindler’s List

  A Family Madness

  The Playmaker

  To Asmara

  Flying Hero Class

  Woman of the Inner Sea

  Nonfiction

  Outback

  Now and in Time to Come

  The Place Where Souls Are Born:

  A Journey to the Southwest

  For children

  Ned Kelly and the City of Bees

  PUBLISHED BY NAN A. TALESE

  an imprint of Doubleday,

  a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.

  666 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10103

  DOUBLEDAY and the portrayal of an anchor

  with a dolphin are trademarks of

  Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell

  Publishing Group, Inc.

  All of the characters in this book are fictitious, and

  any resemblance to actual persons, living or

  dead, is purely coincidental.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Keneally, Thomas.

  Woman of the inner sea/Thomas Keneally.

  p. cm.

  I. Title.

  PR9619.3.K46W65 1993

  823—dc20 92-28554

  eISBN: 978-0-307-80062-6

  Copyright © 1992, 1993 by Serpentine Publishing Company Proprietary, Ltd.

  All Rights Reserved

  v3.1

  To Jane, my valiant and worldly daughter

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  About the Author

  One

  A WOMAN IN HER EARLY THIRTIES, our traveler, the handsome but slightly frowning Kate Gaffney-Kozinski, running across the rain-glossed pavement in Potts Point, saw from a poster in front of the closed newsagent’s that her defrocked uncle had given another interview to one of those smooth-paged magazines.

  She stopped in front of this poster. As an artifact she found it hard and sad to believe in. Her hand sought—beneath the neck of her dress—the scar tissue behind her left shoulder. She had no time—the delicatessen was about to close and she had no coffee for Murray—but she stopped, shuddered, let her breath go in large gasps of steam and began to weep.

  She knew it was the wrong block to start crying so openly. Two blocks further up the road, where the elegance gave way to backpackers’ hostels, to brown houses with opaque windows where men went to have their groins massaged by bored Maori girls from over the Tasman Sea … there people wept and laughed and made the sort of big, loud, mad-city speeches you heard only in big, loud, mad cities.

  But art deco flats and nineteenth-century mansions reserved this end of the street for more orderly emotions than these that were rocking her.

  Weeping Kate could not understand why her uncle should piss away his gifts like that, into the ear of some uncomprehending girl journalist, some popsy who came of Latvian or Greek or—worst of all—North Shore Protestant parents. Some little tart who knew sweet nothing about Uncle Frank’s godhead, or his astounding view of government and the universe.

  Kate could imagine him even with the weight of accusation around him twinkling away at some two-dimensional little hack. Some little hoyden who believed in nothing yet still wanted to ask him the big, vulgar question. Father O’Brien, why don’t you stand for the same prissy Christ all those cops and Legislative Assembly backbenchers make a gesture toward at Sunday Mass? Why aren’t you like His Eminence Fogarty?

  This Celtic city—named Sydney by accidents of history and displaced to the Southwest Pacific—really worshiped scoundrel gods and tart goddesses and gave only token nods to the Other, the Dressed-up One. This city’s true deities were Cuchulain the cattle-duffer and divine horse-thief, or the Fianna his bagmen and party machine followers, and the great bullshitter and cocksman Finn MacCool, who once built a causeway from Antrim to Scotland to enable him to go and seduce a Scots goddess, and who ultimately sailed into this Pacific city in the company of arse-out-of-the-trousers Scots and Irish convicts or immigrants.

  Anyone who knew the not-so-Reverend Uncle Frank knew he came from one of these other more dualist gods, from a god with warts. A Celtic-mist god who counted cunning more important than virtue. As Uncle not-so-Reverend Frank himself would say, a fooking scoundrel.

  Uncle Frank had a very inexact knowledge of folklore, of course. But by this stage of Kate’s history he had said regularly that Kate was a queen of the Sorrows. Sometimes he would use the name of what he saw as a prototype of Kate’s condition. He would advance the name Deirdre. Deirdre of the capital S Sorrows. The royal daughter of Ulster. When she was born, it was predicted she would bring nothing but grief to Ulster. Uncle Frank didn’t know the details of the story, so he used the term sloppily. A glib phrase. Deirdre of the Sorrows because—as Uncle Frank said during a prison visit—some poor bitch has to be.

  Her Uncle Frank was the only person in the world who knew what he was talking about in matters to do with grief. At funerals and in the mortuary parlor of his friend O’Toole the mortician, he had given people essential clues to their loss and they had never forgotten it. And he had given his niece Kate Gaffney-Kozinski the clue that someone had, breath by breath, to find the universe too massive to support; someone, transfixed by it, had thereby to hold it in place. It was she who was appointed to contribute so often the mute rain with her own unbidden tears. That was the rule.

  Except that he, himself, the old fraud, the family shaman, in jail for violations of the New South Wales Gaming Act, for fraud and bribery and tax evasion, still somehow a glamour puss to the press, was the one to do it to her this time. He had caused her unbidden tears.

  The Queen of Sorrows as envisaged by Uncle Frank:

  Never less than fatedly and palely beautiful, yet fatally touched by love.

  Nice bone structure, high cheekbones.

