Father Theodore sat by the fire in the abbot’s house drinking Brother Walafrid’s blackberry wine. Father Chad had asked him to come and report on the progress of the young men who formed the present novitiate.
When Father Matthew died, Theodore had been a surprising choice as his successor. The obedience of Novice Master was exacting, demanding a man of considerable spiritual stature and wisdom, a man of unsentimental kindness, of both scholarly ability and common sense. Theodore; shy, clumsy and forgetful, had not been the most obvious choice. Father Chad remembered Peregrine defending his decision to some of the more sceptical among the brethren: ‘I know he’s a young man, but there may be good in that. The lads who come here may find a sympathy in his youth. Further to that, there is scarcely a man in this community who suffered so much in his novitiate year as Father Theodore, and so much by the fault, or at least the weakness, of his Novice Master.
‘I want a man who has struggled to persevere, a man who knows what it is to bear the cost of another’s weakness. I think I have that in Father Theodore. He will serve the novitiate well.’
And it had been a good choice, Father Chad acknowledged with mild astonishment.
‘All is well then? You have no anxieties?’ he asked him now.
‘No.’ Theodore shook his head. ‘For the moment they are working well, praying devoutly, living contentedly. No doubt trials and difficulties will assail them, but just now we have tranquillity.’
‘Good. Good; I’m glad of that. That’s good.’
Theodore, experienced by now in detecting unspoken unease, gazed steadfastly into the fire, not looking at Father Chad, waiting for him to speak out whatever was on his mind.
‘Father Theodore… this… this has nothing to do with the novitiate, but….’
‘Yes?’ Theo smiled encouragingly.
‘This is a matter of confidence, you understand. I rely on your absolute discretion.’
‘Of course.’
‘I am not happy about Brother Thomas. He used to be such a cheerful, easygoing soul. Now he looks shut in, withdrawn from us. He has lost all his joie de vivre, all his zest for living.’
Theodore frowned in puzzlement. ‘Well, he… well, naturally he has, Father. He’s grieving.’
‘Yes, but… this is the third week of Advent. He should be recovered by now, surely?’
‘Why? Has Advent got some special healing power I haven’t heard about?’ said Theodore. ‘I’m sorry,’ he added hastily, seeing Father Chad’s startled displeasure at the discourtesy of his sarcasm. ‘Father Peregrine is but six weeks buried. Brother Tom will take longer than that to pick up the dropped stitches of his life again, I think. He’s bound to feel a little unravelled for a while. Give him time. Perhaps he needs a chance to talk it over.’
‘With me?’ Father Chad sounded doubtful. And not without reason, Theodore had to admit.
‘You are his abbot, for now anyway. I doubt if he will make it easy for you, but I think you ought to try.’
Father Chad nodded gloomily. ‘And if I get nowhere?’
‘I could have a word with him. Or Brother John.’
Father Chad sipped his wine, staring at the yellow flames of the ash logs burning on the hearth. Administering the business of the abbey had its difficulties, but it was easy compared with the pastoral care of men in grief or crisis of faith.
‘I don’t know what to say to him,’ he admitted.
‘Ask him.’ Theodore spoke as diplomatically as he could. Father Chad was not an arrogant man, but Theo must not be seen to have too much of an edge over his superior in this matter of the nurturing of the souls in his care. ‘Allow him to talk to you freely about Father Peregrine, about the effect on him of that loss. He loved him very much. He will be full of memories, sadness, tenderness that need to be spoken out.’
And you think if I ask him, he will be able to talk to me?’
‘Yes….’ said Theodore, slowly. If you ask him the right way, he thought, but he didn’t say it.
‘He’ll be up at the farm all day. I’ll catch him at Vespers. I’ll try.’
With very little confidence in the usefulness of the interview, Theodore watched at the end of Vespers as Father Chad laid a detaining hand on Brother Tom’s arm, beseeching his cooperation with the peculiar ghastliness of a nervous smile. He watched Brother Tom’s guarded acquiescence, and saw the two of them leave the chapel with negligible hope of frank self-exposure. Brother Tom, in Theo’s judgement, was about as likely to show Father Chad his soft underbelly as he was to take up embroidery. In this assessment of the situation he was right.
