‘She wore the white dress at our wedding, the one I put on when we left harbour.’

‘The empire line, with the embroidery? She must have looked beautiful.’

His eyes gleamed. ‘Sometimes the smell of her comes from the cloth, even after all this time, and I remember so sharply…’ His hands were tightly clenched now, in front of his mouth. It became difficult to distinguish his words.

‘The last days…unbearable…never complained, not once. She was sweet, she was peaceful when she was able to be, though the pain’—he winced as if he’d been struck—‘the pain was terrible. But I cannot think of that. We choose our memories, I believe. We take the recollections and assemble them and tend them like a garden. We proceed by small dignities. That is how you prevail. That is how you can stand up from your bed in the morning.’

He turned his face to me now, his brimming eyes and hollow cheeks. ‘You must be feeling all these things, and choosing among them. You decide. You are fated to carry this all your days now, this loss. But you may alter its shape; that is the one grace permitted you.’

~

I put ashore in the Moonbird’s jolly-boat at a cove on the island upwind of the fire, where the shoreline was piled with granite stones. The back of my dress was wet from the rainwater on the thwart, cold in the breeze as I rowed. Waves appeared in miniature from unseen swells on the flat sea, rushed among the stones and were absorbed: they gleamed with the water’s retreat.

I thought of the master and his words as I dragged the little boat up.

Anyone who loves intensely will believe it is they who emit the light, they who shine warmth on the other. There is a self-centredness in love, so strong that we fail to notice the loved one illuminating us. I understood now that Gideon had passed between me and the fierce light of my father’s love. He had become an eclipsing presence that left only the finest halo of light visible around its edges, and me plunged in the antumbra. I was so fixed upon the idea that I loved my father well: I had failed to see the love he returned.

Argyle had never made the mistake of thinking it was only he who shone.