Jonathan nodded. ‘Which politician was it who used to say that fulfilment in life came from practising “the art of the possible”? Anyway, I’ll read your book within the next few weeks and we’ll take it from there.’ They discussed other topics after that, discovering shared enthusiasms for fly-fishing and music until it was time for Jonathan to turn to his other side and talk to his hostess.

Apart from the members of the course and Jonathan Mercer, Giles and Isobel had invited Lord Dunbarnock, an old family friend, the chairman of the trustees and certainly Glendrochatt’s chief benefactor. His caricature was painted on the backdrop, but in real life he seemed even stranger than his depiction. His passion for vintage cars, of which he had a famous collection, sat uneasily alongside a lifelong phobia about germs – the legacy of an over-zealous nanny in his childhood – so that he spent his life getting his hands covered in engine grease and general grime while he tuned throttles and tinkered with carburettors, and then obsessively scouring them for fear lurking bacteria might smite him with some dread disease. It was rumoured that he kept antiseptic wipes in his sporran and his hands always had a raw, chapped look even in summer. Today, despite the balmy weather he was dressed in his habitual garb of kilt, tweed jacket, hairy shooting stockings and vast brogues. He presented a tall and cadaverously thin figure, but it was his long grizzled hair worn in a pigtail down his back that was the real surprise about his appearance. In his youth he had taken a bet that he wouldn’t go a year without shaving or having his hair cut. He had won the bet, but the hirsute habit had remained: his one gesture of defiance to his terrifying old gorgon of a mother. Recently he had stunned the locality by having his beard shaved off for the first time in over forty years. Giles, who was extremely fond of him and took liberties that no one else dared to do, had suggested that the Scottish Tourist Board had listed a sighting of an unshaven Dunbarnock chin as one of the great moments of Scottish wildlife watching – almost on a par with a glimpse of the Loch Ness Monster – and that kind-hearted Neil Dunbarnock had only shaved to give the summer holidaymakers a better chance of observing this mythical attraction. It would have been easy to write him off as an oddball aristocrat, not to be taken seriously, but he had a close circle of devoted admirers who knew the extent of his erudition, the kindness of his heart and the generosity of his pocket. The fact that they loved him, however, did not stop his friends from laughing about him and regaling each other with tales of his latest eccentricities. As Giles and Isobel often said to each other, life would be much, much duller without him.