I keep his breviary open at the appropriate hour, the ribbon in the crease where he marked his pages. I learn my hours and enter my brother Jean Marc’s life, Aelred’s. J. M. we always called him at home.
It was Chantal’s, my sister’s, idea. Call him J. M., Mummy.
This is a kind of waking sleep. What am I waking up to? What is it that I don’t want to stir? Even now, having come all this way.
Robert, the guest master called my name, knocking me up for Matins. I sit here in my small room, my cell, neat and straight. A narrow bed is in the corner on the right as I enter from the dim and silent corridor. There is a wash basin in the other corner by the window seat, below a window in two stone arches. There is a narrow desk against the other wall and a crucifix on the wall above me. A cell like the one he had: I’m here for him. This is a younger brother’s pilgrimage. Will there be a conversion for me in this? Me so different, our lives taking such different paths.
Cocoa planter! I say to myself, What you doing here, boy?
I sit with my prologue, the way I remember the Lives of the Saints told. We had the same book, read by our mother. Is this a fiction like those, a way of telling of a younger time in another place? Was his wish to be a saint? His life can now seem like a hagiographic tale itself. One part of me writes it that way. To write it out is to understand it. That was his method. Without his journals, I would be nowhere. But then I’m also out of my depth.
I speak of him as another, Aelred. That was the custom, named for a saint, clothed. It helps too with the distance which time has wrought. I’ve made a character of him. To think of him as not my brother, as someone else who did those things, is perhaps easier. But there is too the brother I always loved, for sure; the one who went away, the one I lost.
As I say, I have his words, and words are everything: journals, letters and my own words, enraptured by his ideas. I was inspired by his youth, yes, but startled and shocked. There is a sense of occasion, vocation. But can I face up to what in some ways I don’t want to know? I let words stand on their own. Do they ever, those words? I find myself hardly able to utter them. Our mother would use that expression.
Unutterable, she would say, something that should not have happened, something that should not be said, a story which should not be told.
I know a secret history of Ashton Park. I know that this will not be a pious story. The monastic life? Not the one I imagined he had left all of us for.
I have come to see Benedict, his friend. I am confronted with my own memories as well as his. Things I don’t like to think about myself. It’s a strange feeling, because it’s as if I’m the older brother now as I resurrect that young man in the first year of his monastic life.
What can Benedict tell me? Will he? Can I really expect him to talk to me of things I have read in the journals, explain them to me, perhaps?
In front of me, the monastic day:
| Sunday | Weekdays | ||
| 3.30 Matins and Lauds | |||
| 7.00 Prime | |||
| 8.00 Breakfast | Conventual Mass and Terce | ||
| 9.00 Conventual Mass | 8.50 Breakfast | ||
| and Terce | 10.30 Coffee | ||
| (coffee after Mass) | |||
| 12.15 Sext | |||
| 12.30 Dinner | |||
| 2.15 None | |||
| 3.30 Tea | |||
| 5.15 Vespers | 5.30 Vespers | ||
| 6.00 Supper | |||
| 7.30 Compline |
His day. This was how he spent his days.
Because he went away, and I was the one son among a family of sisters, I had to grow into our father’s shoes and take on the management of the cocoa estate at Malgretoute. Life has fashioned me differently; from the same mother and father, the same home; loved and admired by the same sisters, by Toinette, the same nurse. How is that possible?
Now, I’m coming here, leaving the world I know, to try to say how it happened, tell it to myself, tell it all. Will that be possible, to tell it all? How do I remember it, now? Can I bear to? Ted? Ted and the others, they, the others, who still stand around me. They, those boys, who stood around him, him and Ted. This is in another place, in a younger time. That’s what comes back on top of everything else. Is that why I’m here?
I am following the ritual. I get to know this life, this liturgy. The bells are so unashamedly, so scandalously, I think, ringing out, like loud gonging prayers themselves, waking up the neighbourhood. It is the voice that calls us to prayer, pealing out over fields, the distant town, over the stone enclosure wall and the sheep like stones as the world sleeps. ‘Domine, labia mea aperies et os meum annutiabit laudem tuam…’: ‘Lord, open my lips, and my mouth shall announce your praise.’ I hear them in choir.
Open my lips. I need to tell his story. I owe it to him, owe it to myself.
