by Kirsty Gunn
That when she needs to go back there, that same place would take her in.
Margaret
Helen’s young. That’s all. Don’t mind her large ideas, then. And her quietness you could take for fierce anger, that sense of her independence and opinions and her clear sense of a way – but no. She doesn’t have that certain kind of ire. She’s herself. And I know why she keeps to that room of hers, reading and writing, the window open to the seasons the way she has it open. Even in winter I’ve seen the casement wide open to the air and the cold inside the room like glass.
She’s young, still. That’s the all of it. And, as I say, I know why she stays in the room. The window open in the way of her imagining she might be leaving, as I know she does, imagining leaving all the time. Although I think it’s here she’ll stay.
Iain
Anyway, it’s not like he needs to feel sorry for the old fool. He can go to hell and no way back. After what he did this morning, taking a child away from her mother …
There’s nothing about him that is fit.
And it’s been going too long, with his mind poor, and getting weaker, and that means even more work to do for Margaret and for them all.
Helping him.
And never once a word of thanks.
Just like through the old days. The ‘Bring the Land Rover down’ days, the ‘Get the dogs ready for the morning’ and the ‘We’ll be needing the rods’ days. The ‘Tidy up the place a bit after, the bottles and so on, at the riverbank …’
Never once a word.
Of thanks.
And not today either. Out there. After getting him in. There was no thanks for that either – and the state he was in. The fool. Acting like –
‘Iain, I’m back!’
But no. Not like that, like before. Not ‘fool’ like that. Today …
Was different.
Crying and alone out there today on the hill. Wet through to his trousers and not able to stand.
That was not like he used to be.
‘Iain, I’m back!’
Because look at him, Iain thinks. Lying through in that little room in the dark. He’s not back anywhere, the old boy.
He’s not back and he’s not going.
Anywhere.
Margaret
And Helen? Yes, I can understand her kind of dreaming. I’ve been like it myself. Parts of me still feels what it is to be that girl who wanted much, much more than home could give. To go in amongst the hills or across the flat cliff paddocks or to be taking a boat around the top of the firth in a little schooner, deep into the cold of the North Sea … I imagined these voyages, saw myself on them. Taking the train south or way across to the west. Visiting Edinburgh, maybe, Glasgow. All the cities. Going away as I did to the university for that year in Aberdeen.
Little came of it all, I know. Those dreams of mine, when I was a girl, or thoughts or plans. In the end it was only a ride on the bus, sixty miles away. That’s how far I went away.
Still, one might say my restlessness has come out in Helen.
If it didn’t come out in what went on between me and John Sutherland, you could say it’s come out in my daughter. All my restlessness, in the end, all her travelling and her shifting my idea of what it was to change.
Because when I think of it, the way it was for me when I went to John those nights back then, when I was younger, the way I went up to the room we shared at the top of the House and waited for him there … Some nights when he had his friends in, too, and he’d be late, but still I’d wait for him … All those times. Or I would go to him where he sat, in the evening or at the table after dinner. I would put my hand to the back of his neck, to the soft dent at the base of his skull and he leant back into me then … All those times. Those small, small times … It was a yearning, a moving in me, kind of restlessness, maybe, that wanted to be near him and the small times with him could be enough. To have me inclining towards him, that I needed his leaning back. For all during those years I had a good husband who loved me, and we looked after each other, Iain and I have always looked after each other.
My Iain Cowie.
My shy, shy man.
What restlessness must have been in me to take me away from you? To wait in another man’s bedroom that he’d made for me under the eaves, at the top of the stair?
Iain
And, yes, he put a blanket across the old boy’s shoulders today, because anyone would have done it.
Like he’d hope someone might do that for him, when the time comes and he’s alone and doesn’t know who he is or where he’s going.
Even though he could have brought him down.
Just as easy, if he’d wanted to, he thinks. He could have.
As he cleans his gun.
Because who is old John by now, anyway, that Iain couldn’t bring him down if he wanted to – but just some old man with money, half dead. And so he has enough to pay for a housekeeper, a hired gun. Let him feel what that gun could do.
He would have felt it this morning, sure enough, if Iain had seen fit to use it.
For let Iain show him, the hired gun. Let them be together just once and there to be an excuse for Iain to take him on …
Has always been like a sort of prayer for him.
Just once.
Let him have the excuse. For him to show the old boy then what real power’s like. Not money. Or a voice that calls and commands.
But a stone or a rock or a gun.
Because it’s like a clench for Iain, of the fist, in his heart, the way that voice calls for him. With his ease, his damn music that he thinks makes him a Highland gentleman – it doesn’t make him a gentleman, the way he is with Margaret doesn’t make him a gentleman.
‘Tidy up here, will you? After we’ve finished here?’
