Aelred's Sin (7 page)

‘You’re very absorbed, brother?’

Aelred looked up from his reading. It was Benedict. ‘Oh, yes. I’ve found something really fascinating about Ashton Park. You know that portrait on the staircase? Just outside the library. Where you saw me this morning?’

‘Did I?’ Benedict looked embarrassed. But at that moment the bell for None startled them.

‘Anyway, I’ll tell you about my discovery some time.’

Benedict pulled on his hood and left the library first. Aelred put back the book he had been reading on the shelf. It was a reference-only book. He would have to come back. As he passed the portrait on the staircase, he heard Toinette’s voice: ‘Mungo is his name and he come from Africa.’ He watched the bright young face of the boy and his heart first rose, but then fell.

The Guest House:
25 September 1984

The flame of love grew brighter yet 
That spreads its love to all we meet…

Since J. M. left they have done away with Prime. Terce is tacked on to the Conventual Mass. Odd the little bits I’ve remembered. I myself find it difficult to follow the Mass now. I can still follow the chants, appreciate the beauty of the chant, even now, in English. But the Mass doesn’t mean what it used to. Something J. M. and I obviously shared without me knowing it. Not even that we shared when he came for our mother’s funeral.

It’s hurt me to find out that he would’ve written to Chantal and not to me. She’s the eldest. Was that it? We boys came at the end. The girls almost looked after us. I’ll always be the baby brother, I suppose. The girls wanted me to come to England. Neither of them thought they could face it. Had they suspected something, and were afraid of what they would find?

I sit at the back of the church and feel very out of it. Am I being judged? I’ve not talked to Benedict about my faith, or the absence of it. It’s not that formal. I’m lapsed. It’s the divorce. I let it all drop because they’ve rejected me. I had a simple faith, no real instruction or development beyond confirmation. Mine was a penny catechism faith: the little blue book, questions and answers parrot fashion.

During Mass, I’m distracted by my own reconstructions, by what I find in the journals; the unutterable words, as my mother would call them. I’m not that strait-laced, but I
don’t really want to think of my brother doing those things. Touching, yes, lots of boys somewhere along the line touched each other’s totees. Rub totee, as we called it. We all joked about jocking in the bath queue.

Watch you slip and break your neck, boy, someone sniggered as one boy followed another into the shower.

There was lots of laughter and pushing, but lick, suck! Yes, they sucked each other, some of them. But the other? I always think of dogs stuck together in the heat. But J. M. writes of it as something so hidden and secret, something so precious, savoured from childhood; something that came back like a perfume. He knew that it was a sin.

Can you find any of that in yourself? Joe asks.

I don’t know.

Miriam says, You must look into yourself.

Joe says, You must keep an open mind.

Something in the life I’m discovering moves me. They ask if I would accept all those things between men and women. I shrug a yes.

So it’s not the acts in themselves? they ask.

Acts! Well, I’m not sure about that.

I can see Benedict looking at me. Looking for J. M. in my face, in my gestures. He smiles when I talk because of my accent. I suppose it’s like J. M.’s when he first arrived at Ashton Park. I do look a little like him too. Not his unusual beauty. I can see my mother’s eyes on him, her gaze. J. M. was something quite different.

Too beautiful! That’s what my mother used to say.

Well, there is that family resemblance. I can see it when I get out the old photographs. I have my favourite one of him and Ted in my wallet. Looking at it, you would not know what had happened. I’ve always kept it since he
went away. I hardly took it out; my guilt, I suppose. But it would be there as I flicked through my cash cards; fresh-faced, open-eyed boys, haircuts like James Dean, white T-shirts, sleeves rolled up over their muscles. You can almost hear Bobby Darrin in the background: ‘Every night I sit here by my window, staring at the lonely avenue.’ The past comes back as Pop! Early rock-and-roll.

I found the photo among his things in his room at Malgretoute after he left. Yes, the old forty-fives were there as well. Mum decided to pack everything away. There was this box in the press which had J. M.’s things. I often wondered whether he had taken a photograph of himself and Ted away with him. There is no photograph of Ted among his things now. There is the one of me. I expect Mum sent him that, a school leaving photo.

Mum has written on the back: Robert, eighteen years old.

Very English, Benedict. He calls me Robert, pronouncing it in the English way. I feel it’s not me. I expect J. M. must’ve talked about me to him. I know he prayed for us; got the community to pray for us all: our parents, our sisters. He would say in his letters that special prayers had been offered for us. We had this sense that he was looking after us. My mother would often say that J. M.’s going to have a word for us with God, when there was a family problem. We didn’t know what J. M. was up to, did we?

I get angry. I’m angry because I don’t know what he thought of me, what he felt about me during that time and after. Why the hell should I bother about this whole quest? What good is it going to do? Who is the quest for anyway, and why?

I spent the morning reading and making notes on
Aelred of Rievaulx’s life and theology of friendship. It’s a difficult kind of language for me, but there is no doubt to me that he thought masturbation was disgusting. But he says surprising things about monks holding hands and kissing in a spiritual way. I expect that a lot of things went on then, too, and he’s dressing it up, trying to make it spiritual.

I hope I’ll work with Benedict in the orchard again this afternoon. Then we’re supposed to have a quiet session in my room. See how it goes. Where will we begin? Aelred? Ted?

Walking around the park, I returned to his words. My anger left me. I have the words for everything. Everything? He moved between here and Malgretoute, Les Deux Isles. I have brought the journals with me, the letters and the book of dreams. I let his words stand on their own. I change nothing. This is not my paraphrase. I have been going over things.

Coming down the drive after a visit to Ashton this afternoon, I thought of him back then. He would’ve got the train to there from London via Bristol. I thought of his arrival that winter more than twenty years ago. I change nothing. I listen to his young voice. This person I’m reading about was so young, my brother. We missed him. I remember our mother missing him. At times, it was as if he had died.

He has died to the world, Mum would say.

He was sort of frozen in time; would always be the guy who left. Then there would be a letter. He wrote all his letters to her. They were addressed to my father and us as well, but they were to my mother. She shared them with us all, me mostly, the last one at home, her Benjamin. I
remember now I used to feel sick and have to leave the table.