Aelred's Sin (14 page)

The following morning before Prime, Aelred got the secateurs from the cupboard in the common room. While he waited for Edward to meet him after housework he picked out the dead flowers from the vase in front of the Lady statue. He did this as he knelt at the prie-dieu in front of the shrine. Hearing footsteps behind him in the corridor he turned, still in his kneeling position, and saw that it was Edward. He got up, making the sign of the cross.

‘I’ll just get rid of these,’ Aelred said, depositing the dead
flowers in the large hearth of the common room fireplace.

‘
Benedicite
,’ Edward said formally. He had a new work smock, which was crisp and creased where it had been folded in the linen room. Like when he was in his cassock, Edward exuded a smell of newness. Now it was the brand-new denim work smock.

‘Benedicite,
brother.’ Aelred smiled. ‘I’ll just get the secateurs,’ and he returned to the prie-dieu where he had left them.

‘You’ve been doing your devotions?’

‘Yes. Do you have a special devotion?’

‘I prefer to keep my prayer life within the official liturgy, rather than keeping up all these side devotions. I’ve always thought of them as sentimental and belonging to old women and the Spaniards.’ Edward spoke in a tone that Aelred now recognised right away.

‘I see. Oh, actually, my mother is half Spanish. Well, let’s go to the garden, on the terrace.’ They pulled up their hoods and processed out of the novitiate through the cloister and out to the terrace in silence.

There was a mist still lying in the folds of the park, though the bright sun they had had over the last few days was beginning to break through. There was a chill in the air. The new light breaking through played on the walls of the abbey. There was shadow and light in the cloister and on the lawns beneath the terrace.

‘I don’t care what you say. It’s a garden to me,’ Aelred said pointedly, remembering Edward’s remark the day before, as he inspected the beds to see what they could pick and, at the same time, not denude Father Kevin’s hard work. ‘I suppose the thing is not to pick from one place. And any greenery you need, try and get it from
different bushes. The greenery usually lasts a week or even more.’

‘I’d think you were Welsh if I hadn’t been told that you came from Les Deux - what’s its name?’

‘Les Deux Isles. The two islands. Yes, that’s what everyone thought when I first arrived.’

‘It’s the lilt in the voice.’

‘Yes, kind of sing-song. Maybe the French in the dialect.’

By now Aelred had a bouquet of white daisies in his arms. ‘What’s this look like?’ He held the flowers up to the sun, which increased through the mist.

‘You’re the tutor, brother. I’m the apprentice.’

‘You’re always joking, aren’t you?’

‘Brother?’ Edward was taken unawares, confronted unexpectedly.

‘My father had a dry sense of humour. It can be misunderstood, can’t it? At times?’ Aelred said.

‘You’re - excuse me asking: I was wondering, and remarked to Benedict that first afternoon I met you - you’re not coloured, are you? Because you don’t seem so, and yet -?’

‘Now I really love red roses but I daren’t pick any of these first buds. Do you think we should?’ Aelred turned around and held a small red rose up to Edward. ‘Smell this.’ As Edward took the stem of the single rose his finger caught on a thorn.

‘Ow!’ He handed the rose back to Aelred. ‘Take this.’ He sucked on his finger where the thorn had punctured and where it bled.

‘Are you OK? I used to faint as a child for things like that.’

‘I’m fine. I’m fine. Don’t you think we have enough now?’ Edward blushed and Aelred noticed his mounting irritation with his dryness, which was now mixed with sympathy. He remembered what it was like to be new. Everything was strange. One wasn’t oneself.

‘Yes, well, why don’t you take them? Arrange them in the novitiate. The bell for Prime will go soon.’ Aelred handed Edward the bouquet. ‘Mind the rose.’

‘Wish you were doing this.’

‘It’ll be fine. You’ll get the hang of it. Benedict will be pleased.’

‘That’s important, isn’t it? Pleasing Benedict?’

‘Very.’

‘Oh, yes, where’s the quarry?’