  Even when the sun shone, always a woman of rain.

  The Queen of Sorrows’s shoulders still itched with the burn of suns other people have forgotten.

  Through the front glass of the news agency, she could see Uncle Frank grin out of the poster inset. The silly old bugger had always insisted on wearing his Roman collar everywhere. He might even wear it under his overalls in the Central Indust
rial Prison. With criminal charges proven, his photographed jaw sat supported by that buttress of white celluloid. Hardly any licit priests wore the damn thing anymore. He did it for the sake of the old days. When for instance men of the cloth were let into the Sydney Cricket Ground for free by sentimental gatemen called Hogan and Clancy. In the postindustrial, cybernetic, space and nuclear age, the not-so-Reverend Frank still loved all that antediluvian clerical stuff.

  —And how are you today, Father?

  —I’ll be all right so long as the fellers get their defense organized.

  —Oh, I think they might miss Lyons at five-eighth, Father. I’ve got my money on the others.

  —Well, it’s not in our hands. We’ll see, we’ll see.

  He really believed he still lived in a world where that white celluloid meant something.

  Cardinal Fogarty might and did say, even in the Sydney Morning Herald, that Uncle Frank no longer had faculties. But there were men who’d worked for the Cricket Ground Trust for years who knew Uncle Frank and believed him still a priest—in Uncle Frank’s pompous terms—of the order of Aaron and Melchizedech.

  The last-mentioned two Hebrews were as shady yet powerful in his imagination as Deirdre.

  Uncle Frank was therefore no scholar; went to a lesser diocesan seminary in Cavan and never got the prize for canon law. But he doesn’t let any of that stop him from uttering such suggestive phrases as Deirdre of the Sorrows and According to the order of Aaron and Melchizedech.

  Her tears stopped at last. She had torn her eyes from the magazine poster and was walking again. Soon she had bought the coffee for Murray and some ice cream to honor him for his careful way of life and his gentleness of method. She knew she wanted a third of a liter of scotch and some brutish sex, a universal rut to answer the universe of tears momentarily imposed on her by the poster of the silly old bugger, the not-so-Reverend Uncle Frank.

  Happily, it did not take too much to turn Murray into that species of lover. Seemly in his public demeanor, he could become someone furious who carried off the memory of rain. Kate remembered how it had been managed before this, first by a lagoon in Fiji, after the tragedy this story will concern itself with. She had for a start dictated his moves, but in the end he’d gone screaming like a hurricane through all the doors and windows.

  Good old Murray who did not and never would inhabit one of Uncle Frank’s myths. She meant to marry him for that reason. There was mileage in him, and nothing strange and nothing cursed. Even the wreck of his marriage had been an average wreck. Though he’d taken it as if it was a fearsome grief. To Kate, his innocence was of an erotic scale.

  Two

  THIS KATE is daughter of James Gaffney, owner of a cinema chain and builder of the city’s first hypercinema, a complex of hotels and shops arranged around a series of cinemas: venue above all for film festivals all held under the one roof. And of Katherine O’Brien, a woman of deep yet primitive compassion, a virago, and sister to Uncle Frank.

  Thus to head off any whingeing about mother and daughter having the same name:

  James Gaffney m. Kate O’Brien—sister of Frank O’Brien

  |

  Kate Gaffney-Kozinski

  People found Mrs. Gaffney (née O’Brien) abrasive, and in uttering that opinion of her always balanced it by saying that Jimmy Gaffney was so diplomatic. Kate O’Brien—mother to the Kate of our story—is a fury. Her brother is a wild Druid, and her daughter Deirdre of the Sorrows.

  Some people, the daughter Kate Gaffney herself, the woman who has just stopped crying in time to buy coffee and ice cream, have been known to wonder what sort of children Kate senior and her brother Frank O’Brien were together. Even those who love them know they might have been monstrous, furious children.

  So there it is: Mrs. O’Brien-Gaffney, Kate Gaffney-Kozinski’s mother, is a known difficult woman, and the difficulties her brother has had are written large in feature articles composed by one girl-hack after another.

  Mrs. Kate Gaffney and the barely Reverend Frank O’Brien had grown up together in a dismal town in Limerick where anything might be going on behind the stucco shopfronts and the blinded windows. Whereas Jimmy Gaffney—our Kate’s father—grew up in working-class Leichhardt in the honest Australian sun.

  The barely Reverend Frank had to travel some counties away from home before he found a seminary willing to half-educate him, and then he volunteered to serve in a remote bush diocese, and next in the archdiocese of Sydney (to be close, he argued, to the Randwick and Rose Hill races). His sister Kate O’Brien followed him to Sydney from Ireland and met Jimmy Gaffney at a Children of Mary picnic.

  Our Kate, born just short of nine months after her parents’ marriage in 1958, is on the night of her tears thirty-two years of age. She is close to average height, and her fairness of complexion and light brown hair come from Jim Gaffney’s side. She inherits her figure from her ardent mother, and older women have occasionally—at her wedding, for example, where these conversations are customary—spent time discussing whether her fine-drawn features qualify her to be called pretty or beautiful. She has been married once, to Paul Kozinski, the son of Polish refugees. Her marriage I can tell you at once has been annulled both by the archdiocesan court and by civil divorce.

