Aelred's Sin

by Lawrence Scott

  ‘Now I really love red roses but I daren’t pick any of these first buds. Do you think we should?’ Aelred turned around and held a small red rose up to Edward. ‘Smell this.’ As Edward took the stem of the single rose his finger caught on a thorn.

  ‘Ow!’ He handed the rose back to Aelred. ‘Take this.’ He sucked on his finger where the thorn had punctured and where it bled.

  ‘Are you OK? I used to faint as a child for things like that.’

  ‘I’m fine. I’m fine. Don’t you think we have enough now?’ Edward blushed and Aelred noticed his mounting irritation with his dryness, which was now mixed with sympathy. He remembered what it was like to be new. Everything was strange. One wasn’t oneself.

  ‘Yes, well, why don’t you take them? Arrange them in the novitiate. The bell for Prime will go soon.’ Aelred handed Edward the bouquet. ‘Mind the rose.’

  ‘Wish you were doing this.’

  ‘It’ll be fine. You’ll get the hang of it. Benedict will be pleased.’

  ‘That’s important, isn’t it? Pleasing Benedict?’

  ‘Very.’

  ‘Oh, yes, where’s the quarry?’

  ‘Over there.’ Aelred pointed into the distance, the other side of the orchard. ‘Over there, beyond those fields. It’s just out of view. No rock climbing, though. And by the way, you could say that I’m a creole.’

  ‘Creole,’ Edward repeated, getting his lips around the word.

  ‘Yes, like Joséphine.’

  ‘Joséphine?’

  ‘Joséphine Beauharnais.’

  ‘Who’s she when she’s in choir?’ Edward looked down his nose at the red rose.

  ‘Napoleon’s first wife.’ Aelred smiled and swept up some cuttings from the verge near the flower beds. ‘You know, from the exotic island of Martinique.’

  Edward looked confused and Aelred chuckled.

  As they reached the cloister, and before raising their hoods to process back to the novitiate, Aelred noticed Edward look him over. He folded down the sleeves of his work smock over his brown arms. He was very handsome, Aelred thought.

  They parted. Aelred could smell Edward’s newness as he followed him.

  On fine days the monks were allowed to spend siesta on the lawns below the terrace. It was there that Aelred found Benedict some days later. He was lying on the lawn near the monkey-puzzle tree. He came up to Benedict and stood over him. Benedict looked up from his philosophy books, which were spread open on the grass around him. There were two big tomes: Being and Nothingness and Being And Time.

  ‘Existentialism: Jean Paul Sartre and Martin Heidegger.’ Benedict pointed at the tomes.

  ‘Yes.’ Aelred smiled, not being able to respond. He did not know any of these authors.

  ‘You’ll read these one day.’

  ‘I hope so. I want to study and know more about myself and the world.’

  ‘In time. You must do your novitiate reading first.’

  ‘I’m sorry about what I said the other day. They’re true, the feelings which I expressed. They were true at the time. I felt confused.’ He was talking quickly, blurting it all out before he felt tongue-tied again as he had on the walk. ‘I love you.’ Aelred continued to stand over Benedict, who was now sitting up. He looked into the distance towards the quarry. Aelred felt awkward standing as he was. He didn’t want to sit on the grass next to Benedict, because he shouldn’t be there: he was out of bounds. He made as if to leave.

  He was surprised when Benedict said, ‘Sit a while. Don’t run off.’ Benedict could see that the younger monk was agitated and had taken all the courage he possessed to come here and confess his love. It seemed like that to both of them. It was something to confess, secretly, something which had been made close to sin since childhood. Now he was telling his love: all that love which had been pent up for his friend Ted who had died, and about whom Benedict had questioned him on St Aelred’s Day soon after he had arrived, and again on the walk.

  That first love had come with the first spring of sex. Benedict imagined this for the young novice, barely a man, and seeming to Benedict to be in between man and boy, his face as smooth as a girl’s. As he looked up at him, he seemed to be a person who was questing and struggling for virtue.

