by Tom Keneally
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 afternooon, Faaather Darraaagh.’
‘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.
‘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 Ant
hony 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.
