‘He broke off. He called it a sin. He turned his back on me. He just said, go and confess. You’d think I’d done the most terrible thing. And it was him.’
‘Him, brother? What about him? A strong passion has taken hold of him and now he’s in distress. Possibly on his knees now at his bedside. He was thinking of your soul. But, too, it may represent a terrible thing for your brother. It may be part of a terrible struggle in his spiritual life. You can’t judge him.’
‘So, it’s fine for me but not for him.’
‘Well, not quite. In a way. You’re young. Look at how young you are. How handsome. We must not omit that.’ Basil smiled. ‘He’s taken vows. He has vows to honour. Have you thought of that? These are not easy matters, brother.’ Basil looked at the clock on his desk. ‘We’ve Matins to think of. And I wonder how Sebastian is doing?’
‘But do I have some terrible sin on my soul?’
‘I can give you absolution, brother. If it makes you feel better. But absolution is not magic. It’s your intention, your firm purpose of amendment, as you know, that cleanses you, gives you the grace to change. You’re not a child. But you must realise that you’re young, you’re attractive. These things exist. You must examine your wish for chastity. But believe me, what has happened is also beautiful. Use your passion for your prayer, for good acts. Use your passion. I absolve you in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.’ Father Basil made the sign of the cross over the head of Aelred. ‘Sleep tight, brother. Sleep tight, don’t let mosquitoes bite. I’m sure your mother said that in your hot country.’
‘Good night father. Thank you.’
Aelred went to bed thinking of Benedict and looking forward to seeing him opposite him in the choir at Matins. He was not sure that he understood everything Basil was arguing. He seemed to be arguing for Aelred of Rievaulx’s way. But he felt better. He felt that he must talk to Benedict. He must comfort him. He looked so troubled. This was to be a debate within himself, his own soul, and with Benedict, about the quality and the boundaries of their friendship - their dangerous chastity. What could this love mean? Where could it go? How could it express their highest ideals?
I am black but lovely, daughters of Jerusalem,
like the tents of Kedar,
like the pavilions of Salmah.
Take no notice of my swarthiness,
it is the sun that has burnt me.
My mother’s sons turned their anger on me,
they made me look after the vineyards …
Tell me then, you whom my heart loves …
Aelred read from the Song of Songs and fell asleep in the dim nightlamp of the novitiate dormitory.
Jordan appeared out of the painting on the staircase. He was running along the terrace, chased by the hound at the duke’s feet from the same portrait. There was terror on the face of Jordan. The terrace became the gravel yard at Malgretoute. The duke became his father, then became the Abbot, became Father Justin, his novice master, riding on his father’s horse, Prince, urging on his hound from the portrait. Aelred was dusting the portrait. His father was looking down at him from his horse. Jordan was joined by other black boys. Pardners. They were all being hunted. Young boys running, hunted. Aelred joined his friends, pursued by the duke cracking a whip and urging on the baying of the hounds. The place was both Ashton Park and the house high upon the morne at Malgretoute Estate on Les Deux Isles.
There was the smell of molasses, cane trash. There was a high wind. He tasted syrup, cane syrup. A train clanged along the line in the gully.
Then there was a fire, a sunset fire. Flamboyante and flambeaux, and cries of freedom. The town was burning. Saint Pierre was burning.
Then Aelred was with Ted. They were in a boat in the middle of the sea. The sun was baking. They were fishing off the side of the boat. Then he was close at Ted’s side, so close that he licked the beads of sweat off his naked shoulder. The sweat tasted like salt. Ted turned to look at him. They were both naked. They stood together on the seat in the stern and then dived into the sea. They swam away from the boat. They swam down under the black water. When they came up they were far from the boat and Aelred could not swim to the boat. He saw Ted ahead of him, but, thrash as he might, he could not move. They were clinging to each other.
