‘But surely noses aren’t the same as memories.’
He shrugged. ‘It’s been discovered, so I’ve learned, that there’s a gene that plays a part in making people thrill-seekers, or not. My eldest daughter, now, she always loved a bit of danger, from the time that she was born. Always climbing, she was—we had to harness her to keep her in the pram. She climbed out of her cot, up the bookcases, everywhere. Now that she’s grown, she climbs mountains, and jumps out of airplanes. Where did she get that from? I don’t know. Not her environment,’ he told me, with a certain smile. ‘My wife and I are hardly what you’d call the mountaineering type.’
I shared the smile, imagining the gnome-like doctor or his wife suspended from a cliff by ropes.
‘My point,’ he said, ‘is that some aspects of our nature, of our temperament, are clearly carried in our genes. And memory, surely, is no more intangible than temperament.’
‘I guess you’re right.’
He reached to open up his folder and began to sort the photocopied pages. ‘I did find some very interesting articles on the subject. For instance, here’s a piece by an American professor who believes that the abilities of some savants— autistic savants, who are mentally and socially shut off from all the rest of us, and yet have these strange, unexplainable gifts in one area, music, or maths, for example—this professor thinks their abilities may be the product of some form of genetic memory. He actually uses the term.
‘And here’s another piece that caught my fancy. I tried to keep strictly to science, but even though this is a bit more new-age, it did raise what I thought were some valid possibilities. It suggests that the entire past-life phenomenon, where people are “regressed” under hypnosis and recall what they believe are former lives in other bodies, may in fact be nothing more than their remembering the lives of their own ancestors.’ He handed me the folder, sitting back again to watch me while I sifted through the articles myself. Then he said, ‘Maybe I should start my own wee study, hmm?’
‘With me as your subject, you mean?’ I was briefly amused by the thought. ‘I’m not sure how much use I’d be to science.’
‘Why is that?’
‘Well, there’d be no way to prove just how much of the story was coming from memory, and how much was my own creation,’ I said, thinking now of how I had deliberately brought Captain Gordon back into the plot to stir the waters. That had come from my frustration with Stuart and Graham, and not from Sophia. ‘The family history details, fair enough, those can be checked, but when it comes to things like dialogue…’
“I should imagine it would be a mixture of your memory, and your writer’s art. And what of that? We tinker with our memories all the time. We add embellishments—that fish we caught gets larger, or the faults we had get fewer. But the basic event…well, that is what it is. We can’t turn sad memories to happy ones, no matter how we try. So I’d wager what you’ll write about Sophia, at its essence, will be truth.’
I thought about that later, when he’d gone and I was sitting at my writing-table, staring at the screen of my computer while the cursor blinked expectantly.
I wasn’t in the trance, tonight. My conscious mind was uppermost, and I could feel it pushing at my characters while they dug in their heels. They wouldn’t walk the path I tried to put them on. I’d meant to write the dinner scene, with Captain Gordon sitting at the table with John Moray and Sophia, so the two men could continue their competitive exchange.
But neither man was keen to speak, and in the end I had to go and fetch The Old Scots Navy book that Dr Weir had loaned me, thinking I might come across some interesting naval going-on that Captain Gordon could be telling everyone about, to get the conversation going.
I hadn’t had the nerve to read the book since that first night when I had opened it and learned that all the details I had written about Captain Gordon had in fact been real, and not of my creation. That knowledge had been too much for my troubled mind to process at the time, and after that I’d left the book untouched beside my bed.
But desperation drove me now to scan the index, searching for a Captain Gordon reference that might give me what I needed. And I found a document appended to the text, that seemed to be of the right date. It started: ‘During Hooke’s absence in Edinburgh Captain Gordon, commander of the two Scotch frigates on guard upon the coast （the one of 40, the other of 28 cannon） had come ashore to the Earl of Erroll…’