An Angel In Australia (7 page)

‘Our Australian boys were more than willing to fight on,' said the monsignor, the livid white of egg showing momentarily on his tongue. ‘But Percival's shown that as good as he is at burning people's houses, he's no good at dealing with true warriors.'

Monsignor Carolan's father had come to Sydney from County Cork, and as every Cork man knew, General Percival, as a young officer, had burned down the family house of Michael Collins, Irish Free State hero. Pro-Free Staters had been waiting ever since for God and history to punish Percival.

‘All those poor boys,' said the monsignor, reaching for the toast rack. ‘Prisoners now because of that fool, that gormless coward. It's just like the last business—lions led by donkeys. Fine
intellects left in a hole by ee-jits. And we'll know about it, Frank. There'll be desperate women around now. Their husbands prisoners of war.'

‘I've met one already,' Frank said. ‘But her husband was captured in Libya. By the Germans.'

The monsignor shook his head. ‘You're young, Frank. You should watch out for women who have nothing to lose. They're not quite responsible for themselves at a time like this. Don't be too open to them.'

In a pitiful try at proving his worldliness, Darragh said, ‘The woman I spoke to yesterday has asked to see me in the parlour. I suggested the confessional, but she insisted on seeing me for counsel.'

The monsignor turned ruminative. ‘Fair enough, Frank. I leave it to you. Though I'd suggest it's always good to keep the parlour door open during talks like that. It helps moderate behaviour.' Even in the seminary Darragh had heard speeches like this—advice about managing women, who were of their nature a volatile and perilous quantity.

The monsignor finished his toast.

 

There did seem to Darragh to be an altered air that day, even in quiet Homebush Road. The world had changed. It had been axiomatic that Singapore could not fall. The Japanese, makers of laughable prewar junk products—inferior toys, unreliable clocks—had altered the universe by taking the untakeable port. His father had sometimes, influenced by Irish forebears, mocked the concept of the British Empire, for which of course he had been a Great War warrior. But there had been a profound comfort in its being there, to be lauded or sneered at. Now the exclamation mark of that empire, the
long shaft of Malaya, the plump point of Singapore, was borne away, all in a little more than three months.

He owed it to the Eternal Church and the Communion of Saints to spend the morning visiting the elderly sick of the parish. When Darragh called into Pedderick the Chemist's to buy shaving cream and razor blades, three women were already there, one talking to Mr Pedderick and two others discussing Singapore by the door. Words such as ‘disaster' and ‘poor Mrs Thorpe' filled the shop. His entry caused the conversation to mute itself, except that Mr Pedderick said, like an accusation, though Darragh could not be totally sure, ‘Fifteen thousand Australian prisoners!' Darragh felt an urge to say that all things being equal he was willing to place himself in the way of the Japanese tide. But that would have brought conversation at Pedderick's to a total halt.

It was good to enter homes where his motives were not judged. To stand before people weak from the pressure of the earth's calamities, but now immune from them too, since they were about to broach eternity. The Japanese would not arrive in time to enslave them. For their journey, they lay in beds beneath pictures of the Sacred Heart. Brown scapulars devoted to St Anthony were twisted around the bedposts, missals brimmed with holy cards at the side of the bed, and the odour of devout candles on the sideboard contested the thinner smell of pre-decomposition, the traces of urine and excreta which announced the decline of the human system. It was possible to believe but impossible to imagine, when he thought about it, that Mrs Heggarty could reach this stage. She would exhale her soul, he was sure, in mid-splendour.

Before and after a light lunch he said his office with an energy and freshness which had been lacking on other days, and then
realised that it was his coming pastoral meeting with Mrs Heggarty, who had in her extreme hour, revived his zeal. From his room, he remotely heard the quarter past three bell rung by the freckled child on Sister Felicitas's steps. He read that morning's paper which Mrs Flannery had brought him, and all was reverses: Singapore gone, along with Hong Kong, whose British garrison was swamped so quickly and who with their wives and families lay now in the hands of the newcomers, the punishers. The Dutch in the Dutch East Indies overwhelmed— Sumatra reeling, Java quaking. Photographs of American flight crews with unconscionable smiles spiced the newsprint with hope. It seemed essential that he occupy himself thus, with sombre issues, until Mrs Heggarty arrived downstairs, and Mrs Flannery answered the door, admitted her, summoned him. Until then, he tried with some success to suppress daydreams, especially those involving fraught and beautiful women.

