It stayed light until very late, the dusk a thread pulled taut, blue then silver. Sitting in his place, a lashed barrel on the boat’s port side, he took out his fiddle and searched the wood with his fingertips. It had, he decided, survived its night in Glasgow better than he had. He did not even think it was much out of tune. He rubbed the hair of the bow with a nub of rosin and began a prelude by Purcell, but his fingers were cold and he stopped and slid his left hand under the long hair on the flank of the nearest cow. It was snug in there and the animal seemed not to object to his touch. When his fingers were warmed he started to play again. He could only remember the first thirty bars or so, and he played them twice, with a tempo suggested more by the sea than by Purcell. The men at the stern were figures in stone but he felt them attending to him, and for the minutes he was playing there was an enchantment he had hardly known before with music. Perhaps it was only the drug. He didn’t care. Let it be so. If so, then good. He played, he finished, he stowed the fiddle in its case, rested the case across his lap. He thought of his old music master at Wells, the room in the cathedral where history slept like a dog. (It was always wintry in there and they had started each lesson with a song to bring the blood to their cheeks, to get them breathing. “Ah, Silly Soul,” that was a favourite. So too “Awake, Sweet Love,” though pitched too high for them.) Then his thoughts moved to his father, to the songs in the books, the wild flowers, and he seemed to see him, a tiny figure, toy-like, very distant, coming down the stairs of the house, not to the hall but to the sea . . .

His father had loved him! He had no reason to doubt it. But could that love still touch him? Was love, once given, always possessed? A gift, a quality, you could scatter over your head like sacred ashes when you had need of it?