Again, with Ted. It was their last holiday before he died. He kept moving between Ashton Park and the island home where they were on holiday. They climbed rocks, then they were in bed, like the last time. Ted didn’t want to, then he did. ‘No, yes, lick me there, suck me.’ Then they did what they used to do as small boys, touching their totees, sucking each other’s. Ted was in his bed in his monastic cell and then again in his bedroom at Malgretoute.
Then Aelred was kissing Benedict. Then he was at the quarry. Benedict was falling, falling, felling. Benedict was Edward, falling, falling, falling.
Aelred awoke, afraid, falling off his narrow bed.
‘Benedicamus Domino.’ The acolyte of the choir was knocking at the entrance to his cell, waking Aelred for Matins.
‘Deo gratias,’ he answered.
He had had a wet dream.
The Lodge:
1 November 1984
I persuaded Miriam and Joe to bring me to Ashton Park and stay for the funeral. It meant that I wouldn’t have the car here, but I didn’t want to be on my own for this. After all, Benedict was J. M.’s friend. We were doing it for J. M. Miriam loved the chant. She said J. M. used to often sing and hum snatches of Gregorian chant, right up to the end of his life.
He had monastic choirs on cassette. The music, if nothing else, still took hold of him, she said.
It seems so strange, me here all the way from Malgretoute with these two people who were best friends with my brother, attending the funeral of the lover of his youth. Lover - what a word for me to use. Listening too much to Joe. He remembers how awkward I used to be when I first arrived.
Today, as we walked up to the cemetery behind the procession of monks who walked in pairs, black-cowled and hooded, behind the six monks who shouldered Benedict’s coffin, I thought, how appropriate that he should leave this world in glory. I hear his words. He called it that, glory, the fulsome ripening of autumn in Ashton Park, redolent with copper beech, horse chestnut, the turning oaks, the spruce and the flashes of light shooting through the woods in the silver birches. I feel that that is what J. M. would’ve noticed. Now I notice what he would notice.
‘Glory be to God for dappled things …’ That Jesuit, Benedict had once said, was a passionate man.
His conversation was threaded with reference, information and the most startling insights for me in the week I knew him. I want to remember him for J.M. He shocked J. M., just nineteen and very young, mostly because he hardly understood anything at first. Not that he meant to shock him as he smiled and gruffly wiped his ruddy face, as if to clear away any obstacle that would prevent him from pinning down the insight. He licked his full red lips, running his hands back through his thick black hair, forgetting to have his tonsure shorn, revealing a dome of brow, furrowed, and impressive to J. M.
This is a picture from the journals. One I want to recall now. That was the man in his prime. Not the man I knew, the diminished ascetic I met. Ascetic?
I hear Joe’s voice: a broken man, eaten up from inside. Fasting, starving himself to death.
Killing himself. Is this what he did?
I have J. M.’s words alone. I would no longer have Benedict’s verifications, perspectives or whatever else he was suggesting to me. It seemed like an evasion at times. Why should he have spoken to me? I had been terribly presumptuous. I had him only in J. M.’s words now.
It was Aelred who wrote the journal. Not the J. M. I had known, my older brother; not the J. M. of the end, either. I keep having to remind myself that I’m recovering a brother who was still just a boy.
When Joe talks it’s quite a different picture. Joe has a story to tell me. Little bits creep out - the brother I never knew. I don’t kno
w whether I want to know. I’ve not read any of the post-Ashton Park journals, on purpose. I will have to soon. And Joe wants to tell his story.
J. M. had been excited with everything Benedict thought and said. He presumed that he understood and in that way he came to understand everything with the confidence of his youth and the wisdom of Benedict being older … ‘All things counter … /Whatever is fickle … (Who knows how?).’
He came to appreciate much of it later, when he needed it, Benedict used to say.
He had been like a sower sowing in a most fertile field. J. M. was receptive, intuitively empathic, susceptible and passionately struck by this man whose body his brothers now carried to his grave, as we mounted the short hill to the small patch of green, marked with its rows of simple wooden crosses bearing the names of dead brothers gone before, buried under the whisper of cypresses and yew trees where J. M. first learnt not to fear death when he dug his first grave.
