Sucking Sherbert Lemons

by Michael Carson

  It had not required any effort on his part. Purity had just happened. From his first hour in the building, feelings of awe at the surroundings, and of the great step he would shortly be taking, managed what endless rounds of prayer and worry had been unable to do.

  As the Novitiate year got under way, so concerned were all the novices to banish the tiniest imperfection from their spiritual lives that the idea of serious sin became almost unthinkable. The new worries were sins against charity, minor greeds, laziness and worldliness. Brother Joachim was still prone to all these things but the great trees of impure vice which had hidden the view had been felled – or, at any rate, cut back.

  He pulled his mind back from the gargoyles to the matter in hand. Two PFs! No, that was not right. He had only one. Brother Henry was not his PF. No, definitely not. He loved Brother Henry, of course. That was required. But not especially. Not particularly.

  But was his relationship with Ninian getting between him and the full flowering of his spiritual life? Worse still, was it sexual? The thought chilled him. Then his mind wandered again and he did not recall it until the bell rang.

  “So what have you decided?” Novvy looked round the room for a long moment before pointing to Brother Ninian. “We’re just good friends, me and Brother Joachim,

  Brother!” “I see. Good friends but not particular friends, is that it?” “Yes, Brother,” replied Brother Ninian. “And you, Brother Henry,” said Novvy. “Where do you stand now?” “I have decided to root out my particular friendship for Brother Joachim and cast it from me.” “And what does Brother Joachim think of all this?” Joachim did not reply straight away. He was a trifle hurt. A mere half-hour ago he had had two novices vying for his special friendship. Now he had none. “I don’t really know,” he replied. “To tell you the truth, I was very pleased that Ninian said he was my special friend. I like him very much and honestly don’t think that our friendship gets in the way of our quest for Christ’s love. Perhaps it helps us with the quest.”

  Novvy nodded as if he agreed, but then he asked, “But what about Brother Henry? You haven’t mentioned him.” “No, Brother.” “Why not?” “Well I’m fond of Brother Henry but he isn’t a special friend.” “And how do you think Brother Henry feels about this?” “Er ...” “You see,” continued Novvy, “we have some confusion here. Ninian and Joachim are just good friends. Brother Henry wants to be a special friend of Brother Joachim but can’t. Well, you’ve just heard that he is going to try and root out this feeling, but that is going to take him a great deal of effort. Special human relationships, their development and their demise, take a great deal of effort. What the Rule is saying, I think, is that all your effort must go towards loving Jesus. You have no time for anything else. Do you understand?”

  He turned his attention to the other novices in turn and pointed out the error of their ways. When he had finished, the group were silent and not a little uncomfortable.

  Novvy smiled. “OK. Manual work time. All for Jesus!”

  “Now and Forever!” replied the depressed group of Novices.

  “Come on, no long faces!” shouted Novvy as the group filed out.

  Joachim tried to smile serenely as he made his way to the stables on the north side of the main building. There he changed out of his cassock, put on a pair of boots and collected garden tools which he piled into a wheelbarrow.

  It had been his responsibility to look after the flower garden that had been set up against the south-facing wall of the balustrade. It grew mainly dahlias and gladioli to supply the altar of St Finbar’s chapel. The garden stretched along the whole south-facing wall of the balustrade and was fenced off from the pastureland that led down to the stream and fed the artificial lake. In the field cattle grazed.

  He set about weeding the garden, trying to clear his mind by repeating a psalm.

  Then Brother Michael’s old face appeared over the balustrade.

  “Good morning, Brother!” he said.

  Joachim murmured a greeting back, feeling guilty and anxious again.

  Novices were only allowed to speak to other novices and the Novice Master. It was absolutely forbidden for any novices to speak to anyone else at all.

  There were about fifteen other Brothers in training at St Finbar’s, Brothers who had completed their novitiate and taken vows of Poverty, Chastity, Obedience, and Free Missionary Work with Youth. All these Brothers were out of bounds to the Novices, though some of them often tried to make contact and had to be repulsed politely but firmly. More troublesome were some of the older Brothers on the staff at St Finbar’s. These seemed to be Brothers who had retired from teaching in the Brothers’ schools or were at St Finbar’s for reasons that were unclear.

