Song of Songs
Aelred stared at the bulbs drying in a green plastic tray below the black heating pipes of Father Justin’s cell. It was his weekly conference with the novice master. ‘There’s just one more thing, brother.’ Father Justin detained Aelred as he was about to get up from where he was sitting next to Father Justin’s desk. The geraniums which had been pricked out earlier in the year were now flourishing: red, white and pink in small terracotta pots on saucers, crowded on the small windowsill. While in March and April the scent of hyacinths thickened the air in the cell, now it was this hot geranium fragrance that took away the mustiness of the novice master’s cell. Father Justin was standing at the window, his hands among the leaves, nipping off a few here and there which had turned yellow. The perfume broke from the plants.
‘Yes, father.’ Aelred stayed sitting with his hands beneath his scapular, his head bowed, continuing to stare at the dry bulbs.
‘I think it would be better, brother, if you returned the writings of Aelred of Rievaulx to the library.’ Father Justin delivered this like the first line of a sermon he had prepared beforehand.
‘Are they overdue? I thought I had a couple of weeks left.’
‘That may be, but, no, what I mean is… I mean, I’ve discussed this with Father Abbot.’
‘With Father Abbot?’
‘Yes.
‘What’s happened? Is there a shortage of these books? There were more than one copy, both of The Mirror of Charity and Spiritual Friendship. When I borrowed them I think that there was only one of The Letters, though. I’ll make sure that gets back soon.’
‘Spiritual Friendship. That’s the one. I must say I’d quite forgotten about that text.’ Father Justin did not sound convincing to Aelred. ‘Then, now I think of it, we did talk once before of you reading the monastic fathers so early in the novitiate. By the way, how is your reading of Francis de Sales and John Boscoe? What about Jean Pierre de Caussade?
‘I’ve been trying de Caussade this morning.’
‘I see. And there are, for lighter reading, one or two excellent lives of St Dominic Savio and Aloyious Gonzaga and, of course, very recommended for young people is the Life of Maria Goretti. All examples for young people, though I think that last one is a little flagrant by implication. You know what happened to her?’ Father Justin crushed the dead geranium leaves through his fingers. The perfume still lingered in them. It brought the hot day into the room and made Aelred feel he wanted to be outside. He felt trapped by Father Justin.
Edward climbed the rock face. His strong legs moved as he climbed in his tight black shorts.
‘She was killed because she resisted sexual advances.’
‘Yes, a martyr for the youth of our time.’
‘I read these at school, father.’
‘Yes, well, I hope they did you some good. Anyway, the Abbot has decided to ban Aelred of Rievaulx from novitiate reading. Maybe ban is too harsh a term. He wants the books returned to the library. I think I agree. I think it could be misleading unless you have it carefully interpreted. Who was it recommended this text? Not me. I don’t remember, Spiritual Friendship, is it? I should’ve acted on this earlier. I blame myself.’ Father Justin knew very well he had not recommended the text.
‘For what, father? It was Benedict.’
‘Yes, that reminds me of another matter.’
‘What reminds you of another matter, father?’
‘Yes, well, you must get those books back at once. Other copies are out as well. Who else is reading these texts? I must say they weren’t of great interest in the novitiate in my time. I’ll bring this up during my next meeting of the whole novitiate.’
‘I don’t know father. You were saying.’
‘What?’
‘Another matter.’
‘Another matter? Yes. I don’t think you should be alone with Benedict in the library during study time.’
‘I was talking to him about John Cassian,’ Aelred said abruptly.
‘John Cassian? Yes, now he’s very relevant. In fact he’s to the point. Cliques are very dangerous in our life, brother. I think I’ve spoken to you about this before. Always in threes, never in twos. That’s our little mnemonic.’ Father Justin bent down to the wastepaper basket and brushed off his hands the crushed geranium leaves which he had shredded into a fine dust all the time he was talking.
Aelred felt his hands in Benedict’s, his mouth on his. Benedict’s neck smelt of the yellow soap which was customarily used. It was a rough ration. His neck was white and soft.
