The Winter Sea (Slains, #1)(51)

I rubbed the side of Tammie’s neck. ‘He’s much too pretty,’ I declared, ‘to be a boy.’

‘Aye, but you’ll wound his pride by saying so.’ He glanced at me with interest. ‘D’ye ride?’

‘Not really.’

Grinning, he asked, ‘What does that mean?’

‘That means I can sit on horses if they let me do it. I can even hold on if they’re only walking, but beyond a trot I’m useless. I fall off.’

‘Well, that can be a problem,’ he agreed.

‘I take it no one’s home?’

‘No.’ He glanced briefly at the open double doorway, where the rain was coming down now in an almost solid sheet, and then looked back at me and, seeing how absorbed I was in petting Tammie, said, ‘But we can wait. We’re in no hurry.’ And he hitched a rough stool forward with one foot, and took a seat, while Angus settled on the straw-strewn floor beside him.

It was almost like my book, I thought. The stables, and the mare—well, Tammie, looking like the mare—and me, and Graham, with his clear grey eyes that looked, by no coincidence, a lot like Mr Moray’s. We even had the dog, curled up and sleeping in the straw. Life echoed art, I thought, and smiled a little.

‘What about yourself ?’ I asked. ‘Do you ride?’

‘Aye, I won ribbons in my youth. I’m that surprised my dad’s not had them out to show you.’

His voice, behind the dryness, held such fondness for his father that it made me wonder something. ‘Maybe,’ I ventured, ‘he’ll show me tomorrow. You know he’s invited me over for lunch?’

‘He did mention it.’

‘You’ll be there, too?’

‘I will.’

‘That’s good. Because your dad’s been trying very hard to help me with my research, and he seemed keen to have me meet you so we could talk history.’ Pretending a deep interest in the horse’s face, I asked him, without looking round, ‘Why didn’t you tell him we’d already met?’

I wished, through the long minute of the pause that followed, that I could have seen his face, and known what he was thinking. But when he spoke, his voice was hard to read. He only tossed the question back at me. ‘Why didn’t you?’

I knew why I’d kept silent, and it wasn’t just because I hadn’t wanted to conflict with his own story, or the lack of it. It was because…well, Graham, like the horses, was a private weakness, too. When he was near me I felt half-electric, half-confused, excited as a teenager caught up in a new crush, and I had wanted that to last a while, to hug it to myself and not let anyone intrude upon it. But I couldn’t tell him that, so I said, ‘I don’t know. I didn’t really think.’ And then, like him, I threw the ball back. ‘I assumed you’d had your reasons for not telling him.’

Whatever they had been, he didn’t tell me. We were on a different subject. ‘So,’ he asked, ‘how goes the book?’

Much safer ground, I thought. ‘It’s going really well. It kept me up till three o’clock this morning.’

‘Do you always write at night?’

‘Not always. When I get towards the last part of a book, I write all hours. But I do my best work late at night, I don’t know why. Maybe because I’m half-conscious.’ I’d said that last part as a joke, but he nodded, considering.

‘It’s possible,’ he said. ‘Maybe at night your subconscious takes over. A friend of mine paints, and he says the same thing, that it’s easiest working at night, when his mind starts to drift and he’s nearly asleep. Says he sees things more clearly, then. Mind you, I can’t tell the difference myself from the pictures he paints in the daytime—they all look like great blobs of color to me.’

After this past week and what I’d learned about Sophia Paterson, I’d formed a few opinions on the subject of subconscious thought and how it ruled my writing, but I kept these to myself. ‘With me it’s habit, more than anything. When I first started writing—really writing, not just playing—I was still at university. The only time I had was late at night.’

‘And what was it you studied? English?’

‘No. I love to read, but all through school I hated it when books were pulled apart and analyzed. Winnie-the-Pooh as a political allegory, that sort of thing. It never really worked for me. There’s a line in The Barretts of Wimpole Street—you know, the play—where Elizabeth Barrett is trying to work out the meaning of one of Robert Browning’s poems, and she shows it to him, and he reads it and he tells her that when he wrote that poem, only God and Robert Browning knew what it meant, and now only God knows. And that’s how I feel about studying English. Who knows what the writer was thinking, and why should it matter? I’d rather just read for enjoyment. No, I studied politics.’

‘Politics?’

‘I had ideas of changing the world,’ I admitted. ‘And anyway, I thought it might come in handy, somewhere. Everything’s political.’

He didn’t argue that. He only asked me, ‘Why not history?’

‘Well, again, I’d rather read it for enjoyment. Teachers always knock the life out of the subject, somehow.’ Then remembering what he did for a living, I tried softening that statement with, ‘Not all teachers, naturally, but—’