‘Over there.’ Aelred pointed into the distance, the other side of the orchard. ‘Over there, beyond those fields. It’s just out of view. No rock climbing, though. And by the way, you could say that I’m a creole.’

‘Creole,’ Edward repeated, getting his lips around the word.

‘Yes, like Joséphine.’

‘Joséphine?’

‘Joséphine Beauharnais.’

‘Who’s she when she’s in choir?’ Edward looked down his nose at the red rose.

‘Napoleon’s first wife.’ Aelred smiled and swept up some cuttings from the verge near the flower beds. ‘You know, from the exotic island of Martinique.’

Edward looked confused and Aelred chuckled.

As they reached the cloister, and before raising their hoods to process back to the novitiate, Aelred noticed Edward look him over. He folded down the sleeves of his
work smock over his brown arms. He was very handsome, Aelred thought.

They parted. Aelred could smell Edward’s newness as he followed him.

On fine days the monks were allowed to spend siesta on the lawns below the terrace. It was there that Aelred found Benedict some days later. He was lying on the lawn near the monkey-puzzle tree. He came up to Benedict and stood over him. Benedict looked up from his philosophy books, which were spread open on the grass around him. There were two big tomes: Being and Nothingness and Being And Time.

‘Existentialism: Jean Paul Sartre and Martin Heidegger.’ Benedict pointed at the tomes.

‘Yes.’ Aelred smiled, not being able to respond. He did not know any of these authors.

‘You’ll read these one day.’

‘I hope so. I want to study and know more about myself and the world.’

‘In time. You must do your novitiate reading first.’

‘I’m sorry about what I said the other day. They’re true, the feelings which I expressed. They were true at the time. I felt confused.’ He was talking quickly, blurting it all out before he felt tongue-tied again as he had on the walk. ‘I love you.’ Aelred continued to stand over Benedict, who was now sitting up. He looked into the distance towards the quarry. Aelred felt awkward standing as he was. He didn’t want to sit on the grass next to Benedict, because he shouldn’t be there: he was out of bounds. He made as if to leave.

He was surprised when Benedict said, ‘Sit a while.
Don’t run off.’ Benedict could see that the younger monk was agitated and had taken all the courage he possessed to come here and confess his love. It seemed like that to both of them. It was something to confess, secretly, something which had been made close to sin since childhood. Now he was telling his love: all that love which had been pent up for his friend Ted who had died, and about whom Benedict had questioned him on St Aelred’s Day soon after he had arrived, and again on the walk.

That first love had come with the first spring of sex. Benedict imagined this for the young novice, barely a man, and seeming to Benedict to be in between man and boy, his face as smooth as a girl’s. As he looked up at him, he seemed to be a person who was questing and struggling for virtue.

‘Sit, sit by me.’ He knew this struggle in himself. ‘I understand.’

Was this not like their patron saint of friendship, Aelred of Rievaulx, whose loves in his youth were characterised by conflict and distraction? Hadn’t that Aelred seen himself as needing to be cleansed; and wasn’t it the honey of his love for the boy Jesus which had saved him?

‘I love you,’ Benedict said, raising his hand to hold Aelred’s and tugging at his sleeve for him to sit by his side. ‘Thanks for your love.’

Aelred lowered his eyes in shyness and confusion. ‘Good, I just wanted you to know, because I felt terrible after the walk. For so long now since we’ve had a chance to speak. I don’t know why I felt like hurting you. There’s no reason I can think of.’ He couldn’t get it right - couldn’t get it to sound right, what he wanted to say.

‘These things are difficult. And in time we must talk more, but we must keep to the rules.’

‘I’m so glad you spoke. I love you. I’ve never talked of this kind of love before, not even to Ted really, because we were so young. Not like this. I was younger.’ Then he felt he was betraying Ted.

‘And remember Aelred of Rievaulx. There are those who have gone before us and are our guides,’ Benedict said.

They smiled, and then the two men left each other. The older man knew that for the first time in his monastic life there were feelings for one of his brothers which had not manifested themselves before, feelings which he had to contain, the extent and true nature of which he had not even told Aelred. He felt that he had responsibilities, now that he had confessed to one so young. This was a love which he knew to be more than the love he had for all his other brothers in the community.

