Aelred's Sin Read online

  The chant continued. ‘Ubi caritas et amor, Deus ibi est…’: ‘Where there is love and charity there is God.’ The refrain was picked up by the whole choir processing out of the chapter house into the monastic church for Compline.

  In the dark church, with only the single candles on either side of the altar flickering, the acolyte of the door closed the doors quietly and stood inside the entrance, before proceeding to his place in the choir, to allow the acolyte of the choir to implore the Abbot’s blessing upon the whole community and upon himself, before he should read the opening lesson for Compline. ‘Jube, Domne, benedicere’: ‘Pray, Father, a blessing.’ The hooded monks with bowed heads received their Father’s blessing, and then listened to the admonitions of the lesson: ‘Fratres…’: ‘Brothers, be sober and watch, because your adversary the devil, like a roaring lion, goes about seeking whom he may devour. Resist him…’

  The Confiteor was then intoned: ‘Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.’ The monks knelt to examine their consciences. They beat their breasts. The psalms were intoned and sung reclining upon the misericords. Brother Aelred was one of these in the church militant who joined their voices with the church suffering and the church triumphant with the hosts of angels, archangels, cherubim and seraphim, transcending themselves and being the mystical body of Christ.

  The new Brother Aelred left for bed exalted by the tones of the ‘Salve Regina’ still in his ears. His fellow monks paid their visits to the altars of the saints, the Lady Chapel and the Chapel of the Blessed Sacrament.

  The following morning, after Prime, Brother Aelred sat with a white sheet thrown about him, as Brother Walter shaved off his thick brown curls with an electric shaver. ‘You’ll soon get to like it, brother, and your hood will keep you warm.’ Brother Walter tidied up the back and sides and mowed over the top once more, giving Aelred the monastic tonsure. He was like a sheep being shorn. He was now like a sheep led to the slaughter, a sacrifice for Christ, shorn of the adornment of the world, the sensuality of the flesh. His thick dark curls lay on the tiled floor of the sacristy.

  Aelred stood fully clothed as a novice. He had removed his brown pants and wore only the customary vest and underpants beneath his habit. He stood in Ted’s boots.

  The Guest House, Ashton Park:

  23 September 1984

  Scattering sleep from our minds

  Now before dawn…

  I keep his breviary open at the appropriate hour, the ribbon in the crease where he marked his pages. I learn my hours and enter my brother Jean Marc’s life, Aelred’s. J. M. we always called him at home.

  It was Chantal’s, my sister’s, idea. Call him J. M., Mummy.

  This is a kind of waking sleep. What am I waking up to? What is it that I don’t want to stir? Even now, having come all this way.

  Robert, the guest master called my name, knocking me up for Matins. I sit here in my small room, my cell, neat and straight. A narrow bed is in the corner on the right as I enter from the dim and silent corridor. There is a wash basin in the other corner by the window seat, below a window in two stone arches. There is a narrow desk against the other wall and a crucifix on the wall above me. A cell like the one he had: I’m here for him. This is a younger brother’s pilgrimage. Will there be a conversion for me in this? Me so different, our lives taking such different paths.

  Cocoa planter! I say to myself, What you doing here, boy?

  I sit with my prologue, the way I remember the Lives of the Saints told. We had the same book, read by our mother. Is this a fiction like those, a way of telling of a younger time in another place? Was his wish to be a saint? His life can now seem like a hagiographic tale itself. One part of me writes it that way. To write it out is to understand it. That was his method. Without his journals, I would be nowhere. But then I’m also out of my depth.

  I speak of him as another, Aelred. That was the custom, named for a saint, clothed. It helps too with the distance which time has wrought. I’ve made a character of him. To think of him as not my brother, as someone else who did those things, is perhaps easier. But there is too the brother I always loved, for sure; the one who went away, the one I lost.

  As I say, I have his words, and words are everything: journals, letters and my own words, enraptured by his ideas. I was inspired by his youth, yes, but startled and shocked. There is a sense of occasion, vocation. But can I face up to what in some ways I don’t want to know? I let words stand on their own. Do they ever, those words? I find myself hardly able to utter them. Our mother would use that expression.

