An Angel In Australia

by Tom Keneally

  Yet a Saturday came. And a Sunday.

  After a midday meal of mutton and mint sauce on Sunday, as the students and monks left the refectory, Father Matthew, dairy farmer, again approached him at his place at table. He muttered an invitation for Darragh to meet him in his study.

  It proved to be a farmer’s office—stock books, a pile of bills waiting to be dealt with, journals, a calendar advertising dairy feed, and by a bookshelf a tin can which claimed to contain a drench suitable for use on cattle. Matthew went to the desk and raised the Sunday Telegraph. The front page carried a horrifying headline about an Australian ship sunk in the Sunda Strait with great loss of men. Race results from Randwick, a banner promised, were further back in the paper, displaced by this futher tragedy of the war. Father Matthew found the page within the paper, and folded it back. ‘Frank, I’m sorry to show you this, but the cathedral called and said you should be told. We all know that this is an anti-Catholic rag. The vicar-general at St Mary’s doesn’t want you to take this too hard. Naturally, he wasn’t too happy. He said, you know … young fellows can be …’

  ‘Imprudent,’ Frank supplied, hearing his own thunderous heart.

  ‘CATHOLIC PRIEST HELPS POLICE IN STRANGLER MURDER.’ A lesser headline said, ‘Exchanged Letters with Murdered Woman.’ He read the article a careful sentence at a time, each word occupying seconds. Detective Inspector Kearney of the CID had confirmed that the police had found a letter from Father Francis Darragh at the residence of the murdered woman. Other sources indicated that the priest had been intercepted during a night-time visit to the premises. He had been involved in a scuffle outside the house and then approached by police on watch, and spoken with. Inspector Kearney had refused to say whether the priest was under a shadow.

  At first reading the report felt weightily bad to Darragh, and he knew that a second reading would only reveal extra burdens of shame. But he sat and read the piece again, as a penance, to the end. The archbishop’s office had told the newspaper that Father Darragh had been sent away for a time of reflection at a monastery. The vicar-general had made it very clear to the Sunday Telegraph that Father Darragh would speak to the police further should they require it. So they had got even by publishing a picture of the vicar-general.

  Darragh was not aware, until it happened, that he was capable of groaning. ‘It’s a bugger of a thing,’ said Father Matthew, the dairy farmer. ‘At least no one gave them a photograph of you.’

  ‘My mother,’ said Darragh. ‘It will kill my mother.’ He could imagine Aunt Madge absorbing it, but Mr Regan, who had experienced the lechery of Yanks, and his mother, who had sent him through the seminary, relinquishing the chance of grandchildren—they must be bewildered and suffering. ‘Would it be possible to book a trunk call?’

  ‘I’m sure we can do it through the local exchange,’ said Father Matthew. He picked up the phone, cranked its handle, spoke to someone named Nora, discussed dairy cattle prices and Nora’s children, said he wanted to book a call—he turned away from the receiver to get Mrs Darragh’s telephone number from her dazed son—and ultimately hung up. ‘The trunk call’s booked for four o’clock,’ said Matthew. ‘Is there anything I can do?’

  ‘I think … I need to reflect,’ said Darragh. ‘Maybe a walk …’

  ‘And you’re seeing Anselm at five?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Did I mention Anselm was wounded and gassed? In France.’

  Darragh thought with longing of such great, simplifying events.

  He took the hiking trail again. There was in the Australian bush today, after yesterday’s blankness of fog, an impassive air. The eucalypts gave the sense not only of being pre-Christian and thus indifferent, but pre-human and thus doubly indifferent. The trees, tall in knowledge, continued to keep to themselves all that Darragh had no doubt they possessed. The idea of an answer encoded among these great, shaggy-barked, smooth-fleshed shafts was sustaining, and he would not like to have been stripped of that expectation. He would not have minded being, for the next moment, hour, or forever, motherless Adam, and for this neutral vegetation to cover the entire planet not already covered by the chiding blue of the distant sea.

