Aelred's Sin (2 page)
Authors: Lawrence Scott
The Abbot sat on his throne with the prior and sub-prior, one on either side, one step down on the dais. In seniority, the other monks sat themselves around the chapter house. As the darkness of the early spring evening filled Ashton Park, those monks who sat facing the windows that overlooked the terrace could see the receding shadows of the day and the last smouldering light in the bare wood banked high above the fields.
They all waited in silence.
After the coughing had subsided and the arranging of the voluminous black cowls with their sleeves like the wings of archangels or enormous bats, depending on how you looked at them, had settled, the community waited, hooded, with heads bowed. The silence and then the swish of a cowl in the corridor outside still filled the older monks with anticipation. The soft, rapid footsteps which stopped at the door of the chapterhouse brought back longing to the older monks, and recent memories to the young professed monks and for the novices newly clothed who were sitting erect on the edge of their front benches. There was a firm knock on the chapter-house door.
‘Enter,’ the Abbot said, breaking the silence.
After another moment of anticipatory silence, Father Justin, the novice master, entered. He walked to the centre of the chapter house, lowered his hood and bowed to the Abbot. He spoke, facing the Abbot on his throne
with his monks around him. ‘Reverend Father, there is a young man at the door of the monastery who seeks admittance as a novice into our community.’
‘Let him enter,’ the Abbot answered solemnly.
‘Amen,’ the community recited in unison.
Father Justin bowed and left the chapter house.
The community waited. The early spring evening closed in. The shadows of the evergreens folded along the gravel path. Still, one last wood pigeon in the copse the other side of the park called to its mate.
Then Father Justin went to the front parlour of the monastery, where Brother Jean Marc de la Borde was waiting.
The young brother too heard the last wood pigeon of the declining evening:
dou-dou,
dou-dou,
it sounded like to him. That a bird here should speak to him as he had been spoken to as a child moved him. Again, one last time, the wood pigeon sounded. It had flown to the apple orchard, to a branch sticky with new buds.
The young postulant was dressed in the brown suit, white cotton shirt and brown tie that he had worn the day he had entered the monastery three months before in that winter of winters in 1963. They had been kept in the mending room, where the old habits were repaired and the new cassocks, cowls and scapulars were cut and sewn by Brother Malachi.
His home clothes had been kept for this occasion. If he had decided not to ask for admittance to the monastery as a novice, but rather to abandon his vocation, he would have the clothes he came in to return home. Or it might have been still worse, if, as sometimes did happen, a novice
had been asked to leave. Then he would have had his clothes to re-enter the world and the Abbot would return to him the money he had come with, so that he could get a train to Bristol or London, or wherever. What then?
And some, would run off suddenly into the night.
Dou-dou,
dou-dou.
A voice had come to live in the coo of a bird.
Brother Jean Marc de la Borde sat on the green leather upholstered chair in the small parlour. Leaded windows with yellow and red glass depicting scenes from the lives of monastic saints caught the last light. He did not recognise these saints, English saints. The furniture smelt of new polish. He sat and stared at his black boots which had been his friend’s, Ted’s, as if he had just this day come to St Aelred of Ashton Park from Les Deux Isles asking for admittance. He stared at Ted’s black boots. But he did not think of him; no, not now, not at this moment.
He remembered the stories he had read when he was a schoolboy and first thought that he had a vocation. He remembered the stories of the young boys Maurus and Placid who had come to Subiaco to join the first monastery of St Benedict. He wanted to be like them, young boys giving up all for this ideal.
Then he thought of the story of the young Aelred of Rievaulx that Dom Placid had told him. And then, then he thought of Ted.
He had made a general confession of his life’s sins in preparation for his clothing. He had confessed all again. He prayed for Ted. He was doing this for Ted. It seemed that way now.
This afternoon, after working on the farm, helping
Brother Stephen milk the cows, he had stood at the sink in the dairy and let the hot water scorch his hands and arms, washing off the sweet sticky smell of the fresh milk. ‘You’d better go off now,’ Brother Stephen said. ‘It’s
your
night.’
He walked slowly up to the abbey from the farm. Spring was in the air. Bulbs which had come before Easter in Lent crowded the grassy ground between the pollarded lime trees. How quickly time had gone since then. Lent with pussy willows for palms on Palm Sunday; then early Easter, with all the new flowers he had to learn. He pulled at the rosemary bush, rolled the leaves in his palms, lifted the crushed leaves and inhaled deeply a new smell, the smell of Ashton Park.
He entered the basement where the work boots were kept, wiping his hands on his denim blue smock. He washed again with soap, a rough detergent soap, yellow in the scoop of the old basin. The dimly lit place smelt of socks and leather boots, mud and silage. It smelt of the musty scent of sweat. He took off his Wellingtons, peeling off his work stockings, sweaty like in the boarding-school changing-rooms after games.
They stood around him, the boys of then, the others. Even now he had to chase them from his mind.
He fetched down off the shoe rack Ted’s black boots. He found his clean white stockings curled inside. No one in the community knew that these had been Ted’s boots. The soles were thick and new, new leather. His mother had had them resoled before he left home.
In the mending room, he hung up for the last time the black serge cassock that he had been wearing as a postulant, and took down his brown suit, white cotton
shirt and brown tie, which had been labelled and hung in the wardrobe marked ‘Postulants’;
postulare,
to ask for, to ask for entry. He had been doing that for three months. He was now asking formally for that from the community. He was seeking God.
