Aelred's Sin (35 page)

‘Come in, brother.’ Aelred walked to the desk and stood next to the leather upholstered chair opposite the Abbot. ‘Sit, brother.’

This man was his father, his spiritual director, Christ on earth, God’s representative. It all seemed too much for Aelred to obey, and too much for this small man to carry, dwarfed by the crucified Jesus behind him.

A hagiographic portrait of St Benedict hung above the fireplace to the right of Aelred. St Benedict was kneeling in the cave of Subiaco and the devil as an imp prodded his ankle with a tridon.

Aelred tried to smile. This was his second main meeting. He had left frustrated after the last. The spiritual direction of the novices was left to the novice master. The Abbot was remote from the novices, closer to the senior monks. He was a figure of authority to the novices or, when he visited them at Sunday tea, a beneficent or daunting presence. It should not be like this, Aelred remembered thinking last time.

‘Father Justin says there’s been a problem.’ The Abbot spoke, tugging on his abbatial cross as usual, which hung from a gold chain about his neck.

‘No,’ Aelred said. He did not want this to be the starting point. He did not wish to allow the Abbot the pretence that they didn’t know exactly what had occurred. Why not start right in at the centre of the fire?

‘It’s a question of love, father.’ Aelred realised it was a spirit that had entered him that morning which spoke, but he could feel in himself the language of Benedict. He could feel the clarity of his mentor. He would take responsibility for this - though he also felt that what Benedict meant by responsibility was caution.

‘Indeed, brother. This is the symbol of that love which has saved us, and an example of that love which we must live: the love which Christ had, by which he died so that our sins might be forgiven and we might enter the kingdom of heaven.’ The Abbot turned to point to the life-size crucifix behind him - as if it needed any more of an introduction than the one it gave itself with its overpowering presence, Aelred thought irreverently, already impatient with the Abbot’s sermonising before he had even begun.

Aelred looked at the crucifix, then again at the Abbot. ‘It’s the love of mothers and fathers, the love of brothers and sisters, the love of friends, the love that exists between us as brothers.’ He felt he was giving a sermon himself and that he should stop and let the Abbot continue his sermon. ‘It’s the love of home and country. All these loves which I have had to give up, deny myself, or so it seemed. Now I find that I want to claim them all back. I want all that human love and I also want my life
here, and yes, that is a problem if you say so.’ He found that he could add that bit about the problem and not seem impertinent to the Abbot.

He wished the Abbot did not remind him of his father. He remembered the rows he used to have with his father, about nothing, just about the strengths of their wills. That in itself made him want to resist his authority.

‘You have been asked to leave mother and father, brother and sister, and land, and come follow me: that is the call of Jesus to those who would be perfect.’

Aelred did love the word ‘perfect’. The life of perfection fired him; the Little Flower, St Thérèse of Lisieux, doing each small act perfectly. He wished to be perfect. He wished to be an angel, as he used to say, of whom the monks at school reminded him. He still wanted perfection.

‘Carnal love has no place in our life, brother.’ The Abbot and his novice looked at each other. Aelred didn’t like the word carnal. It meant meat. It meant dog, because dog was
canis
and it sounded the same. He remembered seeing two dogs on the promenade near his primary school stuck together. It made him sick to look at, but it also fascinated him, and he found he got excited sexually. Carnal. The Abbot was referring to Father Justin’s rightly held suspicions, the ones he hadn’t wanted to voice to Edward, giving them the authority and reality, the meaning words confer on things. Aelred still saw the dogs backing, a word used on Les Deux Isles, one humped on the other. The Abbot was speaking about rooting out carnal lust.

Then he heard the word buller, which was used on Les Deux Isles for what men did with each other. It was wrong
to be a buller man. Carnal meant dogs and bulls, what he saw the cows doing in the fields, backing, bulling each other. Then he saw Edward, his white smooth body lying on the hay. He stroked his arms and legs in his imagination and entered his body, backing him, bulling him. That’s what they called it. But he was not an animal. This was pure. And, anyway, what animals did was good. It felt good. They had said that to each other, lying in each other’s arms, their kisses wet on their lips and cheeks. It was good. Edward entered him. That was good.

