Aelred's Sin

by Lawrence Scott

  All during the afternoon walk he had been in Benedict’s presence, but they did not talk. They were aware of each other, a guardian angel and his protégé. Till finally, when they had dropped behind the others, ‘How is my boy from the tropics doing?’ Benedict’s arm was around his shoulder. ‘Come on, we must catch up.’

  It had been a walk of physical endurance. Father Justin liked to test the new novices. ‘Coats on - it’s just a bit nippy.’ There was a driving wind, sleet and flurries of snow. ‘It looks like we’ve not got rid of the winter.’ The young novice savoured each new sensation. He heard the word ‘flurry’. He forgot the meaning of heat on the skin. It was wind, not breeze. But he looked forward to the roaring fire in the common room. He thought of jolly Christmas cards. The world looked like a Christmas scene on a Christmas card: holly, laurel, ivy. England was a carol. Earth stood as hard as iron, water like a stone. He learnt the feel of ‘bleak’.

  Spring was in the air, but still the winter had not gone. There was snow among the daffodils.

  Aelred stared out of the misted-up glass window of the chapter house, which had been arranged for the party. He rubbed away the condensation with his hand. He wiped away the wetness by putting his hands into the deep pockets of his woollen habit. In the glass against the darkness, and in the reflection of the orange lights of the chapter house, he had a smudged image of his face reflected back at him. Behind his face, one face on top of another, the face of Benedict merged with his. Benedict was smoking a cigarette.

  ‘The late fall of snow has begun to melt. It’ll be spring again,’ Benedict said.

  ‘It’s spring, and then suddenly snow again. I’m not used to this change of seasons.’

  ‘What do you have?’

  ‘Dry season, wet season. Hot. It’s very hot. I love it.’

  ‘But you’ve left it. Given it up? Yes?’

  ‘Yes,’ the novice said, thinking it again, and saying it to himself and Benedict. ‘I’ve left it all. Yes, I’ve given it up.’

  ‘Look out on to the fields tomorrow and you’ll see that the snow has begun to melt where there’re no trees. The bright sun we’ve been having in the morning melts the snow. Stand in the sun, and you’ll find that it’s warm. Stand in the shade, and it’s chilly. Cold.’

  Aelred listened to the words used in a particular way: warm, chilly. There was always talk of the weather, each subtle change. And in the pantry on blind Brother Angel’s radio he listened to the strange mantra of tides and winds, gale forces and storms out there beyond this island. Finesterre. He remembered hurricanes. He would rub his hands and say, ‘It’s chilly today’, and hear how he sounded.

  The young brother looked out of the window, but there he saw only the darkness; himself and Benedict reflected in the orange light. There was an amber hum where the town glowed on the horizon. Ashton; it was on fire.

  ‘It looks like a fire,’ Aelred said.

  The wine must have gone to his head, because he realised that he was talking a lot and telling Benedict all about growing up in Les Deux Isles. ‘My mother is wonderful. She’s very beautiful. Kind. Loves me. When she comes down in the evening she smells of l’herbe à Madame Lalie.’

  ‘What’s that? Who’s that? And where does your mother come from, that she comes down?’ Benedict chuckled at the young novice’s enthusiastic gush.

  ‘Oh, it’s no one. Questions! There is no Madame Lalie. It’s a tree. It has a sweet-sweet smelling flower, white, yellow and white. It opens like a lily. We’ve got one in our garden. Right in the middle of the lawn. They make perfume from the flower. She dabs it on her neck and on her wrists. She strokes her long neck with her finger. My mother comes down from her bedroom for drinks with my father in the evening. When it is just getting dark. It gets dark so quickly. A green flash, and dark. Very dark. You can’t see anything.’

  ‘You must miss her. But you have wonderful sunsets?’

  ‘Sunsets? Yes, yes, boy, red-red-red, and yellow. Like fire. Cane fire. The whole sky burning up. Yes, I miss her.’

  Benedict smiled.

  Aelred saw him smile. ‘You laughing at me?’

  ‘No, sounds kind of French, kind of Welsh too, the way you speak, especially when you’re excited.’

