by Kirsty Gunn
When he left the House this morning no one saw him go. He was a secret then to them all. Getting up as usual, washed, he made his bed – though Margaret always tells him to leave it, he’d not have her at that kind of work, of the intimacy of a bed – so he tidied it himself while the rest of them were sleeping. The sheets and covers and the room entire … That was this morning. Peeping into the dining room and there were the breakfast things laid out on the table, the sun coming in and striking at the comer of the table’s wood. Remember it? The feeling of it so quiet and peaceful with the others in their beds and he was up, he was dressed and moving about the place, planning, thinking. For the tune has been with him for a while – on his mind, the great shape of it – and the first part put down, already written,14 but needing something else in it, to make it whole, and he didn’t know what it was – but then, there she was, the child.
So the morning like every other morning, you might say – and he’s managed to leave the House before, earlier, this summer he managed it, to get up to the place in the hills then and they thought he was just down to the river, or up for a walk in the strath – but only this time they don’t know, Margaret and Iain and Helen, too, that this particular morning has all been thought about and planned for. That it’s to be much more than that, him just taking himself off like he’s done before. But this time it’s been arranged. Flushing the tablets down the toilet like he’s been doing lately and none of them can notice. Practising with the stairs, going up and down. Waking earlier and earlier in the morning so as to be used to it, the feeling of being alert enough then and nobody about him. All happening without them seeing a bit of what he’s doing, that he’s getting stronger, clearer – but quieter too. So that he can be up like he was and taking some cereal in the kitchen and some juice and early this was, this morning, looking in on the dining room and seeing the breakfast things laid out just so and the sun coming in, but none of those things will be for him.
Was all in the plan. The clever thought of it. That no one would feel the difference when they woke, that he wasn’t there, would not have heard him move about, wouldn’t know that he’d been up and off before Iain was out for the generator even and then going to see to the dogs. Up the stairs he was while they’re all still sleeping, and there in the basket, she was sleeping too. He’d just gathered her up, had the blanket waiting. Then down the stairs again and away.
That was this morning.
And there would have been a time then, at the beginning of the day, when he was long gone, that all would have been quiet at the house. At six o’clock. At seven o’clock. H e can hear it. Like a little sequence of time at the beginning of the tune. The minutes passing, the seconds. With the sun at the edges in the rooms, and on the dining table the butter laid out and the white bowls and the marmalade and the jam. Listen. There’s the clock ticking in its place over the mantelpiece, and there Margaret comes in with the toast and the porridge and Iain takes a seat like they all sit there together in the mornings before Johnnie is up and sometimes Helen has the baby with her, while she herself eats a piece of toast or takes an apple and cores it – but …
You took her away.15
Something there not quite the neat little sequence of notes that sounded so pretty before.
You carried her off, young Katherine Anna.
For there are the breakfast things still laid out on the table and the sun coming in, struck at the corner of the table’s wood the bright sun, but the things all scattered and no plates or cups or silver knives at peace because of the way one man, himself, has gone and killed the morning, gone, and made the baby’s mother cry.
A cool wind comes in and ruffles at his clothing now. A thin jacket. Little town shoes. John looks up. What is it? The light going bad? No. A cloud passed over the sun’s all it is, and there are no more clouds beside. The day fair enough, it’s fair …
But a change nevertheless. And it was there in the midst of his walking before, he may as well confess it: contained within the very interval of High ‘G’ to Low ‘G’ – that drop – another theme inserted in the crazy reach of notes, in that awful space between them.
He pulls his jacket to, wraps closer about her the child’s white cloth.
You took her away.
There it is, all right. The change.16
You carried her off, young Katherine Anna.
Coming in at those words.
Making it colder. Thinner.
You took her away …
The words of a lullaby but not a lullaby at all.17
For they’re nothing like a lullaby, those words. And Johnnie can hear that. He can hear. Those words for the morning and the words for what he did. How he took the stairs two at a time while the rest of them thought he was still sleeping. How he reached into the basket and gathered her up like she was fruit, the sleeping child.
‘But for the tune I did it!’ he says, hearing his own voice sounding out in the air. ‘Only for the tune!’
But it makes no difference. Speaking out loud. Sounding so certain in the open air.
For though his own words are loud they’re not louder in his mind than the other words, or the music for those words for what he’s done. And though it may be a pretty tune in the way the notes came in there alongside the theme, gentling it, and softening the fall of the ‘G’ to ‘G’ … That doesn’t change it. The meaning of it. Of the words. And he’s stopping now, no longer walking, no longer able. For the loudness of them, those words, the sound of them all through his mind and getting louder and louder …
The sound of the morning and the words for what he did.
You took her away.
Filling everything up, the air around him where his own speaking was, the spaces in his head.
