Office of Innocence by Thomas Keneally

emerged. Sister Happiness. But she had a splendid hard-headedness like the monsignor's. Her spirituality seemed of a functional, sane, confident nature. A youngish woman, she was perhaps ten years older than Darragh, perhaps less, and was clearly being groomed by her order for high office, headmistress-ship and mother superiorhood of one of the posher convents the Dominican Order ran. She was quite a good-looking woman in a sharp-featured way, Darragh abstractly thought.
    Now a jostling queue of children built behind Sister Felicitas in the windowed corridor. The rowdy boys, the prim girls, the junior wide-eyed children of both sexes. He could all but hear their whispers, “There's Father. Shut up, there's Father.” The presence of a priest in the schoolyard had always lent a sacramental weight to his own childhood homegoings.
    Mothers had begun to mill in the bitumened laneway between church and school, and saw him.
    Felicitas called to her students, “Father Darragh is here. You must all say good afternoon to Father Darragh. Silence. Silence there, you ruffian. All say ‘Good afternoon, Father Darragh.' ”
    From within the corridor came the tremolo greeting. “Good after-n
ooo
n, F
aaa
ther Darr
aaa
gh.”
    “Now don't run,” the nun ordered. The children descended, two by two, the short stairway to the playground. Small girls held hands. Boys seemed about to explode from the pressure of their own seemliness. Around the corner of the school, mothers marshaled children for their convoys down Homebush Road. A few dozen students crowded for a while around Darragh, who wore as innocent a smile as he could for them, and told them they had better get on home. A girl showed him an essay with a little gilt star and a holy picture of Our Lady of Succor attached to it—marks of high academic achievement. When he said it was all very good, she ran off, high-stepping with delight.
    As the crowd began to clear, Darragh saw, standing by the school corner, the young woman and the boy he had met on the train a few weeks before, on the way to his mother's. He could also see, absolutely obvious in her, the impulse to speak to him. For a second he felt reinvigorated. A merciful God had sent her up Homebush Road to renew his soul by making some small demand on him. Even so he did not move. He waited confidently for the matter to resolve itself in her. At last she came towards him across the hopscotch lines, her eyes wide and full of doubt behind her auburn fringe, her long lips engaged in her internal dispute about the wisdom of approaching him, her son by the hand.
    “Father Darragh,” she said, arriving. “We met on the train once. Anthony, you go and play.” She released her son's hand, and the little boy went hopping across the playground, relishing its sudden, uncommon vacancy.
    “I didn't introduce myself then. I'm Mrs. Heggarty. Mrs. Kate Heggarty.” As if the name itself were a burden, tears rose in her vast eyes. Apart from her son, she did not look like a Mrs. She was too young, and had an unsullied air.
    “Oh yes,” said Darragh. “And your boy goes here to St. Margaret's. Anthony.”
    “That's it,” she said.
    “Your husband will be home soon. Isn't the prime minister going to bring all the troops back here? To face the Japanese?”
    “My husband has been taken prisoner. Not dead.
Captured
.” She put the slightest, frantic stress on the word, and the weight of her green eyes upon him.
    There was a time before, and recently, when he believed the world simple and had confidence in the automatic comfort of soul which he represented simply by being a priest. He could say something blithe and plain, and people in grief nonetheless would consider it an utterly original set to words particular to their sorrow, and dedicated specifically to relieving it. “He led a decent Catholic life,” for example, or “She was well prepared for death.” Now though, the oft-uttered and reliable clichés evaded him. He could