An Angel In Australia

by Tom Keneally

  ‘Oh dear God,’ said the monsignor.

  ‘I hadn’t told the monsignor,’ said Kearney, ‘but we found a letter of yours in her little lounge room.’

  ‘I thought she was too fine a spirit to write off,’ Darragh explained. ‘I offered further spiritual counsel …’

  The monsignor said, ‘Spiritual counsel,’ as if he disbelieved both words.

  ‘There was no stamp on the envelope,’ the inspector observed. ‘And no postmark.’

  ‘I sent it home with her son.’

  The monsignor’s eyes were again engorged in a way that Darragh found himself tempted to detest. They were underlined by patches of furious red high on the cheeks. ‘Infatuation’s little messenger, eh Frank?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ said Darragh. ‘No.’ He would become angry with the monsignor, but later. Yet Darragh believed the fellow should know, if he was so damn experienced, that the worst thing one priest could do to another was to raise accusations of physical attraction in front of a layman.

  The monsignor compounded the wrong by murmuring, ‘Dean O’Haran again!’

  Darragh understood the historic reference, knew that the policeman would too, and was grateful for the fury that rose in him. ‘Monsignor, you have nothing to worry about on that score.’

  ‘You’ve put yourself in it, Frank,’ said the monsignor. ‘How will it seem if the Sunday Truth or the Telegraph informs the world that a priest was corresponding with a murdered woman?’

  ‘There is no reason for the Truth or anyone else to say so.’

  ‘Well,’ said Kearney mildly, ‘there are Freemasons in the police force who would love to give a journalist such a set of details, Frank.’

  ‘And the morning after it appears,’ the monsignor continued, ‘every Catholic in Australia gets mocked with it as he comes into work! Speak frankly to Mr Kearney here. He can help us prevent scandal.’

  And that was why Kearney had conducted this interview in the monsignor’s presence, so that he could have a barking dog to keep Darragh off balance. But then, if he used tricks like that to find … To find what? The ideas of a victim and a culprit were still equally beyond Darragh’s normally pliant powers of belief.

  ‘Tell me all about your last visit to see her,’ Kearney suggested.

  Darragh did that. He had Mrs Heggarty’s letter, yes. He’d get it in a moment.

  ‘Did you see any sign of her visitor?’

  ‘Well, there was a visitor.’

  ‘Who was it?’

  He felt a strange brotherly guilt at mentioning Ross Trumble. ‘A neighbour, Ross Trumble, called in.’

  ‘Ah, we know Rossy,’ the inspector asserted. ‘What did he do there?’

  Darragh found himself unwilling to say Trumble was drunk. ‘He dropped in some meat from the abattoirs.’

  ‘A gift?’

  ‘I suppose so. He said it was part of the quota of a friend of his.’

  ‘So Trumble might be her fellow, eh?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’ He was affronted by the idea that a bundle of abattoir lamb chops could be the trigger for all Kate Heggarty’s turmoil of soul. So he told how she tossed Ross Trumble out of the kitchen for repeating things he’d already said to Darragh. What things? asked Kearney. The normal Red things, Darragh told him.

  ‘He was harmless,’ said Darragh. ‘I think.’ Darragh told Kearney about Mrs Heggarty’s humane remark, that Trumble was about to lose both a mother and a girlfriend, and his orphan soul wanted to find other kitchens where he was welcome.

  Kearney sent him to his room to get the letter from Mrs Heggarty. On this errand, Darragh paused at his desk and touched his breviary. He opened it and found an ordination card of a classmate sitting there, Paul O’Brien. Oremus pro invicem, Frank, O’Brien had written. Let us pray for each other. And underneath was printed, ‘Our Lady of Perpetual Succour, pray for me.’ Indeed. And for Kate Heggarty’s repute, blighted in death, even though the men downstairs cast her as victim while at the same time consigning her to hell’s pit.

  He got the plain letter, and took it downstairs. As he re-entered the study, the monsignor, beyond himself now and, Darragh noticed, possessing the emotional unreliability of someone who has gone over his normal quota of drink, said, ‘Ha! The billet-doux arrives.’ It was easy to forgive him since he looked, for the first time in Darragh’s experience, sozzled.

  Kearney read the brief letter Mrs Heggarty had written. Then he said, ‘Do you mind if I show this to the monsignor?’