  His mother and father had wished for him a career as a lawyer, a doctor, the sort of man whose life was unaffected by seasonal shifts, and of course, a father of a smiling family. They were good enough Catholics to accept it as God’s will when he announced to them at sixteen his apparent calling to the priesthood. He had already fulfilled one ambition for them, having won in the Leaving Certificate exam an Exhibition—an all-paid scholarship to Sydney University, to the faculty of his choice. There had been no such exemption of fees for the seminary. Yet his mother, out of her savings and her war widow’s pension (his deceased father having been considered, in view of his foreshortened life, a victim of the Great War) had seen him through the seminary, had bought his soutane, his surplice, his Liber Usualis—the book of plainchant—his textbooks of philosophy and theology, moral and doctrinal, his own Summa Theologica, his black suit, his black stock and celluloid white collars. What did she think today? The Telegraph’s story reeked of his infatuation, one way or another, with Kate Heggarty, and it was now clear to him, with the secular voice of journalism ripping away all self-deception, that indeed he had been, and indeed he still was infatuated.

  At four o’clock he returned to Father Matthew’s study to face what might be motherly reproach or, something worse, the lack of reproach. Father Matthew asked the woman at the telephone exchange if she would mind not listening to this conversation, because it was about matters to do with the archdiocese of Sydney. ‘You always have to do that,’ he murmured, one hand over the mouthpiece, in Darragh’s direction. ‘She listens to everything, but she’s a good Catholic …’ Something on the line had claimed Matthew’s attention again, and he said into the receiver, ‘Wait a second.’ He handed the phone to Darragh.

  It was Aunt Madge on the other end. ‘Frank, you sound like you’re in the other room,’ she said, as if the entire point of this trunk call was to demonstrate the miracle of the telephone. She was breathless, as most people were, with the seriousness of trunk calls, with their expense, and the inroads they were said to make upon vital military communications. ‘I hope you are well, dear Frank. Look, we read the paper. Believe me when I say it means nothing. It’s always been an anti-Catholic rag, and like all rags it’ll be tomorrow’s steak wrapping, or cut up into strips to be used on backsides in country shouses. Don’t let them make you feel shame, Frank. Do you hear? Now I’ll get your mother. She’s standing right here.’

  Darragh’s mother said, ‘Darling. Are you well?’

  ‘I’m well. I’m only worried about you.’

  ‘I’m in first-class form,’ asserted Mrs Darragh. ‘It’s always been an anti-Catholic rag, that Telegraph.’ This was the antiphon Catholics were used to uttering when newspapers printed tales of scandal within the Church.

  He said, ‘It’s a poor return for you, Mama, after all the years of expense in the seminary. I keep on thinking of the chalice you and Aunt Madge bought for my ordination.’ Gilt and gold plate with enamelled medallions on sconces of the handle—the Lamb of God, the IHS (Iesos Hristos Soter, Jesus Christ Saviour). A miraculous vessel. A grail. And it must have cost his mother and Madge at least £50. Now it spent most of its year in a cupboard at St Margaret’s sacristy. He sometimes remembered to bring it forth and use it at Mass at Easter or Christmas.

  ‘It’s the insinuation of it all,’ said his mother. ‘You can’t help that the woman went to confession to you, can you? They just like to insinuate. You wonder if anything they say is the truth, even about the war.’

  ‘Oh, I think a lot of that is reliable,’ Darragh sadly assured her.

  ‘They talk about a scuffle. Did anyone hit you, Frank?’

  ‘I’m not hurt, Ma. It was just a local eccentric.’

  ‘Now, don’t you worry,’ she said, a true warrior woman. ‘No one is going
to take any notice of this. Mr Regan was just in here and he said that everyone he’s spoken to thinks it’s ridiculous. They all know you, darling.’

  Then they’re doing well, Darragh thought. But it would be too cruel to say so to his mother. So they continued, for the remaining permitted minute of their trunk call, to play what Darragh thought of as a form of tennis of consolation—‘I’m concerned for you,’, ‘But I’m only concerned for you.’ The kindly myth that no damage had been done was piled up, house-of-cards-wise, in the ether between the Kangaroo Valley monastery and the Darragh bungalow in Rose Bay. Then the line was cut.

