The Big Music

by Kirsty Gunn

  They’ve started walking towards the House and the sound of barking is even more frantic. It’s me! It’s me! Callum feels as though he can barely hear Margaret’s voice over it. There’s the sound, too, of some of the larger dogs thrashing themselves up against the wire meshing of their pens, he can hear that too, through their barking and Margaret’s voice. It’s me! Let me out! Let me come and say hello! Please! As though it’s his return they’ve been waiting for all this time, that it’s Callum they’ve been waiting for, all this time they’ve been waiting.

  ‘He’s not the same as he was’ Margaret is saying. ‘And yesterday …’

  Yet really there is only the one old retriever who would remember him. Callum stops, as though just now he’s recognised that one particular bark. A pale yellow Labrador who he used to take out on the hills when she was just a young dog, in the same way that he’d taken her mother and her mother’s sister. So this last dog of his now is the one whose bark is louder than the rest – or no, not louder, more insistent: Let me out! she’s crying. Let me come to you! Just the one dog, then, but making all the dogs bark louder as though they too remember him, as though they’re all of them not Margaret and Iain’s dogs but that they’re his dogs, Callum’s dogs, and he’s home to take them out again.

  ‘Where did you find him –’ he starts to say, but Margaret’s pulling him inside against the cold, and this noise, the sound of the animals at their enclosure.

  It’s me!

  Please!

  It’s –

  Then she closes the door behind him.

  ‘He’d not just gone for a walk, you see’ she says then. And suddenly it’s very quiet. ‘He was far away, Callum, high up in the hills.’ She waits a couple of seconds. ‘For the best part of the morning’ she says. ‘He must have taken himself off at dawn, Iain thinks it must have been, for he’d gone a fair distance before he got to him. And the weather had turned, you can feel it now, winter’s on its way. And worse. For he had with him …’ She goes before him, opening the kitchen door that leads from her little hallway. ‘Well’ she says, ‘you’ll find out soon enough, I suppose. Helen –’ She holds the door open for him, looks at him.

  ‘What?’

  ‘We couldn’t tell your mother that part, though. She’d worry. And Helen –’

  ‘What about Helen?’

  But by now they’re inside the kitchen and it’s bright, and strange all at once, to be inside and in the warm. Callum feels faint, suddenly, with it – the lights on everywhere and hearing Helen’s name. What about Helen?What was it that Margaret just said about Helen?

  ‘Here we are’ Margaret is saying, to him, and, he realises, to Iain, where Iain is sitting at the table, with the guns and a bottle of whisky and a tumbler set before him. He looks up at Callum, nods.

  ‘Callum.’

  ‘Iain.’

  And there’s a pause then, like there’s always a pause. As though the time between when he last saw Iain was nothing, as though the drive up here was no distance at all, as though it makes no difference at all actually whether Callum was here or not. As though nothing makes any difference.

  Yet –

  Helen.

  There was her name.

  What about Helen?

  Twice Margaret saying her name and nearly something but not saying it.

  Helen.

  Helen.

  Like Callum would say her name a hundred times over and still be wanting to say it:

  Helen.

  Helen.

  Helen.

  Helen.

  But instead he says, ‘How are you, Iain?’

  It’s what he does, of course. No matter what happens, what has gone before, what might come after. Even now, with circumstances so changed, and him being here for his father and the way his father is and something happened, something taken place and twice Margaret not finishing the sentence that she started with Helen in it … Still it’s what he does, what he always does when he comes here, nods, ‘How are you, Iain?’, then shakes his hand. As if any of that might mean anything to Iain, too. As if any greeting he might give would ever change the way things are between him and that man. It’s the same now as it’s always been, whether yesterday, or ten years ago, or when he was a teenager or when he was a boy.

  ‘You’re well?’ he’ll ask Iain. ‘Things have been going okay?’

  ‘Okay enough’ Iain says. He unscrews the head of the barrel, looks down it, takes up the cloth again. ‘You’ll know from your mother Helen’s had a baby now.’

