The next morning after study and just before the bells went for the Conventual Mass, there was a knock on the door of Aelred’s cell. ‘Ave,’ he hailed.
Benedict put his head around the curtain of the novice’s cubicle, which served as a cell. Aelred was so surprised that he leapt to his feet. Before he could speak, Benedict raised his hand and put a finger on his lips. ‘Not now. Don’t speak. Pray.’ His finger traced Aelred’s lips. ‘I’ve brought you this. Read it. I think you’ll find it helpful. Some of the language will be strange at the beginning, but you’ll get used to it. Read it more than once. Read and hear. Let the voices speak to you. It will be good for Lectio Divina. You can have it passed by Father Justin. I’m sure he’ll approve.’
The bells for the Conventual Mass resounded through the abbey. A huge, joyous sound from the throat of the bells filled the valley of Ashton Park.
Benedict raised his hood and smiled. He turned and left the novitiate.
Aelred put his present on his desk. Spiritual Friendship, by Aelred of Rievaulx. He remembered. He was the same saint about whom Dom Placid had told him at school when he had gone to him about Ted. His namesake. He flicked the treatise open and read: ‘When I was still just a lad at school, and the charm of my companions pleased me very much I gave my whole soul to affection and devoted myself to love amid the ways and vices with which that age is wont to be threatened, so that nothing seemed to be more sweet, nothing more agreeable, nothing more practical, than to love.’
He flicked again and read: ‘And so, torn between conflicting loves and friendship, I was drawn now here, now there, and not knowing the law of true friendship, I was often deceived by its mere semblance.’
As Aelred raised his hood and left his cell, he brought his fingers to his lips and traced them where Benedict had touched him. He kissed his fingers for the fingers of his friend. He understood.
The Guest House:
26 September 1984
The glory of the morning light
The burning heat of noonday sun…
The fever heat within the blood.
The monks have gone to Sext. I make the rhythm of their day, his day, my day. I notice the young monks - not many of them now. The community is much smaller than when J. M. was here. The youth of today don’t come in their numbers any more. But I hear a passion in those voices. They breathe in, breathe out, young voices, old voices. And in the ‘Salve Regina’ at Compline last night, pitched in the darkness, their voices reached to the heights of the nave. What is this all about? He called it passion. When I think of J. M., just nineteen, think of all that has happened, I can’t accept that this is the way for young men to grow. But I will keep an open mind, as Joe asks. I will. Has Joe got an open mind? I ask myself.
What Benedict and J. M. had they tried to keep well within the limits of Aelred of Rievaulx’s theology of friendship. Even I can see that, though I find it strange to think of a medieval saint advocating it would seem, homosexual love, in thought at least, if not in deed. I never realised this existed in the writings of the church. This was Benedict’s way of coping. I read that in the journals. Maybe I can talk to him about that, something objective. But can I ask him about himself and J. M.? How can I? It’s too private, and too many years have gone by. Why should he talk to me about this part of his life? Can one talk about these things easily? I wouldn’t want to talk with just anyone about Annette and myself, about the divorce. No way!
This morning I returned again along the trail to the quarry, testing the boundaries, the depth of the excavation. I got lost again among the silver birches. There are ghosts. They walked here. Earlier ones ran. There are these layers of history. I keep coming back to these two things, sorting out in my mind my brother’s love for a man and his guilt about race. These are the two things I have to sort out in myself. The first because it’s to do with him, not me, the second because I grew up in the same world as him with the same history. His views broadened on both these issues. It happened differently for me, living up on a cocoa estate on a small island. I stayed and went to university on the island. Unusual, but there is a very good Department of Tropical Agriculture. I was following my father.
