Aelred's Sin (34 page)

The Storm

I opened to my Beloved,
but he had turned his back and gone!
My soul failed at his flight.
I sought him but I did not find him.
I called to him but he did not answer.
Song of Songs

As Aelred walked to the library, where he hoped to find Benedict, he thought how quiet and normal everything seemed. The cloister was a little removed from him, so that he saw it as if he were watching a film. But the silence and the peace seemed untouched by the fire which had raged in the novitiate, or the one which had burnt in the barn all night. He opened the door of the library and saw that the alcove which Benedict often used was empty. He closed the door behind him, and stood outside the door staring down the corridor. Immediately, he went to Benedict’s new cell. He knew this was absolutely against the rule, but he could not help himself.

Benedict got up -
‘Ave
’
- and came at once to him, seeing him as he had never seen him, distraught and full of pain in his face and tired eyes. ‘But you shouldn’t be here.’

Aelred pushed his way into the cell and slammed the door.

He had travelled a long way since last night. He was glad to rest his head on the shoulder of his beloved friend. ‘My love, my love, peace, peace. Come, tell me all.’ The older monk led the novice to his desk. ‘Sit, but you must not stay here.’ Aelred felt at once that all was
going to be well again.

On Benedict’s bed, Aelred saw the monastic discipline. It was a whip with five strands, each strand tied with five knots. Five for the five wounds of Jesus. Benedict noticed Aelred’s awareness of the discipline on his bed. ‘We must not stay in here. You should never have come here. This is seriously against the rules. Meet me in the library.’ He directed Aelred discreetly out of his cell.

Soon after, in the library, Benedict saw in the eyes of the young novice an older person. The boy had become a man. When Aelred told Benedict of the events of the night before, and of his interview with Father Justin, Benedict, too, grew into an even older man. ‘You mentioned us?’ But that growing was not easy, and it did not mean that he could leave behind immediately the man who had had to wrestle with his feelings for this novice. He did not interrupt Aelred. The novice’s tongue, though heavy with the still reactive effects of the tranquilliser the infirmarian had given him, spoke mellifluously. He felt that his mouth was full of honey, something glutinous as the texture of honey, but not as sweet. He was still loose with the spirit of one who spoke with tongues, setting alight the secrets of those souls: himself, Benedict and Edward, who sought a new beginning without a past. But it was their pasts which had returned: their personal pasts, their collective past, the past, all here, to make this particular present.

Benedict sat and listened in the library. He listened to an account of the events which had happened in the barn the night before with a composure he felt it almost impossible to keep. His heart was wrung at first with jealousy, then disgust, then hate. ‘I don’t think I want to
hear any more of this.’ He felt what he didn’t think he had ever felt in his life before, pure hate. He had pure hate for this young man with tortured eyes and streaked cheeks, who kept holding his hand, and reaching to his face and speaking with a clarity and conviction he found terrifying.

‘Who else will I tell? Who else can listen as you do? Who else loves me the way you do?’ Aelred clawed at Benedict’s sleeves and scapular.

‘Edward?’

‘That’s cruel.’

‘Brother, you must get hold of yourself.’

Despite this hate, Benedict wanted to repossess the person he had loved, beyond any other he had allowed himself to love since he had entered the monastery at Ashton Park. The business of the love of God, or charity within the community, was hard. It gave its pain as it did its pleasure. But it did not hurt like this. It was not a pain which wrung the heart, which took the bottom out of the pit of the stomach and choked him at the throat, all because someone else had touched him whom he loved. Benedict looked at Aelred standing in front of him, a young man of nineteen.

That others loved God and were loved by him did not make one jealous. On the contrary, one rejoiced at this bounteous gift of an all giving lover.

‘You let him touch you, kiss you? You kiss and touch him in ways, particularly in ways, we have made such an effort to refrain from, to abstain from for our ideals of chastity, that dangerous chastity, which did not allow us to go beyond the stolen kiss of a light touch of the lips, a holding of the hands, the seduction of the eyes?’
Benedict thirsted with unquenchable jealousy. He could not get enough of jealousy to drink.

Benedict could not look at Aelred without wanting to tear out his eyes.

That Aelred had let all this happen so suddenly with another, and that he, Benedict, was in part an instrument in creating their meeting and initiating their confessions of openness wrung out of the usually composed Benedict a hate and disgust. ‘I should’ve seen it all more plainly. I knew something was on fire here. I should’ve put it out.’ It made him want to fling this boy, for he thought of him as a boy again, from his hands, off his chest, to tear his fingers from his face, to lift him bodily with a strength he never thought he possessed, and throw him out of the library, out of Ashton Park, so that he would never see him again. He never again wished to have his peace and his ideals disturbed and destroyed in this way. ‘Don’t touch me.’ Then immediately he regretted that rebuff and let the boy cling again to him.

Eventually, all that he could say to Aelred were the repeated questions: ‘How could you say all that you have said? How could you betray us? How could you betray me? How could you do all you’ve done, how? Done with another? And how could you sin so? Touch, kiss, touch.’ Benedict saw all his effort crumbling. Still he held him and let the boy hold on to him.

His journey to Ashton Park, which he had never fully told to Aelred, came back with a frightening clarity. It was as if Aelred had lit a huge fire in the middle of the cloister and it was slowly burning its way through all the secrets of the souls which struggled with the meaning of love in their secluded lives.

