Free Aelred's Sin by Lawrence Scott Page A

not know what had happened. I’ve always kept it since hewent 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 onAelred 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. Iremember now I used to feel sick and have to leave the table.
    I am now back on my first morning, a winter’s day, at Ashton Park, 1963. The afternoon before, Father Dominic, the guest master, had met me in a Land Rover at the top lodge where the taxi from the station had dropped me, prevented from entering because of the high drifts of snow. ‘Brother Chrysostom was very old. Ninety. He died last night and we are keeping his vigil, ’ Father Dominic said as we drove down the narrow winding drive from the top lodge down to the monastery in the small valley of Ashton Park. I couldn’t see anything