Benedict and I didn’t work together yesterday, but we did manage our first quiet talk here in my guest room. We had about three-quarters of an hour before Vespers. He is mainly concerned about me, to talk about my loss of faith. He can’t understand how I’ve let the whole thing go. I said that I felt rejected by the clergy and the community. It was a matter of how the church dealt with what it called sin, in particular, sexual sin. I suggested that this was similar to what had happened for J. M. He skirted round that. I have to be careful with how I talk about J. M. He was sympathetic, like he was through the whole thing in the end. He said that he would not condemn, but that he could not condone and he did not approve of how J. M.’s life had developed.
But I can see it disturbs him that I have J. M.’s journals. He must know that I know more than I talk about. As a way of life, it disturbs him. I think it disturbs me. It does disturb me. Probably because of the way I learnt about it. There hasn’t been anything in my life till now that would encourage me even to think about homosexuality as acceptable in any way at all. Homosexuality was messing about at school or older men touching up young boys. But I’ve never had to take it on as a seriously considered way of life which people have noble thoughts about; certainly never considered it as something that could be part of my family. You read Aelred of Rievaulx and you see it was an intrinsic part of his religious life and love of God. I might see it as a phase. Benedict says it’s something you have to accept in yourself. It’s something not even to get rid of, but to accept, almost God-given, to be borne, a cross. It is an occasion of sin, but also an occasion of grace. Something to be denied. The more powerful, the more it is to be denied; the richer the grace for the greater denial. I felt he was protesting too much. Was he telling me about himself? Is this how he dealt with his homosexuality and his celibacy, his chastity? Would he call it that? Would he admit to that?
Even on J. M.’s last visit to Les Deux Isles, even then, I didn’t put two and two together. He was a loner. He went off on his expeditions. This was when he was visiting Amerindian sites in Oropuche and Arenas. Now I understand: even then he was interested in the presence of Africa in the Caribbean, as he called it. The Amerindian stuff interested me, and I would’ve liked to have gone with him on a dig, and in that way try and make some sort of relationship. I had an interest in the early history of the island. But he never made it possible. He said he preferred to be on his own. There was something, but I put it out of my mind. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. I put it down to someone who had lived in a monastery. So it didn’t seem odd that he wasn’t running behind women. Now that I think about it, he mentioned a woman who was also an archaeologist in England. That was why Miriam’s name rang a bell when I first met her, so I thought maybe she was his girlfriend. Anyway, I was busy with the estate.
About African history on the island, I said, there was nothing.
J. M. replied, Wasn’t that significant?
He asked me didn’t I think it was interesting, disturbing, that there were no African names of any real significance, no place names? Had I not thought about why that was?
At the time, I said that I hadn’t.
We wiped out their history, he said.
Long ago I might’ve said, And a good thing too. I don’t think that now. But 1970 and Black Power was still a memory for all of us at Malgretoute, a hard lesson.
Late one night we stayed up talking on the verandah high above the cocoa hills. The night was full of fireflies. On the plains, St Pierre twinkled in the distance near the gulf. I remember it well. He used to enjoy me playing the cuatro, all the old-time calypsos. Like he hadn’t changed. He got a bottle and spoon, I an old grater, and we made music together. That night he had quite a few rums, which surprised me. But I could see that he had found our father’s death and funera
l difficult. He had arrived just in time. A day later, and he would’ve missed it.
At the actual moment of death it was just J. M., me and our mother; the girls had just left. I could see his mouth moving over the Hail Mary and Our Father of the rosary. He wouldn’t be silent and hurt her. He prayed as if he believed. Maybe, somewhere he still did. Maybe somewhere there was still that special link with her, that thing which had to do with religion and just the way he was.
Too beautiful, she would always say. I mumbled my responses in my usual way.
She was accustomed to that. Robert, darling, open your mouth. It is God you are talking to.
It was our father’s heart that gave out in the end. But he had been going steadily downhill over the last couple of years. J. M. said he didn’t really want to hear about it, that Mum had written about it in a letter. But I had had a few rums myself. Emotions were raw because of Dad’s death and the funeral the week before. So I launched into my story. Electricity and phone lines had been down, so there was no communication. Imagine it! We were all out here on the verandah, like now, I told him. It was after dinner and Toinette had already cleared the table and gone downstairs. There was no TV to watch. She used to like to sit by the pantry door and watch the TV from there. She had got very old. I could see J. M. register that. He had missed Toinette’s death. He asked where she was buried. He wanted to visit her grave. Mum had written to him about that. I had to get out the cemetery plan for him. They buried her outside the family plot.