Though he may have been born in this House, John Callum MacKay, and his father before him. Though he might be the son of a family who made of this part of the land something that could be owned …
He despises that, too, Iain does. That one family could shear off from the ways things have always happened here and gain some portion for itself. He’s read enough, he knows the stories of what went on around here – though his own family are not from around here – he knows enough, Iain does.33 And he knows all old John Callum’s family ever did was charge tenancy for the time the animals could be on the hill, like a tacksman might charge other men, or a factor. Like a thief.
So all of it … Despise.
Because his reading and knowing tell him, Iain: no real Highlander would ever do that, think that way about the land. As money and business. That the land could be seen as no more than a path from one place to another – how that’s all wrong. And just for the fact that some ancestor or other had a few more sheep than others, more than one or two, but charged out the land to his neighbours for theirs so it might stop his own bit of scratching at the earth. So it’s other men’s work’s made him rich.
Another man doing his work.
And times have changed. And people learn, and they watch. And when something happens like what happened here today … Just as well Iain has his own life, that he doesn’t feel he must be owing to anyone.
He has his own gun.
And shouldering it this morning as he did, stepping out the door. Down the brae in the Argocat and off up the hill the other side of the river, the dogs all about him – to get him, like a hunt.
That felt real enough. That was real – not the other, false Highlander who took himself away.
Because once you’ve gone you don’t get to come back.
Do you, dogs?
Is what he’s always thought, what he thought this morning while he was going up there.
When it was like a hunt.
Hunting down a criminal off a hill.
And that he could have finished him off this morning, too, easy, with a bullet or a stone.
Could have. Course he could have.
But …
Once he was away up there on the tops and h
ad caught what he was after …
To see the poor old fool pissed himself through to his trousers and not able to stand …
He didn’t do that.
And yes, he put a blanket around him.
Put a blanket about the false shoulders.
Though anyone would have done it.
And, yes, he lifted him, the body of a criminal, the body of a man who had lived the way he had, treated people the way he had, who would behave towards Margaret the way he behaved … Still he lifted him. Laid him into the seat of the Argo, laid him there.
But so he might hope another would also lift him. Lift Iain.
If he was wet through and alone and shivering. And had not a wife to go back to in the House, or a young woman who’s like a daughter to him and he’s looked after her all these years.
So he might hope then he would also be lifted.
And he was light, the other man was. Like a child, lighter even. Like a leaf.
And –
‘Come on now, John’ Iain had said. ‘We’re here to take you home.’
Margaret
So, through all those years with him …
Who could say I didn’t love John then?
When I was a young woman and when I first met him I was only a girl.
Who could say I wouldn’t love him?
The way we came together, that first time – though …
He’ll never know, nor Iain.
Only Helen.
Because only Helen has the story in her, of how John Sutherland and I came to be together and what happened then.
insert/John Callum
For sure, there was not much else for her, Johnnie’s mother, by the time her little boy was sent away. Her husband was long lost to her by then, deep into his practice and composition and would barely have known the difference between whether the child was there or gone. He’d be in his room alone and rehearsing and practising or else he’d have his students staying with them at the House, or other musicians and composers, and they’d be together, all the men, and John’s mother would see them at the dinner table only.34
‘A fine day, Elizabeth?’
‘Oh, yes, a fine day.’
So there was her loneliness, the heart of it, in his mother, the way she learned to gather it up, making herself be surrounded by it as though she were used to it, silence after silence. And as for her son, well. Few boys of that generation would ever remember much, would they? And sure Johnnie can’t, of ever feeling that he had such a great craving for that man who was his father. Wouldn’t remember, for example, missing him or wanting him home. When Callum Sutherland was in London, say, and this just after the War, or in Edinburgh or somewhere else and always for music. When his father was away, or even when he was just at home but off in a room somewhere playing, the room where he sat with his piper friends or his pupils … All that time John Callum can’t remember being after his father’s companionship or attention at all. He was used to it, not wanting it. Like his mother made herself be used to it. No expectation there to have the man’s time or his tenderness, much less again the thought that he might give his love.
I don’t mind.
Like he didn’t have a father.
I don’t mind.
Like he never had.
So no surprise now, why should it be, that he’s come to seem as though he’s the same man himself, could be, as his own father. Put to the same instrument his father was put to, set up from the beginning to have his own long hours away from anyone else he might care for.
His father someone he remembers just in bits, in little pieces.35
Only his mother comes back to him entire. Her hand on his head. Her taking of the chanter36 from his lips, to set it to one side: ‘That’s enough now. That’s enough for today.’ And those times when his father would ask him into his room to have him play for him, the tough cast of his father’s jacket, the tweed cuff as he reached in to straighten the pipes in the boy’s arms. Was there a smile then? A word or two spoken?
A word with a tune?
All this is way back in Johnnie’s past now and hard to remember. Not much left, of the memories, not much besides. Of those times. His father, and his cuff. Maybe a word was spoken, a phrase that comes back to him: ‘Do it again!’ For the section of the music he’d been playing but the notes were all bad. That whole line wrong, his father said, all bad and the fingerings were smeared – so: ‘Play it again! Do it again!’
