I am sorry I did not write, but that is the reason, as you will understand.
Dr Graveson thinks I can start coming to him only once a month, which of course is good, but also horrible as it will affect how much I see Edward and how much I write to you. I won’t be able to write to Edward from here.
Pray for me. I have such doubts.
Love,
Aelred
I place their letters side by side. They tell a story. A little story, a big story. A personal life. An era.
They put your brother through the wringer, didn’t they? Joe says. This analysis! This attempt to change the poor boy. Psychological claptrap.
Joe! Miriam exclaims. I think J. M. thought he got something from the analysis, Miriam adds.
Yes, but you know all the usual clichés. Distant father, over-possessive mother, et cetera! Joe says with a flourish.
I know what J. M. thought, Miriam says.
We’re not discussing dear J. M. We’re discussing this poor nineteen-year-old, shipped off to a monastery because his teenage lover kills himself, probably.
Joe, Miriam says, annoyed. Think of Robert’s feelings.
Robert knows how I feel. Joe looks knowingly at me. Then he has to suffer the insufferable Father Justin and that patronising abbot, before he’s sent off to Graveson to shrink his young passion.
Joe is angry now.
Yes, but there was the lovely Basil. Doesn’t he sound a real sweetie? Miriam tries to lighten things. J. M. said he was astonishingly nice and caring. Miriam smiles at me.
I let you construct the story that follows. Yes, I’ve selected the material. I have placed it in a certain order. I’ve paraphrased, and passion has spoken. But I can no longer reconstruct, interpret and reinterpret. They had kept each other’s letters. Now, I, as archivist, as Miriam calls me, receive them back again, receive what they gave to each other, testimonies of their love. Confessions.
As I read I hear them in the flat. Laughter, crying, tears. There is pain, loss. Talk, late into the night. Friends come and go. A life of coming and going. Now I’m here, bereft.
19 St John’s Way
Bristol 8
Somerset
9 September 1967
My dearest Benedict,
I’m writing right away because there is so much to say, and when I start to think it all out, I can’t put it down, so I must just start writing to you and hope that what I say is what is in my heart, and will be clear to you.
I know that somewhere I have hurt you, and for that I’m sorry, though I know I can’t erase it. And I know that is so, because for you, as it is for me, it is a moral question. It is almost metaphysical, the difference between us. Yet we were one, the love we had, questing after an ideal so perfect. That’s it! I came to see it not as my ideal, but as one given to me, which masked my true nature. That ideal was what lay before me since I was very small, and now, without it, I’m like a duck out of water - or is it a fish - I never get English expressions accurately. Perhaps they’re both awkward, out of the swim. I am.
I keep wanting the routine of the bell and the office, my meals and my brothers around me, and you. I miss you. And like last night, when Edward came back from his job. God, it sounds so strange. We both said that we missed the community. It is so strange, me in this room with Edward, he going out to a job, me still here, waiting to know if I’m going to be able to study or if I will have to return to Les Deux Isles. That, of course, is another question. My return. As you know, there is a part of myself that must return. There is unfinished business. How else could it be? I left so young, not knowing anything. But Dr Graveson says I must continue with him for at least another year. You know he was disappointed by my decision to leave Ashton Park. He had wanted me to work towards an integration which was within the monastic life. Now I think he’s scared of the enlarged dimensions within which I must integrate. He doesn’t really accept Edward as a part of my real life. He sees it all as a fantasy which will diminish in time. He’s not censorious, but neither is he approving. I’ve had this series of dreams in which a small black boy is climbing in through my bedroom window in my childhood home at Malgretoute and when I wake up I am terrified - in the dream, and also literally. He says it is my dark self, which I am fearful of confronting. I tell him that it was a childhood fear of mine, and that I lived in a country with black people whom I was taught to fear, not to love. Had he not heard of the slave trade, the plantation society? A tropical collective unconscious. I was talking as if I were an expert. Yet, I was so conscious of how little I know. So much I need to return to, in order to understand. He cut short the session. He dismisses this. A huge chunk of my life dismissed by one of the most brilliant men in the psychoanalytical world. Can you imagine it? I’ve told him about Jordan too! Because I still see him, talk to him, and of course I feel I have betrayed him, by leaving his grave untended, by leaving his portrait unvisited, and I may never walk again in Ashton Park where he was killed. Murdered. I know you think all this sounds fanciful, but there are these disjunctions in my life which I must yoke together if I am to survive.