I could see that this was bringing back J.M.’s death for Miriam and Joe.
Death had held him as a child, coming as a punishment for sin. Was that not St Paul’s thought? He knew the sting of death. Ted, his boyhood friend had died, as a punishment, he had thought. Had he changed his mind about that?
So much had happened here in such a short space of time, which now seemed like quite a life apart - another life, the enclosed life. But for me, what had happened here in those four years, and in particular that first year, was a chapter in a story begun much earlier, the conclusion to which I was writing down for myself. Presumptuous with his words? Brotherly love? I was scared of what I knew I would have to face up to.
‘Dies irae, dies illa …’ the sequence for the Requiem, the attenuated tones of celibate men, inflected antiphonally according to the inspired chant of St Gregory mixed with the wind. For J. M. they were mixed with the waves on the beach at San Souci. I knew the chants so well too, as a boy educated within a monastic school. But J. M. had learnt them as a boy with a passion. He tells of the first strains in the darkness of dawn, with Dom Placid chaperoning him to early morning Mass in the abbey church, down the hillside path, through the garden with the goldfish pond, under the arch of bare earth near the sacristy, as the monks concluded Lauds and the Angelus broke the dawn over the hills and plains of our island.
I find my world in his. I find it described in journals, red notebooks with black spines, stacked on a shelf in an empty room in Bristol.
I stood behind the circle of monks at the side of the grave, Benedict’s grave. I could hear the coffin scrape the sides as two monks lowered it, with bands of canvas looped about the polished wood with a simple silver cross. ‘Requiem eternam done ei Domine …’ Ted, poor Ted. So long. J. M. Then, Benedict. Names remembered.
There still wasn’t any sun as we left the cemetery to process back down to the monastery. I still didn’t understand the seasons: four, not just the dry and wet. After the asperges and the incense, the Abbot picked up a handful of dirt and threw it into Benedict’s grave.
When the monks dispersed, Miriam asked to see the grave of Jordan. We went over to the chapel wall and found the stone with the African head and the letter J.
So it did exist, she said. And the story that helped him - was that true?
It was true enough, I said. I suppose. We stood together and looked. There is a truth, Miriam said, which in its entirety eludes one. I’m working on a dig at the moment, in Devon. An admiralty-chartered barque, ‘The London’ foundered on the rocks in Rapparee Cove near Ilfracombe. Its captain, Robertson, was a not very reputable character. It’s a lovely spot. Lush fields fall away to the jagged rocks down to a small beach. In 1796 the 300-ton vessel tried to put in at the cove during a storm. It was returning from Saint Lucia to Bristol. It had captured booty and slaves from the French. Some reports suggest that there may have been as many as 150 slaves in her hold. Their full fate has not come to light. Storms and erosion have begun to unearth something.
Miriam told her story while we looked at names on stones. Joe was inspecting the monks’ graves and found Basil and Sebastian next to each other.
It was his passion that drew me, his beauty, which I always saw, Joe said, as we had coffee in the parlour. J. M. was always trying to make meaning of his nature against all established traditions. Joe spoke precisely. Excavating pieces of buried traditions, outlawed traditions - this is what kept him going. He called it migrating for meaning, migrating for food, living in another country. Words were his food. Eating words - you’ve read about it, Joe said. Joe kept looking at Miriam while he spoke. She kept smiling. He looked at me. She stroked his arm.
She’s a sensitive, attractive woman, very intelligent. I hadn’t heard Joe speak quite so emotionally. Miriam was allowing him to open up.
It was what I had begun to think: Benedict had not been eating. It had been going on for years, starting, it seems, after J. M. left. There had been a series of long fasts which steadily affected his health. The Abbot let it slip out. What a strange synchronicity.
