The Morning Gift

Ruth shut the diary. ‘Poor man,’ she said quietly. ‘But why do you embalm him? You should grow radishes, like Mishak.’

‘What?’ For a moment he wondered whether her brain had been affected by the accident.

‘Marianne didn’t like radishes. His wife. He never grew them when she was alive. When she died, he said, “Now I must grow radishes or she will remain under the ground.” He meant that the dead must be allowed to move about freely inside us, they musn’t be encapsulated, made finite by their prejudices.’ She paused, moving her hair out of her eyes in a gesture with which he was utterly familiar. ‘He grows a lot of radishes and I don’t like them very much as it happens, but I eat them. All of us eat them.’ She paused. ‘Perhaps it’s right to give Bowmont away; I don’t know about that, and it’s none of my business – but surely it must be because you want to, not because of what you think he might have wanted? He would have grown and changed and seen things differently perhaps. Look how you hated me this afternoon – but you have not always done so and perhaps one day you will do so no longer.’

Quin looked at her, started to speak. Then he took the diary and locked it up again in the bureau. ‘Come,’ he said, ‘I think it’s time you met the Basher.’

He took his old tweed jacket off the peg behind the door and put it round her shoulders. As he led her downstairs, he made no attempt to be unheard, switching on lights as he came to them, walking with a firm tread. He knew exactly what he would do if they were discovered and that it would cause him no moment of unease.

They made their way down the corridor that connected the tower with the body of the house and as he steered her, one hand on her back, through the rooms, she touched, here and there, the black shabby leather chair, the surface of a worn, much-polished table, learning Quin’s house, and liking what she learnt. Inside the fortress was an unpretentious home, and the hallmark of the woman who had been its curator was everywhere. Aunt Frances, who had left Quin alone, had left his house alone also. There was none of the forbidding grandeur Ruth had imagined; only a place waiting quietly for those who wished to come.

But this was a journey with a particular end, and by the far wall of the library, Quin stopped. In Aunt Frances’s flannel nightgown, Quin’s jacket hanging loose from her shoulders, Ruth stared at the portrait of Rear Admiral Quinton Henry Somerville in his heavy golden frame.

The Basher had been seventy when the portrait was commissioned by his parishioners and the artist, a local worthy, had clearly done his best to flatter his sitter, but his success had been moderate. The Basher’s cheeks, for which a great deal of rose madder had been required, showed the broken veins caused by the whisky and the weather; his short, surprisingly snub nose was touched at the tip with purple. In spite of his grand dress uniform and the bull neck rising from its braided collar, Quin’s grandfather, with his small mouth, bald pate and obstinate blue eyes, resembled nothing so much as an ill-tempered baby.

‘And yet,’ said Ruth, ‘there is something . . .’

‘There’s something all right. Pig-headedness, ferocity . . . in the navy he bullied his officers; he thought flogging was good for the ratings. He married for money – a lot of money – and treated his wife abominably. And when he died, every single soul in North Northumberland came to the funeral and shook their heads and said that the good times were past and England would never be the same again.’

‘Yes, I can see that it might be so.’

‘He despised my father because he liked poetry – because he liked to be with his mother in the garden. He was terrified that he’d bred a coward. Cowardice frightened him; it was the only thing that did – to have a son who was a weakling. My father was wretched at school – he went when he was seven and he cried himself to sleep every night for years. He hated sailing, hated the sea. He was a gentle soul and the Basher despised him from the bottom of his heart. He was determined that my father should go into the navy, but my father wouldn’t. He stood up to him over that. Then at fifteen he ran away to one of his mother’s relatives. She took him abroad and he joined the Diplomatic Service and did very well – but he never went back to Bowmont. He loathed everything it stood for – power, privilege, Philistinism – the contempt for the things he valued. Yet you see when it came to the point, he risked my mother’s life so that it could all go on.’

Ruth was silent, looking at the portrait, wondering why this ferocious Englishman should have a nose like Beethoven’s, wondering why she did not dislike that hard old face.

‘But you liked him?’