An Angel In Australia (6 page)

Darragh said he was the curate from St Margaret's. ‘Is Mrs Flood in?' he asked. ‘I believe she's been fairly sick.'

‘Yeah,' said the man, rubbing his overnight beard. ‘Yeah, she's been a bit up and down lately. It's her condition.'

‘Is she at home?'

The man stood back, reluctantly permitting Darragh to enter. The hallway had an odour of dust spiked with the bitter scent of invalid tonics and tinctures. ‘We're out in the kitchen,' said the man in the vest, directing him up the hallway. Darragh turned. ‘You're Mr Flood?'

‘That's right. Bert.'

‘Father Frank Darragh,' said Frank, offering his hand. But the mutual clench was full of doubt. After all, how could you achieve the normal electricity of mateship between hand and hand if you introduced yourself as ‘Father Frank Darragh'? What other description could Frank give himself though? They would suspect him more if he did not introduce himself in those terms, which
nonetheless created an instant space about the priest, across which the sacramental mercies might or might not operate. Mr Flood retrieved his unwilling hand, and led Darragh up the hallway.

In the sunny kitchen, at the head of a scrubbed table with the well-intended remnants of sandsoap embedded in its grain, Mrs Flood, in light from the window behind her, sat in a wicker chair buttressed by pillows. She made a splendid invalid, possessed of a strange beauty. Seated beside her on a plain kitchen chair was a lean but muscular young man, fair-headed, drinking tea and holding in one hand, folded for reading, a newspaper entitled
The Worker
. Seeing Bert Flood and Darragh arrive, he creased it exactly to the size of a legal deed and laid it on the table like an opening bid. His left hand was heavily bandaged.

‘Rosie,' said Mr Flood, gesturing with embarrassment towards Darragh, ‘this is the priest from up the road.' There was a clear, pleading message:
you
deal with him.
You
send him on his way with a flea in his ear. There was no doubt Mrs Flood had the presence for such a task. She and the young man studied him in committee. Mrs Flood's red hair had sinuous curls, apparently of its own volition, without the intervention of beauty parlours. Her eyes glittered. She wore a generous trace of smile that gave Darragh hope of a welcome.

He heard himself repeat his name and tell her he'd heard she wasn't well. Breathing harshly, and her eyes glimmering in some kind of appreciation, Mrs Flood rubbed her lips with an immaculate handkerchief. She said, ‘Sit down, Father Frank.' Generally only the close friends of priests had the liberty of calling them by their first names. She was, of course, aware of this, and was possibly sending him a signal—he would not be getting conventional reverence in this kitchen, but then he would not get typical denial either. And perhaps, in her voice crimped by her disease, with the
second syllable of ‘Father' reduced to a wheeze, she was presuming on the authority of her illness to help her through this meeting.

‘It's years since we've had a priest here,' she told him from her chair.

‘But you're on the parish roll,' said Frank.

‘Yes,' she admitted. ‘I used to go up there sometimes for Mass. But that monsignor of yours, he's money-crazy.'

‘Not for his own sake,' said Frank.

‘Oh, Father Frank, he used to drive a pretty nice car. You met Bert, did you? And this is our friend, Ross Trumble. Ross crushed a finger at the brickworks. He's off on compo.' Darragh exchanged nods with blue-eyed Mr Trumble.

‘Get us some tea, eh, Bert?' suggested Mrs Flood. Bert went to the stove willingly to check on the state of the kettle, which was close to boiling.

‘Sit down, Father Frank. Take that chair, that's right. I bet those old biddies the Clancys told you to come and try to improve me. Did you drive down yourself?'

‘Walked,' said Frank.

‘Good for you, young feller,' said Mrs Flood. She called to her husband, ‘See, Bert, not all of them have cars.' It sounded as if they had once had a bet on the matter.

Ross Trumble still considered him, and the man's cheeks had become flushed from mounting discomfort or hostility. It was clear from these signs he had not met many priests, had preconceptions about them, and waited in uneasy certainty for Darragh to manifest himself.

