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No man makes the Curia by accident. No man makes his way to a bishopric, even, by accident.
No man but one.
Aldo was trying very hard to like the new Holy Father. He set to it as grimly as he set to his prayers lately; as grimly as, when a child, he had set himself to the task of learning the psalms, the catechism, the liturgy.
He was trying and he was failing. Aldo did not much like the taste of failure, but it had become exceedingly familiar in recent months. First he had failed at the papacy; then he had failed at the moral test of courage; finally, he had failed at reconciling properly with Thomas. Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin resounded in his ears whenever they made eye contact which these days, just to really ram the point home, was not often.
The thing was, he had thought they’d made up! That heartwarming little interlude, his own carefully phrased apologies, Thomas’s indirect admission to ambition, a charmingly intimate fallibility handed over. John. Aldo could have managed a John XXIV, particularly one wearing the face of such a beloved old friend. He was less sure he could manage an Innocent XIV.
Thomas’s politics were polite and neutral. He was firm, gentle, lacking in real drive despite his astounding boldness during the conclave. He would respond well to direction, and he would be kind. Sabbadin and Aldo could help him, Sabbadin for the practicalities, the political wrangling, Aldo for the theology of it, the heavy-weight thinking. Contemplating politics at a time like that….
But Benítez, Christ. Who knew what the hell his politics were, or if he even had any? Service was not politics. Mercy was not politics. Compassion, whatever Tedesco had to say on the matter, was also not politics. He’d run his diocese, he’d done aid-cum-missionary work in the Congo, so he knew something of logistics. But politics? Court politics, rather than the politics of a gun in the face? Like hell. The optics of a situation had probably never entered his mind in his life. He acted without check or without consideration for the long term.
Thomas, half-laughing, had mentioned that the man had said he was not afraid of schism. To hell with saviours and angels, Aldo wasn’t entirely sure he wasn’t the Antichrist.
OK, that came a little too close to Tedesco-territory for comfort.
And all those hidden tests of the Holy Father. Aldo could not believe the old man had meant for a Benítez papacy straight off his own. Too much relied on chance – all right, yes, too much would have relied on the indetectable and unfathomable hand of God.
No, the old man had thought to live longer. He had groomed Aldo for it. Quite possibly he had seen Sabbadin or Lawrence as a decent back up. Cardinal Ré, maybe? Tremblay, before he’d erred so completely.
The old man was a lot more fire and brimstone, black and white than he’d guessed. Going by the notes, a lot less forgiving too.
What was it about their little lost cardinal that rubbed him the wrong way and had right from the start? Aldo hated things out of order. Half his politics were a desire for a comprehensive dealing with the realities of life, a boxing away and a labelling, a defining, of things the Church otherwise felled with comprehensive condemnation. The world of theology and doctrine was his world, but it played out in the material world too. The Eucharist, surely, the highest possible example of the spiritual made tangible.
The dislike was clearly mutual. That steely coolness was directed his way. A small smile aimed in Lawrence’s direction dropped into what in a less holy man might have been a grimace at the sight of Aldo.
And there was the jealousy too, of course.
The very obvious partiality Lawrence had for Benítez, that had begun at the same time as Aldo’s own dislike. The way the small amount of personal time they both had, which had always been spent together, was now spent apart.
How to make up with Thomas? What could he say (except the truth) that Thomas would accept? I’m jealous you’re still so in demand these days, and I’m not? It wasn’t true, or not true enough, and Thomas would know it.
His arsenal of friendly gestures was depleted. Aldo knew that taking Thomas out to dinner was an exercise in embarrassment for them both. Pick, pick, unless you got him relaxed enough to forget himself. That was harder going, these days, labouring under the burden of one’s own sins. And the knowledge that Thomas was in love with someone else.
Un-fucking-bearable. Thirty years. Thirty years! Aldo hadn’t even been in love with Thomas for that whole duration, that was what was so galling. At the start he had wanted to fuck him, and then he had been platonically fond of him, and then at some point during the past five years or so it had snuck up behind him and coshed him over the head. Congratulations, you are in love with Thomas Lawrence. Do you want some painkillers to go with the inevitable accompanying migraine?
