Susanna Kearsley: The Winter Sea

I reached out to knock at the door. ‘It’s just lonely.’

‘So will you be, if you live up here. Perhaps this wasn’t such a good idea.’

‘It was your idea.’

‘Yes, but what I had in mind was more a cozy little place right in the village, near the shops…’

‘This suits me fine.’ I knocked again. ‘I guess he isn’t here yet.’

‘Try the bell.’

I hadn’t seen the doorbell, buried deep within the tangle of a stubborn climbing vine with tiny leaves that shivered every time the wind blew from the sea. I stretched my hand to press it, but a man’s voice from the path behind me warned, ‘It winna dee ye ony good, it disna ring. The salt fae the sea ruins the wiring, fast as I fix it. Besides,’ said the man, as he came up to join us, ‘I’m nae in the hoose tae be hearin ye, am I?’ His smile made his rough, almost ugly face instantly likeable. He’d have been well into his sixties, with whitening hair and the fit build and ruddy complexion of someone who’d worked hard outdoors all his life. The woman at the Post Office had seemed sure I’d like him, although she had warned me I might have some trouble understanding him.

‘He speaks the Doric,’ she had said. ‘The language of this area. You’ll likely find it difficult to follow what he says.’

I didn’t, actually. His speech was broad and quick, and if I’d had to translate every word I might have had a problem, but it wasn’t hard to catch the general sense of what he meant when he was talking.

Holding my hand out, I said, ‘Mr Keith? Thanks for coming. I’m Carrie McClelland.’

‘A pleasure tae meet ye.’ His handshake was sure. ‘But I’m nae Mr Keith. Ma dad was Mr Keith, and he’s been deid and beeried twenty years. Ye ca’ me Jimmy.’

‘Jimmy, then.’

Jane introduced herself, never content to be out of the action for long. She didn’t exactly nudge me to one side, but she was an agent, after all, and though she likely didn’t even notice it herself, she liked to take control whenever somebody was bargaining.

She wasn’t pushy, really, but she led the conversation, and I hid my smile and let her lead, content to follow after them as Jimmy Keith fitted his key in the lock of the low cottage door, and then with a jiggle and thump of the latch made it swing inwards, scraping the tiles of the floor.

My first impression was one of general dimness, but when the blinds were raised with a rattle and the faded curtains pushed back, I could see the place, although not large, was comfortable— a sitting room, with thinning Persian carpets on the floor, two cushioned armchairs and a sofa, and a long scrubbed wooden table pushed against the farther wall, with wooden kitchen chairs around it. The kitchen had been fitted at the one end of the cottage with the snugness of a galley on a ship. Not many cupboards, nor much countertop, but everything was in its place and useful, from the one sink with its built-in stainless draining board to the small-sized electric stove that had, I guessed, been meant to take the place of the old coal-fired Aga standing solid in its chimney alcove on the back wall.

The Aga, so Jimmy assured me, still worked. ‘It’s a bit contermacious—that’s difficult, like—but it aye heats the room, and ye’ll save on the electric.’

Jane, standing by the front door looking up, made a pointed remark about that being handy. ‘Do you know,’ she said, ‘I haven’t seen one of these since I rented my first flat.’

I came to gaze up, with Jane, at the little black metal box fixed to the top of the door jamb, with the glassed-in meter and assorted gauges set above it. I had heard of such contraptions, but I’d never seen or used one.

Jimmy Keith looked up as well. ‘Michty aye,’ he agreed. ‘Ye dinna see those ony mair.’

It took 50p coins, he explained, and was fed like a parking meter—run out of coins and the power went off. ‘But nae bother,’ he promised. He’d sell me a roll of the coins and, when I’d used them all, he’d come open the meter and take them back out and just sell me the coins back again.

Jane gave the box one final doubtful look and turned to carry on with her inspection. There wasn’t much left, just a bedroom, not large, at the back, and an unexpectedly roomy bath across from it, complete with footed tub and what the British called an ‘airing cupboard’, open shelves set round a yellow water heater, good for storing towels and drying clothes.

Jane moved to stand beside me. ‘Well?’

‘I like it.’

‘Not much to it.’

‘I don’t need much when I’m working.’

She considered this, then turned to Jimmy Keith. ‘What sort of rent would you be asking?’

Which was my cue, I knew, to leave them to it. Jane had often told me how inept I was at making deals, and she was right. The cost of things had never much concerned me. Someone told me the price, and if I could afford it, I paid it, and didn’t waste time wondering if I could have had the thing for less. I had other things to occupy my mind.

I wandered through again into the sitting room, and stood a moment looking out the window at the headland reaching out into the sea, and dark along its length the ruined castle walls of Slains.

Watching, I could feel again the stirrings of my characters— the faint, as yet inaudible, suggestion of their voices, and their movements close around me, in the way someone can sense another’s presence in a darkened room. I didn’t need to shut my eyes. They were already fixed, not truly seeing, on the window glass, in that strange writer’s trance that stole upon me when my characters began to speak, and I tried hard to listen.

I’d expected that Nathaniel Hooke would have the most to say, and that his voice would be the strongest and the first that I would hear, but in the end the words I heard came not from him, but from a woman, and the words themselves were unexpected.

‘So, you see, my heart is held forever by this place,’ she said. ‘I cannot leave.’

I cannot leave .

That’s all she said, the voice was gone, but still that phrase stayed with me and repeated like a litany, so urgently that when the deal was done and Jane and Jimmy Keith had settled things and I was asked when I would like to take possession, I said, ‘Could I have it now? Tonight?’

They looked at me, the two of them, as though I’d lost my mind.

‘Tonight?’ Jane echoed. ‘But your things are still at our house, and you’re flying back to France tomorrow, aren’t you?’

‘Onywye,’ said Jimmy Keith, ‘it’s nae been cleaned.’

They were right, I knew, and really, one or two days more would hardly make a difference. So we set the date for Wednesday, just the day after tomorrow. But that didn’t stop me feeling, as we locked the cottage door behind us, that I was committing a betrayal.

I felt that way all through the drive back to Peterhead, and through my last night visiting with Jane and little Jack and Alan. And next morning on my way back down to Aberdeen I drove deliberately along the coast, through Cruden Bay, to let the castle ruins know that I had not abandoned them.

It didn’t take me long to settle things in France. I’d rented the house for the season, but the money didn’t matter, and the things that I’d had with me there didn’t fill two suitcases. My landlady, who wasn’t losing anything because I had already paid up front in full, still looked a bit put out until I told her I would probably be back before the winter’s end, to do more research up at the chateau. But I knew, as I was saying it, that I would not be back. There was no need.

My characters had chosen not to come to life at Saint-Germain-en-Laye because their story wasn’t meant to happen there. They were supposed to be at Slains. And so was I.