As Bert came to the table with the replenished teapot, and a fresh cup and saucer for Darragh, Mrs Flood asked, ‘What can we do for you, Father?'

‘Well,' said Frank, ‘since you're ill, and no doubt you find it
hard to get to Mass, I thought you might welcome the chance for me to hear your confession and bring you communion occasionally.' The young man was looking utterly away now, not willing to share his gaze with Darragh. He knew it wasn't his place to say yes or no, however.

Mrs Flood was overtaken by an authentic tubercular coughing fit. It was not opportunistic, a disguised answer to Darragh's offer. Mrs Flood did not need to disguise anything. The young man, Trumble, rose, turned his back to the company, and went to a bench and poured a brown liquid into a glass. He brought it back and put it down in front of Mrs Flood who, gasping and signalling with eyes and small gestures of her hands that she would soon be well, reached for it and swallowed it at a gulp, right on top of her still active, gasping cough.

‘Thanks, Rossy,' she said in a choked voice, as serenity re-entered her eyes.

She smiled, and Trumble gave the briefest grin of gratification.

‘Kind of you, young Father Frank,' she said at last. ‘But I don't think it's come to that yet. I've got a fair way to go, I hope. Rossy and Bert look after me well.' She reached out and gently patted the young man's bound hand. ‘Sinner I am, but I'm not ready for the big last confession.'

There was an implicit wink in the way she spoke. She was not vicious, yet Darragh would not have been surprised to see her flutter her eyelids in attentive Ross Trumble's direction. She managed with ease this company of three men, two of them rendered uneasy by the presence of the third.

With her polite refusal, what could Darragh do, having chosen the subtle rather than the didactic line? He said gamely, ‘I wasn't trying to imply that you needed the last rites, Mrs Flood. But every Catholic is supposed to make his Easter duty, to go to
confession and take communion before Easter. Would you like me to visit you before Easter?

He looked at Bert. Bert must understand that an Easter confession could restore his marriage. You would expect a husband to hang on the wife's reply to such an idea, but Bert did not seem to hang on anything or see significance in much. He remained a mildly friendly presence, and distractedly smoked his thin cigarette. His mind was not so much elsewhere, but had long moved away from here, from the triangle around the table and the priest who could amend it.

Mrs Flood seemed to pity him in his bemusement. ‘Look,' she said, ‘you're a nice young fellow, Father Frank. But neither of these boys here are Tykes. And I think I'm going to have to wait for them to get more used to the idea of you calling in like this. How about if I get them to give you a call if I need anything? Anything along the lines of communion, or eternal salvation. What do you say, eh?'

She beamed, offering her small concession, having thoroughly won this encounter.

Darragh could merely utter the official line. As much as he believed it he sounded like a cop reducing some complicated statute to plainest English. ‘I do urge you to think about doing your Easter duty, Mrs Flood. It's a requisite placed by the Pope on all Catholics.'

‘I'll certainly think about it, Father Frank,' she told him, but with a sudden sisterly frown which warned him not to try his luck further; not if he wanted to be welcome.

Darragh finished his tea. To try to elicit something from the men—he was not sure what—but to try to engage them, he began to talk of the war.

Mrs Flood explained, with a heightened colour in her cheeks
for which Darragh hoped she might not have to pay later, ‘Rossy here's a bit of a Red, you see, Father Frank. He thinks the most important thing is the battle in Russia, because if Hitler wins, that's the end of the revolution. But God, I have to say I'd hate it if the Nips came. I'd have to call on you then for sure, Frank.'

Frank
?

‘Well, perhaps we could meet a little earlier than that,' said Darragh.

He saw Bert rolling a further, conclusive cigarette, and maintaining the composure of those who survive by being beneath notice. A verandah-dweller to a T. Bert and Trumble and Mrs Flood knew it was time for him to go. Supporting his bound hand a little, Ross Trumble stood up. ‘I'll see him out,' he insisted.

