He really did have the best smile, I thought. It was sudden and genuine, perfect teeth gleaming an instant against the neat beard, closely trimmed to the line of his jaw. I missed it when he turned his head to watch the progress of the dog. ‘So, Carrie, tell me, what is it you’re writing?’
I knew that everyone I met in Cruden Bay would ask that question, and eventually I’d have to come up with a tidy, single-sentence answer, something that satisfied their polite interest without boring them to sleep. I tried it now, and told him, ‘It’s a novel set at Slains, back in the early eighteenth century.’
I’d thought that he might nod, or maybe say that sounded interesting, and that would be the end of it. Instead, he turned his head again, face angled so the strong wind kept the hair out of his eyes. ‘Oh, aye? What year?’
I told him, and he gave a nod.
‘The Franco-Scots invasion, is it? Attempted invasion, I guess I should call it. It wasn’t exactly a raging success.’ He bent briefly to wrestle the ball out of Angus’s teeth and then tossed it back out, several yards past the point where my own throw had landed. ‘An interesting choice,’ Graham said, ‘for a novel. I don’t ken that anyone’s written about it, that way. It barely makes the history books.’
I tried to hide my own surprise that he would be aware of what was written in the history books. Not because I’d made any assumptions about his intelligence, but because, based on the way he looked, the way he moved, I would have expected he’d be more at home on a football field than in a library. Showed what I knew, I thought.
I hadn’t noticed that the dog was overdue in coming back, but Graham had. He looked along the shore, eyes narrowed to the wind, and whistled sharply through his teeth to call the spaniel back. ‘I think he’s hurt himself,’ he said, and sure enough, Angus came limping towards us, the ball in his mouth, but one front paw held painfully.
‘Stepped on something,’ Graham guessed, and crouched down to investigate. ‘Broken glass, it looks like. Not a bad cut, but I’ll need to get that sand out.’
‘You can use my kitchen sink,’ I offered.
He carried Angus easily against his chest, the way a man might hold an injured child, and as I led them across the white footbridge and up the steep side of Ward Hill I was thinking of little else but the dog’s welfare. But with both of them inside, the cottage felt a little smaller, and I found myself becoming more self-conscious.
‘Sorry for the mess,’ I said, and tried to clear a space for him to lay the dog down on the narrow counter.
‘That’s all right. I’ve seen it worse. Is there a towel in the airing cupboard? One of those old yellow ones will do, don’t use a good one.’
I stopped, in the middle of moving a teacup, and stared at him. And then the gears of memory clicked a notch, and I remembered Jimmy Keith describing his two sons to me. He’d said, ‘There’s Stuie, he’s the younger, and his brother Graham’s doon in Aberdeen.’
‘Your last name isn’t Keith, by any chance?’ I asked.
‘It is.’
So that was why he seemed at home in here, and why he knew his local history. He should do, I thought. He lectured in it at the university.
He glanced at me, still holding the dog’s paw beneath the running water. ‘What’s the matter?’
Looking to the side, I smiled. ‘Nothing. I’ll go get that towel.’ I found the ones he wanted, the yellow ones, tucked in the back of the cupboard, and chose one that was worn, but clean.
He thanked me for it without looking up, and went on working at the wound. He had nice hands, I noticed. Neat and capable and strong, and yet their touch upon the spaniel’s paw was gentle. He asked, ‘Has Dad been telling tales about me, then? Is that it?’
‘No. It’s just that I keep tripping over members of your family. First your brother, and now you. There aren’t any other Keiths running around here in Cruden Bay, are there?’
‘Not counting cousins, there’s only the two of us.’ Still looking down and concentrating, he asked, ‘How did ye come to meet my brother?’
‘He was on my plane. He drove me up here from the airport.’
That brought his head around. ‘The airport?’
‘Yes, in Aberdeen.’
‘I ken fine where it is,’ he said. ‘But when I saw you last week, you were on your way to Peterhead, and driving by yourself. How did ye get from there,’ he asked me, ‘to the airport?’