CHAPTER 8
I WOKE, STILL IN the armchair, to the hard grey light of morning, and a numbing sense of cold. In the confusion of new consciousness, I looked around and noticed that the lamp I’d left switched on last night was off, as was the little electric fire plugged into the wall at my feet. And then, becoming more awake, I realized what had happened, and a quick look at the black box fastened to the wall above the door confirmed that the meter was no longer spinning. The needles rested in the red. I’d used up all my coins, and now my power had gone off.
Worse, I had gone to sleep before I’d stoked the stove up for the evening, and the kitchen fire was out, as well. The stove, when I got up to touch it, wasn’t even warm.
I swore, with feeling, since my mother wasn’t in the room to hear me, and dropping to my knees began to rake the old dead coals and ashes over, hoping there would be enough left in the hod to start a new fire.
I was still at it when Graham came to fetch me for our walk. I must have looked a sight when I opened the door to him, with my face smudged and my clothes in hopeless wrinkles from my sleeping in them, but he was nice enough not to comment on it, and only the deepening creases at the corners of his eyes as I explained the situation to him showed that he found anything amusing.
‘And I can’t get the stove to start again,’ I finished in frustration. ‘And because it’s hooked up to the water heater, that means I have no hot water for washing, and—’
Graham cut in. ‘You look fine,’ he said, calmingly. ‘Why don’t you go and find something warm to put on over that shirt, and I’ll take care of this out here, all right?’
I looked at him with gratitude. ‘All right.’
I did a little more than simply put a sweater on. I scrubbed my face, uncaring of the freezing water, and used a wet comb to bring my hair back into order. When I’d finished, my reflection in the mirror was a bit more recognizable. It wasn’t quite the face I’d hoped to show him when he came, but it was one that I could live with.
In the kitchen, I found Graham boiling water on the small electric stove. The air already felt a little warmer from the fire he’d started in the Aga, and the lamp that I’d left burning in the front room by my chair was on again. I crossed to switch it off, and, bending, pulled the plug on the electric fire.
‘Thanks,’ I said.
‘No problem. I take it you haven’t had breakfast? You’ll need to eat something, before we head out. It’s a fair walk. What is it you drink, tea or coffee?’
He was reaching in the cupboards with the confidence of somebody who knew where things would be, and I wondered whether he, like Stuart, had ever stayed here on his own. The thought of Stuart having lived here, on and off, had not affected me, but knowing Graham might have once slept in that small back bedroom, in my bed, was something different. I chased the stray thought from my mind, and asked instead, ‘How did you get the meter running?’ People these days, after all, weren’t likely to be going round with pockets full of 50p coins.
‘That,’ he told me, smiling, ‘is a trick that Stuie taught me, and I swore I’d never tell. It wouldn’t do to let Dad’s tenants learn the way of it.’ The kettle had boiled, and he took it off, asking again, ‘D’ye take tea, or coffee?’
‘Oh. Coffee, please.’
He took a pan and cooked me eggs, as well, and made me toast, and served it all up with a slab of cheese. ‘To weigh you down,’ he said, ‘so that the wind won’t knock you off the path.’
I took the plate, and looked towards the windows. ‘It’s not windy.’
‘Eat your breakfast.’ Having made a cup of coffee for himself, he poured the rest of the hot water in the frying pan and washed it, while I watched and tried to think of the last time a man had cooked for me and washed my dishes afterwards. I drew a total blank.
I asked, ‘Where’s Angus? How’s his paw?’
‘It’s not so sore, but if he tried to walk the way up to the Bullers, it would be. I left him with my father for the day. He’ll be all right. Dad always stuffs him full of sausages.’ He rinsed the pan and set it on the draining board to dry.
His mention of the Bullers made me stop dead in the middle of my toast. Oh, damn, I thought. I hadn’t written down my dream. I’d had that marvelous, long dream last night, with all that perfect action, and I’d gone and let it go to waste, because I hadn’t thought to write it down. It would be lost, now. If I concentrated, maybe I could reconstruct some bits of it, but dialogue just disappeared unless I got it down on paper moments after it had formed.
I sighed, and told myself to never mind, that these things happened. There was nothing to be done for it. I’d just been too distracted, when I’d woken, by the cold, and the more pressing need to see I didn’t freeze to death in my front room.