‘Sit yourself down, Brother Thomas,’ said Father Chad. He had intended a warm and reassuring welcome, but his voice slid into a disconcerting falsetto under pressure of his apprehension.
Brother Tom sat down in silence in the chair that Father Chad indicated by the fire. He looked at the ash logs burning in the grate, then looked down at his hands with a lowered head. He had a fair idea of the purpose of this summons, and he did not want his heartache forced into the open by Father Chad or anybody.
Aware that his uncooperative silence might seem more than a little rude, he glanced up with a forced and sickly smile.
‘Thank you,’ he said. He could think of nothing else to say. Encouraged by this crumb of compliance, Father Chad cleared his throat and began his pastoral consultation.
‘I’ve been worried about you, Brother,’ he said sympathetically. ‘You haven’t been your usual cheerful self at all these last six weeks.’
Tom raised his head and stared at him incredulously.
‘I’m not surprised, of course; of course I’m not surprised,’ Father Chad added hurriedly. ‘It is quite understandable: you were very fond of Father… um… Columba.’ As he came to say the man’s name, Father Chad stumbled over his anxiety to do the correct thing. As acting abbot of the community it seemed more proper to refer to the deceased man by his name in religion than by the affectionate informality of ‘Father Peregrine’. Tom, hearing the hesitation, wondered in amazement if Father Chad had actually forgotten Peregrine’s name.
‘Yes,’ he said, in the pause left for his reply, which was lengthening into embarrassment. ‘Yes. I was very fond of him.’
‘Good. Good. Well, that’s natural and right, of course.’ Father Chad’s voice carried the insincere effusiveness of anxiety. It matched his smile.
‘However… all of us have to, um, count our blessings in circumstances like this; to… er… you know—look on the bright side and put a brave face on things and… um… so forth.’
Father Chad was a timid man, not at his best in such circumstances as these: but he was not a fool. He struggled to repress the twinges of irritation and resentment that were awakened by the expression on Brother Tom’s face. Brother Tom looked as though he thought Father Chad had all the intelligent sensitivity and discernment of an earwig.
‘I have been putting a brave face on it,’ said Brother Tom. ‘At least, I thought I had. What would you like me to do differently?’
‘No, no, no!’ Father Chad wished he had had the humility to ask Father Theodore to join in this conversation. ‘Don’t misunderstand me, Brother. This is not a rebuke. It is only that, although you have not complained or given any cause for complaint in your work or prayer, nevertheless your unhappiness is very evident. I am your abbot, for now anyway. Brother Thomas, I know you don’t like it, but you ought to confide in me and tell me what’s on your heart. It says so in the Rule.’
Brother Tom was sufficiently self-indulgent to allow himself the tiniest twitch of the eybrows. This small twitch was so expressive that it plunged Father Chad into a sense of total inadequacy.
‘So it does,’ said Brother Tom. He lifted his eyes calmly to look Father Chad in the face. ‘What would you like me to tell you?’
Why is this going so wrong? Father Chad floundered in desperation. I knew it wouldn’t be easy for him, but why do I want to shake him and shout at him? I mustn’t let him see how I feel. I must try to understand.
‘Well….’ he replied with forced benevolence, ‘well… um… perhaps you would like to talk to me freely about Father… um—Columba, about the effect on you of that loss. You loved him very much. You must be full of memories, sadness, tenderness that need to be spoken out.’
Tom looked away quickly into the fire, biting his lip. The hurt of bereavement was intolerably raw still. He could not bear it touched.
‘He always burned apple logs,’ he said at last. Father Chad smiled.
‘Really? Apple logs, mm? Good, good.’ There followed a silence in which Father Chad cleared his throat uneasily.
‘That, um, that wasn’t quite the kind of thing I was thinking of,’ he said. ‘I was wondering more about how you felt about him. Um, I thought you should tell me how you feel now; um, what hurts most, you know, and the memories you had of times together. That sort of thing.’
Tom swallowed. ‘Oh,’ he murmured, ‘that sort of thing.’
