A Woman of the Inner Sea Read online

  But she understood that she had no one but Denise to call on. She would be humiliated to ask her father or Uncle Frank, and even though—if he hadn’t been going to Melbourne—Paul might in fact willingly do it, she did not want, aglow with the energy of her rowing, to encounter the mute Perdita-dazzlement in his eyes as he asked for the sake of form, How was it?

  Thus, after Paul left to pack and go to Melbourne, she went exploring ledges of rock left bare only once or twice a year by rare, low, tranquil seas like this one. Siobhan and Bernard were such consummate beach folk now. They knew to the nearest square meter of stone what rocks generally lay below the sea. They got a thrill from walking on surfaces usually deep beneath a growing surf. If you wanted shells not normally encountered, and strange sea animals left behind in isolated pockets of lenslike water, then both were available to you when the Pacific was low and imitated its tranquil name.

  On a great sandstone boulder above where Siobhan and Bernard and she were fossicking she saw a man holding binoculars. His head and shoulders were completely covered with a large beach towel. Under the beach towel he wore the sort of floppy white hat favored by aesthetes or pedophiles in British films about the Mediterranean in the Edwardian era. He was wearing long white trousers too; either careful of the sun even as late as now, when it was on its way back north, or else wanting to show he didn’t intend to take part in water sports. He was in fact taken up entirely with what he could see through the binoculars. Kate idly followed the line his lenses were aimed along and saw a little way out what looked like porpoises or oily flaps of seaweed. The shapes, however, then defined themselves as two divers in wet suits, lying with their backs and their calves breaking the surface, their airtanks discernible but their heads under, fixed on the subaqueous planet. They moved barely but both at once, browsing.

  They must have wanted simultaneously to see more closely what was there, because in unison they kicked up two sets of flippers in the air, and went—communally fascinated—for the bottom. Now they were utterly out of sight.

  The man dropped his binoculars for a second, though his eyes kept to the point the two had disappeared from. It was Murray, the seeker of signatures for petitions. And now—it seemed from all of the protective clothing he wore—the sun hater.

  She drew level with him and called out hello.

  —Kate Kozinski. I’m sorry you didn’t stop the restaurant.

  —Hello, he said. I’m sorry too.

  Then he returned his glance to the point where the flippers had risen above the surface of the sea and vanished in harmony.

  She was shocked and annoyed. He had been urbane enough when he’d wanted her to sign his petition. And it was known that he was supposed to have charm and was so obviously a different kind of man from the rough-edged media and law barons who populated Palm Beach on weekends. They would have given you that sort of answer: Hello. I’m sorry too. Go to hell.

  Murray’s young wife spoke freely to people. That was how it was known that she considered her husband almost grotesquely well bred. He was from some supposedly elegant British family—again according to his wife’s free conversation. His mother, a hand-reared but unmarried English girl, had flown to Australia especially to have him and had raised him for a potential return to the motherland. He had gone to the imitation English grammar schools the Australians ran to knock the rough edges off themselves, and was such a good cricketer that he was first selected for the New South Wales Sheffield Shield team at the age of twenty. His mother’s hope was that he’d return to England in an Australian test cricket team, and that the relatives who had wanted his mother to raise him in uncouth Australia would meet him at Lord’s in the tea break and write to her and say, You’ve done a wonderful job after all. He’s just like one of us.

  Is it worthwhile making him talk? she wondered. It would have been natural to her to do that—but what was the value of it now? However, the impulse to try was almost habitual. To test this man who had rabbited on to get her signature to a petition which in the world’s scales meant damnall. To jostle up against the surface of his hand-rearing, and see what it was worth.

  —I wouldn’t mind being out there with them, she called up to him.

  He did not take his eyes away from the line which connected him to the last certain sight he’d had of the divers. She could see that his face, from which he now dropped the towel, had gone a vivid red. Straight away Kate repented of the game. Because it was his wife out there gamboling in the water with someone else. Possibly going for that extreme act of subsurface communion, sucking oxygen from the same face mask and the same tank and blowing it into each other’s mouth.

