by Kirsty Gunn
So –
‘Where are you, boy?’
But it’s only Margaret saying ‘Shhh …’ at the door. For she’s the one, Margaret. Who always brought Callum in.
‘He’ll be here soon’ she’s saying. ‘Callum will be.’
Though he’s never once told her … When –
‘Callum?’ he says. ‘Where are you, boy?’
– Margaret was the one used to bring him in.
And all of this is unexpected. Being here in the gap, feeling the empty space about him. When he was out on the hill with Callum this morning, wasn’t it this morning? So he should be here by now, his boy. Or was it before, he saw him? Another morning, that he was with his father? The three of them were together then and with the dogs and he can still hear the dogs.
So, again –
‘Where are you, Callum?’
Because everyone else is here. Margaret is here but Callum’s not come in. It’s not as though Johnnie can see him.
‘Are you there?’
He can’t see him, he can’t.
‘Callum?’
It may as well be all his adult life the boy’s been gone.
Just as his mother’s been gone. And his father.
I’ll not be back!
Though he was the one who’s been gone! He was! It was him, calling out on the road that day, I’ll not be back! And, now, all the time he’s lost …
While lying here …
All the time …
Gone. Just the sound of the dogs far away, his own boy far away, and then the ‘Play it again!’ of his father when he, Johnnie … He is the father, too.
He is the father.
And the son.
Those notes he heard before, his theme with the singling, the doubling … They’re variations of that time when the father was a son and the notes the same now as the notes for then – for the same ‘Again!’ he heard before and the crack of the electric flex his father used to punish him, the crack of it against his fingers as he tried to play the tune properly, and against the back of his legs.
‘Again!’
And he never said that to Callum, did he? The ‘Again’?
But he said other things, maybe. He did. Or he didn’t bother saying anything to him at all.
And where has that come from, that thought just now, like the other? Rising up at him out of the same place where the stag leapt from, the past coming out to him after all this time? Of himself a father and his son a boy. Of himself a boy and the smart of that clear knowledge at the burn and cry of his skin, the blood that came and the ugly mark that his father didn’t care for him at all? Hated him even? And is that why his mother was never there to see? Why she took herself off to the Schoolroom then? To the room at the top of the House, under the eaves? So she couldn’t see him crying? For he’s crying now. In the dark with the light on in the hall and yet still darkness where he is, and Callum is not coming, though the light is on and the dogs are barking, though Callum’s dog is out there barking to welcome Callum home.
second variation/The Grey House: family history
(Roderick) John Callum (b.1887 – d.1968) and John Callum MacKay (b. 1923 – d. within these pages): some facts; history
They gave his father a proper funeral in the end. The flag on the coffin. Twelve pipers at the graveside down in Brora. His father inside, in the space cut into the earth, in the box. There were three hundred people, more, must have been, in the tiny cemetery and outside its walls the cars were parked up all the way down the road. His mother was greeted and kissed by every single person who came that day, every student his father had ever taught, every farmer he’d ever known, every official or representative he’d ever had dealings with. There were men from the museum at Fort George where they kept his father’s medals and his kilt, the music he’d composed in France,34 for the assault into Ravenna, where his father had taken the lead. There were people from the War Institute in London, where they had the original manuscript of his father’s three Battle Strathspeys in a glass case, and there was the current commissioner, too, from the battalion where he’d been Chief Piper all those years ago, and there was the present Head of Piping who still taught those same tunes that his father had first taught to the new recruits every year. So his mother stood by the graveside and back at the House as every one of them came up to her to pay their respects.
‘Elizabeth.’
‘I am sorry, Elizabeth.’
To take her hand, to kiss her cheek.
Every one.
‘I’m sorry.’
They were all there.
And so John Callum may have gone away all those years ago, got away from his father and his music …35
So he’d said ‘I’ll not be back!’ to his mother, to his father, driven down the grey road, leaving behind him the flex of the cord and those same tunes that were playing in the grey air that day …
So, too, was he also there. For his father’s funeral. For the music that played. And after that, well. Started the returning.
It may be necessary now to establish the kind of man John Callum was through those years that he was away, that he would leave his family in the way he did – ‘I’ll not be back!’ – and nothing but judgement for the place with its endless isolation and its music that went on and on with his father’s schools and compositions and his playing and his relentless teaching but in the midst of all that never speaking, not really, or reaching out in thought or deed …
For certainly he was no more than a boy when he said goodbye to his parents and made that vow of exile – not intending ever to return – yet, as the years went on, so he would also remember the place, too, as though some part of him was left behind there, you might say, and some day he would have to go back and retrieve it. After all, what kind of life must it have been for him? That he’d made for himself so far away from where he’d been born? What kind of habits had he established, what did he do? That his was a very different kind of life, to be so far away from the House and country he’d grown up in, is certain. Who was he at all, what kind of man could he have been? This before he started coming home again, first to attend to his mother, to manage the affairs of the place for her, but then spending weeks here, to bring his son for the summers, and then longer, weeks turned into months, and then finally coming home for good? We need to know, don’t we, who he was, who he became, before these papers begin? To establish his time away as being equally real as the pages before now have also established him. For it was as real, was it not? The life that was spent apart from this House? These hills?
