Remember Me

by Penelope Wilcock

  Then Brother Conradus saw something. He looked twice because he thought his eyes had deceived him at first glance, but no—he was right. There in that cradled space where the ground rose and dipped, against the decaying trunk of a fallen tree, huddled in the leaves, resting his head against the moss that had colonized the dead wood, one of his brothers sat hunched. For some reason he could not exactly place, Brother Conradus formed the impression the man might be unwell, otherwise he would have assumed him to be praying quietly and respected his solitude.

  As he drew nearer, concerned, he saw that the man, curled into a tight ball, had his face in his hands. And then it dawned on Conradus, who almost stood over him by now, that he was sobbing as if his heart would break. And he felt almost sure (though scrunched up like that with his back turned it was hard to say, several men had silver hair) it was Father William, the cellarer—well, the cellarer’s assistant, but they all knew he was the cellarer really. Brother Conradus’s heart flooded with pity, and he wanted to offer some comfort, but the longer he stood there, the less sure he felt that he ought to be there at all.

  “Oh, Christ… my lord Christ… it is too much… too much… I cannot do it…” Conradus heard the muffled groan before the convulsing sobs eradicated any kind of speech, and the conviction came to him that his presence here would be seriously unwelcome. He stepped backward cautiously, onto a large fallen twig that broke with a loud snap. The response this provoked made Conradus almost jump out of his skin.

  William (it was he) flinched violently, and with an odd, sudden, sideways movement that reminded Brother Conradus of a frightened crab scuttling to safety in a rock pool, he reacted with alacrity, scrambling away from the sound and flinging himself round to face whoever had made it. This left him crouching like a cornered fugitive, aghast at being thus discovered.

  As he looked down at William’s face, red blotched and awash with tears, eyes swollen almost shut from weeping, but open enough to glitter at the novice in helpless rage at being thus run to ground, Brother Conradus could see immediately that he had messed this up to the maximum. Both startled, in a brief hiatus they regarded each other.

  “Is there nowhere—nowhere at all in this monastery—where a man can ever find the shelter of a little privacy?” demanded William then. Those were not his exact words but the gist that remained once the multiple expletives that peppered his question had been overlooked.

  Brother Conradus, appalled to find he had so seriously blundered with his unwelcome intrusion, stammered his apology and began to back away. William’s furious, desperate, tragic face looked like a wild creature at bay—quite a savage one.

  With great courage, Conradus paused in his retreat. “Father, you seem to be in such trouble,” he ventured bravely. “Is there nothing I can do to help?”

  “No!” William snarled at him, “except go away and leave me in peace and keep this to yourself !”

  Conradus nodded. “Mea culpa,” he said humbly, and smote his breast. “Please forgive me for having intruded.”

  He retreated with all haste and hurried back down the hill, his joy in the evening eclipsed by the disconcerting experience. The memory of it stayed with him through Compline and followed him into the Great Silence of the night. He was glad when, after Chapter the next morning, the silence lifted and the comfortable banter of his companions in the novitiate reestablished his sense of normality. He did not divulge anything of what he had seen but put it as best as he could from his mind. He did not especially like William and felt afraid of him if anything, but he had no wish to expose anyone’s private grief to community gossip.

  After the midday meal the next day, he felt drowsy. The air was muggy and humid; distant thunder rumbled up on the hills. Nothing moved, and the heat felt oppressive. He was permitted a siesta in the afternoons provided he attended to his own studies as well as his work in the kitchen. So he snatched a short nap in his cell, which extended longer than he had meant, and then dashed down to help Brother Cormac prepare the evening meal. At least that was what he told himself. Brother Conradus regarded all the fully professed brothers with proper respect and did not admit even to himself that his haste in reaching the kitchen was as much to prevent Cormac from having too great a hand in the meal preparation as to help him. But he found all well. Baked fish and salad greens were not complex dishes and asked for no sophisticated level of expertise. The dishes went covered into the embers of the fire, and Brother Cormac said he’d get the bowls of fruit ready if Conradus would dish up the bread for the servers to take into the refectory.

  Brother Conradus had put out thirty-eight portions of bread and was in the process of deftly and methodically adding to each plate an appropriate helping of butter when he became aware of someone’s presence on the other side of the large table that held all the plates. Assuming it would be Brother Cormac, he glanced up and was taken aback to find himself looking into William’s eyes. He knew it was ridiculous that this man’s gaze always gave him a slight sense of alarm: but, exacerbated as this was by the unsettling encounter of the evening before, he stopped breathing completely, his hand holding the knife with its load of butter arrested in midair.

  William’s eyes appeared to search his soul. Conradus thought he looked very slightly unhinged. He observed that William had broken a blood vessel in his left eye; the effect was decidedly macabre. Taken all round, he looked dreadful.