‘I beg your pardon?’ Father Chad’s face creased into the nervous smile. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t quite catch what you said….’
But Tom shook his head. ‘Nothing.’
He picked up the iron poker from the hearth and prodded moodily at the fire. ‘What hurts most,’ he said, ‘is that he’s dead.’
Father Chad laughed, then stopped himself abruptly, unsure if the remark had been intentionally humorous. He cleared his throat again. ‘Ah yes; yes, I can understand that. Um… tell me about it.’ His face twitched in alarm at Tom’s sharp intake of breath. ‘Are you all right, Brother? You sound as though something hurt you.’
Tom passed his hand across his face and sighed. He decided that he might as well give Father Chad what he wanted simply in order to secure his escape.
‘How I felt about him? I loved him. Sometimes I was angry with him, at my wits’ end with him. Sometimes he made me feel very small, very ashamed. Sometimes he tore my heart open with pity. He taught me to love in darkness, showed me that it is possible to find a little spring of hope in the most arid place of despair, just by loving; by consenting to be defenceless… permitting the pain and the wonder of loving and being loved. All that… but mostly I just loved him without knowing why. I loved his crazy smile and the way his eyes could dance with laughter. I loved the way he looked like a bad-tempered bird when things were going wrong. I loved his faith.
‘And what hurts most is facing up to the fact that I will never hear that slow, careful voice struggling its way back to speech—“T-om. Th-ank y-ou, T-om.” Never. As long as I live, never again. Never see those eyes smiling, “T-ell m-e about it.”
‘What else did you want to know? Memories? I remember the night we went out to look at the stars… the hunger and ecstasy in his eyes, the sigh in his voice, “Oh, mon Dieu; oh le bien.” And the scent of rosemary. I remember lying with him in the grass below the burial ground, talking about his death, about God… I remember him lying on his bed naked in the firelight, the oil shining on his body, the sound of him weeping, and Brother Michael talking to him, quietly. I remember another time he wept, holding him in my arms, and I felt as though his pain would divide my soul in two. Those wretched blackberries. I remember holding his hand, before he learned to speak again, and the extraordinary cost of caressing it with real tenderness, such a simple thing, but it took courage to do…
‘I remember how Martin used to drive him to distraction… I remember how jealous I was that it was Theodore, not me, who taught him to speak again… silly….’
Tom looked up at Father Chad, all the extravagant torment of unbearable grief in his eyes. He felt the pain of it swell relentlessly inside him; the by now familiar agony of hurting so intense he felt it would split him apart, dislocate his reason.
Father Chad was looking at him with considerable concern, clearly disturbed, shocked even, by what he had just heard. He cleared his throat and, anchoring his voice with an effort to a normal masculine pitch, began his cautious reply.
‘Thank you for being so, um, open with me, er, Brother Thomas. What you have said is very moving of course, but I must, er, confess, it disturbs me just a little bit… um… concerning, er, as it were the, er, um, nature of your closeness to Father Columba.’ He cleared his throat, crossed his legs, avoiding Tom’s eyes.
‘As you know, our Rule is very insistent on a most prudent modesty… guarding against particular friendships… against too, er, demonstrative forms of affection, and certainly against, er, um, nakedness. I feel I ought really to ask you whether this extreme affection was in all ways, er, in your view, quite proper?’
Father Chad would never have believed it possible for one man to pack so much contempt into his gaze. He had an extraordinary sense of having shrivelled to a state of being so cheap and so dirty that he had no rightful existence in the order of creation at all.
‘What are you suggesting?’ Tom asked him coldly. The simple question demanded an answer of a bald honesty that Father Chad squirmed to think of.
‘Presumably you are asking me if the relationship I had with Father Peregrine was as lovers?’
Father Chad felt as though his tongue had dried up, cemented to the roof of his mouth. All he had to say was, ‘Yes.’ He could not bring himself to say it. It seemed to him as if some mischievous force had picked up his attempt at pastoral counselling and worried it to bits, leaving his room all strewn about with pain and indignation, disgust and distrust and distress.
He made himself look at Brother Tom. ‘That, um, was what I was asking, but I see by your reaction that I may have been wrong, er….’