‘May I give you a blessing before I go?' asked Frank of Mrs Flood.

‘Don't see what harm it can do.'

Trumble averted his eyes during the small rite.

‘
Benedicat vos …
' He used the plural, so that even torpid Bert and hostile Ross, without their knowledge, were encompassed in the rite. ‘
Benedicat vos omnipotens Deus, Pater et Filius et Spiritus Sanctus
.'

‘Feel better already,' said Mrs Flood, opening the bright eyes she had kept closed for this prayer, her marvellous smile in place. ‘Thank you, Father Frank.' With the generosity of that smile she had beguiled first Bert, and then lean Ross Trumble. She who had the power to leave them with nowhere else to go, exactly as she had left Darragh with nothing else to do except depart.

He told all of them it had been a pleasure to meet them, that he would remember Mrs Flood at Mass, and then Ross Trumble was solemnly leading him back up the hall. The tall,
fair-haired brick worker opened the door with his undamaged hand and then blocked the exit.

‘Look,' he said, ‘I can't call you “
Father
”, so don't expect it.' He waited a while as if he half-hoped for a strong chastisement from Darragh.

‘I can't make you do anything, Mr Trumble.'

‘Okay, Frank, listen. You're just another feller to me, you see. You seem a fair enough bloke which makes it all the more bloody outrageous that you should come here with your “I'm Father Darragh” and your “Let me give you a blessing”, and all the rest of the bag of tricks.'

‘It's what I was put on earth to do,' Frank asserted. He still hoped it was true.

‘Yeah, and you might be sincere about it. But I bet you live pretty well. Better than us.'

Darragh could do nothing but fall back on his common malehood and shrug. ‘I get paid barely thirty shillings a week.'

‘Yeah. But all's found for you by the believers, isn't it? And you whack on about God and redemption, but really you're put here on earth to keep the workers in their place. To offer them heaven instead of justice.'

‘I've heard all those arguments, Mr Trumble.'

‘I think they're pretty good arguments, Frankie boy.' He was breathless with anger, Darragh noticed. ‘I mean, God doesn't need marriage, but the banks certainly do. One little two-person mortgage after another. Do not fornicate outside the marriage because you'll buy the second woman a dress or a jewel, and that'll get in the way of bank repayments!'

Frank said with an ironic smile which invited Trumble into the joke as well, ‘I never knew that. That I was a bank employee.'

Trumble wouldn't concede. ‘You're as much a bank's man as any copper. Look, I know what you're here for. You've heard the gossip and you're chasing us up. You think if you hear her confession you can make her split up with me. All of us out in the kitchen knew what this was about. So to me you're just a bloke who tries to stand between a man and his woman. And according to tradition, that's a bloody dangerous place to stand.'

Darragh, edgy with anger, nonetheless decided to resort to equivalent frankness. ‘Come on, Ross. The way you're living isn't natural.'

‘It's natural as hell to me. I'm warning you, you've got no special protection just because you happen to wear a dog collar. You ought to wake up to yourself!'

Darragh had always surmised that one day there would be threats of this nature. He had imagined that they would be easier to brush off than this one was. His arms and legs, ready to fight if needed, felt heavy with alarmed blood. His mouth was dry, and he felt foolish and negligible.

‘Are you going to let me out of the door?' he asked Trumble. ‘I've got other duties today.'

‘You poor young bastard,' said Trumble, and stepped aside at last.

Darragh walked out, down the steps, across the garden, and took exact care closing the wire gate, as if that might earn him some credibility from Trumble.

