CHAPTER 12
THERE, I THOUGHT, WITH satisfaction, printing off the pages I’d just written. Now Sophia’s love life was as messed up as my own. Just as I’d had to deal with Stuart’s coming back, she’d have to deal with Captain Gordon, though admittedly John Moray had reacted to the challenge rather differently than Graham had. The benefit, I thought, of writing fiction was that I could twist my characters to do the things real people never did in life.
The printer finished humming and I shut down my computer, arching back against the chair to stretch my shoulders, arms upraised.
I didn’t know what time it was. It had been light outside my windows for a while now, but the sky was flatly grey and there was no way I could judge how high the sun had climbed behind the clouds.
I only knew that it was morning, and I hadn’t been to bed, and all I wanted was a piece of toast, a glass of juice, and several hours of sleep. So when the shadow of a person passed my window, my first impulse was to let the knocking go unanswered and pretend I wasn’t home. But curiosity won out.
‘I’ve brought you lunch,’ said Stuart, standing on my doorstep with a winning smile and something wrapped in newspaper that smelled so good my stomach flipped. It wasn’t exactly a peace offering, since Stuart, I felt certain, didn’t realize he’d done anything to warrant one—but in return for fresh-made fish and chips, I might forgive him for the trouble he had caused me.
‘Come on in.’ I pushed the door wide. ‘Your timing’s amazingly good, by the way. But it’s breakfast, for me.’
Stuart arched a dark eyebrow. ‘It’s nearly twelve-thirty.’
‘That late?’
‘D’ye never go to bed?’
I took the fish and chips from him and crossed to the kitchen while he shrugged off his coat by the door. As I parceled the food out on plates, I explained, ‘I got into the flow last night. I didn’t want to stop.’
His eyes danced as though I’d just made a dirty joke. ‘That happens to me sometimes. Not with writing,’ he admitted, with a Casanova smile, ‘but it does happen.’
Indulging him, I let the double meaning slide and handed him his plate. ‘You’ll either have to eat it standing up, or sitting by the fireplace,’ I apologized. ‘There’s no room on the table.’
‘So I see.’ He chose an armchair, settling back and nodding pointedly towards the mess of papers that was covering my writing table. ‘How far along are you, then?’
‘Maybe a third of the way, I don’t know. I never know how long a book will be until I’ve finished it.’
‘Don’t you work to a plan?’
‘No. I’ve tried, but I’m no good at it.’ My characters refused to be contained by any outline. They were happiest when charting their own course across the page.
Stuart grinned. ‘I’m not much good at planning either. Graham’s the organized one of the family.’ He glanced at me. ‘What did you think of him?’
‘Graham?’ I opened the door of the Aga and prodded the coals with a bit too much force before saying, ‘I thought he was nice.’
‘Aye, he is that.’ My bland choice of words had apparently satisfied Stuart. ‘The only time I ever saw him lose his manners, to be honest, was when he played rugby. And even then I don’t doubt he apologized to everyone he stomped on.’
I’d been right, then, thinking Graham was an athlete. ‘He played rugby?’
‘Oh, aye, he almost went professional.’
Clanging the Aga door shut, I crossed to join Stuart, my plate in my hand. ‘Really?’
‘Aye, he was recruited, had the papers nearly signed, but then Mum died, and Dad…well, Dad, he didn’t do so well. And rugby would have meant that Graham had to live away, so he just turned the offer down,’ he said, ‘and stayed at university until they took him on there as a lecturer. I’d not say that it would have been his choice, but then, you’d never hear him moan. He’s too responsible. He sees his job as taking care of Dad, that’s all. He comes up every weekend to look in on him.’ A sideways glance, and smile. ‘He’s given up on taking care of me.’
I could have told him no, he hadn’t, but I kept my concentration on my plate. ‘He’s never been married, I take it?’
‘Who, Graham? He’s never come close.’ His initial amusement changed, slowly, to something approaching suspicion. ‘Why do you ask?’
‘I just wondered.’ To soothe his pricked ego, I asked, ‘What about yourself ? Ever been married?’
Back on his own favorite subject, he shook his head. ‘No, not yet.’ And unable to pass up the chance for a play, he said, catching my gaze with his own, ‘I’ve been waiting to find the right woman.’
I didn’t swing at that pitch either. ‘How was London?’
‘Murder. It’s a busy time for us. I’ll be off again tomorrow night, to Amsterdam, and then from there to Italy.’