‘Father Peregrine,’ said Tom, with a sudden, unexpected smile, ‘was not that way inclined. Neither am I. We both took our vow of chastity seriously. Particular friendship… I don’t know. Towards the end of his life, without friendship, what would he have had? But certainly, it was perfectly proper. He was naked because he had bedsores, and limbs deformed by paralysis, and he ached all over. Brother Michael was tending to him. There was nothing erotic about it, you may take my word.’
‘Quite. Quite, I see. Good. Er, good. Well, um—oh dear, is that the Compline bell? No? Oh dear… I thought it was….’
Father Chad’s hands fluttered in a small gesture of helplessness. He felt totally at sea. Perhaps, he thought, it would be possible to redeem the situation by moving on to a less critical topic of conversation.
‘Has Brother Stephen told you of our new plans for the farm?’ he asked brightly.
Tom frowned. ‘No,’ he said, with a note of surprise in his voice. It was not like Stephen to forget to mention farming matters to Brother Tom.
‘Hasn’t he?’ Father Chad looked at Tom in alarm, wondering if he had made a blunder, racking his brains to think of some reason why Brother Stephen might have thought it more prudent to say nothing about the plans to Brother Tom. He could think of none.
‘Yes, we met last week. We have decided on looking at it again that the dovecote really does need rebuilding to a larger size. Also I have been up to the buildings by the boundary, and I can quite understand from the way Brother Stephen explained it that they all need to come down. We need a good-sized barn, with three threshing floors and a granary up there, as well as new cow housing.’
Tom said nothing to this. His face was fixed in a smile of bitterness. He looked older than his thirty-three years.
‘I am surprised Brother Stephen said nothing to you. Perhaps it slipped his mind.’
‘Yes. Maybe so. And then again, maybe he remembered Father saying, “Over my dead body will you build a barn with three threshing floors.” Perhaps he has the grace to blush. So—with what is this work to be paid for?’
Father Chad pulled a glum face. ‘Well, this is the problem of course. We shall rely on selling corrodies, which I know Father—er—Columba was reluctant to do.’
‘Reluctant? He wouldn’t hear of it!’
‘No… still, these are troubled times. Heavy taxes and so forth, you know. He was not a well man, and of course, his disability kept him rather confined here. It may be that he did not realise how common a thing it is to sell corrodies these days.’
‘What ever do you mean? Of course he knew! It was seeing all the houses round about going into debt and cluttering the place up with worldly people that made him so desperate to stay free of it. I… Father Chad… please… please may I go?’
Tom got to his feet. He was shaking, his hands clenched into fists. He hardly knew how to contain his anger and grief. He knew only that he had to get out before he hit Father Chad; before he did something really stupid.
Father Chad looked up at him. He had an unwelcome suspicion that Father Peregrine, under the same circumstances, would not have permitted Tom to go anywhere. Even so, it was a relief to hear his own voice saying, ‘Of course, Brother Thomas; this is not an easy time for you—you must be very tired,’ in spite of the embarrassing quaver in it.
‘Thank you for your time,’ said Brother Tom, with a valiant attempt at humble courtesy, and left.
He did not see Theodore sitting in the cloister in the wintry darkness. He did not even register that the Compline bell was ringing. He walked swiftly along the cloister, out through the passage beside the Chapter House, and then ran up the hill to the farm; ran till the frosty night air hurt like a knife in his throat, ran till he had a stitch in his side and he gasped for breath. He stopped then, up on the hill, looking down on the farmyard in the moonlight, the silence of winter all around him. An owl floated overhead on noiseless wings. A fox’s bark carried on the tingling air. He stood, his body heaving, regaining his breath.
Then, slowly, he walked down the hill again. It was too cold to stand still. The cold ached in his ears, numbed his toes.
He walked down to the farmyard. He could hear the shifting and blowing of the cows in the byre as he came alongside it. He opened the barn door and went in. The fragrance of the hay hung on the air, a distilled memory of dusty summer days. Weary, numb, defeated, Tom trailed into the barn and sat in the warmth of the hay, his knees drawn up to his chest, his forehead resting on his knees and his arms wrapped tightly round his shins, contracted to a ball of aching misery.