  So he too was in the same old stupid torment. And he didn’t have the divine relief of Siobhan the flash swimmer or Bernard and his new gifts as a catcher. He was stuck solitary on his sandstone slab.

  If she climbed up to him what would she say?

  —Listen, put the glasses down. Turning the focus knob won’t make anything better. My husband is out of sight, on his way to talk to Hungarian property people and city officials and trade unionists, and I can’t see him. But I know Perdita’s there too. Perdita: the Lost One. Certainly lost to Mr. Krinkovich. Gone a million. And your wife is a cricket ball’s throw away, a shorter distance than from deep fine leg to the stumps, but you can’t see her either. She and her diver, who could be called anything. What’s his name? What smiling name is carried by your grief?

  But in his state of brusqueness, in his heavily clothed denial of the sun, Murray wouldn’t like to be visited. He was foolish enough to think he was going to learn something when his wife and the unnamed resurfaced.

  Her own weariness, her own inexpectancy of finding out anything whenever Paul resurfaced, made her feel unstrung. To be restored, she chose to forget Murray and to go chasing after Bernard.

  Knowing she was spending lonely evenings, Jim Gaffney thought she might want to attend one of his political dinners with him.

  —But why?

  —It’s a distraction. It’s a sport. They’ll put us at the same table as a cabinet minister. You can ask a few polite questions and feel close to the power. It’s a night out. I’ll send a car out for you.

  It was not her normal idea of a night out. She went, though, to show her parents she was still in business, still possessed of a nice line in table talk.

  Some of the dinner guests would know she was Paul Kozinski’s apparently spurned wife.

  As Denise arrived to be with the children, Kate dressed herself painstakingly. She knew it was her duty to take a sort of rugged joy out of looking good for its own sake, or for Jim’s, so that he could be fatherly proud. Looking in her mirror at the finished effect, she thought abstractedly of Frank Pellegrino the filmmaker, a token man from somewhere in the ether who would—given the chance—approve of and desire her.

  The Minister for Immigration sat at their table—the Prime Minister and the Treasurer were at adjoining ones. The conversation at Jim’s table was all about the difference between economic and political refugees.

  —What’s to stop a Chinese student from deliberately getting into political trouble with his government? asked a broker at the table. Demonstrating in front of the Chinese Embassy in Canberra, for example, and getting his face on TV?

  A thoughtful man from Perth’s outer suburbs, the minister, not quite the sort of argumentative mauler and spoiler the Labor Party produced in Sydney, sister city of Tammany and Boston, frowned. To demonstrate outside the embassy was a risk, one not lightly undertaken. After all, most of the Chinese who did so had vulnerable relatives back on the Chinese mainland.

  Not even for the sake of peace over the dessert would the broker agree. He wanted his children to inherit an Australia which was different in as few aspects as could be managed from the one which prevailed tonight, in this metropolis between the Pacific and the Blue Mountains. There was a kind of love in his anxiety. Why don’t I feel this anxiety for Bernard and Siobhan? Kate thought. She didn’t
see their blood as under siege from Koreans or boat people or quick-moving Hong Kong or mainland Chinese.

  The time of the evening came when the Prime Minister gave a speech about banking deregulation and growth indices, and then guests began to table-hop in earnest. She noticed that everyone, the Prime Minister and Treasurer as well, called Jim Gaffney by his first name and shook his hand with a direct warmth. The politicians and trade unionists who crowded up to say hello to him had been boys of the Christian Brothers when he was a boy at the Christian Brothers. They talked to each other in a language, an argot if you liked, they brought with them out of the common past. Jim Gaffney had a primal attachment to the political party of his parents and of his childhood. Kate wasn’t sure at all that he even voted Labor anymore. She was certainly sure that he didn’t vote Labor all the time. Nonetheless, the idea of Labor was part of his religion and his system.