  Unutterable, she would say, something that should not have happened, something that should not be said, a story which should not be told.

  I know a secret history of Ashton Park. I know that this will not be a pious story. The monastic life? Not the one I imagined he had left all of us for.

  I have come to see Benedict, his friend. I am confronted with my own memories as well as his. Things I don’t like to think about myself. It’s a strange feeling, because it’s as if I’m the older brother now as I resurrect that young man in the first year of his monastic life.

  What can Benedict tell me? Will he? Can I really expect him to talk to me of things I have read in the journals, explain them to me, perhaps?

  In front of me, the monastic day:

  Sunday Weekdays

  3.30 Matins and Lauds

  7.00 Prime

  8.00 Breakfast Conventual Mass and Terce

  9.00 Conventual Mass 8.50 Breakfast

  and Terce 10.30 Coffee

  (coffee after Mass)

  12.15 Sext

  12.30 Dinner

  2.15 None

  3.30 Tea

  5.15 Vespers 5.30 Vespers

  6.00 Supper

  7.30 Compline

  His day. This was how he spent his days.

  Because he went away, and I was the one son among a family of sisters, I had to grow into our father’s shoes and take on the management of the cocoa estate at Malgretoute. Life has fashioned me differently; from the same mother and father, the same home; loved and admired by the same sisters, by Toinette, the same nurse. How is that possible?

  Now, I’m coming here, leaving the world I know, to try to say how it happened, tell it to myself, tell it all. Will that be possible, to tell it all? How do I remember it, now? Can I bear to? Ted? Ted and the others, they, the others, who still stand around me. They, those boys, who stood around him, him and Ted. This is in another place, in a younger time. That’s what comes back on top of everything else. Is that why I’m here?

  I am following the ritual. I get to know this life, this liturgy. The bells are so unashamedly, so scandalously, I think, ringing out, like loud gonging prayers themselves, waking up the neighbourhood. It is the voice that calls us to prayer, pealing out over fields, the distant town, over the stone enclosure wall and the sheep like stones as the world sleeps. ‘Domine, labia mea aperies et os meum annutiabit laudem tuam…’: ‘Lord, open my lips, and my mouth shall announce your praise.’ I hear them in choir.

  Open my lips. I need to tell his story. I owe it to him, owe it to myself.

  The city hums at the edge of the fields, a horizon, an amber hum. There is the silence and my scratching pen, as when I’m up late at night at Malgretoute having to do the accounts. The rain drips in the cocoa. I miss home. I’ve been here longer than I first planned. I think of Krishna looking after the estate. I’m lucky to have such an expert to leave things to. I thought I would come and settle these affairs and return quickly. But it’s taken much longer.

  The affairs of the heart take much longer.

  Keep an open mind, Joe said to me as he drove me down from Bristol. We had got drunk the night before, in the flat with all of J. M.’s things scattered on the floor, all those red notebooks with black spines, photographs of our parents, one of me.

  Joe, out of the blue, had written, ‘I have some things which belong to you.’ I’m surprised how easily I get on with Joe. He’s like any
other guy really. Looks like a monk with his crew cut, not the earring though. I don’t know of anything we have in common, except my brother, of course, and his desire to drink rum, a love of the sun and cricket. I go everywhere with my cuatro, so I strummed and sang him an old-time calypso that first night when he and his sister Miriam welcomed me to the flat in Bristol. I taught them the refrain: ‘Sans humanité.’ A kind of wake!

  Sing, ‘Rum and Coca-Cola’, Joe said.

  They all want that tune.

  In the clubs, he said, it’s the popular calypso, Arrow’s ‘Hot Hot Hot’, that they enjoy.

  Yesterday afternoon, I took the road alongside the farm towards the fields. There I found a path, a forest trail pointed with yellow arrows, painted at intervals on fences and posts. I followed assiduously as if the place would yield something. I wanted it to. But always there is this double thing. I don’t want to know.

