An Angel In Australia

by Tom Keneally

  But at least the newspapers pleased the monsignor by not mentioning Darragh, and by failing to cast any shadow over the monsignor’s financial and sacramental polity of St Margaret’s.

  Apart from that, it was a pitiable story, and the newspapers were sympathetic to Mrs Heggarty, though they did not thoroughly excuse her. There was an editorial in the Telegraph which reminded soldiers’ wives that as generous as they might be socially, they must be careful about the people they admitted to their houses in their husbands’ absence. Neighbours had seen a man in a brown suit visit Mrs Heggarty one time in the early evening, and another man in a blue suit arrived from a large car parked around the corner about noon on a recent Saturday. He carried a suitcase like a commercial traveller.

  Mrs Heggarty was well liked by neighbours, the papers said, though they said she did not go round attending tea parties. Her son could say nothing about the male visitor, except that he was strong—‘He tossed me for fun,’ said Anthony. ‘He was named Johnny, and brought chocolate with him’. It seemed that sometimes when the visitor was there, Mrs Stevens minded Anthony.

  Darragh’s head, for spasms of perhaps twenty seconds at a time, and recurrently through the coming days, was possessed by the image of her face descending, the crown of her honest head exposed to God and to Darragh’s gaze, to embrace with her lips the thin rim of a china cup. And somewhere, in Africa or Europe, Private Heggarty woke in his prison camp thinking himself still a man with a wife.

  Darragh went to the school to see Anthony, but he was not there. The nuns said he was having some days off with Mrs Stevens.

  The day after her death had been suitably one of neutral weather, and even early, when Darragh went to put on his vestments and say Mass, offering up the bread and the wine that Christ, who knew agony, might extend His mercy to Kate Heggarty, clouds had already cancelled sun, and sun the clouds. The seasons were seized in place, he believed. After Mass and a poor breakfast, he felt in his shirtsleeves the need of a black cardigan, and when he put it on, the need to be bare-armed. He said his office in one session that morning, and the words evaded his attention, so that sometimes he would look back over the ‘Veni Creator’ and ask, ‘Did I recite that?’

  The monsignor was not about at lunch time, and Darragh could not think of a single task for himself. If Kate Heggarty, disciple of Rerum Novarum, could not be helped, it was worth asking who might be.

  The afternoon paper said that the observed wearer of the brown suit, an Italian door-to-door salesman of household products, was helping police with their enquiries. Darragh exclaimed at the newsprint. This could not be the man bearing gifts. Kate Heggarty would not admit a salesman and make him the crux of whether she remained a Catholic or not.

  In the afternoon of that suspended day, Mrs Flannery found him in his room and told him there was a telephone call from the cathedral. It proved to be the vicar-general of the archdiocese, Monsignor Joe McCarthy. Standing in the hallway, phone to ear, Darragh felt chill break out on his underarms as if he would be unable ever again to accommodate himself to any climate.

  ‘Frank, Joe McCarthy here. Sounds to us here as if you’ve had a hectic time. Shot at one week, and now this parishioner of yours. And the strangler.’

  At the utterance of that word—strangler—Darragh felt, like an intimate revelation, the genuine existence of such a person. Until now the fellow had been a black vacancy, brown or blue-suited perhaps, carrying his bag of indefinite kindness, a force with the consistency of smoke. Not a defined man, with hands as rough and hurried as those of a rescuer. Nor did it seem to Darragh, for once, that Inspector Kearney had the right level of urgency to match the concreteness of this clever, strong fellow, this murderer. With this idea of a definite, ten-fingered, two-handed man, Darragh was overtaken by a boiling rage, utterly unsuitable to bring to a telephone call from a vicar-general of an archdiocese. He scrambled in this tempest to hold to one small white area of reason, at the apex of his brain, with all the rest blood-red again, and suffocating.

  ‘I feel very sorry for that woman,’ were the tepid words he managed to emit from this cauldron.

  ‘The world has gone utterly mad,’ Monsignor McCarthy asserted. ‘It is a time for God’s special mercy. I hope we all get it, Frank.’