You missed something, I told him. They came right into the yard, about a hundred people, Indian and Negro. Their leader shouted for Dad to come out and talk to them. All the time the crowd shouted, Power! They called for la Borde. Mum took to her bedroom with the rosary. I stood just inside and Dad went out on to the verandah. The chanting of Power continued. Then the most extraordinary thing happened. Toinette came out from under the house and started shouting in her weak voice.
What all you people want? All you young boys don’t have work to do? All you don’t have mother and father to go home to? You not shame coming up in Mr La Borde yard at this time of night.
The crowd went silent. Dad went down into the yard and stood next to Toinette, and put his arm around her shoulder. For a moment they stood there, the old cocoa planter and his servant, the old black woman, with a crowd of Negroes and Indians ready to start chanting again, but gone strangely quiet.
I was looking down from the verandah. Dad and Toinette just stood there. Someone tried to make a speech about wages on the estate, about the state of the barrack rooms that still existed. But it was Toinette standing there that dampened the crowd. I swear they might have burnt down the house. Then people began shuffling and filing out of the yard. Dad and Toinette kept standing there till the last man and woman left. Dad indicated to Toinette to go back to her room and then he came back upstairs.
I heard Toinette muttering, Well, what you expect if you treat people so. What you expect? She knew. But at the same time she came and stood next to Dad. He was shaking. He didn’t speak. He went to his room.
Later in the night, I heard a noise, glass shattering, so I came out on to the verandah. Dad was sitting alone. He was sobbing. Someone had flung a flambeaux on to the verandah, where it had smashed. The flame ran for a bit then petered out. The banisters got scorched.
They want to burn me out, I heard Dad say.
Only one odd drunk fellow coming back late, I told him.
But it cut him up.
After all these years, they want to burn me out, he said.
It was the final end of the old ways. I remember J. M. saying that. I could see that he thought we deserved what was coming to us. But then he said, Poor Dad.
Strange all this coming back as I sit here in England unravelling these stories. We don’t know what will turn out when we are kids and growing up.
Before J. M. left to go back to England we sorted through Dad’s things. I had flashes then of how it had been at school. He had been a kind of hero for me to begin with and then it changed. I didn’t guess his life.
You were the one he really loved, J. M., said, meaning Dad. Funny, the one thing he took as a memento was an old Yardley shaving bowl in which Dad kept his school rowing medals. He took the bowl and the medals. They were part of the clutter on the desk in the flat in Bristol. For some reason I put my face in it and it still held that Yardley fragrance, the one perfume he allowed himself.
I unearth. I unlearn. I’m an earth digger. I’m a word eater.
Typical Benedict, as I’m learning: as he stood to leave the room for Vespers, he pulled me towards him and hugged me. He really held on to me.
I will pray for you, he said. Have an open heart.
His body was so thin. I could feel the ribs beneath his habit. Benedict used to be well built, J. M. said. He sees J. M. in me, he says. I felt a bit awkward there being hugged and him saying that. There is a way you hug a man. You embrace and keep firm. If one of you relaxes into it as you might with a woman, he gives himself away; you know something is different and you withdraw. We held it firm. I expect they used to relax into it.
My Lectio Divina is the Song of Songs, a favourite monastic text, interpreted metaphorically. I didn’t know the Bible could be so hot. I continue to read Aelred of Rievaulx. I have the journals and now my own stories. I reconstruct. I tell his life. It begins to change something in me. It begins to change me writing this. Write it to understand it: that was his method. I hear Miriam’s voice.
I eat his words.
He moves between there and here.