  Brother Michael was the worst offender at leading Novices astray. He was a thin, white-haired Irishman of about seventy, and never let a Novice pass him without a smile. Joachim liked him for that but was terrified that Novvy would find out that he talked to him.

  “How are you, Brother Joachim?” asked Brother Michael, leaning over the balustrade.

  “Very well, Brother, thank you,” replied Joachim, keeping his eyes on his work and hoping that this would serve to discourage the other Brother. It did not have the desired effect, however.

  “Look at me, Brother!” cried Brother Michael.

  Joachim did so.

  “Yes, you’re the one all right!” said Brother Michael triumphantly.

  “How do you mean, Brother?” asked Joachim, looking round for witnesses.

  “The blue eyes. You’re the one.”

  “Am I?”

  “There’s no mistaking it. You’re the talk of St Finbar’s. Blue eyes to lead a saint astray!”

  Joachim stuck his hoe into a dahlia tuber. He pulled the tuber off and stuck it back into the ground, heeling it in and hoping it would not be ruined. Then he looked up at Brother Michael and said, “Brother, I really shouldn’t be talking to you. It’s the Rule.”

  “The Rule! The Rule! What is the Rule compared to those blue eyes!”

  “Yes, but...”

  “See those bulls?” asked Brother Michael, changing the subject as he often did.

  “Yes?”

  “Bulls serve cows.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “To get calves.”

  Joachim said nothing. He felt embarrassment reddening his face.

  “They can’t manage it themselves very well. That’s where Brother Luke comes in.”

  “Is it?”

  “Yes. Brother Luke has to take the bull’s big thingy and aim it at the cow’s hole. Brother Luke can look and do the necessary and it isn’t a sin.”

  Now it seemed to be Brother Michael’s turn to become agitated. Leaning further and further over the balustrade, he looked to left and right before continuing, “If you or I watched that sort of thing it would be a mortal sin. Even poor dumb beasts have a right to privacy, don’t you know? And what is more, such a sight could inflame the passions. But Brother Luke’s job it is to do that sort of thing so it’s all right. Do you get my meaning?”

  “Yes, Brother,” replied Joachim abjectly.

  “Come closer, Brother,” commanded Brother Michael.

  Joachim edged towards the balustrade a couple of paces while Brother Michael leaned still further over.

  “Fiddling!” whispered Brother Michael.

  Joachim’s morale fell at his feet and was buried by the hoe.

  “Brother Michael, I... “

  “Don’t try and tell me you haven’t! Don’t tell me that! With those eyes! You’re the undoing of many a pious Brother in this monastery, Brother Joachim. It’s the truth I am telling you. There’s many a soul in this place racked by the sight of your blue eyes! Don’t tell me you didn’t know!”

  Grumpily Joachim prodded the soil and said nothing. He felt extremely depressed at
that moment.

  “ ‘You shouldn’t be saying these things to me, Brother!’ “ he managed.

  “You shouldn’t be saying these things to me, Brother!” mimicked Brother Michael unkindly. “Sure, don’t I know that! What are you going to do about it, Brother Blue Eyes?”

  Joachim lifted the hoe and shook it in the direction of Brother Michael. “Stop it! Stop it! You’re evil! Evil!”

  “Evil am I?” gasped Brother Michael in a strangled whisper. “Well let me tell you, Brother, that when you have been here as long as I have you can be forgiven a little bit of plain-speaking even if it is forbidden by the Rule!”

  “So why do you stay here, Brother? Perhaps you belong back in the world!” countered Joachim boldly.

  “No, Brother Blue Eyes. I’m in the right place! It’s you who belong back in the world! There are people waiting out there for you. They’ve got their tongues hanging out waiting for a taste of you, so they have!”

  He didn’t say any more. His face disappeared from over the balustrade. Joachim looked up and saw only sky.

  He returned to his work, upset and anxious again, only to hear Novvy’s voice above him.