  ‘And you, you sound funny too, not like limey people in Les Deux Isles.’ He wanted to hit back at something. ‘Tell me about yourself. I know nothing. You come from London?’

  Benedict laughed. ‘No, not at all - well, I’ve been all over. Up north. I was born in the valleys outside a large city. A valley of mines. My father was a miner. Lots of us. Nine. Poor, really. I escaped south. Seems a long time ago now. Studied. Became a teacher. Ended up here. My parents are dead now. My father, in an accident. In the mine. My mother, pneumonia. That’s my life.’

  ‘God. All of it?’

  ‘Well, not quite; perhaps I’ll tell you more. There’s a beauty in the valleys. Suddenly they open up whole hillsides, not all besmirched. Some other time. When we get a chance. And you must tell me more about your sunsets. What your sunsets say. Another feast day perhaps. We must mix now.’

  Before he turned away to speak to a group of young monks who were fellow philosophy students, Benedict took the novice’s hand in his. He held it in both his palms. He looked straight at him, into him, Aelred thought. ‘We’ll talk again.’ Then he ruffled his fast-growing, cropped hair playfully. ‘Your hair grows quickly. You’ll soon have to be shorn again.’ The novice felt embarrassed. He felt that Benedict shouldn’t do that. But he was also happy. He was nervous and happy at the same time.

  ‘What sunsets say? They don’t say anything,’ he said.

  Besmirched, Aelred listened to how things were described. Benedict was already speaking to one of the other monks.

  Aelred sat with the other novices, listening. Then he talked with Brother Stephen about the farm. He was excited about being put to work on the farm. The farm was like the estate, his father’s work with animals.

  He saw Benedict on his own, which was unusual, because in observing him, he noticed that he was the life and soul of the party; he was popular with the older monks, and the young monks were eager to talk and share opinions on their study.

  Aelred found himself feeling jealous. He didn’t feel he had anything interesting to say to him. He wanted Benedict’s attention. The way he spoke, the way he looked at him: it made him feel special.

  Later, when it was almost time for Compline, Benedict and Aelred found themselves together again. Benedict beckoned him over to where he was sitting. Right away, he was direct, picking up where they had left off, as if not to lose any time. ‘It can’t all be sunsets. What do you miss the most?’

  Without deliberately thinking it out, Aelred answered, ‘Ted.’ Ted was so often in his mind, on the tip of his tongue, like a secret. He had to bite his tongue.

  ‘Ted? Who is Ted?’

  He had not told anyone at Ashton Park about Ted. He looked down at his boots. I’m standing in him, he thought. Always, I have him.

  ‘Ted. He was the best at everything. The way he swung a bat, bowled a ball. Football season, he was the fastest on the left wing. Captain. We played tennis for hours. Sun and sweat like salt. Then we swam. Best, we climbed into the hills and swam in the river pool where the water fell twenty feet sheer. Like falling glass. Frothy like crystal, shattering. He dived, jackknife.’ He said the words, painting the picture of another world, lost, dreamt. ‘We were the best. Two of us.’

  The young novice found himself staring into the murky glass of orange light and darkness and the faces of himself and Benedict superimposed, each upon the other, mixed and distorted. Then he looked at Benedict, staring at him, talking about Ted.

  ‘He meant a lot to you?’ Benedict said, concerned. But his eyes had an astonishment about them, as he heard the young novice in front of him tell of his young friend.

  ‘He meant a lot to all of us. All who knew him. He had a way of making you feel special. He was the best and brought out the
best in others.’

  ‘But he was your friend? Your special friend, was he?’

  ‘Yes, he was my friend.’

  ‘And you gave that up too? You left him with your sunsets?’

  ‘Yes. I gave him up.’ As he spoke, he thought he felt Ted’s boots pinching his toes. ‘These are his boots.’ They both looked down at the black boots. ‘It’s a secret. Can you keep it? Is that OK, you think, to have them?’ ‘Let no one presume to give or receive anything without the Abbot’s leave, or to have anything as his own, anything whatever, whether book or tablets or pen or whatever it may be; for monks should not have even their own bodies and wills at their own disposal.’ That was the Rule.