  This new Labor Party represented in Macquarie Street tonight had however become the preserve of young technocrats and middle-class ideologues. Some of the old holiness still attached just the same. And in this company, amongst men and women from the House of Representatives of the Commonwealth of Australia, men and women from the Legislative Council and Legislative Assembly of New South Wales, Jim was an insider, a reliable man to call on for government commissions and for counsel.

  Apart from the tribes of Jim’s boyhood and the new party visionaries, there came also to these Macquarie Street dinners tycoons from advertising, the television industry, banking, mining, development and construction—from the whole rugged and eccentric apparatus, that is, of antipodean thrust, enterprise and acquisitiveness. She had been lucky so far, and seen very little of them.

  Dessert had been eaten and Kate was refusing port when a man with a square face and groomed and dyed hair came to the table, got down on his haunches beside her chair, and began to talk in a hushed voice.

  She recognized it was Reg Krinkovich. She had seen him before only a few times, in the near-nakedness of meetings on the beach.

  —I wanted to say hello, Kate.

  Unlike Paul Kozinski, Reg still had traces of an immigrant accent, in his case Yugoslav. He retained also a kind of Adriatic courtliness. But he was informal enough to table-flit and to crouch by somebody else’s chair in this casual way.

  —Could I see you before you go home?

  At other dinners in Sydney it would have been impossible for Krinkovich to talk like this to the wife of the man who was on, involved with, and by his own confession achieving ecstasy with your wife.

  But in this company, the chief gossip was political gossip.

  —What about the lobby out there? she suggested.

  —Let’s meet out in the lobby in three minutes.

  There, surrounded by portraits of former premiers of New South Wales, they could talk in the remaining minutes before the Prime Minister rushed out to his car and initiated a general departure.

  Reg and Kate met as arranged then and sat down on upholstered seats around an indoor fountain.

  —I don’t enjoy meeting this way.

  Reg thereby through accident made it sound as if this was an assignation. As he should have known, the assignations were elsewhere.

  He knit together the fingers of both hands. They looked fairly well kept hands for a man who began his business more or less the same way as old Mr. Kozinski—with one truck, one cement mixing machine, one barrow.

  —Listen, Kate, I’m talking about rumors I keep hearing. Let me start like this. When I married Perdita, I wanted to write her into my business. Okay, there were tax reasons for doing it. But it was meant to be a gesture of love too.

  He half smiled at that and shook his head at his own recent innocence.

  —Anyhow, my lawyer is a wise old bloke, Jewish, you know. A Polish Jew. With his head screwed on. He’s like a father to me. I know Yugoslavs don’t have any reputation for liking Jews, but I love this old bugger. Anyhow, he said to me, Reg, don’t do it. He meant, There’s other ways of minimizing tax, and other ways of showing devotion. He said, I know you’re going to live with her forever in happiness. But her background’s different, she’s Australian born and bred. She’s sort of Anglo-Saxon or something like that. Hard as it is to imagine now, you might have problems. So just be wary. Think about it.

  A few trade union officials, meaty-faced, meaty-handed, muttering like extras in a Renaissance tapestry, went by on their way to the toilets.

  —So I thought about it, and I wrote her into the industrial waste disposal division—I wanted to give her something no one could take away. There’s an income for her in that, no one could ever take from her. That’s the way I thought at the time. I was pretty pleased with myself. Even now I don’t begrudge her that.

  —Pardon me, Reg, but there’s actually a rumor you might be happy to get rid of her.

  He unknitted his hands.

  —Three months ago, before she and Paul started, I would have said yes. But it isn’t true now. I’m not enjoying myself these days.

  There were sudden tears in his eyes, falling down the cheeks which looked so well tended, waxed and hairless.

  —These days I really can’t stand the idea of him rooting her.