  Iain turns away then, gets up from the table, lets the words settle.

  ‘Just this past month she’s back from the hospital’ he says.

  Callum looks at him. At Iain’s back. ‘No, I didn’t –’ he says, starts to answer but he can’t speak. He just stands there. It’s as though he’s waiting, only he’s not waiting.

  Iain turns around and picks up something on the table.

  Then Callum says ‘No, I didn’t know. Margaret?’

  But Margaret’s busy at the bench.

  ‘Congratulations, then’ Callum says

  ‘Aye, well …’ Iain looks briefly at him, just for a second, then sits down again, continues with his work.

  ‘She’s a little one, all right.’

  It seems to have gone very still in the room, like there’s no air, nothing to say, no way of saying it, but then Margaret starts talking to him, about Helen, about the child. She’s at the kettle, still doing something at the bench but telling Callum now how old the child is, and her name.

  ‘Katherine. Her name is Katherine’ Margaret is saying. ‘Katherine Anna.’

  And Callum can take none of it in. Anna? That’s his wife’s name, isn’t it? Anna? So he does hear that. He takes that in.

  ‘And she is a Katherine, too’ Margaret is saying. ‘Dark-haired but fair. My mother was a Katherine. She was Mary Katherine.’

  But Callum’s not taking any of it in.

  Only:

  Helen’s had a baby now.

  Helen.

  So … Katherine.

  And Anna …

  They’re somewhere else, it seems. Along with everyone else, Margaret and Iain and his father …

  When he’s supposed to be here for his father, arriving here for his father – not this, to hear this. To be hearing this, but not hearing … Is not why he’s come. It’s supposed to be for his father is why he’s come, he’s here for him, not anyone else. It’s his father who is waiting for him … Waiting for him to go through to him, to say hello …

  ‘She’s beautiful, of course’ Margaret is saying. ‘And Helen is enjoying her. After she’d finished helping here last summer, she went back to Glasgow, but she came home again. To have the baby. To stay. She’s here for good now, she says.’

  ‘But –’

  Helen.

  Still Callum can’t speak.

  ‘She says it’s for good, anyhow’ Margaret is saying. ‘She says she doesn’t want to leave again.’

  Helen.

  ‘I –’

  He starts again, stops. Because that’s the only part he’s really heard. Helen. That Helen’s here with them. That she’s somewhere in the House.

  ‘You’ll see her later, in a bit’ Margaret is saying. ‘When she’s settled the baby down, she’ll come in and say hello.’

  Slowly, slowly, Callum lets a few seconds pass, watching Iain with the guns, letting himself breathe in, breathe out, while Margaret is still talking – about his father now, how they’ve moved him, some weeks ago, from his own room to the little bedroom off the hallway downstairs. That he can’t sit up at all, these last couple of days. After what went on. That resting is all he can manage now, and for a while has been so very drawn, and tired and frail.

  ‘Helen noticed the change in him’ Margaret is saying, ‘after being away, she could see how he’d aged.’

  And slowly, slowly with each second it comes back to Callum what he must do, how he must be. How, despite everyth
ing, he must manage to behave as he always does when he’s arrived here. Stand, for a time, certain words exchanged. Iain will offer him a dram, he’ll say thanks but later maybe, and then in the past Margaret would have taken him through to the main house, to the sitting room, the ‘Music Room’ they always called it, where his father would be waiting.

  Which is what he must do. Go to his father now, to see him. What he will do.

  But not just yet. For a few seconds more he must just stand here, wait. Talk a little. Nod his head, perhaps. Yes, he might say. Or, No. But not go through to see his father yet. Not just yet.

  ‘So you got here at last’ is what his father always used to say when he arrived here.

  Even so, not yet.

  ‘Took your time, didn’t you?’

  Because everything is changed now.

  You’ll know from your mother Helen’s had a baby.

