by Kirsty Gunn
But you already know. You’re my daughter and with a child of your own. Of course you know. How, after birth, one is made to be all open. I can tell you about this because you know too what it is not to value marriage in the same way – once you’ve gone through a labour on your own. You just don’t.
So it is if there’s no man to be with you at the birth, or afterwards in the bed. You just learn early it’s on your own you’ll be managing, alone, and you do manage, you get on with it, you’re the one taking care. Nothing else for me to do now than keep that habit. Looking after the House, the mealtimes, taking care of the bit of the garden we’ve got left, managing the place for the guests when the guests used to come.
I’m busy enough. And as for John, well, you could say I’ve always been the one to keep a look out for him, take care of him. And so I will continue.
Turning over his bed –
(though it’s not the same bed)
– and his sheets, in his bedroom –
(though it’s not the little room at the top of the House)
– taking care of that room –
(where we used to go …)
– cleaning out his bath. I lay the table in the dining room like we’ve always done, using that room in the evenings even though it’s only him here and the visitors may love it when they come, sitting around the lovely wood of that table, and the candles lit, and the patterned china laid out that was his mother’s. But for the most part it’s just one man at the table. Though Iain will go in there sometimes, I know, to sit in his same seat, and he’ll take a dram there. I’ve seen him.
(transcript)
It’s always been this way.
Always?
For ease, yes, let me say. Certain ways, patterns of doing things. Like his mother used to do before him, and the mother before her no doubt. The time passing not noticed because the House stays the same, the way we do things the same.
So, yes, because of that maybe, that feeling of no time at all passed between then and now … I can still see that same look in his eyes. And …
Perhaps.
Is the look. Yes, I do know that. For it’s been the same look all these years, though I’m with Iain now for more than thirty.
A long time.
A long time.
So …?
Yes, perhaps.
I understand the look. I understand that feeling, too.
Helen
Her part would be to say: ‘I don’t feel I have any more choices about being here than the others.’
And she could say that. Claim inevitable. The being here. The being on her own in this empty place. That her mother’s right, she’s like her mother. That she understands that all of it’s a thing of no choice in the end, and her bringing a child into it, too. Could say she had no more will in that either than her mother did all those years ago when she brought her own child in.
So, she could say: ‘I don’t feel I have any more choices about being here than the others.’
For it’s like she’s never been gone now she’s back here at the House again. Though she’s had all her travelling and her study, and all her friends and lovers and her life. I n the end she’s no different than Margaret and Iain, no more variation in her than they who’ve never lived more than sixty miles from where they all bed down now, eat, work, as rooted here, brought back to the place she belongs to, as a plant dug up waits to be put back in the same kind of soil. Just as the old man himself came back after years of being gone, came back for good.
So Helen and her mother found home here in the end. And …
Perhaps.
Perhaps, nothing. It’s only yes. Is what her mother means. Of course her mother can’t keep that from her daughter. Her daughter’s seen the look.
The glow coming off the pair of them like a kind of heat when they’re in a room together, not often in a room together, sure, but when it occurs – that he may be sitting there in his chair and she’s banking the fire or she’s brought him something on a tray – then the feeling holds and burns. Though neither of them will talk about it, or show it – of that feeling or that light, to others or each other or themselves – no, not for years. Not for long, long years …
Still.
A daughter can see.
A faithful daughter.
‘And Margaret’ she would say. ‘Don’t think that I don’t realise how that might keep a mother. Might keep a daughter, too.’
Margaret
(notes)
I know he’s not been swallowing the tablets. The doctor knows. When he visited last he told me. ‘John wants to come to the end now, Margaret’ is what old Ramsay said. And I can’t force him. I can’t make him take the medication if he doesn’t wish it for himself.
And for me? I don’t know what to wish for. Him alive the shadow of the man I used to share a bed with, lie down with, while somewhere else in the House, in my own room, my child and my husband were sleeping – am I not to remember those times? Or the way he and I were together at the beginning? The way being with him gave me my strength, the feeling, I mean, for being on my own, truly alone. So strong in my body after that time we were together that it meant I could take Iain as a husband when he came here. That kind of strength.
It only comes from a bed.
I wouldn’t say any of this, of course, to the others. Only write it to you, Helen. When you come to read this sometime.
And I think you know in full anyway what it was John gave me. I think you know what it was I needed for you’ll have something of those same needs yourself. That come with having a child and looking after the child. That we seek out ways of making ourselves strong. Keeping the things in our lives that are private deep in and holding secrets as a source of power – though here I am telling my secrets now, in writing them down.
(Though I wouldn’t tell about the room at the top of the House, where we used to be together, I would never tell …)
And so for that, for private thoughts, for my memories of that time, would I let him slip off now into illness and into age?