  Darragh somehow managed to agree.

  ‘His Grace the archbishop thinks that in these disturbing times you should go on retreat … you know, spend a bit of time in meditation and reflection. There is a Franciscan retreat house on the South Coast, or more exactly, Kangaroo Valley …’

  Darragh knew, as any priest would, that to be told that the archbishop thought was not to hear an idle opinion but a command.

  ‘It’s very kind of His Grace,’ said Darragh, trying to accept it all as a matter of the new, Australian-born archbishop’s paternal concern. But he lacked the means of contemplation. He possessed only the means of rage. ‘I keep myself very busy, Monsignor, and I doubt if Monsignor Carolan could easily get through all he has to do without my help. I mean, in the chief areas in which I am able to assist—ceremonies, confession, parish visitations …’

  ‘Yes, you visited the poor woman, didn’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The vicar-general made a creaking noise over the phone, as if he were struggling to find arguments Darragh knew very well he already possessed, and had well calibrated from use on earlier problem priests.

  ‘A–a–ah,’ said McCarthy. ‘It is precisely when a priest considers himself indispensable that he should take a retreat. I feel indispensable to His Grace, but if I were run over by a truck, he’d find a perfectly good new vicar-general in a moment.’

  ‘For how long did His Grace want me to stay in retreat?’

  ‘Well, that is flexible. For as long as we and Monsignor Carolan between us think it might benefit you, I suppose. Beginning next Monday. You could take the train to a bit beyond Wollongong, you see, and the Franciscan friars will pick you up and take you out to Kangaroo Valley. You’ll miss your Monday off, I’m sorry, but the journey’s very pleasant in its own right.’

  ‘Next Monday,’ Darragh repeated woodenly.

  Not early enough to prevent him undertaking his full weekend workload, but soon enough after the event should the salacious Sunday press mention him. He was dolefully aware he would not escape making this retreat. Retreats were the Church’s universal early response to all questionable incidents involving the clergy.

  ‘We wouldn’t want you to rush back, I don’t think, Frank. Count on at least ten to twelve days.’

  ‘I don’t believe there’s any need,’ he still pleaded. It was no good being like an obedient monk. Not with all this fever in his soul, and the idea of the strangler born of woman and bearing a name. ‘Look, it just seems to me … the country’s about to be invaded, Monsignor, and whether by war or murder, children are becoming orphans. I don’t think I can go away and meditate at such a time.’

  ‘Frank,’ the vicar-general told him with greater severity than had marked the discussion so far, ‘your superiors think you have to. It’s precisely at a time like this that you need to reflect. You’ve been through a great deal, a storm of the emotions. These events deprive a man of his compass. A retreat will get you back to your true north. Now, Frank, no more arguments. I’d be embarrassed to have to get the archbishop himself to talk to you.’

  There was no arguing. ‘May her soul, and all the souls of the faithful departed, rest in peace …’ he muttered at the phone when the vicar-general hung up. ‘May her soul …’ He needed to act. In God’s name he had been forbidden to act. Blessed be the Name of the Lord.

  The monsignor was in, and so the dinner was uneasy at the presbytery table, Darragh sensing that as angry as the monsignor might be with him, he was, this sober, tea-drinking night, angry with himself as well, for his heated, whiskified feelings at the conference with Kearney yesterday. Perhaps, too, he harboured an edgy suspicion that there might have been a better way to do things, a more loyal w
ay to Darragh, if only a man had not been so angry, and so shocked by anointing the strangled girl.

  ‘Did you hear from the cathedral?’ the monsignor asked with basso neutrality.

  ‘They want me to go on a retreat,’ said Frank. ‘It seems you’ll decide with them how long I should be there.’

  ‘I think you need it, Frank,’ said the monsignor.

  ‘Why don’t I go tomorrow then?’

  ‘Tomorrow you have to take young Heggarty up to the orphanage at Killcare. I’ve got Mr Connors lined up to drive you and the little bloke.’

  ‘Then why don’t I go on retreat the next day?’

  The monsignor’s face was pained. ‘Because you’re needed over the weekend.’