  And no, he didn’t know. And neither is his father through there in the small sitting room, where he always used to be when Margaret took him through, sitting in the big armchair with a whisky in his hand, those pipes of his resting at his feet.

  Because everything is different, everything changed.

  And he can’t stand here any longer. Callum needs to sit down. Take the dram when it’s offered. Needs to sit, wait. With somewhere in the House, Helen. And somewhere else, but not the little sitting room, his father.

  And so he does, sit, and when Iain asks him, nods, yes, and Margaret puts a glass on the table.

  ‘Your health.’

  For he needs to let some time pass here before he moves towards what will happen next. When he sees Helen. When he sees his father lying in a bed.

  insert/John Callum

  But his father has been dead for forty years! And his mother thirty! So what good now remembering all that before, clear out of the past?

  What good any of it coming back to him – the House, and the way his father was, and his mother? For it’s been his whole adult life since they’ve been gone.

  His mother. His father.

  And he was a boy who grew up, and there was a child of his own then, a wife of his own – and now she’s away from him, too, back in London and a voice on the telephone’s who she is.

  A whole life gone by.

  With marriage in it, a business.

  And money that was made and lost, and affairs of this place to manage, this House where he is now, in this small room within these stone walls, and outside all around him the wide hills.

  I don’t mind …

  And he’s still here. In the dark. He’s all alone – and how long, lying here? Feels like a lifetime, yet – what? Two days? Yesterday? When he went off and all for the tune, to make the tune, find the end for the tune.

  ‘I’ll not be back!’

  Remember?

  Not ever to come back! To his father and his father’s damn music! Yet here he is. And remembering. Even when it’s no good remembering. When it’s all of it gone into dark and lost. When everything he might have had, he let it go.

  And there was a lovely note.

  The clear, long ‘F’ note and he can hear her in it …

  In the note that’s there in the Lullaby …

  But did he get her fully in the tune? Was that note enough?

  When she was lovely and he needed her?

  The long, lovely note?

  For he can’t know now whether he has her there, truly, in the tune. Though the ‘F’ is there, he has heard the ‘F’, along with other notes – listen! He can hear them. He can remember them all. And the little Lullaby – it’s safe. The main part, the theme. That’s set down and in notes, the written manuscript up at the hut, put down in pencil first, and then in manuscript inked in.

  So safe, safe. That part in black ink. And the ‘F’, he knows he’s heard it, set into the ground that’s laid out and protected on his desk by the window up there in the hills, laid out on the papers where he’s to finish the whole, when he writes the whole piobaireachd out with the end and the new beginning.28 But whether that clear note will be enough for her? To be able to sound? When he makes the Taorluath, will it be enough? The ‘F’? For her, that she can be in the tune, be able to sound? The note of ‘F’ he’s already heard enough for Margaret and to hold it? He sings the phrase now, that he knows, aloud …29 And beautiful, the ‘F’ to ‘G’ – with the child coming out into the theme. For remember that part? When it came to him? Of the little one? Is why he needed her in his arms before, her cry like a beginning, let out clear and strong into the open air. Is how it should be. ‘F’ to ‘G’. Not gone into darkness then but high clean notes with tiny, tiny doublings to keep the tune going, on and for ever … Like that. Hear them? All the lovely notes? So, yes. It’s there, the tune. The dark not got in. Only ‘F’ to ‘G’ with a lullaby and he’ll get back to the hut where he wanted to take her and in time to finish it.

  ‘F’ to ‘G’, ‘F’ to ‘A’

  ‘F’ to ‘G’, ‘A’ to ‘A’ …

  And he will. Get back there. The place like his mind, the little secret place, set in amongst the hills and no one knows about it, no one can find him there. With all the papers and his manuscripts about him and he can stay there, he can never come back – and maybe he’ll find out there whether the notes he has already are enough? Whether the tune has enough? If he can just get there, stay there. To that place he built for himself all those years ago, a place that’s for himself, for his own music – and not his father’s music. Only there will he be able to hear, if he has all the notes written down. He can see the manuscript lying on the desk by the window that looks out onto the loch – he can see it from where he’s lying. And listen! He can hear the notes again that are already put down. From the hills to the secret hut, the ending and the beginning. And his mother there, it’s all written down, and his father seated before him and the chanter practice going slow, over and over, playing the same bit of the tune until he got it right.