Real as the life already written?
God knows he’d had to get away from his father! He’d had to! So we know from that, from the ‘I’ll not be back!’, that he was that kind of man. Someone who could leave his own father, strong enough to leave, and certain. And because of that it was no wonder, then, after breaking with his family and taking himself as far away as possible, that he’d get himself sorted out so quickly somewhere else, first in Edinburgh, then in London – with his own business, his own concerns. No wonder, too, you could say, the kind of time it was for him then because – look! At the young man he was! His father’s son all right. From his father’s family. With that same kind of determination of a Sutherland to have a venture succeed, to make the practical side of it successful. Only different from them in that he would make his success far away from the place where they came from. Far, far away.
So he settled, first in the New Town, this was straight after university in Aberdeen, where he didn’t graduate but left to take a single room in Edinburgh and he had a phone there and a desk. That was the start for him – there with his phone and his desk. He obtained work with one of the merchant investment companies and found that he had a way with talking to them abroad, in Singapore and in Hong Kong, and that he could decide easily, it came to him easily, where the money should go, how it should be invested. Whether to place in this stock, or this new kind of bond, that he knew about this
sort of security for the different kinds of goods they were exporting then, out of the East, that he knew about insuring against those risks – all this came naturally to him, this kind of thinking. And he was a young man, remember, at this time. A very young man – for he never went back to the university, he’d left it for his single room – but then, before you know it, he’s in a larger place, a flat of his own and then a house and soon that was not enough for him either, and indeed nor was that city large enough for this young man, for his plans. So he came further south, he was twenty-four, and it was in London that he really established himself. That was when it all came together for him, as a businessman, you might say, as a city man – not a country man, not a man for music or for land but a man for banks and investments – with the rush of a great metropolis about him, with the sly business sense of all those at his back and at his elbow who knew about investments and dealing, and opportunities, anyone with a head and appetite for risk … These people were his friends. And did it matter that he’d never finished at the university, those years ago? Did it matter that he had no family who might support him? Did it matter? It did not.
He was out, he was having the life, he was making the plans and the decisions. He was everywhere, he was in the back streets, he was in the boardrooms, in grand offices with great desks and windows that looked out upon all the buildings in the world. And all of the people he knew? They were from that world, they came out from those buildings, they went into them again, arriving, leaving by the front door – and they were living the life with him, oh, weren’t they, they were out and there was whisky, and God, the women! You could get anything you wanted in that place! It was thick with it, money, London. Vivid with the excitement of being young and not thinking about a thing except where you might go, who you might go home with, where you might find yourself at the end of the day, when night fell.
And so, for a long time, John Callum lived like that. In long nights. Long days. With no tiredness at all but just fresh thinking, new …, more ideas. He changed his clothes, the way he spoke. As though the past had been a separate thing. Those voices of the past, the sounds. His father’s tunes. The Schoolroom and his mother’s touch. That sting of the cord even. It was as though all of it had never been near him. That he was someone else again, who might never have had his mother’s lovely sharp and flowery scent right there at her neck when he puts his arms around her and she lifts him up. That there’d been no memory of that or the scratch of the old man’s jacket, there at his sleeve, and the flavour of his tobacco that the boy could seem to taste in the air. These things were put away from him and he would not let them in. He would not. For years, in London. Not talking of them, thinking of them. So they could sit up there together on their own, he thought, his father and his mother, by the fire, not speaking. So his father could tutor all the children in Scotland, have all the pupils he wanted come from the ends of the earth, and all his piping friends to see him but still John Callum MacKay Sutherland would not take his own son to meet him, he was decided. If ever he had a son. He would also keep him away. And he would not think of his father or his mother or the place where he’d come from and the music from there. Not ever. ‘I’ll not be back!’, remember? Was how he thought then. When he was a young man. When he was so young and strong and sure.
And yet …
The past was waiting. Like the tunes that played that day they lowered the casket of his father into the ground. It was in the air he breathed, in the ground he stood on, bedded in. Though John had work to do and a different life, and experiences to create for himself, new memories to make, to keep. Though for all that time he was away and not thinking of that other life and nothing to do with that life, so he thought, with his mother, with his father. Or his father’s father and that place of theirs that had always been there, in that part of the hills … Nothing. Yet. It was always there, within him, dug in. The place in the ground, the Urlar, for his own box.
