CHAPTER 16
JANE SET THE PAGES to the side and said, ‘Well?’
Looking up from my cake plate I asked her, ‘Well what?’
‘I’m intrigued, now. What happens?’
I admitted that I wasn’t sure yet. ‘But of course in those days you just couldn’t have a baby on your own, with no one noticing. And since they’ll be wanting to keep Sophia’s marriage to Moray a secret, I think that the countess is going to send her away, somewhere safe.’
‘And where would that be?’
‘I don’t know. I’ll have to see.’
‘But if the baby’s due in…’ She was silent for a moment,counting months. ‘In March, then won’t that mean Sophia’s not at Slains for the invasion?’
‘I don’t know.’ I licked the icing from my fork.
She shook her head. ‘How can you write a book without a proper plan?’
‘I’ve always done it like this.’
‘Not exactly like this,’ Jane corrected me, running her thumb down the side of the pages to straighten the stack. ‘I’ve never seen you write a book this fast.’
‘It must be the Scottish sea air. I’m inspired.’
I kept my tone carefully light. Jane only knew about the one episode of the castle floor plans, and she’d already put that down to overwork, and I had let her go on thinking that was all that it had been. It was a strange thing, but I found it much easier talking about what was happening to me with someone I barely knew, like Dr Weir, than with someone I felt closer to, like Jane. Or Graham. Maybe it just mattered more to me that they not think that I was crazy.
And I’d known Jane long enough to know there was no place for unexplainable phenomena within her ordered life.
She told me, ‘If you’re so inspired here, you ought to move to Scotland. Buy a little house. There’s one the next street over, coming up for sale.’
Jane’s husband Alan had been clearing dishes from the table where we’d eaten lunch, but now he felt the need to interject, ‘She wouldn’t want to live the next street over, Janie.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because you’d hardly make yourself invisible, would you? You’d be over there the whole time, nagging. “How’s it going with the book?” and “When will it be finished?”’
‘I would not.’ Jane tried her level best to look indignant.
‘Besides which, Carrie needs her privacy.’
‘She’d have it.’
‘Oh, aye?’ Alan gave his wife a sideways glance. ‘You want her to believe that, after all the grief you’ve given her this morning?’
‘I only said she should have let us fetch her and not come by taxi.’
With a smile, I interjected, ‘All that way. It’s what, ten minutes?’
‘That,’ she said, ‘is not the point.’
‘The point is,’ Alan said, ‘you thought she’d bring a man.’ To me, he added, ‘That was why she made the cake. She’d never bother with a cake for only us.’
Jane couldn’t quite manage to look truly offended with Alan. ‘I wouldn’t hold your breath waiting for another one if this is all the thanks I get.’ Shifting position, she sent him the same sort of withering glance she might use on a bothersome publisher. ‘Anyway, when I talked to Carrie last she said that she might bring a man.’
‘I did?’
‘You said you’d let me know.’ She gave a shrug as though the wording didn’t matter. ‘It’s the same thing. I just wanted to be welcoming, in case he came.’
Her husband rolled his eyes at me in silence, and I smiled. Jane missed the interchange, because at that same moment baby Jack, upstairs, let out a sudden wail to let us know he had awoken from his nap, and by the time he had been brought downstairs the focus of attention had been shifted on to him.
He was a lovely baby, bright and interested in everything, with Jane’s blue eyes and reddish hair and happy, fearless nature. ‘They’re remarkable things, babies,’ Jane told me. ‘Such little things, and yet once they come into your life they just change it completely. Take over.’
Which led us back to talking of my character, Sophia, and of how her life would change once her child came.
‘I don’t know that I’m actually going to write a scene about the birth itself,’ I said. ‘It isn’t something I’ve experienced.’
‘You’re wise.’ Jane’s voice was dry. ‘Speaking for myself, I can’t think anyone who has gone through it really wants to read about it.’ Giving little Jack a hug, she said, ‘The end result’s all right, but I don’t need reminding of the process, thank you all the same.’
I did convince her, though, to talk a little bit about it so I’d have the knowledge there in case I needed it. And by the time we’d finished talking it was nearly two o’clock, and time for me to leave.
I called another taxi, over Jane’s objections.
‘I can drive you,’ was her protest, as she walked me to the door and watched me tuck the story pages back into my briefcase. It was an oversized case, built to carry my laptop computer and a couple of changes of clothes. Jane wouldn’t have missed that, I knew, but I’d already thought up a good explanation.
It was tricky telling lies to Jane, she had such good antennae that you couldn’t get much past her. I had always found it easier to start with something like the truth.
I said, ‘But I’m not going home. I’m going down to Aberdeen. I need to do some research for the book. Depending on how long it takes to find what I’m after, I might just stay over and come back tomorrow.’
She seemed to accept that. She waited in the front hall with me till the taxi came, then said, ‘Hang on a minute, will you?’ and went back into the kitchen and returned with something in a plastic square container. ‘Here, take this.’
‘What is it?’
‘It isn’t for you. It’s for him.’
‘For whom?’
‘You’ll lose your taxi,’ was her warning, as she ran me down the steps and to the waiting cab. She held the door and saw me safely settled in the back before she said, with innocence, ‘You did say that he came from Aberdeen?’
She’d nailed me and she knew it, but I made a final sinking effort. ‘Who?’
‘The man who took you walking on the coast path. You did say he was a lecturer, in Aberdeen—in history, am I right?’ Her smile was just this side of being smug. She nodded at the sealed container. ‘See he gets his cake.’
And then she closed the door before I could react, and waved me off while I reflected on the great success she might have had if she had gone to work as a detective. Any criminal, I knew, would not have stood a chance, with Jane.
