“Did the day go well?” asks Madeleine, as she gets down the linen bag with her spindle and carders, pulls out the big sack of fleece from behind the chair. “It was good of Brother Thomas to bring us down those sacks of grain and clothing – well, good of my brother to send him with them, I suppose. He just does as he’s told. Still, it was kind and a big help that he fixed the scythe and sorted out the fence for us. And I think you got quite a bit more fruit picked, you and Brother Cedd, didn’t you?”
“Aye, I think it went well,” says her husband. “I hope so anyway. I hope that lad doesn’t give up on the path he’s taken. It’s always such a sadness when someone leaves.”
She laughs. “What? If that isn’t the pot calling the kettle black, I don’t know what is! Surely, if it’s not the right thing for a man to stay then it must be the right thing to leave. What matters is not if he goes or stays but if he comes to know his own soul, follows his guiding star, is true to the voice of his heart.”
“Aye,” he says. “Of course,” he adds. By the tone of his voice and the aversion of his face, Madeleine knows she’s annoyed him now. She tries to make it better.
“While I was picking the blackberries along the hedgerow, I saw you took the baskets of apples up with the lad to the big loft, and you were there ages. Did he tell you something of his trouble, when you had that moment to yourselves?”
“Aye, he did.”
She waits to hear what that trouble might have been, but evidently he’s not going to tell her; so she probes further, curious: “Did he say what it was made him decide to come here?”
“Aye. He did.”
“So – why then?”
Shadowed in the shadows his eyes meet hers. She can’t see his face properly, his back is to the window, his face is obscured in the dusky failing light. But she can feel the tension of his reluctance to tell her. Why? She’s his wife – wouldn’t he want to share it with her, talk it through?
With a quick sigh of impatience, he says: “Apparently, him sitting on the other side of the choir from me at St Alcuin’s, he had opportunity to see tears flow that I could not help. So he thought I’d understand. That’s what he said.”
And now he has her absolute fixed attention. “Tears? About what?”
“Oh, heaven! Madeleine, surely you know! About you, about lying to John, about the mess I made of the money and the whole damned tangle I got myself into. It all about tore me to shreds. Some days it was too much for me.”
“So you would sit in chapel weeping, in the Office?”
“Sometimes. Not too often, I hope.”
“And nobody saw? No one cared or did anything about it?”
“Madeleine, what could they do? How could I have told anyone about you and me? And what was to be done about the money except for them to pull their belts in and make the best of it? They didn’t berate me or beat me; they understood. And tears aren’t especially uncommon in a monastery. There’s much that’s difficult to swallow and precious little privacy. You can’t always keep it back until you’re alone in your cell.”
“Oh. So – what was it Brother Cedd thought you’d understand? What’s he done?”
“He hasn’t done anything, he’s just struggling.”
“With what?”
“Oh, great God in heaven give me patience – you don’t give up, do you? Why don’t you mind your own business? Just leave it alone!”
“William, that’s really rude –”
“Rude? I’m rude? Not you’re over-inquisitive, poking about in what’s not yours to know?”
“What? That’s so mean! Why do you have to be so touchy? What’s the matter with you? Get over yourself!”
He draws breath to reply, then he stops, completely, standing absolutely still. Madeleine is familiar with this by now, but not sure she will ever get used to it. She has realized it is part of what it means to share a life with a man thirty years a monk. At first when she saw him do this, she thought he was overcome by anger – that’s what’s usually happening, in her experience, with people who stop dead and stand in total silence when you criticize them. Mostly, it means trouble brewing; they are fomenting outrage. But not, she has learned, with this man. It is about anger, but he is not getting ready to let fly. She knows what his silence means now. It’s the time it takes to humble himself, rein in his natural responses of defensiveness, cancel the instinct to a sharp retort. These short silences are her windows into his self-mastery, and she has learned to esteem them, give him time, not assume he’s holding out on her and get ready for a fight. Neither does she try to intervene with physical closeness – a hug, an apology, an endearment. She knows (now – she didn’t at first) it’s all he can do to cope with himself in these moments; he’s already trying his very best and has nothing left over for cuddles.
So she waits. And, quietly, as he always does, he apologizes. “I am so sorry, Madeleine. I was disrespectful and churlish in what I said. I humbly ask your forgiveness.”
And although what fits right in with monastic life sounds almighty strange in an ordinary household, in this cottage, she thinks every time he does it, Oh, I love this man.
She knows, because he’s told her about it, that these few moments of struggle it takes him to find the self-control he needs, have made trouble for him his whole life long; not as a monk only, but as a child as well. What they wanted – his father, his mother, his novice master, his prior – was absolute immediate obedience: in his attitude, in his demeanour, in his face; not in his words and actions only. There was no “as soon as you’re ready” about it; they meant “now”.
Those few unresponsive seconds, they have got him thrashed times past counting; but he can’t seem to get it down to “now”, no matter how hard he tries. It just takes him a moment to get past the black fury, the red rage, wanting to have the upper hand when someone admonishes him. It’s not that he believes himself to be always in the right, but too many years living under excoriating injustice and mocking cruelty make it hard to live with any kind of reprimand. It makes him flare up inside, it burns, snarls. And it does take those few short seconds to control it.
