The Beautiful Thread (24 page)

John said nothing to this, but looked carefully at the sums recorded. Eventually, “Seems to me we could manage with one less cow,” he said.

* * *

Surrounded by friends and family all jostling and straining to see, under a sky of brilliant blue adorned with scudding clouds of purest white, Hannah and Gervase exchanged their vows. Afterwards, as the cheerful, noisy throng of people poured into the church for Mass through the west door from the abbey court, William lingered outside. Though he'd promised to help serve food to the hordes of guests, he honestly wondered if this might be the moment to slip away. He detected and acknowledged the familiar bitter ache of exclusion, right down there deeper than his gut, than his bowel. In his core, the fountainhead of who he was. It hurt. John had once given him Eucharist in the privacy of the abbot's house, and had gone out on a limb for him, dared to break every rule for him. Compassionate. Forgiving. But having been a brother of this house, having broken his vows to Christ and walked away to marry Madeleine, there was no way back. The abbot could not possibly, in such a public setting, hold out the host of Christ's body for him to take. Though John had not formally excommunicated him, this far he could not go. And William knew it was his own doing, but it still felt like a deep, deep bruise.

He wanted to see the summer light slanting through the coloured glass of the lofty windows, and smell the incense. He wanted to hear the beautiful music Father Gilbert had prepared and made them practise every evening for the last heaven knows how many days. He wanted to hear the abbot's homily in this Mass. He wanted to be in the church, not just outside it; part of the holiness and the peace. Hungry, thirsty, tired; his soul. Without really consulting him, his feet trailed along with the ragtag of the crowd, and he found a shadowed place to stand in the side aisle, leaning his shoulder against the curving body of one of the great sandstone pillars. And so the Mass began.

William listened to the familiar words of Christ's teaching, that before approaching the altar of God a man must be reconciled, must make peace where relationships are broken. He wondered if that was really the Gospel reading set for the day, or if this was Abbot John tweaking the rubric in a last desperate attempt to make the Bonvallets be nice to their unwelcome addition. He watched the abbot walk down to the chancel step to speak to the people. There he stood, dignified in the embroidered chasuble, bearing the weight on a slowly mending back, vested in the solemnity of his position. Abbot of this monastery, but the same man as the one who had stooped, knelt, in his simple black tunic, to wash and salve the burns and scrapes on William's body when he came here after the fire. The same man as had dissolved in convulsing agony of grief over the death of his mother, the angry pain of his sister. The same man who had come and found him in the hayloft and refused to budge until he heard the source of his misery. John. Healer. Friend.

The abbot murmured his dedication of the words he would speak, signing himself with the cross. He looked out across the people, then at the couple who stood together at the front.

“Hannah, Gervase, this Mass is celebrated in honour of your nuptials, and really these words are not for everyone else but for you.

“Not long ago, a friend commented to me that the idea of love baffled him at times. There were days when he felt an upwelling of affection towards his wife – delight in her – and others when, frankly, he wished she'd leave him in peace and he found her profoundly irritating. Here and there he came across fellow human beings whom he esteemed and with whom he felt a sense of fellowship, harmony. But not many. Mostly he preferred to go his own way and let everyone else go theirs. And guilt stirred in his soul, because he loved little, loved few – sometimes stopped loving even the one he had vowed and pledged to love, to have and to hold. And yet, he took seriously the command of Christ – to love and go on loving, to make that the mark of his discipleship and the work of his life.

“And my friend – humbly, neither cocksure nor evading the issue – put it to me that though he could not always find it within himself to love, he thought he could try to be kind. He said, in the course of his life he had been loved but rarely; and because of this, he valued with real gratitude those who had treated him with kindness. He said, sometimes he found it hard to tell whether someone actually loved him – cared for him with genuine friendship – and when they were merely being kind to him. So, knowing himself to be a shrewd judge of men, he concluded love and kindness must be so extremely similar that the division between them is porous – where one ends and the other begins cannot readily be detected. He said this gave him hope, since, though love felt so often remote and mysterious, he knew how to be kind. Because, he said, everyone knows what kindness is. It means giving the other person the benefit of the doubt; including them, not cold-shouldering them; offering a smile and a cheerful greeting; making them a hot drink when they're tired and cold at the day's end; overlooking their shortcomings and their harmless – but intensely annoying – little mannerisms. It means giving them another chance. My friend also mentioned that it means trying not to swear at them too often, and forbearing from actually hitting them, however much you want to. He doesn't always find it easy to get on with his fellow man, or his wife – as you can tell.

“I thought – Gervase, Hannah – you might find it useful to hear about that conversation I had with my friend. Though today I hope you feel you are head over heels in love and will never be anything else, well, these vows are for a lifetime. I sincerely hope that means a substantial number of years for both of you. And maybe even today, you may be tired, you may feel somewhat strained; this is a big occasion, and family events always carry many resonances. Not all of them are easy.

“So I thought I'd put my companion's musings before you – that even when he runs out of love, forgets what love is, finds love impossibly difficult, he knows what kindness is; love's humble, less exalted, identical twin.

“God bless you in your life together. May you be happy, may you know bliss, may you be fruitful and content. And may you always at least try to be kind to one another – remembering that one of the most everyday habits of kindness is the willingness to try to understand, to forgive and begin again.”

The abbot turned back into the sanctuary, and the Mass moved on through its rhythms of reconciliation and sanctification. There came the sharing of the peace – out of fashion but steadfastly maintained in the traditions of this house. “Peace be with you… peace be with you…” Those who stood close to William shook his hand in the
Pax Christi
, but their gaze didn't meet his. It was just a requirement, a formality. They didn't know him. They moved around, they moved on, shuffling and murmuring and turning from one to the other. He folded his arms across his belly, his back curving into a protective hunch that shut out the world as he took up his stance again, leaning against the sturdy York stone pillar, still slightly surprised to have encountered himself in a sermon, the echo of an evening conversation with John in the course of his stay.