To fill in the time further he began reading a detective novel about one Lord Peter Wimsey, who lived in a world unidentifiable to those who inhabited Australian suburbs, to those who ministered to the sins of such as the pernicious brother of the Strathfield community, or Mrs Flood. Even the suspicious characters did not speak to Lord Peter with the particular working-class directness of Mrs Flood's lodger and lover, Ross Trumble.

Remotely, he heard the large knocker at the front door sound. He rose and put on his black serge coat. He picked up his breviary, as if it was the natural armour to take him to such a confrontation as that about to occur. He paused to take in a breath, but did not look at himself in the mirror behind his door for fear that he would spot the hollow man he had been for the
past week. Mrs Flannery could be heard making her brisk way to his door, and then knocking. ‘Father? Mrs Heggarty is waiting for you in the parlour.'

‘Tell her I'll be just a moment,' called Darragh in the voice of preoccupation. He gauged the passage of a minute. He'd always hoped he would never spend a minute in this way, for vanity's sake, letting fallow, godless seconds evaporate. Then, full of a kind of terror and indefinable hope, he opened the door and heard his own steps like those of another person in the corridor and on the staircase. The door to the parlour was open, and pushing it further aside, he saw her seated in a chair at the far end, with the window behind her. She had dressed as if for Mass in a fawn suit, and a little slanting domed hat with a feather at the brim. Her hands were joined nervously at the table, but now she stood up, as she had stood up all her life for the entry of priests.
Introibo altare dei
. The emergence of the vestmented priest from the sacristy onto the altar steps, of the school-visiting priest in a classroom, had been bringing her to her feet since babyhood. You could tell these things by instinct.

‘Hello, Mrs Heggarty,' he heard himself say, like a kindly grocer.

Frowning most frankly, she told him good afternoon.

‘Take a seat,' he said, sitting under the picture of Pius XII, the former Father Pacelli. His Vatican lay deep in the fascist state of Italy, whose German brethren had captured Mr Heggarty. Yet the Vatican's eternal
magisterium
rose above such temporary political facts.

‘Have you heard anything at all about your husband?' he asked.

‘I spoke to another woman,' said Mrs Heggarty, not quite engaging him with her green eyes. ‘Her husband was captured
last year. She said it took at least six months for the Red Cross to find him and for her to get a letter.' The pressure of such a wait brought the possibility of tears to her face again, but they were suppressed. ‘The Department of Defence said they'll send me his wages direct. But he was only a lance bombardier.'

So … Lance Bombardier Heggarty.

‘Soldier's pay,' murmured Darragh. He had heard her say that, in the playground.

‘That's right, Father,' Mrs Heggarty asserted. ‘Nothing to write home about.'

‘Does Anthony know what's happening?'

This was progressing well, he believed, for Mrs Heggarty seemed to be aided by his questions, not that they showed any superior skill.

‘I'm still trying to choose the moment.'

Darragh nodded.

‘We don't know when the war will end, do we?' she said, lifting her eyes, like a woman closing with the chief point of debate. ‘We don't know whether it will end at all. And if it'll end our way. Do we?' The tears gamely repressed behind her features gave her questions an enhanced authority. He knew at once she had lived in a harder world than he had.

‘Surely Western Christianity will succeed in the end,' said Darragh, ‘even though it's hard to believe from the papers.'

‘But the Nazis are Christians, as you told me. And they're doing pretty well, aren't they?' asked Mrs Heggarty with a touch of aggression. ‘Every time we set out into Libya, they drive us back. Don't they? These Christians. And a lot of them are Catholics.'

Darragh blinked. He did not want to think too much about the Nazi Catholics. He had enough conundrums already. ‘Let me
say this, Mrs Heggarty. Sometimes I think there will be suffering before there's deliverance. You're part of the suffering now, and I sympathise with you.'

