Aelred's Sin Read Online Free PDF Page B

their names. After fixing the flowers, he replaced the burnt-out candles before the icon of St Benedict in the common room.
    Earlier, he had watered Father Justin’s hyacinths, whose scent reminded him of the smell of pomme aracs. He inhaled them deeply. Home came on the breeze of the smell; from the big tree behind the house at Malgretoute. He and Ted had climbed that tree. One holiday, they gorged themselves on the red fruit. The perfume was on their breaths, the juice on their chins and fingers.
    The hyacinths grew in the warmth on the sill above the radiator in the common room. Words came with a world: warmth, radiator. They named a world.
    Aelred performed all these chores with regularity and enthusiasm. The young novice was an inspiration to all.Old men smiled, looking at him. He aided the infirm up the stairs. He picked up Dom Michael’s walking stick. ‘Let me help you, father. Here, take my hand.’
    The older monks were glad at his fervour. They knew it could not last and that the monastic boredom would eventually enter. They knew the disillusionment which could beset the fathers of the desert. The few knew the joy, once that desert was journeyed through, but they exulted at the young novice’s first flush of fervour. They had all known it. It encouraged them, reminding them of their youth. Dom Leonard pinched Brother Aelred’s cheeks with his bony fingers. ‘Brother, young brother, young, young brother.’ Aelred delighted him.
    ‘Yes, father, let me help you with those books to the library.’
    Brother Aelred had made strides since those first days as a postulant, racked by homesickness and doubt, writing home: ‘Dear Mum and Dad, I am settling in fine… Love to Robert and all the girls. And a special hello for Toinette.’ His grief remained between the lines for maybe a mother to notice.
    He had never been quite sure if it had been the spring that had begun to appear before St Aelred’s Day which had taken away that awful desolation of missing his home, and stopped him crying every time he received a letter from his dearest mother: ‘My darling, I keep calling Robert by your name, which makes Giselle and the other girls giggle and tease me.’ Or was it the feeling which he had that Dom Benedict, his guardian angel, was different and special? He wasn’t sure that it wasn’t the excitement and comfort of that which had got rid of the homesickness.
    He still remembered that special hug on the night of his clothing. He remembered that he looked for Benedict where he knew he sat in the chapter house. He did that in the choir and in the refectory. He liked his official meeting with Benedict, when he was given advice or instructed in a new custom. Best of all, he loved it when they were put to work together and they would relax the rule of silence so they could chat. As when they were washing up, when Aelred said, ‘So, you are ten years older than I am.’
    And Benedict had answered, ‘But that should not matter between brothers.’
    Then there were moments when Benedict was different, with his hands under his scapular. There was a formality when he spoke, not cold, but formal. Then Benedict was his guardian angel: ‘Brother, let’s go over the lesson for tomorrow’s Matins.’
     
    It was at the celebration on the night of St Aelred’s Day, his own feast day. After they had had a day full of the liturgy of the patron saint with the pomp of the Abbot’s pontifical Mass, they were allowed a relaxation of the rules. The order of the day was like a Sunday, with a long siesta and a walk in the afternoon, followed by fruit cake and tea. In the evening they had a film, The Song of Bernadette, and were allowed to smoke cigarettes and were offered a glass of wine.
    All during the afternoon walk he had been in Benedict’s presence, but they did not talk. They were aware of each other, a guardian angel and his protégé. Till finally, when they had dropped behind the others, ‘How is my boy from the