In scheduling at least he seemed to match my novel’s Captain Gordon, turning up just long enough to have an impact on the plot before he dashed away.
He started telling me about what he’d been up to in London, but I was only half-listening, trying to hold back a yawn that brought blood drumming loudly inside my ears. Stuart, not noticing, carried on talking, and although I tried from politeness to follow along, I was fading, and fast, as my long night of no sleep caught up with me. Resting my head on the chair back, I nodded at something that Stuart was saying.
And that was the last thing I really remembered.
The next thing I knew I was waking up, still in my chair, and the armchair that faced me was empty. The daylight had faded to dusk. As I moved, I discovered that Stuart was more of a gentleman than he would likely have cared to admit—he had taken a spare blanket out of the cupboard and covered me with it, to make me more comfortable. And when I made my way into the kitchen and opened the fridge, I discovered my half eaten fish and chips still on the plate, sealed with cling film, and waiting for me to reheat them for supper.
However irritated I had been with Stuart yesterday, there simply was no way that I could go on being mad at him when he did things like this. Nor could I muster more than faint exasperation when, a little later, Dr Weir phoned up and started off with, ‘I ran into Stuie Keith coming out of the Killie, and he said he’d left you fast asleep, and so I thought I’d best call first.’
Trust Stuart, I thought, to put his own twist on what had happened. But I was glad to finally hear the doctor’s voice.
‘I’ve been away a few days,’ he said, ‘visiting my brother, but I’ve done a bit of reading on the subject of genetic memory and I’ve found a few things that might interest you. I could come round right now, if that’s all right?’
It was more than all right. I’d been waiting to talk to him, wanting to hear his opinion on what I’d discovered in Edinburgh. There wasn’t anybody else I could talk to about it, really—no one else who’d listen in the patient, non- judgmental manner of a trained physician and be able to discuss things from the medical perspective.
I had the tea brewed by the time he arrived with a folder of what looked like photocopied pages from assorted books. And before he could tell me what he’d found, I told him my news about Mr Hall’s letter describing how he’d brought Sophia to Slains.
Dr Weir was delighted. ‘That’s wonderful. Wonderful, lass. I’d have never believed you could find such a thing. And it actually said that she came from the west, and that both of her parents had died in connection with Darien?’
‘Yes.’
‘How incredible.’ Shaking his head, he said, ‘Well, there you are. There’s your proof that you’re not going mad.’ He smiled. ‘You simply have the memory of your ancestor.’
I knew, deep down, that he was right. I even shared his obvious excitement at my find, but it was tempered by a sense of hesitation. I wasn’t sure I wanted such a gift, or knew the way to deal with all its implications. And my mind was still resisting the idea. ‘How could something like that happen?’
‘Well, it has to be genetic. Do you know much about DNA?’
‘Just what I see on crime shows.’
‘Ah.’ He settled in, balancing his folder for the moment on the broad arm of his chair. ‘Let’s start with the gene, which is the basic unit of inheritance. A gene is nothing but a length of DNA, and we’ve thousands of genes in our bodies. Half of our genes we inherit,’ he said, ‘from our mother, and half from our father. The mix is unique. It determines a whole range of characteristics: your eye color, hair color, whether you’re left- or right-handed.’ He paused. ‘Countless things, even your chance of developing certain diseases, are passed down to you in your genes from your parents, who got their own genes from their parents and so on. Your nose may be the same shape as your great-great-great-great grandmother’s. And if a nose can be inherited,’ he said, ‘who knows what else might be?’
‘But surely noses aren’t the same as memories.’
He shrugged. ‘It’s been discovered, so I’ve learned, that there’s a gene that plays a part in making people thrill-seekers, or not. My eldest daughter, now, she always loved a bit of danger, from the time that she was born. Always climbing, she was—we had to harness her to keep her in the pram. She climbed out of her cot, up the bookcases, everywhere. Now that she’s grown, she climbs mountains, and jumps out of airplanes. Where did she get that from? I don’t know. Not her environment,’ he told me, with a certain smile. ‘My wife and I are hardly what you’d call the mountaineering type.’
I shared the smile, imagining the gnome-like doctor or his wife suspended from a cliff by ropes.
‘My point,’ he said, ‘is that some aspects of our nature, of our temperament, are clearly carried in our genes. And memory, surely, is no more intangible than temperament.’
