Stonemouth

Later, with the maturity that came with my late teens and hitting the big Two-Oh, getting engaged and married started to seem like a deeply romantic thing to do, an expression of hope and nailing-your-colours-to-the-mast defiance in the face of the expectations of a jaundiced and cynical world. Maybe there was an element of contrarianism, too; if everybody just assumed that of course there was no real point in getting married, then there were always going to be a few of us who’d think, Ha, well, I’ll show you!

To be absolutely honest, when I asked Ellie to marry me it was kind of a spur-of-the-moment thing and I expected her to say no. Never really occurred to me she might say anything else, not after all the times she’d told me how she’d grown up listening to her parents snipe and shout at each other, and hating that they felt tied, manacled to one another. I really just wanted to get the whole question of getting formally married out of the way so we could be sure where we stood, and I assumed that where we stood was that our love and commitment was so strong and so complete within itself that it didn’t need the dubious outside recognition provided by the state (and certainly not by the Church).

We were standing in the snow by the slow dark waters of the Urstan river at Bridge of Ay. There had been a lot of snow the night before and I’d suggested we borrow Donald’s Range Rover to go for a drive and just take in the snowy scenery, maybe find a village pub or an open-out-of-season hotel serving lunch. The way our various course commitments and so on had worked out, it was our first weekend together for nearly a month.

We’d been gazing upstream to the old bridge, a delicate-looking humpback construction in stone that described a near geometrically precise semicircle over the river. There was a deep pool just downstream from it, haloed with ice, the black, still waters at its centre reflecting the bridge with barely a ripple. Bathed in the cold white light of a calm winter’s day, the structure and its inverted image seemed to form an almost perfect circle.

I was slightly stunned when she said yes. There were hugs, there were tears. It was just as well Ellie’s chin was on my shoulder as we stood there wrapped in each other’s arms; I think my eyes stayed wide with surprise for a good minute or two. I remember thinking, Well, that didn’t go the way I thought it would. I was used to my unpremeditated ideas going pretty much as I expected them to, to the extent that I had time to think about them and form any sort of expectation of them at all in the moments — sometimes as little as a few seconds — between making the decision and finding out where it led.

Standing there in the snow-struck silence, beneath a shining, mother-of-pearl sky with Ellie hugging me so tight I almost had to fight for each cold breath, it occurred to me for the first time that maybe being so cavalierly spontaneous wasn’t always such an effortlessly brilliant idea after all. I suppose if I’d been a really smart person I’d have made sure this was the last time this occurred to me, too, but it wasn’t. I think I later convinced myself it was just a blip. And anyway, at the time, being hugged, being held so fiercely by this woman I knew I loved and wanted to be with for ever, it felt like this had been my best snap decision ever, and like I’d inadvertently rescued her from something I hadn’t even known was a threat, like I’d said exactly the right thing completely by accident.

‘Yes,’ she said, sniffing, still hugging me tight around the neck. ‘You sure?’ She pushed back, looked at me through teary eyes. ‘You sure?’ she repeated.

Well, I am now, I thought of saying, but didn’t.

‘Of course,’ I told her.

7

On the far side of the bridge over the Brochty Burn, before the mass of trees that is Vatton forest, there’s a choice of paths as various tramped ways — through the grass and between the broom and gorse bushes — all split and weave and come back together again; I choose one that rides a line of low dunes between the forest proper and the beach, a little undulating highway with views of sand, sea and trees.

I see the figure on the beach from maybe a kilometre away: just a single dark dot, walking slowly, obscured by drifting tendrils of mist, then suddenly glowing in a random shaft of sunlight, briefly radiant before the haze resumes. He or she is wandering along the near-flat beach, their route taking them generally towards anything anomalous: mostly the dark, sand-and wave-smoothed wrecks of trees lying half sunken in the great sable stretches of sand. They’re quite bundled up: wee thin legs and what looks like a heavy jacket. Female? Big kid? There’s something about the way they walk, though, that catches at me. I can’t explain it to myself at first, but I feel an emptiness in my belly, and my heart beats faster.