Aelred's Sin

by Lawrence Scott

  They wanted to control their hands as they both reached out at the same time to hold each other’s hands where they were buried in the loose hay, trying to hide themselves. Aelred was sitting and Edward was kneeling in front of him. Edward lay his hands in Aelred’s lap and Aelred held them in his. They stayed like this, looking at each other and waiting.

  They waited for words, but no words came; no words could be found by either monk to express the intensity of his feelings, the complexity of his emotions and the contradictions that ran through his mind.

  They had always suffered the same contradictions, but had in the first place dealt with them differently. Aelred had acted on impulse in the dormitory and Edward had resisted. But now they both suffered the same contradiction, each feeling powerfully drawn to the other but wanting to resist.

  Edward, because he felt that he must make Aelred feel that he wanted this too, leant towards him, still letting his hands be held in Aelred’s. At first he leant his cheek against his in the custom of the monastic kiss, to the left and to the right, their heads and cheeks touching. As he drew away and faced Aelred’s full face, he took in all his fellow novice’s face, brown and flushed hot by the summer’s day and the excitement of their emotions. As if they each knew at the same time the intention of the other, they leant towards each other, Aelred sitting and Edward still kneeling with his hands in Aelred’s on his lap.

  They kissed each other on the mouth. Edward let his lips stay on Aelred’s and then Aelred opened his mouth, inviting Edward to do the same, so that their tongues touched, dry and then quickly moist with saliva. Aelred beckoned Edward’s tongue into his mouth, so that he could suck on it. Aelred leant back on the bale of hay so that Edward no longer knelt, but raised himself to lie on top of him. All the time, they kept kissing with open mouths deeper than ever in the vortex of the heat and the humming afternoon, electric through their skin and their denim working smocks. They lay like this, then rolled over, so Aelred lay on top of Edward, pushing his tongue into his mouth.

  They inhaled each other’s smells and felt the weight of each other’s bodies. Words were murmurs and sighs.

  They had forgotten the afternoon and their fellow monks haymaking. They had forgotten Brother Martin waiting for the new load of hay. They were lost in each other, and then suddenly jolted out of that lostness by the arrival of the tractor from the top field.

  The two novices rose where they lay on the bales of hay clinging to each other, their faces wet with their kisses, their hands damp with the heat and the excitement of their transgression.

  ‘We must stop,’ Aelred said. Edward still clung and still they kissed, while the first bales were delivered. ‘We must stop.’ Aelred’s voice got lost in the rattle of the conveyor. Edward broke away and returned to the upper level to receive the bales from Aelred. They worked furiously to catch up with the bales which were coming fast.

  They worked together.

  Now they looked at each other, their eyes seeking each other out. They smiled. In passing the bales to Edward, Aelred let his fingers clutch at his where they clutched at the taut string which bound the bales. They were both impelled to hold to each other. Now they were dwelling in a void in which there was no thought, no prohibition, no caution, but only a current of feeling. They worked like this till there were no more bales.

  Brother Martin called up, ‘That’s the last load, I’ll be off now.’

  Aelred and Edward slumped against each other.

  In the silence, they heard the monks from the field come down the gravel drive and clomp across the concrete of the farmyard. Aelred looked down to see the last monks going up to the abbey. Then he saw Benedict on his own, walking up slowly through the apple orchard. Seeing him, he felt lonely and he felt that he was betraying his friend, the one of whom he was beloved.

  Aelred now understood something else about this question of love. He had basked in the glow of being loved by Benedict. The older man had wooed him and he had given in. Yes, there was the love he felt for him as a brother, and a love which was the love of a son for a father. These were mixed in with them being lovers, monastic lovers in a quest for a dangerous chastity. Benedict had forced this. He was the one who was tempted for more, a more which would make monastic life impossible. That power of feeling was then experienced by Aelred. The sexual feelings he felt for Benedict seemed integrated and pure and an expression of his love. But these feelings he had now with Edward, and which he had always felt, did not seem to be those of love - not the love which he had for Benedict. They were feelings that possessed him and left him without choice.

