The Morning Gift

Now in her sixtieth year, big-nosed, tight-lipped, with sparse grey hair and fierce blue eyes, her opinion of the human race was low. An abandoned seal pup, a puffin with a broken wing, could count on Miss Somerville for help; a human in a similar plight would be lucky to get a cup of tea in the servants’ quarters. Once, rumour had it, it had been different. She had been sought in marriage by a Scottish nobleman, despatched to his house to be looked over . . . but it had come to nothing, and the shy, plain girl became the formidable spinster, respected by all and loved by nobody.

A gardener’s boy came across the terrace, carrying a rake.

‘You! George!’ called Miss Somerville, and the boy scuttled towards her and touched his cap.

‘Yes, Miss Somerville.’

‘Tell Turton there are trippers at the end of the bay. They must be removed.’

‘Yes, miss.’

The boy hurried away and Miss Somerville turned her binoculars to the other side of the promontory. Here, in the relative shelter of the curving cliff there was a smaller bay, the sand dotted with rocks and dark drifts of seaweed. Anchorage Bay, it was called, and in the previous century boats had tied up at the little jetty, there had been fishermen living in the row of cottages and cobles drawn up on the beach.

Those days were gone and Quin had converted the boat-house and two of the cottages into a lab and dormitory for the students he brought up for his field course. More people who did not belong, she thought wearily, more defilement and chatter. Last year one of the girls had worn a two-piece bathing costume and Miss Somerville’s early morning viewing through her binoculars had revealed the completely exposed midriff of a girl from Surbiton.

The gardener’s boy reappeared.

‘Please, miss, Mr Turton says as they’re between the tides, so he can’t shoo ’em off right now. And he says to tell you, miss, that Lady Rothley telephoned and she’s coming at eleven.’

Miss Somerville tightened her lips. The tide-marks . . . the infuriating ancient law that decreed that the shore between low tide and high tide belonged to everyone. It was nonsense, of course. To get there they had come over Somerville land – the fields behind the bay all belonged to Quin and she made sure that the gates were kept locked.

For a moment, she felt old and discouraged. This was not her world. Beyond the point was ancient Dunstanburgh with a golf course now lapping its ruined towers. Trippers could creep in that way too and make their way to Bowmont. She was like King Canute, struggling uselessly against the defilement of the human race.

And Quin didn’t really help her. Quin had ideas that she tried to understand but couldn’t. Miss Somerville loved no one; it was a point of honour with her to have banished this destructive emotion from her breast, but Quin was Quin and she would have jumped off the cliff for him without further consideration. And yet from this boy, whom she herself had reared, came ideas and theories that she would not have expected to read even in the Socialist gutter press. Quin did not chase trippers off his land, merely requesting them to close the gates; he had acknowledged a right of way across the dunes to Bowmont Mill, and now there was talk of one day . . . not while she lived, perhaps . . . but one day, giving Bowmont to the National Trust.

The dreaded words made Miss Somerville shiver. The sun had established full dominion now; the terns were white arrows against the indigo of the water; harebells and yarrow and clusters of pink thrift glowed in the turf, but Miss Somerville, usually so observant, saw only the spectre of the future. A car park in the Lower Meadow, refreshment kiosks, charabancs with stinking exhaust pipes unloading trippers in the forecourt. Poor Frampton had done it, given his home away, and there were vulgar little green huts at the gates of Frampton Court and men in caps like doormen punching tickets, and a tea room and souvenir stall. But Frampton had an excuse; he was bankrupt. Quin had no such excuse. The farm was in profit, the rents from the village brought in sufficient revenue to see to repairs, and his inheritance from the Basher had left him a wealthy man. For Quin to give away his heritage was irresponsible and mad.

She turned and went in through a door beside the tower, to a store room which she had turned into a kennel for her Labradors.

‘How are they, Martha?’

‘Fine, Miss Frances. Just fine.’

Martha had been sent to her as a lady’s maid, but Miss Somerville, returning from her broken engagement on the Border, had refused any nonsense to do with dressing up and frippery, and Martha now looked after the dogs.

The puppies were sucking: five blissful, ever-swelling bags of milk whose mother thumped her tail in greeting and let her head fall back again onto the straw.

There was good blood there. Comely had been mated in Wales – Miss Somerville had taken her there herself and it had been a bother, but it always paid to get decent stock.