The Winter Sea

CHAPTER 4

SOMEBODY WAS KNOCKING at the cottage door.

It took a while to register. Still half-asleep, I raised my head a little stiffly from where it had lain the past few hours across my arm, outstretched along the hard wood table. My laptop computer had grown tired of waiting for me to go on, and had switched to the screen-saver, infinite stars rushing at me and past me as though I were hurtling through space.

I blinked, and then remembering, I tapped a key and watched the words scroll past. I hadn’t really believed they would be there. Hadn’t really believed that I’d written them. I’d never been a fast writer, and five hundred words in one day was, to me, a good effort. A thousand words left me ecstatic. Last night, in one sitting, I’d written twice that, with such ease I felt sure it had all been a dream.

But it hadn’t been. Here was the evidence, plain black and white on the screen, and I couldn’t help feeling the way I might feel if I’d opened my eyes to discover a dinosaur in my front garden. With disbelieving hands, I saved the document again and hit the key to print.

The knocking came a second time. I scraped back in my chair, and stood, and went across to answer it.

‘I didna mean tae waken ye.’ Jimmy Keith was all apology, although he had no reason to be, given that it was, as near as I could tell, the middle of the day.

I lied. ‘You didn’t, that’s all right.’ I clenched my cheeks to hold the yawn back that would have betrayed me. ‘Please, come in.’

‘I thought ye micht be wanting help, like, wi’ the stove.’ He brought the cold in with him, clinging to his jacket like the briskness of the salt wind off the sea. I couldn’t see too far behind him for the fog that hung above the waves was like some great cloud that was too heavy to get airborne. Leaving his mud-bottomed boots at the doormat, he went past and into the kitchen and opened the stove door to peer at my coal fire. ‘Ach, it’s gone and deed on ye, it’s fairly oot. Ye should’ve ca’d me.’

Sweeping the dead ashes out, he relaid the coals, his rough hands so quick and neat in their movements that I wondered again what he did for a living, or what he had done. So I asked him.

He glanced up again. ‘I was a slater.’

A maker of slate roofs. So that would explain why he looked like he’d lived his whole life in the open air, I thought.

He asked what I did, and there was the ‘f ’ sound again, in the place of a ‘w’—making the word ‘what’ in Jimmy’s speech come out as ‘fit’: ‘Fit aboot yersel?’ He gave a nod to my laptop computer, its printer still humming away on the long wooden table against the far wall. ‘Fit d’ye dee wi’ that?’

‘I write,’ I told him. ‘Books.’

‘Oh, aye? Fit kind o’ books?’

‘Novels. Set in the past.’

He clanged the door shut on the Aga and stood, looking fairly impressed. ‘Oh, aye?’

‘Yes. The one that I’m working on now is set here,’ I said. ‘That’s why I wanted this cottage. My story takes place at Slains Castle.’

‘Oh, aye?’ Jimmy repeated, as though he’d discovered a thing of great interest. I had the feeling that he would have asked me more if someone hadn’t, at that moment, knocked again at the front door.

‘Yer in demand the day,’ said Jimmy as I went to open it, and found, as I had half-expected, Stuart on the doorstep.

‘Morning. Thought I’d come and see how you were getting on,’ he said.

‘I’m fine, thanks. Come on in, your father’s here.’

‘My father?’

‘Aye,’ said Jimmy, from the kitchen, his eyes crinkling at their corners. ‘I’ve nivver seen ye up sae early, loon. Are ye a’richt?’

Stuart parried the jab with a smile. ‘It’s after eleven.’

‘Aye, I ken fine fit time it is.’

He finished restoking the fire in my stove and stood when I thanked him. But he didn’t look as though he were in any hurry to go anywhere, and neither did Stuart, so I asked, ‘Does anyone want coffee? I was just about to make a cup.’

To both Keith men, apparently, a cup of coffee sounded fine. They didn’t sit while waiting. Jimmy wandered out into the main room, whistling faintly through his teeth, while Stuart came after me into the kitchen and leaned with his back to the wall, his arms folded. ‘So, how did you like your first night in the cottage? I should have warned you that the bedroom window rattles like the devil when the wind blows off the sea. It didn’t keep you up, I hope?’

‘I didn’t actually make it to the bedroom last night. I was working,’ I said, with a nod to the long wooden table.

Jimmy, who’d been having a look at my computer, added, ‘She’s a writer.’

‘Aye, I know she is,’ said Stuart.

‘She’ll be writin,’ Jimmy said, ‘aboot oor castle.’

Stuart looked at me with what might have been pity. ‘It’s a big mistake, to tell my Dad a thing like that.’

