An Angel In Australia Read Online Free Page A

or third century in Christian monasteries. The office thus possessed a worldwide breadth and a historic depth, but that did not prevent comparative speeds for its completion being discussed by young priests on tennis Mondays, the way athletic times for the half-mile might be discussed by runners. A jovial former seminary buffoon named Tim Murphy boasted that he could manage the whole thing in thirty-four minutes. If so, it showed a remarkable facility Frank Darragh couldn’t match—the Latin seemed to him to demand a slower enunciation. Verses such as ‘ Undique circumvenerunt me sicut apes; adusserunt sicut ignis spinas: in nomine Domini contrivi eos ’ did not rattle off the tongue. Neither did they roll off the mind, in their significance. ‘They surround me like bees; they engulf me like tongues of fire …’ He had got to say Matins and Lauds the evening before, as was customary, and Prime and Terce and Sext between his two Masses, and now on the tram he recited None from his breviary, his lips moving, as required by canon law, to pronounce the Latin hymns and psalms and versicles.
    The purpose of requiring priests to recite the office the world over, from Nazi-occupied Belgium, where his breviary had been published by the Benziger Brothers, to the southernmost priest in New Zealand or Argentina, was to remind the individual cleric that whatever business the rest of mankind might be engaged in—invention, invasion, impregnation—his job and caution, hisonly possible joy, was in pursuing the divine order. It was there in the vulgate Latin version of the psalm he read with a slight, unobtrusive flutter of his lips, as he hung from a strap, expelling the words in minor whisper which the tram-clang drowned. ‘ And I shall walk on a spacious road because I follow all your precepts … I am reminded by light of your name, oh Lord, and I guard your law … I shall take delight in your mandates, which I guard. ’
    He was towards the end of None, of the versicle and response, Darragh doing both, unlike the monks with one side of the chapel uttering the versicle, and those on the other side singing the plainchant reply. He had got as far as the words ‘ Averte oculos meos, ne videant vanitatem —Avert my eyes, that they should not see vanity,’ when he felt in an instant cleft in two by the sharpest agony of loss. It arose from nothing, from a slight jolt of the tramlines, and carried not only the face of the young mother, but also the face of the boy generated from her, leaning confidently against her knees. Had he ever known such a woman? Had he leaned against his mother’s knees with such casual confidence? He blinked and looked up. The eyes of a proportion of the tram-travellers, reverent and hostile, were on him. He felt certain they could see his extreme condition, the sudden axe which had divided him, shoulder to loins. How will I eat dinner with my mother? he wondered for a second, though he hoped the extremity of feeling would depart by then. The rest of the office remained to be said: Vespers, Compline. How could it be completed before midnight if he felt as distracted as this? His legs ached too, for no good reason, and he wished he had taken the schoolboy’s offered seat.
    As the tram began the climb to Edgecliff, however, the pain retracted to become a dull, habitual depression, and he beganreciting the hymn of Vespers. ‘Extinguish the flames of passion, draw off the heat of poison, grant the salvation of bodies and the true peace of hearts.’ He feared, however, that for him an age of automatic grace had passed.
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    The bungalow of Darragh’s childhood, approached with the new feeling of having somehow aged during a mere tram ride, and of being tested, stood on New South Head Road in Rose Bay. It was built of plum-coloured brick, and its street-facing windows had little segments of stained glass to relieve them of their banal