He sat there motionless, containing the sorrow, the impossible, breaking weight of sorrow that he could not dodge or escape or put down. The spaces of the night widened away from him, until he became the beating heart of a universe of bereavement, the core of a vast, immortal, pitiless night.
Bird of death, the owl, came curving down on silent wings, with cool, unerring precision seizing the little grey mouse that scuttered among the hay. A small noise, a disturbance of the hay, piteous squeak of terror, and it was over. Tom raised his head and saw the owl fly through the moonbeams that shone in at the doorway, a limp scrap of frailty in its talons.
He also saw someone standing in the doorway, silhouetted in the moonlight, looking in.
‘Tom?’
It was Theodore’s voice. Tom watched him silently from the dark place where he crouched.
‘Tom?’
It seemed churlish to hide from him. Tom felt half-inclined to call out to him; and half-possessed by the silences of an empty, finished world.
‘Tom?’
Tom compromised. He shifted his position in the hay. Let him hear that if he wanted to. He heard it. ‘Tom.’ Theodore came into the barn. He walked forward uncertainly into the darkness.
‘Theo, I’m here.’
Theodore came towards his voice, peering in the dim light afforded by the open door until he made out the blot of black dark amid the darkness that was Brother Tom.
‘Tom?’
He sat down in the hay beside him. An immense, dragging weariness filled Brother Tom at the prospect of explanations, questions, futile commiseration. But Theodore said nothing. He unclasped his cloak, turned it upside down so that the wide hem of it might spread over the shoulders of both of them. Only then did Tom become aware that he had been shivering. His shivering increased, became uncontrollable, and Theodore took him in his arms, with the cloak wrapped about them, saying nothing still.
It was only there, hidden in Theodore’s arms, in the sheltering cloak, hidden in the silent dark of the barn, that Tom uncovered the wound of grief that savaged the very bowels of him, and allowed his face hidden in Theodore’s shoulder to wear the agonised mask of mourning, allowed the tears that ached in his throat to scald his eyes, until he clung to Theo in the sobbing anguish of his torn, abandoned soul. And Theodore did not speak, did not move, did not intrude upon that molten place of pain in which a man’s soul is recast.
Eventually, it was finished. Tom sat back in the hay, drained of everything, exhausted.
‘I didn’t know anything could hurt this much,’ he said. He lay down on the fragrant hay, his face, his throat, his belly aching from the labour of weeping.
The last six weeks had been full of the kind words and sympathetic counsel of the brethren; well-intentioned words ranging from, ‘It’s a blessed release for him, Brother. He’s better off where he is,’ to, ‘I expect it’s a relief to you to be free of all that extra work in the infirmary.’ Theodore’s company had an intriguing novelty about it in that he said nothing at all beyond the simple statement of his presence.
‘D’you remember what he said about having your heart ripped open?’ said Tom after a while.
‘Yes, I do.’ Theodore sat rubbing his ankle, easing the pins and needles that had resulted from sitting awkwardly immobile for a considerable length of time. ‘He said it was part of the necessary pain of following Jesus.’
‘Ripped open. That’s what it feels like. Other times it doesn’t feel like anything. I walk around like a man lost in the fog; things that were familiar looking alien and bizarre. My life doesn’t feel like home any more. I feel as though I’ve been cast out of my own heart, wandering. And then the grief comes again, swelling and rising inside me till I’m maddened with it. Last night… last night I lay on my bed tearing at my belly with my hands, retching, trying to void myself of the pain of it…
‘Five minutes. If I could talk to him just for five minutes. “Th-ank y-ou, T-om… T-ell m-e about it… L-ove h-as n-o defenc-es, T-om. Y-ou kn-ow it’s l-ove wh-en it h-h-urts.” He… he… oh, I’m sorry….’ The wash of it overwhelmed him again. He lay on his back feeling the tears welling hot in his eyes, and trickling cold down into his ears, weeping helplessly, torn open with grief.
‘Psalm a hundred and twenty-nine,’ said Theo. ‘“Supra dorsum meum…” um… how does it go? “Supra dorsum…”’
‘Whatever are you talking about?’ Tom’s voice quavered peevishly between his tears.