Or try and get him back by standing with him, watching, to try and make him that way take the pills, watching while he swallows, watching with my eyes his eyes the way we used to watch each other, every movement held.
Of course I would try to keep him.
Even with me seeing the way he is now. And him not wanting to eat or sleep or take his proper medication, going off on his own for hours back there in the summer like he used to do in the past, taking himself off for days at a time and I never knew where he went, but now not doing anything much at all.
Even then I would wish him away? To have him be finished for himself here and all our past together gone then, with the present?
You don’t answer questions until you need to, that’s the problem. You keep holding out, waiting. You keep thinking, a few months it will be better. Or let the summer pass and then you say the winter, let another year go by …
And still we’ve not decided here what we’ll do, when he’s gone. And it won’t be long now, with Sarah phoning up from London every ten minutes to see if he’s taken another turn and how to get him away down there with her, to one of her hospitals, I suppose, where they’ll lock him up, where she thinks he’ll be safe.
I know I won’t find another job. I don’t want it. Too old now, anyway, to be working on an estate somewhere else and there’d be others to deal with there and not like here where it’s just ourselves and we can be on our own. For with Iain the way he is and Helen with us now and her baby to look after – it’s not as though we could at any other place be fitting in.
Besides, they’d know. In those other places. That we’d been working for John Sutherland and that not ever a piece of land managed like the others are managed. More a place for the piping always, it’s been, than a proper farm or for the fishing or the deer. And they’d know, for sure, the other estates. That we wouldn’t have worked here in the way that would be expected. And they would have
heard about Iain, too. That there’s nothing much for him on the hills, with the run of the few sheep that’s left. That there’s little here for him to do.
So it would all get out.
That we do things differently, not like the other properties in the area, the farms and the estates … And always have done so. And now that the Piping School is long over, and the students and the pipers gone. We’re just on our own here. And we have been for a long time now, a long time.
Therefore …
(and such a lovely word to write, to say: Therefore …)
With everything I’ve laid down here on paper, of truth and love and intimacy, the wrap of the past around our lives … I don’t claim it’s as though any of us here would want John to finish it. Though the dark’s closer for him now than it ever was. Still. We need him to be here, we all do, for our privacy and for things to stay the same, the place the way it is to continue, for all of us.
Therefore …
(John Callum … My John Callum … Always therefore …)
Though it may be that we’re caring for a ghost here, is how it feels, and though it’s like standing with your back to vacancy, so we do, we stand. And I confess I have feelings for the man even after all this time, for he took my body and he let me take his, at a time when bodies were all I was wanting. He understood that in a way I believe few men will understand it from a woman. And that I could have at the same time towards him both coolness of distance and great warmth? I would have the same coolness and the same warmth now.
Iain
Sits.
Does nothing.
The fire on though it’s not cold.
But it burns. It burns.
For Margaret’s told him all he needs to know. About herself and that other. She’s told him long since so no reason to have it between them – but how it does rise up between them. What happened in the past not gone away, not over the years it hasn’t, and sometimes Iain senses it in the House, a thing still existing between his wife and another man and it sickens him, like a poison you give animals going through his own veins, to think of the old man and his wife having been together in that way.
So don’t think.
Is why he won’t.
Think anything, not now.
Takes up the bottle, and sets it down. Won’t. Not ever. And that’s what he’s done, too. Kept it all from his mind.
Though from the first time he met him here at the House, when Margaret came out of the House to greet him, it was like he could smell it, that something had taken place, was maybe still being enacted between the two of them. So he remembers when that other first returned, for the funeral of old Callum. And the way he was with Margaret then, greeting her. Remember? Well, there’s always that. That they’d known each other before, he could see that, though neither showed it. But remember too, he always will, Iain, he’ll remember … How Margaret greeted him also, greeted Iain, the first day when he came here for the job. That day when he came here to meet old Roderick Callum and his wife – and this long, long before that other’s return. And he was a young man then, by God, Iain was, he was no more than twenty – and how Margaret was with him then, that day, with him, Iain … Remember that? Of course he’ll always remember. For that’s the important thing. How she looked at him, that day as she came out of the house to meet him, smoothing back her dark hair with a hand that she then put out to him. To him! To greet him! He was lonely all right. And it was as though she could recognise that in him, she could see it right away. Couldn’t she? That he was lonelier than that other would ever be, that one who would want for nothing but who would always get more and more and more.
For in the touch of her hand …
Though he came to know later, would sense in that other, the way he was with Margaret, that there was something still going on between them … Even so he remembers, too, Iain does, that first touch of Margaret’s hand taking his hand that day. When she’d been lovely to him, to Iain, right there from the beginning. How he’d noticed everything that day. How she had a speck of a kid with her, standing at her side – and he’d taken that in, Iain had, how the child was Margaret’s child and there was not about her any father – Iain had noticed that, too, from the outset. Had come to understanding right away: that it would be Iain himself who would take on that role with her, with Margaret, to help her with the child. It would be how he would get her. How he’d be able to claim her, keep her for himself, and they’d be secure together then.