  “There’s a lot of weeding to be done, Brother. Still, not to worry. With winter coming, it’ll get easier.”

  Joachim looked up and smiled. He hoped that the agitation he felt did not show.

  “I see Brother Michael was giving you some advice about the flower beds. Don’t take anything he says too seriously. He’s no expert.”

  Then Novvy too was gone.

  Lunch was taken in silence in the Novices’ Refectory.

  Novvy sat at a table by himself and faced the long novices’ table that stretched the length of the room. At the far end a wooden crucifix, almost life-size, hung on the high Bath stone wall. On the table bowls of vegetables and baked potatoes in their jackets steamed like incense.

  Behind the lectern to Novvy’s right, Brother Alban was reading the day’s meditation. He would read throughout the meal and, only when everyone had finished, would he be free to eat his own meal. Each novice read at mealtimes for a week. He read:

  “SEVENTH MEDITATION: HELL

  “PREPARATION

  “One. Place yourself in the presence of God and humbly ask His help.

  “Two. Imagine yourself in a city of gloom, a city of burning pitch and brimstone, a city whose inhabitants can never escape.

  “CONSIDERATIONS

  “One. Like those in this city, the damned are in the depths of hell, suffering unspeakable torments in every sense and member; having used their life to sin they suffer pain befitting their sin; eyes which looked on evil things will endure the awful vision of devils and of hell; ears which delighted to hear evil conversations will listen forever to wailings and lamentations and cries of despair.”

  Joachim nudged the potato on his plate with a fork, listening hard, thinking of Brother Michael. Brother Alban’s reading, amplified by the high ceilings of the refectory, bombarded his ears. It confirmed his own worst fears. He tried to shut out the sound, to concentrate on his food. He cut the potato in half. The potato opened like a chocolate Easter egg but, inside, he found himself staring at black rotten flesh. Joachim dropped his knife onto his plate with a clatter that turned heads and caused Brother Alban to stumble in his reading. Joachim looked down at his dinner, and listened.

  “Three. Consider that what makes hell intolerable is the fact that our suffering can never have an end. If a little tickle in your ear or a slight fever makes the night seem endless, how terrible that eternal night when afflicted with so many sufferings! An eternal night which gives birth to eternal despair and frenzied blasphemies without end.”

  Joachim was still staring at the plate. Brother Alban’s echoing voice had become a drumbeat and he saw himself marching in time down a wide road which led straight into the hottest part of hell. Then the rotten potato blurred as the tears began to fall. He became immediately embarrassed and quickly started to eat the potato, forcing it down as a penance, as a purge.

  “So ends the reading from Introduction to the Devout Life by St Francis de Sales.” Brother Alban closed the book and opened another: Period Piece by Gwen Raverat. He read on, describing cosy lives in turn-of-the-century Cambridge, but Brother Joachim could not banish hell from his head so easily.

  He felt that his new feeling of safety in the monastery was an illusion. Satan could penetrate even here and, in the form of a leering old man’s face, turn him back towards a seemingly inevitable fall. For what Brother Michael had hissed at him that morning had thrilled him in the same way that long-buried memories of gun emplacements at home could thrill him. For sure, Brother Michael was Satan’s tool.

  The thought alarmed him almost to the point of panic. Satan had found him, even here among the Bath stone and the beautiful gardens. He looked over towards Novvy, who sat contentedly chewing alone at his table, listening to Gwen Raverat’s words and obviously enjoying them. Joachim wanted to get up and run to Novvy and bury himself in his arms. Instead, he stayed where he was and wondered about Brother Michael.

  Perhaps he was Joachim in fifty years’ time. Perhaps he would be like Brother Michael then! He would be the one hanging round the boys’ toilets at some school in the hope of corrupting some child with blue eyes. Between Joachim now and Joachim then lay merely fifty years of failure to conquer passion and sin.

  Truly he and Brother Michael were at different ends of the same boat, plying its way inexorably towards the abyss. He had no reason to feel self-righteous and superior to the older Brother. He was no innocent. He could not say that he had been corrupted by the men he had played with. In some ways his need had been greater than theirs. No, Satan was everywhere: in himself, in Brother Michael, in Ninian’s pretty face, in the whole of Creation. Everyone and everything teetered on the brink of a chasm. The ocean of Time eroded the ground on which they stood. Hell would get them in the end.