‘And again!’
‘Again!’
So many times. The notes were all bad.
So there’s nothing left. Nothing. Only –
‘Who are you, Johnnie?’
He asks in the dark.
‘That you would remember your own father so?’37
Urlar/final fragment
Green/grey: the shape of the hills against the grey sky. The final part of the first section before they bring him back off the hill, wrap him up, inject him, bring him home.
1 ‘Lament for Himself’ appears in various versions throughout the Appendices attached to this book but in the first instance is represented here as opening ‘remarks’, that is, the outline of a sequence of notes that introduce the main theme of isolation. This is created by a set of open intervals ‘B’ to ‘E’, ‘A’ to ‘A’, ‘B’ to ‘E’, ‘A’ to ‘A’ etc. that appear to sit against the emptiness of the background of the drone, the baseline ‘A’ note. Appendix 10/i contains more details of this sequence, and manuscript.
2 The Gaelic word ‘urlar’, the first movement of a piobaireachd, translates as ‘ground’ and lays down all the musical ideas of what will follow. Appendix 11 has more details of piobaireachd structure and form.
3 Common usage – ‘ben’, meaning at the back, or to the side, in this sense, it’s the favoured side of the hill. The Glossary has a list of Gaelic words and expressions used in this book.
4 Various maps at the back of this book describe the area in which ‘The Big Music’ is set; general, particular and historical.
5 Appendix 3 relates to the history of the Highland North East region and includes details of the notorious ‘Clearances’, when many were forcibly evicted from their homes from the late eighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries and relocated elsewhere or abroad.
6 Details of the Sutherland family and the history of the place where they have always lived appear throughout ‘The Big Music’, particularly in the Taorluath and Crunluath movements, and in Appendices 4–9 that relate particularly to The Grey House.
7 Some Gaelic words are in use that are also translated into Scots/English versions of the same that sound similar to but are different from the full Gaelic pronunciations – ‘sligheach’ is such a word, also pronounced by people like John Sutherland in the more anglicised form of ‘sleekit’; see Glossary.
8 ‘E’ is known as the ‘echoing’ note on the bagpipe scale. The Last Appendix gives a chart with a full translation of the notes’ meanings and characteristics.
9 The base note is the ‘A’, also known as the Piper’s note.
10 The ‘F’ note, or note of Love, figures as a ‘return’ in both Margaret and Katherine Anna’s themes in the Urlar and in ‘The Big Music’ generally.
11 This sequence of notes is the opening line of the fragment of music known as ‘Lament for Himself’ and is reproduced in manuscript at the back of the book. These first bars indicate the main theme of John MacKay Sutherland; the later ‘drop’ from High to Low ‘G’ occurs in the second line, as part of the so-called ‘Lullaby’ sequence – see later in this Urlar for further details.
12 The House is known as The Grey House throughout ‘The Big Music’ but occasionally it is referred to by the Gaelic that translates as ‘the End of the Road’, owing to its position and history as a stopping place for shepherds and black-cattle herdsmen en route to the West and South. A full history of The Grey House, itself a name deriving from its original architecture as a grey ‘longhouse’, is available in Appendices 4–9; s
ee also various maps and plans.
13 The manuscript at the back of the book that shows the fragment that survives of ‘Lament for Himself’ is all the composer knew of his piobaireachd and so he would have been largely unaware of its full meaning and patternings. However, the fact that the Urlar had nevertheless been written by John Sutherland in full, some weeks and months prior to when the events of this and subsequent movements of ‘The Big Music’ take place, gives the reader, and, at times, the composer himself, intimations of the ideas that would have been developed fully were the tune to be completed. Here is the musician hearing his own music as though for the first time, with understanding, as though composing it now. This will continue to happen to him as the book progresses and the Lament comes to reveal itself in full.
14 The Crunluath section – especially three/second paper – of ‘The Big Music’ shows John Callum at work on his composition earlier in the year, when, despite a series of earlier strokes and spate of ill health, he was still fit enough to be able to walk up to the Little Hut in the hills where he did all his writing and composing. After his death, the manuscript for ‘Lament for Himself’ was discovered on his desk there, beneath the window.
15 Here arrives in the text for the first time the sound of a voice we shall hear more of as ‘The Big Music’ continues, that enters into the narrative and remarks upon it here, in this line of what will become known as the Lullaby, ‘A Mother’s Song’. The music for this Lullaby appears in the second line of the Urlar of ‘Lament for Himself’ and its words and further details can be found in this and in the Crunluath movements of ‘The Big Music’, as well as in the List of Additional Materials at the back of the book, in particular see scanned material.
16 Here, another example of what was described earlier – notes written by John Sutherland in manuscript before their meaning was grasped and understood – in this instance the octave interval and the drop of notes described in the second bar of the second line of the music representing the act of abduction that was to occur many weeks after composition.