The Winter Sea

I hadn’t been outside in days. My eyes were unaccustomed to the light, and I felt cold despite my heavy sweater. But my mind, fixed firmly on the past, ignored these things. There were still dunes that ran above the beach, but not in the same places they had been three hundred years ago. The sands had blown, and shifted, and the tides had come to claim them, and left little I could use to judge position by. But inland, there were hills I found familiar.

I was studying the nearest of them when a blur of brown and white streaked past me, snatched a rolling bit of yellow from the sand, and sharply wheeled to change its running course and come and pounce on me, with muddy feet and wagging tail.

I had stiffened at the sight of him. He’d caught me unprepared. I’d known that Graham would be back to visit Jimmy, but I’d hoped I could avoid him. And the way that we had left things, I’d been sure that he would be avoiding me.

The spaniel nudged my knee with an insistent nose.

‘Hi, Angus.’ Reaching down, I gave his ears a scratch and took the tennis ball he offered me and threw it out again for him as far as I could throw. As he dashed happily away in close pursuit, the voice that I’d been bracing for spoke, coming up behind me.

‘Good, you’re up. We were just coming to collect you.’

His tone, I thought, was so damned normal, as though he’d forgotten what he’d told me at his father’s. I turned my head and looked at him as though he were insane.

He’d been starting to say something else, but when he saw my face he stopped, as someone does who’s put a foot down on uncertain ground. ‘Are you all right?’

The dog was back. I turned again to take the ball and throw it out along the beach for Angus, grateful to have some excuse to look away from Graham’s steady gaze. I shook my head and bit my tongue to keep from saying something I’d regret. And then I calmed my temper and said, ‘Look, just let it go, OK? If you don’t want to see me anymore, that’s fine. I understand.’

There was a pause, and then he came around to stand so that he filled my field of vision.

‘Who said,’ he asked, evenly, ‘I didn’t want to see you?’

‘You did.’

‘I did?’ Forehead creased, he shifted slightly as though needing space to concentrate, as though he’d just been handed something written down in code. ‘And when did I say that?’

I was beginning to feel less than certain of the facts myself. ‘At your father’s, after lunch, remember?’

‘Not exactly, no.’

‘You said that Stuart was your brother.’

‘Aye?’ The word came slowly, prompting me to carry on.

‘Well…’

‘Stuart was behaving like himself on Sunday, meaning he was something of an arse. But he was doing it,’ said Graham, ‘to impress you, and I didn’t have the heart to knock him down for it. That’s what I thought I’d told you.’ With a step he closed the space between us, and he lifted one gloved hand to tip my face up so I wouldn’t look away. ‘What did ye think I meant?’

It wasn’t that I didn’t want to tell him, but his nearness had the power of a magnet on my brainwaves, and I couldn’t even phrase a decent sentence.

Graham took a guess. ‘You thought that I was giving you the push, because of Stuie?’ There was disbelief in that, until I answered with a tiny nod.

He grinned, then. ‘Christ,’ he said, ‘I’m not so noble.’

And he brought his mouth to mine, and kissed me hard to prove the point.

It was a while before he let me go.

The dog, by then, had given up on both of us, and trotted off some distance to explore along the ridge of dunes that edged the beach. Graham turned and, slinging one arm warm around my shoulder, set us strolling in the same direction.

‘So,’ he asked, ‘we’re good?’

‘You need to ask?’

‘I’m thinking, now, I’d best not be assuming anything.’

‘We’re good,’ I said. ‘But Stuart won’t—’

‘Just let me handle Stuie.’

I decided I should mention, ‘He’s been giving everybody the impression that he tucks me in at night.’

‘Aye, so I’ve heard.’

I glanced up quickly, but I wasn’t quick enough to catch the smile. He said, ‘I ken my brother, Carrie. He’ll not be a problem. Give it time.’ He drew me closer to his side, and changed the subject. ‘So, if you weren’t out here waiting for me, what brought you down to the beach?’

‘I was getting a feel for the setting,’ I said. ‘For a scene I’ve been writing.’

I looked at the dunes, and the rough waving grass, and the clifftops beyond, and I had the strange feeling that something was missing, some part of the landscape I’d seen in my mind when I’d written the scenes between John and Sophia.

I narrowed my eyes to the wind, as I tried to remember. ‘There used to be a rock, up there, didn’t there? A big grey rock?’

Turning his head, he looked down at me, curious. ‘How did ye know that?’

I didn’t want to tell him I’d inherited the memory of its being there. ‘Dr Weir loaned me some of his old photos…’

‘Aye, they’d have had to be old,’ he said, drily. ‘That stone’s not been there since the 1700s.’

‘It must have been a drawing, then. I just remember seeing some view of this shoreline with a big rock, just up there.’