‘We’re not a clique, father.’
‘I know. And Benedict is exemplary. But of course he’s not your guardian angel any more. You must let him devote his time to Edward.’
‘He does. I hardly get to talk to him.’
‘You must think of talking to others at the appropriate time. And I think it would be good for you to see Father Abbot. You haven’t had a good meeting with him since the first visit just after your arrival. Father Abbot likes to keep in touch with the novices.’
‘Yes, I’d like to see him.’
‘I’ll arrange that. Very well then. And get those texts back to the library. I’ll have to see who’s got the other copies. Aelred of Rievaulx! I’ve never understood the interest. What do you think of my geraniums?’
‘They’re fine and smell so strong.’ Aelred closed the door of the Novice Master’s cell.
The geranium pots at Mount Saint Maur were by the goldfish pond near the arbour with Barbados Pride. The pods, like mangetout, were called deadman’s flesh.
As Aelred made his way through the common room to the dormitory, he noticed Edward sitting on the windowseat near the novitiate shrine. There was a fresh bouquet of flowers in the vase. ‘Oh, prickly.’ Aelred quickly pulled back his hand from trying to rearrange Edward’s arrangement.
‘Benedicite, brother. Hawthorn. Is the arrangement not to your liking?’
‘Yes, no. No, yes, I mean the white is like lace, but I love the pink, which seems rarer around here for some reason. From near the quarry?’ Aelred adjusted one of the sprigs of the pink hawthorn.
‘Yes?’ Edward questioned Aelred’s question and what lay within it.
Aelred noticed that Edward was reading Spiritual Friendship. ‘A dangerous text, brother!’ There was a note of irony in the tone of his voice.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Who recommended it?’
‘Benedict.’
‘Benedict?’ Aelred raised his eyes.
‘Yes.’
‘I see.’ Aelred felt a pang of jealousy, because what he thought was a matter of intimacy between him and Benedict alone was shared with Edward. Obviously Benedict’s guardian angel duties, he thought. But it still made Aelred wonder. Did Benedict recommend Aelred of Rievaulx to all the novices in his charge?
‘When did he recommend it?’
‘What’s the point of this inquisition, brother? And, “dangerous text”? What do you mean?’
‘Oh, it’s nothing. Don’t pay attention to what I say.’
‘How can I not, when you burst in with your questions and statements, your raised eyes and smirks.’
‘Smirks? Return to your Lectio Divina, brother.’
As Aelred made off, Edward said, ‘You’ve got really dark. You’re almost black.’ He said this when Aelred was already halfway down the corridor. Aelred heard it. He turned and came back to where Edward sat on the windowseat.
‘Black? Have you ever seen a black person? Black? Does it bother you?’ Then Aelred returned to his cell, leaving Edward flummoxed, and mumbling.
‘I’ve seen coloureds in our town,’ Edward raised his voice. Aelred did not turn back.
Aelred gathered up the texts from his cell and went directly to the library. ‘Coloureds?’ He asked, as he passed Edward still on the windowseat. He did not wait for an answer, but he puzzled with snatches of newspaper pictures he remembered of black people from the islands coming to England for
work. There was one of a group of steel band men playing on a wharfside next to a big ship. There was another of a man and a woman knocking on a door under a sign which said ‘No coloureds’. There was a way in which the world had been shut out, and then suddenly he became aware of it. Just beyond the walls Ashton Park was another world and he hardly knew anything about it.
‘Some say Mungo get ship away.’ Aelred heard Toinette’s voice. As he opened the door to the library, he looked back at the portrait of the black boy on the staircase. He looked back at Jordan. ‘Black boy for sale.’ He heard the cry in the streets of Bristol.
He deposited the books he had brought from his cell on to the shelf for returned books. He felt angry. He felt jealous. He felt homesick. He stood at a standing desk built into the bay of the window looking out on to the front lawn. The fresh grass was embroidered with daisies. He heard his mother’s voice in her last letter: ‘Sweet heart, we miss you. And Toinette said, “Tell Master Jeansie I say hello.” We all miss you, darling.’ Aelred wished he was still Jeansie playing at Malgretoute as a boy, playing behind the house near the servants’ rooms under Toinette’s all-seeing eyes.