Then, as the long thanksgiving and consecration prayers began, he became aware of a shifting in the people around him, making room for somebody coming to stand there, next to him. He turned his head, and to his astonishment saw Father Chad, who nodded at him in faintly embarrassed greeting, but did not speak, just stood beside him. They stood together, through the
Benedictus
, the epiclesis, the raising of the host, the singing of the beautiful, haunting, yearning
Agnus Dei
, the invitation of the people. As the great press of people moved forward to make their communion, William stood where he was; and Father Chad went on standing at his side.

Eventually, as those at the back began to make their way forward, the men were left behind in a space alone. In the privacy this created, Father Chad turned to William and said quietly, “The body of Christ.” William looked at him. Then he understood. The teaching of Augustine that John, and Peregrine before him, brought again and again before the community had evidently sunk in. That the body of Christ, mystical, cosmic, immense, is in how we touch one another, how we are with each other, as well as in the broken bread, blessed wine. It was very clear to Father Chad that William could not possibly participate in the sacrament. But there is more than one way to express the body of Christ.

From somewhere within and beneath him, arising from the earth under his feet, moving up through the whole of him, William felt a smile of purest peace and happiness; unexpected, startling. He whispered back the words he knew Chad meant to prompt – “I am.” And Chad beheld what he would never have believed without seeing the evidence for himself: the shining of Christ's smile breaking through the fractured and shifting clouds of William's eyes.

The crowd formed around them again, returning. They stood there together through the final prayers, the benediction, watched the brothers process from the choir round into the south transept to the cloister door.

They still stood there as the multitude began to chatter and shift and find its way out into the sunshine in search of food and festivity. Eventually, once more they were alone.

“Thank you,” said William.

“I'm sorry I didn't understand – before,” said Chad. “About why you came here.”

Silence fell between them, awkward and self-conscious, these men who essentially had nothing to say to each other and no time for each other, until now. Nothing but distrust on the one side and contempt on the other. Not fertile ground for friendship.

William took a deep breath, seeing some response must be necessary.

“It's only that…” he said, reluctant to bring out the truth of himself where he felt unsure it could be received, “only that… the first two decades of my life were a maelstrom of fear and loneliness… humiliation. The rest of it… I had to do as I might to piece the shards together into something that would hold up. But… well, the shards were me. There wasn't a wholeness to guide me, to show me how to go about it. No pattern to work from. I had to make it up as I went along, and all the time I still lived… like a wounded animal cornered, I guess. I'm sorry if this sounds intense and dramatic – I know that doesn't sit easy with you. But it's the only truth I have. It's what happened. You know what hell I ran from to come here. You know. It was my last hope. I… John touched me with kindness. He made a gap for me to crawl into. How could I forget that? How could I not come back? It was… like – no, it actually was – the open wound in Christ's side, to me. The way into his heart.”

He made himself look, pleading, at Father Chad, and saw perplexity. “Then… why didn't you stay? If it meant so much to you.”

“Because…” William sighed, looked away, moved restlessly. He hated this exposure of his roots. It was hard enough with John. With Father Chad it felt unbearable. But he could see that if he didn't take it now, this chance would never come again. “I came here to learn how to love, if that might be,” he said. “I didn't know that, for me, ‘love' and ‘Madeleine' might as well be the same word, but that's how it turned out. I just
had
to, Chad – be with her, I mean. I had to go. All I can do is ask you to forgive me. I can't put it back now, even if I wanted to. Even if it doesn't make sense to you, can you not forgive me?”

Silence between them was measured then in heartbeats.

“And can
you
believe,” said Chad then, “that you have been Christ's gift to me? I hated being the prior – it was too much for me. But I love working in the library, and in the garden. If it hadn't been for you, I'd probably have gone on being the blasted prior forever. I think I owe you a lot. But I'll be frank with you. This kind of thing isn't easy territory for me. The thunder and lightning that shakes and rattles around you just makes me want to stay inside with the door locked. I'm not that kind of man. I just like peace and quiet. I –”

But William cut him short, leaning towards him, the intensity that so disturbed Chad flaring in his burning, awful eyes. “
Yes!
” he said through clenched teeth. “For heaven's sake, brother! Can't you
see
?
So do I!
”

With more courage than he knew he possessed, Chad refrained from taking a step back, from dropping his gaze to escape the vehemence that beheld him.

“Then… why… why not just choose to live quietly?”

“Because, as you yourself pointed out to me, trouble follows me
every
where I go!”

This came cloaked in such expletives as Chad found shocking in this holy place.

“We are in church,” he murmured reproachfully.

William stared at him. “‘The body of Christ',” he said. “‘I am.' Where are we not in church?”

A small involuntary sigh escaped Father Chad, and he sagged imperceptibly. “This was never going to be easy, was it?” he said. “Look, can we – will it be all right to settle simply for goodwill?”

William smiled. “I think we're past that. Heavens, man, you saved my life. You brought me Eucharist. I've passed through enough arid country, enough bleak desert where nothing grows, to treasure the flowers of kindness where I find them. I'm not about to forget. But I'd still be grateful to know myself forgiven.”

Chad shook his head. “For what? By all holy, what a blessed tangle. This isn't simple, is it? There's no fault, no straightforward cause and effect. Too much of struggle and pain. The way you are, the way I am. What's to forgive? Let's just say we're friends, then – but, if it makes you feel better, for whatever you did – which escapes me now, we have too much history – for whatever the problem is; yes, most certainly I forgive you. And I hope that's mutual.”