The room had grown much warmer now, but whether that was wholly from the stove or from the fact that Graham Keith was standing a few feet away from me, I didn’t know. He had crossed to examine the plans of Slains castle, spread out on my work table. ‘Where did you get these?’
‘From Dr Weir. He loaned them to me.’
‘Douglas Weir? How did you meet with him?’
‘Your father set it up.’
‘Oh, aye.’ His brief smile held a son’s indulgence. ‘Dad does have connections. Give him time, he’ll have you meeting half the village. What did you think of Dr Weir?’
‘I liked him. And his wife. They gave me whisky.’ Which, I realized, made it sound as though the two facts were related, so I stumbled on, ‘The doctor told me quite a lot about the history of the castle, and the Earls of Erroll.’
‘Aye, there isn’t much he doesn’t ken about the castle.’
‘He said the same thing about you,’ I told him, ‘and the Jacobites.’
‘Did he, now?’ His eyebrows lifted, interested. ‘What else did he say about me?’
‘Only that he thinks that you’re a Jacobite yourself.’
He didn’t exactly smile at that, but the corners of his eyes did crinkle. ‘Aye, there’s truth in that. Had I been born into another time,’ he said, ‘I might have been.’ He traced a corner of the Slains plan with his fingers, lightly, then he asked, ‘Who else has my dad got you meeting?’
I told him, as best I could remember, ending with the plumber’s driving tour. ‘Your brother said he’d drive me round instead.’
‘You’ve seen him drive?’
‘I said I’d take my chances with the plumber.’
Graham did smile, then. ‘I’ll take you for a driving tour some weekend, if you like.’
‘And you’re a safer driver, are you?’
‘Aye,’ he told me. ‘Naturally. I’m all the time driving old ladies to Kirk on a Sunday. You’ve nothing to fear.’
I’d have gone with him anywhere, actually. My mother, had she known that I was walking on the coast path with a man I barely knew, would have been close to apoplectic. But instinctively, I knew that Graham told the truth—I didn’t have to fear when I was with him. He would keep me safe.
It was a newfound feeling, and it settled on me strangely, but I liked the way it felt. I liked the way he walked beside me, close but not too crowding, and the way he let me go ahead of him along the path, so I could set the pace.
We went the back way down Ward Hill and found ourselves in the same gully with its quiet tangled trees and running stream that I’d gone through with Jane, two days ago, when she and I had headed from the village up to Slains. It was a drier day today. My boots were not so slippery as we crossed the little bridge and made our way up and around until we’d climbed again up to the level of the clifftop.
Ahead, I could see the long ruins of Slains with the one tall square tower that stood at the end overlooking the sea, and I looked at the windows and tried to decide which ones should be Sophia’s. I would have liked to spend a few minutes in the castle, but there was another couple walking round the walls this morning, loud and laughing, tourists, and the atmosphere was not the same. And Graham must have felt it, too, because he didn’t slow his steps, but followed as I set my back to Slains and started off again along the coast.
I found this new part of the path disturbing. Not the walk itself—it wasn’t really all that difficult, for someone used to walking rough—but just the sense that everything around me, all the scenery, was familiar. I’d had flashes, in my life, of déjà vu. Most people had. I’d felt, from time to time, a moment’s fleeting sense that I’d performed some action once before, or had some conversation twice. But only for a moment. I had never felt this long, sustained sensation, more a certainty, that I’d already come this way. That just up here, if I looked to my right, I’d see—
‘Dunbuy,’ said Graham, who’d come up to stand behind me on the path, where I had stopped. ‘It means the—’
‘Yellow rock,’ I finished for him, slowly.
‘Aye. What turns it yellow is the dung of all the seabirds nesting there. Come springtime, Dunbuy is fair covered with them, and the noise is deafening.’
The rock was near abandoned now, in winter, but for several gulls that stood upon it sullenly, ignoring us. But I could hear, within my mind, the seabirds that he spoke of. I could see them. I remembered them…
I frowned and turned away and carried on, still with that sense of knowing just where I was going. I might have been walking the streets of the town where I’d grown up, it was that sure a feeling.