‘Psalm a hundred and twenty-nine. “The ploughers have ploughed upon my back, and made long furrows.”’
Tom sniffed, and considered this, sniffed again. ‘Yes….’ he said. ‘That just about says it.’
‘I’ll expect to see you looking like a horse with a green mane in the spring, then. And a blond hedgehog by next harvest.’
Tom felt offended by this inappropriate levity, and faintly guilty at his own, equally inappropriate, faint stirring of amusement. He was not sure how to respond. He hunted for his handkerchief and blew his nose.
‘You know,’ said Theo into the darkness, ‘how Martin likes to have one of the brothers say grace over the food; in Latin. It has to be in Latin. He can’t speak a word of Latin you know, but he thinks it’s needful for blessing. I was there one day; in September, it must have been, because Father was just struggling with speech—he had it, but it was very unclear still. And Martin brought him his meal; fish, rather overcooked, and some very tough beans, the end of the season, and a hunk of Cormac’s bread, chopped… and soaked to a mush. He beamed down at Father, and he said, “Now then, you be a good lad, and let’s hear you say grace today.”
‘Father looked up at him, and I was a bit worried for a minute: it was so insultingly patronising; I thought he would be angry. But he smiled at Martin—the sweetest smile, and it was a bit of a relief, you know.
‘He composed his face into the most dignified, sepulchral solemnity, and he said, “L-L-amentat-iones J-er-emiae, c-caput pr-im-um; V-ide D-Dom-ine quon-iam tr-ibul-or, c-conturbatus est v-enter m-m-m-eus… in n-om-ine P-Patr-is, et F-ilio, et Sp-ir-itui S-ancto, am-m-en.” And he made the sign of the cross over his food with all the pomp and ceremony of a bishop. Martin was delighted. I couldn’t figure out what he’d said at first, his speech was so stuttering and laboured still, but gradually it dawned on me. It was that verse from the first chapter of Lamentations, “Behold, oh Lord, my tribulation, and how my bowels shudder… in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.” I don’t know how I kept a straight face. I thought I’d choke before Martin was out of the room, but he, he didn’t bat an eyelid. He didn’t eat it either.’
Tom smiled. It felt strange. His face wasn’t used to smiling. His eyes were sore and swollen. He began to laugh, but his breath caught in a sob. ‘He was awful to Martin,’ he said.
‘No,’ said Theo. ‘He took more than he gave.’
Tom wiped the cold tears out of his ears with his handkerchief. ‘He couldn’t always see the funny side of it,’ he said, ‘but we brought him up here to the farm one day, me and Stephen. It was only about the second time I’d brought him out. He was so touchy about meeting people, but he consented to come up here. The harvest was in, it was halfway through September, and Stephen and I were just pottering about doing odd jobs, so I thought it would be good for him, nice to be out of doors and have a bit of company. We wheeled the chair up as far as it would go, and then carried him to the grass beside the track up above the orchard, in the shelter of the wall.
‘We left him there and came back down here to swill out the milking shed and scrub the milk barrels clean. We’d left enough chores to keep us busy round the yard for a while, knowing he would be there.
‘Then Stephen and I went down to the pasture to have a look at one of the cows, she’d a bad foot. While we were there, Brother Germanus came tearing down to the field: “Brother Thomas! Brother Thomas!” he was shouting, and he as white as a sheet. We ran to meet him. He was puffing and blowing, “Oh God, come quick,” he said. “Father Columba’s in some kind of fit. I don’t know what to do, he looks terrible.”
‘Stephen and I looked at each other, and we went up there at a run. I think he felt as cold and sick as I did. As we came up by the orchard, I could hear this thrashing about and garbled shouting, and when we got round the corner, sure enough there he was, rolling about on the grass, making a terrible row, calling and shouting, all nonsense. I knelt down beside him and started to soothe him as best I could, but he was pushing me away with his hand and going on and on at me, writhing about on the ground. It was odd you know, because his eyes didn’t look glazed or anything, but there was obviously something badly wrong with him. He looked at my face and at Brother Stephen’s and he stopped shouting, and he started to laugh. For one hideous moment I thought he’d gone insane; wondered if there was some kind of fit you could have with his illness to make you lose your mind.