While the nothing went on, the years gone on, from Edinburgh to London, and letters written, maybe, sometimes the letters would arrive from his mother and he would write, yes, sometimes he would write back to her36 but, even so, he continued to think ‘I’ll not be back!’ He was on his own. He had his own friends. He was with his own friends. It was his own world he’d made for himself, after all, and he’d say it again and again: That he was not the same, was he? As his father? The hero? The ‘Play it again’? He was not? And he would not labour under that same tutelage, would he? Johnnie? Not wrap himself in the banner his father wore?
Is how he continued to stay away.37 Continued to grow and change. For just as it had been Edinburgh at first that he’d set himself up in, but then it was London and surely when he got there, to the centre of things, then he would never want to turn back … So he continued to stay apart from everything that had been familiar once. By now he had his own company set up off the back of contacts he had up north, a bigger operation altogether, with greater risks but better, altogether better, and the people he’d met through his dealings in the Scottish capital – well, he’d traded them for the future he was making for himself in the south, for the family of his own he would have someday and the money he would make! The money! Christ! He’d stay apart from the past for that, all right, for the banks and for the contacts. Because the money! Christ! If you had half a brain and a way with investments, for seeing opportunities, and all around in that place there were opportunities … Then of course you’d never leave, why would you? He’d never leave.
And so there were things he needed to accomplish and he did accomplish them. And eventually he was married, he did have a son of his own, and his business was growing and so his son would one day inherit that business … He was moving into that phase of life that was even more demanding than before, with more to do, that time when his boy was born, during those early years when he was small, more than ever to plan and organise and think about, and he sold his house, he bought a bigger house …
But his father died, suddenly, in the midst of everything. When he was not thinking about that, about any of it – but then. All at once. He was a man on his own. With his own son. A son with his father gone.
And so he travelled all the way up to Brora to attend the funeral. And he saw his mother. She was there to greet him, at the church, at the side of the grave.
‘John.’
And at once, it was back. Or rose up at him, rather, and all around him, the past that had always been there, waiting.
His mother’s scent, the same flowery scent as when he’d been a little boy.
And him putting his arms around her, not for her to hold him like she used to when he was a child but now for his arms to encircle her and she was like a stalk, like a little branch, but something of the blossom about her still.
‘John’ she’d said, and he’d held her. ‘John.’
While even then, he thought, this wasn’t returning. How could it be?
With the child grown into a man.
The mother to a twig.
The old man gone.
With everything he’d done, and been so long away? When he was so marked himself by distance, and so changed? How could this be, he thought, returning?
Yet the music was playing, his mother was there at the grave. And that was the beginning. Coming back for his father’s funeral, to help his mother first, then to have the summer with her, and then it was the following year and he found his old chanter then, in the Schoolroom, his old set of pipes, and he took them up and tuned them. The ‘A’ to the ‘A’ and perfectly they sounded. Then after that it wasn’t long – two summers, more, three summers – until his mother died but enough to form a habit and by then it was habit. To come back to the House where he’d been born, where his father had been born. To want to stay.38
Is how the years continued, for John Callum MacKay. A Sutherland from Sutherland after all, and nothing surprising then, in the habit of being here, put back again into place after all the time away. And back ag
ain, too, the old habits. Of silence. Of music. Of expecting and getting what you might need. Of keeping all your secrets close. It wasn’t long until it seemed to John that the time he’d been away hadn’t changed him at all, not really – only that what he’d come back to had always been in him and was just waiting for him to let it out again. More and more, as time went on, that’s how it felt. That though he’d thought he’d once been someone else and had done those other things – had his work, his life, with marriage in it, had a son – any idea of being that other person was now as thin and disappearing as a dream. And, just as before, when he’d been a young man, he’d not been able to honour his past, find the words to factor its content and meaning, so now, as the habit of being home again continued with him, did he find himself counting everything that might have been dear to him once, the things he’d bought and the deals he struck, as nothing.
The substance of his whole life …
Just parts, bits.
Nothing.
So that though he was staying longer each time at The Grey House, after a while bringing his son with him, the boy whom he’d christened after all and even before his father’s death, as Callum … Still, nothing was how he felt about his boy. When the boy was – what? Eight years old? Nine years old? And they’d drive up together and stay the whole summer …
And his wife phoning, Sarah. On those old telephone lines you couldn’t hear, phoning long distance to check her son was all right –
‘John?’
All through those summers, checking up on him, asking ‘Is he okay? Is Callum okay? Has he something to do? Are you keeping him warm?’, John listening to her voice down the static of the line … Still all of it was just parts, bits. ‘John, can you hear me?’ Nothing. Whether she called or didn’t call. Whether his son was cold or not cold. Whether it was raining or whether it was fine. The nothing so taken hold in him – and Callum twelve by now, thirteen – that nothing would let John Sutherland realise that maybe if he’d not been so interested before in all those other things, the getting away, the business and the bank accounts and the houses … He might have been able to make sense of his life before now. Maybe. Learn that something had always been wrong for him, deep in. That he’d had a wife who would be phoning him the way she did, but who’d never wanted to come back here with him, not ever.