I set the kettle on to boil. ‘Why’s that?’

‘He’ll be up to the St Olaf for his lunch, that’s why, and by this afternoon the whole of Cruden Bay will know exactly why you’re here, and what you’re doing. You won’t have a moment’s peace.’

‘Ach, the loon disna ken fit he’s on aboot,’ Jimmy said. ‘I’ve nae time fer claikin.’

‘That’s “gossiping”,’ Stuart translated the word for my benefit. ‘And don’t believe him. He loves telling stories.’

His father put in, ‘Aye, and lucky fer me I’ve yersel tae keep geein me somethin tae tell aboot. Is that the kettle?’

It was. I made the coffee, and we sat around companionably and drank it, and then Jimmy checked his watch and said, ‘Weel, I’m awa hame.’ He jabbed a finger at his son. ‘And dinna ye stop here lang, either.’ And he thanked me for the coffee, and went out.

The fog was lifting, but the damp sea air surged in behind him, and I felt it even after I had closed the door. It made me restless.

‘Tell you what,’ I said to Stuart. ‘Why don’t I go get my coat, and you can give me the Cook’s tour of Cruden Bay?’

He cast an eye towards the window. ‘What, in this?’

‘Why not?’

‘Why not, she says.’ But he gave in, unfolding himself from the chair. ‘Well, the weather’s as good as you’re likely to get at this time of the year, I suppose, so all right.’

It was good to walk out in the wind, with my hair blowing loose and the spray from the sea carried up from the breakers that crashed on the empty pink beach. The path down the hill was still slippery with water and mud, but whatever misgivings I’d felt here last night in the dark were forgotten by day, and the harbor below looked quite friendly and welcoming.

It wasn’t a large harbor, just a small square of calm water behind a protective wall fronting the sea, and there were no boats actually moored there—the few I could see had been pulled up and out of the water completely to lie on the land, and I gathered that no one went fishing from here in the wintertime.

Stuart led me up the other way and past his father’s cottage and the others huddled tight beside it, with their roughened plaster walls and roofs of dripping slate. We passed the long, white-painted footbridge that crossed over to the high dunes and the beach, and while I would have liked to detour off in that direction, Stuart had another place in mind.

We’d turned the ‘S’ curve where the Harbour Street changed into Main Street, with its row of houses and its few shops climbing up the one side, and the lively stream cascading down the other, overhung by leafless trees. At the top of the hill, Main Street ended by running straight into the side of another main road—the same road I’d been driving on when I’d come through here last weekend, only I hadn’t stopped then till I’d followed it further and round through the woods. I’d been so focused that day on chasing my view of the ruins that I hadn’t taken much notice of anything else. Like the beautiful building that held court just over the road at the top of the Main Street.

It had red granite walls and white dormers and several bow-fronted two-storey projections that gave it a look of Victorian elegance. We were approaching it now from the side, but its long front looked over a lawn that sloped down to the stream which appeared to behave itself better up here, running quietly under a bridge on the main road as though it, too, felt that the building was owed some respect.

‘And this,’ said Stuart grandly, ‘is the “Killie”—the Kilmarnock Arms Hotel. It’s where your friend Bram Stoker stayed when he first came to Cruden Bay, before he moved to Finnyfall, the south end of the beach.’

‘To where?’

‘To Finnyfall. Spelt “Whinnyfold”, but everybody says it like you’d say it in the Doric. It’s not a large place, just a handful of cottages.’

Somehow I couldn’t imagine Bram Stoker at home in a cottage. The Kilmarnock Arms would have suited him better. I could easily imagine the creator of the world’s most famous vampire sitting at his writing-table in an upstairs window bay, and gazing out across the stormy coast.

‘We could go in,’ said Stuart, ‘if you like. They’ve got a Lounge Bar, and they serve a decent lunch.’

I didn’t need a second nudge. I’d always taken pleasure in exploring places other writers had been to before me. My favorite small hotel in London had once been a haunt of Graham Greene, and in its breakfast room I always sat in the same chair he’d sat in, hoping that some of his genius might rub off on me. Having lunch at the Kilmarnock Arms, I decided, would give me a similar chance to commune with the ghost of Bram Stoker.

‘All right,’ I said. ‘Lead on.’

The Lounge Bar had red upholstered banquet seats with brass and glass globe lamps set at their corners, and dark wood chairs and tables on a carpet of deep blue, but all the woodwork had been painted white, and all the walls, except the stone one at the far end, had been papered in a softly patterned yellow that, together with the windows and the daylight, gave the place a cheerful ambiance, not dark at all. No vampires here.