‘God made this love and he saw it was good,’ Aelred said to the Abbot, mimicking Genesis. He felt like being provocative and saying, ‘And on the eighth day God made the love which men have for each other and he said this is good and he saw that it was good.’ But what he had said was provocative enough.

The Abbot cut immediately to the quick of this exchange and said, ‘Brother, I will have to ask you to leave Ashton Park. What you are advocating is wrong on all counts within and without the monastery, and I cannot afford the scandal you will create among the innocent and impressionistic young novices.’

Aelred suddenly felt a wild thought tear at his heart, and he stood up over the Abbot. Facing the life-size crucifix, he said, ‘You can’t make that decision. This is my decision, my vocation, my call from God to be here, to enter here, and no one comes between me and God.’ Then he sat down trembling, hardly knowing or hearing what he had said.

The Abbot rose and then sat again and composed himself, putting his arms beneath his scapular. ‘I want you to go to your cell, brother, and quieten yourself, and
return to see me tomorrow.’ He showed the novice to the door.

Aelred left the Abbot’s room, desperate for the open air. When he entered the cloister, he felt the first signs that the skies were going to open, and the rain, which had been threatening for days, was going to fall at last. And just as suddenly as he thought that, he saw the fine drizzle making the walls of stone grey. There was a wild clap of thunder and then lightning and more thunder, and he thought of rain back home, drenching rain which made the hot pitch steam and smell of tar. Heavy drops of rain began to come down slowly, and then faster and thicker, until it was crashing around the abbey and splattering the floor of the cloister where it was open to the enclosed garden at the centre.

Aelred walked into the rain, putting on his hood, and went through the gate at the end of the path that lead down to the drive with the poplars, leading to the open fields. He was running now, running, hooded, and wildly pulling up his habit above his knees so as not to trip and fall. He reached the fields where the large horse chestnuts and copper beeches grew. They gave him some shelter and he stood near the trunk of a copper beech, looking up into its branches black with the rain - more and more branches spreading black and no longer the red-purple they had been in late summer.

There was no shelter from this rain. It crashed through the black branches and drenched him where he stood hooded, his habit getting more and more soaked. He heard nothing and saw nothing but the black rain crashing around him. Then there was more lightning,
and Ashton Park, the Ashton Park he knew, was transformed. The electric sky lit up the fields with wild gashes of light. The thunder rumbled, and he thought of the Abbot pulling his heavy chair across the floor of his room. The sky seemed to want to rip itself open and give him a revelation. The woods, the interior of the woods, were suddenly shown to him, opening up hallucinated groves. Aelred made himself the trunk of the tree and, standing there, he thought of the real danger he was in of being killed by a stroke of lightning, of a tree falling on him. He left his black shelter for the open fields and the drenching rain.

The storm seemed to be moving away from directly over Ashton Park, and Aelred could behold the wonder of a new creation over the valleys like a gigantic
son
et
lumière
specially put on for him alone: a private revelation, a storm, a flood. The oppression of the last few days drained out of him with the falling rain, loud in his ears like the rain of his childhood drumming on the galvanised roofs.

As the thunder and lightning moved away into the distance, opening up horizons he could hardly imagine, horizons with new mountains and valleys and open flat plains, he became exhilarated by his visions. His anger turned to elation as he raised his face to the sky, which had cleared and was now a luminous blue as evening came early, the sun banished by the storm.

The rain continued to fall as a fine drizzle as he strode through the long grass of the fields. He was now some distance from the abbey. His instinct still instructed him to avoid trees, the copse on the knoll, the spinney near the pond. He came to a field, where the grass was like a
lawn, wet and newly cut. He realised it was the field where he had been yesterday during haymaking. He sat on the ground in the rain and looked back at the abbey rising out of the valley. Against the hill, on top of which were the graves, the stone abbey stood out in relief. A trick of light made the hill part of the encroaching darkness and allowed the abbey to stand out, pricked with orange lights coming on in the windows, glowing like embers.

The rain was not so heavy now, and Aelred, accustomed to its fall, now heard other sounds. He could hear the heavy dripping in the woods, and the freshness of the rain had awakened an unaccustomed chorus of birds for this time of day. He could hear runnels of water flowing down the fields, meeting up with the streams which fed the pond. Then the bells for Vespers began to ring, echoing and echoing around the valley of his visions with the storm racing away in the distance, as if illustrating the perils of the future that lay ahead for Aelred.

