The Morning Gift

Ruth was silent, tilting the lemonade in her glass. ‘It is a pity there is no Morgan,’ she said. ‘He could help one to choose the morning gift. It would have to be something very nice so that one would not mind not having responsibilities. A St Bernard dog, perhaps.’

‘Well, there isn’t. If there was, he would probably be a Welshman from Pontypool and a rugger blue.’

‘A Welshman? Why is that?’

Quin leaned across the table and laid a hand briefly on hers. ‘Listen, Ruth, we have finished with Morgan, right? The subject is closed. I’ll fetch you at eleven from the museum; we’ll be married at noon and by the evening we’ll be on the sleeper.’

He had risen, but she did not follow suit. ‘Don’t you see, I can’t let you do this,’ she said in a low voice. ‘There must be someone in England that you want to marry.’

‘Well, there isn’t. As for your Heini, surely he’d rather you were safe and reunited with him even if it means waiting a little while before you can be married? Think how you would feel if the positions were reversed?’

‘Yes, I would do anything to be with Heini,’ she said quietly. ‘Only it isn’t fair. I can’t ask it of you and –’

But Quin was looking at the bandstand where the worst was happening. ‘For heaven’s sake, let’s get out of here,’ he said, pulling her to her feet. ‘That trout in the helmet has raised her baton.’

‘It’s Wiener Blut,’ said Ruth reproachfully, as the luscious waltz soared out over the park.

‘I don’t care what it is,’ said Quin – and fled.

5

The night had been stormy, but now the sky was clearing and over Lindisfarne, the Holy Island, a thin strip of silver light appeared, widened . . . and the sea, which minutes before had been turbulent and dark, became suddenly, unbelievably blue. Three cormorants skimmed over the water, heading for the Farnes, and from the bird-hung cliffs came the incessant mewing of the nesting kittiwakes and terns.

But the elderly lady, formidably dressed in dark purple tweeds, her iron-grey hair concealed under a woollen scarf adorned with the bridles of horses and their whips, was not gazing either at the birds, nor at the round heads of the seals bobbing off Bowmont Point. Standing on the terrace of Bowmont, she trained her binoculars on the long, golden strand of Bowmont Bay. The tide was out, revealing the rock pools at either end, and the crescent of perfect sand ran for half a mile before the next headland, but polluting its emptiness, ruining its peace, were . . . people. Three; no, more . . . A whole family, paddling and, no doubt, shrieking, though they were mercifully out of earshot. She could make out a man and a woman, and another woman . . . a grandmother. And a child. Not fishermen or village people going about their business.

‘Trippers!’ pronounced Miss Somerville. Her voice was deep, her outrage total.

They would have to go. They would have to be shooed away. It was happening more and more. People came up from Newcastle or down from Berwick. Holiday-makers, tourists, defiling the empty places, catching shrimps, wearing idiotic clothes . . .

Bowmont had been built on a promontory: an old peel tower to which, generations ago, had been added a wing of ochre stone. Lonely, wind-buffeted, its history was Northumbria’s own – raided by the Danes from the sea, by the Scots from the land, besieged by Warwick the Kingmaker; ruined and rebuilt.

Turner had painted it in a turbulent sunset, a sailing boat listing dangerously at the base of its sea-lashed cliffs. St Cuthbert, on Lindisfarne, had preached to the eider ducks which still nested on Bowmont Point, and from the white needle of Longstone lighthouse, Grace Darling had rowed into legend, bringing rescue to the shipwrecked wretches on Harcar Rock. Quin, as a child, had known exactly where God lived. Not in the Holy Land as painted in his illustrated bible, but in the swirling, ever-changing, cloud-wracked sky above his home.

Frances Somerville had been forty years old, a spinster still living at home, when old Quinton Somerville, the legendary and terrifying ‘Basher’, retired from the navy, had sent for her.

‘I’m going to die soon,’ the Basher had said. ‘I want you to come to Bowmont and look after the boy till he’s of age.’

Frances had refused. She disliked the old man, who had made no secret of the fact that as a plain, unmarried woman, she was entirely without consequence. Then Quin, aged ten, was sent for and introduced.

‘I’ll come when you’re dead,’ Frances said that evening – but she did not believe that the bucolic old reprobate was anywhere near his end.

She was wrong. The Basher was found dead on a garden seat not three months later, and in his own way he had played fair, for he had left her a comfortable annuity out of his admittedly vast estate. Since then she had been Bowmont’s guardian and its chatelaine and with Quin so often away on his travels, that meant keeping it free from invaders, from the creeping stain of tourism and so-called modern life.