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 I don’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 not know what had happened. I’ve always kept it since he went 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 on Aelred 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. I remember 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 because the banks of snow were so high. And though it was only two in the afternoon, it was as dark as night.

It was like night. I think I said, It’s like night,’ and then I thought that Father Dominic thought that I was stupid. ‘I’ve never seen snow before.’ I had never felt cold. It was like putting your hand in the ice compartment of the Frigidaire. Before, cold was the drop in temperature in the mountains at school. My mother had given me a bottle-green cardigan.

When we got to the front door with my trunk, Father Prior said, ‘Ninety-five in the shade is it, where you come from?’ He laughed. I smiled, shyly.

The house smelt of boiled cabbage. The panelling on the parlour wall was dark oak. Dark oak: I read that in books about England, about the time of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn. ‘Is there a priest’s hole in this house? I learnt that when I was doing English History. Then we changed to West Indian history, no longer kings and queens, Cardinal Wolsey, but slavery and emancipation. Wilberforce. Slave ships, black people packed in rows like bananas, and the islands changed hands many times between the European powers, like pawns in a game between the  French, English, Spanish, Portuguese and the Dutch,’ I babbled.

‘Well, you’ll have to have a look,’ Father Dominic said, tapping the panelling, smiling. ‘And maybe there is even a secret tunnel, a runaway’s escape.’ Then we went into see Father Abbot and I had to kneel to kiss his ring.

‘Father Justin, this is your new charge,’ the Abbot said. The heavy door closed behind a broad monk, who smiled without opening his mouth, his lips a thin line. His hand felt like sandpaper. He smelt of pomme aracs. Later I saw the bulbs on the windowsill of his cell. Hyacinths, I learnt. I breathed in the smell of my childhood, the red fruit which looked like pears whose pulp was like cotton wool, smelt strangely like these flowers, blue like Quink ink, which grew from bulbs into fleshy leaves and petals like skin. The scent hung heavy in the room on the windowsill above the black, hot-water pipes. Father Justin took me up to the dormitory of the novitiate wing.

‘We’ve put an electric blanket in your bed. It’s not usual, but Father Abbot thought it best for the first night. You may dispense with it when you think you can cope.’ That night I woke thinking I had a raging temperature. I had forgotten to turn the blanket off. I was hot and then cold.

He tells his life like a story. He wanted it told, even then. I will tell it.

I see now that there were other things which bothered him, for instance, the special significance he gives to those boys: Redhead, Espinet, Ramnarine and Mackensie. Obviously looking back he felt guilty about the colour business. He didn’t have to go through all that we had to go through with Black Power. It doesn’t seem natural, his preoccupation with race. I mean, they are like anyone else to me. Like Krishna who works for me: he’s like any other guy. He’s a friend really. But it wouldn’t have been like that in his day. Yes, things had to change. I don’t get too wound up about it. Some black people still do. Miriam asked me the other day about it. She asked whether there were any memorials to what happened. I didn’t know what she meant at first.

I mean, it’s nearly two hundred years ago, I said.

But the repercussions are still there, she said. Think what it would be like if we had erased the holocaust. Slavery is like that to black people.

It hadn’t occurred to me that she was Jewish. Things like what Miriam says make me think that these are J. M.’s adult friends; make me wonder about who he became.