  This put Darragh in an impossible situation—the monsignor was ready to take denial as an insult, but also to read too much into Mrs Heggarty’s words. In the end, he nodded his consent, and the monsignor turned his enraged eyes to it, and his ‘My good heavens!’ and his ‘Mother of God!’ sounded like distant artillery. The monsignor looked up, almost pleading, ‘Tell me what this means, Frank. “Except that I do not want to argue the matter with you again. I feel we argued the matter enough last time.”’

  ‘She didn’t want me pointing out the danger she was in.’

  ‘My God in heaven! Then why visit her?’

  Darragh did not reply, and Kearney said, including both of them in the decision, ‘I don’t think there’s anything here for my colleagues. I’ll have to keep it though, Frank, in case. But you went, like the shepherd in search of the lost sheep, in good faith, even though she told you not to talk about the matter. But then, she would, wouldn’t she?’

  The monsignor tossed his head as Darragh saw with some amazement his letter from Kate Heggarty vanish into Kearney’s breast pocket. Kearney said, ‘You’ll have to trust me with this, Frank and Vince. I’ll let it into the file only if I have to. See, someone might think that “the matter” might refer to something else than spiritual advice.’

  ‘That would be ridiculous,’ said Darragh.

  ‘Public opinion is ridiculous,’ Kearney assured him. ‘There’s no justice and very little sense in it.’

  Monsignor Carolan began mourning aloud, yet more or less to himself. ‘There has not been a whiff of scandal here at St Margaret’s. The parish was founded in 1872, and has been immaculate since …’

  ‘Mrs Heggarty mentioned a neighbour. Thalia. Did she see visitors come to or go from Kate Heggarty’s door?’

  ‘She saw you, Frank,’ said Kearney, with a false-shy smile. ‘Her best friend, Thalia Stevens, who minds Anthony. She saw you. Saw Trumble. Saw a big black car, a Chrysler she thinks, once or twice on the corner of The Crescent and Rochester Street. Not yours, was it, Vince?’

  The monsignor looked up with alarmed eyes and the hair on his skull distrait. ‘Mine’s a Buick,’ said the monsignor, covering his mouth with his fist as the acid of what he had been drinking seemed to recur. ‘Thank God, Frank doesn’t have a car.’

  ‘But does your mother have a car, Frank?’

  ‘A Morris,’ said Darragh. ‘It belonged to my father. My mother doesn’t drive it much.’ He yearned for the father who had nursed the Morris so proudly along, swinging its bony steering wheel, or, in braces and a tie and vest, treating the leather upholstery with a soft cloth. So much is lost before you’re thirty, and now it seemed Kate Heggarty was among the careful lost who cleaned their leather and linoleum and baked their fruit cake.

  ‘Apparently it was all pretty secretive,’ the inspector said. ‘The coming and going of your kindly fellow, Father Frank. She was even secretive with Thalia Stevens, who really liked her. Mrs Stevens told me they were like sisters. Her old man is away too, but safe for the moment, in Western Australia. But far off enough for her to sympathise with Mrs Heggarty. She approved of her friend being pretty secretive, because people these days jump to conclusions. She knew this Heggarty girl had her pride. You’d picked her as a proud woman, Father Frank?’

  The monsignor muttered, ‘Strangling doesn’t happen to proud women, but to fallen ones.’

  ‘Well, that’s not always true, Monsignor,’ said Kearney moderately. ‘Sometimes it happens to those who
are too innocent.’

  ‘I can’t imagine that,’ the monsignor remarked, locked into his own version of the death. His stubbornness about it made the story he had told about Mrs Heggarty, the absolution of her body, more and more credible to Darragh. He felt the shudder as truth entered his blood. No more spiritual advising for Kate, he thought for the first, freshly bewildered time.

  ‘The truth is,’ Kearney went on, yawning slyly as his argument turned a new corner, ‘it’s often a woman who is caught between two men. It’s often jealousy or fear of losing her on the part of one of them, or of both. That can bring on a fatal result.’

  ‘But there weren’t two men,’ Frank protested. ‘Her husband is a prisoner.’

  ‘But say there were people who didn’t know you, Father Frank,’ suggested Kearney. ‘Think for a moment as they would. This fellow who wants the girl in one sense, and a priest who wants the woman in another sense, and sends her letters by way of her son, and visits her even though she says she has nothing more to say. I know you don’t see it as a triangle, and I don’t. But vulgar people, or people who didn’t know your pure motives, might, you see. Sit down, Father Frank. Let’s all sit.’