It isn’t fear that returns him every time to this habit of self-discipline, this stilling silence. The regimes he lived under drove him beyond fear. The child who lives each day with fear becomes simply used to being frightened all the time. It is a given, and no longer determines choices and actions. It’s very hard to dominate someone who is habitually afraid. Anything new comes too late to frighten him. He’s scared already, and what he does will make no difference to that. The man who is always afraid will dare and imperil anything, unable to evaluate risk in a life already terrifying.
He persists with his obstinate effort to get self-mastery down to a perfect art. In part he does so for shame – he feels bad that he can’t immediately achieve it, that this rage always boils over inside. But it’s also simply habit; it has become reflexive, to stop, to breathe, to wait, to get himself under control. It is the discipline of a lifetime. More compellingly, a long time ago he learned contempt of violence; and he cannot bear to see it. Cruelty and pain, screaming terror – they sicken him to his stomach. He cannot stand it. Even thinking of the slaughter of a pig, an ox, makes him vomit. He can only just cope with Madeleine breaking the neck of a pot-boiler.
When they go to the market – she is used to this now, but couldn’t understand what was happening at first – if, as so often happens, he sees a child sobbing, broken-hearted, pleading in futile desperation with an indifferent parent; bawled at, flung aside, lambasted with words, with sticks, with whatever comes to hand, for some misdemeanour; he has to walk away. Right then, even if he’s in the middle of haggling for a price, regardless of who is saying what to him. He can’t blot it out. He says it interferes with his eyesight – for a moment he can’t see, so wild is the sorrow and despair it sets off inside him.
And he tells her that for the greater part of his life he tried to fight back, to become somehow invincible – more ruthless, colder, crueller than anything that threatened him. But then came his curious encounter with Christ, with love, with kindness; and the deeper reality broke through – the truth is that he just hates it, this violence which never stops, this endless bullying, the calling card of the human race. So far as it lies with him, he will no longer inhabit the same space. What he has no power to put a stop to, he will leave.
But he has to live with the unpalatable reality that the seeds of it are buried in the recesses of his soul; they sprout, they send out shoots. Despite his best efforts he can’t weed it out, shake it off. All he can do is decide how to deal with it. And that takes a few moments of silence. When he stops like that, becomes quite still, he is not praying, he tells her; in those moments he is beyond praying, though he is striving for faithfulness. He says he has to trust Christ to hold on to him then, while he lets go of everything and allows the rage to subside.
And so here he stands, in the dusk, in this now comfortably familiar room. It’s time to light the candles. Outside, already, a hunting owl is calling. The moon is rising. He achieves containment, and manages to say it – “I am so sorry, Madeleine. I was disrespectful and churlish in what I said. I humbly ask your forgiveness.”
And though it inspires in her this upsurge of love, at the same time there’s something about the terrible control of it that makes her feel hemmed in, as if she can hardly breathe. And then it’s as though the words speak themselves without her bidding: “Oh, for heaven’s sake, William! Don’t take yourself so seriously – it’s not as bad as that!”
Even as she says it, she is already thinking, Why do I always say something like this? It only winds him up even more. She looks for, and sees, the tic in his face, the clench in his jaw. This is usually the point when the trap springs, a net of tense silence closing around them for the rest of the evening. In silence they finish the day, go to bed without speaking, and in the end she reaches for his hand in the dark as they lie in bed without moving, without speaking. Apart from anything else, it’s intensely irritating and makes the day end very late.
Something in her suddenly decides the pattern cannot be inevitable. She moves to stand in front of him. She gives him a little space, stands more than a yard from him, waiting respectfully until his gaze meets hers. Still that tic, that flexing jaw muscle. His eyes hold her gaze but she sees his reluctance, how intolerable it is to have to face her standing there.
“William,” she says, quietly, but not trying to appease him. Nothing wheedling or beseeching, just speaking his name. “Please. It’s me. You married me. You love me. I didn’t mean to belittle you or hurt you. I did not intend contempt or disparagement. It’s just how I am; I spoke too hasty like I always do. Please, dearest friend, can you manage to put it down, let it go? I know how much people have abused and humiliated you. I know how the rage inside you goes wild. But we don’t have to do this. I think you have the courage and humility to see past my rough clumsiness and know that I don’t mean to slight you. And I didn’t realize I was being intrusive; I was only interested. I thought it would be all right for a man to share such things with his wife. I mean, I’d tell you anything. I… oh, William, what I’m saying is, can’t you… no… please will you forgive me for getting it wrong?”
And she realizes, that last thing she says – the simple request for forgiveness, without excuses or defensiveness – is what he needs. He knows how to respond to it. It belongs to his lifelong practice of the monastic way. He doesn’t know how to find his way through the tangle of the most ordinary human interaction, but he knows the pattern of seeking and granting forgiveness as a method of beginning again.
In the gathering dusk, he nods. “Of course,” he says: and suddenly sees the funny side of it himself. The tension goes out of him with a sigh and he runs his hand over his head. “What am I like?”
She steps forward then, and takes him into her arms.
“Does nothing change?” he whispers into her hair. “Does nothing ever change? Am I never going to conquer this? I am touchy; you’re quite right.”
“Sweetheart,” she says, “you don’t have to be so hard on yourself. I love you more than I know how to tell you, and you’re doing fine.”
He holds her, so close, so tender, so dearly enfolded. As if he would never, never let her go.
But for all it is so intimate, so beautiful, she knows he’ll still never tell her. Whatever Brother Cedd confided in him will be safe for eternity.