A Woman of the Inner Sea (39 page)

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.

Yet Kate feared, a bubble of panic rising in her throat, pricking the roof of her mouth, that Teece spoke as if he would soon switch gear and render a different picture of Uncle Frank.

The prosecutor asked, Did the Reverend Frank O’Brien seek any special favors from you?

Teece took pale thought.

—One day Father O’Brien called and wanted to see me. I said I
was available. He came in and asked if he could open a bank account in the name of Edith Timms. He said it was an unregistered trust, and there were problems in using his regular accounts. I didn’t ask him too many questions about this. I had no reason to. I thought he might be just wanting to open an account for a widow or for someone injured …

There was indulgent laughter from the press and, Kate was comforted to see, the women in the jury in particular.

—And you know, he didn’t want to go through the legal fuss with founding a trust. And then I asked him what address this Edith Timms account should be in. He hadn’t thought of that. He didn’t want it to be
his
address. He was looking perplexed. So I said that if he wanted he could use my address for a time.

The prosecution acknowledged that this was very generous of Mr. Teece and asked how much ultimately came through the account.

Teece said, About thirty-seven thousand dollars.

The prosecutor remarked tritely that this was something more than a widow’s mite. Mr. Teece said it was not beyond the bounds of possibility for a trust based on donations to raise as much money as this, if raffles and dinners were held.

—But you never knew who this Edith Timms was?

Teece said, No.

—Even though the address of the account was yours?

—I thought that was a technicality.

—Did your superiors ultimately point out to you that it was more than a technicality?

Teece admitted that they had. He did not seem utterly shamefaced about it. But he admitted he had been suspended.

Would Mr. Teece have been surprised to know that a number of accounts under the name Edith Timms had been established at other branches of various banks, that they had been established by Mrs. Kearney and that all of them used his address?

Teece shook his head. This is where he thought the Reverend Frank had let him down a little. He’d been ignorant of all this.

So—in a way—was Kate. Ignorant of the style and cunning and scope of Uncle Frank’s operations. Astonished by it and overtaken by a kind of wonder.

The chief question then:

—And you say that the defendant O’Brien offered you no direct inducements for this service you had done him?

A month after the account had been opened, Teece remarked, the Reverend Frank—who knew he was a keen punter—called him and gave him three telephone numbers. Father O’Brien said that if Teece called any of these numbers, he would discover that he had a credit of three thousand dollars.

Did Mr. Teece think this was a bribe?

No, said Teece. He knew the Reverend O’Brien was a wealthy man. It wasn’t such an astounding thing for him to give another punter a little credit.

—So it wasn’t an inducement, Teece said. It was a gift.

Through this, Fiona Kearney kept thin and composed, but she wrote no notes to Tandy Q.C. She was an old-fashioned woman and had taken her direction from Alderman Kearney and now from her spiritual director and lover, the not-so-Reverend Frank. It was Uncle Frank who held his head on the side, seeing at every step the trick behind the prosecution’s drift and firing off the notes to Tandy.

—Are bank officers encouraged to accept gifts from wealthy clients? asked the prosecution.

—Not in theory. But it happens.

When it came to Mr. Tandy Q.C.’s turn, he seemed to understand Uncle Frank’s disposition as thoroughly as Kate herself did. He asked Teece the right questions, or at least the questions which Uncle Frank wanted asked.

—When the Reverend Frank O’Brien told you of the three thousand dollars credit, did you consider it a reimbursement for your having let your address be used in this way?

—No.

For Teece as for Uncle Frank, it was all in the spirit of the premature burial and wake.

—Did you consider the extension of credit as connected with your duties as a bank officer in any way at all?

—No.

—What did you consider it?

—A gesture of friendship. From a generous sportsman.

Happily Teece’s ignorance remained as invincible as Uncle Frank’s. The next witness called was however so likely to be damaging that Murray suggested they leave now.

—Soon, said Kate. Soon, Murray.

This witness was older, a former manager of a bank in Milperra. He had a jovial, beefy look, but was wearing an old-fashioned brown suit. For he was serving a sentence for embezzlement, a matter quite separate from the matter before this court. He had however received visits during his banking career from Mrs. Kearney and the Reverend Father O’Brien. He had opened accounts in the name of Edith Timms and Edmund Kelly.

—Did you have any reason, the prosecutor asked, to believe the names were fictitious?

—Well I wondered about Edmund Kelly. In view of the fact it’s the name of the bushranger.

Ned Kelly, hanged in the Melbourne jail, in Uncle Frank’s worldview another victim of the lion and unicorn.

—What address was used for these accounts?

—There wasn’t any actual account. I kept the amounts informally for Father O’Brien and Mrs. Kearney.

—What do you mean by
informally?

—Well sometimes—temporarily—I’d keep them in my bottom drawer, or else in my office safe.

—Was bank interest paid on these amounts?

—No, said the fallen manager. I was doing it as a favor.

Kate noticed with a pulse of fear that when the witness said this, Uncle Frank had nodded. Good answer! Good lad! Judgment might come as a vast surprise to Uncle Frank, a terminal confirmation of the lack of civil good humor everywhere on the planet.

Tandy Q.C. spoke to the witness.

—How did you first meet the Reverend Frank O’Brien?

—My wife approached him. She was worried about my gambling.

—Did she have cause to be?

—I wouldn’t be serving a sentence if not.

—Why would your wife go to the Reverend Frank O’Brien, who was known to be something of a gambler himself?

—My wife believed that Father O’Brien was the
beau idéal
of gamblers. He had his gambling under control.

This caused the jury and the press to guffaw, and Kate was grateful that her mother was not there.