B
ACK IN THE
presbytery, Frank Darragh ate his lunch with a wooden but profound appetite. In the face of Mrs Flood's charming refusals, of Trumble's hostility, he urged himself to greater firmness and self-respect. It was not as if this fallow season of the soul was unexpected, and its feelings of leadenness and futility. Every authority spoke of the onset of the disease called accidie, a sort of religious version of profound boredom, a sense of the withdrawal of grace when no notable sin has been committed to explain it. Mystics—St John of the Cross, St Teresa of Avila, as well as Thomas à Kempis in
The Imitation of Christ
—all wrote of this sudden absence. It could last for years, and the traveller had numbly to seek his way, in the certainty that illumination lay at the end of the track. He had had it easy until now, yet who was he to expect it would be joyous all along, when even St John of the Cross had walked the path of ashes? Still, with this deadness in them, it was not to be wondered that some priests preferred playing golf to hearing confession, or that they consoled
themselves with food or drink or gambling. And with oblivious sleep. Manoeuvring other, younger priests into doing the early Masses.

The idea he had been so free with when hearing the brothers' confessions, that this was a test, brought him only the dimmest sense of consolation. For the first time he was not intent to finish the residue of his office, of which so far he had recited only Prime. Nonetheless, he walked up and down behind the church, yawning occasionally, beating his way through the hours, muttering, speeding through the ‘
Veni Creator
'. He could hear a chant of times-tables from the school behind the church. Because it was the sort of thing curates did when he was a kid, he went to his room, put on his collar and coat and then walked across to the school, where the children were about to emerge from the classrooms to start their walk home, in convoy for fear of the more robust stone-throwing children of the state school, or to board the 413 and 414 buses. In the meantime the real enemy had come closer. A long way off, but closer than that in the geography of dread.

St Margaret's Primary School was a succession of four sunny red-brick rooms connected by a corridor. On the tarred playground, hopscotch lines had been painted by some enterprising nun or parent. A toilet block of brick and lattice work completed the quadrangle, the campus, at the as-yet humble but serviceable St Margaret's Primary. It was staffed by the nuns from the Dominican convent, who were driven each morning from the Boulevarde, where their splendid high school was located, to St Margaret's by a pious old man named Dyer, and driven back to their convent again after school. As Darragh waited on the edge of the playground, one freckled boy of about ten years emerged on the steps outside
the classroom corridor, holding a school bell. The boy was about to clang it to signal the end of a day's education at the hands of the Dominican sisters when he saw Darragh in the yard. He straightened his fairly languid stance, paused, and rang the bell with a severity which such a sighting warranted.

Sister Felicitas, the principal, emerged. Sister Happiness. But she had a splendid hard-headedness like the monsignor's. Her spirituality seemed of a functional, sane, confident nature. A youngish woman, she was perhaps ten years older than Darragh, perhaps less, and was clearly being groomed by her order for high office, headmistress-ship and mother superior-hood of one of the posher convents the Dominicans ran. She was quite a good-looking woman in a sharp-featured way, Darragh abstractly thought.

Now a jostling queue of children built behind Sister Felicitas in the windowed corridor. The rowdy boys, the prim girls, the junior wide-eyed children of both sexes. He could all but hear their whispers, ‘There's Father. Shut up, there's Father.' The presence of a priest in the schoolyard had always lent a sacramental weight to his own childhood home-goings.

Mothers were beginning to mill in the bitumened laneway between church and school, and saw him.

Felicitas called to her students, ‘Father Darragh is here. You must all say good afternoon to Father Darragh. Silence. Silence there, you ruffian. All say, “Good afternoon, Father Darragh.” '

From within the corridor came the tremolo greeting. ‘Good aftern
ooo
n, F
aaa
ther Darr
aaa
gh.'

‘Now don't run,' the nun ordered. The children descended, two by two, the short stairway to the playground. Small girls held hands. Boys seemed about to explode from the pressure of their own seemliness. Around the corner of the school, mothers
marshalled children for their convoys down Homebush Road. A few dozen students crowded for a while around Darragh, who wore as innocent a smile as he could for them, and told them they had better get on home. A girl showed him an essay with a little gilt star and a holy picture of Our Lady of Succour attached to it—marks of high academic achievement. When he said it was all very good, she ran off, high-stepping with delight.