  When Darragh went into Father Anselm’s study that night, the old man looked at him with an acute and, for the first time, knowing kindliness in his eyes. ‘I believe, young Darragh, you are in a hard position. A priest who falls, even for the moment, into the hands of the weekend press …’

  What Darragh was most certain of, now that his follies had been published and there was no further need to keep him hidden, was that he would be released from his retreat after eleven days, on the coming Friday, to enable him to do the Saturday confessions and Benediction, and the early Sunday Masses. And so it happened. On Friday afternoon, the vicar-general called and said that the retreat was considered concluded, and that Darragh was to take the Saturday morning train back to Sydney. The cheering aspect of this recall was that it meant the cathedral did not expect him to appear in this coming Sunday’s papers.

  His last session with Father Anselm was five o’clock on Friday evening.

  ‘It’s possible,’ the old monk told him in conclusion, ‘for a man to be involved in scandal through very little fault of his own. His strongest impulse, his simplicity of heart, betrays him. But the world does not know how to use a simple heart.’

  Father Anselm seemed for a time to think about unnamed instances, perhaps on battlefields, where the world had tried to violate with steel his own simple heart. ‘It’s the reason priests get hardened as they age. They were taken as fools in youth, and don’t want it to happen again.’ He thought about this phenomenon awhile, too. ‘You bear for Christ this cross of notoriety. With any good fortune, it’ll be a temporary affliction. I have in a long life, Father Frank, seen men bear themselves with dignity even when there are no grounds for dignity left. You must bear yourself with dignity now, administering the sacraments, giving good sermons, visiting the sick, living simply. And show your parishioners that you are conscious of no deliberate shame, or if you are, that you have taken account of it.’

  That evening, after dinner, Father Matthew stopped him outside the refectory and took him to his office and poured him a whisky. ‘I’ve got to say I wouldn’t want to be in your position, mate,’ said Matthew, and Darragh felt a vague and yet enjoyable vanity at being seen as a man on a frontline. ‘I’m sure you’ve got the heart for it, but it’s hard to face people, and you’ll be facing a lot of them at Mass on Sunday. What’ll you say to them?’

  ‘I haven’t thought of that,’ said Frank, putting down his glass. It was a daunting idea. ‘What do you reckon, Matthew? Do I address the subject? Or do I just give a regular Sunday sermon? Faith, hope and charity. The sacraments. The Blessed Virgin … Say this had happened to you—would you mention the Telegraph?’

  ‘Some of your parishioners would want you to stand up for yourself. Some will have morbid interest. It’s a hard one. But, bloody hell, I think I’d tell the truth and mention anti-Catholic newspaper talk—that sort of thing. I’d reckon you’re entitled to say that.’

  ‘Do I speak of the woman?’ asked Darragh.

  ‘That’d be brave. But look, even down this way, even in a country town, there’s a new and dangerous air about. We used to visit the big world in the picture shows, but now the pictures have come to us. In the form of the Yanks. In the form of the Japs as well. I tell you, Frank, I’m glad I’ve got the dairy farm to concentrate my mind.’

  HOME AFTER LUNCH on Saturday, Darragh found himself treated with a sort of edgy awe by Mrs Flannery, who gave him a canned salmon sandwich to compensate for his missed meal. Captain O’Rourke had called, and had reported that ‘the person in question’, who had been ‘sentenced at court-martial’, had been ‘shipped north with a penal battalion’. These were words she read from notes she had taken, raising her eyes wonder-struck at ‘court-martial’, as if it were the measure of how utterly transformed Darragh now was.

  Invigorated to know that Private Aspillon still breathed, Darragh washed his face and hands, put on his cassock, and went across to the church to hear confessions. As he approached his confessional, he was aware of the normal three or four pews of queued penitents. Some looked at him sideways; there was a shining fixity in the faces of the older women there. Yes, he had been in the papers. But they were sure the papers were wrong! Their loyalty abashed him. But there must have been some drawn into the ambit of his confessional by his notoriety, or even the possibility that being under question himself, he would not be too severe with them. Carrying his stole, he paused at the middle door of the confessional, kissed the cross embroidered on the purple, entered, closed the door on himself in this small, shadowy space, and took his position on the chair which enabled him to hear with equal ease confessions on the right and the left.