Aelred’s sin, I call it.
Near here, near the port, there is a cemetery and there are other graves. I visit there and think of him. I have found the names of many others, many, many, so many without names. Buried at the end of a journey. So many buried at sea on that fatal triangle. I go off at a tangent, and I really want to talk to you. I will this letter to get through the abbot’s censor.
Yes, it is a moral question, and I hope that in time we will respect each other in this, in order to regain some of the old belief and love. It is not, as I’ve said before, that I could not continue to love you, but that I could not continue to pretend to be living as one who has taken the vow of chastity. Your ordination was a sign of a final separation.
I know that at the moment the church does not recognise anything which my love for Edward represents. It is indeed the love that has no name, the love that must not be spoken. For me it has a name. It is brotherly love. It is my need for a brother. Some need a sister, a wife, a mother, a father, and I need my brother. My friend. I admit that I myself don’t fully understand it. I am not clear about any of it. I was certain enough to know that I had to leave Ashton Park to be with Edward and that I do want to express my love physically and sexually in a full way. That was not possible for either of us at Ashton Park. It was never possible for me as a young boy to conceive of my love for Ted as really legitimate. It was a sin. I call it Aelred’s sin.
I hope you will be able to come and see us. We both need to talk to you.
I will write again soon and I hope to hear from you.
My love,
Aelred (I still use the name, for how long? I don’t know)
Then the letters got fewer and fewer. Or I have not found them; what about that lay brother’s cleaning out of the cell. Incineration. The journeys. Time. Odd that Edward should’ve continued to live in the same flat all these years.
19 St John’s Way
Bristol 8
Avon
26 September 1983
Dear Benedict,
It has been a long time and I hope you are still there. It is like old times and there is no one else for me to write to.
Edward died this summer.
He wrote to me in Les Deux Isles (you knew I had returned, as I put it then, following my Jordan story and looking again for my memory of Ted - so strange that he was the diminutive of Edward) - telling me of his illness. He was seriously ill and they had no idea what the matter was.
Benedict, I could have written back and hoped for his recovery. You know a little of how Edward and I eventually parted, how that love we risked so much for could not hold, had little to hold it up at first, no community to give it recognition, no traditions, no laws, no rules. They allowed us nothing but secrecy and anonymity. You know how I lost him and he lost me in the quest for our desire, thinking it was a kind of freedom. How it seemed that if we were mad
e into criminals we acted that way. It seemed that the one thing, the pleasure that men can have together in each other’s bodies, being so denied, so outlawed by church and state, made it the narrow quest of so many of us. There are those who have reached in and reached out from our prisons. A way to say: this is who we are. They allowed us places outside the city, those places where those who died of the plague are buried. They allowed us dark places in the city. Alleyways, dives, seedy cinemas, public lavatories where we scratch our messages of desire. Their law for consenting adults in private, a protection for the rich and powerful against blackmail. There were some of us who luckily found in a wider freedom both love and desire. We need those men so much now. We need the work that so many are doing to unearth the writings, the history, the poetry, the stories of the long and arduous quest to give this love, a legitimacy, a name, as we see it happening, and now again so cruelly threatened and misunderstood. We need the freedom of the law, our own emancipation. Fortunately, there seems to be a determination which is stronger than death.
I came back to him, Benedict. I thought to write to you then and ask for your support. I came back to him. I nursed him to the end. Allow me this, Benedict, this outpouring. A more quiet truth must be written some time.