Was it during the cancer? Or the moment the Holy Father had brought them in to discuss the logistics of Aldo’s ascension to Secretary of State, Thomas’s election – it hadn’t been a demotion – to the office of Dean, and Aldo had accidentally caught Thomas’s eye and seen a welter of unending hurt and concealed pain? Or some more mundane moment. Glancing over at Thomas during mass to see him gazing up at the ceiling. Catching him asleep at his desk and feeling a surge of affection for this man with all his human frailties. Laughing together during dinner with the Holy Father at the Casa Santa Marta.
The fine down that Thomas’s hair had degenerated into. His good strong hands, never used for anything more violent than penning a strongly worded reproof. His alarming blue eyes which had been even worse when they were young, like receiving a mild electric shock. His contained stride, which said he would have liked to be moving faster but age and the dignity of his office prevented him.
That was the polite, tender version. With came a resurgence of youthful lust. Aldo did sometimes still fantasise about Thomas as he had been then but he wasn’t so lost in a haze of misplaced romanticism that he didn’t also imagine Thomas as he would be now. His body would have changed (not that Aldo had ever seen it). The flesh on his frame would be looser, the hair round his cock grey and thinned out. Did those liver spots (which bred such awful affection in Aldo when he caught sight of them) extend further across Thomas’s body? He must struggle to become aroused, between age and his illness. Aldo would have had to excite him, to coax him, wheedle him into a state of longing. Thomas’s embarrassment (inevitable), his nervousness and uncertainty – that would be endearing too. Aldo would be in charge and as had been quite recently affirmed to him with unnecessary strength, Aldo liked to be in charge.
Politics had come between them a little even before the conclave. When Thomas had resigned as Secretary of State, Aldo had sorrowed for his friend’s ill health. He’d prayed for him night and day in the midst of his work, that passionate and all consuming work he loved. He'd always wanted it. It cost Thomas, and the awful thing was Aldo had still wanted it anyway. He had felt bad but not bad enough. Father, let this cup pass – and Aldo had been too busy grabbing the chalice with both hands.
Aldo took comfort in the reassuring bonds of celibacy. The chances of Thomas wanting to break that vow are nil. It was not that he did not desire. It was that he was a masochist. He took more pleasure in his own denial than in the most willing, aroused and debauched lover in the world.
Ah, God, when they’d first met, how handsome Thomas had been. So handsome and so – not shy, exactly. Untouchable, perhaps. Noli me tangere – which only made one want to touch more. Aldo could recall Thomas had had serious trouble, in his first two parishes, with female parishioners.
It was a tale as old as time. Of course it was very grave if the priest requited that undue interest of the lonely amongst his flock, but Aldo couldn’t help but feel it would have been better if Thomas had. It was almost worst that Thomas so clearly didn’t, yet was pursued by a horde of women of various ages anyway. It bordered on the absurd, and nowadays he supposed they would say it bordered on sexual harassment.
Aldo could recall, too, the catty comments of the diocesan. Thomas had got himself promoted to Rome essentially out of self-defence, and Aldo had the sneaking suspicion those of their superiors more benevolent than their bishop had seen it that way too.
For the sake of your chastity, Father Lawrence, for the sake of your unblemished reputation, and more importantly, for the sake of the rather less unblemished reputation of the Church and also in the hopes of a return to an atmosphere of worshipful decorum rather than that of a teeny bopper’s concert during weekday Mass at St Barnabas, hie thee to Rome with all due haste.
But now the unpleasant fact dawned that apparently Thomas’s chastity had not been so important to him after all. He simply needed to meet somebody he wanted badly enough.
Aldo doubted, in all honesty, that Benítez had even noticed. He did not know Thomas well enough; he did not know him before, well enough to know that he was changed. Revitalised. Joyful, even, on some occasions. A decorous joy but it came through him, light coming through the chinks of broken stained glass and ending the darkness of the church.