  “I am so very, very sorry,” said William. “I should never have spoken to you as I did. Please will you forgive me?” He spoke with such humility and contrition that Conradus was even further astounded.

  The young man blinked, recollected himself sufficiently to close his mouth, swallowed, and said, “Think nothing of it. I’m sorry to have put my foot in it as I did.”

  He knew that monastic apologies and absolutions were not supposed to go like this. There was a form, a ritual, and every brother should stick to it, but he could see this would not be the moment to insist upon it.

  William nodded. A brave gleam of something suggestive of a smile warmed his features, but not very much. He half turned to go, then hesitated and turned back. “Please—you won’t…”

  “No,” Conradus reassured him. “No, I won’t.”

  But though he would not have dreamed of telling of what he had seen, as a juicy tidbit of gossip, the more he thought about it, the more convinced he became that he ought to make sure their abbot knew all was not well with Father William’s soul. He did not act on this instinct immediately. He knew well enough how a secret burns and tries the doors to be let out. He kept it to himself for another ten days, doing every little thing he could think of in the meanwhile to bring comfort to Father William—but with notable lack of success. Then when Father Theodore took the novices through the chapters of the Rule laying down the monastic duty of confiding all things to the abbot in absolute trust and without reserve, Brother Conradus knew where his duty lay.

  As Conradus stood the closest he could get to the other side of John’s table, gazing at him urgently, Abbot John reflected that this young man’s dark eyes were very compelling.

  He leaned back in his chair, putting down his pen, to listen to what the novice had to say.

  “It’s Father William,” said Brother Conradus.

  “Oh? What now?” John waited with a certain amount of apprehension for what fresh revelation there might be.

  “I believe … ” Conradus fixed his abbot with the trusting, ardent fervency of his eyes, “ … that he is very unhappy!”

  On the receiving end of the unconscious melodrama in the short, plump young man’s voice, in the earnest solicitude in his eyes, in his sense of complete involvement with the distress he had detected, John was appalled to find that he wanted to laugh. It was not that William’s struggle didn’t matter to him; he was acutely aware of it, and not a day passed without him praying for William and usually reappraising his own pastoral management of the situation, asking himself if he had done as he should and all he could.
What activated his sense of the ridiculous was the young man’s fervid engrossment that struck John as more than a little sensationalist and out of proportion. It had not escaped his attention that William had lost the joy that had briefly illumined him, but John, having little to do with him in these last few weeks, had seen him only return to his habitual appearance of dry, ironic detachment. Manfully holding down the rising wave of mirth that having been triggered threatened to get out of hand, he defused the vibrancy of energy by reaching for the rag to clean his pen and moving it to a different place on the table.

  “Yes,” he replied, unable to look at Conradus, “he does have a rather doleful cast of countenance at times, doesn’t he?” With considerable effort, John kept his face straight, but his voice shook.

  “No!” John felt the combined force of Brother Conradus’s depth of compassion and powerful sense of duty converging upon him. “I mean, really unhappy. The sort of unhappiness even food cannot touch. Father, in this last month I have tried every means to comfort and cheer him. I have taken him little pastries and delicious date truffles, I have made him lovely spiced cordials and tasty morsels—flowers fried in batter, tiny plum turnovers, everything I could think of. I even—” John kept his eyes fixed determinedly on the edge of his table, but he could feel the novice leaning over it toward him. “—in final desperation I made the secret recipe that the Lady Giacoma di Settesoli made for the blessed Francis of Assisi at his own request in the last extremis of his dying! I mean, he received the holy sacrament, of course!” Shocked at himself, Conradus hastened to correct any unintentional impression he might have conveyed that Francesco Bernadone could be considered by any person to be naturally frivolous. “But before that, his soul was upheld and comforted by the confection—and who could have been less fixated upon his victuals than the blessed Francis? I thought it couldn’t fail: but it did! Father William took one look at it and asked me to take it away. But he didn’t ask me gently, or decline it with courtesy. His tone was rough and the words he used unrepeatable—and he doesn’t normally speak with a harsh voice; his speech is characteristically soft and light. I concluded, he is struggling with something terrible, some dark oppression or distress. And I have seen that he is. I cannot tell you because I said I wouldn’t, but I have seen that he is really unhappy.”

  This proved too much for John. The spectacle of this serious novice with his indefatigable solicitude for William’s well-being, presenting himself with an unending parade of unwelcome delicacies at every end and turn, came so vividly before the abbot’s imagination that he collapsed in helpless laughter.

  “Oh, I’m so sorry, Brother Conradus,” he gasped when he could speak, “I do beg your pardon! Oh, glory—just a minute…” But he could still see the situation in his mind’s eye, and the inherent comedy of it just made him laugh the more.

