Free Aelred's Sin by Lawrence Scott

Antigua, near to Ashtown, a small coastal town on that island.
     
    ‘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 Idon’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