  As Aelred watched Benedict climb the hill through the apple orchard, half of him wished to be at his side talking and feeling close in the way they had managed their dangerous chastity. Maybe, just as they passed behind the high hedges, they might steal a kiss and rest within each other’s embrace. That would be enough for the flesh, as it were, as they made their love an emblem of that love of Christ for his church, in their own mystical marriage. They made it an expression of Christ’s love for his disciples, his love for the beloved disciple, John, who had lain on his breast at the Last Supper. It was like Jonathan’s love for David, Aelred of Rievaulx’s love for Simon. It was in the end, a spiritual friendship.

  It was circumscribed with prohibition. It fed on the sight of the beloved: on the touch of the hand, on the monastic kiss, and on embrace. It had to stop there.

  Aelred ached for what he had achieved with Benedict, compared with what he now felt as he stood in the barn with Edward, looking at his friend disappear behind the hedges, along the path leading up to the church.

  The farm was now deserted.

  As Aelred turned towards Edward, the bell sounded across the valley and echoed through the estate and the farmyard calling the monks to Compline, their night prayers.

  What were they still doing here? They seemed unable to leave this place, this hideaway that had witnessed their first kisses. As the bell continued signalling a way of life they were a part of, but which they were not allowing to command them, they drew close to each other. First their fingers, then their eyes, seeking, searching out, where words were not possible and thought did not exist.

  They gave the monastic kiss to start with, still nervous and new to each other. They held each other in that embrace of fraternal love and decorum. They brushed their cheeks against each other and rested their heads against each other as they would at the ‘Agnus Dei’ during Mass, or when they offered greetings on feast days.

  They held on, waiting. In intervals of inactivity, they became in tune, learning to move with each other in a common sensation, tentative, trying out.

  Aelred brought a knowledge of his body which he had learnt with Ted, and he noticed that images from the past flashed through his mind like a kind of pornography, their bright boys’ bodies in the sun, perspiration and salt water on their skins.

  He knew where he could be touched, and he knew where his boyhood friend liked to be touched.

  Then the image of Ted diving into the pool. He jackknifed into the bronze pool, red like flamboyante.

  Even here, even now.

  But he waited. He did not want to take the lead, but then knew that he might have to.

  This had not happened to Edward before, but, as in the dormitory, his own desires became embodied now in the other novice’s desires. So, ever so slowly, Edward let Aelred teach him and lead the way. Their eyes took in each other’s faces and they began to kiss as they had done earlier. They kissed and smelt the fresh sweat on their faces and work smocks. Together, still kissing, they lay down on the bales. Aelred, still leading, undid Edward’s belt so that his smock hung loose. He ran his hands under the smock over Edward’s chest and played with the hair that ran upwards from his groin. He encircled the nipples on his chest with his fingers, tracing his desire, all the time kissing his lips and looking for his open eyes.

  They did not speak.

  A gentle breeze came into the barn.<
br />
  Edward, in his shyness, kept closing his eyes. He lay back while Aelred kept on leading. Then Edward sat up and undid the belt of Aelred’s smock and raised it up over his chest. Going further than his tutor, he kissed the skin which was open between the straps of the denim overalls.

  This symbolised a change: each was now as bold as the other. Their gradual undressing was mutual in its desire and in the help they gave each other, till they lay naked against each other’s warm skin, wet with fresh sweat. Each together, and in turn, rubbed their hands along each other’s arms and legs, over each others’ chests, leaving for last their erect penises, as if scared of where all this was leading. It was as if they did not know what to do. It was as if in the midst of all this knowing, there was profound innocence.

  They made a soft bed of their discarded monastic smocks in the hay.

