An Angel In Australia (22 page)

Darragh admitted it.

‘Good,' said Anselm. ‘God has given you an honest nature. He may have given you a vain one as well, but you would not be the only young chap that he so endowed. I was certainly similar. I did not want to be a bystander. I had the vanity, too, which said that salvation of the world was all my task. It is a terrible, scruple-ridden tendency. It is the work of fervour, but also of pride.'

‘Yes,' Darragh assented. This old man, he thought, seemed a genuine seer.

‘Do you and I think God exists to guarantee the two of us that we won't be failures? Think of this, my son. We were never guaranteed by Christ that we could save even ourselves. We were given hope, mind you, but no guarantee. And yet we demand success. Who are we, you and I, to demand success? We're nobodies. Aren't we?'

‘That's true,' said Darragh.

‘I say this, young fellow, not to make you more concerned, but to make you calmer. Christ did not wish you to suffer as you have
chosen to suffer. He said, “Sufficient to the day is the evil thereof.” That is, we may be sure to encounter the evil of the day without searching ambitiously for it. That may be why the cathedral wanted you to come here. They saw that you had become feverish.'

‘And they're right,' Darragh admitted. He felt heady, as if the old monk could hold out the prospect of the oneness he wanted.

Anselm looked at Darragh with his pale, light-blue eyes, and asked, ‘Did you desire that young woman? Your parishioner? It's not a shameful thing to admit. If we were not all capable of desire, our vows would mean nothing.'

‘I think I did, Father,' Darragh said. ‘But I was concerned for her salvation as well.'

‘As any true admirer should be, Father Darragh.'

‘I'm also concerned for her son.'

‘Why? He's with the good sisters I believe.'

‘A woman in Homebush was willing to take him in. But she was not Catholic.'

‘And thus perhaps an unsuitable guardian,' the old priest suggested.

Darragh shook his head. He was not ready to yield that point yet. ‘It might be that the boy would have been a better Catholic in a household where he was happy.'

‘That's a very secular view.'

‘I know. It's the sort of doubt I'm often prompted to.'

‘Take all your doubts,' said Anselm, raising both his hands and making an encompassing motion, ‘doubts of your superiors, doubts of articles of faith, and submit them at the feet of Our Blessed Mother. Her mercy is not the mercy of this world. Her compassion is not the mere compassion of neighbours. Commit the boy to her, also. And then …' He paused and dreamed away
for ten seconds, in a way that reminded Darragh of the old exorcist who had once urged him to be a merciful confessor. ‘And
then
,' he resumed at length, ‘live for the moment.'

‘Ah!' said Anselm after Darragh had blinked. ‘You are surprised to hear me say that? It's the sort of thing young men and women terrified of the war say. It's the cry of an unjust generation. But in another sense it's the cry of those who are in peace. We do not own the past, with its grief and sin. The past imperfect, as the grammarians say. We do not own the future. We own only a rag of time, this moment named the present. And to the present, I know, God gives the necessary grace—to enable us to glorify that second in His name. I learned in time that if I lived in any other way than the embrace of the divine second, I would certainly be damned. I was once in battles … in battles, a man can live only in the second, and sometimes not even in the second. I learned in battles … I learned in terrible battles that it is not necessary to expand the present with false imaginings and with peevishness, and the frenzy of our lives.'

He seemed to drowse off in remembrance of things known only to him and perhaps to the late Sergeant Darragh. Then he resumed. ‘Time is like a meal—each mouthful is separate and glorious. Even the second of our death is to be lived and imbued with grace. That is why we accept … we accept what is on the plate. We accept the orders of our superiors when they defy reason. We do not give way to a fear that they might again sound unreasonable in the future. That is something to leave to the future. The limits of what we are permitted to do
now
—that's what we accept. If not, then the world and its manifold voices will certainly send a young man like you insane, and distract you from your priesthood. I know this because I have already trodden the path …'

The old man swallowed. This stratagem he held out—acceptance, and the certainty of grace of the moment—was splendid, and tempted Darragh the way desire might.

But you are damaged, Darragh was tempted to say. You are shell-shocked in some way, and your spiritual plan is the spiritual plan of the shell-shocked. It is achievable within the limits of your nature and your monastic career. My nature is not docile even when I play at it!

Thus, he secretly asked himself in fear and for the first time, ‘Can I long remain a priest, and will I see the face of God?'

This question occupied the first three days of his retreat. He envied old Anselm, the peace the man had achieved. It was the triumph of one soul, a triumph suited to a monastery rather than to the rough-and-tumble of a parish. But he was not a Franciscan monk, living in reflection and devotional routine. He was a secular priest, visiting the Misses Clancy and Mrs Flood, mixing it in sick rooms with all types, walking the uncloistered street and subject to blows from Trumble. Occasionally, Darragh would feel a surge of optimism—yes, I could become that humble old man, the man who gives his seamless attention to every spoonful of time, to every obscure instant. And the reward would be, he was sure, some revelation. He would live to see the killer's face and revel in the capture.

But the wilful complexity of his nature would recur to him at odd moments: after a spartan breakfast, on his silent afternoon hike, or in the middle of the Vespers chant in the chapel. He could
not
become Father Anselm. He hadn't been chastened and simplified by the artillery barrages of the Great War. It was not simply that he was innocent in the wrong way, nor that he'd bristled with rashness. It was that he refused to delude himself that over a lifetime he could render the crass complications of his
soul into that particular one thing, the joyful, smiling gratitude for the new second, already, in any case, fled.

Each morning, feeling halfway like an impostor, he said Mass at a small side chapel, assisted by two Franciscan students, one to ring the bell, one to raise the tail of his chasuble as he in turn raised the consecrated Host, the body and blood of Christ, his Friend, Saviour and God. And even at this moment he knew that his prayers were contrary to Anselm's great tenet of composure-in-Christ. They rushed to present to God the question of how the killer of Kate Heggarty could be found, and how soon. The question still placed a massive personal weight on him, and put paid to Anselm's great proposition that the Moment + Grace = Peace of Soul.

One morning, Father Matthew murmured to him after breakfast, ‘Body's been released. Funeral's today, Frank.'

There was a persistent mist that day on the great plateau above the sea. Darragh lived in its midst in fragile numbness. She who had wanted dignity had become a byword for indignity! The recitation of his breviary became a long plaint for the redemption of her soul. The blue-and-white Virgin Mother who had always been like a member of his family, a prescence of childhood and yet remoter than Mars, could not be imagined as one who would reject Kate Heggarty's last, panicked regrets, or judge her for the confusion of her strangled mind.

So this day of the funeral continued as one hung between times and seasons, and the moments went, embraced or not, and graced or not.

The funeral was photographed by the newspapers, Darragh found out, since each day Father Matthew permitted him to take a glimpse at the monastery's
Daily Telegraph
. There was a confused picture of the monsignor, large in his lacy surplice, solemn
in his biretta, sprinkling the coffin on which a small scatter of flowers lay. So she was in the earth now, despite all his impatience for this revelation whose nature he could barely specify.

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.