  Old Mr. Kozinski, Paul Kozinzki’s father, used to boast with what Kate once saw as reasonable pride that he began in Australia with a wheelbarrow, and built that wheelbarrow—load of cement by load of cement—into one of the nation’s five largest construction companies.

  Andrew Kozinski m. Maria Kozinski

  |

  Paul Kozinski

  Even during Paul’s courtship of her, Kate Gaffney had suspected the regularity with which old Mr. Kozinski said that—one of the five largest. It wasn’t that it wasn’t the truth. It was that Mr. Kozinski was honest enough to say one of the five largest, but not honest enough to say the fifth largest. It was probably too extreme though to see this simple vanity as an unheeded early warning.

  Paul Kozinski had been educated by the Jesuits. He worked part time as a rigger while acquiring a degree in economics. He was lanky, had brown hair with a cowlick, and a philosophic grin. There was something in his family’s peasant background which fitted in perfectly with his Australian upbringing. Something to do with egalitarian impulse and lands of opportunity. That was Australia. Only peasants need apply.

  He founded and managed the real estate development side of Kozinski Constructions. He carried his power with an easy charm. He was athletic. He could make loving jokes about his parents. That is, he seemed to observe the Kozinskis’ wheelbarrow dynasty from outside itself.

  This night when Kate sees her uncle’s dog-collared head-and-shoulders, the enterprises of the Kozinskis are ailing. The Kozinskis’ whereabouts are such as we cannot divulge so early in the story. But in the boom times of the 1980s, Paul took the development arm of Kozinski Constructions into California malls, borrowing up junk-bond money for expansion. In that mad decade he was praised for it in the business sections of magazines. He has not been the only prince of industry caught in a squeeze. If what had turned foul between Kate and himself had been nothing more than an average marital breakdown, she might have been happy—in a rancorous way—about his sufferings, or companionably distressed for him, as some ex-wives were for former adventurous spouses.

  As it happens she finds either attitude an irrelevance. The photographs she has seen of him more recently in journals like the Financial Review are chosen for the shadowiness of his face, the suggestion of stubble, the shiftiness of the eyes. The snide captions of the past year, the ones that indicated he was in a mess, the reports that the National Securities Commission had interviewed him, that the Commission of Inquiry into the Building Industry had gathered anecdotal evidence of him from those who once received his favors—all that is so incidental to reality it has sometimes made her furious, made her crumple the pages in her fists. Not out of anger at him, but because the issues are such pallid ones.
/>   The real question has always been his guilt in matters the National Securities Commission doesn’t even inquire into. Matters beyond the purview too of the Commission of Inquiry into the Building Industry.

  Paul Kozinski and Kate Gaffney were married by Uncle Frank, whose own crimes had not at that stage been established and who charmed all Kate’s and Paul’s friends so thoroughly that people asked, in those days before his faults had been catalogued in the Sydney Morning Herald, Why isn’t he a monsignor?

  Mrs. Kozinski regretted that boozy Reverend Frank had been the officiating priest. Her husband was such a good friend of young Monsignor Pietecki, who was reduced at the Gaffney-Kozinski wedding to the stature of mere concelebrant of the Wedding Mass.

  Loreto Girls and Saint Ignatius boys! Marriages made in heaven and consummated in mutual ignorance. Omnes ethnici sunt periculosi, as Uncle Frank had said in the garden on the day of the wedding. All foreigners are dangerous. Said as a fancy clerical joke, but of course she remembers it as a warning now. What it meant roughly was that just because a boy goes to the Jesuits doesn’t mean you have anything in common with him. History is everything. People will not in the end forgive you for not having shared theirs.

  Three

  HERE ARE THE BACKGROUNDS:

  1. Kate Gaffney graduated in a staid time for students and with a Distinction in the unexceptional area of Pacific History. This was a favorite subject of radicals, since it had to do with all the inroads of cruel European culture and all the plunderings of Poly-, Mela- and Micronesia. Just the same, she did not have the makings of a student radical. For a start, she had not suffered any alienations from her parents. An enchantment with Uncle Frank and regard for her parents kept her fairly observant of what Uncle Frank called—almost with a wink—the Faith.

  2. Adolescent, she saw that the not-so-Reverend Uncle Frank’s Faith was connected not only to mysteries of religion but to certain cultural mysteries such as SP bookmaking, liquor, irreverence for government. Whereas the Kozinskis’ “Faith” was different from Uncle Frank’s. One of the Kozinski mysteries was that Jewish property developers—many of whom had come in the same ship as the Kozinskis—played all games by secret and preferential rules, hammered out in the Sinai Desert in Moses’ day and employed to kill the Son of God and make things hard for ambitious Catholics. Veneration of the Virgin, which had somehow diminished in the Gaffney household since Kate’s childhood, flourished in the Kozinski household. The Black Virgin of Czestochowa, the easternmost great Madonna, the last before the Muscovites began, and—Paul once remarked with an engaging Polish slyness—the Madonna who had the honor of being closest to Auschwitz, was something of a familiar of Mrs. Kozinski’s.