An Angel In Australia by Tom Keneally Page A

down and eat a salad with the monsignor.The living room was empty now, and Darragh went to the kitchen and found Mrs Flannery at her work, slicing the previous Sunday’s lamb from which the summer air seemed to have drawn all succulence.
    â€˜If you’d excuse me from being at tea, Mrs Flannery,’ Darragh told her.
    Mrs Flannery said, ‘But you can’t give Benediction on an empty stomach, Father.’
    Darragh held up an apologetic hand. He could see its dishonesty before his face. ‘Please—I’ll make myself some toast and tea afterwards. That will do me.’
    â€˜Go to the ice chest when you’re finished Benediction. You’ll find I’ve left you something under a beaded cover.’
    Darragh foresaw greasy slabs of cold mutton, with sliced beet-root and lettuce, and a jug of condensed milk mayonnaise, the latter covered with its own little beaded doily. What sort of man despised such niceties, such marks of regard, he wondered. But in his present state, he did.
    For all he could imagine doing after Benediction was to sink again into torpor, in which all questions would be for the moment suspended. He had heard of priests experiencing these phases of despair, when the tide of grace ran out, when the performance of duty seemed arid. He was concerned it had happened to him now, when he was barely three years ordained, when there was so far to go, and such great changes to be accommodated. And not over time either, but this year. This half-year.
    When he got to the sacristy door at five to seven, the altar boys were standing there in the last of the light, gazing out for his arrival. They knew he was generally conscientious enough to get there early. Due to an edict of the monsignor, the boys were forbidden from lighting the charcoal for the incense until a priestwas present, for fear that in their brio they would burn the church down. Now they set to work on igniting the beads of charcoal, and they looked sideways at the robing Darragh as they did so. Altar boys had an infallible nose for the mental state of a priest. This was the first time, Darragh knew, they had seen him so beset.
    It was five minutes past seven before Father Darragh, phenomenally late by his own standards, followed the boy carrying the incense, and the other with the brass thurible with its small load of glowing charcoals, to the altar, and the organist began playing that resounding Benediction hymn ‘ Tantum Ergo Sacramentum ’. The congregation, the taste of their evening meals on their tongues, having rushed along Homebush Road in the certain knowledge that he always began Benediction on time, might themselves have been a little bemused by the late start. The golden cope hanging from his shoulders, Darragh ascended the altar, unlocked the tabernacle with its brass key, and extracted the large consecrated host, the body and blood of Christ, and inserted it in the great brass and golden sunspray of the monstrance. Leaving it on the altar in its place of honour, he descended the steps, a ritual recognition of the supremacy of Christ’s Eucharist. This descent had until the last few days enriched him, but now it was just taking carpeted steps and trying not to trip on his long white alb. Feeding incense into the thurible, he swung the smoking metal bulb in the direction of the sacrament, while the congregation bowed profoundly behind him. But the task of holding the chains and directing the thurible was best achieved by him with eyes raised to Christ his brother, hidden behind the banal species of a white disc of unleavened bread. ‘Help me,’ he begged fraternally.

M RS F LANNERY SEEMED as innocent of slumber as of girlishness. The concept of her rest somewhere in the presbytery, in a specific housekeeper’s room on the ground floor, defeated the imagination. She was always in full, wakeful throat when she woke Darragh at a quarter to five. Instantly awake, instantly uneasy,