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.’
‘These are pretty specific,’ I said.
‘So I gather.’ He gave me another look, closely assessing, as though I were one of his patients. ‘If it were only déjà vu, I’d have you in to see a specialist tomorrow. Dejà vu can be a side effect of certain kinds of epilepsy, or more rarely of a lesion on the brain. But this, from what you’ve said, is something more. When did this start?’
I considered the question. ‘I think when I first saw the castle.’
‘That’s interesting.’
‘Why?’
‘Well, you said that your ancestor came from the west coast of Scotland.’
‘That’s right.’
‘So it’s unlikely she ever saw Slains.’
‘Well, we know she was born near Kirkcudbright. We know she was married there. People in those days just didn’t go traipsing all over the country.’
‘Aye, true enough. So it may not be memory, after all. How could you have her memories of Slains,’ he said, ‘if she was never here?’
I had no answer to that question, and I’d come no closer to one by the time I left, a little dazed, less from our talk than from the fact that I’d drunk whisky before noon.