Barry Unsworth - The Ruby In Her Navel

The day before leaving I rode out to the monastery of Santo Spirito, where my father was a monk. Always, before setting out on a mission that might hold danger for me, I felt the need to see him, though he showed little interest in me, or in my life or doings. He had not lost all affection for me, but I belonged to the world outside his gates, the world he had turned his back upon.

The monastery lay in the foothills to the west of Carini, over towards the sea on that side, a morning's ride, starting early. The day was beautiful, still fresh when I set out, with the sun rising over the bay.

The plain of the Conca d'Oro opened before me with its parklands and gardens and its groves of orange trees, and the first rays touched the crags of Monte Pellino and made them glow red as fire. I cannot know now if it is merely to be wise after the event, looking back to find signs that were not truly there, but it seems now to me that I had a presentiment that morning, as I rode out so early, some foreknowledge that my life was soon to change.

I followed the plain westward as it widens in its shape of a shell, through orchards of almonds and figs, where the land on that side comes closer to the sea and the air is sharpened with salt. It was here that the Kelbite Arabs, in the days before the Normans came, founded the industries that made the island rich, sugar and cotton and silk. They mined for mercury and sulphur and silver also, but these mines have been long abandoned – my way led past some of the disused workings.

The sun was already high as I passed through Carini, a town full of stone houses, whose people have grown rich through the exporting of carob beans and dried figs, in their own ships, to every part of Italy.

An hour more and I was entering the narrow track, loose-surfaced in places and difficult for the horse, which winds steeply up on the seaward side overlooking the gulf that is named after the town and ending at the gates of the monastery.

On the terraces of olives below the walls there were men working, lay-brothers in their white habits and some who seemed common labourers.

Arriving I asked the monk on duty at the gate, who recognised me from other visits, if he would send word to my father. I waited in the cold room where we always talked together when I came to see him, a square, stone-flagged room with a raftered ceiling and a low stone bench running along one wall. I was heated from riding in the sun, urging my horse up the rough track, and I seemed to feel the chill of walls and floor on my face, a sensation familiar to me, waiting for my father in this room. To see him at all was a privilege: the Cistercian Order, to which he belonged, was founded on a strict return to the rule of St Benedict enjoining solitude and silence on the brothers. The privilege was for him, however, not for me; coming from the knightly class and bringing with him the revenues from his estate, which he had granted to the monastery in perpetuum, he was given a certain latitude. All the same, as far as I knew, I was the only one from the world beyond the monastery walls that he ever saw.

He came at last, walking slow and very upright, as always. He was tall – he had given his tallness to me; he had to incline his tonsured head a little as he passed below the stone arch of the doorway. He had laid aside cowl and scapular and wore only the white habit of his order. He apologised for the time I had spent in waiting, but gave no reason for it. He would have come from the oratory, from the singing of the midday office, I thought, in company with his fellow choir monks – the lay brethren did not take part in this. He would not have much time for me: soon there would be the afternoon liturgy that came between Sext and None. I knew all the offices and the times they kept, all the observances of my father's life. To bring him closer to me in my imagination, I had made careful study of the Benedictine Rule and read the Parvum Exordium of Steven Harding, where he gives the history of this new foundation.

He did not approach very close to me or offer to take my hand, but he smiled as he motioned to the bench, and this I took as a sign of some pleasure at my visit – I chose to take it thus, to give myself heart. He was firm of step and sure in the carriage of his body, as I always remembered him. But abstinence, which I suspected went far beyond the requirements of the Rule – St Benedict had never asked his followers to go hungry – had wasted him; every time I saw him it seemed to me that his habit was looser on his frame and the bones of his face more prominent. It was a handsome face, though very fixed and unmoving, with blue eyes like my own, and a big chin and an obstinate moulding of the mouth.

We sat together on the bench and I asked after his health. He was well, he said, with the grave courtesy that belonged to him, but his eyes did not stay on mine. I began to say something about the journey I was soon to undertake, not that to Bari, I would not have burdened him with that, but the one I was making to Calabria in my capacity of purveyor. And I was aware as I spoke, by no means for the first time, of the paradox in this: my father's retiring from the lures and pleasures of this world, had led to my career of providing them.

He listened to me and I saw a flicker of interest come into his eyes at my mention of the quarry birds I was to buy. He had had a passion for hawking in his other life; as a small boy I had sometimes gone with him, riding my pony at his side, watched him unhood the hawk and fly it loose in the hunting field, seen his pleasure when, through his own training and handling of it, a peregrine would stoop down on a grey heron, a bird accounted too big for it in the wild state, bind to it and bring it down, or else kill it with a stroke of the talons. This, and seeing him dressed for the lists, mounted on his black charger, plumed and burnished and splendid in his armour, with our colours on his shield and the pennant of his lance, were among my earliest memories of him, hardly quite believed in now, like scenes in a story I had been told and had begun to doubt, now that the storyteller had gone away and there was no one to ask.

"What type of bird will you be looking for?" he asked. "Those marshes of Calabria close by the sea, I remember them for the cranes you found there, huge birds, you could hear the ruffle of their wings when they were still far." His voice had quickened, saying this, and he raised his head as if to follow those great birds in their flight.

"One would need an eagle to take birds of that size," I said. "One of the King's golden eagles."

"The King keeps eagles for the pride of it, and it is right he should do so, for it is a kingly bird. But an eagle is not biddable enough for good hawking, it does not give heed, no skill can train it beyond a certain point. No, you need a short-winged hawk for the cranes, one that can climb quickly. A goshawk is good."

"I am hoping to get the smaller birds, the white egrets. The Royal Falconer has asked for those, as he does every year. They fly faster and change direction more swiftly and suddenly, so they make better sport."

He nodded, but that life of interest had already left his face, subdued by the long habit of discipline. He cast his eyes down and listened soberly as I talked, and I looked at his face and sought there, again fruitlessly, something to account for the decision that had brought him here, the greatest single gesture of his life. Fourteen years ago he had walked barefoot up the stony track, beat at the gate of the monastery, and asked them to take him in, denying in that moment everything he had been brought up to think of as his duty and his destiny as a Norman knight.

No clue in the face, how could there be? All the struggle was over now.