I knew, without Graham’s announcement, when we were approaching the Bullers of Buchan. There wasn’t anything remarkable to see at first, only a tight-clustered grouping of cottages built at the edge of a perilous drop down another deep gully, and in front of them a steep path winding upwards to what looked to be an ordinary rise of land. Except I knew, before we’d even started up that path, what waited at the top. I knew what it looked like before I had seen it—a circular shaft, like a giant’s well, cut at the edge of the cliff, where the sea had eroded the walls of a mammoth cave till the cave’s roof had collapsed, leaving only a strip of stone bridging the cleft at its entrance, through which the waves sprayed with such force that the water appeared to be boiling below when I stood at the edge to look down.
Graham stood at my side with his hands in his pockets, and standing there he, too, seemed part of a memory, and I wondered if this was what people felt like when they started going insane.
He was talking. I could hear him, vaguely, telling me the history of the Bullers, and how its name had likely come from the French word for ‘kettle’, bouilloire, or perhaps more simply from the English, ‘boiler’, and how in the past small ships had hidden there from privateers, or if they were smugglers themselves, from the Scottish coast patrols.
On one level, I took this in quite calmly, and yet on the other my thoughts swirled as fiercely as the waves below me. I didn’t think Graham had noticed, but in the middle of telling me how he and his brother had ridden their bikes the whole way round the rim of the Bullers once, when they were younger and more daring, and how he’d almost lost control going over the thin bridge of sunken earth not far from where we were standing, he stopped talking and gave me a penetrating look.
‘You all right?’ he asked.
I lied. I said, ‘I’m not so good with heights.’
He didn’t move an inch, or take his hands out of his pockets, but he looked at me and gave his pirate’s smile and said, ‘Well, not to worry. I won’t let you fall.’
I knew it was too late. I had already fallen. But I couldn’t tell him, any more than I could tell him what I’d felt today on our walk here, and what I was still feeling. It was craziness. He would have run a mile.
The sense of déjà vu stayed with me on the long walk back, and worsened when I saw the jagged walls of Slains, and I was glad when we’d gone past and down into the wooded gully. On the little bridge that crossed the stream I thought that Graham hesitated, and I hoped he might suggest we take the pathway to the right and stop in at a pub for lunch, but in the end he only walked me back up onto Ward Hill and across the tufted grass until we stood before the cottage.
He said nothing to begin with, so I filled the pause by lamely saying that I’d had a lovely time.
‘I’m glad,’ he said. ‘I did, as well.’
I cleared my throat. ‘Would you like to come in for a coffee, or something?’
Stuart, I knew, would have picked up on the ‘or something’, but Graham only took it at face value, and replied, ‘I can’t, the day. I have to get back down to Aberdeen. I have a stack of papers sitting waiting to be marked.’
‘Oh.’
‘But I’ll take you for that driving tour next weekend, if you’d like.’
My answer came a bit too fast. ‘Yes, please.’
‘Which would be better for you, Saturday or Sunday?’
‘Either.’
‘Then let’s make it Saturday. We’ll call for you at ten, again, if that won’t be too early.’
‘We?’ I asked him.
‘Angus and myself. He loves a drive, does Angus, and I’d never hear the end of it if I left him behind.’
I smiled, and told him ten o’clock would be just fine, and having thanked him once again and said goodbye, I went inside the cottage.
But my nonchalant attitude vanished the minute I stepped through the door, and I grinned like a schoolgirl just back from a date. Standing in my kitchen, well back from the window so he wouldn’t catch me watching him, I saw him take a pebble from the path and skip it deftly out to sea, and then he kicked one booted foot into a tuft of grass and, looking pleased himself, strolled down the hill towards the road.
I wasn’t holding out much hope, when I sat down to write.
It would be gone, I knew. The dream I’d had last night would be long gone. It was no use.
But when I turned on the computer and my fingers touched the keyboard, I surprised myself. I hadn’t lost it after all. It was all there, the whole of it, and as I wrote each detail I remembered having dreamed it. I could not recall this happening in all the years that I’d been writing. It felt…well, like I’d said to Jane, it felt the way a medium must feel, when they were channeling the dead.
The story flowed from my subconscious in an easy, rapid stream. I saw the leering face of Billy Wick, the gardener, and the smile of Kirsty’s sister in her cottage, with the children playing round the gentle mastiff, and I felt Sophia’s sadness as she spoke about her parents, and her thrill of expectation as she saw the ship at anchor near the castle, and the mad confusion of her run with Kirsty to the house, and Rory’s warning they should get inside, before the countess missed them.
And tonight, my writing went beyond the dream. And there was more.