  ‘Oh, yes, I’ll keep your secret. If you’ll tell me more. But we must go.’

  The Abbot and prior were preparing to go into Compline. The community was forming a procession out of the chapter house.

  That was it, Aelred thought: he made him feel special. Then he thought of Ted. In the darkness of the choir he felt the tears rolling down his cheeks. He pulled out his handkerchief and blew his nose.

  The acolyte of the choir asked for the blessing, bowing in front of the Abbot and then standing in the middle of the choir. He read the lesson: ‘Fratres…’ ‘Brothers, be sober and watch, because your adversary the devil, like a roaring lion, goes about seeking whom he may devour… Resist him…’

  The next day, as Aelred looked out on to the fields while the mist of dawn was lifting, he waited for the bell to announce the Conventual Mass. He saw that the snow was indeed melting and the grass was lucent beneath a light film of ice. Where there was a sun catch, there was a patch of fresh green grass. It would be spring again. All this was a kind of miracle, this change of seasons, an entirely new experience which seemed to grow instantly in him. But at the same time, his head was filled with Benedict, not because of anything that Benedict had particularly said, but because of a vast multitude of things which being with Benedict, and talking with him, had made him feel, especially telling about Ted. So there was comfort in his homesickness, and he found that it disappeared with the coming of the spring and with his feelings for Benedict.

  There was a growing desire to see and be with Benedict, but this was not going to be possible. Benedict had already taught him all there was to know. The other customs he would pick up from the other novices, or be told by the novice master. He would have to lose his guardian angel.

  The Guest House:

  24 September 1984

  Already now the shades of mist are thinning

  And dawn is rising from the skies…

  Lauds, praise! I pick my way in the darkness around the cloister, up early like a good cocoa planter. The temperature can drop even in the valleys around Malgretoute.

  In the silence, the bare stone, the arch of the sanctuary reaches and curves. The round solid pillars support space. The church is central to this complex, this monastery. An enclosure wall holds all in: workshops, farm, chapter house, scriptorium (library), refectory, cloister, cemetery, gardens. Silence. These men move quietly, businesslike, happy, smiling: like the men I had as teachers at school. What were they up to that I didn’t know about? Once or twice we joked about a couple of them.

  Take care Dom Michael in Maths, boy. He like to touch you up.

  A rough cowl scrapes the worn and polished stone. A hooded man, bowed, walks near the wall. I think I see my religious brother, then I don’t.

  I am learning about this life, about this ritual. From so young, J. M. knew it all. There was the fervour since that first dawn going down to the abbey church and hearing the Gregorian chant. It took away his homesickness during his first week at boarding school. There was that fervour and then there was Ted. When I was very small I saw something. I’m not sure, now. I put it out of my mind.

  There they are, in the choir to which he once belonged. There is Benedict, still there in the same stall where Aelred always knew he would be at Matins, Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext, None, Vespers, Compline. When J. M. entered the monastery, Benedict was ten years older than him. Ten years! He found that out when they were washing up one day during one of those rare moments, stolen moments, out of the monastic silence. I never imagined that this was the life he was leading. I didn’t dream it could be this way.

  Boy, I don’t know. I don’t know nuh. I was twelve, going on thirteen when he left.

  Yesterday afternoon, after my walk, after I had threaded my way back through the silver birches and the wood the other side of the stream, I joined Benedict in the orchard. I like the way this park is like an estate. He’s so thin. J. M., Aelred - what do I call him? Here, I call him J. M.; in my reconstructions, Aelred. I’ve got to get my bearings, keep my mind, sort out what I really think. J. M. described Benedict as strong and well built, at least in the early days.

  J. M. writes in his journal:

  ‘This is Dom Benedict,’ Father Justin said, introducing me. ‘Our new Brother de la Borde, from Les Deux Isles,’ he said to Dom Benedict. I opened my outstretched arm to shake his hand which was still hidden beneath his black scapular. But instead his arms extended to my shoulders, clasped them tightly and drew me towards him, first to the right side and then to his left in the kiss of peace, the monastic kiss, and I could feel my full crop of hair brush against the shorn side of his head and cheeks. He was strong. Strong arms, full chest.