There was little the doctors could do; nothing seemed to work. They didn’t know what to do. They allowed me to take him back to his home. I met some courageous men who helped, friends of Edward’s. Now friends of mine. Men like these labour now for other sick they keep reporting.
This was at the end of the summer. Then it seemed a long journey to the end. He hung on through bouts of pneumonia. I was so frightened by his suffering and his wasting away. He became so thin. Then he developed what the doctors called a rare cancer. The sarcomas appeared like purple blotches all over his body. Oh, Benedict, I had loved that body. He had been so beautiful. So known to me and yet so unknown. We drove each other away with our desire for and against each other and others.
We came and went from each other. I’m so grateful for the last months, weeks, days.
There had been great days! It was a good love.
In the last days it seemed as if he had become transparent, so thin and white he had become. Night sweats. Fevers. Raging. Frightening. His eyes so wide and staring in his head, his sarcomas like purple roses blooming on his skin. He was so thirsty. Always by his bed a bowl of ice, and I held the cubes to his dry thin lips. Between the drugs and encephalitis, I think Edward saw the world he left as an hallucination.
I only hope that his visions were good ones. I know that some were bad ones. I knew his nightmares. I hope he realised somewhere the love for each other which we recovered.
I want to come and see you and talk about these times. I only hope you are there. What will I do if you are not?
Write soon.
All my love as usual,
Jean Marc (Aelred)
I don’t know if they ever met. Benedict did not talk of that meeting, he talked only of earlier ones. The one referred to here, he must have kept a secret.
Epilogue
Malgretoute Estate: December 1984
It was my last evening in the flat in Bristol, and Joe and Miriam prepared dinner. I got a bottle of rum. Real rum.
None of that Navy stuff, Joe said.
Miriam excelled herself with recipes she had found in a West Indian cookery book: chicken fricassee and curried shrimp. These are prawns, she said. Rice and peas, melangen grantin.
My favourite, pumpkin, she made into a soup. I got the avocados for the salad. These are zaboca, I said.
We were all doing the washing up, standing in the kitchen. A favourite place for English parties, I’ve discovered, leaning up on the fridge and sink, drinking and joking. It felt like we were avoiding something. Joe had been avoiding it for months now.
In the corridor outside J. M.’s old room, Joe and I stood up and talked. Like we couldn’t sit down.
You must take it all, if you want to. You should take his academic papers, that one called ‘Atlantic Junction: Toxteth, Brixton, St Paul’s’. I think we’ll take the rest to Oxfam. Miriam and I have chosen our mementoes. Small things, like this photograph. Have I shown you this one? 1967! The year of consenting adults! Joe said cynically. On the steps of the student union in Bristol. That’s where we all met. Edward read History, J. M. English and History, and me, Sociology and Politics. We were educated for the sixties: ‘68 was Paris and Prague! We went through everything together. That story you’ve been piecing together, Joe said, is a horror show as far as I’m concerned.
But there were ironies. Here is another photo I’ve kept. Polonecks and jeans. Their hair is already getting long. Barmouth in Wales. We’d speeded up to Shropshire in an old mini to visit Ed’s parents. I remember them loving Tintern Abbey. J. M. quoted Benedict quoting Wordsworth as we drove along the Wye. ‘O sylvan Wye! thou wanderer thro the woods,/ How often has my spirit turned to thee!’ He leant over from the back and put his arms around Ed’s neck. He was always doing things like that.
They got cold feet in Shropshire. Ed couldn’t face his father. He wanted to ‘come out’ in ‘68. Imagine! I had an aunt in Barmouth with a guest house, so we went off there. It was hot. The hillsides near the estuary were purple with wild rhododendrons and shimmering with yellow gorse. High mountains sheer to the Irish Sea. In the distance mountains in haze.
Reminds me of islands, J. M. said.