  I was circling the enclosure of the abbey, keeping the stock bell tower in view, the rest of the enclosure hidden. The landscaping of the natural woods encloses the cloister. I left the fields, and over a stile, made through some gorse scrub. I learn the words: gorse, scrub. I would say ‘bush’ back home. I learn that from J. M. He’s provided me with a miscellany of English flora and fauna. Still I was being pointed onwards.

  I surveyed this English park the way I do my cocoa estate. Just beyond the gorse bushes, through a little wood of oaks, I came into a clearing. The phrases are becoming almost natural, like ‘Down by the mango tree, take a left for the pasture’.

  If I could only bring him back!

  Then I came upon it. At first, I hadn’t taken in this other noise. I was attuned to the fields, the silence and the sheep like stones, the abbey getting smaller. But then, more than the silence, the hum drew me to the very brink of the escarpment. It horrified me, as it fell sheer in well excavated layers, like giant steps: a vast quarry of Bath stone, the guest master Father Dominic told me it’s called. In the centre there was a large oval pool of water glinting on its floor like a mirror, or, a mass grave. Just a fancy.

  Long ago, there had been fields here, the monks tell me. Here they had climbed. And even a longer time ago, I learnt, from J. M.’s journal, that dogs hunted their masters’ prey in the nearby fields. I had thought that was a dream, but it was true. I once thought that it was a myth. The terrible trade! We were forced to confront it, my generation, in 1970 with Black Power! What do the dreams tell of that time? To dream a time past - is that possible? They stand around your bed in the light which is filtered through mosquito nets, like those of a waking child in another place, shadowy behind a scrim. Power! Power! So, he had found the beginnings of our history here?

  Chunky lorries, almost like toys, those dinky cars we played with as boys, the ones of his I still have in a box somewhere at Malgretoute, were descending the terraced excavation, being loaded and then making the ascent. Huge arc lamps were harnessed to very tall pylons and girders for night work. Their metal glinted in the afternoon sun. My horror turned to awe and then fascination at the work. A notice told me that blasting took place between 11.00 a.m. and 2.00 p.m. I was safe. It was 2.45 p.m. I hadn’t heard any blasting earlier. I circled the escarpment and then descended the other bank into a wood of silver birches, losing myself before finding my yellow trail again. I was lost among the silver birches.

  They’re holding hands. Look at them now. Phrases and conversations with myself, with him, his words. He’s become word to me.

  Dreams still haunt. Dogs - the cry of dogs still sounds where the water trembles over small blue stones the colour of blue blood, tongues lapping at the blood, flowing into the lake in the spinney. I see another running. Then, he turns, and throws a stone.

  My memory haemorrhages with his words, phrases, metaphors.

  In another river, in another place, a boy dives like a shaft of light into a bronze rock pool. Like an angel, scarlet like the petals of the flamboyante.

  I make his poetry mine.

  Both of them, angels? Athletes, angels! No, hardly angels.

  The Feast Day

  In his longed-for shade I am seated

  and his fruit is sweet to my taste…

  Song of Songs

  The polished oak staircase ascended from the sacristy through three floors to where it tapered and became a smaller winding stair to the attic. It was Brother Aelred’s daily chore to sweep these stairs, dust the banisters and polish both the stairs and the banisters after Prime, before going to his cell for Lectio Divina, his daily spiritual reading. It was divine reading. Legere et audire, to read and to hear, was the injunction. For these chores, he changed into a simple, cotton, denim smock with a hood, tied at the waist with his leather girdle: the girdle of chastity which the abbot had wound around his waist at his clothing.

  The impressive staircase ascended in tiers. At the third landing was a mezzanine floor which housed the monastic library. Then the staircase continued up to the first, second and third floors on which were the cells of the senior monks. Those corridors were out of bounds for the novices. This was different to what the Rule of St Benedict instructed: ‘The younger brethren shall not have their beds by themselves, but shall be mixed with the seniors.’ Now, they were forbidden to go to a senior monk’s cell.