  ‘Sit, sit by me.’ He knew this struggle in himself. ‘I understand.’

  Was this not like their patron saint of friendship, Aelred of Rievaulx, whose loves in his youth were characterised by conflict and distraction? Hadn’t that Aelred seen himself as needing to be cleansed; and wasn’t it the honey of his love for the boy Jesus which had saved him?

  ‘I love you,’ Benedict said, raising his hand to hold Aelred’s and tugging at his sleeve for him to sit by his side. ‘Thanks for your love.’

  Aelred lowered his eyes in shyness and confusion. ‘Good, I just wanted you to know, because I felt terrible after the walk. For so long now since we’ve had a chance to speak. I don’t know why I felt like hurting you. There’s no reason I can think of.’ He couldn’t get it right - couldn’t get it to sound right, what he wanted to say.

  ‘These things are difficult. And in time we must talk more, but we must keep to the rules.’

  ‘I’m so glad you spoke. I love you. I’ve never talked of this kind of love before, not even to Ted really, because we were so young. Not like this. I was younger.’ Then he felt he was betraying Ted.

  ‘And remember Aelred of Rievaulx. There are those who have gone before us and are our guides,’ Benedict said.

  They smiled, and then the two men left each other. The older man knew that for the first time in his monastic life there were feelings for one of his brothers which had not manifested themselves before, feelings which he had to contain, the extent and true nature of which he had not even told Aelred. He felt that he had responsibilities, now that he had confessed to one so young. This was a love which he knew to be more than the love he had for all his other brothers in the community.

  The younger man felt happy, and already yearning for the next time they would meet. When they did, they would look at each other in choir, in the refectory, on the way to the garden, when they shared the washing up: the daily chores of their simple life. Glances would carry so much more; looking and the language of the eyes would mean so much more.

  Aelred began to feel for the first time that the burden of his feelings had been lightened. He heard what Benedict said. They had their rules. He felt like the young Ivo, in Aelred of Rievaulx’s treatise on friendship, who wanted to open his heart, pour out his thoughts. He felt that Benedict had noticed him in the same way that the medieval abbot had noticed his young friend Ivo. He returned to the treatise on friendship with added enthusiasm to find solace and advice for this new thing in his life.

  ‘Come now, beloved, open your heart. Just a little while ago I was sitting with the brethren, you alone were silent. At times you would raise your head and make ready to say something, but just as quickly, as though your voice had been trapped in your throat you would drop your head again and continue your silence. Then you would leave us for a while, and later return looking rather disheartened. I concluded from this that you wanted to talk to me, but that you dreaded the crowd, and hoped to be alone with me.’

  These were exactly Aelred’s feelings, to be alone at Benedict’s feet, his model monk. Now his friend who actually said, I love you. He took the words away with him, treasuring them, excited and frightened.

  Later, as they were queuing for None, Benedict came up to Aelred. ‘Benedicite, brother,’ he smiled. ‘On another matter. You must be supportive to Edward. Remember what it is to be new.’

  Aelred nodded, as Edward joined the queue behind him and the community began processing into choir for None.

  The Guest House:

  29 September 1984

  As shadows lengthen into night …

  Compline: ‘Brothers, be sober and watch, because your adversary the devil, like a roaring lion, goes about seeking whom he may devour… Resist him, strong in
faith…’ The young monk who is the acolyte of the choir read the lesson and afterwards lit the Lady candles. He is so young, so handsome. He reminds me of J.M. I try to imagine him then. I left Compline sad, so sad for losing my brother, for his way of dying, not knowing how to retrieve him. I get some of him back.

  Back then, there was Benedict. They were all younger then, both of them. I feel that the older men had given him, given them, so little direction, not the right kind at the right time. He shouldn’t have had to lose this life. I feel that so much of him wanted to go on with it. But, in the end, he had to go and seek the meaning of that love, that friendship, that passion, in the city, as Joe calls it.