I stood on the tarmac of the airfield below the green mountains which changed to blue when I began to walk towards the steps up to the plane. When would I turn around and wave to my mother and father, brother and sisters, to Aunt Marie who had just given me a bound volume of the Old and New Testaments, and a bouquet of pink anthuriums wrapped in cellophane for Aunt Julie in England? They were so pink and looked unreal in the cellophane. Like plastic. I felt awkward carrying them, but I couldn’t refuse. When would I turn and wave? That was what important people like Princess Margaret or the Governor did when they got to the top of the steps before they entered the aircraft. I turn. There is Robert. Did I ever make things clear to him? Did I leave a burden on young shoulders? The sun came out from behind the clouds and the mountains were green again.
‘My dear man, you can’t possibly expect me to unpack this boy’s case. But I will, because I will certainly not pay the overweight.’ My mother was in charge. She spoke to the black BOAC attendant. My father had his back to us at the check-in desk, at the window, looking out into the car park. He was smoking a cigarette. ‘Jean Marc, it’s those boots and you have insisted on those books, darling. You can get books in England. There will be lots in the library of the abbey. Let’s take the books out. Leave the boots, otherwise your poor feet will freeze in that winter. Remember what Father Justin said in his letter. They are worried about you. I can’t send you without shoes, darling. And Mrs Salter was so kind to let you have Ted’s boots. Your friend. Open up this case, my dear man.’ My mother threw up her arms with impatience.
Ted’s mother had said I could have his boots for the trip to England. Ted. Poor Ted. And would I die too? We swam underwater till we got to the rock. ‘Come on out now,’ someone shouted. Our bodies shining in the afternoon sun. Ted died when he was seventeen. I was a bearer at his funeral. We went from school in a procession all along the promenade to the big church.
‘Bless me, father, for I have sinned. Father, will he go to hell?’
‘Why, my son?’
‘The week before he died - died - we were playing in the pool and we…’ When I looked into the coffin he looked as if he had been covered with white powder. He didn’t look like Ted. I had been dreaming of Ted. Poor Ted. I could see in the dim night light which shone from the dormitory ceiling, his boots, next to my desk. I woke to the other novices being knocked up, Benedicamus Domino, and their sleepy answers: D
eo gratias. I was being allowed to lie in this first morning. Then falling asleep and waking again to bells. Matins… Domine labia mea aperies … and then I fell back to sleep. Thoughts and dreams.
I lay under four blankets and an electric blanket on rough cotton sheets, my head on a bolster with what seemed like a rock stone inside it. The cotton curtain of my cubicle cell moved in the cold draught I felt when I stuck out my hand, and then it moved again with the draught of passing novices in the corridor. I woke when the novices came back from Matins. Then I got up. It was dark like night. The water was as cold as ice. Thank God for Uncle André’s coat, thick and grey. It smelt of mothballs and cuscus grass, the little sachets which Aunt Marie had tucked into the sleeves and pockets preserving it from the penetration of moths after Uncle André’s death. ‘He loved you like a father would love a son; he would have wanted you to have had it.’ I had lain the coat right on top of all my blankets. Its coarse herringbone scratched my face, as did the rough feel of the jute blankets.
I hugged it around me now, far from home, that first morning after my first night in my monastic cell. I pushed my woollen-gloved hands deep into the pockets. The notes of the Sequence for the dead trembled in the lattice of naked branches. The measured tread of the monks following Brother Chrysostom’s coffin crushed the gravel under the ice, which crunched at the entrance to the small oblong of green lawn that had once been a medieval cemetery. Funny, I thought, it looks like dry season, but so cold, so cold. The dead leaves in the hedge which the snow had not covered, like dry season, but cold, so cold. Father Justin had been right about coming in the winter. I didn’t feel homesick though, not yet. But it was only my first day. My throat tightened. I wasn’t homesick, yet.
To find my name years later, his thoughts of me, amazes me, moves me. It was like he had died then. They had both died. I kept a low profile at school, except I learned tennis, and got really good, for his sake. He wanted that.
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