A Woman of the Inner Sea Read Online Free

are designed for gobshites. And they both oblige the processes by
being
gobshites!
    She believed Uncle Frank was sure she was listening. Acquiring a very ordinary political and ecclesiastical education: not shattering news, but received a little earlier than most of her sister students at Loreto Convent were receiving it.
    But before this ordinary heresy could escape too pervasively into the Eastern Suburbs air, her father had lovingly pushed Uncle Frank into the back of the limousine.
    There had always been that nearly embarrassing feeling of personal communication. This scandalous priest, rumored to have investments in hotels and racehorses, would—often at the height of a binge, even at the point where incoherence threatened—raise his large prophetic jaw and utter a message which seemed to his niece to be meant for her.
    Slowly she had gathered a portmanteau of usable Uncle Frankisms. Things barely worth saying in themselves but having force as said. All plain truths, or truisms. But there was something about the force of truisms when they’re uttered by certain mouths, and Uncle Frank’s mouth had that force for her. Uncle Frank was her
teller
in the furnace. The way lovers dealt in banal yet always refreshing praise, Uncle Frank dealt in banal but always refreshing truth. As essential as a lover is a
teller!
And the greater was the art of the teller, since with the right resonant dictum, you could understand even a loveless universe.
    When she was quite young, even before she had identified Uncle Frank as her shaman, she noticed that other people, the parents of her schoolfriends, would sometimes denounce the not-so-Reverend Frank with a special fury. Their faces would close down. They talked about his imported cars, his alpaca suits, and his gambling and drinking as if he were the only priest guilty of such things. The Archdiocese of Sydney, whether Anglican or Roman Catholic, had never been intensely penitential. As in the brash city itself, the visionary or the mystic had never been encouraged. Generally a lower-middle-class virtuousness was counted more highly than searing faith.
    Grafted on to these ambitions of low church respectability, which in Sydney were always breaking down anyhow into graft and saturnalia, was the tradition of the Irish working-class priesthood as perceived by someone of Jim Gaffney’s and of Uncle Frank’s generation. The priest was heterosexual (after all, how else was he to be conventionally tempted and proven?), a gambler, a drinker, a sporting man. He was even
entitled
to be. It was sufficient that he edify by being a eunuch for Christ’s sake. If you permitted him access to the bottle and the sporting field, then hewas less likely to look wistfully toward the marriage bed. He was not the great Bull of Coole. He was a steer for higher causes. So he was entitled to eat well and drive well, to put money on the backs of footballers and racehorses—yes, even though an ordinance of the Archdiocese of Sydney forbade priests to attend racecourses, since the possibility of obsession existed there. But after all, gambling was venial, and copulation was mortal.
    The reason people muttered about the not-so-Reverend Frank O’Brien was, Kate would realize much later, that they thought he was getting the lot: the racing, the football, the whiskey, the alpaca coat, the Jaguar or the BMW, and the arms of a woman as well. The woman being his business partner, the widowed Mrs. Fiona Kearney.
    This was an O’Brien-Gaffney scandal even before the action of this book begins. But the rumors about Mrs. Kearney and Uncle Frank were well suppressed in the household. Kate did not pick them up herself until she was in the first year of her degree at university. Perhaps Kate’s ignorance was a chosen one; it is astounding what people can fail to notice if it suits them. Hearing Uncle Frank put forward in some undergraduate debate as a far-gone example of institutional hypocrisy, she understood certain