An Angel In Australia by Tom Keneally Read Free Book Online

priests lacked bladders. Their bathroom was always set up in taste, with a special towel laid by for his use, and a fresh bar of Cashmere Bouquet. They always presumed, too, he was there for a donation. They did not resent it, but offered him money to take back to the parish—generally, as now, £10 in a white envelope.
    â€˜But I didn’t come for that,’ he said.
    â€˜Well, if you’re to be a parish priest you must get used to asking for money.’
    The Clancy sisters were also astounding informants. They did not seem to be shocked at all by scandalous behaviour in the Strathfield–Homebush area. Nor did they adopt any pharisee airs—they were honestly enthralled by gossip, a generally minor sin they might, for all Darragh remembered, have mentioned in the confessional. They knew which absent soldiers’ wives were behaving badly. They had, perhaps from their pub-owning papa, such a normal air of knowing all about the debased nature of the human heart, even of their own hearts, that it was hard to seethem as narrow carping gossipers, as whitened sepulchres while within everything was rotten.
    â€˜Mrs Flood,’ said the elder Miss Clancy, while the other shuttled about their kitchen, ‘her mother was such a good Catholic. Her father was rough as anything, they said he was a Communist at the saleyards. She rents a room to a young fellow from the brickworks. Strapping young bloke, but they tell us 4F, unfit to serve.’ Miss Clancy tossed her head in the baldest disbelief. ‘He seems to serve the Flood household all right.’
    The other Miss Clancy came from the kitchen with fresh hot water.
    â€˜Mrs Flood,’ she sharply informed Darragh, ‘now shares bed and board with the young fellow, and the husband resides on the back verandah!’
    They both shook their heads, though they did not seem as shaken as Darragh by this degree of lasciviousness in a prosaic suburb.
    â€˜You should go and see her, Father,’ said the bossier of the Clancys. The command made him uneasy. Another dictum of his old spiritual director: ‘People don’t come around by being harangued. They respond to example.’ He would need to think about what example he could set Mrs Flood.
    â€˜Thing is,’ said the older sister, ‘she has this very bad consumption. Coughing all the time. Bloody handkerchiefs. She’s been in a sanatorium …’
    â€˜Boddington,’ said the younger Miss Clancy. ‘In the Blue Mountains.’
    â€˜You’d wonder where she’d get the energy. And for the young fellow … well, you’d wonder what the attraction is.’
    â€˜Red hair,’ said the younger sister, offering Darragh more Scotch Fingers. ‘Some men are crazy for it.’
    Darragh supposed he should visit Mrs Flood sometime in the near future in view of her medical condition alone. It would be a difficult business if the brickworker and the husband were both at home at the time. What could be said? Perhaps the Clancy sisters were wrong about the boarder. But they had an aura of great certainty.
    When Darragh asked them, before leaving, if they had an air-raid shelter to go to, they told him of course they did, only two doors up. As for their ever fleeing, ‘No Jap would dare put a foot in our front door,’ said the eldest. Darragh hoped she would not be disabused of that proposition.
    He returned from the Clancy sisters with that unaccustomed sense of oppression recurring. He felt he needed what he rarely needed: not a mere afternoon nap, but a few profound hours of sleep. It was as if to the scales of sin the Clancy sisters had added that one backbreaking straw—the sexual villainy of mortally ill Mrs Flood. This tattle about the red-headed adulterer seemed connected in its high colour with the confession of the soldier about the boy seductress. He knew his father must have seen fantastical things in Paris and London, where