His brown suit and white cotton shirt and tie still smelt of his home far away. They smelt of his mother and father, his brother and sisters, whom he had left. They smelt of his country. They smelt of heat and sunshine and haze rising up to a blue sky above green cane fields and the shade of the cocoa hills. They smelt of wood smoke in the board-house villages of the poor rising from the dusty backyards and barrack rooms from where Toinette came. ‘Morning, morning,
Dou-dou
.’
Toinette came to cook and clean, to wash and iron. Toinette came to mind children. He could still smell on his cotton shirt the suds of soap on whites in sunshine bleaching, the steam from the hot flat iron.
He heard Toinette. ‘You get a lot of loving,
oui
.’
What was he doing here? A moment of doubt.
He smelt that smell of travelling in aeroplanes on the sleeve of his jacket. There was a musty smell of Ashton Park, then of his home Malgretoute: in spite of everything.
He put his hands into the pockets of his brown pants. He half expected to find something there. Something. He remembered a letter pressed in there for a week before he could give it. Another, received, which burnt his leg.
Brother Jean Marc de la Borde heard the swish of Father Justin’s cowl in the corridor outside the parlour. He saw his hooded form through the glass door. His heart was beating fast.
Father Justin smiled as he entered the parlour. ‘They’re ready for you.’
Brother de la Borde smiled nervously and pushed back the heavy dark brown hair from his brow and drew back the loose strands of hair behind his ears with his fingers. He had wet his long hair in the washroom upstairs in the novitiate to keep it tidy. He followed Father Justin to the chapter house. He pressed his hair down again.
Ted’s boots echoed through the cloister.
‘It will be fine,’ Father Justin smiled.
As they entered the chapter house, Brother de la Borde noticed his guardian angel, Dom Benedict, smile. Yes, his eyes had gone straight to where he knew Benedict would be sitting. Ever so quickly, a stolen glimpse, and then his eyes were lowered. He had learnt the rule of St Benedict, passed his test at the Abbot’s Council, the Twelfth Degree of Humility: ‘whether he is in the oratory, in the garden, on the road, in the fields, or anywhere else and whether sitting, walking, or standing’, a monk ‘should always have his head bowed and his eyes downcast, pondering always the guilt of his sins.’
Dom Benedict was a little amused at seeing his protégé dressed as he had been that first winter afternoon when he had arrived brown and bonny from a country far away. He was relieved that he had got through that terrible winter, that he had succeeded through his postulancy. His smile was one of encouragement, of congratulation, of admiration, and Brother de la Borde felt it.
Now he knelt in the centre of the chapter house with folded arms and lowered his eyes to the floor in front of
him until the Abbot addressed him, asking him, ‘What do you seek?’
Brother de la Borde raised his lowered eyes and gave the formal response to the Abbot, the representative of Christ on earth. ‘I seek to serve God with Charity in this community.’
‘Come forward,’ the Abbot announced.
Father Justin led Brother de la Borde up to the Abbot’s throne, where he knelt on the top step of the dais in front of the Abbot.
Then the ceremony of the clothing of a novice began.
The Abbot, assisted by Father Justin, took off the brown jacket. ‘You must take off the old man.’
The community responded, ‘Amen.’
The rubrics according to the ancient traditions of monasticism were once again followed. The brown jacket was folded and given to the acolyte of the clothing to be returned to the mending room. The Abbot unbuttoned his shirt at the top and removed his tie, reiterating, ‘You shall take off the old man and put on the new,’ this time intoning the exhortation.
Again, the community responded, ‘Amen.’
The tie was folded and also given to Father Justin, who folded it once more and hung it neatly over his arm, from where the acolyte took it and laid it to rest with the brown jacket.
The young brother would not be stripped naked here. Later, he would remove his trousers and shirt when he returned to his cell.
The Abbot then proceeded to clothe Brother de la Borde with the new man in the habit of a Benedictine novice. First the cassock: ‘I clothe you with the new man
who is Christ.’ Then he unrolled the leather girdle: ‘I gird you with the girdle of chastity.’ He buckled it tightly around his waist. The scapular with the hood was placed over his head: ‘With the scapular of peace.’ Last of all, he shook out the cloak of the novice: ‘And the cloak of our brotherhood.’ After each instruction and gesture, the community responded with the response, ‘Amen.’
Fully clothed in the ancient habit of the Benedictine novice, his novice’s scapular reaching only to his knees and not full length to the floor, Brother de la Borde was marked out as a neophyte in this community of celibate men.
He was here to seek God according to the rule of the Holy Father St Benedict, who first wrote his Rule for Monks in the cave at Subiaco in the Italian hills near Rome in the fifth century: a young man, escaping the materialism of Roman society, his young passion tempted by the devil in the shape of a beautiful woman, so that he had to throw himself into a patch of brambles to stem that passion before moving to his monastery at Monte Casino. Brother de la Borde remembered his
Lives
of
the
Saints.
They had been his fairy tales. His adventure stories had been the lives of the martyrs.
Jean Marc de la Borde forged this ideal out of what he saw when he was small: his parish priest, Father Maurus, with veins the blue of the blue in marble, blood like Quink ink, resplendently white like an angel in the white habit of monks on the missions because of the scorching heat, kneeling before the Blessed Sacrament, performing the liturgy of the Mass, intoning the Gregorian chant whose inflections moved him with their antiphonal intervals. He knelt in the shadow and light of these memories.
Later, when he went to his school, which was run by Benedictine monks, he came to love the measured order of their day, which he could observe closely, controlled by the tolling of bells: the angelus in the morning, at noon, at six o’clock in the evening and at sunset. He followed their call to the seven hours of the Divine Office: Matins and Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext, None, Vespers and finally Compline, chanted in the darkness of the choir.