  Darragh, taking the third seat, wanted to say, ‘Call me Frank or Father. Not Father Frank.’ But he was pleased to suppress the demand, since it might make him seem restively guilty in the face of this outflanking line of argument. He felt restively guilty in any case.

  Kearney resettled himself and sighed. ‘This is what I wanted to tell you, Father Frank. I’ve done a lot of work with priests in the past, and I know as well as anyone that they’re human. If you’ll excuse me for saying, they’re like the rest of us, all too damn human. Now Kate Heggarty was a very beautiful young woman, a genuine good sort. And not all young priests are very worldly. They go into the seminary straight from the Brothers’ schools. They might have been to a Catholic Youth Organisation dance. That’s the extent of their knowledge of society between men and women. You went to the seminary straight from school, didn’t you, Frank?’

  Darragh admitted it. ‘But you’re going in the wrong direction,’ he said.

  ‘I’m sure I am, but just tolerate me a little while. It would be possible for a young fellow who was a priest, and who didn’t have a lot of worldly experience, to get infatuated and to have all the human longings … And these could be in what you’d call a very spiritual way. But still, human longings underneath.’

  ‘Like St Francis and St Clare,’ the monsignor annotated, for once not disgusted, but still fearful.

  ‘I am not saying for a moment that this happened,’ Kearney assured Darragh yet again. ‘But imagine a young priest had built a woman up in his mind as a model of what a woman should be—good-looking, straight, virtuous. A fair dinkum Australian woman of the best kind. And as I say, he doesn’t have a romantic attachment to her in any clear way, but he wants her maybe to go on being this model of Catholic womanhood. He wants her to be a fine daughter of the Blessed Mother, he wants her to be a Child of Mary. And then he discovers that it’s not so. Like other woman under stress, their husbands POWs in Singapore or Germany, or just serving in the army, she falls. You see, good women can fall. If they didn’t fall they wouldn’t need confession. And so one way or another this young priest finds she’s let herself down, and let down all the effort he’s put into her soul. And, he finds out, she betrayed herself with some character who has bought his way into her affections, say with gifts of stockings or chocolate or gin, or something else as silly. A young priest might feel really outraged then. A young priest might feel a sort of fury … And he might find a lot of strength.’

  Behind his instant rage, Darragh felt also an instant self-recognition. He managed though to glare at the two policemen, the one called the monsignor, and the other who was a servant of the Crown in New South Wales.

  Kearney said, ‘You’re a slim, fit young fellow, Father Frank, a bit scrawny but long-armed and strong.’

  As Kearney hypothesised, casting him as the potential strangler, the level of outrage Darragh felt was in fact not as extreme as he would have expected. Though his revulsion was profound, it was tempered by the suspicion that Kearney, as he had when he asked for a Lenten indulgence, was playing at a mental exercise at which he was skilled. He liked to have people flustered. He had succeeded with Monsignor Carolan, and turned him into an inquisitor to harry Darragh.

  ‘You’re not telling me that I’d hurt her?’ asked Darragh, at a loss for convincing words, reduced to the plainest, most ordinary denial. ‘Out of some sense of moral outrage?’

  ‘Or out of a kind of justice,’ Kearney said.

  Darragh covered his face with his hands.

  ‘It’s ridiculous,’ said Darragh. ‘She has a little boy.’

  The monsignor, weary now, his mouth aching open in a whisky yawn behind which he still managed to counsel Darragh. ‘Frank, I adjure you, son. If there were anything at all to it, you’re better off telling the inspector. Rather than becoming the suspect of some bigot who’d love to send you to gaol.’

  Inspector Kearney nodded at that. ‘Better to speak now, while you’re among friends.’ He reached for the near-empty whisky bottle. ‘Have another drink, Father Frank. Ease it out. What is there you can tell?’

  With both hands, Darragh dismissed the idea of a drink. His voice was taken over by some fury of contempt. ‘Apart from the confessional, I met Mrs Heggarty five times, I believe. Once by accident on a train. Then in the playground, and in the parlour there. Then at her house with her child there, or at least running in and out, excited, with Mrs Stevens’s children, and with Trumble calling in.’ The memory took his breath a moment. ‘Then at Mrs Flood’s funeral. That’s all. I won’t waste time taking offence.’

