The Winter Sea

The garden gnomes, more welcoming, laughed up at me from their close huddled spot beside the front walk of the neat, white-painted bungalow. And Dr Weir seemed pleased I’d come to visit.

‘How’s the book coming?’ he asked me, ushering me into the front entry, with its atmosphere of comfort and tradition.

‘Fine, thank you.’

He hung my jacket on the hall tree. ‘Come into the study. Elsie’s just gone with a friend up to Peterhead to have a wander round the shops. She’ll be sorry she missed you.’

He’d clearly been all set to enjoy his day of solitude— beside his leather wing chair in the study lay a tidy stack of books, and on the smoking table one of the great cut-glass tumblers that we’d used the other night was sitting with a generous dash of whisky in it, waiting. Dr Weir explained it as, ‘My morning draught. I always thought the ancient ways of starting off the day were more appealing. An improvement over soggy breakfast flakes.’

I smiled. ‘I thought the morning draught was meant to be strong ale, with toast.’

‘I’ve had the toast already. And in Scotland, we did things a little differently,’ he said. ‘A man might have his ale and toast, but he’d not be a man unless he finished with a dram of good Scots spirits.’

‘Ah.’

He smiled back. ‘But I could make you tea.’

‘I wouldn’t mind a morning draught myself, if that’s all right.’

‘Of course.’ His eyebrows raised a fraction, but he didn’t look at all shocked as he saw me settled into the chintz armchair by the window, as before, with my own glass of whisky beside me.

‘So,’ he said. ‘What brings you by this morning?’

‘Actually, I had a question.’

‘Something about Slains?’

‘No. Something medical.’

That took him by surprise. ‘Oh, aye?’

‘I wondered…’ This was not as easy as I’d hoped. I took a drink. ‘It has to do with memory.’

‘What, specifically?’

I couldn’t answer that until I’d laid the background properly, and so I started with the book itself, and how the writing of it was so unlike anything I’d experienced before, and how sometimes it felt that I wasn’t putting it down on paper so much as trying to keep up with it. And I told him how I’d picked Sophia Paterson, my ancestor, to be my viewpoint character. ‘She didn’t come from here,’ I said. ‘She came from near Kirkcudbright, in the west. I only put her in the story because I needed somebody, a woman, who could bind all the historical characters together.’

Dr Weir, like all good doctors, had sat back to let me talk, not interrupting. But he nodded now to show he understood.

I carried on, ‘The problem is that some of what I’m writing seems to be more fact than fiction.’ And I gave him, as examples, my correctly guessing Captain Gordon’s first name, and his ship’s name, and the name of Captain Hamilton; and how my own invented floor plan of the castle rooms had so exactly matched the one he’d given me. I told him, too, about my walk along the coast path yesterday—although I didn’t tell him that I hadn’t been alone, I only told him of my sense that I had made that walk before.

‘And that’s OK,’ I said, ‘because I know there’s probably a simple explanation for it all. I’ve done a lot of research for this book. I’ve likely read those details somewhere, and seen photographs, and now I’m just recalling things that I forgot I knew. But…’ How did I say this, I wondered, without sounding crazy? ‘But some of the things that I’ve written are details I couldn’t have possibly read somewhere else. Things I couldn’t have known.’ I explained about Sophia’s birthdate, the death of her father, his will that had given the name of her uncle. ‘My father only found those dates, those documents, because I told him where to look. Except I don’t know how I knew to look there. It’s as if…’ I stopped again, and searched for words, and then, because there wasn’t anything to do but take a breath and dive right in, I said, ‘My father always says I like the sea so much because it’s in my blood, because our ancestors were shipbuilders from Belfast, Northern Ireland. He doesn’t mean it literally, but given what’s been happening to me I wondered if you knew if there was such a thing,’ I asked him, ‘as genetic memory?’

His eyes, behind the spectacles, grew thoughtful. ‘Could you have Sophia’s memories, do you mean?’

‘Yes. Is it possible?’

‘It’s interesting.’ He gave it that, and for a moment he was silent, thinking. Then he told me, ‘Memory is a thing that science doesn’t fully understand, at present. We don’t even properly know how a memory is formed, or when our memories start—at birth, or in the womb, or if, as you suggest, we humans carry memory in our genes. Jungian psychologists would argue, in a broader sense, that such a thing exists; that some of us share knowledge that is based, not on experience, but on the learnings of our common ancestors. A sort of deep instinct,’ he said, ‘or what Jung liked to call the “collective unconscious”.’

‘I’ve heard the term.’

‘It’s still a controversial theory, though it might, to some degree, explain the actions of some primates, chimpanzees, who, even after being raised in isolation from their families so they couldn’t have learned anything directly, still showed knowledge that the researchers could not explain—the way to use a rock to open nuts for food, and such like. But then, a good part of Jung’s theories can’t be tested. His idea that our common human wariness of heights, for instance, might have been passed down to us from some poor, luckless prehistoric man who took a tumble off a cliff and lived to learn the lesson of it. Pure conjecture,’ he pronounced. ‘And besides, the “collective unconscious” idea is not about people recalling specific events.’