As the crowd began to clear, Darragh saw, standing by the school corner, the young woman and the boy he had met on the train a few weeks before, on the way to his mother's. He could also see, absolutely obvious in her, the impulse to speak to him. For a second he felt reinvigorated. A merciful God had sent her up Homebush Road to renew his soul by making some small demand on him. Even so he did not move. He waited confidently for the matter to resolve itself in her. At last she came towards him across the hopscotch lines, her eyes wide and full of doubt behind her auburn fringe, her long lips engaged in her internal dispute about the wisdom of approaching him, her son by the hand.

‘Father Darragh,' she said, arriving. ‘We met on the train once. Anthony, you go and play.' She released her son's hand, and the little boy went hopping across the playground, relishing its sudden, uncommon vacancy.

‘I didn't introduce myself then. I'm Mrs Heggarty. Mrs Kate Heggarty.' As if the name itself were a burden, tears rose in her vast eyes. She did not look like a Mrs. She was too young, and had an unsullied air.

‘Oh yes,' said Darragh. ‘And your boy goes here to St Margaret's. Anthony.'

‘That's it,' she said.

‘Your husband will be home soon. Isn't the prime minister
going to bring all the troops back here? To face the Japanese?'

‘My husband has been taken prisoner. Not dead.
Captured
.' She put the slightest, frantic stress on the word, and the weight of her green eyes upon him.

There was a time before, and recently, when he believed the world simple and had confidence in the automatic comfort of soul which he represented simply by being a priest. He could say something blithe and plain, and people in grief nonetheless considered them an utterly original set of words particular to their sorrow, and dedicated to it. ‘He led a decent Catholic life,' for example, or ‘She was well prepared for death.' Now, though, the oft-uttered and reliable clichés evaded him. He could only reproduce some parboiled idea picked up from newspapers. ‘I believe the Germans treat prisoners better than the Japanese do.' Since this gave Mrs Heggarty nothing, and far from easing the tension in her face caused her brow to knot, he struggled, a mere secular fool, graceless and floundering. ‘Of course, despite Hitler, they come from the Christian tradition,' he said.

He wondered did the government go on paying her husband's wages during his captivity. Lord knew how long that would be. The war in the northern hemisphere seemed endless, fought at one end on unimaginable reaches of the Sahara, and at the other on the equally immense steppes of Russia. Only in the southern world, increasingly Japanese, were the fronts fluid and daily altering.

Mrs Heggarty blinked and shook her head free of his inanities. She murmured, ‘You know, it's cold, he said in all his letters. My husband. He said I wouldn't believe how cold the desert could get. I hope the Germans give him a blanket.'

‘Of course they will,' said Darragh, but he was blindly hoping too, and she could tell that. He had the purest impulse to take
her by the shoulder, to place some reassuring pressure there. A fraternal thing. That sort of innocent vernacular gesture was forbidden to him, though. He saw with a particular resentment he had never until now experienced that he must operate on a bloodless and austere level. Ah, he remembered—there had been a piece in the
Herald
about a Rommel offensive. Towards Benghazi in North Africa. ‘I shall remember you and your husband in my Masses,' he assured her.

He could see that this had at least some meaning for her, she did not consider it nothing; she considered it part of what she had come for.

‘You must do that,' she told him. ‘We need it. Things weigh heavily …'

He had feared that Mrs Flood had so diminished him with her twinkling irony that all his offices might seem negligible to the daughters of Eve, to every single one of them. But it was delightful that it weighed with her, his intention to pray. She was clearly from a tradition of observance. On little evidence he surmised her parents: a working man but nobody's fool. An Aunt-Madge-like, Lang-voting mother. Faith and social justice! For Mrs Heggarty was no supine soul. She had an air of independent thought—or so he believed on the slim evidence of their two brief meetings. She was the sort of person about whom he was willing to make fairly early and positive judgements. The forthrightness with which she'd spoken to him on the train, that was his guide. So he stood constructing a history and a soul for her, out of the few scraps of what he actually knew.