‘I guess you’re right.’
He reached to open up his folder and began to sort the photocopied pages. ‘I did find some very interesting articles on the subject. For instance, here’s a piece by an American professor who believes that the abilities of some savants— autistic savants, who are mentally and socially shut off from all the rest of us, and yet have these strange, unexplainable gifts in one area, music, or maths, for example—this professor thinks their abilities may be the product of some form of genetic memory. He actually uses the term.
‘And here’s another piece that caught my fancy. I tried to keep strictly to science, but even though this is a bit more new-age, it did raise what I thought were some valid possibilities. It suggests that the entire past-life phenomenon, where people are “regressed” under hypnosis and recall what they believe are former lives in other bodies, may in fact be nothing more than their remembering the lives of their own ancestors.’ He handed me the folder, sitting back again to watch me while I sifted through the articles myself. Then he said, ‘Maybe I should start my own wee study, hmm?’
‘With me as your subject, you mean?’ I was briefly amused by the thought. ‘I’m not sure how much use I’d be to science.’
‘Why is that?’
‘Well, there’d be no way to prove just how much of the story was coming from memory, and how much was my own creation,’ I said, thinking now of how I had deliberately brought Captain Gordon back into the plot to stir the waters. That had come from my frustration with Stuart and Graham, and not from Sophia. ‘The family history details, fair enough, those can be checked, but when it comes to things like dialogue…’
“I should imagine it would be a mixture of your memory, and your writer’s art. And what of that? We tinker with our memories all the time. We add embellishments—that fish we caught gets larger, or the faults we had get fewer. But the basic event…well, that is what it is. We can’t turn sad memories to happy ones, no matter how we try. So I’d wager what you’ll write about Sophia, at its essence, will be truth.’
I thought about that later, when he’d gone and I was sitting at my writing-table, staring at the screen of my computer while the cursor blinked expectantly.
I wasn’t in the trance, tonight. My conscious mind was uppermost, and I could feel it pushing at my characters while they dug in their heels. They wouldn’t walk the path I tried to put them on. I’d meant to write the dinner scene, with Captain Gordon sitting at the table with John Moray and Sophia, so the two men could continue their competitive exchange.
But neither man was keen to speak, and in the end I had to go and fetch The Old Scots Navy book that Dr Weir had loaned me, thinking I might come across some interesting naval going-on that Captain Gordon could be telling everyone about, to get the conversation going.
I hadn’t had the nerve to read the book since that first night when I had opened it and learned that all the details I had written about Captain Gordon had in fact been real, and not of my creation. That knowledge had been too much for my troubled mind to process at the time, and after that I’d left the book untouched beside my bed.
But desperation drove me now to scan the index, searching for a Captain Gordon reference that might give me what I needed. And I found a document appended to the text, that seemed to be of the right date. It started: ‘During Hooke’s absence in Edinburgh Captain Gordon, commander of the two Scotch frigates on guard upon the coast (the one of 40, the other of 28 cannon) had come ashore to the Earl of Erroll…’
I could feel the now familiar creeping chill between my shoulder blades.
It was all there, as plain as day.
The captain promising the earl that he’d stay off the coast for fifteen days, and the exchange of signals to be used in case he met the French ship, and the fact that Captain Hamilton was bound to grow suspicious if the French ship stayed too long in Scottish waters. Even Captain Gordon’s statement that he might soon have to leave the naval service, since he would not take the oath against King James.
I read it with the same sense of surrealism I’d felt when I’d been sitting in that reading room in Edinburgh with Mr Hall’s old letter. Because I knew for certain I had never read this document before. I hadn’t gotten this far in the book on my first reading. I had gotten spooked and closed it, as I closed it now. I pushed it far away from me across the table. ‘Damn.’
I’d honestly believed that scene had been my own invention, that I’d made the captain come back just to complicate the plot. I’d been so proud of how I’d worked the whole thing in. And now I found I hadn’t done such an amazing thing.
It looked as though I’d have to face the fact that Dr Weir had hit the nail more squarely on the head than I’d have liked. It might be that I was not to have a hand at all in the creation of this story.
Maybe all that I could do was write the truth.
Deleting the few stilted lines I’d written so the cursor sat once more at the beginning of the chapter, I closed my eyes and felt the silence of the room press round me like a thing alive.
‘All right,’ I said. ‘What scene should I be writing?’