Authors: Lawrence Scott
Aelred's Sin (4 page)
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.
All during the afternoon walk he had been in Benedict’s presence, but they did not talk. They were aware of each other, a guardian angel and his protégé. Till finally, when they had dropped behind the others, ‘How is my boy from the tropics doing?’ Benedict’s arm
was around his shoulder. ‘Come on, we must catch up.’
It had been a walk of physical endurance. Father Justin liked to test the new novices. ‘Coats on - it’s just a bit nippy.’ There was a driving wind, sleet and flurries of snow. ‘It looks like we’ve not got rid of the winter.’ The young novice savoured each new sensation. He heard the word ‘flurry’. He forgot the meaning of heat on the skin. It was wind, not breeze. But he looked forward to the roaring fire in the common room. He thought of jolly Christmas cards. The world looked like a Christmas scene on a Christmas card: holly, laurel, ivy. England was a carol. Earth stood as hard as iron, water like a stone. He learnt the feel of ‘bleak’.
Spring was in the air, but still the winter had not gone. There was snow among the daffodils.
Aelred stared out of the misted-up glass window of the chapter house, which had been arranged for the party. He rubbed away the condensation with his hand. He wiped away the wetness by putting his hands into the deep pockets of his woollen habit. In the glass against the darkness, and in the reflection of the orange lights of the chapter house, he had a smudged image of his face reflected back at him. Behind his face, one face on top of another, the face of Benedict merged with his. Benedict was smoking a cigarette.
‘The late fall of snow has begun to melt. It’ll be spring again,’ Benedict said.
‘It’s spring, and then suddenly snow again. I’m not used to this change of seasons.’
‘What do you have?’
‘Dry season, wet season. Hot. It’s very hot. I love it.’
‘But you’ve left it. Given it up? Yes?’
‘Yes,’ the novice said, thinking it again, and saying it to himself and Benedict. ‘I’ve left it all. Yes, I’ve given it up.’
‘Look out on to the fields tomorrow and you’ll see that the snow has begun to melt where there’re no trees. The bright sun we’ve been having in the morning melts the snow. Stand in the sun, and you’ll find that it’s warm. Stand in the shade, and it’s chilly. Cold.’
Aelred listened to the words used in a particular way: warm, chilly. There was always talk of the weather, each subtle change. And in the pantry on blind Brother Angel’s radio he listened to the strange mantra of tides and winds, gale forces and storms out there beyond this island. Finesterre. He remembered hurricanes. He would rub his hands and say, ‘It’s chilly today’, and hear how he sounded.
The young brother looked out of the window, but there he saw only the darkness; himself and Benedict reflected in the orange light. There was an amber hum where the town glowed on the horizon. Ashton; it was on fire.
‘It looks like a fire,’ Aelred said.
The wine must have gone to his head, because he realised that he was talking a lot and telling Benedict all about growing up in Les Deux Isles. ‘My mother is wonderful. She’s very beautiful. Kind. Loves me. When she comes down in the evening she smells of
l’
herbe
à
Madame Lalie.’
‘What’s that? Who’s that? And where does your mother come from, that she comes down?’ Benedict chuckled at the young novice’s enthusiastic gush.
‘Oh, it’s no one. Questions! There is no Madame Lalie. It’s a tree. It has a sweet-sweet smelling flower, white, yellow and white. It opens like a lily. We’ve got one in our
garden. Right in the middle of the lawn. They make perfume from the flower. She dabs it on her neck and on her wrists. She strokes her long neck with her finger. My mother comes down from her bedroom for drinks with my father in the evening. When it is just getting dark. It gets dark so quickly. A green flash, and dark. Very dark. You can’t see anything.’
‘You must miss her. But you have wonderful sunsets?’
‘Sunsets? Yes, yes, boy, red-red-red, and yellow. Like fire. Cane fire. The whole sky burning up. Yes, I miss her.’
Benedict smiled.
Aelred saw him smile. ‘You laughing at me?’
‘No, sounds kind of French, kind of Welsh too, the way you speak, especially when you’re excited.’
‘And you, you sound funny too, not like limey people in Les Deux Isles.’ He wanted to hit back at something. ‘Tell me about yourself. I know nothing. You come from London?’
Benedict laughed. ‘No, not at all - well, I’ve been all over. Up north. I was born in the valleys outside a large city. A valley of mines. My father was a miner. Lots of us. Nine. Poor, really. I escaped south. Seems a long time ago now. Studied. Became a teacher. Ended up here. My parents are dead now. My father, in an accident. In the mine. My mother, pneumonia. That’s my life.’
‘God. All of it?’
‘Well, not quite; perhaps I’ll tell you more. There’s a beauty in the valleys. Suddenly they open up whole hillsides, not all besmirched. Some other time. When we get a chance. And you must tell me more about your sunsets. What your sunsets say. Another feast day perhaps. We must mix now.’
Before he turned away to speak to a group of young monks who were fellow philosophy students, Benedict took the novice’s hand in his. He held it in both his palms. He looked straight at him, into him, Aelred thought. ‘We’ll talk again.’ Then he ruffled his fast-growing, cropped hair playfully. ‘Your hair grows quickly. You’ll soon have to be shorn again.’ The novice felt embarrassed. He felt that Benedict shouldn’t do that. But he was also happy. He was nervous and happy at the same time.
‘What sunsets say? They don’t say anything,’ he said.
Besmirched, Aelred listened to how things were described. Benedict was already speaking to one of the other monks.
Aelred sat with the other novices, listening. Then he talked with Brother Stephen about the farm. He was excited about being put to work on the farm. The farm was like the estate, his father’s work with animals.
He saw Benedict on his own, which was unusual, because in observing him, he noticed that he was the life and soul of the party; he was popular with the older monks, and the young monks were eager to talk and share opinions on their study.
Aelred found himself feeling jealous. He didn’t feel he had anything interesting to say to him. He wanted Benedict’s attention. The way he spoke, the way he looked at him: it made him feel special.
Later, when it was almost time for Compline, Benedict and Aelred found themselves together again. Benedict beckoned him over to where he was sitting. Right away, he was direct, picking up where they had left off, as if not to lose any time. ‘It can’t all be sunsets. What do you miss the most?’
Without deliberately thinking it out, Aelred answered, ‘Ted.’ Ted was so often in his mind, on the tip of his tongue, like a secret. He had to bite his tongue.
‘Ted? Who is Ted?’
He had not told anyone at Ashton Park about Ted. He looked down at his boots. I’m standing in him, he thought. Always, I have him.
‘Ted. He was the best at everything. The way he swung a bat, bowled a ball. Football season, he was the fastest on the left wing. Captain. We played tennis for hours. Sun and sweat like salt. Then we swam. Best, we climbed into the hills and swam in the river pool where the water fell twenty feet sheer. Like falling glass. Frothy like crystal, shattering. He dived, jackknife.’ He said the words, painting the picture of another world, lost, dreamt. ‘We were the best. Two of us.’