He began to walk aimlessly away from the abbey, circling without direction, losing sight of it and then regaining sight of its lit-up windows. The ringing of the bells had ended. He thought of the lit-up church and other windows as a great ship on the sea. He had felt so safe there. It was the safety he had wanted as a boy at school. What it looked like from the outside was safety. He used to think, When I become a monk I will be different. I will be good. I will be perfect. The fear and guilt which grew out of a vision of Ted in his coffin would be absolved. He would be new. Ensnaring desire would be replaced by a perfect love. Once on that ship, he realised the truth of Thomas à Kempis’s words in
The
Imitation
of
Christ
that ‘a change of place did not change a man.’ He had brought his nature here on to the ship. But then he had grown in Benedict’s love. Benedict had taken the responsibility of holding it all together and offered him Aelred of Rievaulx.

This reassessment continued as the darkness became more complete around Aelred, so that he hardly knew where he was. He began to sing to himself: not his favourite chants, but songs he knew as a boy, wild romantic songs of love. ‘Just Walking in the Rain’, then Paul Anka’s, ‘O Diana, I’m So Young and You’re So Old’. He put his own words to the tunes he remembered. He heard the house bell for supper. He ignored the life of the ship. His elation grew with his singing as he strode through the long wet grass in the darkness. The storm in the distance had waned: only now and then there was a faint glimmer of sheet lightning lighting up some very distant land for hardly a second, and then there was darkness again.

Aelred thought of Edward, and then of the future and what would happen if the Abbot really expelled him. It was an unthinkable thought. He had no other life, had never had any other future. He knew boys who wanted to be all sorts of things. But he had only ever wanted to be a monk as he and Ted were swirled around the school yard in the cotton folds of Father Maurus’s habit and he smelt the incense of his armpits, the wine of the blood of Christ on his lips and the smell of the wafer breads of holy communion. Then he saw the blood in his veins, the blue of Quink ink, like the blue in the veins of the marble of the high altar.

He had made his way aimlessly to where the small
streams that came through the watercress beds fed the ponds where the winter birds migrated. A faint mist was rising off the water. It was silent at this time of the year, with only the ducks which lived there all the year round. He sat on a log near where the streams ran into the brown water of the pond. The water slid over blue-grey stones streaked with red. He sat and stared into the water running over the blue stones streaked with red. He lost himself in that vision.

As Aelred stared into the stream flowing over the blue stone, he saw his own face beneath the running water. His face was black. It was blue-black and it stared back at him. It altered its stare, its look. His face was the face of Ted. It was the face of Jordan.

A breeze shook the branches and drew a curtain, as a cloud covers the moon.

In the darkness, Aelred heard the bark of a dog. His vision returned.

The bark of the dog became the scampering of many feet in the grass. He heard the yelps of hunting hounds. A hunt was gathering in the shadows around the great house of Ashton Park.

Master Walter was to have his way.

A figure with a flaming torch cut across the field from a hayrick towards the house. Suddenly, behind the hunt, the house was ablaze. The figure cut behind the hedges for the fields, a burning torch still in its hand. Then the burning torch was extinguished in a pool of water. Soon every hedgerow, copse and spinney, holly and laurel bush, every bit of long grass, every reed in the shallows of the pond, was alive with the sniffing and yelping for the
stink of fox, for the stink of a nigger.

Ashton Park was on fire.

The instinct of the running figure was escape, to run away. Its horizon was freedom. It ran to maroon itself in darkness.

The figure, only a shadow, crouched so that it might be mistaken for a mound on the fields, for a tumulus on a knoll, for a stone or a grazing sheep, a cow chewing its cud in the night air. It sought to inhabit animal or plant so that it might live freely in this world of men. It sought to be nothing but a shadow, part of the air, an illusion of the light. It was learning to prefer this element to the light of the world that had enslaved it to a life of cruelty and pain, had enslaved it as a part of commerce, as a chattel, as a crop: coffee, tobacco, sugar, cocoa, molasses, rum.