‘“T-om,” he managed to say at last, and I was so relieved. He closed his eyes, and made a real effort to get his speech working, calm himself enough to make some sense. “F-or th-e l-ove of G-G-od, m-an,” he said, “w-ill y-ou g-g-et m-e off th-is a-ants’ n-est?”
‘We had to take all his clothes off and everything. They were all over him.’
Tom chuckled at the memory. ‘Brother John was disgusted with us. We’d made him promise not to tell, but he was covered in bites.’
Resonant and clear on the tingling wintry air, the Matins bell began to sound in the abbey below them.
‘Midnight?’ said Tom, startled. ‘It’s not midnight already?’
‘I searched for you a long time before I found you,’ said Theodore. ‘And you were a long time weeping.’
Tom scrambled to his feet. ‘We’d better go down, Theo. They’ll miss us from our beds and our places in chapel.’
Theo sat up in the hay. ‘If you feel ready. There’s no harder work than grieving. We can stay here if you like.’
‘No.’ Tom was brushing the hay from his clothes, bending over to shake it from his hair. ‘No. Come on, Theo, get all the hay off you, straighten yourself up. It… it’s just something Father Chad said this evening. I think I’d have a lot of explaining to do if he had reason to think I’d been out of my bed, spending half the night with you in the barn—especially you, with the novitiate and everything.
‘Come on—please. I don’t want another long session with him. Not just now.’
Tom fastened the barn door to keep out the animals, and they hastened down the track to the abbey.
As they approached the cloister, Tom made Theodore stop, and he inspected him anxiously in the moonlight. ‘You’ve got hay in your hair still, look.’
‘Have I? I’m surprised you can tell the difference.’
‘No, I’m serious, Theo. Turn round, let me look at the back of you. Truly, I think I shall be in trouble if you appear with me in chapel looking as though you’ve just been having a tumble in the hay. Have a look at me. Am I all tidy?’
‘Brother, you look charming. I suspect your nose and your eyes, which are rather swollen, may also be rather red, but it’s hard to say by the light of the moon. Apart from that detail you look positively elegant.’
‘Oh, for mercy’s sake, the bell’s stopped. Come on.’
Father Chad, Tom was relieved to see as he took his place in chapel, looked almost as crumpled and bleary-eyed as he did himself.
They were in silence, so Tom could not speak to Theodore again, but he sought him out the next day, climbing the stairs to the novitiate to find him in the few minutes before Vespers began, after the Novitiate Chapter. He was grateful to find him alone. The novices had already gone down to chapel.
‘Theo—thank you… last night… Thank you.’
Theodore smiled, the kindness in his eyes enfolding Tom with a gentleness and understanding that was almost unbearable. Tom bit his lip. ‘Don’t be too kind to me. I can’t… I’m a bit shaky still.’
‘Give yourself time,’ said Theo. ‘You can always come up and find me here if you need me. You know how it is for the novices—they spend half their lives in bits. They won’t think anything of it.’ He hesitated. ‘Father Peregrine….’
‘Yes?’
‘He… he was worried about you. He spoke to me about it one day. He said that he never knew when he might be taken ill again, and he was worried once Brother Francis went away to the seminary, that if he died while Francis was away you might have no one you could turn to. He told me to look after you. He said I was to remind you, if you needed some comfort, that you’d helped him to start living again. He couldn’t have faced it without you. He said that the breath of God in you is a gift of life, a holy kiss to be passed on. He said you’d know what he meant. And he said to tell you that the sorrow of grief is a bitter crucifixion, but that the loving had been joyous, and one day would be again.
‘He told me to behold your grief without embarrassment, to help you not to run away from your pain. He told me… he said that it would be the comfort of my love that led your anguish out into compassion, instead of it festering to destruction. He said to tell you that a man in grief is like a man with bedsores. It costs him to reveal it, but he needs help with it. He said you’d know what he meant. And he told me to remind you of the thing you said last night. That love has no defences, and you only know it’s love when it hurts.’