An Angel In Australia by Tom Keneally

boy, stop the Japanese, make my husband kinder, aid me as the other man charms me, give me a happy death, ease my pain, assuage my doubt!
    As he went to the bathroom to rinse his neck and upper body, he could hear Monsignor Carolan’s voice raised in conversationin the lounge room downstairs. Tuesday. The monsignor always had lunch with his classmate Monsignor Plunkett on Tuesdays. Monsignor Carolan had once told Darragh, ‘Plunkett knows every rich Catholic between here and Bourke, and knows how to talk to them, too.’ Darragh decided that when he had washed and changed his shirt, he would go—as a polite curate should—and pay his respects to eminent Monsignor Plunkett. So ten minutes later, in the sort of collarless shirt to which priests attached their stocks by means of a stud, he made his way down the stairs. Halfway down, it became clear to him that the monsignor believed him to be out of the house. He was speaking in that full-blast voice which powerful men develop in their middle age, and he was discussing Darragh.
    â€˜He hears bucketloads of confessions,’ the monsignor was saying. ‘That seems to be his chief definition of what a priest does.’
    â€˜Sounds morbid,’ suggested Plunkett. ‘I hope not, Vince.’
    â€˜No. A happy soul. If anything innocent as a lamb. See, an only child, elderly and protective parents. The father’s dead. Poor young Frank knows nothing of the world. He also knows nothing about the eleventh commandment, the sacrament without which nothing gets done. Thou shalt raise plenteous finance. I don’t think he’ll ever be any good at that one. Parishioners tell me he visits them and asks them not to give him money.’
    â€˜Some sort of a zealot then?’
    â€˜No. Too earnest, that’s all. You see, everything he does flows out of his innocence. What’s going to become of him if events shake him up?’
    â€˜What sort of events do you mean?’ asked Plunkett.
    â€˜Well, he’s the hero of silly pious women and pale self-abusers. What’ll happen when he meets real people?’
    Darragh would have hated to be caught on the stairs, listening, his face full of blood. He eased his way upwards again. Knowing it was vanity, he was nonetheless sharply affronted to hear his parish priest’s assessment of him. He had been attracted to the Church by the certainty priests could enjoy that the orders and opinions of their superiors, their parish priests and bishops, must be accommodated and accepted as God’s will. He had had no trouble with that proposition till this afternoon. Why couldn’t he just accept the monsignor’s unflattering report? He could not, and although he knew it was futile, he felt anger as well. The monsignor was pleased enough with his innocence to exploit it to have early Masses said! To have him take Benedictions, and double shifts in the confessional! Darragh would tell him too, but not yet; in robust anger, but not while this stupid state of pique was on him.
    Walking in his room, he struggled through the last of Compline, and then said the next day’s Matins and Lauds, thus completing his daily duty. He was distracted throughout by rage and shame, by the question of which he should be, angry or self-questioning. His lips still enunciated the Latin in the rounded Italian style he had cultivated before his ordination. ‘ Fratres: Sobrii estote, et vigilate … Brothers, be sober and keep watch, because your adversary the Devil, like a raging lion, goes about seeking whom he might devour …’ As these words fell from his tongue like unregarded pebbles dropped by a negligent hand, he rehearsed the furious speeches he would never make to the monsignor.
    Even for a man who was instructed to rejoice when criticised, it was too grave a night, given what he had overheard on the stairs, given, as well, boys in make-up and 4F interlopers from the brickworks, to sit