  A shiver possessed him as his mind, his sacramental intent, settled itself to hear the whispered shame of his congregation. Whispers of desire and meannesses of love and of spirit entered the space where he sat. He told the masturbating boys that when they met their wives in ten years time, they would be ashamed of having yielded to their weaknesses now. Virtuous women who confessed to pride—the most suspicious confessions of all, since sometimes when women mentioned pride they also implied they had much reason for it—plagued his ears and eroded his spirit. He was aware of an impatience in his voice, and a slight astonishment in response from the other side of the wire grille, of the kind a child shows when a favourite and indulgent uncle becomes severe. He imposed the penalties appropriate to these small sins, but again he confused certain matrons of the parish by asking them to say entire decades of the rosary to expiate the pride they had so proudly confessed.

  The radiance of afternoon faded in the small slit of beaded-glass window behind his head. He sat in an even more sombre half-dark, in which his folded hands shone dimly but luminously. Winter afternoon sun came down aslant the council chambers, leaving Darragh’s confessional weakly lit. Yet, he knew, he spent twice, three times as long in the confessional as the monsignor. This small geographic injustice once more nagged away at him for half an hour, as he automatically bound and loosened his penitents, absolved the petty crimes of his parishioners, handed out penances and thought of tasks to be attended to among the living—the two chief issues being the tracking down of Gervaise, and a trunk call, if it could be arranged, to the orphanage in Killcare.

  Nearly all the light was gone. Having concluded with a penitent in the box to the right, he slid the shutter on that side’s grille closed, and opened the one to the left to find nobody there.

  His mind took now to nudging round the rough tablets of his Sunday sermon, as yet unwritten. The story of the woman taken in adultery, whom Christ saved. There had been no merciful intervention in Kate Heggarty’s case. Darragh knew he should not explicitly mention her name. It would only titillate people to do so—boys who had seen her in the pews on Sunday and thought she was a good sort. He also knew that to mention the murdered woman by her name would play into the monsignor’s rampant idea of his, Darragh’s, own folly, and it was best to satisfy that appetite only when conscience or instinct made it unavoidable.

  He flinched as a penitent entered the left-hand confessional box, and he heard the whisper of cloth as whoever it was lowered himself to the kneeler there. He knew it was a man in a suit. In taking up the kneeling position, men’s serge made a different noise from women’s satin or cotton or wool. Though he did not even know he knew this, Darragh’s mind accepted the newcomer as a male.

 
He made sure that the right-hand grille was definitely closed, lest a late-entering penitent in that box hear what this newcomer said.

  ‘Bless me Father for I have sinned,’ the penitent began, proving the universality of the rites of the Catholic Church by speaking in Fratelli’s voice. Looking through the confusing window of the fine-mesh grille, Darragh saw a Fratelli-like bulk. This meant, he decided, with reasoning rendered leaden by the hour, that the penitent was Fratelli.

  ‘It is a year and a half since my last confession.’

  ‘So you missed your last Easter duty?’ asked Darragh.

  ‘That’s a fact, Father. But a good angel is on me, and so I came now.’

  ‘A good angel? What exactly does that mean?’

  ‘It means that for the moment I’m not the Devil’s property.’ It sounded such a humble and gothically minded Fratelli, a Fratelli drawing on the robust Italian Catholicism of his parents, a Fratelli who for the moment renounced the shining nimbus of his helmet and the authority of his side-armed waist.

  ‘Here,’ said Darragh, coughing and regaining his breath, ‘here you are within the reach of influence far greater than that of angels. That of Christ and His Blessed Mother.’ Where did these sure assertions come from? Darragh wondered.

  ‘I need to be under a better influence by far. You know that …’

  ‘How do I know it? I’m not aware of that. Not yet.’

  ‘Well, I always thought you saw through me.’

  So, either I’m a fool or a seer! thought Darragh, his head spinning. What little ration of wisdom might be in him was underestimated by vicar-generals, and overstated by penitents.

  ‘No,’ said Darragh, wanting to clear away the idea that he had any special insight. ‘Do you know what? I thought you looked like a courtier in a Renaissance painting. A handsome creature, virtuous and dangerous at the same time. That’s all I thought. So don’t make things up about me.’