The city hums at the edge of the fields, a horizon, an amber hum. There is the silence and my scratching pen, as when I’m up late at night at Malgretoute having to do the accounts. The rain drips in the cocoa. I miss home. I’ve been here longer than I first planned. I think of Krishna looking after the estate. I’m lucky to have such an expert to leave things to. I thought I would come and settle these affairs and return quickly. But it’s taken much longer.
The affairs of the heart take much longer.
Keep an open mind, Joe said to me as he drove me down from Bristol. We had got drunk the night before, in the flat with all of J. M.’s things scattered on the floor, all those red notebooks with black spines, photographs of our parents, one of me.
Joe, out of the blue, had written, ‘I have some things which belong to you.’ I’m surprised how easily I get on with Joe. He’s like any other guy really. Looks like a monk with his crew cut, not the earring though. I don’t know of anything we have in common, except my brother, of course, and his desire to drink rum, a love of the sun and cricket. I go everywhere with my cuatro, so I strummed and sang him an old-time calypso that first night when he and his sister Miriam welcomed me to the flat in Bristol. I taught them the refrain: ‘Sans humanité.’ A kind of wake!
Sing, ‘Rum and Coca-Cola’, Joe said.
They all want that tune.
In the clubs, he said, it’s the popular calypso, Arrow’s ‘Hot Hot Hot’, that they enjoy.
Yesterday afternoon, I took the road alongside the farm towards the fields. There I found a path, a forest trail pointed with yellow arrows, painted at intervals on fences and posts. I followed assiduously as if the place would yield something. I wanted it to. But always there is this double thing. I don’t want to know.
I was circling the enclosure of the abbey, keeping the stock bell tower in view, the rest of the enclosure hidden. The landscaping of the natural woods encloses the cloister. I left the fields, and over a stile, made through some gorse scrub. I learn the words: gorse, scrub. I would say ‘bush’ back home. I learn that from J. M. He’s provided me with a miscellany of English flora and fauna. Still I was being pointed onwards.
I surveyed this English park the way I do my cocoa estate. Just beyond the gorse bushes, through a little wood of oaks, I came into a clearing. The phrases are becoming almost natural, like ‘Down by the mango tree, take a left for the pasture’.
If I could only bring him back!
Then I came upon it. At first, I hadn’t taken in this other noise. I was attuned to the fields, the silence and the sheep like stones, the abbey getting smaller. But then, more than the silence, the hum drew me to the very brink of the escarpment. It horrified me, as it fell sheer in well excavated layers, like giant steps: a vast quarry of Bath stone, the guest master Father Dominic told me it’s called. In the centre there was a large oval pool of water glinting on its floor like a mirror, or, a mass grave. Just a fancy.
Long ago, there had been fields here, the monks tell me. Here they had climbed. And even a longer time ago, I learnt, from J. M.’s journal, that dogs hunted their masters’ prey in the nearby fields. I had thought that was a dream, but it was true. I once thought that it was a myth. The terrible trade! We were forced to confront it, my generation, in 1970 with Black Power! What do the dreams tell of that time? To dream a time past - is that possible? They stand around your bed in the light which is filtered through mosquito nets, like those of a waking child in another place, shadowy behind a scrim. Power! Power! So, he had found the beginnings of our history here?
Chunky lorries, almost like toys, those dinky cars we played with as boys, the ones of his I still have in a box somewhere at Malgretoute, were descending the terraced excavation, being loaded and then making the ascent. Huge arc lamps were harnessed to very tall pylons and girders for night work. Their metal glinted in the afternoon sun. My horror turned to awe and then fascination at the work. A notice told me that blasting took place between 11.00 a.m. and 2.00 p.m. I was safe. It was 2.45 p.m. I hadn’t heard any blasting earlier. I circled the escarpment and then descended the other bank into a wood of silver birches, losing myself before finding my yellow trail again. I was lost among the silver birches.
They’re holding hands. Look at them now. Phrases and conversations with myself, with him, his words. He’s become word to me.
Dreams still haunt. Dogs - the cry of dogs still sounds where the water trembles over small blue stones the colour of blue blood, tongues lapping at the blood, flowing into the lake in the spinney. I see another running. Then, he turns, and throws a stone.
My memory haemorrhages with his words, phrases, metaphors.
In another river, in another place, a boy dives like a shaft of light into a bronze rock pool. Like an angel, scarlet like the petals of the flamboyante.
I make his poetry mine.