An Angel In Australia Read Online Free Page B

transparency. His mother, a vigorous, lean woman in her early fifties, tended the rosebushes which marked the way to the verandah and the front door. His parents had bought the house in 1923 from an old Scot who had placed by the front door a framed glass sign in which the word Arbroath was marked out in gold tinsel. They had left it there. The child Darragh had not realised it was the name of a Scottish town, rather than a formula for the hearth. In his present mood of, at best, wistfulness, on this still Sunday suffused with the smell of legs of lamb baking in a thousand kitchens, it failed to evoke much in him.
    One of the baking legs of lamb which, despite meat rationing, were still offered up as a matter of course to Australian Sabbath appetites was inside Arbroath , and Darragh paused at the closed front door and let its savour lead him back to a more grateful sense of who and where he was, and what was his destiny. An only child. A father always pleased for his son’s academic success. Before his sudden death eight years past, Mr Darragh told Frank that though Mrs Darragh was shy and not a woman to make a display, she boasted about Frank to all the neighbours. If she showed wariness in her affection, it did not mean she was not as generous as the young mother he’d met on the train. ‘Yourmother is a brick, a true rock,’ his father had told him approvingly. ‘You know where you stand with her.’ Young Frank was as willing as his father to find her reticence endearing, and not to mistake it for coolness. At the Christian Brothers’ college at Rose Bay, he had given his teachers similar cause for celebration. He suffered from no learning problems or laziness, and so did not need to be punished in the muscular way of the Brothers’ community, with leather straps and fleas in the ear. He was competent alike at such contrasting puzzles as cricket and algebra. Nothing befell him, not even in adolescence, to drive him to rebellion, or make him seek a world other than the one he knew—unless it was the idea he had of his father’s participation in the ill-defined mysteries of war, that massive and risky secular sacrament. He had been exactly the sort of unsullied, unworldly yet not stupid young man the seminary sought.
    At the door of Arbroath , he rang the bell and his aproned mother opened the door. ‘Frank,’ she said with a careful smile. Darragh had learned from childhood to read her small signs, as now, when with her eyes modestly gleaming she led him through to the dining room and his Aunt Madge. Madge, his maiden aunt, came through the curtain from the kitchen where she had obviously been assisting his mother with the bake. His late father’s sister was a fuller and less restrained woman with a plump, pleasant face and brown hair. She believed in rouge, and her cheeks gleamed with that and with the sherry she always drank before Sunday dinner. While he admired his mother for taking quiet delight in things, Aunt Madge was rowdier. Her story, however, like her parents’, had been shaped by the Great War. The family story was that her boyfriend from the Illawarra had been killed in France on some muddy, indiscriminate patrol—he had been a mere eighteen years old.
    Madge had spent her adult life as buyer for the millinery department of a store in the city—the highly trusted Miss Darragh who would have made a wonderful wife. For a time about 1934 when Mr Darragh lost his job at Hawley and Ledger, the importing company at which he had worked for thirteen years, Aunt Madge had moved in with her brother and sister-in-law as a minister of mercy to help them pay the mortgage. But most of the time she liked to live alone, in a flat at Dover Heights.
    When she loudly kissed him now, Darragh could smell the pleasant blush of sweet wine on her breath. Past her, he saw the table set with white linen on which cruets sparkled, and was fully absorbed and consoled by the