  Again!

  So the first movement is done by now, and the second arriving, something unexpected come out of it, clear out of the Taorluath that’s coming to him now.30 There’s the new set of notes’ variations – alongside the past that sounds like the old: the ancient ‘A’ of the drone and a fall from the high gracenotes to the theme, a different finish for the third line, just slightly different,31 containing all the thought and the patterning of the movement that will follow. For it will follow.

  All notes he might play for his father.

  ‘Can you hear them, Daddy? Can you?’

  Though his father has been dead for –

  what?

  – and his mother –

  … Yet it’s not thirty years! Can’t be! Nor forty!

  For that part he heard just then, with his father in the study, wanting for him to play those notes, over and over, and his mother somewhere upstairs and he can hear her, too, in the music, walking through the rooms of the House … This part is as clear in the tune just as surely as the baby’s cry. Both his parents there. Just as fully sounded as the Lullaby, this part as fine as the earlier notes, and strong. Not dead at all but rising up to him, in that change of the sequence in the third line, in the second half of the third line – is where the idea came from. That third bar of the third line. Just changed enough to make everything set to change.

  From the ‘G’ to ‘B’ to ‘E’

  ‘G’ to ‘A’ with the ‘D’

  ‘F’ to ‘G’, ‘E’ to ‘A’

  And they say that, don’t they? About the Taorluath? He’s said it often enough himself. That it’s a movement that can rise up at you that way, unexpected, a Leumluath, a ‘Stag’s Leap’ it might be,32 it’s been called. From the ground that’s been set beneath, rising up out of nothing it seems or it jumps clear into nothing. The ‘Stag’s Leap’ there in his own mind. Taking all the notes he’s written and leaping clear off the edge of the hill –

  into nothing.

  Making everything change.<
br />
  That he can hear it now, the holding down in that third bar as a sort of gathering, of his father, his mother, the repetitions of the ‘G’ …33

  All the notes …

  Even in the dark room …

  Is proof of how strong it is – the leap.

  A sound full of something you didn’t know was going to be there before.

  Out of nothing risen up – and over.

  ‘And you didn’t think it was there before, Johnnie, but it was there.’

  So he can rest now.

  He can.

  ‘Calm yourself, man.’

  He must have everything he needs here.

  Everyone is around him. The past, the future.

  And maybe sleeping now.

  So he thinks about that, for a bit. Just sleeping. Just letting his mind settle with it, with everything he knows is in the tune, and the lovely gap and not having to worry because they’re all here, all the people he needs, and he’ll get back to the hut for the papers, he’ll find his way up there again. He’ll walk up there on his own some morning soon and they’ll be there, the papers with the marks on them laid out by the window in the sun.

  And Margaret is here, too, he’s seen her lovely face at the door.

  ‘Come in.’

  Though he’s still waiting for the sound of her and he could never manage without that sound and so he’ll keep waiting …

  Even so there’s nothing else to do right now but sleep.

  He’d just said to her, ‘Come in.’

  And she did come. She would, always.

  ‘Shhh …’ she would whisper to him. And soft, in that soft way of hers.

  ‘Shhh …’

  Though he isn’t a child. And not a lover. Still she comforts him with her presence, with the way she comes in.

  And he’s never told her, has he? What she means to him? He’s never used those words, not been truthful that way, or brave. With his whole life gone by. With marriage, and a wife and a child of his own and he can hear Callum’s dogs. Hearing them through his sleep, maybe. With the others all about him and his mother upstairs and Margaret at the door. And here’s Callum as well for he can hear Callum’s dogs.