‘This is his last letter,' she said, extending a small, square, stiff letter. The army photographed the letters of soldiers and sent them off to families in this form, a card, the writing sharp but reduced. ‘His job was towing an anti-tank gun around the
desert,' she said, surrendering the letter now with a small shrug, as if to say: He only drove a truck … why did the Germans bother taking him?

Darragh looked at the letter. ‘Dearest Sweetheart and Tiger,' it was addressed. Mrs Heggarty pointed to a passage which read, ‘You wouldn't believe how cold it is at night. Even in Alexandria—what we call Alex—it can get colder and foggier than you'd think was likely. I thought this was supposed to be Africa, eh? Not like at the pictures though. Not like
Tarzan
.'

Having proved the assertion that her husband found the desert cold, she emitted a sound like creaking. A tear or two appeared on her cheek. But Darragh felt that she had then sternly cut off the subtle machinery which produced them.

Sister Felicitas and her small group of nuns had emerged from the school building and moved away, carrying their satchels to where Mr Dyer's car waited for them beyond the gate, ready to return them to the bosom of their community. There was a small flavour of starch in the way Felicitas called, ‘Good afternoon, Father Darragh. Good afternoon, Mrs Heggarty.' It was as if she was in her way jealous of this close discourse, the chance of tears and anguish which hung over it.

When the nuns vanished up the laneway, there were only lolloping Anthony and this married girl and Darragh in all the reaches of tar.

‘Could I come and talk to you at the presbytery, Father?' Mrs Kate Heggarty asked.

‘Certainly,' said Darragh.

The presbytery's severe parlour was indeed designed for meetings with the laity. They took place beneath the tranquillity of the Virgin's gaze from a statue placed on a plinth above the table, beneath the authority of the picture of Pius XII on the
wall, and the glow of Christ's suffering heart above a credenza. And under the strict but oblique observance of Mrs Flannery, too, who suspected that any layman or woman not connected to fundraising or prospective marriage was somehow engaged in trickery and special pleading when they came to an appointment in the parlour. Indeed, she felt that the monsignor and Darragh had better things to do than look after the obscure wants of the laity. That's what confession was for!

Darragh was so aware, however, of the pressure of desperation in Mrs Heggarty that he would have been willing to hold such a meeting this afternoon, while her son Anthony zoomed unheeded around the playground. Indeed, on a selfish level, he sought to continue this dialogue, for it was a solace to him as well. Her offer of the letter was a solace. She had thought him to have potential influence over her husband's plain words sent such an exorbitant distance. Poor Private—or was it Trooper or Gunner?—Heggarty's capture and its impact on Mrs Heggarty had brought Darragh a purpose in the midst of a vacant day. The still-receding backs of St Margaret's four black-and-cream-habited nuns, making for the street and Mr Dyer's big old car, inhibited him though. He was reminded that he should perhaps be less impetuous.

‘I could see you tomorrow,' he said. ‘At four o'clock. Could someone mind Anthony for you?'

‘Yes. I'll arrange it.'

She had regained her composure, her cheeks were drying. This admirable soul.

‘But are you sure,' he asked, taking the part of the monsignor and Mrs Flannery, ‘that your problems could not be better dealt with in the confessional?'

She thought and then shook her head. Again, poor Private
Heggarty. To be separated from such a tower by the chances of battle.

He said, ‘Look, your husband
will
return, with a smile on his face. One of these days soon. The war seems endless. But I'm sure it will end.'

What a silly utterance, he chided himself. For it was, of course, the intervening days which weighed on Kate Heggarty's spirit.

When Darragh came to breakfast after early Mass the next day, he found Monsignor Carolan eating boiled eggs in the presbytery dining room. From his face, Darragh could tell the world had changed further, even since yesterday's bombing. ‘Well, it's happened, Frank. That
ee-jit
General Percival has surrendered Singapore.' Monsignor Carolan, influenced by the Irish nuns who had taught him in his childhood forty years past, called anyone he didn't like by that Irish version of idiot. And General Percival, British commander in Singapore, had been an ee-jit he'd inveighed against regularly.