A miserable man in all his ways. God, how Aldo loved him.
And there was the attendant, less selfish fear too, that Benítez, who was so remorseless with himself, would be no less so with Thomas.
Sex, at their age! God, it wouldn’t even enter Benítez’s head, would it, that his beloved Dean could feel such an impure emotion for him.
Or maybe it would. Benítez was worldly, had seen the terrible aftermath of the sexual act time and time again during his ministry. But homosexual desire – how much of that could he have seen, working with women as he had done?
He wouldn’t even know how to go about it, Aldo thought meanly. Neither would Thomas. The fumbling of old, impotent and incompetent bodies, two elderly virgins trying to fit their flesh together in the dark – how tawdry. How sad.
*
Red wine always made him think of his youth. His youth and, the inevitable sequel, Thomas’s youth too.
Learned, quiet, shy, making a name for himself. A warm evening, a little vino rosso, some light teasing and he relaxed.
‘What is it, Aldo?’ Giulio said, showing his exasperation by resorting to English. They were sharing a vile bottle of Californian (out of Aldo’s misplaced patriotism) over lunch.
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Aldo said as lightly as he could. ‘The weather… the time of year… a change in the water.’
Giulio rolled his eyes. ‘The new Holy Father,’ he guessed.
Aldo shook his head. ‘Really, no. I might find his politics a little – naïve, but I’m not at odds. Really, I’m not, Giulio.’
‘It would be understandable if you felt complicated,’ Giulio said slowly. This was a concession on his part. He had no sympathy with nostalgia or might-have-beens.
‘It’s not that, Giulio, you know I didn’t want it. Not truly.’
He was immediately fixed by a knowing look. ‘Better luck next time…?’ he suggested.
‘Stop.’
‘Then it’s Lawrence after all,’ Giulio said triumphantly. As Aldo dropped his head to his hands and groaned he laughed. ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I couldn’t think it was anything else but you’d never have admitted it if you didn’t think I was suspecting you of unworthy thoughts.’
Aldo could feel his face burning. ‘Yes, it’s Lawrence.’ He paused, and then forged on. If not Giulio, who knew Lawrence well and had his sum as he had the sum of every man in the Curia, then who? ‘I don’t know what to do.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘We’re not… speaking. Not really. Not properly.’
‘He’s caught up in the transitional period, he’ll get over it,’ Sabbadin said dismissively.
‘No, that’s not it. We – well, to tell you the truth, we argued. During the conclave. I thought we’d got past it but now I know I was wrong.’
‘You’ve argued before, though.’
In fact they hadn’t. Aldo had never before argued with Thomas about anything, not even where to go for lunch. Not even heated debate, only ever calm and rational discussion ending in reconciliation of opinion. Presumably they disagreed on some things; none of them had ever been raised.
When they first met he had felt blessed by Christ to have this smooth companionship. Later they grew apart, their paths diverged but at the base of it always surely that likeness, spirit calling to spirit.
In lieu of explaining this to Giulio and being labelled a sentimentalist, Aldo said ‘Mmm,’ and drained his glass.
*
Aldo had sometimes wondered what happened exactly to make Thomas the way he was. Whether he was born like that tor took their faith too rigidly, the terrible torments an early religious education can in the wrong guiding hands inflict. Or whether as seemed more likely, more boringly cliché, something happened in his childhood.
Thomas never talked about it. He never talked about his parents. Aldo found out only ten years into their friendship that Thomas had no siblings. He had admitted early on to a boarding school education, but Aldo only discovered where when a few years ago bored he googled Thomas’ Wikipedia page. He had had a vague idea that the English packed them off young, but he could not have said how young Thomas had been. It was not that he enjoyed discussing his own past, but sharing a few selected titbits with his closer companions, drawing them closer, that was human nature, surely, natural conversation. My father taught high school, my mother was a homemaker, I grew up in a small town in New Jersey, I have a sister and two brothers. He had shared these things with Thomas, and Thomas had not requited them.