‘I know you do,' she said. ‘But I'm the one who has to go through it.' Was there a further hint of aggression in her voice?

‘Perhaps I could speak to the gentlemen in the St Vincent de Paul's?' he suggested. ‘In case there's anything you need …'

‘I wouldn't want charity,' she said, a leaden working-class pride at once apparent in her. ‘We've lived our lives avoiding anyone's charity.'

‘Well, there's a place in the city—CUSA—it helps out soldiers' wives.'

‘Yes,' she said. ‘Charity.'

Darragh said, ‘I know you're a proud woman. But sometimes we all need——' She cut him off again, more briskly.

‘We all need …' she said with a nod.

He could not make up his mind now how things were going. One thing he knew: he could not imagine the monsignor accepting so many interruptions.

She settled herself in her chair. ‘Sorry, it's not your fault. I get this anger, and sometimes it doesn't fit inside a room, even a big one like this.'

‘You can't help feeling some anger,' he said.

She shook her head. ‘Do you know my chief reason for coming here? I don't want to be one of those Catholics who creeps away from the confessional and never speaks to a priest again.' She talked like someone contemplating apostasy. ‘That's why I'm speaking to you face-to-face, like an honourable person. There is a man … that's all I'll say. No more and no less. A visitor. Nothing else.'

Remembering Mr Regan's moral outrage, Darragh nearly
asked without thinking, ‘An American?' But that was the height of irrelevance. The question of nationalities had no place in the moral counsels of the Universal Church. He was aware of some ridiculous serpent of vanity in him. It was almost as if he felt entitled as her priest to approve her connections with other people, and she had neglected to let him.

‘This man isn't like other men,' she said. ‘He's patient and courteous. He demands nothing, and I do not choose to offer anything but tea and conversation.' She had grown flushed, as if she had surprised herself with her own forthrightness. ‘But he's there, of course, at least now and then. He's careful how he comes in, so that I'm not embarrassed with the neighbours. But he's willing to provide my son and myself with a few things which make life decent. A pound or two more of meat, a half-pound of butter, an orange. Chocolate …'

She shrugged, and brought her hands together. She had been opening them as she spoke, to indicate spaciousness. You could tell she was disappointed in herself for mentioning chocolate by name.

She said, ‘There's no glory in rickets, Father. God doesn't want scrawny ribs.'

Darragh could feel himself flushing too. ‘I understand exactly what you're saying. But I doubt this fellow does it all from the pure kindness of his heart. Are you telling me that he wants nothing?'

Darragh was voicing the concern not of his own worldly wisdom, but of the sexual scepticism Noldin and other moral theologians passed on to all their students. Even innocents.

‘There
is
pure goodness of heart,' she told him directly. ‘Surely a priest would take that for granted. But there are also mixed motives, and we live with them all the time. Especially if they favour us.'

‘Do you realise …' he asked her in a voice he did not want Mrs Flannery—should she be ensconced somewhere supervising their dialogue—to hear, ‘do you realise this is a proximate occasion of sin?'

She leaned her head to one side and spread her hands again. ‘It hasn't proven to be,' she said, like a challenge.

Darragh could say only, ‘Well …'

Mrs Heggarty relented. ‘It has
not
proven to be. But I don't want you to think I came down in the last shower either.'

Darragh still kept his voice low and fraternal, but something had shifted in him, something unpredicted. Noldin and all the parish priests of history had put their words unbidden in his mouth. ‘So this is what you'll do?' he murmured. ‘Sell your soul for items of groceries?'

He wished the words unsaid. Indeed, she seemed disappointed. ‘Father,' she said, shaking her head, ‘you said you understood exactly what I meant. I'd sacrifice my soul for dignity, because people without dignity have no soul to save anyhow. For the dignity of my boy. So that he doesn't grow up as a bony, miserable little working-class brat.'

Even in his self-disappointment, Darragh was still wary of eavesdroppers. ‘You're talking like a Marxist,' he murmured. ‘What about the dignity of suffering?'

‘Well,' she said in her level way, as if being gentle with him, ‘you'll have to forgive me, Father, but I don't see too much dignity of suffering here at the presbytery.'