Nearly twenty minutes later, I was laughing at her dry descriptions of the joys of diapering a newborn, when her husband, Alan, thrust his head around the doorway of the bedroom.
‘You do know there’s a party going on downstairs?’ he asked us, with a scowl I would have taken much more seriously if I hadn’t known it was all bluff. He was a softie, on the inside. ‘I can’t entertain this lot all on my own.’
‘Darling,’ Jane replied, ‘they are your relatives.’
‘All the more reason not to leave me alone with them.’ But he winked at me. ‘She’s not got you talking shop, I hope? I told her she’s to let you be. She’s too concerned with contracts.’
Jane reminded him, ‘Well, that’s my job. And for your information, I am never in the least concerned that Carrie’s going to break a contract. She has another seven months before the first draft’s due.’
She’d meant for that to cheer me, but I think that Alan must have seen my shoulders sag, because he held his hand to me and said, ‘Come on, then. Come downstairs and have a drink, and tell me how the trip was. I’m amazed you made it all that way in time.’
There were enough jokes floating round about my tendency to get distracted when I traveled, so I opted not to tell them anything about my detour up the coast. But it reminded me, ‘Alan,’ I asked, ‘are you flying tomorrow?’
‘I am. Why?’
Alan’s little fleet of helicopters helped to serve the off-shore oil rigs dotted through the North Sea off the rugged coast of Peterhead. He was a fearless pilot, as I’d learned the one and only time I’d let him take me up. I’d barely had the legs to stand when he’d returned me to the ground. But now I said, ‘I wondered if you’d fly me up the coast a bit. Nathaniel Hooke came over twice from France, to intrigue with the Scottish nobles, and both times he landed at the Earl of Erroll’s castle, Slains, which, from the map I’ve got, the old one, looks to be somewhere just north of here. I’d like to see the castle, or what’s left of it, from out at sea, the way it would have looked to Hooke when he first saw it, coming over.’
‘Slains? Aye, I can take you over that. But it’s not up the coast, it’s down. At Cruden Bay.’
I stared. ‘Where?’
‘Cruden Bay. You would have missed it, coming up the way you did.’
Jane, sharp as ever, noticed something in my face, in my expression. ‘What?’ she asked.
I never ceased to be surprised by serendipity—the way chance happenings collided with my life. Of all the places that I could have stopped, I thought. Aloud I only said, ‘It’s nothing. Could we go tomorrow, Alan?’
‘Aye. Tell you what—I’ll take you early so that you can have your look from out at sea, and if you want when we get back I’ll watch wee Jack awhile and Jane can drive you down to have a wander round. It’ll do you both good, get a breath of sea air.’
And so that’s what we did.
What I saw from the air looked much larger than what I had seen from the ground—a roofless, sprawling ruin that seemed to sit right at the edge of the cliffs, with the sea boiling white far below. It sent one small cold thrill down my spine, and I knew that familiar sensation enough to be frankly impatient to get on the ground, so that Jane could take over and drive me back down.
There were two other cars in the car park this time, and the snow of the footpath showed deep, sliding prints. I ploughed ahead of Jane, and raised my face towards the salt blasts of the wind that left a taste upon my lips and set me shivering again within the warm folds of my jacket.
I confess I couldn’t, afterwards, remember any other people being there, although I knew there had been. Nor could I recall too many details of the ruin itself—just images, of pointed walls and hard pink granite flecked with grey that glittered in the light…the one high square-walled tower standing solid near the cliff ’s edge…the silence of the inner chambers, where the wind stopped raging and began to moan and weep, and where the bare roof timbers overhead cast shadows on the drifted snow. In one large room a massive gaping window faced the sea, and when I stood and leaned my hands against the sunwarmed sill I noticed, looking down, the imprints of a small dog’s paws, perhaps a spaniel’s, and beside them deeper footprints showing where a man had stood and looked, as I was looking, out towards the limitless horizon.
I could almost feel him standing at my shoulder now, but in my mind he’d changed so that he wasn’t any more the modern stranger I had talked to in the car park yesterday, but someone of an older time, a man with boots and cloak and sword. The thought of him became so real I turned… and found Jane watching me.