The Winter Sea

I was grateful I was eating, and I only had to mumble something noncommittal through a mouthful of pudding before the telephone began to ring, and rescued me. I hobbled over on my own to answer it this time, and Jimmy let me do it.

Graham’s voice felt warm against my ear. ‘Hello.’

‘Hi.’ Holding the receiver closer, I lowered my voice.

Behind me, Jimmy closed the Aga’s door with a decided clang and stood. ‘I’ll jist fetch ye a bittie mair coal fae oot back,’ he announced, and went whistling past.

Graham asked, ‘Was that my father?’

‘Yes.’

‘You’re being well looked after, then.’

‘I am. He brought me sticky toffee pudding.’

‘Good man. How’s the ankle?’

‘How did you hear about that?’

‘I have sources. How is it?’

‘Not bad. Dr Weir says I need to stay off it a couple of days.’

‘Ah.’

‘Why “ah”?’

‘Because I had a proposition for you, but if you’re supposed to rest…’

‘It’s just a sprain, it’s not that bad.’ I glanced around to make sure I was still alone. ‘What kind of proposition?’

‘Well, I thought that since my brother’s home and looking after Dad, and since it’s difficult for me to come to you with those two hanging round the cottage all the time…I thought that you might like to come to Aberdeen this weekend.’

It was my turn to say, ‘Ah.’

‘You could bring your computer,’ he said, ‘so you won’t lose your writing time. I’ve got some marking of my own to do.’

‘It’s not that. It’s just I promised to have lunch with Jane, my agent, up in Peterhead on Saturday.’ I didn’t tell him that Jane had, in essence, invited him, too. There was no way I’d even consider subjecting him this early on to Jane’s scrutiny. She could be worse than my father when it came to grilling my boyfriends, and I didn’t want Graham grilled. He was special.

‘Nae bother,’ he said. ‘I could come and get you after lunch. We’d still have half the afternoon and evening, and all Sunday.’

Put like that, and with his voice so close against my ear, persuading me, I couldn’t think of any reason not to tell him, ‘All right, then. I’d love to.’

‘Good.’

Jimmy, still whistling, was coming back. Raising my voice to a more normal tone, I said, ‘OK, I’ll phone you tomorrow. We’ll work out the details.’

‘I’ll phone you,’ he promised.

I rang off in my most businesslike fashion, so it caught me off guard when Jimmy asked, ‘Was that ma son?’

It was, I thought, a good thing he was looking at the coal hod he was filling, not my face. He didn’t see me hold my breath. Head down, he remarked, ‘He’s a good-hearted loon, Stuart is, but he can be a nuisance.’

I exhaled, and relaxed. ‘It wasn’t Stuart.’ Then, because I saw a useful purpose in it, I said, ‘It was Jane, my agent. You remember Jane?’

‘Aye. She’s nae the sort o’ quine a man forgets.’

‘I’m having lunch with her this Saturday in Peterhead,’ I told him. Then, more casually, ‘I might, in fact, stay over. Spend the weekend with her family.’

Jimmy thought that sounded like a good idea, and he said as much. ‘Ye canna hide awa up here the hale time. Folk ging mad athoot a bittie company.’

I watched him tip the coal bag up and send the last bits rattling into the hod, and I thought how it must be for him, in his cottage alone. I remembered how Graham had told me his dad had been lost since his wife’s death. He might have his sons and his group of friends at the St Olaf Hotel, but it wasn’t the same thing as having a woman around all the time.

So when he’d finished with the coal and would have left me from politeness, I asked him if he’d make some tea, and then I asked him if he’d stay and have a cup, as well, and for the next two hours we sat and talked and laughed and played gin rummy with the deck of cards I used for playing solitaire.

Because, as Jimmy’d rightly said, it could be better sometimes having company than being on your own.

XIV

COLONEL GRAEME KEPT HIS word, and stayed.

Sophia reasoned that he stayed as much because he wanted to be there to see the frigate come to herald the beginning of the king’s invasion, as because he liked the hospitality of Slains, but either way she took great pleasure in his company. She came to envy Moray, that he had an uncle so engaging and as different from her Uncle John as daylight was from darkness. He talked more than his nephew, and was quicker to observe the humor in a daily happening, but he was enough like Moray that Sophia felt at ease with him and on familiar ground.

He brought a liveliness to Slains, for like his nephew he did not sit still long. If his body ceased its motion then his mind in turn grew restless and required diversion. He had them play at cards most evenings, learning all the new games now in favor at the French king’s court and Saint-Germain. And on one rainy afternoon toward the week’s end he began to teach Sophia how to play the game of chess.

He said, ‘Ye’ve got the brain for it. Not many lasses do.’

She felt quite flattered by his confidence, but wished that she could share it. With a sinking heart she watched him set the pieces out upon the wooden board that he had laid between them on the little table in the library. There seemed so many figures, finely carved of wood with flaking paint of black or white—the castle towers, and the horses’ heads, and bishops’ mitres flanking two crowned pieces taller than the rest, their painted faces staring back at her with doubt.