  Aelred eased himself down between Edward’s legs and took his penis in his hands, stroking it and licking the tip of it and then the length of it, till he put the penis into his mouth and sucked it gently. Edward lay back sighing and then saying, ‘Let me do that to you.’

  These were the first words to bring them and their lovemaking into any kind of consciousness. Aelred raised himself and lay back on the bales of hay while Edward lay on top of him with the full weight of his tall naked body. They kissed and kissed. Then Edward, in turn, eased himself down between Aelred’s legs and followed his tutor in love, in the stroking, licking and sucking of his penis.

  As Aelred looked up into the roof of the barn, he noticed the cracks of light which he had noticed earlier. The bands of light which were laden with dust were gone.

  The barn was another world. The evening had declined and the sun no longer shone on the open side of the barn. Aelred could see that the sky was black-blue, and just visible was the first star of the evening.

  For a fleeting second, Aelred’s mind went back to Benedict and to his fellow monks in choir. Instinctually, he heard the words of the lesson: ‘Brothers, be sober and watch, because your adversary, the devil, like a roaring lion, goes about seeking whom he may devour.’ But as the changing evening had almost eluded him, the phrases in the admonition slipped out of his mind as easily as they had entered.

  He was not choosing sin. He was in the power of whatever this was, on a quest with a companion as eager as himself.

  In what was a respite, but about to plunge them deeper into a current of these feelings, they both lay back on their backs, looking up at the first evening star, a piece of jagged silver.

  They were now separate. This gave them time to reconstitute themselves. Their limbs were like water, or a fire that runs through young grass.

  They did not choose to leave the barn. They did not debate the missing of Compline. Instinct dictated that they did not lose this moment. It felt like a moment to which each of their lives so far had been a journey, a secret quest. Their secret history. Aelred had had his companion in boyhood and lost him in death. Edward had journeyed without knowing the quest. Their phantoms had slipped away after waking from dreams.

  They noticed their nakedness. They looked at each other and smiled.

  Edward rolled on to his stomach and Aelred rearranged the bed of their clothes, their denim smocks, for them to lie on. Just brushing against each other made them tingle with anticipation. To look at each other’s naked bodies was wonder enough: to trace a finger along a cheekbone, to run a hand over a shoulder - each gesture became a young life’s journey of discovery.

  Aelred stroked the nape of Edward’s neck. He ran his fingers through the hair at the back of his head. He ran his hands down his back to the end of his spine where his buttocks separated and each was smooth and soft with a down of blond hair. His fingers slipped between Edward’s buttocks, where the down of hair was wilder, bristly and moist. There, the skin of the anus was soft and wet with fresh sweat. Aelred lowered himself, licking the skin on Edward’s back. He lowered himself to rest his cheeks on his buttocks and kissed their downy softness. Gently, he opened, with his fingers, the hole of his anus. Edward sighed with the twinge of pain. Aelred lowered himself more, in order to lick his anus and smell the fresh sweat and musty scent. Edward’s anus, at first tight, yielded to the licking and the insertion of Aelred’s finger. He sighed, not with pain, but with a pleasure, a pleasure mixed with pain, a pleasure that was a kind of pain. It came from somewhere he had not been before.

  Edward turned over suddenly and sat up. He took Aelred’s head in his hands, and he took his whole mouth into his in a joyous claim, wanting to take back what had been taken from him. Aelred yielded his possession and more, as Edward turned him over on his stomach, and like his tutor, the student in love practised his art of licking and fingering.

  ‘I love you,’ he said over his shoulder.

  ‘I love you,’ said the other: the same words, spoken at the same time, the speakers indistinguishable.

  Their discoveries followed this mutuality.