Getting louder and louder …
Those other words.
Though he can’t be minding them. Still there they are …
Completing.
So he’s stopping. Listening. When he should be moving on.
To a lullaby that’s no lullaby at all.
You took her away, a baby sleeping.
In your old arms, took her into the wild.
John breathes, holds. He can’t be dealing with this now. What the song is. What it isn’t. He needs all his energy for the last of the hill. And he can’t be waiting now on the side of the path or go back on his plan and his intention just because of words. For it’s over to the right he needs to go, to get to the little path that’s the secret, the way in to a bit of the hill unmarked by the rest of the path or the ways that you might walk, unknown.
So –
‘Think about that, instead’ he says. ‘Says Johnnie!’ Out into the air again. Like shouting, say it.
‘The little path!’
‘His clever plan!’
And …
‘Think about that, my Johnnie.’
He takes another breath.
‘Yes!’
Because he can. Think about those words. For they’re better words. The little path. The clever plan. They’re stronger words. And –
‘Ha!’
Think that again, too. That: ‘Ha!’
‘And be strong!’
For they don’t have the smallest, faintest dreamed idea. Back there, with the sun in the rooms. With the breakfast all laid out. They don’t know even yet what he’s up to. Because he’s away, he is! Long gone! By the time Margaret’s up and in the kitchen, and Helen coming through to boil the kettle for a cup of tea and she’s not even been into the baby’s room yet. While he’s already hours into the day! Out on the hills with the sun rising fair. Gone long before them with their baby and on his way to the secret place.
No one else knows.
For they don’t know, do they? About it? The sleeach, sleekit way you turn off the path towards it? Where you come up this part of the hill and cut down to the right, turn in to a little valley that you can’t see from the flat … No one knows? That you can’t see from here on the hill even, but it’s th
ere in the dark lee, in the crevice.
And …
‘That’s where we’re going. Where I’m taking you, my darling.’
To the little secret place he made for himself up there and long ago.18
So he starts up again, increasing his pace now, one foot there on the path, another on a stone that will lift him higher up the hill. Like a stair the shape of the path, cut chunks into the peat and bits of rock jutting out to form a step here, and there. Up and up and then to look for the dip in the heather that’s like an indent by a big boulder, like the sort that marks the entrance for a path or a way – and that’s where he’ll turn off and go in.
And oh but he’ll laugh at them again, then. Make that sound ‘Ha!’, like he wants to laugh now, out loud! At the craziness of it! This plan of his and the way to make a tune! To be taking the child into the secret like he is. Showing her to the Little Hut, putting her there, when no one else knows about it at all.
You took her away …
So yes, all right, yes. Those words are still there but fainter just because now he’s feeling strong. Thinking about the boulder and the path. And maybe he set that boulder up, some time, he did, long since, as a kind of signpost, to indicate the way to go but no one knows about that either, not even his own son and Callum is in London now and he’ll never see Callum again.
So …
Katherine Anna, Helen’s child.
‘Don’t worry.’
Because she needn’t mind. He doesn’t mind. In the end it’s not important what they think. What they might say. For they don’t know, the others. They don’t understand. How she’s to be in the tune, the little one. How she’ll make sense of it, make the finish of this ‘Lament’ of his – the words of a lullaby can’t describe it because she’s more than those words, she’s more in this than all of them, in this tune that has his ending. That his life has come to nothing, maybe, but that she may make sense of it in beginning with her here. A little man and she can be a spirit, a great lover and an artist and a woman, that he can be an old man out alone on the hills but holding in his arms a queen.
By this time the weather has fully turned. The clouds that were laid over thinly on the blue, taking out the sun’s warmth, have thickened, darkened, the rain come in from the west.
And John has no coat on.
Johnnie has no coat.
Just the cotton jacket and the thin, silly shoes. The baby is covered in the white blanket and it is this, in the end, the others will see up against the grey when Iain strains to get a glimpse in his binoculars, casting across the tops, along the green face: There it is! This tiny fleck of white against the greyness of the hill, against the rain. Is what will bring him in. Iain sending the dogs up first, once he’s got the Argo over the river and across the flat, and then coming himself at a run behind them, closing in on the old man, minutes and minutes getting nearer to him and the child.
But for now you wouldn’t guess it. That the morning’s to be saved this way. All you’d see is an old man with a baby he shouldn’t be carrying out alone with her in the weather and the child moving in his arms, a good sign perhaps, for I worried before when she lay so still and quiet. But this is her awake now, and twisting enough in an old man’s grasp for to make him think for a second he could drop her. Christ! For not like a parcel at all, remember, he thought that before – she’s a baby, Christ! – and now she’s shaking her head, starting fretting, and turning and harder and harder for him to hold and – No! Making that sound, like No! again. No! And wide awake and in a temper and twisting and moving and screwing up her face and now she’s crying, pure crying out into the air and loud and he’d need a lullaby now, all right, a real lullaby,19 to keep her still and steady.