In the afternoon, after Miriam and Joe had left, I returned to the quiet cemetery, which had once been here from the original country house, to work with Brother Leonard, whose afternoon task it was to fill in Benedict’s grave. We worked in silence till we had filled the six feet, each spadeful crashing on to the polished wood with the simple silver cross. Then the sound became the thud of dirt on dirt. I felt suddenly that I too had grown to love Benedict: the Benedict of the journals and then the man I met. This visit, this retreat, was to be with him. But then he died. Here he was, gone to earth.
Before we had packed down the last of the earth that covered Benedict’s grave, and replaced clods of turf, Brother Leonard and I sat on a small bench in silence: a silence that quite soon took you to its very centre, a deep drone of a wind in the high surrounding trees. We sat, wonderfully exhausted by our gravefilling.
They had been lucky to have Father Basil, I thought. I see his grave.
My whole plan has now changed. I am on my own, except for meals, when I go to the refectory and sit at the high table with the Abbot and the other guests. My planned talks with Benedict are now no longer possible. I regret that.
Of course, I have more time to read and write. As Benedict said in his letter, I’m going over again the fragments of the Ted story. Yes, I too think that it had set a pattern to his questing. That lad at school, as Aelred of Rievaulx would have called him. What do I remember? I know I don’t like this part of the story.
After the graffiti incident, which broke the scandal, it was an embarrassment to be even seen in the toilets, to be there with others. After that burning shame, which the monks and lay teachers ignored, and Ted and J. M. tried to pretend hadn’t happened, I lived with my brother’s reputation, not fully understanding, and not wanting to betray him, but tempted, when the teasing got too much.
I was solitary in my shame, solitary in my love for him. I could not tell tales at home. I spoke to no one. There began a growing rebellion on the part of the other pupils. One night, late, I went down in the darkness and scraped off the burning words in the silence, broken only by the gurgling water in the lavatory cistern. My fingernails peeled the paint away. They were sore. Tears rolled down my cheeks.
I looked up the rank of tables in the refectory at J. M. who was on the senior tables. I looked from under my lowered eyes, my head bowed, during grace before meals. The stamping got worse and worse as Ted entered to sit at the high table and lead the grace before meals: ‘Bless us, O Lord, for these thy gifts which we are about to receive.’ He could not start. They would not let him. The stamping became banging. I could see boys looking at me to see if I was joining in. Knives and forks were lifted and banged down on the table. More eyes looked me. I could feel my feet lifting and falling. My hands were on the knives and forks. I was banging them down on the table too. I was joining in. My eyes moved between Ted’s and J. M.’s. They did not look at each other.
Eventually, Father Julius took over. You cou
ld hear a pin drop. Then suddenly in the silence, a loud voice shouted: buller man! I could feel the shout coming up from my belly. It tasted like food I could not digest. It was like bile coming up and then out into the open as a shout. Everyone laughed and jeered. Father Julius shouted for silence. The silence continued. Then there was the scrape of chairs, the clatter of sitting down. There was the smell of school food. I retched. Food was being passed down from the prefect. The clatter of knives and forks was because everyone had started eating, but some boys were carrying on the banging under the usual din. My shin hurt. The boy opposite had kicked me. I looked up the tables at my brother, then at Ted. I saw others look.
A boy opposite said, He’s your brother-aaggh, making a vomiting sound. I smiled and banged my knife and fork. I stamped my feet on the ground. The boy who kicked me and the other boys near by laughed.
These facts seem so trivial, now, so small, as I understand so much more. Then it was a burden of shame. How could the taunts of small boys cause so much pain, so much havoc? No one understood the enormity of what we were doing. No one did anything about it. I did not understand what I had done. Everyone hissed as they left the refectory. Someone kicked me behind the knees. I hissed. Is this what they wanted to do to J. M., to Ted?
J. M. must’ve told Benedict this story, as he had written it out in his journal. Rehearsing? I read to see if he had noticed me joining in.
He says, I see Robert down among the juniors.
He sees Robert. Did he hear his shout of buller man? This is one of the few times my name appears in these early journals. Did he see him stamping and banging and hissing? I’ll never know.
Aelred's Sin Page 16