  ‘That’s exactly right, Monsignor. I’m needed over next weekend, and next Monday to Friday as well. Who’ll do all your extra work for you?’

  ‘Frank, is this the attitude?’

  ‘Yes. It seems I’m getting worldly. Having been grilled by you and Kearney in tandem, I’m not nearly as innocent as I was.’

  ‘Look, Frank, I made the best decision I could. I was too damned upset, Frank, even to pray over it. Perhaps you thought I threw you to him, but … As for false innocence, I can only hope you’ve turned that corner. You know what they say? In the world, but not of it. To be effective, a fellow has to know something of how the world works.’

  ‘I won’t learn much about the world in a Franciscan monastery in Kangaroo Valley.’

  ‘I think you’ve acquired a bit of knowledge in the last few months, Frank, and now it’s time to reflect on it.’

  ‘With you the gaoler, Monsignor, to tell me when I can emerge?’

  Darragh was delighted to see that his baiting had brought angry colour back to the monsignor’s cheeks and scalp.

  ‘His Grace will certainly discuss it with me.’

  ‘And who will be your donkey when I’m not here the weekend after next?’

  ‘Frank, I don’t like that tone.’

  ‘Do you think it’s time some of your beloved finance committee went on retreat? They’re in the world and totally of it.’

  ‘Frank, watch what you’re saying. This isn’t you, I know. You’ve always been such a cooperative young bloke!’

  ‘That was because I was a fool. Now I know a thing or two.’

  ‘Well, one thing you ought to know is you don’t talk to your parish priest like that. You ought to know that much if you’re suddenly such a knowledgeable cleric.’

  ‘Do you mind if I leave the table, Monsignor? I don’t feel like any dinner.’ In fact, mutton was setting in its own fat on his plate, and the peas too were being claimed by the unspecific, tepid gelatinous mixture which was Mrs Flannery’s version of gravy.

  ‘You can certainly go, Frank. You’ve just demonstrated why you need to go on retreat.’

  Frank stood up and went to the foot of the stairs, where he savoured the small astringency of his vented anger.

  ‘Don’t forget you have to do the early Mass tomorrow,’ called the monsignor.

  The phone began to ring then. It was Captain O’Rourke, oblivious of murder, proposing, without any particular enthusiasm, a shared visit to Private Aspillon.

  HE WAS PLEASED to decide he did not need to tell the monsignor of his intended visit to Gervaise. In any case, what harm could occur under the aegis of Captain O’Rourke? There were no jurisdictions to be violated. Bearing his grief, he would be a visitor, and he would behave like it. A seemly curate.

  Darragh, the same purple stole in his pocket as he had taken into his first encounter with Private Aspillon, made the considerable journey by steam train to Liverpool. This was a town not so far beyond Sydney’s outskirts, a place where by day the residual heat of summer seemed to arise from hard-baked earth in streets broadly surveyed as if for some British cantonment in India. By arrangement, Captain O’Rourke picked him up from the northern side of the station, opposite a straggle of garages, frock shops and little grocery stores of the kind his father had called Ned Kellys. The American chaplain was already waiting by a large khaki Buick appropriate, in Darragh’s eyes, to General MacArthur. He was accompanied by a smartly dressed American soldier-driver who smoked while waiting for the visitor. Now he dispensed with his cigarette and came across the street to meet Darragh.

  ‘Father Duggan?’ said the driver.

  ‘Darragh.’

  ‘That’s the one. Sorry sir. Any luggage?’

  He reached for the small grip Darragh had brought with him and took it to the car. Captain O’Rourke, who looked like a slightly florid athlete, shook Darragh’s hand as the driver opened the back door of the Buick for them to enter. O’Rourke wore no clerical collar but an army tie, and seemed very martial in a splendid peaked cap and tan suit, and his two bars, to signify his rank, at the collar of his shirt. He said it was nice to meet Darragh, but Darragh could tell that he was watchful for signs of eccentricity or excess in his visitor.