For Tandy and the judge did not laugh.

—Did Father O’Brien ever give you any advice?

—Yes, said the fallen bank manager. The Reverend O’Brien sent me to Gamblers Anonymous. Just as an observer at first. To get the idea. Even though it was all meant to be anonymous, I didn’t want to declare myself in case word got back to Head Office. So Father O’Brien gave me three telephone numbers. He said I’d better ring those if I
had
to bet. He said that I would find that I had ten thousand dollars credit if I called those numbers.

—At the time of your arrest, how much did the people who answered those telephone numbers tell you you owed them?

—They told me I owed them $17,737. I spoke to Father Frank about it and that was the last I heard.

Seeing the prosecution rise in a way she thought predatory, she asked Murray if she could go. After all it was an odd minute, when again the press might not be so watchful. But it was painful for Frank’s sake to be a witness to this—the drift of judgment. Even his friends were—with the greatest respect—condemning him, and he construed it as praise.

Murray helped her as she struggled upright urgently.

Waiting for the lift outside, he said, This is a remarkable family you belong to, Kate. You are yourself a remarkable woman.

She said nothing. She was palpitating for Uncle Frank.

—I never thought I’d be mixed up with a family like this.

He began to laugh.

Two barristers appeared, talking secretly to each other and nodding at Murray. Murray too spoke as in a conspiracy when he turned to her.

—Come and live with me, Kate. Now. I’ve been a negligent friend. But I’m very patient. If that’s what you like. My first wife couldn’t stand it.

—I have to get out of the so-called sanatorium first.

—Come and live with me when you do.

As they were leaving the building, a press photographer in wait took their picture. As it appeared in the next morning’s Packer tabloid, they seemed designed for each other by their parallel thinness.

W
HEN THE SANATORIUM SEASON ended, it had to be either her parents’ place or Murray’s. Her mother had a surprisingly poor sense of how little a woman deprived of her children wanted to go back now to her childhood hearth. Jim Gaffney understood it though. He understood the obvious things: such as that her burns had had nothing to do with Murray.

So she moved to Murray’s city apartment. She laid her few clothes out in a chest of drawers. She had begun to use simple cosmetics again, but only the most simple. She wanted to mask the harsh effect all the sedative had had upon her skin. She established a modest beachhead on a vanity table the former Mrs. Stannard had no doubt used more spaciously.

She went to day therapy for a week, sat and listened to men tell how loneliness or ambition had unhinged them, to women speak of how a lust for possession had entrapped them. She listened to them talk each morning of such ordinary treacheries. As a means of convincing everyone that she was whole, she made up eminently sensible advice for all parties. She enjoyed creating these salutary little near-fictions about other patients, salting them with items from socio- and psycho jargon, frowning and hesitating before uttering each Californian cliché. The burden of her advice was: You mustn’t blame yourself. It seemed to satisfy everyone eminently, and she believed it was benign advice anyhow.

And so the sanatorium let her go with a set of prescriptions and a list of emergency phone numbers.

She had ambitions to work, and one Sunday afternoon she and Murray went to drinks at Bernard Astor’s.

How her son’s godfather had aged!

She went back to Bernard’s to do itineraries—the plain business of flights and hotel bookings—and to write press releases. She did
not set up or attend press conferences, as she had when she was young, and she did not travel with actors and directors. Yet Bernard paid her as if she did. She chose not to argue about it. She would earn it all soon. She could foresee a time when she
would
appear at press previews and move amongst the reviewers with a casual skill.

Soon she was able to call Murchison’s Railway Hotel. Jack seemed to be a man harried in a new way, a less comfortable one. He said that Connie had had a little time in hospital, but she was improving now. She was learning not to blame herself, he said.

—What for?

—You know. Her sister. Beats me to be honest.

He changed direction then, and she heard his laugh.

—Jesus, we had to keep a straight face telling lies about you the night you and Gus took off. We didn’t know what to say, so we said the least we could …

Guthega was a town hero, said Jack. But men really spoke volumes of Jelly, and Jack was putting up a plaque for him in the bar. It was sad, Noel and his father had fallen out and Noel was off doing shearing exhibitions at country shows. It could be the making of the boy.

Though of course he would always remember that through no fault of his own he had fallen on the plunger.

—And have you seen Gus? she asked.

—Gus’s engaged, said Jack, and this struck him as utterly hilarious. He’s traveling round New South Wales in his fiancée’s caravan, and they lecture and show slides on Australian wildlife to schoolkids.

At night Kate reclined back against Murray’s body. He placed his cheek against her scarred shoulders. He said that she was beautiful. It was a preciously ordinary word. She was aware of hollowness, but her daily work was done and Murray enfolded her. She fulfilled responsibilities and observed herself doing it. She believed there would never be a connection between the observer and the task. She was sundered in two for good.

The black onus of punishing Paul Kozinski never left her, and she was not delayed by anything as minor as reluctance to act. Even as she wrapped herself into Murray’s embrace, she was utterly willing to arrange a conference with Paul and to reach out in
the midst of cool exchanges and plunge a knife into his abdomen. Everything she could devise failed to come up to weight however. As with all committers of unspeakable wrongs, the punishment should bring the culprit himself deliverance, but not too easily.

Paul had bought himself a new house for the new marriage, not that the new marriage was achieved yet. But there would be a wedding as soon as the annulment was delivered, and Monsignor Pietecki—Kate knew—would officiate. She knew that this new place had been bought in part with the insurance money from the hecatomb at Palm Beach, her share of which waited for her somewhere, in some lawyer’s office. A charred reward she intended not to touch.