Even that: a cold English childhood, the disruption to the parent-child relationship occasioned by the separation, the early religiosity - it just didn’t enough. Sometimes Aldo suspected Thomas himself didn’t know. What went wrong was stored inside a strongbox inside Thomas’s mind, and he never looked inside. He’d forgotten it.
Aldo could not even say where he was born. His father according to Wikipedia was in the Foreign Office, posted overseas in the year of Thomas’s birth - so was he born in Lebanon where his father was stationed, or had his mother gone back to England for the birth?
Aldo could of course have asked Thomas all this. He knew he would get an answer, however abbreviated, but he never would ask. He wanted Thomas to volunteer. He wanted Thomas to tell him everything of his own volition.
The facts didn’t satisfy. He preferred to know nothing if Thomas wouldn’t bare his soul to him.
Would it be a relief to Thomas to talk about it? Maybe but Aldo was selfish. It wouldn’t relieve him to let Thomas sidle round these personal things. It wouldn’t satiate him if he knew in which hospital Thomas was born but not if his mother loved him; if he learnt that he had dogs growing up, but not whether he had kissed a girl in his early teens or if his father beat him.
He wanted all of Thomas’ hurt and heart or none of it. He wanted Thomas’ happiness to be his or he – NO. He did want Thomas to be happy, even if he himself were not the source of that happiness and could not share in it. Didn’t he?
On that lowering thought, Aldo retired to bed.
*
The next night, Aldo had experienced a bout of insomnia, to be taken up with a little light reading (Jane Austen, his guilty pleasure) or perhaps revisions to his newest article.
Instead, at 3am: a hammering on his door, the strained, pained Aldo, Aldo that could only come from one mouth.
He opened the door and let Thomas in.
Thomas was dressed down in a ragged blue jumper and an appalling pair of ancient trousers that might have belonged to his father. He looked like any other Englishman of a certain age and class except for the wild look he wore, an expression Aldo had never seen before on him in his life.
‘Will you take my confession?’ he said without so much as a hello.
‘Of course,’ Aldo said automatically, ‘But Thomas, why? It’s late,’ and oh Christ Thomas’s face was crumpling, he was dissolving, impossibly into sobs.
Aldo managed to get him into the living room and onto a sofa where he hunched, still weeping, in abject misery. Aldo sat down next to him and cautiously put an arm around him.
‘Talk to me. Talk to me first and then if you still want to, I’ll take your confession.’
‘I – Aldo, I don’t know what to do. I must resign.’
‘What?’
‘I have sinned. I have erred, grievously, and I see no means of amending.’
‘Sinned how?’ Aldo said, dread in his mouth. He already knew how.
Thomas opened his mouth, paused, and then shut it again. His hands were clenched on his knees. Helplessly, he looked up at Aldo.
‘Thomas,’ Aldo said, and stopped. It felt inadequate but he had called Thomas ‘Tom’ on exactly one singular occasion and the strained, forbearing wince (neither really covered it) it produced persuaded him never to do it again.
‘I have fallen in love.’
Aldo would not have expected to pry those words out of him with a pair of flaming pliers. His mouth fell open in shock. Thomas, clearly misreading it as horrified condemnation, flinched and shrivelled further into himself, then hurried on.
‘I couldn’t help it, I didn’t know. I swear to God, Aldo, I didn’t know what was happening, if I had I would have left, I would have, I wouldn’t sully him with my, my wretched feelings, my unnatural and degenerate desires –’
He continued in this vein for some time. It was clearly not cathartic to him. It was mortification, and wasn’t that just like Thomas, good Catholic on the one hand, good Englishman on the other, to miserably brace himself to withstand something wild horses wouldn’t have persuaded Aldo to do.
In the storm of emotion being laid on his lap, Aldo had not missed that Thomas had said ‘he’. But he suspected Thomas had.
Finally he put up one hand. Thomas ground to a halt, looked up at Aldo with mute, pleading eyes.
He might as well have said out loud, Fix it, Aldo. Fix it for me, please.
Aldo said, heart in his mouth, ‘Who are you in love with, Thomas?’