The younger man felt happy, and already yearning for the next time they would meet. When they did, they would look at each other in choir, in the refectory, on the way to the garden, when they shared the washing up: the daily chores of their simple life. Glances would carry so much more; looking and the language of the eyes would mean so much more.

Aelred began to feel for the first time that the burden of his feelings had been lightened. He heard what Benedict said. They had their rules. He felt like the young Ivo, in Aelred of Rievaulx’s treatise on friendship, who wanted to open his heart, pour out his thoughts. He felt that Benedict had noticed him in the same way that the
medieval abbot had noticed his young friend Ivo. He returned to the treatise on friendship with added enthusiasm to find solace and advice for this new thing in his life.

These were exactly Aelred’s feelings, to be alone at Benedict’s feet, his model monk. Now his friend who actually said, I love you. He took the words away with him, treasuring them, excited and frightened.

Later, as they were queuing for None, Benedict came up to Aelred.
‘Benedicite,
brother,’ he smiled. ‘On another matter. You must be supportive to Edward. Remember what it is to be new.’

Aelred nodded, as Edward joined the queue behind him and the community began processing into choir for None.

The Guest House:
29 September 1984

As shadows lengthen into night …

Compline: ‘Brothers, be sober and watch, because your adversary the devil, like a roaring lion, goes about seeking whom he may devour… Resist him, strong in faith…’ The young monk who is the acolyte of the choir read the lesson and afterwards lit the Lady candles. He is so young, so handsome. He reminds me of J.M. I try to imagine him then. I left Compline sad, so sad for losing my brother, for his way of dying, not knowing how to retrieve him. I get some of him back.

Back then, there was Benedict. They were all younger then, both of them. I feel that the older men had given him, given them, so little direction, not the right kind at the right time. He shouldn’t have had to lose this life. I feel that so much of him wanted to go on with it. But, in the end, he had to go and seek the meaning of that love, that friendship, that passion, in the city, as Joe calls it.

They were without support, surrounded by treachery, bigotry, like criminals. That’s what it was like then, Joe says. You were arrested. You were imprisoned and fined. You were shamed, insulted, beaten up. Not that it does not take place now. There were some pubs which you knew you could meet at. There were actually one or two clubs, particularly in London, and just opening up in the bigger cities. There were growing liberal attitudes, but essentially you were still a criminal. Odd to think of the ideal they were forging in this cloister.

The
‘Salve
Regina’
at the end of Compline was pitched into the darkness, and the candles threw long shadows.

I keep going over what Joe and Miriam have described to me, trying to imagine him going out into that world of public lavatories, back alleys, waste ground, odd pubs and underground clubs, away from this safe cloister; imagine them losing each other. But then, here, they were branded sinners.

Of course, back on Les Deux Isles we knew nothing of this. My parents would turn in their graves.

There is a history, Joe says. It happened for a reason.

And, Miriam adds, now we know that the concentration camps were also for those with pink triangles. There was a systematic elimination of them too. They need memorials too.

I will leave tomorrow for Bristol. But I will come back. I’ve told Benedict that I will. Already, I hear the hum of the traffic on the main road beyond the fields. The city’s sodium amber hum. Joe or Miriam or both will pick me up after lunch.

Making sure not to make any noise, I went out into the night and again circled the enclosure walls. I knew the trail by heart now. Using my former knowledge, I didn’t have to depend upon the yellow arrow trail. My trousers got caught on the gorse bushes. I passed through the little wood of oaks. Again I was on the brink of the escarpment, and opening up in front of me were the sheer, steeply descending layers of the Bath stone quarry, with the pool of water on its deepest floor. I could see the crevices where the wild buddleia grew. The arc lights hummed and floodlit the vast underground, busy with its own industry. There was blinding clarity and shadows and
then encircling darkness. I descended the bank into the silver birches.

That night, I read of his heroes.

His images entered my dreams.