  It was now seven thirty in the morning. Prime had been at seven o’clock, and the community had been up since three thirty for the singing of Matins and Lauds, after which there were the Low Masses of the priests of the community. Brother Aelred had served the prior’s Mass this morning.

  Aelred had already had his breakfast of toast, honey and coffee. His enthusiasm for his new life was evident in his prompt rising for Matins, and his preparation for and participation in the liturgy. He took his daily chores seriously. If Father Justin, the novice master, had anything to correct in his charge, it was a tendency to rush from one thing to the other. ‘All things in moderation, brother.’ His enthusiasm would eventually have to be checked.

  Before he had taken up his official chore of sweeping and dusting the oak staircase, he had already been out to the garden in the cloister and picked fresh flowers for the Lady Altar in the novitiate corridor. There were daffodils and pussy willow, which he liked. Before those, there had been a carpet of snowdrops and crocuses. He learnt their names. After fixing the flowers, he replaced the burnt-out candles before the icon of St Benedict in the common room.

  Earlier, he had watered Father Justin’s hyacinths, whose scent reminded him of the smell of pomme aracs. He inhaled them deeply. Home came on the breeze of the smell; from the big tree behind the house at Malgretoute. He and Ted had climbed that tree. One holiday, they gorged themselves on the red fruit. The perfume was on their breaths, the juice on their chins and fingers.

  The hyacinths grew in the warmth on the sill above the radiator in the common room. Words came with a world: warmth, radiator. They named a world.

  Aelred performed all these chores with regularity and enthusiasm. The young novice was an inspiration to all. Old men smiled, looking at him. He aided the infirm up the stairs. He picked up Dom Michael’s walking stick. ‘Let me help you, father. Here, take my hand.’

  The older monks were glad at his fervour. They knew it could not last and that the monastic boredom would eventually enter. They knew the disillusionment which could beset the fathers of the desert. The few knew the joy, once that desert was journeyed through, but they exulted at the young novice’s first flush of fervour. They had all known it. It encouraged them, reminding them of their youth. Dom Leonard pinched Brother Aelred’s cheeks with his bony fingers. ‘Brother, young brother, young, young brother.’ Aelred delighted him.

  ‘Yes, father, let me help you with those books to the library.’

  Brother Aelred had made strides since those first days as a postulant, racked by homesickness and doubt, writing home: ‘Dear Mum and Dad, I am settling in fine… Love to Robert and all the girls. And a special hello for Toinette.’ His grief remained between the lines
for maybe a mother to notice.

  He had never been quite sure if it had been the spring that had begun to appear before St Aelred’s Day which had taken away that awful desolation of missing his home, and stopped him crying every time he received a letter from his dearest mother: ‘My darling, I keep calling Robert by your name, which makes Giselle and the other girls giggle and tease me.’ Or was it the feeling which he had that Dom Benedict, his guardian angel, was different and special? He wasn’t sure that it wasn’t the excitement and comfort of that which had got rid of the homesickness.

  He still remembered that special hug on the night of his clothing. He remembered that he looked for Benedict where he knew he sat in the chapter house. He did that in the choir and in the refectory. He liked his official meeting with Benedict, when he was given advice or instructed in a new custom. Best of all, he loved it when they were put to work together and they would relax the rule of silence so they could chat. As when they were washing up, when Aelred said, ‘So, you are ten years older than I am.’

  And Benedict had answered, ‘But that should not matter between brothers.’

  Then there were moments when Benedict was different, with his hands under his scapular. There was a formality when he spoke, not cold, but formal. Then Benedict was his guardian angel: ‘Brother, let’s go over the lesson for tomorrow’s Matins.’

  It was at the celebration on the night of St Aelred’s Day, his own feast day. After they had had a day full of the liturgy of the patron saint with the pomp of the Abbot’s pontifical Mass, they were allowed a relaxation of the rules. The order of the day was like a Sunday, with a long siesta and a walk in the afternoon, followed by fruit cake and tea. In the evening they had a film, The Song of Bernadette, and were allowed to smoke cigarettes and were offered a glass of wine.