  He shook.

  “Is anything wrong, Brother?” asked Novvy.

  Brother Joachim, sitting rigid behind a stewed pear bathed in custard, replied, “No, Brother. I’m fine.”

  “Are you ill?” continued Novvy. “You haven’t finished your pudding. That isn’t like you.”

  “I er... “ said Brother Joachim.

  Novvy led Brother Joachim along the cloister and into the Novices’ Room.

  “You can help me get the music ready for this evening,” he said as they walked.

  The other novices were busy clearing up after lunch. Then they would go to the chapel to read Self-Abandonment to Divine Providence, a text which generally led to self-abandonment to a post-prandial snooze.

  Novvy took a key from the pocket of his cassock and unlocked the cupboard under the window that held a large collection of LP records. He crouched down and peered along the stack of records. At last he selected a boxed set and pulled it out.

  “I think this will do for tonight.”

  Brother Joachim read WAR REQUIEM on the front of the box in large white letters on a deeply black background. The letters seemed to dance in their whiteness.

  “It’s by Benjamin Britten!” exclaimed Joachim.

  “Yes, you liked the last one by him we listened to, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, I did.” The piece had been ‘Noye’s Fludde’. All the novices had enjoyed it. “It was full of good tunes. I especially liked the mice and Mrs Noye.”

  In fact he often found himself singing and whistling the tunes from it during the day. Occasionally he wished himself alone in the front room with the mirror. There he would have really been able to give full expression to the music. Still, in the circumstances, whistling was almost enough.

  Novvy started polishing each of the two records of ‘War Requiem’ in turn.

  He handled the shining records as reverently as the priest handled the Host.
/>   “This one will make you weep, Brother,” said Novvy.

  “Will it, Brother?”

  Novvy nodded. “It made me weep, Brother. I heard the first performance on the wireless a few years ago. Brother Michael and I were in the Brothers’ Parlour. We were both weeping like a couple of girls. It’s a very sad and wonderful piece of music, Brother.”

  The idea of Novvy and Brother Michael howling by a wireless struck Joachim as funny.

  “You’re laughing! You can’t imagine an old man like me crying!”

  “Yes. No,” replied Joachim.

  “Do you cry easily, Brother?”

  “Well I ... I try not to.”

  “Why were you so upset at lunch?”

  Joachim looked at the cover of the records. ‘War Requiem’ danced in the darkness.

  “Did the reading about hell upset you?”

  “Yes, a bit,” confessed Joachim.

  Novvy sighed. “I sometimes think we take you novices too early away from your families.” He replaced the records carefully in their transparent plastic covers. “All that talk of hell! St Francis de Sales is not one of my favourites, I tell you, Brother. Enough to put anyone off their food. Did it scare you, Brother?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well a bit of fear is no bad thing. It can nudge us in the Lord’s direction. But too much fear is a great enemy to the spiritual life. Above all things, Brother, you must seek to love Jesus as a Friend. He knows your weaknesses. If you fail sometimes – and who doesn’t? – you will not fall into hell. You wouldn’t send a friend to hell. Jesus won’t send His Friends to hell either. You do believe me, don’t you, Brother?”

  Joachim did not know whether or not he believed Novvy. He had started to cry again as Novvy spoke. More than anything else, he wanted to be held tightly by Novvy and to tell him everything that was on his mind and hold nothing back.

  He was slowly edging over towards Novvy when Novvy asked, “Is there anything you want to tell me?”

  Joachim wept on for a long moment, trying desperately to think what to answer. Had Novvy at that moment touched him, he would have been released. The touch would have been like the dove coming to Noye’s ark. It would have been the signal that released all the fearsome creatures that lurked in his brain, fouling it, crowding it – into the full light of a New Day. He saw the animals bounding free away from Ararat, dispersed, harmless, leaving him alone in the heights to sing ‘Hosanna’.