  My heart beat fast.

  ‘We prayed for your safe flight,’ Dom Benedict said. Father Justin smiled.

  ‘Dom Benedict will be your guardian angel. Show you the ropes.’ We all three smiled.

  The geography of the abbey and the grounds was my first guided lesson, the afternoon after Brother Chrysostom’s funeral.

  We kept calling him J. M. at home, even after his clothing. Mum read his letters at dinner. He was special to Mum; something different from what the girls and I had, even I who was her baby. I know my father didn’t like it. Now I remember feeling ashamed. When he left I didn’t want to go to the airport to say goodbye, not after what had happened. I never felt that I could make it right again.

  There is a feeling of autumn in the air, early autumn. Light in autumn has a great intensity which is then distilled. It is the angle at which it falls. But there is also a breath of cold in the air, and a haze like a veil through which it filters. I notice this change in the light, new to me. I see it in his words, feel it, like his skin feeling it, feel him feeling it.

  I learn these new seasons through his words, under his gaze, seeing with his eyes, his fingers on my pen. This English park comes off the pages of his journal. Then in my memory the bush opens. The mountains of Les Deux Isles grow and climb to peaks. The cocoa hills of Malgretoute creep like iguanas.

  I was telling this to Joe and his sister Miriam, who’ve given me such a warm welcome as friends of J. M. It was Miriam who said that J. M. continued with his notes on landscape and flowers and birds. I went walking with them along the Avon between Bristol and Bath. It was spring then.

  There, a kingfisher, a flash of blue under a bridge, Miriam said.

  I just caught it. It was when I had first started reading the journals. Reading of J. M.’s first spring, when the snow didn’t begin to melt till March. The winter wouldn’t go away.

  We had fun, Joe, Miriam and I, discovering the first cowslip, the wild violets and the primroses. Miriam loves those. I think Joe brought her along so I wouldn’t just have to be with him. I think he thought I was self-conscious just being with him alone, though we’ve spent a lot of time together alone sorting through J.M.’s papers and things.

  I must get back home. I’ve well overstayed my intended time. The phone calls back to Malgretoute get more and more expensive. Krishna called from the agricultural college. He can still oversee the estate for me. He’s very good; spent some time before as a kind of trainee. Now that he is fully qualified they want him to teach at the university. He’s almost a friend now. I feel confident in him. But I need to get back. I can tell that he
wants me back: I really like him.

  Yesterday afternoon, with Benedict, there was also the fact that we were throwing bundles of blackberry cuttings and raspberry canes on to a stack for a bonfire. The flame and the smoke, a plume of blue rifling up in the afternoon, made the time undeniably autumn.

  This is the real smell of autumn, Benedict said.

  I speak of it now with such confidence because of J. M.

  An owl hooted. Benedict turned and looked in the direction of the copse. The hoot came again, but we did not see its flight. Benedict looked so handsome as he turned towards the light. At fifty, he’s still handsome, but thin. Why so thin? He hasn’t mentioned any ill health. Yes, he’s handsome. I can see that. You can see that a guy is handsome; nothing wrong with that. But more difficult for me to see how it all went on as a daily occurrence. I know what the journals say. But he seems just a nice fella. And he might be like one of the priests to whom I would’ve gone to confession. I don’t any more. That’s my own affair.

  They would seem closer in age now, both older. But then, when J. M. first came, so young, a boy still, Benedict was a man. This couldn’t’ve been right. I remember again that laughing about Dom Michael at school touching up boys. I don’t want to think that it was like that with them.

  Benedict is glad that I’ve come and wants me to come down to stay for a another week, a kind of retreat. I’m apprehensive. He wouldn’t try something with me, would he? Now, as I reflect, I feel OK about it, but then I suddenly want to be back in the flat in Bristol. When I talk with Joe and Miriam I think I begin to see Benedict and J. M. like anyone else - well, nearly.

  Look at Joe. He’s my brother and he is who he is, Miriam says.