  It evinced tears in Kate’s eyes too.

  —Well, I can’t either.

  But saying it brought its own anxiety. Because if he stopped the affair, she believed she could restore the marriage very easily. But she didn’t perceive Paul as of the essence, the way Reg Krinkovich claimed he saw Perdita.

  Seeing Krinkovich cry, the absolutism of his love or his pride, she knew that only the children were supreme with her. While Kate could shed tears for Paul, all living cells were magnetized toward Bernard and Siobhan. They were her unarguable north. And they hadn’t noticed anything yet—the long absences had come on at a gradual pace. There had not yet been any of the questions normally spoken by the children of a marriage like hers; there had been no Is he going to go away forever? Since Paul hadn’t distressed the children at the core, had distressed only her, the thing could be managed and mediated, could be healed and redeemed.

  So the tears, the wistfulness, the lack of usual Croatian anger in Krinkovich spoke for the idea that his soul cried out for her. For the strayed Perdita.

  Now Krinkovich had, almost by will, vaporized the tears. His face was utterly clear again.

  Reg said, I’ve heard from reliable sources that you’ve got tremendous power, Kate. You know, by comparison with my wife. Because Paul signed you right into the heart of his business, just like I wanted to do with Perdita. Very passionate people, the two of us, that prick of a husband of yours and me. But it means you can really cause the bastard a lot of financial pain, Kate. You can bring him back to reality with the biggest bloody thud he’s felt since old Mrs. Kozinski gave birth to him on some Polish shitheap. The bastard.

  Krinkovich’s idea terrified her. She looked around. She was anxious that her father might appear, or one of the ministers or back benchers or trade unionists he’d gone to school with, someone who’d try to trade a few sentences with her. Soon surely the Prime Minister and his retinue would come stamping out. He always wanted to return to Kirribilli House as early as he could.

  She had to talk quickly, before prime ministerial fatigue set in.

  —I suppose you’d want me to tell him the corporate facts? All Perdita will bring to a marriage with him is the waste disposal business? While with the right lawyer I can really tie his assets up. Or end up splitting them out from beneath him. Selling them to someone he hates!

  Reg was looking expectant.

  —That’s exactly right, Kate. You’ve always had a clue or two. Tell him you’ll do him over, eh. Remind him of the real world, love. Be fair dinkum with him.

  He’d become more colloquial now that he saw hope.

  She wondered how he could believe that would work. He wanted her to use an abstract legal stratagem as if there wouldn’t be a resultant long, killing hate.

 
; —I’d use your method, Reg, if it would work. But I know it won’t.

  Krinkovich tossed his head. He was disgusted. He cast his eyes up.

  —Look, love, let me tell you something. Paul is scared of only two people in this world. His father and his mother. If the father and mother knew that you intended to rip into Paul, turn him upside down, empty his fucking pockets, ride off with half the assets—they would really start treading on the bastard. They’re two old crocodiles. They’d bully him into seeing you like an innocent, a woman he’s treated like shit …

  This was now such a tempting scenario that she had to think quickly about why it was the wrong one.

  —If I took half his business away, wouldn’t I take half his liabilities as well? The malls in California. They’re geared to hell.

  —Christ!

  Krinkovich had stood up.

  —Have you got some boyfriend or something? You just don’t want to save your fucking marriage!

  —I want to do it on terms I can tolerate.

  —That’s just indulgent bullshit.

  He put on a fake female voice.

  —I want to be able to respect myself. You’re talking about people—the fucking Kozinskis—who don’t give a flying fuck for their self-respect. All they want is to get to the top of the shitheap. Most of these people lived under Hitler and Stalin. The SS made them fuck their sisters in public. They know shame never killed anyone. What people die of is of not fucking winning! For Christ’s sake, wake up, Australia!

  She stood up. She’d been stupid to talk to him. She couldn’t learn anything from Krinkovich, who even the Kozinskis said was a gangster.