Barry Unsworth - The Ruby In Her Navel

He had held his fief as a vassal of the Duke of Apulia, to whom he had vowed his service. In fulfilment of this vow he had left home to take part in the Duke's wars against Robert of Capua, whose forces, aided by a contingent of German knights under Henry the Proud of Bavaria, were besieging Salerno. In a skirmish outside the walls he had been taken by the Capuans and kept six months in prison while they haggled over the ransom. During this time my mother, who had been pregnant when he left for the wars, died in childbirth, and he who would have been my brother died with her.

The ransom left us poorer, but it was not this that so changed the course of my life, nor was it the loss of my mother, much as I grieved for her. The land was tenanted, with thrift the loss could have been made good. It was my father who ruined us, making the estates over to the monastery, together with his own person, and the rents that went with them. By a chance I could not help regarding as malign, the earlier devotion of the Cistercians to poverty, their refusal to accept manorial endowments, had for some time been relaxed. And so, at a stroke, I was disinherited.

Part of the pain of this was not to know why. I was sixteen years old, I loved my father, I would have put all my mind to understanding him. But he had never spoken of it to me, never tried to explain. He had never talked to me of the solace he had found here or the grace he had discovered; he had never, that I could remember, uttered God's name. And in the years that followed the resentment that came to dress the wound had prevented me from asking. Had he witnessed some scene of cruelty or carnage that had charged his soul with horror for war? But he was no stranger to bloodshed. Perhaps in that prolonged captivity his heart had changed, he had discovered a love of solitude or a need for it, made greater by sorrow at the death of my mother, or even remorse, as if it might have been prevented had he been there by her side – theirs had been a love-match, so I remember my mother telling me.

Whatever the cause, it had cost me dear. Once again, as I looked at the face that was slightly turned from me, and spoke to him – I was talking now of recent events in Palermo – I was struck by the strange congruity of our lives. Those barefoot steps that had taken him from knight to monk had taken me by degrees from aspirant knight to the Office of Control and its workings, open and hidden. We had both, in our different ways, gone into hiding. On that December day when my father begged for admittance at the monastery gate I had been within eighteen months of my dubbing as knight; I had been trained to arms from the age of ten and I was gifted in it; all my heart was in achieving knighthood, it was all in the world that I wanted.

This disappointment, and the reproach I felt in my heart, lay always between us; it was between us now as we sat together there. When I might still have been freed from it he had kept himself away, behind these walls. It was too late to speak of it now. On this visit, as always before, I spoke of things that might interest him, among them what I had learned from Demetrius, that the Byzantine mosaicists were leaving with their work still unfinished, to be replaced by others of the Roman liturgy, Italians from the mainland and some Franks from beyond the Alps.

With this topic I succeeded in rousing some interest in him, but his feeling about the matter was the reverse of mine; he approved of it entirely. "They should all be expelled," he said. "Or kept below ground in dungeons. It is wrong that they should be allowed to walk the streets of our cities."

"Well," I said, "I do not see them as dangerous, but of course, speaking strictly, they are enemies to our realm, now that their emperor is preparing to invade us."

"Not dangerous? Not dangerous when they paint their faces and pad their bodies and go abroad in the clothing of women?"

"There are some who behave in this manner, so much is true. The population of Palermo is very great and many are the needs there that seek satisfaction."

"Needs," he said, and he looked at me as if I were a stranger.

"Franks and Saracens and Lombards could be found who do the same."

"No, it is a vice of the Byzantine Greeks. That is common knowledge.

They darken their eyelids and hang rings from their ears."

Common knowledge where? Inside these walls? I felt the usual stirring of dislike for these communities of monks, a feeling I knew to be childish and unjust, as many worthy men, and scholars of note among them, have lived cloistered lives. But it was bred by my father's desertion, the ruining of my dreams of glory. He thought of the Byzantine Greeks as decadent and womanish and as poor soldiers, and this was not anything to do with his life in the monastery – what did he see of them? It came from his life of before, it was the common prejudice of the class to which he had belonged, to which he still belonged in some part of him.

The Greek was womanish, the Lombard was treacherous, the Saracen was a worthy foe… The years of toil in the fields, of prayers and vigils, of mortifying the flesh, had made no smallest difference to these views of his.

As I say, anger with him made me childish. I wanted to say that I preferred the company of Greeks to that of Normans, which in fact was true; I wanted to ask him if darkening the eyelids was not better, since it might be thought by some to improve the appearance, than shaving the pate clean and leaving a fringe all round, which could not be thought by any to do so.

But of course I did not. My feelings for him were divided but I could not have hurt or offended him. I had love for him, and something else that was not love but in some way bound up with it, something stronger than merely blaming: I felt he had betrayed me, that he betrayed me over again at every parting. Always, as the parting approached, I tried to bring him closer and to punish him by using those powers of speculation that Yusuf had fostered in me, figuring to myself the life to which he was returning. And always my imaginings leapt over the daylight hours and lingered on the night, and this, I think, because I so much hate the dark. I saw him lying in the common dormitory, still clothed in his habit; he would have been sleeping there since nightfall. Then, in the darkness, long before first light, the bells would ring for matins and he would rise still full of sleep, and fumble to put on his night shoes.

He would throw the covers over his bed, he would put on his cowl to go to the privy – to go bare-headed was forbidden, I knew this from my reading, but the wherefore of it was not said, and such a question I could never have asked him, but supposed these functions of the body, performed always in company with others, were too intimate for the face to be shown, each was protected by not knowing who squatted beside him.

All this while the bell would still be sounding, they would shuffle down the stairs into the cavern of the church, dark here too save for some scattered light of candles, and assemble in the choir to sing the night offices.

There was always some horror for me in this thought, that my father, once so splendid to view in face and form, should submit himself to this night-time hooding and groping, that he should have become a person of the night to me, when he had been like the sun. He had been a knight of modest estate and modest following, but he had been my model of all a knight should be. I was my own model now, and far from perfect I found it. Perhaps some of the sadness of this knowledge showed in my face as we said goodbye, because this time he clasped my arm for a moment and his eyes looked into mine and we saw each other and there was something that perhaps he would have said to me, but the moment passed and he drew back.