He heard her voice. ‘Dou-dou child.’
‘Where Mungo get that scar?’ He heard his question.
‘Mungo get hang in Hangman Alley.’
Every Sunday after Mass in Felicity, they passed the avenue of mango trees coming up the hill above the sugar-cane factory. They passed under the trees where they said men had been hanged and men had gone to hang themselves. And the only thing that took away the fear as they passed was the nice warm hops bread from Mr Gomes’s shop by the railway line. And there were also the warm plaited loaves his mother got specially for Sunday breakfast after fasting for so long before Holy Communion.
Stories and memories plaited themselves. Mungo is a spirit flying in at the window. ‘See that scar on his neck,’ Toinette say.
Then there was this other story in the book he did not want to put down, did not want to return to the library.
During those first days at Rievaulx, the young Aelred was caught up in the new routines of the men who had first enchanted him. He had come upon them in the small wood near the river, dressed in their rough brown working habits, sawing wood, clearing a space near the River Rye for an extension to their humble dwellings. And though he had not expressed it that clearly to himself, he saw in them the possibility of men living together for love. Rising in the night for Matins and then private prayer, before returning to the church for Lauds, tired him. All his energy was exhausted in keeping up with the rigour of the day, the hours of waking, prayer, manual work and Lectio Divina. He felt that his body was being fashioned in a fire which was also tempering the spirit within him, so that he hardly turned his mind to the life which he had so suddenly and abruptly turned away from with his companion at the court in Scotland. He remembered the morning of his conversion. He remembered the morning of their departure after their brief visit. He looked back from on top of his horse, climbing the ridge above the valley and the river. He saw the monks processing out to work, and decided, or rather, he let his companion decide, that they return, taking the other young man’s zeal as confirmation that he should follow his own passion.
But the other passion had not left his mind, nor had it given up its power to tempt his body.
One week later, he woke to his heart weighed down with sadness, missing the friend whom he loved above any other, in the far distant northern kingdom.
Aelred comforted himself with the story of his patron saint, which he remembered his childhood mentor, Dom Placid, telling him in his mountain school. He retold it to himself now, a young man growing up and experiencing love. He remembered then, at his teacher’s feet, how he had asked Dom Placid whether love was painful, and the older man had nodded agreement. He wondered now what Dom Placid knew. Had he been a man who loved another? Was he like Basil and Sebastian? Had he been telling him this story because he knew, through the boy’s confessions, of his passion for his friend Ted and had wanted to prepare him for a life in which it is not easy to love another man? Had he loved him, himself, and was sublimating his desire for the boy into his celibate love? Was this what he should now do? Aelred strove for sublimation, his chaste and celibate ideal. Benedict called it a dangerous chastity.
They could not take the story from him. They could not. It was a love story. He took the books again from the shelf and read, absorbed, standing at the window till he was interrupted by the bells for Conventual Mass.
‘Flaming June. That’s what we call it.’ Brother Stephen outlined to Aelred his part of the walled garden to work for the collection of the soft fruit. The remainder of the morning timetable had been collapsed to bring in the rest of the harvest … ‘and in the morning we will go to the vineyards’.
The whole novitiate were particularly involved. Everyone went out after the Conventual Mass. They stayed out all morning. They broke to recite Sext, standing in two rows opposite each other. Benedict began the office, ‘Deus in adutorium meum intende.’ They all made the sign of the cross.
‘Domine aduvandum me festina,’ the rest of the group responded. Then all bowed at, ‘Gloria Patri et Filio and Spiritui Sancto,’ rising at, ‘Secut erat in principio et nunc et semper et in saecula saeculorum, Amen.’ The monotone chant droned like the wasps and bees around the strawberries and raspberries.
Festina, quickly. Aelred savoured that word, festina.
