Aelred's Sin

by Lawrence Scott

  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.

  Aelred felt the shadow, as soft as cotton on a cotton bush, brush against his face.

  It made an effort to fly, but it was too heavy to fly.

  Aelred heard a hymn, which was the song of a fieldhand singing in a sugar-cane field. He heard Toinette: ‘The River Jordan is mighty and cold, halleluia, chills the body and not the soul.’ He heard the clapping and the singing of the women in the chapel down the hill in the village of Felicity below Malgretoute.

  The moon spilt its calabash of white light.

  Jordan sought the secret tunnel.

  He turned, bent down, picked up a stone and threw it. Then he bolted.

  Aelred saw the boy fall into the stream, and the stream ran blue and red. The yelps of the hounds hung in the branches of the trees. The tongues of the hounds lapped, red and blue.

  The next morning, two farmhands lifted Aelred’s vision from the stream. As they lifted Jordan’s head from the stream, Aelred bent and stroked his face, kissed his lips: a forbidden love, the love of Aelred’s sin. He kissed the lips of Ted’s brown face. The body was taken from him and taken to a hole against the chapel in the cemetery. He followed and saw on a Christian cross the name, Jordan. As they lowered the body into the wet grave, he saw that Jordan was indeed Ted and then that face was the face of all those friends whom he had left behind: Redhead, Espinet, Ramnarine and Mackensie. Now it seemed as if they had all died with Jordan and Ted.

  As the men filled in the grave and stuck the cross in the mound of earth, Aelred noticed that they too were black and that they had the faces of men who worked on his father’s estate at Malgretoute: in spite of everything.

  His vision faded.

  Aelred felt that he had walked miles as he rested against the wall of the medieval chapel. The community would be finishing supper. He was beginning to feel cold. His habit was soaked and muddy. He felt he belonged here with the rain, grass and mud. He felt calm, as if his head had been washed out. The tranquilliser had lost its effect, and the walk through the rain had released all the tension of the morning and the afternoon and the happenings of the night before.

  He lay down near Jordan’s grave.

  The next morning, he was awakened by the bells for Matins. He was cold. As he descended to the abbey, he saw the dawn beginning already to burn over Ashton on the horizon.

  He would go and see the Abbot and find a way to mend his life, to stitch together what seemed against all odds an impossible task to mend, stitch together what seemed impossible loves. In his heart he felt that he had the courage of one who had made unimaginable journeys. The boy would see him through. Jordan!

  After the night of the rain, the atmosphere had cleared and the already verdant park seemed almost tropical. The Abbot allowed a few days to lapse before asking to see Brother Aelred. He stopped him himself after Prime. ‘Let us talk this afternoon brother.’ The Abbot smiled. Aelred felt that a huge pressure had been lifted off him. It was almost as if getting everything out into the open, but not quite, had released a lifetime of tension. It was as if everyone, including Father Abbot
and Father Justin, had benefited from this, once they were assured that no major scandal had been caused for the other novices. Aelred felt that he had been heard. Benedict, Edward and he went through their monastic routine with a greater calm. They did not seek each other out. They observed the boundaries set by the rules. There was a way in which the community, sensing a danger which could threaten it at its heart, rallied a support which allowed the offending brother to feel integrated once more.

  When Aelred arrived at the Abbot’s study for his talk, the Abbot met him at the door and suggested that they stroll outside and go and sit in the sunken garden. He had asked Brother Julius in the kitchen to bring some tea and cake out on a tray. Together the Abbot and his novice talked under the wisteria arbour.

  ‘There’s colour in your face again, brother. You were so pale the other afternoon.’

  ‘Yes, I feel much better, father, much better. I …’

  ‘Yes, you are much better.’

  ‘I’m sorry for all this trouble I’ve caused everyone,’ Aelred said apologetically.

  ‘Now, now. We’ve all learnt something valuable here. I’m sure. Let’s have some tea. And have a large slice of Brother Julius’s fruit cake. I certainly will.’ The Abbot, usually a very abstemious person, surprised Aelred with his enthusiasm for Brother Julius’s cake. Aelred had not seen this side of the Abbot. He felt sure, though, he would say something wrong and spoil this newly found peace and accord. He cut the Abbot a slice of cake and took a mug of tea from him.

  ‘In the lead up to your profession, brother, there is someone I would like you to see. Now, this is only a suggestion. I want you to have an interview, and if you feel this is what you would like, I’m going to offer you a chance to explore some of these - let’s call them emotional problems.’

  ‘Who do you want me to see, father?’

  ‘Well, he is a man I’ve known for some time and comes very well recommended. He has helped us in the past. He is a good man, a great admirer of our life. Strangely, you know, he’s not one of us, not a Catholic, but a man of great human insight, I think. I feel sure you would like Dr Graveson.’

  ‘He’s a doctor? What kind of doctor? ‘Aelred began to be nervous. ‘You don’t think I’m mentally unstable, do you, father?

  ‘Oh, nothing of the sort. Get that right out of your mind. Dr Graveson will explain it all. There’s nothing further from the truth. It’s entirely up to you.’

  ‘Why do you think I need any kind of doctor?’

  ‘Now, now. I won’t suggest this if it’s going to worry you. Dr Graveson is coming down from Bristol and will stay a couple days. You can see him initially, and if you wish to see him again we can arrange it.’

  ‘What have you said to him about me?’

  ‘Now, brother. I think it is right that we talk about our friend Aelred of Rievaulx.’

  ‘Yes. I did find Aelred of Rievaulx helpful.’

  ‘Yes, without doubt a very extraordinary man, a saint of the church. But the writings of the fathers have to be interpreted. In the wrong hands the scriptures can even be the instrument of the devil.’

