The dog was back. I turned again to take the ball and throw it out along the beach for Angus, grateful to have some excuse to look away from Graham’s steady gaze. I shook my head and bit my tongue to keep from saying something I’d regret. And then I calmed my temper and said, ‘Look, just let it go, OK? If you don’t want to see me anymore, that’s fine. I understand.’
There was a pause, and then he came around to stand so that he filled my field of vision.
‘Who said,’ he asked, evenly, ‘I didn’t want to see you?’
‘You did.’
‘I did?’ Forehead creased, he shifted slightly as though needing space to concentrate, as though he’d just been handed something written down in code. ‘And when did I say that?’
I was beginning to feel less than certain of the facts myself. ‘At your father’s, after lunch, remember?’
‘Not exactly, no.’
‘You said that Stuart was your brother.’
‘Aye?’ The word came slowly, prompting me to carry on.
‘Well…’
‘Stuart was behaving like himself on Sunday, meaning he was something of an arse. But he was doing it,’ said Graham, ‘to impress you, and I didn’t have the heart to knock him down for it. That’s what I thought I’d told you.’ With a step he closed the space between us, and he lifted one gloved hand to tip my face up so I wouldn’t look away. ‘What did ye think I meant?’
It wasn’t that I didn’t want to tell him, but his nearness had the power of a magnet on my brainwaves, and I couldn’t even phrase a decent sentence.
Graham took a guess. ‘You thought that I was giving you the push, because of Stuie?’ There was disbelief in that, until I answered with a tiny nod.
He grinned, then. ‘Christ,’ he said, ‘I’m not so noble.’
And he brought his mouth to mine, and kissed me hard to prove the point.
It was a while before he let me go.
The dog, by then, had given up on both of us, and trotted off some distance to explore along the ridge of dunes that edged the beach. Graham turned and, slinging one arm warm around my shoulder, set us strolling in the same direction.
‘So,’ he asked, ‘we’re good?’
‘You need to ask?’
‘I’m thinking, now, I’d best not be assuming anything.’
‘We’re good,’ I said. ‘But Stuart won’t—’
‘Just let me handle Stuie.’
I decided I should mention, ‘He’s been giving everybody the impression that he tucks me in at night.’
‘Aye, so I’ve heard.’
I glanced up quickly, but I wasn’t quick enough to catch the smile. He said, ‘I ken my brother, Carrie. He’ll not be a problem. Give it time.’ He drew me closer to his side, and changed the subject. ‘So, if you weren’t out here waiting for me, what brought you down to the beach?’
‘I was getting a feel for the setting,’ I said. ‘For a scene I’ve been writing.’
I looked at the dunes, and the rough waving grass, and the clifftops beyond, and I had the strange feeling that something was missing, some part of the landscape I’d seen in my mind when I’d written the scenes between John and Sophia.
I narrowed my eyes to the wind, as I tried to remember. ‘There used to be a rock, up there, didn’t there? A big grey rock?’
Turning his head, he looked down at me, curious. ‘How did ye know that?’
I didn’t want to tell him I’d inherited the memory of its being there. ‘Dr Weir loaned me some of his old photos…’
‘Aye, they’d have had to be old,’ he said, drily. ‘That stone’s not been there since the 1700s.’
‘It must have been a drawing, then. I just remember seeing some view of this shoreline with a big rock, just up there.’
‘Aye, the grey stone of Ardendraught. It used to lie in that field, up at Aulton farm,’ he said, pointing out a spot above the far curve of the beach. ‘A great granite boulder, so large that the sailors at sea steered their course by it.’
‘Where did it go?’ I asked, gazing upwards at the empty hillside.
Graham smiled at me, and whistled for the dog. ‘Come on, I’ll show you.’
The ancient church sat in its own little hollow of trees, with bare farmland rising all round and no neighbors except for a plain-looking house and grander home built of red granite that stood on the opposite side of the narrow curved road, which was edged by the high granite wall of the kirkyard so closely that Graham had to park the car a short way down, beside a little bridge.