It blew our minds. I think we were high anyway. Look at how young and lovely they are. I’ll make you some copies of these and send them out to you. All the way in the car we sang along to ‘Are you going to San Francisco, be sure to wear some flowers in your hair.’ I had some hash and we got high, falling about on the grass where we stopped for a picnic. ‘There’s a strange vibration, people in motion.’ We giggled so much.
I remember, when we were sorting out the sleeping arrangements at my aunt’s, J. M. saying, It’s not much different out here, is it? We can’t hold hands in the street. We worry about being caught sleeping together. It’s worse, he said, in some ways. I saw ‘QUEER’ written up on the wall on the seafront.
I remember that time vividly. It was odd being with them, lovers who had been lovers in a monastery. There was a kind of other-worldliness about them. Don’t get me wrong. They loved having sex. In the evening, we walked on the front. ‘Under the boardwalk, down by the sea …’ we sang along with The Drifters.
Near a funfair, J. M. suddenly ran off in the direction of the square. Right there, standing all alone was a black guy playing a steel tenor pan.
J. M. said, God that music! I’ve not heard it in years. I would know it anywhere.
Ed said, Ask him where he’s from. J. M. was shy. Ed said teasingly, which I didn’t understand at first, Bet his name is Jordan.
J. M. was absorbed. Then he turned and poked Ed in the ribs playfully. The metallic notes bounced off the steel basin. We tapped our feet, moved our hips. J. M. said, Calypso, man! Hear that calypso music!
Joe couldn’t stop talking. He was circling in the small space of the corridor playing with the photographs in his hands all the while he was talking.
I’ve never told you, have I?
I knew what he was talking about and I said, No. You want to, so tell me. I want to hear. We sat on the bed in J.M.’s empty room. I pictured it as Joe talked. Ed’s dying was bad enough. It was I who wrote and told J. M. to come back. I knew he would. I couldn’t cope on my own. You should’ve seen your brother: he was not that indulgent romantic of the story you piece together. No, I loved him, really, in ‘67! Don’t mind me. He was a practical, caring man who sat by Ed’s bed and nursed him. We took it in shifts. A year ago we didn’t know as much as we know now. I expect we took a lot of risks. He had the works, that rare cancer with horrid sarcomas. The sweating was the thing, having to repeatedly change him through the night, high temperatures, raging, frightening. My memory of J. M. at that time is him sitting by the bed in the other room, the one Miriam now
uses. Sitting there putting ice cubes to Ed’s mouth. His mouth was a grey line. He hallucinated about his mother a lot. You know he sort of lost his mother when he was young. He used to see her at the door to his room. She had been ill and had to be away from home. His father did come and visit him when he was in hospital. He didn’t want to come to the flat.
But with J. M. it was different. It was very gradual at first. It was an ordinary cold and cough which just wouldn’t go away. I would hear him coughing at night. I still hear that cough in the flat sometimes when I’m in on my own. But he had the fevers, the night sweats. There was an early bout of pneumonia which miraculously he recovered from. It left him wasted. His breathing became difficult. He needed oxygen. As you see, we’ve never taken back the cylinder. He had terrible pain, which they gave him morphine for, so we would lose him for days. It became too much and we had to take him to casualty. Then bring him home again when he was recovered, for more often than not they needed the bed.
Miriam was brilliant. She came to live here. She had always been fond of J. M. since that time I took him back home as a student. What shocked her was the cancer. He used to call them his sunspots. It was extraordinary how handsome he remained despite his gauntness and the grey pallor.
Joe twirled the photographs in his hands.
He had nightmares. He would call out in the night. Sometimes I or Miriam had fallen asleep. It was very tiring. He often dreamt of Les Deux Isles. He would describe these lurid dreams, always full of tropical ferns and lilies and heavy rain. He would describe the house at Malgretoute and the cocoa hills. I think these were caused by the morphine. He dreamt of Ted, the waterfall. The whole Ted thing came back, all that awful teenage stuff. It was as if his whole life was being played back as a Spielberg film. The past returned as a terror. He mentioned you. He tried to talk about you.
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