  ‘Yes, but -’

  ‘What is absolutely clear is that Aelred of Rievaulx thought that carnal love was the road to damnation. That is certain. Now the other things he says are right and proper. Carnal love must be denied.’

  ‘Doesn’t he talk of transforming it?’

  ‘Yes, but you can’t transform it, brother. You have to pray that God in his mercy will. You have to avoid the occasion of sin. You see, if that had been followed in the first place, and I’m sure Father Justin advised correctly, a lot of our present trouble would have been avoided.’

  ‘What about the things he says about holding hands and recognising attraction?’

  ‘Yes, brother, things exist. St Aelred tried to deal with this abnormality in himself. I think you have to see that. He’s very unique. Now this is where I think Dr Graveson can come in. He can do something about changing that.’

  ‘Changing me?’

  ‘Now, I don’t want to go into it. Dr Graveson will be better at describing his work. The medievals had their way but we have ours. I think I want to try and use Dr Graveson’s way to help us with using God’s Grace. Because we must help ourselves if we want God to help us.’

  Aelred felt that he could hardly swallow the fruit cake. He was to be changed.

  ‘I think that this has been a good talk,’ the Abbot said. ‘Now I want you to try and return to monastic life, the normal routine. It is our routine, without distractions, which is our way. If we look after the little things the more difficult things will look after themselves.’

  Aelred carried the tea tray back to the kitchen.

  Edward looked worried and said, ‘I think he’s what you call a psychoanalyst. You talk to him and it helps you. He’ll have to explain.’ They stood in the library and Edward folded his hand over Aelred’s.

  ‘He wants to change me.’

  ‘I saw Basil. He’s been really inspiring. He says that we must use our love in our monastic life. There’s no question of changing ourselves, as the Abbot suggests.’

  Benedict was a little more alarmed. ‘Well, you’ll have to see. But when you talk to Dr Graveson, think carefully if you want to embark on this. My feeling is that we can cope. Look at Basil and Sebastian. There’s nothing wrong with you.’

  ‘The Abbot said that Aelred of Rievaulx was abnormal and what he did was to deal with his abnormality, for his time.’

  ‘I’ve got permission to fast.’

  ‘Also, I see that you are using the discipline.’ Aelred was referring to the five-strand whip which he had seen on Benedict’s bed.

  ‘Yes I’ve had permission for a limited time.’

  ‘Is this what I should do. Beat myself?’

  ‘No. I don’t think it would be appropriate for a novice. Basil has allowed me, though reluctantly.’

  ‘I remember the monks at school doing this. We used to eavesdrop on Friday nights in the corridor of Mount Saint Maur, Ted and I, huddled in the dark giggling. We thought they used to beat their pillows.’

  ‘Brother. This is serious.’

  ‘Don’t you think it’s a bit extreme. Aelred of Rievaulx killed himself.’

  ‘It’s unusual, but it can help, with guidance. This will be a part of my retreat before my final vows. You must pray for me. You must help me.’

  ‘I will. I won’t be an occasion of sin.’

  ‘Oh Aelred. You aren’t. My love is strong. You will see. This gift, as Basil calls it, will help us.’

  ‘Dr Graveson will change me, so that I can’t love you.’

  ‘He can’t change you.’

  ‘Then why am I going? I don’t want to be changed.’

  They stood silently, looking out of the library window over the park. Aelred said to himself, Jordan! He rose from a previous time, from an ancestral past of pain.

  The Flat, Bristol:

  10 November 1984

  Not before have I experienced a love like this! There are the events of this place and the events on the island. There have been great omissions. Sins of omission. I have found them hard to describe. And believe me, at this time, I am in the throes of something my experience has not known before: the meaning of this love. My education, my social and political class have not prepared me for this. I must prepare myself. His life is preparing me.

  Joe prepares me. Miriam prepares me.

  I’m witness. This is a testament, a testimony. Witness for the prosecution. Witness for the defence. For I fear they will always be prosecuted.

  As Joe says, We’re still prosecuted.

  Benedict took up what he later described to me as the responsibility he felt he had had for both Edward and Aelred, and in becoming the counsellor of their love - no easy task - he was himself stepping beyond any boundary he had known before. He was in fact finding a way to sanction a love the world as yet had no name for, except names of hate, ridicule and disowning. This is w
here I echo the early journals and Benedict’s thought.

  Joe says, The history has been obliterated. We have to rewrite it.

  He gives me histories. At least what they show is that nothing is simple. There’s never been one simple view of any of this. There are also a lot of conflicting views.

  But, as Joe says, there has been more tolerance and understanding than we give history credit for. This must be the basis of our change.

  Yes, Benedict retreated, then advanced, then retreated. I can understand. I have returned for this moment. And it is this which makes his sudden death such a loss, because I had hoped to go over a life with him and to bring all these meanings together with him, into one tapestry. I remain with fragments. I’m weary with reconstruction, with paraphrase. Tampering? Have I tampered? Tempered?

  Joe says, That’s all you can do.

  Miriam says, That’s what my work is. If I have a fragment I’m lucky; mostly I have dust in my hands and it tells me nothing, she says. You have more than dust. You have living memory, she says.

  Fire is a metaphor. Blood is a metaphor. That is his poetry of pain.

  Where does it leave me? Missing them all, his guides, now my guides. I meet them in words, in history.

  Would I have kissed Benedict on the mouth? Funny how I keep considering this now. Like when I’m with Joe sometimes. We touch. It’s in my culture to put my hand on his shoulder, to reach out and pull his shirt in the heat of discussion. He smiles. He says it reminds him of J. M.

  You’re so alike, Joe says. Then he says, No, you’re not him.

  Then I wonder. I mean, I could I do some of these things. Why am I not impelled in this way?

  Why am I not impelled to feel these things for a woman? Joe asks. They are much more common, if we take statistics. But I might, I could, he says.