Free A Woman of the Inner Sea by Thomas Keneally

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 strangelydeliberate. 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 shebegan 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