But not the one he’s been hearing for none of that is about comfort – and he has heard all the words of that tune and they’re not his to sing. With the weather turning into heavy rain it seems as though the hills themselves could hear that the song, and the dark air too could hear it, down by the House and up by the rivers and the loch, like Johnnie’s poor mind can hear it, down by the House and up by the rivers and the loch, like Johnnie’s poor mind can hear … That the voice of the song is not his, it never was, though the notes may be formed for it from out of his own tune. Because it’s a woman singing, the whole lullaby in place now within the theme and set in the first part of the music, in the ground, this small thing contained within it and never his part to sing the words at all.
When it’s a mother’s song. Not his song. Only listen:
An old man taken the baby away,
He’s snatched her up in his arms for to see
Her life in his, to stay his dying
but the child’s not his, her mother is me.
narrative/1
The people at the House and what they thought of him
Iain
Thinks nothing. Sits cleaning his gun. Glass of Morangie set down on the floor by his right foot, eye on the barrel.
Why should I be thinking about him?
Of the three of them, he’s the outsider here. Knows fine what went on between the old boy and Margaret all that time ago. And –
To hell with him.
Because he knows fine, too, that was in the past and he’s the one married to her, not that other. So:
To hell again.
For look at him, when he last looked at him. John Callum MacKay. He’s old.
He takes a sip of his whisky. And Iain’s the young one. Feels like it. He’s the one fit and strong. He breaks the gun and takes up a cloth that’s full of oil. Rubs the gun down the long length, turns it in his lap, once, twice. So just make it that there’s nothing to think about that other one. Nothing. He’s only old. And all that business with Margaret, it’s in the past and long before he came along, before Iain came.
And by now he’s been here longer than that other, too, when that other only returned to the House after his father had passed. Iain the young one from the beginning, you could say, in place here already when that other returned, and always younger than him, always, and stronger.
So –
To hell.
And most women, anyway, when you meet them … Well, they’re going to have something from before you knew them hidden in their skirts.
He drains the glass then, sets it down. Takes up the bottle and pours himself another. No point going back into that bit of time anyhow, the past, with women. You move on. You marry. And he’s the one did that, took Margaret that way. She was a woman with a child and he was the one, Iain, who gave her a ring, a name –
All right?
A decency you could say, for people still care about those things, and she did, Margaret cared.
So all right again.
For she needed it, didn’t she? Margaret did? For Helen back then? A marriage and a place for Helen in a family when Helen was just a child? For them to be together here, working at the House, to be a family of their own.
They all wanted that, the three of them.
And nothing to do with that other. Nothing.
So just think nothing, think –
To hell. To hell.
For just because people like old Johnnie always get what they want, have a certain way with them, with women, with people. Just because they have money and a bit of power, maybe, or so they think … Well.
He’s not going to let that trouble him now, Iain’s not. He’s not going to let a single thing trouble him now.
So.
He takes another sip of whisky.
Good whisky, too.
And just …
Don’t think.
For he’s got his own run of the place here, and Margaret, and Helen … They all do, they do things their own way. And Iain the one sorts it all out, it’s Iain they call for, with the animals and the land, he the one in charge and not that other who thinks everyone’s just here to do his bidding, swanning up from London like he used to, calling them from the end of the road, like some king, fro
m the old call box there: ‘Bring the Land Rover down for me, will you, Iain? I’m back!’
For who does he think he is?
Old man?
Nothing bit of a man?
It’s Iain who has the power here. You can see it, he still has it. In the strength of his arms, his legs. Like a young man is what he is.
And fit.
He takes another sip.
And strong.
Margaret
(transcript)20
I see a look, sometimes, in his eyes and yes, it is then like it used to be. As though … Perhaps. Is what I see. That look, and only that, nothing more. For it’s been a long time now since we were together in that way, and him married at the time but with Sarah all the way down in London.
Do you have feelings about him now?
I don’t have any feelings about any of that now.
But he was lonely. And you were lonely too. I’m like you were back then, that time in your life, alone with a young child.
I could tell you what the feelings were back then.
I could try and write it down.
(notes)
How I was then, and you will understand this, any woman who’s had a child but without a man around her, who’s been on her own, would understand. How a woman like that, after childbirth and alone, is aware of her aloneness, somehow more aware, I think, is my feeling, in a way that a woman within a marriage is not.
I could tell you, Helen.
About the gaping kind of open feeling from having had a baby but no man there in the bed afterwards. After you’ve let yourself wide open for the child …