  They were without support, surrounded by treachery, bigotry, like criminals. That’s what it was like then, Joe says. You were arrested. You were imprisoned and fined. You were shamed, insulted, beaten up. Not that it does not take place now. There were some pubs which you knew you could meet at. There were actually one or two clubs, particularly in London, and just opening up in the bigger cities. There were growing liberal attitudes, but essentially you were still a criminal. Odd to think of the ideal they were forging in this cloister.

  The ‘Salve Regina’ at the end of Compline was pitched into the darkness, and the candles threw long shadows.

  I keep going over what Joe and Miriam have described to me, trying to imagine him going out into that world of public lavatories, back alleys, waste ground, odd pubs and underground clubs, away from this safe cloister; imagine them losing each other. But then, here, they were branded sinners.

  Of course, back on Les Deux Isles we knew nothing of this. My parents would turn in their graves.

  There is a history, Joe says. It happened for a reason.

  And, Miriam adds, now we know that the concentration camps were also for those with pink triangles. There was a systematic elimination of them too. They need memorials too.

  I will leave tomorrow for Bristol. But I will come back. I’ve told Benedict that I will. Already, I hear the hum of the traffic on the main road beyond the fields. The city’s sodium amber hum. Joe or Miriam or both will pick me up after lunch.

  Making sure not to make any noise, I went out into the night and again circled the enclosure walls. I knew the trail by heart now. Using my former knowledge, I didn’t have to depend upon the yellow arrow trail. My trousers got caught on the gorse bushes. I passed through the little wood of oaks. Again I was on the brink of the escarpment, and opening up in front of me were the sheer, steeply descending layers of the Bath stone quarry, with the pool of water on its deepest floor. I could see the crevices where the wild buddleia grew. The arc lights hummed and floodlit the vast underground, busy with its own industry. There was blinding clarity and shadows and then encircling darkness. I descended the bank into the silver birches.

  That night, I read of his heroes.

  I admired the sprinting athlete, the diver as the champion swimmer, the jumper through the invisible air, a figure of perfection - perfection in that turn and twist. I saw perfection in the swift cycler, and in the serve of the tennis player, long and stretching and delivering deftness and power. I had come close to some of these arts myself, failing and succeeding in order to touch the essential beauty in myself and in Ted; his perfect beauty.

  I admired the dash of the footballer on the wing, the drive of the turning batsman with the ball driven to the covers. I examined the sprinting fast bowler, with that trick of manhood; the feminine dance of the spin bowler, that trick that man could be so like a girl and be a man. This was a richness which I sensed, tasted and knew to be there, but could never fully have.

  Ted and I placed questions in the hearts of each other. We placed them in our wrestling young bodies, like athletes in an arena we did not understand the rules of. We placed them in our clinging to each other, swimming off the boat when we were alone in the sea and could not see the land. The salve of life was to lick the sweat from his shoulder, those salty crystals, which then I took with my lips to place eventually, in that audacious way, upon the mouth of my best friend with a kiss like those I was shown in the pictures, like Warren Beatty and Natalie Wood in Splendour in the Grass.

  His images entered my dreams.

  The Quarry

  … like a gazelle,

  like a young stag.

  Song of Songs

  This had become Aelred’s favourite walk. It led through a gate at the bottom of the apple orchard, frothy still with the last of the white blossom. The late winter had slowed the spring and then there had been a quickening, a feeling of juice and joy in growing things. Then he learnt that the cold could suddenly come and interrupt the season. Once he left the grassy orchard, the path was a mixture of gravel and soft verges with beaten-down leaves and bark chippings. At this time of the morning, between housework and Prime, the grass and flowering cow-parsley were ladened, fresh with dew and early morning drizzle. Banks of white lace tumbled from the hawthorn and the air reeked with the wild perfume of the hawthorn and cows’ parsley and the wetness. Everything was shooting long, seeming lovely and lush. Aelred walked quickly. His heart raced with an enthusiasm which was born of excitement in feeling loved by Benedict, his ardour for his monastic duties and the newness of the season. It was a short interval, stolen in the tight schedule of the monastic day.