I ordered soup and salad and a glass of dry white wine. Wine with lunch was a habit I’d picked up in France, and one I’d likely have to break myself of now that I was here in Scotland. I’d have to be totally sober to face the coast paths, I reminded myself. Even without my mother’s warning, I knew from experience it wouldn’t do to go tottering close to the cliffs. But for now, since I wasn’t intending to go very far from a sidewalk, I judged myself safe.

Stuart, true to his father’s prediction of yesterday, ordered a pint and sat back in the booth with me, settling his shoulders against the red leather. He was, I thought, a very handsome man, with that nearly black hair falling carelessly over his forehead, and his eyes that were so quick to laugh. His eyes were blue, I noticed, like his father’s, but he didn’t look like Jimmy. Still, in this light, something in his features struck me as familiar, as though I had seen his face, or one quite like it, somewhere else before.

‘Why the frown?’ he asked.

‘What? Oh, no reason,’ I said. ‘I was thinking, that’s all. Occupational hazard.’

‘I see. I’ve never had lunch with a writer before. Should I watch my behavior, in case I end up as a character in your new book?’

I assured him he wasn’t in danger. ‘You won’t be a character.’

He feigned a wounded ego. ‘Oh? And why is that?’

‘It’s just that I don’t base my characters on people I know. Not a whole person, anyway. Bits and pieces, sometimes—someone’s habits, someone’s way of moving, things they might have said. But everything gets mixed up with the person I imagine,’ I explained. ‘You wouldn’t recognize yourself, if I did use you.’

‘Would you cast me as the hero, or the villain?’

That surprised me. Not the question, but the tone in which he asked it. For the first time since I’d met him, he was flirting. Not that I minded, but it did catch me off guard, and it took me a moment to shift my own footing, adjust to the change. ‘I don’t know, I’ve just met you.’

‘First impressions.’

‘Villain,’ I said, lightly. ‘But you’d have to grow a beard, or something.’

‘Done,’ he promised. ‘Could I have a cape?’

‘Of course.’

‘A man can’t be a villain,’ Stuart said, ‘without a cape.’ He grinned, and once again I had that feeling, strange and new, unsettling, that I had seen his face before.

I asked, ‘Were you in France on business, or on holiday?’

‘On business. Always working, I am.’ His sigh was so long-suffering as he sat back and raised his pint that I couldn’t help challenging.

‘Always?’

‘Well, maybe not now,’ he admitted. ‘But in a few days I’ll be back at it, away down to London.’

‘You work with computers, your dad said?’

‘In a way. I do pre-sales support for an enterprise resource planning system.’ He named the firm he worked for, but it meant nothing to me. ‘Their product is good, so I’m in high demand.’

And with a smile like that, I knew, he likely had a girl in every port. But still, he made me laugh, and it had been at least a year since I’d been on a date. I’d been too caught up in my work—no time for meeting men, no time to do much with one even if I’d met one. Writing got like that for me, sometimes. It could be all-consuming. When I got deep in a story I forgot the need for food, for sleep, for everything. The world that I’d created seemed more real, then, than the world outside my window, and I wanted nothing more than to escape to my computer, to be lost within that other place and time.

It was probably just as well Stuart Keith’s work kept him moving. He’d find me poor company, were he to stay.

The Kilmarnock Arms was the start and the end of my first tour of Cruden Bay. Stuart seemed happy to sit there in comfort and warmth and displayed no great interest in taking me anywhere else. He was back to being friendly when he walked me home. No flirting, just a smile on the doorstep and a promise he’d look in on me tomorrow.

I checked the kitchen fire and found it burning low, and so I stoked it in the way that Jimmy’d shown me, feeling almost expert. ‘There,’ I said and stood, raising a hand to catch the sudden yawn that was intended to remind me I had barely slept at all last night, and had just drunk a glass of wine and needed to lie down.

My little bedroom in the back had just a wardrobe and an iron bed, complete with sagging mattress on old-fashioned springs that squeaked when I sat down. There was a window here that looked towards the north, and I could see the jagged outcropping of rock with ruined Slains high on it, rising red against the sky. But I was far too tired, just now, to take much notice of the view.

The bed squeaked loudly when I lay on it, but to my weary face the pillowcase felt soft and cool, and when I slipped beneath the freshly-laundered warmth of sheets and blankets I could feel my state of consciousness slip, too.

I should have slept.

But what I saw when my eyes closed was neither darkness nor a dream.

I saw a river, and green hills with trees below a sky of summer blue. Although I didn’t recognize the place, the image would not leave. It went on playing like a private film within my mind until I lost all sense of being tired.

I rose, and went to write.