Aelred remembered photographs of monks chanting the office like this when he used to pore over books on monastic life at Mount Saint Maur. He was fired by the romanticism of it. Now he was actually doing it. Then they had a picnic lunch under the mulberry tree. After lunch they had a brief recreation. They went and lay in the field outside the walled garden just beyond the stream with the watercress beds for siesta. There would be a second shift to take them into the afternoon, after reciting None. Then if necessary, a third shift, finishing with the fall of darkness, before which they would recite a shortened form of Vespers. Aelred loved this time. It was a respite from the routine of monastic life - though he was still as enthusiastic about it as ever. It gave him an opportunity to be with Benedict with less tension. Not having to worry about Father Justin finding them, as in the library. He knew that they could not hold hands and kiss, but they could just talk. Stolen time. They could talk while sitting in the garden, as the nature of the work allowed for pairs to work closely at one patch for a while. The relaxation this afforded was exhilarating to Aelred.
He was always keener than Benedict to steal moments together when some of the other monks were busy elsewhere in the garden. Benedict wanted to include the other monks and not appear to be exclusive. He spent time with Edward, which made Aelred jealous. But it was also the temptation, the occasion of sin, that these moments could present, that sometimes deterred him from Aelred’s games. To have other monks near by was safe.
In their work smocks, their bodies seemed to be more exposed. The smell of the grass, the heat and the open air conspired to make these moments most difficult for Benedict. He admired more than ever the beauty of Aelred as his skin tanned to dark brown in the summer, reminding him of when he had first arrived. His arms and cheeks were glowing with the blood of his exhilaration in moving quickly around the garden, collecting up the punnets which lay near the strawberry beds and raspberry canes, and carrying them in a wheelbarrow to Brother Stephen’s shed, where they had to be packed to be taken into the nearby market town.
Aelred knew that he was being admired. He turned and smiled.
They had found a sun catch at the top of the field behind a full-flowering hawthorn which was losing its bloom. Aelred wanted to talk. In his spontaneity, he touched Benedict on his arm. He held his hand, impetuous to make his point. Benedict restrained the boy, as he thought of him at these times, still enjoying his at least seeming innocence. He seemed to have no will to change, even though Benedict made it clear that they should be careful.
The
summer’s exhilaration, the hot sunshine - these offered their own explanation.
They lay together where they could not easily be seen. ‘This is good. What are you afraid of? We’re just talking. No one else can see what we’re doing.’ Aelred was sliding his hand under the folds of Benedict’s smock and tickling his ribs.
‘But you’re still a novice. Anyway we must always be careful.’
‘Aelred of Rievaulx says it’s fine, to touch, to hold hands, to look at another monk, to admire his beauty, the shape of his body, the look in his eyes. These things are good. I’ve read about this. You gave me this to read.’ Aelred saw a question in Benedict’s eyes. ‘Why did you give it to me to read then? To excite me and then to punish me? This desire is essentially good.’ Aelred broke out into a kind of tirade, but not really angry, just forceful. Gradually his tone became more cynical, when he remembered Father Justin’s voice.
Then Benedict could not help but flirt. ‘You look beautiful when you get angry.’
‘Don’t talk nonsense.’
Benedict smiled, not recognising Aelred’s mounting seriousness, and then lost himself, putting his arms around the boy, pulling him in with an embrace and holding up his head by lifting his chin from where it was buried against Aelred’s chest. He looked into his eyes, and, very slowly, brought his face close to his and kissed him on his mouth. His lips were cracked by the heat, dry with their hard work. They held each other, and then broke off, feeling suddenly exposed in the field the other side of the copse where Aelred had contrived that they could snatch the last half hour, before they would have to meet again in the walled garden to recite None under the mulberry tree.
‘You see, you go further than I would,’ Aelred said.
‘That’s why I must be careful, as I said in the library. You’re not aware of what you do? I notice it even with the other monks. You disturb some of the other monks. Even Edward. You must be careful. Careful with what you do with your hands, with your eyes.’
Aelred's Sin Page 19