  Where the path narrowed it was prickly with gorse bushes crowding the edges, catching on the sleeves and legs of his denim work smock. He leapt over the puddles. He liked the fact that when he saw things now, he knew their names. He knew and could feel the difference between the open blue air, the shade in the wood of oaks and the glade of silver birches, dappled with shadow. It was chilly, he thought.

  He was alerted. He looked up. Just there, beyond the hedgerow at the edge of the field, level with a row of poplars, was a hovering hawk. Where and what was its prey? It might be a field mouse, or a rabbit, or, a small bird. Phrases from a new poem he was reading came with his stare. ‘My heart in hiding stirred for a bird - the achieve of, the mastery of the thing.’

  Time was running out. His stolen time would be abruptly cut off with the bell for Prime. He could not be late. There was just enough time to reach the quarry. He liked to descend to the bottom, circle the glinting pool, climb out the other side and return along the escarpment down through the silver birches.

  In dips, where things had begun to grow again, a purple lilac was in bloom. Buddleia, not yet in flower down here, sprouted from stone crevices as if living on nothing but the air.

  He had entered this new world and was learning to name it, but through the poetry he was reading he read the landscape with exhilaration and gleaned the glory of his Lord.

  Then Aelred saw him. His first reaction was to call out, he was so startled. But then he checked himself, in case his outburst should surprise the rock climber and he should fall. Aelred walked fast and drew closer to the face which was being climbed. It was Edward. Aelred found his denim work smock, weighed down by a rock, with a bunch of freshly cut lilacs near it. He had come out to cut flowers. But really he had come to climb. What was most startling was that he had on a pair of tight black shorts and a white jersey. His arms were outstretched and his hands worked at grips in the small crevices on the face. His legs stretched and his feet found a sure footing, slipping and finding it again, stepping up and up. All the time he was moving, and testing the firmness of his grip and the sureness of his hold. Aelred stood below and looked up. He was afraid that the quarried face might not hold the climber. He was not sure whether Edward had seen him. As he looked, he could see the straining of the muscles in his calves and along his arms. Aelred was scared and he was worried that if he stayed any longer he would not hear the bell for Prime. Had Edward thought of that? Had he lost a sense of time? He was so absorbed in his climbing, in the acute concentration in that moment. Aelred stared at the movement of his body: his legs, his calves, his buttocks, his arms. He was an extraordinary cohesion of strength and co-ordination of purpose. Edward’
s blond hair was waving in the breeze at that height. Bits of rock fell away from the footholds and clattered, bouncing on jutting rock further down, being pitched to the bottom and shattering into small pieces where Aelred stood, staring, as Edward continued to prise with his fingers and feet and raise himself up. He was almost at the top. That was the hardest. Where would he get a grip at the top, where the tufts of grass clung in loose earth, ready to give way? He might just lose hold and fall back.

  Freefall like a hawk.

  Aelred began his climb out the other side. He would go and meet Edward where he would reach the summit. Then he thought to go back and gather up Edward’s work smock and the bunch of lilacs. By the time he got to the top Edward’s hands were clutching for a firm hold. The bell was ringing for Prime.

  ‘Here, grab hold of my arm.’ Aelred lay down on his stomach and reached over the edge. Their heads were close together.

  Edward looked up. He was breathless. Aelred could have touched his face.

  ‘What’re you doing here?’ Edward spoke between gasps. He had not noticed Aelred at the bottom. ‘I’ll pull you over if you lie like that and we’ll both be gonners.’

  ‘What should I do? Don’t you need a hand?’

  ‘If there is a root or a stump just here, I might be able to grab for a hold. What can you see?’ He scrabbled with one hand, holding with another. ‘Or, if you can secure yourself with one hand, you can offer me the other.’

  Aelred dug with his fingers where he felt that there was a root, possibly from a young oak a little further off. He dug around it so that he could get his hand through it like a handle. He held fast to the root with his left hand, also digging his feet into the ground to secure himself. Then he stretched out the other arm to Edward, who raised himself a little further to the summit so that his head was over the top. The bell for Prime had stopped.