  The car set off, the two priests in the back together. ‘Okay,’ said O’Rourke, ‘as I told you on the phone, I set it up for you to visit this Aspillon guy, but it took some doing. His trial isn’t up yet, and I know they’ll come down heavy on him.’

  ‘Heavy?’ asked Darragh. A shiver ran through him. He had had enough of heavy comings-down.

  ‘Depends whether they end up deciding he’s AWOL or a deserter. And then of course there’s the fact of cohabitation … Some of these white girls! My guess is he’ll get a five-year sentence.’

  ‘Five years?’

  ‘That’s right. At least he wasn’t in the face of the enemy when he went missing.’

  ‘He sheltered me with his body,’ said Darragh. ‘I could tell the judges that.’

  ‘Father, believe me. That’s just a grace note. Counts for nothing. Look, I went to see him and he’s not a bad kid. Wild. Too much appetite. And an operator. Plausible. But when you go missing like he did, little positive traits of character don’t add up to much at the court martial.’

  They drew up to the camp gate in a country of stunted eucalypts and acacia. The rituals of admission, the gestures of the military police, were all so emphatic. Americans were good at military liturgy, an art form much more casually attended to in the Australian army. No movement these men made seemed casual or negligent. In their standings-to-attention, in their impeccable webbing, they seemed to Darragh to have built a ritual bridgehead against the enemy.

  It became apparent as Captain O’Rourke’s car entered that the numbers of Americans within the gates had tested the accommodation provided by this complex of Great War huts in which the recruits of 1915, his father among them, had spent their last peaceful nights before the madness of France and Flanders. Barracks gave way to long rows of tents, aesthetically pleasing in their choreographed orderliness, the way the ropes of one echoed and ran parallel to the corresponding ropes of the next. The farther into the camp one went, the more tents proliferated. This was at some level a comfort to Darragh. Common wisdom had it that most American troops were either waiting in Melbourne or training in North Queensland. So if there were so many as these in the outer townships and suburbs of Sydney, Australia was not as wide open and bereft of support as was the popular belief.

  Deeply into the camp, they came to a region of high wire gates and fences, surrounded by wooden watchtowers. Armed guards stood atop the towers, on watch against their own—at first sight, a peculiar task for a patriot. This detention compound was thickly tented out as well—so many misdemeanours and crimes had apparently been committed in a few months by the soldiers of Australia’s great ally and best hope. Only one permanent structure lay in there—a guard hut to which, having dismounted from the Buick at the gate and entered an opened portal within it, Fathers O’Rourke and Darragh were led. They were offered a seat in a barred-off section of the structure, furnished with a table and chairs for interviews of this nature. The other part of the hut was a large holding cell, empty today. A natty military policeman waiting by th
e door pointed to Darragh’s grip and asked him would he mind opening it, and whether he had brought anything for the prisoner. Darragh produced a pocket missal and a set of rosary beads.

  The military policeman was half embarrassed in saying, ‘He can have the book, Father. The rosary beads …’

  ‘A prisoner could hang himself with those, see!’ Father O’Rourke explained to Darragh. ‘Don’t worry, we have communal rosary and they use natural beads. Their fingers.’

  ‘I brought some biscuits too,’ said Darragh, reaching further into his little bag. ‘Shortbread.’

  The military policeman looked strickenly at Father O’Rourke, who said, ‘Sorry, Father Darragh. It’s always Lent in here. If you’d leave them with me, I’ll make sure they get to some of the other guys.’

  Of course, Darragh handed them over to O’Rourke, who seemed amused to receive them and asked a guard near the door to take them to his driver.

  Before a proper conversation could develop between Darragh and O’Rourke, tall Gervaise Aspillon, accompanied by two MPs and chained at the wrists and the ankles, was brought in through the further door. The connecting links were loose so that at a nod from his mentors Gervaise was able to consider sitting, but not before, eyes aglow with modest hope, he greeted the priests, O’Rourke with an equally enthusiastic nod as Darragh. As Gervaise settled, O’Rourke leaned towards Darragh and murmured. ‘Father, I might just leave you alone? Before I do, you wouldn’t get a fellow priest into trouble, would you?’