Man and wife.
All through the little girl. Through Margaret being a woman on her own without a husband and with a child to bring up – and he could be the one who would help them. The father. The husband. He would be the one who took care when that other had never been around, the one, Iain could be, who takes care now and always.
For he is the lonely one. Iain is. No one else needed to be with someone like he needed. And Margaret was there from the beginning, coming out of the House to greet him …
The touch of her lovely hand …
Just her.
Just Margaret.
And so she was a woman who’d been with other men? So she had a child by one of them, and something there between her and old Callum’s son that had started long before he came along, before Iain came along, and that he could sense when that other was around and could feel? Still she had turned towards him that day, Margaret had, towards him, put out her hand – she’d touched his hand.
He looks down at his same hand now, as though the mark of her press might be there still upon his palm.
See?
And –
Look at me, Margaret. Look at me.
Is how he willed her to see him that day. As he takes another sip, remembering.
Look at me.
For hadn’t he so needed for her to see him? From the moment of their greeting? So needed to make her understand along with him – that he could offer her … Something. That might count just as much as love, as feeling towards him. That by way of income and support for the business of bringing a child up into the world … So he could help. Though the child would never be his child, still …
They could be a family, the three of them together.
Because that was the kind of man he was. Iain was. Who would be straightforward that way, not trying to be the big man if you had no intention. The opposite of that other, then, the type who’d be standing too close to Margaret whenever he came back here – but not here ever to help in any kind of way that was real. And he’s always done that, too, that other. He’s always stood too close.
No wonder he’s always hated him, then. Old Johnnie. Will always hate him. For how could you not hate the man who loved your woman? Though you tried not to let it matter? Tried to keep it all down? For that other was the one got to her first and he still has to live with that, Iain does – the memory coming in every day as they’re here at this House together now the old boy’s back to stay. Iain having to bear it that he came second in line, second. Even now having to watch his wife with him, to give him his medicine, attend to the making of his bed …
No wonder he hates the one seems to take it all.
Is what he thinks.
If he thinks.
And he won’t think.
For who gives a hare’s jump now about old Johnnie? Those people that he used to know – where are they now? They’re not here. Not even his own wife, his own son. And Iain has that, he has a family around him. And it’s Iain, himself … Who did that. Made them into a family here. So Margaret could be his wife. And Helen like his daughter, she could be his daughter. Because he was a man who always wanted children, and no children followed, so Helen is like his only child and it’s how he thinks of her: ‘My Daughter,’ he says to himself sometimes, when he used to set the money aside for her schooling and her university in Glasgow, he thought it then. ‘My Daughter, Helen,’ he would say. Though the money went into Margaret’s purse so she could be the one would give it, that Helen would think she was ta
king it from her mother, not him, for he had little part in her life other than that, he was not her father … But still he could say: My Daughter, to himself. Think he might be something to her in that way, of helping her with money for her schooling, that he could be a father to her then and she his daughter, and him helping her that she could get herself off to university and into the world …
And now she’s come home again, the money spent.
With a child of her own. Her own daughter.
And still, even now, he could take care, Iain could. The three of them together like they used to be together, inhabiting the House as though it is their own, with Iain at the table and passing out the plates. In the kitchen, seeing Margaret with a baby in her arms.
My family.
But that other one has been back amongst them now, and for a while he’s been and not leaving, so it seems, for he’s too ill to go. And that makes it – not the same. As it should be. Not the same as when he used to come for the summers but then he’d go away. Come back here maybe, and staying longer and longer – but then he’d go. And now he’s not going anywhere. Just sitting in his chair, or sleeping. And there’s work to be done around him like there was always work to be done for him, all work, work.
Like in the past –
‘Iain, we’ll be needing the rods’
‘Iain, some help here’
– and –
‘Tidy up the place a bit’
– and –
‘Tell Margaret, will you?’
All work. All his asking. And them all having to do his bidding.
And all right, maybe it’s not the same kind of work now as then, with him old and sick and frail, maybe – but still it’s changed here. The place become his, now he’s here all the time. This House his grandfather built, and his grandfather before him … His House. You feel it – Iain does – with him permanently in it. You feel his presence. His ownership. Though the land is everyone’s, is everyone’s – and you could say he has no right. That this lovely place belonged to old Himself21 no more than it belongs to them, to Iain, Iain Cowie or to Margaret MacKay or to Helen or Helen’s child. Belongs to them more in fact for they’re ones who stayed here, not swanning up from London like the son used to do. Bringing up a party of his so-called friends …