The Winter Sea

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.

II

SHE DREAMT OF THE woods, and the soft western hills, and the River Dee dancing in sunlight beyond the green fields, and the soft waving touch of the high grasses bowing before her wherever she walked. She could feel the clean air of the morning, the cool gentle breeze, and the happiness carried upon it, while nearby her mother sat singing a tune that Sophia could only remember in dreams…