He was not above mortification of his own. He wanted to hear Thomas say what he himself had never dared.
‘The Holy Father,’ Thomas said blankly, then slapped his hands over his mouth.
‘Ah,’ Aldo said. ‘Ah.’ He removed his arm from Thomas’s shoulders and stood.
It shouldn’t have hurt. Aldo had known it, and he had made Thomas say it. It really should not have hurt.
Turning back to the couch, he saw Thomas was clutching at his sides, watching Aldo with big, awful eyes. They were in their sixties. No man should look like that at another. And for such a cause, such a fucking cause.
Caution and virtue to the wind. Aldo opened his mouth and let the snake slither out.
‘Yes, I agree, you do have to resign.’
Thomas’s face had already collapsed. No more grief could fit on it. The bereft look he gave to Aldo was merely an extension of it. But the way he turned his head away, ashamed; the way he cast his gaze down and could not meet Aldo’s eye; the way he clenched his fists and then forced them to release, resisting the terrible sin of expressing emotion through the body: it all told what Aldo can pick out from the wreck of his face.
Thomas genuinely felt the should resign - but he had expected Aldo to talk him out of it. Had hoped for it, even. To be persuaded against his nature as Aldo so often had done for him before, the performance of a small miracle of trust and love time and time again.
Thomas must love him too, Aldo thought wretchedly. To trust him to do that for him, like a child wholly reliant on its mother, rushing to her to have its hurts fixed. Thomas, so private, so morbidly self-punishing, he must love Aldo to be able to let his guard down like that.
But not in the way Aldo loved him.
Love and lust in old age, just when they all began to think of setting aside the problem of fleshly concupiscence. Another betrayal of the body, for a man who already hated his.
And now here was Aldo, who had always (or nearly always, his regrettable behaviour at the conclave aside) said No, you are worthy, no, you are loved, saying instead You are as rotten as you think you are. Get out of here before the corruption spreads. Go, before you defile what is holy. Go and repent, go and self-flagellate. He, who had always tried to counsel without words, Be gentler with yourself, Thomas. He who had never spoken about the fasting, the small petty cruelties, the avoidance of comforts, but who had passed him a sandwich, touched his hand affectionately, packed him off to bed early, lent him a coat or a pair of gloves. He whom Thomas had thought he could trust not to visit cruelty. Not to counsel harshness.
Saying always with his actions or trying to, I love you, I love you, I love you.
This one time, Aldo couldn’t bear to proffer that love. That – wholly inadequate love, that Thomas must know to some degree, to have come here, to rely on it to make Aldo be kind to him. How dare he ask Aldo to do that? How dare he ask Aldo to sanction his love for another man?
Off he would have gone, shining with happiness and Aldo’s absolution, and who was Aldo fooling, Benítez would have been understanding. He so evidently returned Thomas’s feelings. It would be insanity to act on those feelings, but Aldo imagined they could have come to a détente. Christian companionship! Platonic amity! And absolutely no fucking.
Leaving Aldo alone in his sin and unhappiness. To lose his friend to fucking Benítez had been bad enough. To see them as lovers, even sexless lovers – no, no, a thousand times no. What was he, a fucking saint? A martyr to Thomas Lawrence’s sexual awakening? To his obliviousness?
Thirty years. Thirty years, and for a man you have known not even ten months, you are prepared to count the world well lost.
Aldo’s confession that week was going to be long, long, long.
He had destroyed his friend in doing this. Thomas would go now to some severe monastery some cold and cruel bolthole, and he would pray and work and kill himself long before his body died. He would live out the years in misery.
Maybe he would find a sort of peace there in the misery though Aldo did not think it likely. Thomas Lawrence was not built for happiness or contentment or even an anodyne cold stark tranquillity.
Aldo would be quite as miserable himself, without him. He would suffer for his friend and know himself to be the sinful cause of unhappiness. Yes, Aldo would suffer.
But the ruling thought in his head as he settled back on the couch and put a consoling arm around Thomas was: And so will Benítez.