The Victorian end-of-terrace town house had been built, like most of Aberdeen, with granite. Not the red granite of Slains, but a granite of warm brownish grey that gave all of the houses along Graham’s road a strong look of dependable permanence. A holly hedge lined the short walkway that led to the front steps. His blue-painted door had a polished brass knocker that bore not the head of a lion but that of the bard Robert Burns, but I didn’t get to use it. When the taxi door had slammed behind me Angus had begun to bark, and by the time I’d reached the steps the front door had already opened.
Graham, looking as dependably permanent as the stone-built house itself in a well-worn black sweater and jeans, smiled a welcome. ‘You found it all right, then?’
‘No problem at all.’
He took the briefcase from my hand and looked a question at the plastic square container, which had sparked some new excited sniffing interest from the dog.
‘It’s cake,’ I said. ‘For you.’
‘For me?’
‘Don’t ask.’
He didn’t. Stepping back to let me in, he swung the door shut at our backs and bent to greet me with a kiss. It hit me with a sudden strangeness just how much I’d missed him— missed the comfort of his being there; his undemanding presence. And his touch.
He raised his head. ‘Hello.’
‘Hello.’
‘Come in. I’ll show you round.’
He’d only bought the house the year before, he told me, and it was in places still a work in progress. The front rooms, with their high bright windows and lovely corniced ceilings, sat half-empty and stripped of their wallpaper, waiting for paint. And upstairs only one of the bedrooms— his own—had been finished, in quiet greens, restful and masculine. The other upstairs rooms, besides the bath, were undecided. It was almost as if he was wearing the house like a new suit of clothes that still needed adjusting—too large in some places, confining in others. Except for downstairs, at the back of the house. There, it was all Graham. Everything fit.
He’d remodeled the kitchen, keeping its Victorian charm while allowing for modern functionality, and knocking out the back wall to add on a glass conservatory that allowed the sunlight to slant in across the wide plank floor. Stuart had said Graham could cook, and I got some sense of this myself from standing in his kitchen, seeing how he had his things arranged. Everything, from the checked tea towel drying on the oven door to the placement of pots and appliances gave the impression of regular, competent use.
And the way Angus flung himself down with a thump and a sigh on the warm sunlit floor of the conservatory with its unpretentious furniture—a solid low-backed sofa and a faded chair with footstool and a stack of books beside it that rose high enough to almost be a table—told me this, too, was a favorite and familiar spot.
I could understand that. If this had been my house, I’d have found it hard to shift myself from here as well, with the sunshine and the view out to the tidy small back garden, where a wooden feeder hung from one bare tree branch for the birds. And there was warmth here from the kitchen, and the comfort of companionship, with Graham banging whistling round the cupboards while he put the kettle on and got the mugs and things for tea.
It surprised even me how seductive I found the whole set up; how easily my mind adapted to the thought of living here, with Graham. I hadn’t lived with anyone since leaving home. I’d always liked my private space. But standing now and watching him, it struck me this was something I could stand and watch repeatedly. Forever.
It was not a feeling that I’d had before, and so I didn’t know exactly what to do with it. This winter was becoming more and more a time of firsts for me.
‘Good cake,’ said Graham, testing it while waiting for the kettle. Holding the plastic container in one hand, he offered me the fork. ‘D’ye want some?’
‘No, thanks. I had two pieces at lunch.’
‘And how did that go, your lunch?’
‘Oh, I had a good time. I always do, with Jane. We talked about the book a lot.’
He glanced towards my briefcase, which he’d set beside the sofa. ‘You did remember to bring your computer?’
‘I didn’t think you’d let me come otherwise.’ When we’d talked on the phone he’d reminded me several times not to forget it.
‘Aye, well, you can laugh, but you’ll thank me when you’re struck by sudden inspiration in the middle of the night, and need to work.’
‘Yes, Dad.’
‘I’m serious.’
‘You think that I’ll be struck by sudden inspiration, do you?’
Leaning on the worktop with his piece of cake in hand he flashed a faintly wicked smile and said, ‘I mean to do my best.’
The room was strange. I didn’t recognize the placement of the windows or the walls when I first woke, and there was little light to see by. For a moment I lay blinking in confusion, till I felt the solid warmth against my back and felt the rhythmic rise and fall of Graham’s breathing and I knew then where I was.
I closed my eyes, contented, wanting nothing more than just to stay there, with his arm wrapped round me and his head so close behind mine on the pillow that his breath moved through my hair. I felt as I’d felt earlier, that moment in the kitchen when I’d watched him making tea—that I could live this scene repeatedly and never learn to tire of it.
But even as that drowsy realization slumbered through my mind, another scene began to stir and shape itself and nudge me into wakefulness. I fought it, but it fought me back, and in the end I sighed, resigned, and gently lifting Graham’s arm slipped shivering from the blankets, dressed, and went downstairs.
There was no sunlight now in the conservatory kitchen, but the moon cast shadows of its own across the floor where I had left my briefcase. I was cold. Hanging with the jackets on the coat pegs by the back door to the garden was a heavy navy rugby shirt with stripes of red and gold, faded and looking as though it had been through the wars. But it looked warm as well, and I shrugged myself into it, pushing the long sleeves right up to my elbows.
Angus, on the sofa, raised his head and gave his tail a thump of welcome as I crossed to sit beside him, then he rolled and held his four feet in the air so I could give his chest a scratch. I did, but absently, and Angus seemed to know what single-minded concentration looked like when he saw it, for he yawned and rolled again to curl himself against my side, his nose and one front paw tucked in the folds of Graham’s rugby jersey, and he fell asleep as I began to write.