  But it was Aelred, knowing his body from boyhood with Ted, who was the first to spit into his hand and run his saliva over his penis. Then he eased his penis into Edward’s anus, which was soft and now more yielding. Their closeness was as never before, and Aelred slipped out so that Edward might ease his penis into him. Together they alternated in this pleasure and rehearsed the ceremony they had discovered in their nakedness. Kissing, sucking and licking, they trembled within each other, till they each ejaculated into and over each other with their fresh semen, its pure strong smell mixing with their sweat and saliva, where they lay together, holding and clinging, as the black-blue of the sky with the first evening star, changed to darkness, and the whole firmament was now a constellation of stars. They lay there, beneath its immensity.

  And at least now, even if later it was to be endangered or even lost altogether, the inherited fear, shame and guilt of these actions did not exist with the horror in which they had been described in ancient spiritual writings. Rather, they existed as jewels as bright as those in the firmament above them, and under which they slept the sleep of those who know and shun innocence for ever.

  ‘It’s so good,’ Edward said.

  ‘Yes, this is good.’ Aelred echoed his friend.

  They lay entwined together. In their dreams, they feared the sunrise and dreaded the dawn.

  I sleep, but my heart is awake.

  I hear my beloved knocking.

  My head is covered with dew,

  my locks with the drops of night.

  I have taken off my tunic,

  am I to put it on again?

  I have washed my feet,

  am I to dirty them again?

  Song of Songs

  The Lodge:

  6 November 1984

  My cheeks burn. I’ve burnt my fingers.

  I used to notice Miriam leaving the room when Joe got graphic about what goes on in gay clubs or saunas, or out in the ‘cruising ground’ as he calls it, being ironic and a little nostalgic at the same time. Miriam explains the latter to me.

  Then Joe says to me, You need to read what your brother says. You need to read those bits of the journal that are explicit about the sex he had with Edward or what he did with Benedict. That’s part of your brother. That is your brother, your religious brother.

  We’d gone out and bought some more rum in the St Paul’s area.

  There’s no point reviving some sanitised, saintly, idealistic view of him. Even if that nineteen-year-old youth might’ve written up his wild temptations and fallings into sin as if he were a medieval or a Hopkinesque pantheist.

  The rum is working. I strum on my cuatro, ‘All day all night Miss Mary Ann …’

  It will not be the truth if you don’t put in the dirty bits, Joe says.

  Joe! Miriam exclaims.

  But then, Joe goes on, wasn’t he in the writing of those very bits actually placing those accounts alongside equally lurid accounts by Aelred of Rievaulx in his own idiom, about masturbation, for example? What does he talk about - th
at gushing slime, the concupiscence? Joe relishes the word. I think, Joe says, that your brother was trying to redeem the body, take the body away from that demolition site that the church has taken it to. Church and state!

  Joe and his demolition site! We laugh. Miriam comes back into the room.

  She says, I find your brother’s struggle moving and beautiful and tragic. He was young, fired by Benedict, by the poetry, the ideas.

  By Edward’s stunning good looks, Joe interjects.

  By beauty, Miriam explains. He’s writing about beauty and what it does to us. But she says she doesn’t want to know all that goes on down by the docks or up some alley. She’s not being judgemental, she says, though she thinks she has her reservations. She just doesn’t want to hear the details. Some of it worries her and offends her.

  J. M. doesn’t offend me, she says. I think that, yes, in times of prohibition you steal your moments anywhere, but with more freedom let’s leave those places, she says.

  That’s when Joe says, That’s shit! People won’t be liberated in a decade even. Anyway, PC politics doesn’t change everything. There’s a hell of a lot of prejudice and hate out there still, enshrined in law. There’s a lot of internalised shame and guilt. I know, Joe says. He continues. Why is sodomy criminalised? Sodomy! The very word.

  It’s for men and women too, heterosexual sex, Miriam says.

  Yes, says Joe, but why?

  I listen and say, We should have this discussion in Les Deux Isles on TV. Come and see what hate is like from priests, immams, pundits and fundamentalist preachers of hell and damnation. It’s like the mid-west in America. That stuff gets beamed down to the backyard. Then I venture an opinion. Isn’t sodomy, I mean anal sex, unsafe now, anyway?