  He could feel the young novice’s hurt bewilderment and, when he eventually got enough of a grip on himself to look up at him, saw that he was really offended.

  “Forgive me—please forgive me,” he said. “I’m not belittling what you’ve told me, it’s just that I can so vividly see…” He shook his head as the laughter rose inside him again.

  “I know he’s unhappy,” he managed to say eventually. “He does talk to me. He has troubles of his own that go deep into his heart. Flowers fried in batter won’t really suffice… Besides, I think he’s really more of a red wine and strong cheese and roast pigeon man—but you’d do best not to take him anything. I’m sure he will be touched by your kindness, but when he’s hurting he usually wants to be left alone.”

  Brother Conradus took in these words. He supposed there might be a funny side to his efforts to console Father William, though he couldn’t really see it himself. And he had heard that there are people in this life for whom food is nothing more than sustenance, not the comfort and delight it was for Brother Conradus, who regarded mealtimes as the highlights of the day. He realized he must have met one such person in Father William.

  “What can I do for him then?” he asked sadly.

  John smiled at him. “You do my heart good, Brother—you are so kind. I’ll wager your kindness has been a comfort to Father William even if he spurned the tidbits you brought him. He’s a complicated man. I think you should pray for him and leave him in peace.”

  Brother Conradus nodded soberly. “I haven’t—have I—Father, do you think I might have made things worse? I didn’t mean to—”

  “He is not so churlish that he cannot appreciate gentleness,” his abbot reassured him. “You have not made anything worse; he’s just touchy and oversensitive. Don’t let it prey on your mind. He’ll find a way through his difficulties in the end. And thank you for having the concern for him to come and ask me about it.”

  “It says in the Rule…” Some of the eagerness returned to Conradus’s eyes. “… it says that we are to confide in you and bring you our burdens.”

  “Well, yes,” said John, “and that’s an immense privilege and very daunting at the same time. I don’t think I’ve quite grown into being an abbot yet; I still feel like just me.”

  Conradus smiled at him. “‘Only John, who loves to heal people.’ That’s what you said to me before, and that’s how I pray for you.”

  “Thank you. Thank you so much, Brother. And thank you for your kindness to Father William—kindness goes a long way in a monastery; we rest gratefully on each other’s kindness in the tough times. Only, it has to be expressed with restraint. So long as you go on being patient with him, understanding of his incivility when he’s feeling morose, that’s the main thing. And pray for him.”

  “I do pray for him,” said Brother Conradus. “I pray every day. But I didn’t know what to pray for because I don’t know what’s wrong. So I asked Our Lady—Our Lady of Sorrows—what he needed. And it came into my mind that I should pray that he would have the courage to keep the flower of his love alive through this winter, for it would have its time in the sun. Those were the words that came to me, and even though it seemed odd—because it isn’t winter, is it?—that’s what I pray for every day.”

  The expression on his abbot’s face changed, and Conradus saw that he had touched upon something important. For a moment John said nothing, taking in what the novice had said to him.

  “You—you truly know nothing of Father William’s private concerns?” he asked sharply.

  “Nothing at all, Father. That’s why I asked Our Lady.”

  Conradus could see that John felt very disconcerted by this, but his abbot deemed it prudent to close off the conversation.

  “Well, thank you for praying for him. It always makes a difference. Every time. And thank you for coming to see me and for trusting me with your concerns. I’m sorry I laughed—it just struck me funny; it’s not that I don’t care. I’ll make a time to see him. Was there anything else?”

  Brother Conradus hesitated. “Well?” “It’s something else about Father William. There is something more.”

  John waited. He thought they had probably discussed Father William quite enough and wished he hadn’t asked.

  “He feels afraid.” Brother Conradus spoke softly, and this time he would not look at John. “And sometimes he feels that he is worth nothing. And I think somewhere people have held him in contempt, for he is full of shame.”

  He risked a glance at John. “I just wanted you to know.”

  John had not entertained precise expectations of his conversations as their abbot with the young men in the novitiate, but he certainly hadn’t imagined something like this.

  “What makes you say so?” he inquired cautiously. “Father William hasn’t been discussing this with you, has he?” Nothing in John could envisage a scenario in which William might confide in a novice, but he thought he’d better ask.

  “No,” said Brother Conradus. “Never. But often when he has to speak to me on any matter, I have noticed that he makes me feel ashamed, and frightened, and worthless somehow, as though he held me in contem
pt. And then when he goes away, so does the feeling. But I know he doesn’t mean to. And my mother… my mother used to say that you can tell what people feel inside by how they make you feel when you are with them. She said that a person has nothing to give you but what is within their heart, so if they are afraid, they have nothing to give you but fear, and they put it into your heart too. That’s what she said.”