  The monsignor cast his eyes up. It was clear to Darragh that his parish priest did not accept a parity of insult and outrage had been achieved between them, and he was not yet finished with the just punishment of his curate. Kearney, however, remained as level and calm as ever. And began to question Darragh about how, apart from Mass, he had spent Sunday. Darragh explained that he had gone to his mother’s for lunch. Aunt Madge drove him in the Morris down to Watsons Bay for a walk, and she had filled him in on the plots of pictures she had seen since Easter. Then tea, and Madge drove him to Central Station. Then back to the presbytery. ‘I read a bit,’ said Darragh, ‘finished my office.’

  ‘You weren’t tempted to call in on Mrs Heggarty on your way from the station?’

  Of course not, Darragh told him.

  ‘And …’ said Kearney, ‘no night walks?’

  Refusing to answer, Darragh cast his eyes to the far corner of the room. Kearney quietly dispensed with the lees of his whisky glass. He stood. ‘Well, it looks like I can’t help you any further then, Vince,’ he told the monsignor. Darragh was aware in some amazement that both the monsignor and the policeman didn’t fully believe him. Kearney fetched his hat, the clipped and multi-coloured feather in its brim.

  ‘Father Frank,’ he said, ‘you look after yourself. I don’t want you to suffer from guilt by association.’

  For diplomacy’s sake, Darragh stood and shook Kearney’s hand, the hand he at least knew, which led by the ganglia of a big police arm to the brain which had made a cunning assessment of his preoccupation with Mrs Heggarty, though misreading his intentions.

  After shaking the monsignor’s hand, Kearney was gone.

  Darragh said, ‘Excuse me, Monsignor.’

  ‘No,’ ordered the monsignor, kneading his face. ‘Sit down, Frank.’

  Darragh took the seat recently occupied by the inspector. ‘So, she is really dead?’ he could not help asking.

  ‘Oh, you’re so bloody gormless,’ said the monsignor. The corners of his broad head began to shine yet again with red disapproval. ‘My friend gives you a chance to confide in us, and all you can do is come up with a kind of prim outrage.’

  ‘I’ll attend the funeral,’ said Frank.

  ‘That�
��s what I bloody well mean. That’s a fence that’s not even close, Frank. The body won’t be released for burial for at least a week, ten days, Kearney told me. And imagine the newspapers there, round the grave. Thank God there’s nothing too bad in her letter. As for yours, well, who could say?’

  Until this moment, Darragh had not quite believed in the monsignor’s warnings about a press scandal. He believed it had been a conjured-up stick to beat him with. But now he imagined the impact of such a thing in the Sunday Truth, his mother’s surprise, Mr Regan’s. Not exactly Truth readers, the Regans and the Darraghs, but they would have it gleefully pointed out to them by neighbours. It seemed both a small and a massive thing to care about when put beside the idea of Mrs Heggarty being finished with breath and all systems of hope.

  ‘So I shall do the funeral,’ continued the monsignor, pausing again to try to swallow his heartburn. ‘You can take the child to Killcare, Frank, since he knows you. I’ll get one of the parishioners to drive you up. A day in the bush. That’s if you’re here. I’ve spoken to the vicar-general and it’s very likely the cathedral might want you to go to retreat, Frank. Seven days of contemplation. Or a month of it.’ He shook his head in long sweeps, and his horror at having a priest ordered off on a compulsory retreat because his actions had been indiscreet obviously weighed on the monsignor.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Frank. Though he wondered if he could tolerate the silences of a retreat, he would argue that point if it became necessary.

  ‘Oh Frank, you’re encouraging me to become a tyrant, and supervise all your bloody stupid acts. I think I’ve said that once already, though.’ And, having caught himself out in repetition, the monsignor sounded all at once as if he had become more lenient. With a further muttered apology, Darragh was let go to his room, but did not reach it before, on the first landing, the great loss of Mrs Heggarty and the cruelty she had somehow attracted to herself reduced him to crippling tears.

  WHEN THE MONSIGNOR and Mrs Flannery had finished with them, it was natural that Darragh should hungrily read the newspaper reports of the death of Kate Heggarty, in the remaining mad expectation that at the end of one of the columns the journalists or Inspector Kearney would come clean and say, ‘By the way, this is just a sample of what we can do to create realities where there were none and, far from being strangled, Mrs Heggarty, on her next day off work, will be found escorting her son, Anthony, up Homebush Road to St Margaret’s primary school.’ Neither Telegraph nor Herald, a Masonic rag according to the monsignor but necessary to buy on large occasions for its war maps and so that a fellow could be annoyed by its acidulous editorials, nor the vacuous afternoon Sun made this admission so desired by Frank Darragh, who was forced to put the print away from him so that his tears did not ruin the page.