Benedict had once loved a girl called Claire, and they had been engaged and planned to marry in a year or two when they could afford it. It was as simple as that, and as usual as that, as many young couples at the time. That was how love was. They would go for walks on the downs. In the early evening when it had grown dark, they would go for a drink in the pub. They held hands and they kissed and they petted each other, as the parish priest called it, advising against heavy petting. They talked of wanting children when they were married. He used to read her poetry. When he was away teaching, they exchanged love letters, saying more in their written words than when they spoke to each other. And then the letters stopped. Her letters stopped. She stopped replying without any reason, without a final letter. He learnt later from a friend who lived near her that she had eloped with a divorced man and had eventually married him.

All his desire, all his love, all his hope for a life with Claire had become a room with a small corner of pain which he did not let anyone into. He did not allow anyone into that small room of pain.

Then he had come on a retreat to Ashton Park. Suddenly, he felt that he had a vocation to join the monks. He felt that he could embark upon a future and a present without a past, without that past of pain. Slowly, he felt that he had almost forgotten what it was like to live in that small room, and for years he had not opened that door.

When Aelred entered the monastery, a door was opened into that room of pain, and he found himself thinking of the young novice as he had thought of Claire. His youth and his androgynous looks allowed him to
imagine Claire and have fantasies he had not allowed himself. These were the fantasies which drew him to Aelred at that first feast-day celebration, had stopped him on the staircase to look at his legs and lifted his habit in the Lady Chapel to feel his warm body and to confess to him his love. Suddenly, the room of pain was opened up and here was a second chance for human love. He thought they had managed it, so that they could have that human love and still manage their ideal of chastity, that dangerous chastity, as they liked to call it.

But now the supreme trick of love had been played upon him, because he had rationalised his desire, his illicit desire, as the unfulfilled desire which had been denied him with Claire. At first it had been that, but then this boy, this young man, this androgynous creature, had opened in him feelings he never knew existed, so that he wanted him precisely because he was a young man. He loved him as a young man, not as a woman, not as Claire, but as Aelred, his bonnie lad.

This was to enter a forbidden place. It was forbidden to think of himself in this way and forbidden for them to be that way together. Then he had found Aelred of Rievaulx’s works, which he passed on to Aelred. These texts would help them find a way.

But now Aelred had broken all the boundaries and agreements and traditions, and was actually saying aloud to his novice master, to the young Edward and to himself, that he had a choice. He was making a choice to love Edward spiritually and physically. He was saying this. There was no mistake. But the madness of it was destroying him because it was breaking a mould which had been offered as if there were no other. He was saying
that there was not just one, there was another mould, another way, without as yet knowing what it was, what shape it could have, what name.

‘How could you endanger so much?’ Benedict said angrily.

‘If you don’t understand me, I’m left all alone. Don’t push me away. Hold me, hold me,’ Aelred cried. These beseeching cries and kisses on Benedict’s neck slowly untied the hate and disgust which wrung his heart, and he found in himself the capacity, slowly but unmistakably, to love this boy for himself, unconditionally. He would not banish him from understanding and hope, but he would not betray his vows.

This was the act for which Aelred would always remember Benedict.

‘You will have to take responsibility for the truth which you speak with such conviction at present,’ Benedict said, wiping the stains of tears from Aelred’s cheeks. ‘Remember your responsibility when you speak to the Abbot. You have already been rash with what you’ve said to Father Justin. Now is not the time for us to sort all this through. I understand your feelings for Edward. I understand his for you. Have I not myself wanted all this? Have I not wanted you in this way? I will pray for you to come through, to regain the aim of your ideal, the demands of our vocation. Pray that you can deepen these desires.’

Aelred saw the Abbot that afternoon. Father Justin brought him a message that the Abbot would see him after None.

Aelred felt that the effects of the tranquilliser were
wearing off. The artificial suppressor of his anger dwindled in the hot afternoon, which rumbled with thunder and sudden flashes of lightning. He could feel that anger which he had discovered while waiting for his interview with Father Justin that morning rising again. It was taking hold of him, so that he wanted to tear apart the institutions, rearrange the past which held the untruth. He was so quickly realising so much that he was frightened by the extent of the ruins and how he was to rebuild himself. He felt that his self was running out of his hands like some river he could not stop. Where would the reservoir be? Where could he regain himself?

He was not well enough to go to choir and he sat in the window seat of his cell, hoping the rain would break. Then he went and stood at the window of the common room, and looked out on to the fields and saw the monks beginning to go out to the afternoon’s work.

The Abbot was to see him at two thirty. Edward passed him on his way to work. He came and stood close to him. At first he said nothing. Then he spoke gently. ‘For us, don’t ruin it for us.’ Aelred felt removed. He had taken a strength from Benedict which contact with Edward could make weak again.

‘No. And remember you have your meeting with Basil. Listen to him. He will tell you that this is a gift. This love is a gift. But it is also a fire. He will tell you that the rewards are sweet.’

‘Yes.’

‘Go now. I need to be on my own, get my thoughts together.’ They held hands. Then Edward left the common room.

He was now alone on his own mission. He was
determined to hold on to everything. He wanted his love for Benedict, his love for Edward and this life he had given up so much for. He knew no other life, had never imagined anything any different since Ted and he had been so forcibly torn apart. How would all that be possible?

Aelred let the heavy door knocker fall against the dark oak door and wished it were Aelred of Rievaulx he was entering to see. He heard the Abbot’s ‘
Ave
.’ He found himself at the end of the long room with the Abbot rising at his desk at the other end; behind him the life-size crucifix hung the length of the wall.